Relatively little is known about the horrific attack last night in New Orleans, but it seems that the attacker was a US Army veteran inspired by the ideology of the Islamic State.
It’s not hard to guess why someone adhering to a viciously puritanical ideology might focus on those particular blocks of that particular street. I can’t think of any other place in all of America that has more of a reputation for giving full expression to American decadence than do the first six or eight blocks along Bourbon Street as you enter the French Quarter from Canal Street.
As I remembered this stretch from the two times I've lived in New Orleans (in 2007 and then again in 2011), the bars along this stretch were of the seediest sort, blaring canned music out onto the street and advertising “Big Ass Beers” in huge letters. And (with the notable exception of two classic restaurants--Galatoire's and Arnaud's) there was very little along the stretch except seedy bars, tacky tourist souvenir shops, and strip clubs. Further into the French Quarter, Bourbon Street becomes very pleasant—and New Orleans as a whole (very much including its bars) is wonderful in an almost infinite variety of ways. But as I remembered them, those few blocks of Bourbon Street were deeply unpleasant; it was not by coincidence that there were often been fundamentalist Christian demonstrators along that same stretch, carrying large signs accusing the Bourbon Street bars and strip clubs of being dens of iniquity.
I've often visited new Orleans over the past 15 years, but I've avoided that stretch of Bourbon Street. I just now used Google street view to get a more recent sense of those blocks. Much seems to have changed. There are still some seedy bars, to be sure, but they seem to be far less dominant--and considerably less seedy--than was the case 15 years ago. There is still a "Kama Sutra Cabaret" but there seem to be far fewer strip clubs than there used to be. All in all, very little evidence of iniquity. But perceptions linger, of course, and perceptions, however outdated, often seem to have more of an impact on cruelly deranged minds than does reality.
The Christian fundamentalists used to harangue the tourist throngs through megaphones. But I don’t think anyone before the past 24 hours imagined that rage against sinful behavior in Bourbon Street’s real or perceived dens of iniquity—rage of any religious stripe—would find expression in mass murder.
Update, 4 January: It's striking that, overwhelmingly, media coverage of the attack has portrayed the tourist strip on Bourbon Street in a purely positive light. The Assoctaed Press report that's printed in today's Globe and Mail (and no doubt in many other newspapers) is in this respect typical; it describes Bourbon Street as "famous world-wide for its festive vibes." True, but a fuller and more honest accounting would also mention its long-standing reputation for seedy bars and sleazy strip joints.
Wednesday, January 1, 2025
Letter to the Globe: The Vancouver Art Gallery and the Tate
For years the VAG planned to move out of its current quarters into a much larger new building designed by Herzog & de Meuron, a prestigious Swiss firm known for showy and expensive gallery and museum architecture. Sure enough, projected expenses ballooned out of control and the project never got off the ground; it was officially declared dead in 2024, and the VAG has gone back to the drawing board.Re “Big Ideas” (Letters, Dec. 12): In the 1990s London’s Tate Gallery was housed in a beautiful old building that had become too small for its collection.
The Globe published this letter on the topic in its 16 December issue; sensibly, they made three short paragraphs of the one long one I had written.
Instead of moving out of the beautiful old building, they opened a second gallery—converting the old Battersea Power Station into Tate Modern for a mere £134 million. There have been huge battles over the subsequent plan to build a vast extension to Tate Modern, but everyone agrees the original decision to adopt a two-gallery model was a good one.
The Vancouver Art Gallery’s current home—a 1906 courthouse building—is one of the most beautiful gallery spaces in the world. Rather than abandoning it, why not keep it as a home for the gallery’s traditional art collection, and then plan for a second, much larger but economically-built structure to house the gallery’s modern art collection?
Letter to the Globe: The American Election and the Average American Worker
Quite a number of commentators on the American election have suggested that the average American has been doing better economically under the Democratic administration of Joe Biden than they did under the Trump administration. The numbers tell a different story. The letter below was published in the 11 November issue of the Globe and Mail.Re “Postmortem” (Letters, Nov. 13): According to economist Alan McFayden, “the evidence tells us that most Americans have higher incomes now under Joe Biden than they did under Donald Trump.” But FactCheck.org reports that Bureau of Labor Statistics data show real average hourly earnings for all private sector employees decreasing by 2.24% between January 2021 and May 2024, and real median weekly earnings for all full-time workers decreasing by 2.14% over the same period. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that real per-capita disposable personal income decreased by 9.04% over that period.
There’s no doubt that the US economy overall has been growing, and that the growth in corporate profits has significantly outpaced inflation. And there is good reason to expect that Bidenomics will eventually increase real average earnings for workers. Sadly, there is little to suggest that’s happened yet.
Letter to Alberta Views Magazine: Rodeos
One of the best things about Alberta Views magazine is the monthly “Dialogue” feature they run, in which two people on opposing sides of an issue air their views, and then have a chance to rebut the other’s initial statement. For July/August the issue was “Should We Ban Rodeo?”, with Camille Labchuk from Animal Justice arguing yes, and Aritha van Herk arguing no. I would have liked the question to be “Should We Support Rodeo or Not?”—banning anything rubs so many people the wrong way—but it was nevertheless a good debate. The feature can be found online here: https://albertaviews.ca/should-we-ban-rodeo/ . There were many responses from readers published in the September and October issues, most siding against rodeos. The letter below was published in the October issue.Re “Should We Ban Rodeo?” (July/August) Aritha van Herk does as good a job of defending rodeos as anyone could; her argument that banning them would further polarize our society is worth taking seriously.
But what of her assertion that rodeo is a positive good? Her claim is that rodeos help people “learn about animals, agriculture, and food,” and help “everyone better understand the interaction between people and livestock”? But van Herk appears herself to badly misunderstand the basics of that interaction. She tells us that “no one, least of all working ranch hands, wants to inflict pain or damage on the animals that shape their livelihood.” But the fact is that cattle, who have a natural lifespan of roughly twenty years, are killed before they reach the age of two (having spent much of their short lives in feedlots). Doesn’t killing and eating a creature entail pain or damage?
Van Herk lambastes those who ignore the “environmental toll exacted by soybeans” and those who know so little about animal agriculture that they “think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.” “Let’s face facts,” she urges. But the fact is that most soybeans are grown not to be consumed by humans directly but rather to feed animals raised in order to provide food for humans. If we humans all adopted a whole foods, plant-based diet, we would need far less land to be devoted to growing soybeans than we do now. It’s animal agriculture that requires vast amounts of land to be devoted to raising crops such as soybeans; the far more efficient ecological approach is for humans to obtain the nutrients we need directly from plants. And yes, Prof. van Herk, humans often don’t realize where the milk they drink (chocolate or otherwise) comes from. When we humans drink cows’ milk, we do it by taking the babies away from their mothers so that we can drink the milk that otherwise would have gone to the babies. And then, when they are quite young, we slaughter the male babies, so we can eat them as veal. As van Herk says, “let’s fact facts.”
Letter to The Economist: Diet and Health
The Economist is a great publication in so may ways, and open- and fair-minded on almost every topic. A long-standing exception has been animal agriculture; quite consistently over the past twenty years or more, The Economist has ignored or downplayed the ever-growing body of evidence as to the many sorts of harm caused by animal agriculture and by the human practice of eating animal products. And one will search in vain in back issues of the magazine for any coverage of the extraordinary health benefits of a whole foods, pant-based diet. The letter below was not published.Your recent article on the food business (“Appetite for Change,” August 24–30) tells us that “it may not only be an excess of sugar, fat, and salt that causes health problems,” and reports that the “heavy processing” of food may also be to blame. True enough, but even more damage is caused by something you don’t touch on; you make no mention whatsoever of the effects on our health of eating animals rather than plants.
The organization Physicians for Responsible Medicine lists more than a dozen areas (arthritis, asthma, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc.) in which research has shown health outcomes to be far better to the extent that we eat a whole-foods, plant-based diet. And to the extent that we do go that route, our tax bill for health care costs is reduced, global warming is reduced, pollution of our lakes and rivers is reduced, and harm to non-human animals is reduced. It would be good to see some of this reported on in your pages.
Letter to the Globe: Farm Animals and the Law
I haven't posted much on this blog in the past few months, but I have been writing lots of letters to the editor. Many of them didn't have a lot to say (the several I wrote to ask newspapers to pay more attention to the war in Sudan, for examle). But some may be of interest; I'll post a few now. The Globe and Mail published a slightly revised version of this letter in its 6 August issue.Re “More life” (Letters, Aug. 2): A letter writer finds that the National Farm Animal Care Council and Canadian Council on Animal Care “do somewhat protect” farm animals. The truth is that neither they nor federal or provincial governments provide meaningful guards against such cruelty.
Just as American states have done, Canadian provinces have made animal agriculture essentially exempt from animal cruelty laws; anything considered “generally accepted practice” is allowed. And what is generally accepted by the animal agriculture industry – and by these councils – often entails horrific cruelty.
Instead of focusing on reducing cruelty, our governments continue to pass “ag-gag” laws designed to prevent the public from realizing the extent of the cruelty. Meaningful protection of farm animals on the part of all levels of government is long overdue.
Tuesday, December 31, 2024
Song for a New Year
It struck me today that, great as "Auld Lang Syne" is,* we could use a few more New Year's songs. So I wrote this one. The music for it is nothing special, and I don't know how to record and post music (except into a very old tape recorder), so I'll just post the lyrics here. (If anyone feels like making up their own music to these words, please feel free.) Happy New Year!
Where do the old years wander?
What can we do with time?
The sky is alive with wonder,
The world has its ways to shine.
What must we leave alone?
The sky is alive with weather,
And wherever we are is home.
What if the hour is late?
The sky is alive with wonder,
Time can find ways to wait.
*As Maureen pointed out to me, "Auld Lang Syne" is not the only one; Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," for example, is half a New Year's song; it probably deserves to be sung a lot more as the New Year approaches. Ditto for Mary Traver's great song "The Rest of the Year," though it's no more than maybe 1/4 a New Year's song.
Where do the old years wander?
What can we do with time?
The sky is alive with wonder,
The world has its ways to shine.
We see the round world getting older and olderWhat must we bring together?
But we’ll have a young year again.
We’ll have a younger year tomorrow,
We’ll have a younger year tonight—
We'll take the train away from sorrow
To where the moon is shining bright.
What must we leave alone?
The sky is alive with weather,
And wherever we are is home.
We see the round world getting older and olderWhat if the light comes early?
But we’ll have a young year again.
We’ll have a younger year tomorrow,
We’ll have a younger year tonight—
Take the train away from sorrow
To where the moon is shining bright.
What if the hour is late?
The sky is alive with wonder,
Time can find ways to wait.
We see the round world getting older and older
But we’ll have a young year again.
We’ll have a younger year tomorrow,
We’ll have a younger year tonight—
Take the train away from sorrow
To where the moon is shining bright.
*As Maureen pointed out to me, "Auld Lang Syne" is not the only one; Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," for example, is half a New Year's song; it probably deserves to be sung a lot more as the New Year approaches. Ditto for Mary Traver's great song "The Rest of the Year," though it's no more than maybe 1/4 a New Year's song.
Monday, October 14, 2024
The Message Many Literature Professors are Sending to their Students: Literature Really Doesn’t Matter that Much
Imagine if a teacher of culinary skills, asked what sort of ingredients students would be using in their college courses, answered in this way:
Now think of the approach that many professors in English Departments (and other departments that teach literary and other texts) routinely take with their students when they teach a work by Austen, or Plato, or Tolstoy, or Woolf:
“Value” is of course a slippery concept—and perceptions of what does and doesn’t hold value are bound to vary widely. Many would argue—and I certainly wouldn’t disagree—that literature is inherently of incalculable value even if we pay no money for it. “Priceless,” one might say. But the reality is that we live in a money-oriented society—a society in which value tends to be seen as being reflected in monetary value, in price. Everyone of course accepts that sometimes items of high quality may be very surprisingly reasonably priced. But many feel that something that’s extremely low-priced (or free) is cheap for a good reason—it’s not very high quality. Does the average first-year student make a clear distinction between rating the edition of a literary work as being of low value and considering the literary work itself to be of little value? My strong suspicion is that many do not make an entirely clear distinction of that sort; I would be astonished if at least some whiff of “low value” didn’t attach in many minds to the literary work itself.
