Book List for the Five Page Paper:
* Baldwin, James: Go Tell It on the Mountain
Giovanni’s Room
Another Country
* Bambara, Toni Cade: The Salt Eaters
* Beatty, Paul: The White boy Shuffle
Tuff
Slumberland
* Brown, Wiliam Wells: Clotel or The President’s Daughter
* Butler, Octavia: Kindred
Fledgling
* Cooper, J. California: Life is Short but Wide
* Danticat, Edwidge: Breath, Eyes, Memory
* Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man
* Gaines, Ernest J: I Lesson Before Dying
A Gathering of Old Men
* Himes, Chester: If He Hollers Let Him Go
The Real Cool Killers
* Hughes, Langston: Not Without Laughter
* Johnson, James Weldon: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
* Larsen, Nella: Quicksand
Passing
* Lourde, Audre: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
* Mackey, Nathaniel: Djbot Babhostus’s Run
* Morrison, Toni: The Bluest Eye
Sula
Song of Solomon
Beloved
A Mercy
* Mosley, Walter: Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned
Devil in a Blue Dress
* Naylor, Gloria: The Women of Brewster Place
* Reed, Ishmael: Mumbo Jumbo
Reckless Eyeballing
Flight to Canada
* Sapphire: Push
* Slim, Iceberg: Pimp
* Toomer, Jean: Cane
* Walker, Alice: The Color Purple
* Wilson Harriet: Our Nig
* Wright, Richard: Native Son
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Gina Sinisi: "Clothing Optional"
Should you wear your green t-shirt and corduroys today or your leather jacket and combat pants? Perhaps you feel like wearing your good old trustworthy blue jeans instead. No matter what you choose, you must choose something because in American society getting dressed is not an option. While you are not allowed to roam freely in your birthday suit, whatever suit you do wear is your decision, as is where you get your clothes and what they are made of. It’s easy to drive to the mall and consume to your heart’s desire, but what about these traditional American clothing stores? Are they the best shopping option? What if I told you your blue jeans are deadly? Literally. Are they worth the life of another person? Would you trade them for your mom? It’s important to know what you’re wearing, who made it, and wear it came from. It’s important to know you have choices.
Blue jeans are the favorite pants of Americans, but because of the toxic dying process used to make them and the unfortunate chemical –laden cotton growing practices, they put their creators in dangerous situations. I believe in the good old “Do unto others as you would have done to yourself” mantra, and like I mentioned earlier, would you trade your mom for your jeans? No? Then why ask someone else to do the same?
If you are attached to wearing jeans, and your old ones are too worn out for your liking, then it is still possible to find some new ones. One great alternative to buying new clothes is buying second hand, used, or vintage clothing. This option is the most environmentally friendly one because it’s reusing what already exists and doesn’t add to material waste. Second hand shopping is also a great bargain and usually incredibly cheap. Garage sales are a great means for selling or buying new clothes and it’s usually possible to bargain over the price. If you really get excited about clothes and know people who have enviable wardrobes, organizing a clothing swap is another option. This way, you can always borrow something back if you miss it too much, and you always know your clothes can be found on friendly bodies.
If you have a fair budget and you feel that second hand shopping doesn’t always suit your needs, then buying clothes made out of organic cotton or hemp is another agriculturally responsible decision. Typical cotton production is toxic and dangerous. “Because the cotton plant is susceptible to disease and pests, it’s usually doused with a potent mix of agricultural chemicals. Some of these poisons are carcinogenic; others have been linked to headaches, dizziness, lung infections, asthma, depressions, and birth defects” (Visscher 22). While hemp is a much more sustainable plant than cotton and grows easily almost anywhere, the government, unfortunately, doesn’t allow farmers to grow it in the States, so if you buy a product made of hemp, understand that you are not buying locally or nationally.
While searching through the racks at second hand stores and reading lables takes more time than bouncing from store to store at the mall, it is kind of like a treasure hunt and the harder you work at searching for the treasure the better the treasure is. You have to get dressed. You don’t have an option. You do, however, have the option of deciding what to wear and what role you want to play in the American clothing industry.
Works Cited
Visscher, Marco. “Imps & Elfs: Fashion Sense.” Ode. April 2006: 22-24. Print.
Blue jeans are the favorite pants of Americans, but because of the toxic dying process used to make them and the unfortunate chemical –laden cotton growing practices, they put their creators in dangerous situations. I believe in the good old “Do unto others as you would have done to yourself” mantra, and like I mentioned earlier, would you trade your mom for your jeans? No? Then why ask someone else to do the same?
