Going to warm up for a more substantial post with a digest.
Writing: First, I’m in Living Faith today, reflecting a bit on, yes, Ordinary Time. Go here to read that. Or subscribe to the publication! I’m in it five times a quarter.
Thinking through current events for blog posts, of course. Like this one and this one. More to come later today.
Have a meeting today about a new project. Nothing big, nothing personal, just a bit of work for the cause.
Reading: After some lighter mid-century reading, I’m back to Don Quixote, which strikes me as immediately applicable to the present day, but I’ll wait until I’m finished to share those thoughts.
Also, for the homeschool, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which I read for the first time a few years ago as now-College Guy was reading it for school. Here’s part of what I wrote then:
I finished Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and was so very glad I read it. I don’t know if you can really understand this period – or even American history – without having read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It’s a polemic, to be sure, but a powerful one. Stowe does a masterful job of laying out the various, complex views of slavery via her character’s choices and opinions. Most important of all are the characters who are either torn or fancy themselves exonerated from culpability because they are not directly involved in slavery – Stowe does not spare them, of course, and even today, the dissection remains pertinent because moral issues are still hard-fought and we are still tempted to complacency and hand-washing if we fancy it not our problem or beyond our powers to have an impact.
ALSO – over the past week, I’ve read a bunch of Hemingway stories. I think it started when I was contemplating watching The Killers – and then trying to decide which version – 1946 or 1964 (ended up watching neither…) and then discovering they were based on a Hemingway story, and deciding to read it, liking it a lot, and then deciding to explore more beyond Hills with White Elephants, which was the only one I’d read before.
I’ll have more to say perhaps tomorrow, but even though I am mostly on board with what Hemingway is doing in these stories, I was struck – repeatedly – by one point.
The fact that our gal Flannery is repeatedly castigated and critiqued for “racism” when….hoo boy ….have you read Hemingway lately?
Let me put it this way. I would have no problem teaching any work of O’Connor – even a story with a title like “The Artificial Nigger” to any group of students, while I would give serious pause to teaching something like The Killers or The Battler.
What’s the difference? Well, if you are agonizing over whether or not O’Connor was racist, you should take a look at those two stories, compare and contrast. In Hemingway, his narrators regularly describe and characterize Black characters by the n-word, and describe their characteristics in those terms – as qualities or quirks specific to Black people – but not called Black. In O’Connor, her characters may think racist thoughts and treat Black people poorly…because that’s what those characters would do. And racist characters are there, not just because they were in her world and she was committed to accuracy, but because they are, and are ultimately understood as, one more specimen of that thing called Pride.
It doesn’t make it super-easy to have students encounter these words and descriptions and views, but at least in O’Connor they are presented as expressions of specific characters living in a specific place. Hemingway, being a bit more abstracted from time and place in many of his stories, has his mostly objective narrators describe Black characters in racist, stereotypical terms.
In O’Connor’s world, racism exists in the world, but it is obviously a damaged part of a fallen world. In Hemingway, racist attitudes are just The Way It Is, no problem, no argument, no tension.
Cooking: Not much. People have been out visiting and working, so there hasn’t been a lot of eating at home. C’est dommage.
Watching: Same. In what time people are around, as I mentioned, College Guy and I are working through Mad Men, hoping to get done before he (hopefully) goes to Europe in mid-February. Youngest is currently absorbed in something called Attack on Titan, which he describes as having a Lost-like feel to it (in regard to surprises and worlds within worlds…or something).
Listening: For me, my usual – piano jazz and some random classical composer I’m currently fixated on. Right now that’s Mendelssohn.
Also, to this, which we re-homed last Friday. More here.
Traveling: Yes, I’m planning a trip. After College Guy heads off to Italy (hopefully), it’s time for the youngest and I to hit the road. We are limited by a class he takes on Thursday mornings and his weekend church music
job, but he’s due for a break there (hasn’t had a weekend off since October), so we will be working within those constraints and doing a Thursday afternoon – Wednesday night trip in February to a Land with Minimal Lockdowns – but not Florida (last year’s January trip) , in case you are wondering. I figured that’s high season for Florida anyway, and with it being one of the few Free States these days, it’s going to be slammed. So we’ll head…in another direction.
And yes, we could actually go outside the country – at this point, Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica are relatively open. But….we’re down a passport, which was due for renewal 2/1, and I don’t expect the new one will be back until the end of February. I don’t have much interest in traveling outside the US right now, anyway, although I have read a couple of really nice trip reports from recent Guatemala travelers who just made recent trips, so that had me tempted…
Charlotte was Both 