Aren’t some students really struggling, though? Shouldn’t the amount they pay for books be a concern? Of course some students really are struggling, and of course getting good value for money should always be a concern of professors when they decide what books to assign.
I suppose it’s in large part a question of emphasis. Certainly a professor will send a very different message about the value of literature if they frame things this way:
Of course it isn’t just with editions of Austen or Plato or Tolstoy or Woolf that these decisions are made. It’s also with editions of lesser-known works—often ones where the only in-print edition represents an effort on the part of its publisher and its academic editor to “recover” a neglected work—to bring it to the attention of academics and students, and to the attention as well of the reading public. It’s very frequently only as a result of such recovery work that a literature instructor becomes aware of a literary work that they then decide to assign to their students. In such cases, it makes an even bigger difference if literature instructors assign the published version rather than digitized versions of nineteenth-century editions of the work that are often available for free online. If the newly published editions of these neglected works do not sell in at least modest quantities, the publisher inevitably comes under strong financial pressure not to commission editions of other neglected works. In my experience, publishers rarely publish new editions of neglected works in the hope of making large profits from them; it’s a side of the business in which it’s very common for publishers to hope merely to break even, while doing something of real value to the academic and literary communities. But if publishers consistently lose money on such ventures—as is increasingly the case, I’m sorry to say—then far fewer such ventures will be undertaken. And the academic and literary worlds will be much, much poorer for it.
The least expensive--our policy is always to go for the least expensive. Sure, it might make a difference with a lot of dishes to use high quality ingredients—they’re often better for your health, and they’ll often make a dish taste better. But our view is that the only thing that really matters is for you to pay as little as possible.We would be taken aback by such a policy—and we would surely find it inappropriate. To recognize that cost is important—yes, absolutely. To say to students, “we use walnuts with this dish instead of pine nuts; a dish such as this will taste just about as good and using walnuts saves quite a bit of money”—that makes good sense. But to just always buy the cheapest? That surely sends an implicit but very clear message: the quality of the ingredients in what you eat is not worth bothering about. Food just doesn’t matter that much. It would be a very strange message to be conveying to a culinary class.
Now think of the approach that many professors in English Departments (and other departments that teach literary and other texts) routinely take with their students when they teach a work by Austen, or Plato, or Tolstoy, or Woolf:
There are some really good editions of this book available, including two or three that are quite inexpensive—under $20 for a bound book, under $10 for an e-book that you get with just a few clicks. Those editions offer a reliable text, helpful annotations, and useful historical context in the introductory material and the appendices. But I’m not going to ask you to pay $20 or even $10 for one of those editions. I understand that cost is an issue; that’s why I’ll ask you to go online and read a version that will cost you absolutely nothing. It doesn’t include any notes, any introduction, or any contextual materials, and the text itself may be unreliable in some places. But it’s free, and that’s what matters most when it comes to what text students should use.When literature instructors say that sort of thing to their students, they are acting with entirely good intentions; they don’t want to add to the financial burden of students who may already be struggling financially. But the unintended message they send to their students is of the same sort as that of the culinary instructor: the particular version of a literary text that you select really isn’t worth bothering about. Literature just doesn’t matter that much.
“Value” is of course a slippery concept—and perceptions of what does and doesn’t hold value are bound to vary widely. Many would argue—and I certainly wouldn’t disagree—that literature is inherently of incalculable value even if we pay no money for it. “Priceless,” one might say. But the reality is that we live in a money-oriented society—a society in which value tends to be seen as being reflected in monetary value, in price. Everyone of course accepts that sometimes items of high quality may be very surprisingly reasonably priced. But many feel that something that’s extremely low-priced (or free) is cheap for a good reason—it’s not very high quality. Does the average first-year student make a clear distinction between rating the edition of a literary work as being of low value and considering the literary work itself to be of little value? My strong suspicion is that many do not make an entirely clear distinction of that sort; I would be astonished if at least some whiff of “low value” didn’t attach in many minds to the literary work itself.
Aren’t some students really struggling, though? Shouldn’t the amount they pay for books be a concern? Of course some students really are struggling, and of course getting good value for money should always be a concern of professors when they decide what books to assign.
I suppose it’s in large part a question of emphasis. Certainly a professor will send a very different message about the value of literature if they frame things this way:
For this course I’ve decided to assign the Broadview edition of this text [or the Norton, or the Hackett, or the Oxford, or the Penguin—whatever it might be], and I’ve done that for several reasons. It’s an edition that provides a completely reliable text, and annotations that I’m sure you’re going to find helpful. It also includes some background material that’s of real interest, some of which we’ll be referring to in class. Plus, it has a good introduction, which fills in some of the historical and cultural background that I won’t have time to go over with you in class. It will set you back $17 for a brand-new copy of the bound book version, but less than $15 for a used copy—and less than $10 if you decide to buy the e-book. Either way, I strongly encourage you to get this edition, which is classed as an assigned text, not a recommended one; I would really, really like us all to be on the same page! At the same time, I recognize that some of you may be finding it truly difficult to make ends meet, and if that's the case it may well be that even $10 may make a real difference. If you really can’t afford the $10, you will be able to find free versions of this text online. I can’t recommend them—having a good edition of a text really does matter—but I know that some students really are struggling, and I will of course understand if financial constraints force you to go that route.That sends a very, very different message to students—one that can leave students in no doubt that quality does matter, and that literature does have value.
Of course it isn’t just with editions of Austen or Plato or Tolstoy or Woolf that these decisions are made. It’s also with editions of lesser-known works—often ones where the only in-print edition represents an effort on the part of its publisher and its academic editor to “recover” a neglected work—to bring it to the attention of academics and students, and to the attention as well of the reading public. It’s very frequently only as a result of such recovery work that a literature instructor becomes aware of a literary work that they then decide to assign to their students. In such cases, it makes an even bigger difference if literature instructors assign the published version rather than digitized versions of nineteenth-century editions of the work that are often available for free online. If the newly published editions of these neglected works do not sell in at least modest quantities, the publisher inevitably comes under strong financial pressure not to commission editions of other neglected works. In my experience, publishers rarely publish new editions of neglected works in the hope of making large profits from them; it’s a side of the business in which it’s very common for publishers to hope merely to break even, while doing something of real value to the academic and literary communities. But if publishers consistently lose money on such ventures—as is increasingly the case, I’m sorry to say—then far fewer such ventures will be undertaken. And the academic and literary worlds will be much, much poorer for it.
Friday, October 4, 2024
“Let’s Go, Oakland!” Going, going, gone
The Oakland Athletics played their last series this past weekend in Seattle. Hated team-owner John Fisher had refused Oakland’s various offers to help build a new stadium; he will be moving the team temporarily to Sacramento before a planned eventual move to Las Vegas. The same thing happened a very few years ago to Oakland’s football team; the old Oakland Raiders died, to be replaced by the Las Vegas Raiders.
It’s sad and it’s historic when these things happen. I took a ferry to the mainland last Friday and headed down the I5
“Unforgettable” is the word that many people have been using the past few weeks to describe the great moments in the Oakland A’s history; it’s the word that we always use when an era ends. There were indeed great moments:
Many may want to forget the stadium in which the A’s played for all of their 57 years in Oakland (though I confess I very much enjoyed everything the one time I was there). The Coliseum opened in 1966 and is now the second-oldest in the American League, the fourth oldest in baseball; only Fenway, Wrigley, and Dodger Stadium are older. It’s the last of the circular, dual-purpose stadiums that for a while in the 1960s seemed to be the wave of the future. Washington started the trend in 1961; later would come Riverside in Cincinnati, Three Rivers in Pittsburgh, Shea in New York, Qualcomm in San Diego. They’re all gone now—and for the most part they’re unlamented. It never really worked; if you were going to accommodate football as well as baseball, you had to have the sort of absurdly large foul territory that the Oakland Coliseum was famous for.
The Coliseum was famous too for its fans—the rabid Raiders fans and the endlessly loyal A’s fans, with their chants and their drumming. The drumming at the Coliseum was always done by real fans who brought real drums to the stadium; it wasn’t the canned noise of stadium machines, but real drumming--thumping, relentless.
* * *
Oakland’s last series had almost everything—everything, that is, except a win for Oakland. The Friday might game was a 2-0 shutout for the Mariners, a well-played game with a great deal of good defense. The best moment—particularly for those like me who were seated in the right-field bleachers—may well have come on the game’s first pitch, as Oakland’s exciting young right fielder Lawrence Butler leapt to make a superb catch near the wall on a long drive by Seattle’s young star, Julio Rodriguez.
The Saturday night game was a classic. The Mariners were up by one going into the ninth; the A’s were down to their last out before Shea Langeliers turned the game around on a three-run homer. But in the bottom of the ninth Mason Miller, the A’s brilliant young closer, couldn’t summon his best stuff; he recorded just his third blown save of the season as Luke Raley hit a two-run homer to tie things up. It ended with a play at the plate in the bottom of the tenth—with a little grounder from Seattle’s Justin Turner, and with pinch runner Leo Rivas just managing to beat Langeliers’ tag. A walk-off win for the Mariners, another heartbreaking loss for the A's.
Sunday’s game was a good one too. Seattle gradually amassed a 6-0 lead, but then Oakland clawed their way back. With two out in the ninth inning, A’s rookie outfielder Darell Hernaiz smoked a two-run double past Randy Arozarena in the Mariners’ outfield, scoring Seth Brown and Zack Gelof and bringing the A’s to within two runs of the Mariners. Hernaiz smiled from second base and swept one hand from left to right, underlining the word “Oakland” on his jersey. The hundreds of Oakland fans seemed briefly almost as loud as the thirty thousand Seattle fans; “Let’s go, Oakland!” Max Schuemann was coming up to bat next; he represented the tying run. But it was not to be. Schuemann ran the count full, three balls and two strikes; then, with a mighty swing, he struck out. He was the last-ever Oakland batter; Gelof had scored Oakland’s last-ever run, and Hernaiz had recorded Oakland’s last-ever hit and last-ever RBI.
When almost all the players from both teams had left the field there were still a number of people milling around: staff, media, and several little kids were running around on the field—it wasn’t clear who they belonged to. From the third base side a couple of hundred Oakland fans kept sporadically chanting “Let’s go, Oakland! [boom, boom, boomboomboom]” and several waved their signs, “We Love You, Oakland" and “Oakland Baseball Forever.” No one wanted to leave.
The last Oakland A on the field was their great young outfielder, Lawrence Butler, perhaps their most colorful player, and certainly one of their most skilled. (It had been Butler who had robbed Seattle's Julio Rodriguez of an extra base hit on the first pitch of the Friday night game.) After the Sunday game Butler seemed to have a reason for standing around out on the field; he made a phone call, and then he waited. A couple of minutes later Julio Rodriguez appeared. After the two had greeted each other, they exchanged signed jerseys—Butler took quite a little while writing a message on the A’s #4 jersey he gave to Rodriguez. They smiled a little and talked a little and then they embraced—twice—before leaving the field. The season was over for both of them. (After having led their division by ten games or more back in June, the Mariners ended up one game out of a playoff spot; they’d been officially eliminated from playoff contention even before the three-game series with the Athletics began.)
A few other moments from the weekend series:
“No, I’m not from Oakland,” I had to say to several people. “In fact, the A’s have never been my absolute favorite team. But I’ve always liked them—and it’s just sad to see the end of something that was great for a long time.” “Amen to that,” I heard in reply.
One final thought: a lot of the famous old Oakland A’s—Reggie Jackson, Rickie Henderson, Barry Zito, even José Canseco—had some of the world’s biggest egos, but they all were pretty harmless. Larger than life characters who it was always fun to listen to. And always it was fun to watch them play—especially Rickey, who loved baseball so much that even when he was past 45 and no longer good enough to play in the major leagues he kept playing for a while in the independent leagues, for peanuts. For teams like the Newark Bears and the San Diego Surf Dawgs. Just because he loved baseball. Just because he never wanted it to end.