If you are attached to wearing jeans, and your old ones are too worn out for your liking, then it is still possible to find some new ones. One great alternative to buying new clothes is buying second hand, used, or vintage clothing. This option is the most environmentally friendly one because it’s reusing what already exists and doesn’t add to material waste. Second hand shopping is also a great bargain and usually incredibly cheap. Garage sales are a great means for selling or buying new clothes and it’s usually possible to bargain over the price. If you really get excited about clothes and know people who have enviable wardrobes, organizing a clothing swap is another option. This way, you can always borrow something back if you miss it too much, and you always know your clothes can be found on friendly bodies.
If you have a fair budget and you feel that second hand shopping doesn’t always suit your needs, then buying clothes made out of organic cotton or hemp is another agriculturally responsible decision. Typical cotton production is toxic and dangerous. “Because the cotton plant is susceptible to disease and pests, it’s usually doused with a potent mix of agricultural chemicals. Some of these poisons are carcinogenic; others have been linked to headaches, dizziness, lung infections, asthma, depressions, and birth defects” (Visscher 22). While hemp is a much more sustainable plant than cotton and grows easily almost anywhere, the government, unfortunately, doesn’t allow farmers to grow it in the States, so if you buy a product made of hemp, understand that you are not buying locally or nationally.
While searching through the racks at second hand stores and reading lables takes more time than bouncing from store to store at the mall, it is kind of like a treasure hunt and the harder you work at searching for the treasure the better the treasure is. You have to get dressed. You don’t have an option. You do, however, have the option of deciding what to wear and what role you want to play in the American clothing industry.
Works Cited
Visscher, Marco. “Imps & Elfs: Fashion Sense.” Ode. April 2006: 22-24. Print.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Barbara Ehrenreich: "Premature Pragmatism"
The setting was one of those bucolic Ivy League campuses where the tuition exceeds the average American annual income and the favorite sport is white-water rafting – so far, in other words, as one might hope to get from the banal economic worries that plague the grown-up world. The subject, among the roomful of young women who had come to meet with me, turned to “life after college” - :if there is one” (nervous giggles). “My dream was to go into psychiatric social work,” offered a serious young woman in overall and a “Divest Now” button, “but I don’t think I could live on that, so I going into business instead.” When I protested and said that she should hold on to her ideals and try to get by on the $30,000 or so a year psychiatric social workers earn, she looked baffled, as if I were recommending an internship with Mother Teresa.
“Ideal are alright when you’re young,” declared another woman, a campus activist who certainly seemed to fit the age group for which she found idealism appropriate, “but you do have to think about earning a living.” Well, yes, I thought to myself, we older feminists have been saying for some time that the goal of higher education for women is not the “MRS” degree, but when did we ever say that it was banking?
Not that a little respect for the dollar isn’t a fine thing in the young, and a useful antidote, in my day anyway, for the effects of too much Hesse or Kahlil Gibran. But no one in the room had gone so far as to suggest a career in almsgiving, washing lepers’ feet, or doing literacy training among the Bushmen. “Idealism,” to these undergraduates, was defined as an ordinary, respectable profession in the human services. “Realism,” meant plunging almost from pubescence in to the stone hearted world of finance capitalism.
Ehrenreich 2
I find this mindset, which you will find on almost any campus today, “premature pragmatism,” and I’m quite qualified to comment because I, too, was once a victim of it. I had gone to college with an intellectual agenda that included solving the mind-body problem, discovering the source of human evil, and getting an tentative reading on the purpose of life. But within a few months, I had dropped all that and become a chemistry major – partly because I had figured out that there are only meager rewards, in this world, for those who know the purpose of life and the source of all evil.
The result, twenty odd years later is pretty much what you’d expect: I’m an ex-science major with no definite occupation (unless you count “writing,” that universal cover for those who avoid wage slavery at all costs), and I’m still obsessed with the Ultimate Questions, such as What It’s All About and Whether the Universe Will Expand Forever. I could have turned out much worse; I could have stayed in chemistry and gone into something much less idealistic like nerve-gas or plastic, in which case I might have become rich and would almost certainly have become an embittered alcoholic or a middle-aged dropout. The point is that premature pragmatism didn’t work for me, and I doubt it will work for any young person intending to set aside a “Divest Now” button for one reading “You have a friend at Chase Manhattan.”
Yet premature pragmatism has become as popular on college campuses as, in past eras, swallowing goldfish to impress ones friends or taking over the administration building to demand a better world. There has been a precipitous decline, just the seventies, in the number of students majoring in mind-expanding but only incidentally remunerative fields like history and mathematics. Meanwhile, business – as an academic pursuit – is booming: almost one-fourth of all college graduates were business majors in 1983, compared to one-seventh in 1973, while the proportions who major in philosophy or literature have vanished beyond the decimal point to less than 1 percent.