It’s sad and it’s historic when these things happen. I took a ferry to the mainland last Friday and headed down the I5
“Unforgettable” is the word that many people have been using the past few weeks to describe the great moments in the Oakland A’s history; it’s the word that we always use when an era ends. There were indeed great moments:
• a young (and mustache-less) Catfish Hunter pitching a perfect game just a month into the A’s first season in Oakland in 1968;
• Dallas Braden pitching his hungover-on-Mother’s-Day perfect game in 2010 (google “Dallas Braden’s perfect game” for the full story);
• Rickey Henderson breaking Lou Brock’s record for most stolen bases, literally stealing the base that he had stolen and holding it triumphantly above his head, and then later in his speech thanking God and his mother and the fans before concluding, “Today, I am the greatest of all time”;
• Rollie Fingers—he of the world’s greatest 1970s mustache—fielding the game’s last ball himself and throwing to first to clinch the A’s third straight World Series win in 1974;
• Texas outfielder Josh Hamilton missing a routine fly ball cleanly, and thereby allowing the go-ahead two runs to score as the A’s won the AL West title in 2012;
• Mark Kotsay’s hitting the two-run, inside-the-park home run that sent the A’s ahead to stay in the 2006 ALDS.Memorable moments all—but unforgettable? The reality is, of course, that none of it is truly unforgettable. The Athletics franchise began in Philadelphia in 1901; it moved to Kansas City in 1955, and then moved again in 1968 to Oakland. Just about everyone has forgotten just about everything about the Kansas City A’s and the Philadelphia A’s—even the 1929 A’s team that may have been the greatest baseball team of all time. You’ve maybe heard of Lefty Grove and Mickey Cochrane, but how many people know anything of the other players on that team—of Al Simmons and Bing Miller and Howard Ehmke and George “the Mule” Haas? (I didn’t—I just looked them up a moment ago.) That's what will happen to Henderson and Hunter and Eckersley, Fingers and Jackson and Bando, Blue and Braden and Butler. That’s what will happen to the Coliseum. That’s what will happen to us all.
Many may want to forget the stadium in which the A’s played for all of their 57 years in Oakland (though I confess I very much enjoyed everything the one time I was there). The Coliseum opened in 1966 and is now the second-oldest in the American League, the fourth oldest in baseball; only Fenway, Wrigley, and Dodger Stadium are older. It’s the last of the circular, dual-purpose stadiums that for a while in the 1960s seemed to be the wave of the future. Washington started the trend in 1961; later would come Riverside in Cincinnati, Three Rivers in Pittsburgh, Shea in New York, Qualcomm in San Diego. They’re all gone now—and for the most part they’re unlamented. It never really worked; if you were going to accommodate football as well as baseball, you had to have the sort of absurdly large foul territory that the Oakland Coliseum was famous for.
The Coliseum was famous too for its fans—the rabid Raiders fans and the endlessly loyal A’s fans, with their chants and their drumming. The drumming at the Coliseum was always done by real fans who brought real drums to the stadium; it wasn’t the canned noise of stadium machines, but real drumming--thumping, relentless.
* * *
Oakland’s last series had almost everything—everything, that is, except a win for Oakland. The Friday might game was a 2-0 shutout for the Mariners, a well-played game with a great deal of good defense. The best moment—particularly for those like me who were seated in the right-field bleachers—may well have come on the game’s first pitch, as Oakland’s exciting young right fielder Lawrence Butler leapt to make a superb catch near the wall on a long drive by Seattle’s young star, Julio Rodriguez.
Screenshot from the mlb telecast of the Friday-night game; Lawrence Butler is leaping to make a great catch of the game’s first pitch. In the crowd, you can make out a standing figure in a light brown jacket and a yellow shirt, wearing a green and gold A’s baseball cap similar to that of Butler; this is me. At right, in another screenshot from the mlb telecast, Butler is pictured again, smiling at the far-away Rodriguez.
The Saturday night game was a classic. The Mariners were up by one going into the ninth; the A’s were down to their last out before Shea Langeliers turned the game around on a three-run homer. But in the bottom of the ninth Mason Miller, the A’s brilliant young closer, couldn’t summon his best stuff; he recorded just his third blown save of the season as Luke Raley hit a two-run homer to tie things up. It ended with a play at the plate in the bottom of the tenth—with a little grounder from Seattle’s Justin Turner, and with pinch runner Leo Rivas just managing to beat Langeliers’ tag. A walk-off win for the Mariners, another heartbreaking loss for the A's.
Sunday’s game was a good one too. Seattle gradually amassed a 6-0 lead, but then Oakland clawed their way back. With two out in the ninth inning, A’s rookie outfielder Darell Hernaiz smoked a two-run double past Randy Arozarena in the Mariners’ outfield, scoring Seth Brown and Zack Gelof and bringing the A’s to within two runs of the Mariners. Hernaiz smiled from second base and swept one hand from left to right, underlining the word “Oakland” on his jersey. The hundreds of Oakland fans seemed briefly almost as loud as the thirty thousand Seattle fans; “Let’s go, Oakland!” Max Schuemann was coming up to bat next; he represented the tying run. But it was not to be. Schuemann ran the count full, three balls and two strikes; then, with a mighty swing, he struck out. He was the last-ever Oakland batter; Gelof had scored Oakland’s last-ever run, and Hernaiz had recorded Oakland’s last-ever hit and last-ever RBI.
When almost all the players from both teams had left the field there were still a number of people milling around: staff, media, and several little kids were running around on the field—it wasn’t clear who they belonged to. From the third base side a couple of hundred Oakland fans kept sporadically chanting “Let’s go, Oakland! [boom, boom, boomboomboom]” and several waved their signs, “We Love You, Oakland" and “Oakland Baseball Forever.” No one wanted to leave.
The last Oakland A on the field was their great young outfielder, Lawrence Butler, perhaps their most colorful player, and certainly one of their most skilled. (It had been Butler who had robbed Seattle's Julio Rodriguez of an extra base hit on the first pitch of the Friday night game.) After the Sunday game Butler seemed to have a reason for standing around out on the field; he made a phone call, and then he waited. A couple of minutes later Julio Rodriguez appeared. After the two had greeted each other, they exchanged signed jerseys—Butler took quite a little while writing a message on the A’s #4 jersey he gave to Rodriguez. They smiled a little and talked a little and then they embraced—twice—before leaving the field. The season was over for both of them. (After having led their division by ten games or more back in June, the Mariners ended up one game out of a playoff spot; they’d been officially eliminated from playoff contention even before the three-game series with the Athletics began.)
A few other moments from the weekend series:
• The two men with their huge Jesus signs outside T-Mobile Park and their megaphones blaring “Pride Comes before destruction! Repent!”
• The box office staff being wonderfully accommodating with someone such as me who doesn’t have a smartphone. Like many sports events nowadays, Mariners’ games are all digital; “your ticket is your phone,” is what it says online. Not so good for those of us without a smartphone on which e-tickets can be downloaded. But as it turned out, the nice people at the box office were very happy to provide a physical “location pass”—essentially a very large ticket—that was accepted at the gate with no fuss whatsoever. It strikes me that there may be only a handful of people who were provided with physical tickets of any sort for the last-ever Oakland A’s game; at any rate, I’m one of them—and I’ve kept the ticket.
• Rickey Henderson throwing the ceremonial first pitch of the last game, dressed in a half-half uniform—the left side Seattle, the right side Oakland. (Though Rickey is associated above all with the A’s, he played for nine teams during his 25-year career—including Seattle.)
• Justin Turner, after he’d been hit by a pitch in the second inning of Sunday’s game, still managing to joke around with the first-base umpire.
• The “Let’s Go, Oakland” chants growing louder and louder in the ninth inning in Seattle. And, for a brief while, louder than ever after the game was over.
• Getting a baseball autographed—something I hadn’t done for decades. I got only two autographs, but I was very happy to have them: Daz Cameron, who played right field in Oakland’s last game, and Dallas Braden, who pitched a perfect game for Oakland—perhaps the most memorable of all the 24 perfect games that have ever been pitched. (None of the current Oakland players came out of the clubhouse to sign before Sunday’s final game, but the team had arranged for Braden to greet fans and sign autographs beside the dugout.)
• The sun shining bright before Sunday afternoon’s last game for Oakland but, with rain predicted, the roof slowly closing an hour or so before game time. There was still a tiny strip of sky visible—and for a while in the third inning, there was a rainbow.
• The vendor up on the third level Saturday night, calling out in a gentle, world-weary voice, “It’s Saturday, night, folks. Saturday—it’s a good night for beer drinking.”
• The Hempler’s Hot Dogs promotion that the Mariners run during the seventh-inning stretch. After “God Bless America” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” there’s something more: “Hot Dogs from Heaven.” Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth” blares from the loudspeakers as dozens—hundreds—of aluminum-foil-wrapped hot dogs drift down to the crowd from the upper deck, each with its little parachute. Some get caught in guy wires, but every dog makes it down eventually. Fans love it. Sadly, there seem to be no veggie dogs.
• The woman in front of me in the line-up waiting for the stadium gates to open Friday, saying “nice hat” with reference to my green and gold A’s baseball cap, and thereby getting us into a short conversation during which we both agreed how moving the final game at the Coliseum in Oakland had been the previous night. “I cried,” she said as the line started to move forward. “I really did. There was Rickey, and all the old…. I couldn’t help crying.”There were numerous other people—Mariners’ fans—who in one way or another acknowledged my evident Oakland allegiance sympathetically. They would nod and say “it’s a real shame,” or “I’m sorry,” in rather the same way that people say “I’m so sorry for your loss” to an acquaintance when they hear that someone close to the person has died. “I can’t even begin to comprehend what it would mean,” said one young man. “And the Raiders too….” He walked away shaking his head as he tried to imagine what it would be like if Seattle lost both its Mariners and its Seahawks.
“No, I’m not from Oakland,” I had to say to several people. “In fact, the A’s have never been my absolute favorite team. But I’ve always liked them—and it’s just sad to see the end of something that was great for a long time.” “Amen to that,” I heard in reply.
One final thought: a lot of the famous old Oakland A’s—Reggie Jackson, Rickie Henderson, Barry Zito, even José Canseco—had some of the world’s biggest egos, but they all were pretty harmless. Larger than life characters who it was always fun to listen to. And always it was fun to watch them play—especially Rickey, who loved baseball so much that even when he was past 45 and no longer good enough to play in the major leagues he kept playing for a while in the independent leagues, for peanuts. For teams like the Newark Bears and the San Diego Surf Dawgs. Just because he loved baseball. Just because he never wanted it to end.
*The thought back in the summer had been that my son Dominic and I would take in Oakland's final series together. Dominic (who is a sports enthusiast and incredibly knowledgeable about sports generally) had to bow out, for the happiest and best of reasons. He was hired in August for what for him is a dream job--Senior Manager of Business Operations and Corporate Partnerships for a Major Junior A hockey franchise--a wonderful development in many ways, but it did mean that he couldn't take a few days off for a baseball trip in late September!
Sunday, August 18, 2024
Show, Don’t Tell? Or Show and Tell? Perspectives on Prose Fiction
Here are two passages from highly regarded works of fiction—both of which describe a young woman’s experiences listening to an older man:
I want to focus primarily on what the two passages have in common, but let me briefly touch first on the nuanced ways in which they differ. In the Diaz passage the narrative voice is distanced. Much as what we are told of the psyches of both characters rings true, there is nothing that shows us the workings of Helen’s mind from the inside (or, for that matter, that shows us the workings of her father's mind from the inside). But the extended metaphor of the maze works very neatly—and overall, this is a fine passage of exposition, telling us in straightforward fashion of a pattern of interaction between Helen and her father. Compared to Diaz’s extended use of the maze image, Eliot’s use of the labyrinth is quite loose (though there are obvious similarities). Like the Diaz passage, the Eliot passage seems to be telling us in straightforward fashion about the psyches of a young woman listener and an older male who does most of the talking. But for much of this Eliot does not quite tell it ‘straight’; she uses what has come to be known as free indirect style. In other words, what we are given is not the direct assessment of an objective narrator telling us of “the scope of his great work,” but rather the shared sense of Dorothea and of Casaubon as to the scope of the “great work.” (Eliot does not write “it seemed to Dorothea that he had been as instructive as Milton’s affable archangel…”; the clause “it seemed to Dorothea that” is merely implied, giving the reader a more direct experience of what is happening in Dorothea’s mind.)
There are, then, interesting differences between the two passages. But the similarities are at least as interesting. Neither the Eliot nor the Diaz passage gives us any dialogue, any concrete “scene.” They are passages of exposition, dealing in generalizations; we are told of the characters’ impressions being formed, rather than shown specific examples. To deal in generalizations in this way—to summarize for the reader the way in which a character behaves, and even to summarize a character's inner nature—has long been considered an old-fashioned way of telling a story, a very "Victorian" approach. Eliot, indeed (often regarded as the greatest Victorian novelist) is arguably the most accomplished practitioner of this way of writing fiction. When, to pick another example, she tells us about Rosamond's nature, the psychological commentary crackles brilliantly into a fiery fury:
Of course, there are a great many ways of showing rather than telling. Minimalism is perhaps the most famous; Hemingway does almost no telling at all, and doesn’t show the reader all that much, either. (His view was that, as a writer, you “could omit anything if you knew that … the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”) But there are many other ways of showing, not telling. Roddy Doyle’s style—influenced by Joyce, no doubt—entails showing almost entirely through dialogue. (Doyle’s style reminds us that one can write fiction made up of scenes that “show” without, in a physical sense, showing anything—without including any physical description whatsoever). One can show rather than tell with the intensely offbeat interiority of Joyce Carol Oates (where scenes often take place entirely within the mind of the protagonist). One can show rather than tell as James Baldwin often does, with everything written in the first person. One can show rather than tell as Alice Munro often does, with variable-time sequencing (zooming in to see and hear the details of scenes that define a life in all its normality, all its strangeness, zooming out for bird’s-eye views extending over continents, over decades). One can show rather than tell as Atwood often does, in biting scenes that sardonically flip the world inside out. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has its own principles of showing—principles that demand a good deal of inference on the part of the reader, but that tell the reader very little. The narrators in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go may seem to tell us a good deal, but their telling is in itself a sort of showing—as is perhaps the case to a large extent with any work of fiction featuring a narrator possessed for whatever reason of limited understanding. (The narrative approach of such novels might be regarded as an interesting sort of halfway house between showing and telling.)
This is to single out only a very few individual authors and works.* One might add, as a group, the long list of late twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century fiction writers who tell their stories entirely in the present tense. (Arguably, to use the present tense throughout a novel is to enforce the rule of show, don’t tell.)
Is show, don’t tell nearing the end of its long run? Has the tide finally begun to turn? I suspect that may indeed be the case; Diaz is not the only distinguished fiction writer these days to be doing at least as much telling as showing. And the Pulitzer surely says something about the way the wind may be blowing.
Nineteenth-century fiction writers typically leaned a good deal more towards tell than have twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century fiction writers. Victorian novelists told their readers a great deal—as did the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists. But they also showed a great deal; Tolstoy and George Eliot may be famous for telling rather than showing in certain passages, but they were both also immensely talented with dialogue, and with “scenes.” In short, they struck a balance between show and tell. If the pendulum is beginning now to swing back towards more exposition, and away from any presumption that everything must be presented through “scenes,” that to my mind augers well for the fiction of the twenty-first century.
I should perhaps add that I often find it difficult myself to get the balance right. I'm at the moment revising the manuscript of Leaving Pittsburgh, my next book of fiction, and trying as I do so to tell less and show more--this on the advice of Deborah Willis, a brilliant fiction writer who is also an extraordinarily perceptive fiction editor. She has reminded me that, even if it's true that the show/tell pendulum has begun to swing a bit back towards tell, we are still a very long way from nineteenth-century habits of writing and reading fiction. However difficult it may sometimes be for a Luddite such as me, one has to live in one's own age!
Helen tried to meet her father in the trackless territories of his delirium. She sat with him and listened as he talked without interruption. Sometimes she asked a question, more as proof that she was listening than to get a proper answer. Her efforts to understand him were sincere, and based on the hope that if she could find any shred of sense, any thread, she would be able to hold on to it and lead her father out of his maze. Yet her attempts always met the same end: Leopold’s thoughts curved and curled on themselves, forming a circle that Helen was unable to enter, and he was unable to leave. As if to prove the possibility of physical movement, she was compelled to go on long walks after experiencing this mental claustrophobia.
Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr. Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her own experience to him, and had understood from him the scope of his great work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent. For he had been as instructive as Milton’s “affable archangel;” and with something of the archangelic manner he told her how he had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr. Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed.The first passage is from the first section (“Bonds”) of Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2022 novel, Trust (page 44 in the Riverhead Books paperback edition); the second is from Chapter 3 of George Eliot’s 1871 Middlemarch.
I want to focus primarily on what the two passages have in common, but let me briefly touch first on the nuanced ways in which they differ. In the Diaz passage the narrative voice is distanced. Much as what we are told of the psyches of both characters rings true, there is nothing that shows us the workings of Helen’s mind from the inside (or, for that matter, that shows us the workings of her father's mind from the inside). But the extended metaphor of the maze works very neatly—and overall, this is a fine passage of exposition, telling us in straightforward fashion of a pattern of interaction between Helen and her father. Compared to Diaz’s extended use of the maze image, Eliot’s use of the labyrinth is quite loose (though there are obvious similarities). Like the Diaz passage, the Eliot passage seems to be telling us in straightforward fashion about the psyches of a young woman listener and an older male who does most of the talking. But for much of this Eliot does not quite tell it ‘straight’; she uses what has come to be known as free indirect style. In other words, what we are given is not the direct assessment of an objective narrator telling us of “the scope of his great work,” but rather the shared sense of Dorothea and of Casaubon as to the scope of the “great work.” (Eliot does not write “it seemed to Dorothea that he had been as instructive as Milton’s affable archangel…”; the clause “it seemed to Dorothea that” is merely implied, giving the reader a more direct experience of what is happening in Dorothea’s mind.)
There are, then, interesting differences between the two passages. But the similarities are at least as interesting. Neither the Eliot nor the Diaz passage gives us any dialogue, any concrete “scene.” They are passages of exposition, dealing in generalizations; we are told of the characters’ impressions being formed, rather than shown specific examples. To deal in generalizations in this way—to summarize for the reader the way in which a character behaves, and even to summarize a character's inner nature—has long been considered an old-fashioned way of telling a story, a very "Victorian" approach. Eliot, indeed (often regarded as the greatest Victorian novelist) is arguably the most accomplished practitioner of this way of writing fiction. When, to pick another example, she tells us about Rosamond's nature, the psychological commentary crackles brilliantly into a fiery fury:
Rosamond never showed any unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made the irresistible woman.... Think no unfair evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide. She was not in the habit of devising falsehoods, and if her statements were no direct clue to fact, why, they were not intended in that light—they were among her elegant accomplishments, intended to please. (Middlemarch, Chapter 27)Like those of Eliot, the passages of exposition in Diaz's prose are capable of throwing off heat and light in equal measure, and again and again (especially in the first of the book's four parts, presented as a novel “by Harold Vanner”—the book's structure offers readers more of a postmodern puzzle than a Victorian one) we are given Victorian-style commentary on the characters that crackles with a flame almost as intense as that of Eliot's summing-up of Rosamond's nature:
During this time, Mrs. Brevort was exuberant in her grief, exploring all the social possibilities of mourning. She found unsuspected radiance in the deepest shades of black and made sure to surround herself with particularly plaintive and misty-eyed friends so that she could highlight her arrogant form of sorrow, which she called "dignified." It is not unlikely that she felt genuine pain under the somewhat farcical spectacle of bereavement she put up for her circle. Some people, under certain circumstances, hide their true emotions under exaggeration and hyperbole, not realizing their amplified caricature reveals the exact measure of the feelings it was meant to conceal. (page 122)In reviewing Trust in the New York Times, Michael Gorra (to my mind, among the most astute literary critics alive today) has remarked on Diaz’s tendency to “report on his characters’ inner lives instead of dramatizing them,” to give us lives “more often in summary than in scenes.” In other words, Diaz is doing very much what George Eliot is famous for doing--and doing the exact opposite of what generations of creative writing students have been told they must do. Since the early twentieth century, aspiring writers of fiction have been told show, don’t tell. And since the early twentieth century most highly regarded fiction writers have very largely followed that advice.
Of course, there are a great many ways of showing rather than telling. Minimalism is perhaps the most famous; Hemingway does almost no telling at all, and doesn’t show the reader all that much, either. (His view was that, as a writer, you “could omit anything if you knew that … the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”) But there are many other ways of showing, not telling. Roddy Doyle’s style—influenced by Joyce, no doubt—entails showing almost entirely through dialogue. (Doyle’s style reminds us that one can write fiction made up of scenes that “show” without, in a physical sense, showing anything—without including any physical description whatsoever). One can show rather than tell with the intensely offbeat interiority of Joyce Carol Oates (where scenes often take place entirely within the mind of the protagonist). One can show rather than tell as James Baldwin often does, with everything written in the first person. One can show rather than tell as Alice Munro often does, with variable-time sequencing (zooming in to see and hear the details of scenes that define a life in all its normality, all its strangeness, zooming out for bird’s-eye views extending over continents, over decades). One can show rather than tell as Atwood often does, in biting scenes that sardonically flip the world inside out. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has its own principles of showing—principles that demand a good deal of inference on the part of the reader, but that tell the reader very little. The narrators in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go may seem to tell us a good deal, but their telling is in itself a sort of showing—as is perhaps the case to a large extent with any work of fiction featuring a narrator possessed for whatever reason of limited understanding. (The narrative approach of such novels might be regarded as an interesting sort of halfway house between showing and telling.)
This is to single out only a very few individual authors and works.* One might add, as a group, the long list of late twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century fiction writers who tell their stories entirely in the present tense. (Arguably, to use the present tense throughout a novel is to enforce the rule of show, don’t tell.)
Is show, don’t tell nearing the end of its long run? Has the tide finally begun to turn? I suspect that may indeed be the case; Diaz is not the only distinguished fiction writer these days to be doing at least as much telling as showing. And the Pulitzer surely says something about the way the wind may be blowing.
Nineteenth-century fiction writers typically leaned a good deal more towards tell than have twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century fiction writers. Victorian novelists told their readers a great deal—as did the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists. But they also showed a great deal; Tolstoy and George Eliot may be famous for telling rather than showing in certain passages, but they were both also immensely talented with dialogue, and with “scenes.” In short, they struck a balance between show and tell. If the pendulum is beginning now to swing back towards more exposition, and away from any presumption that everything must be presented through “scenes,” that to my mind augers well for the fiction of the twenty-first century.
I should perhaps add that I often find it difficult myself to get the balance right. I'm at the moment revising the manuscript of Leaving Pittsburgh, my next book of fiction, and trying as I do so to tell less and show more--this on the advice of Deborah Willis, a brilliant fiction writer who is also an extraordinarily perceptive fiction editor. She has reminded me that, even if it's true that the show/tell pendulum has begun to swing a bit back towards tell, we are still a very long way from nineteenth-century habits of writing and reading fiction. However difficult it may sometimes be for a Luddite such as me, one has to live in one's own age!
*It strikes me as I review the list presented here that it includes no fiction writers from outside the Anglo-North American tradition. And it strikes me further that the generalizations I’m making here may not apply to writers outside that tradition. Do novels such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things follow the show, don’t tell principle? Far less, I suspect, than do most twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century novels in the Anglo-American tradition.
Saturday, August 10, 2024
Sentience, Cruelty, and and Farm Animals
On July 26, the Globe and Mail ran an interesting long piece by Thomas Verny on animal sentience ("The controversy behind animal sentience"). The piece focuses extensively on the views of Prof. Georgia Mason of Guelph University, whom Verny quotes as describing herself "as a passionate animal welfare advocate." Mason sums up the approach she recommends in this way: "Pain and suffering is morally relevant. We need to think, ‘Can we reduce it?’ The guiding question should perhaps not be ‘is there evidence that this species is sentient?’ but rather ‘are we sure it is not?’”