Erhenreich 3
Even more alarming to anyone whose own life has been scarred by premature pragmatism, is the decline in “idealism” as expressed by undergraduates and measured by pollsters. In 1968, 85 percent of college students said that they hoped their education would help them “develop a philosophy of life,” etc., etc. In 1985, only 44 percent adhered to such lofty goals, while the majority expected that education would help them “earn a lot of money.” There has been, in other words, almost a 50 percent decline in idealism and a 100 percent increase in venality, or to put it less judgmentally, premature pragmatism.
I concede though, that there are good reasons for the hard-nosed pragmatism of today’s college students. They face rougher times, economically, than did my generation or the generation before mine. As economists frank Levy and Richard Michel have recently shown, today’s baby boomers (and especially the younger ones) are far less likely than their own parents to be able to buy a home, maintain a family on one income, or to watch their standard of living improve as they grow older.
So the best comeback for the young woman in overalls would have been for her to snap at me, “You think I should live on thirty thousand dollars a year! Well, perhaps you haven’t noticed that the National Association of Homebuilders now estimates that it takes a yearly salary of thirty seven thousand dollars a year to be able to afford a modest, median priced home. Or that if I want to send my own eventual children to a college like this I will need well over fifty thousand dollars a year. Or are you suggesting I rely on a rich husband?” And she would have been dead on the mark: in today’s economy, idealism is a luxury that most of us are likely to enjoy only at the price of simple comforts like housing and education. The mood on campuses isn’t so much venality as it is fear.
But still, premature pragmatism isn’t necessarily a winning strategy. In the first place, what looks like realism at age eighteen may become sheer folly by age thirty-eight. Occupations go in and out of corporate favor, so that chemistry, for example – which seemed to be a safe bet two decades ago – has become one of those disciplines that prepares people for life in the retail end of the newspaper business. The same may eventually happen to today’s campus favorites – like law, management and finance. At least it seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world’s total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.
Erhenreich 4
Furthermore, with any luck at all, one becomes a rather different person at age thirty-eight than one was at age eighteen. The list of famous people who ended up in a different line of work than the one first embarked on includes Clark Gable (former lumberjack), artist Henri Rousseau (postal clerk), Elvis Presley (truck driver), St. Augustine (playboy) and Che Guevara 9physician). Heads of state are notoriously unprepared for their mature careers; think of Adolph Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Min (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan. Women’s careers are, if anything, even more unpredictable, to judge from my own friends: Barbara (a biochemist turned novelist), Sara (French literature professor now a book editor), cousin Barb (anthropology to medicine).
But the saddest thing about today’s premature pragmatists is not that they will almost certainly be unprepared for their midlife career destinations, but that they will be unprepared for Life, in the grand sense, at all. The years between eighteen and twenty-two were not given to us to be fritted away in contemplation of future tax shelters and mortgage payments. In fact, it is almost a requirement of developmental biology that these years be spent in erotic reverie, metaphysical speculation, and schemes for universal peace and justice. Sometimes, of course, we lose sight of these heroic dreams of youth later on, as overdue bills and carburetor problems take their toll. But those who never dream at all start to lose much more – their wit, empathy, perspective, and for lack of a more secular term, their immortal souls.
But what about the fact that it take nearly a six-figure income to achieve what used to be known as a “middle-class” lifestyle? What about my young ivy League friend forced to choose between a career in human services and what she believes, perhaps realistically, to be an adequate income? All I can say is that there is something grievously wrong with a culture that values Wall Street sharks above social workers, armament manufactures above artists, or, for that matter, corporate lawyers above homemakers. Somehow, we’re going to have to make the world a little bit more habitable for idealists, whether they are eighteen or thirty-eight. In fact, I suspect that more and more young people, forced to choose between their ideals and economic security, will start opting for a career in social change. “The pay is lousy,” as veteran writer-historian-social-change-activist Irving Howe like to say, “ but it’s steady work.”
“Ideal are alright when you’re young,” declared another woman, a campus activist who certainly seemed to fit the age group for which she found idealism appropriate, “but you do have to think about earning a living.” Well, yes, I thought to myself, we older feminists have been saying for some time that the goal of higher education for women is not the “MRS” degree, but when did we ever say that it was banking?