Prof. Mason responded to Verny's piece with a letter to the Globe (the full version of which has been made public by the University of Guelph), expressing her regret that Verny had not referenced the view--still apparently held by a few scientists and by more than a few agricultural associations--"that most animals are non-sentient":
Prof. Mason responded to Verny's piece with a letter to the Globe (the full version of which has been made public by the University of Guelph), expressing her regret that Verny had not referenced the view--still apparently held by a few scientists and by more than a few agricultural associations--"that most animals are non-sentient":
...[F]or instance, ... the Ontario Federation of Agriculture has proposed that farm animals lack sentience. Such positions potentially imply that fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and farm animals need no protection from welfare harms. Currently the National Farm Animal Care Council and Canadian Council on Animal Care do somewhat protect these animals. However, whether they protect them enough, or protect all relevant species, is an ongoing ethical issue....I wrote the Globe to take issue with Mason's use of the word "somewhat." For it's not enough for these councils to accept that animals are sentient if the practices the councils consider acceptable entail horrific cruelty to these sentient creatures--and in the real world of today's animal agriculture industry, that is exactly what happens. The paper published a lightly edited version of my letter in the August 6 issue; I'll provide here the full text:
RE “The controversy behind animal sentience” (July 26): In her August 2 letter, Georgia Mason writes that “currently, the National Farm Animal Care Council and Canadian Council on Animal Care do somewhat protect” farm animals. The fact is that neither they nor the federal or provincial governments provide meaningful guards against cruelty to farm animals. All provinces have made animal agriculture essentially exempt from animal cruelty laws; anything that is considered “generally accepted practice” is allowed. And what is generally accepted by the animal agriculture industry—and by these councils—entails horrific cruelty. Instead of focusing on reducing cruelty, our governments continue to pass “ag gag” laws designed to prevent the public from realizing the extent of the cruelty. Meaningful protection of farm animals on the part of our provincial and federal governments is long, long overdue.That, of course, is to speak only of cruelty to the living; it is to say nothing of the cruelty of killing animals whose welfare we profess to care deeply about. The natural lifespan of a cow or pig can be at least 20 years; in modern factory farms, pigs are killed when they are no more than six months old, and "beef cattle" when they are no more than two years old. (Dairy cattle are also killed young--usually at about five years of age.) If we are truly "passionate animal welfare advocates," we should surely allow all animals to live out their natural lives--and adopt a whole-foods, plant-based diet ourselves. Healthier for us, healthier for the planet--and infinitely healthier for the animals we say we love. Sadly, human society as a whole seems still to be some considerable distance from taking such a step. But surely even carnivores should be insisting that farm animals be allowed to live reasonably happily during the short period before they are killed and eaten.
Monday, June 24, 2024
Help wanted: “Remove viscera and other inedible parts from carcasses”
I’ve often been struck by one aspect of the way in which management-labor disputes are usually reported in the media. Percentages are typically given (e.g., "the union is demanding an initial wage hike of 8 per cent,” “the agreement includes wage increases of 14 per cent over five years”), but only rarely are we given any idea of the raw numbers. Needless to say, an 8 per cent or a 14 per cent increase when you’re being paid $15 an hour is a very different thing from an 8 per cent or a 14 per cent increase when you’re being paid $120,000 a year.Your coverage of the strike at Cargill (“Cattlemen’s worries grow as Guelph slaughterhouse strike backs up supply chain” – 10 June) focuses very largely on the plight of cattlemen, and on whether or not Cargill has done too little to mechanize production. Only in passing are we told that “few people want to work in the difficult and unsavory environment of a slaughterhouse.” Indeed they don’t. The Government of Canada job bank has posted information on jobs at the plant, including a position posted in February of this year with starting pay of $19.25 an hour, the job description for which begins as follows: “slaughter livestock and remove viscera and other inedible parts from carcasses.” The Globe reports that Cargill has offered workers a 16% increase over four years. Let’s do the math; that offer would increase a $19.25 hourly wage to the princely sum of $22.33—by 2028.
A recent example is the dispute at the Cargill slaughterhouse in Guelph, Ontario. I drafted a letter to the editor on this topic earlier this month; the Globe and Mail published a slightly shortened version of the letter's first paragraph in its June 16 issue, under the rather unfortunate heading “Don’t have a cow.” I cut the second paragraph myself before sending the letter; including a second paragraph, I realized, would take the letter over the Globe's 150 word limit.
Unsurprisingly, the media reports that I’ve seen have not included any information as to how the non-human animals at Cargill facilities are treated.
But can Cargill afford to increase wages? Bloomberg reports that the company's profit declined from $6.69 billion in the year ending May 31 2022 to "only" $3.81 billion in the year ending May 31 2023. Cargill itself has reported that it has 160,000 employees worldwide. Again, let’s do the math; even with the drop in Cargill’s profit, total profit is over $24,000 per worker.
The dollar figues for Guelph, Ontario slaughterhouse wages are Canadian dollars, of course; $19.25 Canadian translates at current exchange rates to about 14 American dollars.
Sunday, June 9, 2024
A New "Wild Mountain Thyme" / "Will You Go, Lassie Go?"
Maureen takes singing lessons, and this week she and her teacher decided that the next song they would work on would be the fine, Celtic folk song variously known as “Wild Mountain Thyme” and “Will You Go, Lassie, Go?” Like so many traditional folk songs, it has somewhat tangled roots, with links to at least two Scottish folk songs from the late eighteenth century. The song we know today was composed in the 1950s by an Irishman, Francis McPeake 1st (1885 – 1971), of a long line of musical McPeakes; he is described in the Dictionary of Irish Biography as a “piper and tram conductor.” The chorus of his best-known song is a musical marvel, the lyrics perfectly weighted (both in stress and in quantity), and the melody endlessly stirring. But when Maureen and I listened to different recordings of it last night, we both agreed that it’s not all it could be in one respect: it lacks a story. The stanzas are bare bones, and there aren’t many of them:
Why not another version, then? Last night and this morning I worked on a version of “Wild Mountain Thyme” that has a story to it. Here it is:
Oh, the summertime had come
All the young birds had their feathers,
And the wild mountain thyme
Grew around the blooming heather.
It was long and far we’d roam,
It was hand in hand together
And as two we built a home—
And all around the blooming heather.
Then the dazzle days flew past
As dazzle days will ever,
And my lassie bore a lass,
While all around was blooming heather.
Then my true love found another,
I grieved my heart with weeping,
Wee lass and me together.
And the warm, wonder weather,
This is now and that was then,
Like my love, I’ll find another.
All through any love whatever,
To our lassie, ever new,
And all around the blooming heather.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=wild+mountain+thyme+-+lyricsAs Maureen observed, the most interesting thing about them may well be the note of optimism that the singer expresses when facing the possibility of lost love: "If my true love will not have me, / I will surely find another." But the note has no follow up; there really is no story developed in the song’s few stanzas.
Why not another version, then? Last night and this morning I worked on a version of “Wild Mountain Thyme” that has a story to it. Here it is:
Oh, the summertime had come
All the young birds had their feathers,
And the wild mountain thyme
Grew around the blooming heather.
It was long and far we’d roam,
It was hand in hand together
And as two we built a home—
And all around the blooming heather.
Will you go, lassie, go?
And we'll all go together
To pull wild mountain thyme
All around the blooming heather
Will you go, lassie go?
Then the dazzle days flew past
As dazzle days will ever,
And my lassie bore a lass,
While all around was blooming heather.
Will you go, lassie, go?We both swore that we’d be true,
And we'll all go together
To pull wild mountain thyme
And all around the blooming heather.
Will you go, lassie, go?
Then my true love found another,
I grieved my heart with weeping,
Wee lass and me together.
Will you go, lassie go?Now the spring has come again
As we’d all go together,
To pull wild mountain thyme,
And all around the blooming heather
Will you go, lassie, go?
And the warm, wonder weather,
This is now and that was then,
Like my love, I’ll find another.
Are you gone, lassie, gone?But we’ll both be ever true
Are we both gone, together?
Past the wild mountain thyme
And all around the blooming heather
That’s all gone, lassie, gone.
All through any love whatever,
To our lassie, ever new,
And all around the blooming heather.
Will you go, lassie, go?
And we'll all go together,
To pull wild mountain thyme
All around the blooming heather
Will you go, lassie, go?
Friday, May 24, 2024
America, Where the Rivers Meet
In one of the linked stories in my next book (a collection of linked short stories called Leaving Pittsburgh), there’s a family reunion, and on one sunny morning everyone heads down to the Point Park in Pittsburgh, where the rivers meet; the Allegheny and the Monongahela flow together to form the Ohio. It’s a place with a lot of history—history that reflects both the best and the worst of America. In the story, two people provide accounts of two very different American lives. In the book, I had at first included versions of those accounts that were too long and too formal to suit the tone of a work of fiction; thanks to my partner Maureen’s good advice, those are now edited out; I’ll include them here in case they may be of interest.
The first is the story of William Trent Junior, who was the commander at Fort Pitt during Pontiac’s Rebellion. Like George Washington, he was a land speculator, amassing vast tracts of land west of the Alleghenies at a time when white people weren’t allowed to do that—it was land that was supposed to be only for the Shawnee and the Lenape and the Huron and various other Indian nations. And when the Shawnee and the Lenape and the Huron and the others had had enough of their lands being illegally taken from them, they fought back—that was Pontiac’s Rebellion. Trent's attempt to destroy them using deadly disease is one of the most notorious episodes in American history:
It’s a sad commentary on America today that many on both sides of the great ideological divide would be comfortable in hearing only one of these stories. On the political left, many are uncomfortable with any sort of story that seems to celebrate American achievements—particularly if they are achievements by a mainstream figure who tried to build bipartisan consensus.
On the political right, many are far less tolerant than that. Numerous state governments have been revising educational curricula, making every effort to banish topics that show America in anything other than a positive light. Those efforts have gathered steam recently, but they are not new. In 2008, for example, the Arizona Legislature declared that the state's public schools would not be allowed to "include within the program of instruction any courses, classes, or school-sponsored activities that promote [or] assert as truth ... any political, religious, ideological or cultural beliefs or values that denigrate, disparage, or overtly encourage dissent from the values of American democracy and Western civilization."
The sad fact is, of course, that while "the values of Western civilization" have often been expressive of admirable ideals, they have often also been expressive of conquest and oppression; such was clearly the case during Pontiac's Rebellion.
In much of America, there has never been much appetite for telling the truth about the land speculations of the likes of George Washington and William Trent Jr. or the atrocities committed by the likes of Trent. And a great many textbooks, encyclopedias, and institutional websites, in discussing the causes of Pontiac's Rebellion, tend even today to omit any mention of the fundamental underlying dynamic - Indigenous peoples rising in protest against settler colonialists taking their land. Here is how the Battlefield Trust website presents things:
We can only hope that one fine day all of America will be willing to learn about all of its history.
The first is the story of William Trent Junior, who was the commander at Fort Pitt during Pontiac’s Rebellion. Like George Washington, he was a land speculator, amassing vast tracts of land west of the Alleghenies at a time when white people weren’t allowed to do that—it was land that was supposed to be only for the Shawnee and the Lenape and the Huron and various other Indian nations. And when the Shawnee and the Lenape and the Huron and the others had had enough of their lands being illegally taken from them, they fought back—that was Pontiac’s Rebellion. Trent's attempt to destroy them using deadly disease is one of the most notorious episodes in American history:
William Trent grew up in a wealthy slaveholding family in New Jersey. When he grew up, he started to acquire land west of the Alleghenies, paying as little as he could get away with to the Indians who had occupied the land—all this when settlers or would-be settlers were not allowed to occupy or to buy land west of the Alleghenies. The British colonial authorities had spelled that out in the Treaty of Easton in 1758 (and it would be spelled out again in the Proclamation of 1763). But the settlers and the land speculators had other ideas. George Washington put his view of the situation bluntly in a letter to a friend: he said he looked on the Proclamation as nothing more than “a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians.” Eventually, in Washington's view, the Indians would have to consent to the settlers occupying those lands. Of course Washington asked his friend to keep those views secret—this was still years before the American Revolution, and it wouldn’t do to be seen or heard to openly defy the colonial authorities.The other account has to it a very different tone:
William Trent Jr. had been a colleague of Washington’s in the British army, and like Washington he had become a land speculator as well as a soldier. The plan was simple: buy or acquire through whatever means you could as much land west of the Alleghenies as you could. Join the growing chorus of American colonists insisting that the westward march of colonial settlement must not be held back. Be prepared to fight the Indians as necessary.