Not that a little respect for the dollar isn’t a fine thing in the young, and a useful antidote, in my day anyway, for the effects of too much Hesse or Kahlil Gibran. But no one in the room had gone so far as to suggest a career in almsgiving, washing lepers’ feet, or doing literacy training among the Bushmen. “Idealism,” to these undergraduates, was defined as an ordinary, respectable profession in the human services. “Realism,” meant plunging almost from pubescence in to the stone hearted world of finance capitalism.
Ehrenreich 2
I find this mindset, which you will find on almost any campus today, “premature pragmatism,” and I’m quite qualified to comment because I, too, was once a victim of it. I had gone to college with an intellectual agenda that included solving the mind-body problem, discovering the source of human evil, and getting an tentative reading on the purpose of life. But within a few months, I had dropped all that and become a chemistry major – partly because I had figured out that there are only meager rewards, in this world, for those who know the purpose of life and the source of all evil.
The result, twenty odd years later is pretty much what you’d expect: I’m an ex-science major with no definite occupation (unless you count “writing,” that universal cover for those who avoid wage slavery at all costs), and I’m still obsessed with the Ultimate Questions, such as What It’s All About and Whether the Universe Will Expand Forever. I could have turned out much worse; I could have stayed in chemistry and gone into something much less idealistic like nerve-gas or plastic, in which case I might have become rich and would almost certainly have become an embittered alcoholic or a middle-aged dropout. The point is that premature pragmatism didn’t work for me, and I doubt it will work for any young person intending to set aside a “Divest Now” button for one reading “You have a friend at Chase Manhattan.”
Yet premature pragmatism has become as popular on college campuses as, in past eras, swallowing goldfish to impress ones friends or taking over the administration building to demand a better world. There has been a precipitous decline, just the seventies, in the number of students majoring in mind-expanding but only incidentally remunerative fields like history and mathematics. Meanwhile, business – as an academic pursuit – is booming: almost one-fourth of all college graduates were business majors in 1983, compared to one-seventh in 1973, while the proportions who major in philosophy or literature have vanished beyond the decimal point to less than 1 percent.
Erhenreich 3
Even more alarming to anyone whose own life has been scarred by premature pragmatism, is the decline in “idealism” as expressed by undergraduates and measured by pollsters. In 1968, 85 percent of college students said that they hoped their education would help them “develop a philosophy of life,” etc., etc. In 1985, only 44 percent adhered to such lofty goals, while the majority expected that education would help them “earn a lot of money.” There has been, in other words, almost a 50 percent decline in idealism and a 100 percent increase in venality, or to put it less judgmentally, premature pragmatism.
I concede though, that there are good reasons for the hard-nosed pragmatism of today’s college students. They face rougher times, economically, than did my generation or the generation before mine. As economists frank Levy and Richard Michel have recently shown, today’s baby boomers (and especially the younger ones) are far less likely than their own parents to be able to buy a home, maintain a family on one income, or to watch their standard of living improve as they grow older.
So the best comeback for the young woman in overalls would have been for her to snap at me, “You think I should live on thirty thousand dollars a year! Well, perhaps you haven’t noticed that the National Association of Homebuilders now estimates that it takes a yearly salary of thirty seven thousand dollars a year to be able to afford a modest, median priced home. Or that if I want to send my own eventual children to a college like this I will need well over fifty thousand dollars a year. Or are you suggesting I rely on a rich husband?” And she would have been dead on the mark: in today’s economy, idealism is a luxury that most of us are likely to enjoy only at the price of simple comforts like housing and education. The mood on campuses isn’t so much venality as it is fear.
But still, premature pragmatism isn’t necessarily a winning strategy. In the first place, what looks like realism at age eighteen may become sheer folly by age thirty-eight. Occupations go in and out of corporate favor, so that chemistry, for example – which seemed to be a safe bet two decades ago – has become one of those disciplines that prepares people for life in the retail end of the newspaper business. The same may eventually happen to today’s campus favorites – like law, management and finance. At least it seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world’s total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.
Erhenreich 4
Furthermore, with any luck at all, one becomes a rather different person at age thirty-eight than one was at age eighteen. The list of famous people who ended up in a different line of work than the one first embarked on includes Clark Gable (former lumberjack), artist Henri Rousseau (postal clerk), Elvis Presley (truck driver), St. Augustine (playboy) and Che Guevara 9physician). Heads of state are notoriously unprepared for their mature careers; think of Adolph Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Min (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan. Women’s careers are, if anything, even more unpredictable, to judge from my own friends: Barbara (a biochemist turned novelist), Sara (French literature professor now a book editor), cousin Barb (anthropology to medicine).