And of course it was necessary. Pontiac and the others did not give up land that was rightfully theirs without a fight. In 1763 they laid siege to Fort Pitt, where Willam Trent Junior was commanding the militia. During a truce, Trent made an infamous gift to a Lenape [Delaware] group who had promised to remain friendly with the militia. “Out of our regard for them,” he wrote afterwards, “we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.” Trent and the settlers would have quashed Pontiac's Rebellion even without resorting to atrocity. But clearly he had no qualms at having done so.
Look at an 1880s map of the first ward in Pittsburgh—the ward that included what’s now the Point Park. None of what's now parkland was open land back then; Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt were long gone, but there were houses and factories all the way west to the point. The Pennsylvania Railway had a big freight terminal, running between Liberty and Penn. All through the blocks between the Allegheny and the railway—First Street, Second Street, Third Street—there were sawmills, planing mills, foundries, lumber yards, boiler works. There were houses too—cramped little working-class houses, with privies out the back. Some of them fronted on the streets, and some of them fronted on little alleys—like Greentree Alley, that ran between Duquesne Way and Penn St. just east of third Street. The McQuywan and Douglass planing mill and boiler works ran for the whole block on one side of the alley, and on the other side there was another planing mill at Duquesne Way. But there were a handful of houses tucked in there too; David Leo Lawrence was born in one of those houses. He was the last of the four children born to Charles and Kate Lawrence—Kate Conwell, she had been. Both parents came from Belfast families (the whole neighborhood was overwhelmingly Irish—Point Irish, it was called); his father worked in a warehouse and later became a road supervisor; his mother eventually became prominent in a maternity hospital for unwed mothers. When the children were young, though, the family was very poor. It’s an interesting detail that Greentree Alley was originally called Green Alley; the name was changed a few years before Lawrence was born, in order to prevent any confusion with Green Street in the Hill District. “Born on Green Street” would have been the perfect beginning for the greenest mayor that Pittsburgh—and maybe America—has ever seen.So, in Dave Lawrence, some of the best of Pittsburgh and some of the best of America. And in William Trent Jr., some of the worst.
It was right after the war that Dave Lawrence became mayor—1946. Pittsburgh was the dirtiest city in America; it might have been the dirtiest anywhere in the world. There were ordinances on the books that should have been improving things, but they’d never been enforced. Lawrence made sure they were enforced, and he added new ones. He didn’t eliminate the smoke in his twelve years as mayor—“smoke” was still a regular part of Pittsburgh weather reports into the 1960s. But with help from the state and federal governments, he reduced it by 90 percent. He started to address pollution in the waterways as well. He worked to increase the amount of available low-cost housing—and he often acted as a mediator when there were strikes, trying to arrange settlements that would provide decent wages for workers, and help them afford the new housing that was being built. And Point Irish, where he’d grown up? It had been devastated by a fire as well as by industrial blight and decades of neglect of the housing stock. Lawrence was responsible for turning it into a park — what is now Point State Park. He fought with the steel industry, but he would often work with other businesses, and (as Governor as well as when he was mayor) he would work with Republicans as well as Democrats. He wouldn’t have been able to get done all that he did if he hadn’t tried to find common ground with a lot of people he didn’t have much in common with.
It’s a sad commentary on America today that many on both sides of the great ideological divide would be comfortable in hearing only one of these stories. On the political left, many are uncomfortable with any sort of story that seems to celebrate American achievements—particularly if they are achievements by a mainstream figure who tried to build bipartisan consensus.
On the political right, many are far less tolerant than that. Numerous state governments have been revising educational curricula, making every effort to banish topics that show America in anything other than a positive light. Those efforts have gathered steam recently, but they are not new. In 2008, for example, the Arizona Legislature declared that the state's public schools would not be allowed to "include within the program of instruction any courses, classes, or school-sponsored activities that promote [or] assert as truth ... any political, religious, ideological or cultural beliefs or values that denigrate, disparage, or overtly encourage dissent from the values of American democracy and Western civilization."
The sad fact is, of course, that while "the values of Western civilization" have often been expressive of admirable ideals, they have often also been expressive of conquest and oppression; such was clearly the case during Pontiac's Rebellion.
In much of America, there has never been much appetite for telling the truth about the land speculations of the likes of George Washington and William Trent Jr. or the atrocities committed by the likes of Trent. And a great many textbooks, encyclopedias, and institutional websites, in discussing the causes of Pontiac's Rebellion, tend even today to omit any mention of the fundamental underlying dynamic - Indigenous peoples rising in protest against settler colonialists taking their land. Here is how the Battlefield Trust website presents things:
Influenced by the unwillingness of the British to establish alliances, the preaching of a Delaware holy man, Neolin, ignited the struggle between the various Native American tribes and the new power in North America...Here is how Wikipedia summarizes the causes of the war:
Pontiac's War (also known as Pontiac's Conspiracy or Pontiac's Rebellion) was launched in 1763 by a loose confederation of Native Americans who were dissatisfied with British rule in the Great Lakes region following the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Warriors from numerous nations joined in an effort to drive British soldiers and settlers out of the region. ... The war began in May 1763 when Native Americans, alarmed by policies imposed by British General Jeffrey Amherst, attacked a number of British forts and settlements.No mention there of white settlers having taken over large tracts of land that the colonial authorities had agreed would remain Indian land. Eric Foner, arguably America's most distinguished living historian, tells a different story, making clear that the Indians took up arms with the aim of driving the settlers from the Indian lands that the settlers had intruded onto:
[Neolin's message was] that his people must reject European technology, free themselves from commercial ties with whites and dependence on alcohol,... and drive the British from their territory.... In the spring and summer of 1763, Ottawas, Hurons and other Indians ...seized forts and killed hundreds of white settlers who had intruded onto Indian lands.Now, in not a few jurisdictions, it’s becoming illegal to try to teach the sorts of truths that Foner recounts in his Give Me Liberty: An American History (which has become the most widely used university survey textbook on American history).
We can only hope that one fine day all of America will be willing to learn about all of its history.
Saturday, May 18, 2024
Imagining Cleaners’ Work, and Cleaners’ Lives
If you’re looking to enter imaginatively into the life of someone who works as a cleaner or as a house-servant, what do you focus on? Their social status? Their economic circumstances? The physical reality of their daily life? Their emotions and their personal life? To even contemplate such questions is of course to have come a long way from the world of Jane Austen, where the very existence of servants is barely acknowledged, and where those whose existence is touched on usually remain nameless. That’s the starting point of Jo Baker’s marvelous 2013 novel Longbourn, which goes over much of the same ground as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice but is told from the point of view of Sarah, the Bennet’s housemaid. Extraordinarily engaging and often quite moving, Longbourn is utterly persuasive in its presentation of the realities of a life largely spent in cleaning other people’s dishes and other people’s clothes—the intellectual and emotional realities of such a life quite as much as the physical and economic ones.
A more recent example, Nita Prose’s The Maid, sets its sights much lower. The protagonist, Molly, is a good-hearted, enormously conscientious, neurodivergent employee of the luxurious Regency Hotel. Molly inadvertently becomes deeply involved with a criminal network operating within the hotel, and is herself accused of the murder. The story line works well enough, and Molly is an engaging character; in short, it’s a breezy read of a murder mystery, so one should not expect too much. But (as a former cleaner myself, albeit for only a brief time), I couldn’t help but feel the novel to be rather disappointing as a portrayal of this sort of working life. There is a good deal of description of the sorts of work that Molly and her fellow workers do, but almost nothing about the toll such work inevitably takes on the human body. In reading of Sarah’s life at Longbourn, one is frequently told of such things as “the calluses on her hands, or the swellings that pained her legs.” In The Maid, one is reminded again and again of Molly’s determination to return each hotel room “to a state of perfection,” but told little of the physical toll that must take. Nor, it seems to me, are the economic realities confronted as they deserve to be. Prose effectively conveys the financial hardship Molly suffers after her grandmother (a cleaner of houses, who Molly has shared an apartment with) dies, leaving Molly both grieving and falling behind on the rent. But Prose never connects the dots in any way that might suggest a systemic or collective problem rather than an individual financial predicament.
Toward the end of the novel, when Molly is promoted to head maid at the hotel, she receives a raise, and at about the same time she begins again to live in shared accommodation. Even then her circumstances allow her to save at only the most minimal level—“just a few hundred dollars” to start with, though it is described as enough that she can dream of one day being able to enroll in the hospitality program at the local community college. And then she receives an unexpected windfall—a $10,000 gift from a wealthy friend. “Life has a way of sorting itself out,” we are told at the book’s conclusion—one of the nuggets of wisdom that Molly’s grandmother once dispensed. “Everything will be okay in the end. And if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” But it is the end of the book, and, much as things may have turned out okay for Molly, in the broader world that the book touches on, things are very far from okay. There is no suggestion that the other maids have received raises when Molly is promoted. Though we understand that their lives will be improved by having Molly as head maid rather than the hated Cheryl (who used to steal the tips meant for others on the housekeeping staff), presumably the ordinary cleaners are still not making a living wage.
A much more rounded portrayal of what life as a cleaner is really like can be found in the 4,000 words of Sherman Alexie’s* superb short story “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” (originally published in the 29 May 2017 issue of The New Yorker), the story of Marie, who works for decades as part of the housekeeping staff at a motel. Here is part of the description of what the work does to Marie physically:
It's interesting that the best portrayals of effective collective action over the past several decades have been in films rather than in books. Norma Rae and Made in Dagenham are well known examples; less well known but at least as good is Bread and Roses (directed by Ken Loach, and starring Adrien Brody, Elpidia Carrillo, and Pilar Padilla), a brilliant 2000 film based on a true story of the successful struggle of Los Angeles janitorial workers to unionize. I can’t think of any finer example of a work of art that gives an equally powerful and equally moving sense of individual lives and of the collective reality of life for a group of oppressed workers.
In very different ways, both The Maid and Bread and Roses are heartwarming stories of working-class heroes. I recommend them both to anyone, without reservation. But I have to wonder if the very different levels of success they have met with might say anything about twenty-first century society. The Maid (which will soon also be a movie), a perfectly pleasant portrayal of an individual life that in no way challenges the socio-economic status quo, has been a number one bestseller both in Canada and in the United States. Bread and Roses, a deeply moving individual story that is also a profound exploration of a broader socio-economic reality, earned only $533,479 at the box office, and is not always easy to find today, either on streaming services or as a DVD. It’s worth the search!
A more recent example, Nita Prose’s The Maid, sets its sights much lower. The protagonist, Molly, is a good-hearted, enormously conscientious, neurodivergent employee of the luxurious Regency Hotel. Molly inadvertently becomes deeply involved with a criminal network operating within the hotel, and is herself accused of the murder. The story line works well enough, and Molly is an engaging character; in short, it’s a breezy read of a murder mystery, so one should not expect too much. But (as a former cleaner myself, albeit for only a brief time), I couldn’t help but feel the novel to be rather disappointing as a portrayal of this sort of working life. There is a good deal of description of the sorts of work that Molly and her fellow workers do, but almost nothing about the toll such work inevitably takes on the human body. In reading of Sarah’s life at Longbourn, one is frequently told of such things as “the calluses on her hands, or the swellings that pained her legs.” In The Maid, one is reminded again and again of Molly’s determination to return each hotel room “to a state of perfection,” but told little of the physical toll that must take. Nor, it seems to me, are the economic realities confronted as they deserve to be. Prose effectively conveys the financial hardship Molly suffers after her grandmother (a cleaner of houses, who Molly has shared an apartment with) dies, leaving Molly both grieving and falling behind on the rent. But Prose never connects the dots in any way that might suggest a systemic or collective problem rather than an individual financial predicament.
Toward the end of the novel, when Molly is promoted to head maid at the hotel, she receives a raise, and at about the same time she begins again to live in shared accommodation. Even then her circumstances allow her to save at only the most minimal level—“just a few hundred dollars” to start with, though it is described as enough that she can dream of one day being able to enroll in the hospitality program at the local community college. And then she receives an unexpected windfall—a $10,000 gift from a wealthy friend. “Life has a way of sorting itself out,” we are told at the book’s conclusion—one of the nuggets of wisdom that Molly’s grandmother once dispensed. “Everything will be okay in the end. And if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” But it is the end of the book, and, much as things may have turned out okay for Molly, in the broader world that the book touches on, things are very far from okay. There is no suggestion that the other maids have received raises when Molly is promoted. Though we understand that their lives will be improved by having Molly as head maid rather than the hated Cheryl (who used to steal the tips meant for others on the housekeeping staff), presumably the ordinary cleaners are still not making a living wage.
A much more rounded portrayal of what life as a cleaner is really like can be found in the 4,000 words of Sherman Alexie’s* superb short story “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” (originally published in the 29 May 2017 issue of The New Yorker), the story of Marie, who works for decades as part of the housekeeping staff at a motel. Here is part of the description of what the work does to Marie physically:
Marie’s knees and ankles hurt because she had so often squatted and kneeled to clean the floors.Alexie’s “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” is clear-eyed too on the economic front. There is no $10,000 windfall for Marie; her gift on her last day of work is that she is paid for a full day while being asked to clean only a single room. Then, her retirement send-off:
Her feet hurt because she stood for most of the day. And she’d never owned a good pair of work shoes. She’d always promised herself that she would buy a better pair of shoes with the next paycheck.
But “with the next paycheck” was like saying “Dear Big Bang.”
Her lower back hurt because of all the times she had carried the vacuum and heavy bags of clean and dirty towels, and had thrown garbage and recycling and compost into the dumpsters in the alley behind the motel.
One day, she’d twisted her back so severely that she’d collapsed in pain on the sidewalk.
At the free clinic, she learned that “back spasms” was the fancy way to say “torn muscles.”
Once or twice a year since then, she’d torn her back again. But she’d missed only a few days of work because of her bad back. She’d spend one day in bed, recovering, and then she’d force herself back to cleaning, because she’d read that an injured back heals best during activity.…
Her hands hurt.
Arthritis.
Carpal-tunnel syndrome.
And the recurring rashes caused by the soaps and disinfectants and window cleaners.
Her skin itched and burned.
She tried wearing gloves at work, but that only made her rashes migrate from her hands to her wrists, forearms, and elbows. Some mornings, she woke with hands so stiff that she could not make fists. She could not hold her coffee cup or toothbrush. She’d submerge her hands in hot water and flex and flex and flex until her fingers worked properly again.
“It’s hard work,” she’d said to Father James. “But it’s not like working in a coal mine."
“Maybe it is,” he’d said.
The owner gave Marie her last paycheck in cash. Two weeks’ worth of money. Six hundred dollars.It would be difficult in a 4,000-word story to say much of the collective issues relating to the sort of work that Alexie describes—the urgent need for better wages and benefits for all workers in such jobs-though something of their importance can I think be inferred from a careful reading of "Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest." As Tony Keller pointed out in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, the reality today is that those “with the least bargaining power—in low-education and low-wage jobs, with limited benefits or job security—tend to have the fewest protections. If anyone needs some old-fashioned union representation, it’s them.” It is of course extraordinarily difficult for such workers to unionize, not least of all because unpleasant, low-paying jobs will almost inevitably have an extremely high turnover rate (another reality that is brought home vividly to readers of “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest”). But a high turnover rate is not the only obstacle; in many jurisdictions, governments have since the 1980s made it far more difficult for workers to act collectively.
Then she got into her car. It started on the fourth try.
She drove home to her husband. He was sitting on their couch watching the midday news. He’d retired from his job at the hardware store a few months earlier.
With Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare and good luck, Marie and her husband would survive.
It's interesting that the best portrayals of effective collective action over the past several decades have been in films rather than in books. Norma Rae and Made in Dagenham are well known examples; less well known but at least as good is Bread and Roses (directed by Ken Loach, and starring Adrien Brody, Elpidia Carrillo, and Pilar Padilla), a brilliant 2000 film based on a true story of the successful struggle of Los Angeles janitorial workers to unionize. I can’t think of any finer example of a work of art that gives an equally powerful and equally moving sense of individual lives and of the collective reality of life for a group of oppressed workers.
*Anyone nowadays who praises any aspect of the work of Sherman Alexie has to accept that some readers may respond with surprise and with disapproval. Given that background, I should make clear that praising “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” as an extraordinarily accomplished and richly evocative work of fiction should in no way be construed as a defence of its author against the series of accusations of sexual harassment that surfaced in 2018—any more than praising Le Morte Darthur should be construed as a defence of Sir Thomas Malory against accusations of rape, or than praising Four Quartets should be construed as a defence of T.S. Eliot against charges of misogyny and antisemitism.
Thursday, April 4, 2024
Cruise Ship Folly
Of all the mistaken notions about tourism and the economic health of communities, the most egregious are surely those relating to cruise ships. It’s now widely recognized that the cruise ship hordes descending on Venice and other tourist magnets have had considerable adverse effects. Cruise ship tourists usually eat as well as sleep on their cruise ships. They stay in the city being visited for only very brief periods and tend to spend little—and when they do spend, it tends to be on cheap souvenirs, not on anything that supports a healthy and sustainable economy. That’s why Venice finally started to say no to cruise ships a few years ago—and why a growing number of North American cities (including Monterrey California and Charleston, South Carolina) are doing the same. But some cities that haven’t yet suffered from cruise ship hordes continue to spend substantial amounts trying to attract just those sorts of tourists.
A case in point is Nanaimo, a much smaller center than nearby Vancouver and Victoria, with far fewer of the sorts of attractions that are likely to attract cruise ship tourists. Nanaimo has a charming, historic downtown core that has for years been struggling. It badly needs to have more resources devoted to making the downtown more inviting—by addressing the issues of homelessness and drug use, by increasing the residential population of the city core, but also by supporting downtown businesses and creating more by way of permanent attractions to entice both locals and visitors (business visitors as well as tourists who may stay several days rather than just a few hours) to spend more time and more dollars in downtown Nanaimo. The city lacks a downtown movie theatre, and it lacks any distinctive attraction; it would be a perfect location, for example, for a Marine Museum that would showcase historic ships (much as Squamish has managed to attract visitors with its Mining Museum). But instead of supporting those sorts of initiatives, the city has stuck with a failed strategy of trying to lure cruise ships to its harbor. In the early years of this century it persuaded the federal government to spend $20 million on a cruise ship terminal. The terminal has never attracted more than a handful of cruise ships a year, and it has attracted none at all since 2019. Nanaimo Cruise Development Manager Andrea Thomas recently trumpeted the news that two small cruise ships would visit Nanaimo in 2024 (https://www.nanaimobulletin.com/local-news/two-cruise-ships-will-set-course-for-nanaimo-this-year-7333193). “We’re starting over again, really,” she said, “and it’s a great opportunity to show what Nanaimo is and what we can do and who we are and why we’re great and why we have a unique product offering in terms of, not specifically the port, but the city itself and the excursion opportunities” to sites such as Cathedral Grove and Vancouver Island wineries. But none of that makes any sense. First of all, no city should, as late as 2024, be “starting over again” after the pandemic. According to today’s Globe and Mail, the city of Vancouver hosted “a record number of cruise ships in the summer of 2023.” The first cruise ship to visit Vancouver after the pandemic did so in early April, 2022. In other words, Vancouver “started over” more than two years ago. And the “excursion opportunities”? The cruise ship tourists visit for a few hours, not for several days; winery tours or trips to Cathedral Grove are not an option.
How much money does Nanaimo now spend in trying to attract cruise ships and on providing services for the very, very few cruise ships that have visited? I would love to see the numbers—but however much is being spent, it’s hard not to think that the money could be better spent in other ways. Mayor Leonard Krog and the current city council have taken some important steps in recent years to make the city in general and the city core in particular more attractive to locals and visitors alike. To pick just three examples, they’ve helped to bring a baseball team to the city (and revitalize the stadium); they’ve facilitated the start-up of a successful foot ferry between downtown Nanaimo and downtown Vancouver (as it turns out, a much better use for the harbor terminal than the hoped-for cruise ships); and they have successfully encouraged more residential construction in the city core. But much more is needed—and spending money on trying to attract cruise ships is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
A case in point is Nanaimo, a much smaller center than nearby Vancouver and Victoria, with far fewer of the sorts of attractions that are likely to attract cruise ship tourists. Nanaimo has a charming, historic downtown core that has for years been struggling. It badly needs to have more resources devoted to making the downtown more inviting—by addressing the issues of homelessness and drug use, by increasing the residential population of the city core, but also by supporting downtown businesses and creating more by way of permanent attractions to entice both locals and visitors (business visitors as well as tourists who may stay several days rather than just a few hours) to spend more time and more dollars in downtown Nanaimo. The city lacks a downtown movie theatre, and it lacks any distinctive attraction; it would be a perfect location, for example, for a Marine Museum that would showcase historic ships (much as Squamish has managed to attract visitors with its Mining Museum). But instead of supporting those sorts of initiatives, the city has stuck with a failed strategy of trying to lure cruise ships to its harbor. In the early years of this century it persuaded the federal government to spend $20 million on a cruise ship terminal. The terminal has never attracted more than a handful of cruise ships a year, and it has attracted none at all since 2019. Nanaimo Cruise Development Manager Andrea Thomas recently trumpeted the news that two small cruise ships would visit Nanaimo in 2024 (https://www.nanaimobulletin.com/local-news/two-cruise-ships-will-set-course-for-nanaimo-this-year-7333193). “We’re starting over again, really,” she said, “and it’s a great opportunity to show what Nanaimo is and what we can do and who we are and why we’re great and why we have a unique product offering in terms of, not specifically the port, but the city itself and the excursion opportunities” to sites such as Cathedral Grove and Vancouver Island wineries. But none of that makes any sense. First of all, no city should, as late as 2024, be “starting over again” after the pandemic. According to today’s Globe and Mail, the city of Vancouver hosted “a record number of cruise ships in the summer of 2023.” The first cruise ship to visit Vancouver after the pandemic did so in early April, 2022. In other words, Vancouver “started over” more than two years ago. And the “excursion opportunities”? The cruise ship tourists visit for a few hours, not for several days; winery tours or trips to Cathedral Grove are not an option.
How much money does Nanaimo now spend in trying to attract cruise ships and on providing services for the very, very few cruise ships that have visited? I would love to see the numbers—but however much is being spent, it’s hard not to think that the money could be better spent in other ways. Mayor Leonard Krog and the current city council have taken some important steps in recent years to make the city in general and the city core in particular more attractive to locals and visitors alike. To pick just three examples, they’ve helped to bring a baseball team to the city (and revitalize the stadium); they’ve facilitated the start-up of a successful foot ferry between downtown Nanaimo and downtown Vancouver (as it turns out, a much better use for the harbor terminal than the hoped-for cruise ships); and they have successfully encouraged more residential construction in the city core. But much more is needed—and spending money on trying to attract cruise ships is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Sunday, March 31, 2024
Letter to the Globe - Let's Not Forget Sudan
I sent this letter to the Globe a week ago; at this point it seems unlikely they will publish it. Nor have they published other letters on the crisis in Sudan--and nor have many letters on this topic appeared in the New York Times (another newspaper that's been doing a good job of covering the crisis). Sadly, it seems that Gaza and Ukraine may have crowded out what seems likely to be at least as great a tragedy. Just to give some idea of the scale, it's been credibly reported that the RSF (the total nasties who are fighting the somewhat-less-nasty Sudanese official government) massacred 15,000 people in a single urban center a few months ago--https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/ethnic-killings-one-sudan-city-left-up-15000-dead-un-report-2024-01-19/. Not only should our governments be doing much more; we should be doing much more as individuals (or, at least, those of us who can afford it), donating to the UN World Food Agency, Medicins Sans Frontiers, Unicef, or to any other of the aid agencies that desperately need more funds to help them help those who need help.Re ”Response to plea for Sudan aid falls short” (March 22): Credit goes to Geoffrey York and the Globe for providing incisive coverage of a conflict that so much of the media is ignoring. Vitally important though the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine are, we should not let them overshadow what may well be an even greater catastrophe in Sudan, with “tens of thousands of civilians killed,” as well as “8½ million forced to flee their homes” and “18 million facing acute food insecurity.” To date, Canada has committed over $100 million to Gaza aid. We should surely be providing at least as much to help the millions who are homeless and starving in Sudan; so far we’ve pledged well under half that amount.
Saturday, March 9, 2024
The Best Films of 2023: Barbie and Simple Comme Sylvain/The Nature of Love
It seems likely at this point that the 2023 Academy Awards will have a good deal in common with the 1939 Academy Awards and the 1959 Academy Awards; one of the funniest and most original comedies of all time will lose to a bloated historical drama with impressive special effects. In 1939 it was The Philadelphia Story losing out to Gone with the Wind. In 1959 it was Some Like It Hot (not even nominated) losing out to Ben Hur. And this year it will of course be Barbie losing out to Oppenheimer.
The case that Barbie (and Greta Gerwig) deserve to win the Best Picture Oscar has been very well made elsewhere (see, for example, Ann Lee’s “Why Barbie Should Win the Best Picture Oscar” in the March 5 issue of The Guardian); it doesn't need a boost from me. The great comedy by a woman director that does need more of a boost (in the English-speaking world, at least) is arguably Monia Chokri’s Simple Comme Sylvain (entitled The Nature of Love in its English-language subtitled release). It tells the story of how the happy-enough but largely sexless marriage of Sophia and Xavier is disrupted when Sophia and Sylvain (who has been hired to renovate Sophia and Xavier’s chalet) enter into a passionate affair. There are no villains and no heroes in the piece; we sympathize with all the characters. The dialogue is quite often excruciating at the same time as it is excruciatingly funny (“I think I might have met someone,” is how Sophia begins to break the news of the affair to her loving husband.) The difference in social class between the two lovers (and between their families) is the source of much of the film’s comedy—and also of considerable sadness. It’s a film that makes viewers think too—about love, about sexual attraction, and about social class. As Konrad Yakabuski reported in the March 2 Globe and Mail, Simple Comme Sylvain beat out Oppenheimer for the Best Foreign Film award at France’s César Awards. My partner Maureen and I watched the film after seeing Yakabuski’s column—and we both agreed that the French are right in thinking Simple Comme Sylvain a better film than the overly long, pretentious, and badly organized Oppenheimer. You can rent Simple Comme Sylvain/The Nature of Love online through several sites; it’s worth it!
The case that Barbie (and Greta Gerwig) deserve to win the Best Picture Oscar has been very well made elsewhere (see, for example, Ann Lee’s “Why Barbie Should Win the Best Picture Oscar” in the March 5 issue of The Guardian); it doesn't need a boost from me. The great comedy by a woman director that does need more of a boost (in the English-speaking world, at least) is arguably Monia Chokri’s Simple Comme Sylvain (entitled The Nature of Love in its English-language subtitled release). It tells the story of how the happy-enough but largely sexless marriage of Sophia and Xavier is disrupted when Sophia and Sylvain (who has been hired to renovate Sophia and Xavier’s chalet) enter into a passionate affair. There are no villains and no heroes in the piece; we sympathize with all the characters. The dialogue is quite often excruciating at the same time as it is excruciatingly funny (“I think I might have met someone,” is how Sophia begins to break the news of the affair to her loving husband.) The difference in social class between the two lovers (and between their families) is the source of much of the film’s comedy—and also of considerable sadness. It’s a film that makes viewers think too—about love, about sexual attraction, and about social class. As Konrad Yakabuski reported in the March 2 Globe and Mail, Simple Comme Sylvain beat out Oppenheimer for the Best Foreign Film award at France’s César Awards. My partner Maureen and I watched the film after seeing Yakabuski’s column—and we both agreed that the French are right in thinking Simple Comme Sylvain a better film than the overly long, pretentious, and badly organized Oppenheimer. You can rent Simple Comme Sylvain/The Nature of Love online through several sites; it’s worth it!
(I also wrote about Oppenheimer in a Jan. 14 post, "Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer—and Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer"--see below.)
Friday, January 26, 2024
Letter to the Globe - China's Economy (and Japan's, and Canada's)
The Globe published a version of this letter early this week, but they trimmed it significantly (leaving out Ibbitson, and leaving out Canada). Here is the full text:Re “China’s looming decline could be a threat to the world” (Jan. 19): According to John Ibbitson, University of Wisconsin demographer Yi Fuxian may well be right in arguing that “China’s current economic downturn is not cyclical, but structural and irreversible.” But what is this supposed “current economic downturn”? On Jan. 16 the Globe reported that China’s economy grew by 5.2% in 2023, up from 3% in 2022. Admittedly, those are rates of growth much lower than China registered a few years ago—but they are still rates of growth well above those in Europe and North America.
In the late 1960s the Japanese economy boasted growth rates similar to those of China in the 1990s and early 2000s—sometimes reaching 10% or 12% annually. Then its population began to shrink; Japan has had a declining population for many years now. But its economy has still held up reasonably well; it typically now grows by about 1% annually—which, on a per capita basis, means growth of about 1.5% annually (considerably better than Canada’s current rate). There’s no reason why China can’t do the same.
I don't want to end a post on an anti-Ibbitson note. I'm currently reading (and very much enjoying) Ibbitson's The Duel: Diefenbaker, Pearson, and the Making of Modern Canada; it's wonderfully informative about all sorts of little things, and Ibbitson has a very interesting new perspective on the big things, arguing that in terms of policy, there is much more continuity between the Diefenbaker and Pearson governments than has generally been realized. (Ibbitson's book Empty Planet from a few years back is first-rate too.)
Sunday, January 14, 2024
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer—and Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer
My partner and I watched Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer this past week (we decided to take it in three one-hour segments—it is a very long movie!). Maureen and I both thought it a fairly good film, and an interesting one—but we find it hard to understand why it would be so enthusiastically touted as the best film of 2023.
Oppenheimer is not only too long (at least 30 minutes could easily be cut); it’s also much too loosely organized. The film is constantly jumping about between the wartime story of the atomic bomb being developed; the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearings as to whether or not Oppenheimer’s security clearance should be revoked (because of his leftist political sympathies and his lack of enthusiasm for developing the hydrogen bomb); and the 1959 hearings as to whether or not Lewis Strauss should be confirmed as Commerce Secretary. A good deal of it is not easy to follow, and in its final 45 minutes or so, as Nolan focuses more and more on the 1959 Lewis Strauss hearings, the film veers off oddly in a largely new direction. Strauss (who had persuaded Oppenheimer to become the director of Princeton’s Advanced Study Institute in 1947, but had subsequently turned against him over the H-bomb controversies) lost the 1959 cabinet confirmation vote in the US Senate, in part because various scientists testified that he had persecuted Oppenheimer through the 1954 hearings. All that is unquestionably interesting, but with the film’s focus towards the end more and more on Strauss’s personal viciousness and vindictiveness towards Oppenheimer, the larger issues start to fade into the background. Was it right to develop the atomic bomb? Was it right to develop the hydrogen bomb? How should society deal with the inevitable tension between the need for security and the democratic principles of openness and tolerance? The film has something to say about all of these, but the film’s structure dilutes what it has to say.
A much tighter—and, I would argue, a much better—work on the same topic is Heinar Kipphardt’s play from the 1960s, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Kipphardt was a practitioner of the Theater of Fact, a movement that incorporated material from real-life documents into drama. Much of his play is drawn directly from testimony given at the 1954 AEC hearings—and, unlike Nolan, he does a first-rate job of structuring that material into a tightly focused drama. Here the questions that tend too much in Nolan’s film to recede into the background are kept front and center—with one large question that Nolan pays scant attention to brought to the fore in Kipphardt’s drama: in what circumstances should scientists (should any of us, for that matter) place loyalty to our country and our government ahead of loyalty to humanity?
In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a play of ideas—Oppenheimer’s wife is not brought into it, and nor is Lewis Strauss—but the main characters are nevertheless vividly drawn, and the conflict between Oppenheimer and Edward Teller over whether or not to develop the hydrogen bomb creates real dramatic tension. (The text of the play is not entirely cut-and-pasted from the 1954 hearings; Kipphardt added several monologues, and they are a real help in stitching the story together and bringing the characters to life.)
Kipphardt’s play (which I first read thirty or more years ago—I pulled the old British Methuen edition off the shelf recently to re-read it) seems to be largely forgotten nowadays in the English-speaking world. An off-Broadway production was mounted at New York’s Connelly Theater in 2006, but the play seems to have been very infrequently performed since then. The book remains in print, but has only 15 ratings and 3 reviews on Amazon.com. It deserves to be far better known!
Oppenheimer is not only too long (at least 30 minutes could easily be cut); it’s also much too loosely organized. The film is constantly jumping about between the wartime story of the atomic bomb being developed; the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearings as to whether or not Oppenheimer’s security clearance should be revoked (because of his leftist political sympathies and his lack of enthusiasm for developing the hydrogen bomb); and the 1959 hearings as to whether or not Lewis Strauss should be confirmed as Commerce Secretary. A good deal of it is not easy to follow, and in its final 45 minutes or so, as Nolan focuses more and more on the 1959 Lewis Strauss hearings, the film veers off oddly in a largely new direction. Strauss (who had persuaded Oppenheimer to become the director of Princeton’s Advanced Study Institute in 1947, but had subsequently turned against him over the H-bomb controversies) lost the 1959 cabinet confirmation vote in the US Senate, in part because various scientists testified that he had persecuted Oppenheimer through the 1954 hearings. All that is unquestionably interesting, but with the film’s focus towards the end more and more on Strauss’s personal viciousness and vindictiveness towards Oppenheimer, the larger issues start to fade into the background. Was it right to develop the atomic bomb? Was it right to develop the hydrogen bomb? How should society deal with the inevitable tension between the need for security and the democratic principles of openness and tolerance? The film has something to say about all of these, but the film’s structure dilutes what it has to say.
A much tighter—and, I would argue, a much better—work on the same topic is Heinar Kipphardt’s play from the 1960s, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Kipphardt was a practitioner of the Theater of Fact, a movement that incorporated material from real-life documents into drama. Much of his play is drawn directly from testimony given at the 1954 AEC hearings—and, unlike Nolan, he does a first-rate job of structuring that material into a tightly focused drama. Here the questions that tend too much in Nolan’s film to recede into the background are kept front and center—with one large question that Nolan pays scant attention to brought to the fore in Kipphardt’s drama: in what circumstances should scientists (should any of us, for that matter) place loyalty to our country and our government ahead of loyalty to humanity?
In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a play of ideas—Oppenheimer’s wife is not brought into it, and nor is Lewis Strauss—but the main characters are nevertheless vividly drawn, and the conflict between Oppenheimer and Edward Teller over whether or not to develop the hydrogen bomb creates real dramatic tension. (The text of the play is not entirely cut-and-pasted from the 1954 hearings; Kipphardt added several monologues, and they are a real help in stitching the story together and bringing the characters to life.)
Kipphardt’s play (which I first read thirty or more years ago—I pulled the old British Methuen edition off the shelf recently to re-read it) seems to be largely forgotten nowadays in the English-speaking world. An off-Broadway production was mounted at New York’s Connelly Theater in 2006, but the play seems to have been very infrequently performed since then. The book remains in print, but has only 15 ratings and 3 reviews on Amazon.com. It deserves to be far better known!
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