But the saddest thing about today’s premature pragmatists is not that they will almost certainly be unprepared for their midlife career destinations, but that they will be unprepared for Life, in the grand sense, at all. The years between eighteen and twenty-two were not given to us to be fritted away in contemplation of future tax shelters and mortgage payments. In fact, it is almost a requirement of developmental biology that these years be spent in erotic reverie, metaphysical speculation, and schemes for universal peace and justice. Sometimes, of course, we lose sight of these heroic dreams of youth later on, as overdue bills and carburetor problems take their toll. But those who never dream at all start to lose much more – their wit, empathy, perspective, and for lack of a more secular term, their immortal souls.
But what about the fact that it take nearly a six-figure income to achieve what used to be known as a “middle-class” lifestyle? What about my young ivy League friend forced to choose between a career in human services and what she believes, perhaps realistically, to be an adequate income? All I can say is that there is something grievously wrong with a culture that values Wall Street sharks above social workers, armament manufactures above artists, or, for that matter, corporate lawyers above homemakers. Somehow, we’re going to have to make the world a little bit more habitable for idealists, whether they are eighteen or thirty-eight. In fact, I suspect that more and more young people, forced to choose between their ideals and economic security, will start opting for a career in social change. “The pay is lousy,” as veteran writer-historian-social-change-activist Irving Howe like to say, “ but it’s steady work.”
Monday, February 15, 2010
121 paper 1 Example
Andre Peltier
Professor Peltier
English 121
10 February 2010
Windemere: The Childhood Summer Home of Ernest Hemingway
The history of the state of Michigan is ripe with art and creativity. From Motown Records in the 1960s to Madonna in the 1980s and from Diego Rivera’s Modernist mural in Detroit to the songs and stories of Native Americans in the Upper Peninsula, the cultural life of our state should never be underestimated. It was in the midst of this cultural history that one of America’s most famous writers spent his summers as he matured into a name among names in American literature. Ernest Hemingway, having written some of the most widely read book of the 20th Century, including To Have and Have Not, A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, has influenced every generation of American life since the 1920s. Another of his books, the short story collection titled In Our Time, is primarily set in rural Northern Michigan, the same rural north where he spent his childhood summers at the family cottage, Windemere, on Walloon Lake in Emmet County. Although clearly an influential area on his life and works, little has been written about this home, a home built by his father as a small shack in 1899 and then expanded over the years before finally becoming a registered National Historic Landmark in 1968.
If one were to begin to begin writing a Wikipedia page about this home, the obvious place to start would be on the internet. Government sites like www.nps.gov, the official site of the National Parks Service, have information about the process through which any landmark goes before actually being registered. There is no information on the NPS site about Windemere
Peltier 2
though, so looking elsewhere on the web would become necessary. The Michigan State Housing Development Authority has a brief description of the home and the home’s history, including when it was built, when it was added to both the State and National Historic Registers, and when Ernest Hemingway actually lived there.
Aside from the official, government sites, Universities and historical societies offer more information. The Clarke Historical library at Central Michigan University yields a complex history of the home and of its construction with many photographs and side-notes depicting what life would have been like in a small Northern Michigan cottage at the turn of the last century. The Michigan Hemingway Society, an organization dedicated to researching and promoting the influence that Michigan had on his works, also dedicates multiple pages on their web-site to his life on Walloon Lake, and particularly to the time he spent at Windemere. They also provide a link to a PDF file of the full text of Frederick Svorboda’s guide-book, Up North with the Hemingways and Nick Adams, a brief view into the life of the Hemingway family in Northern Michigan.
Once the Universities and historical Societies have been utilized, one should turn to on-line journals as a final web resource. Magazines like Michigan Country Lines On-Line and Home Life: An Up North Magazine have recently published fascinating articles regarding the home and the history of the area. In these articles, Mike Buda and Beth Anne Piehl respectively, demonstrate the contemporary history of the house, information that will work well on a Wikipedia page once it is coupled with the older information from the other sources. A third on-line magazine, Absolute Michigan, published the article, “Michigan History: Up North with the Hemingways,” in 2007. Although there is no author listed on the article, it is still a strong source for information and will work well as another option when preparing the Wikipedia page.
Peltier 3
After spending a little time with a search-engine like Google, it’s important to also turn to something a bit more academic like the MLA Database, a database that collects information about scholarly articles dealing with literature and history. A simple search using “Hemingway” and “Michigan” as keywords returns twenty articles from peer-reviewed journals. The first of which is from the Spring ’09 edition of Hemingway Review,” and the article titled “I Also, Am in Michigan': Pastoralism of Mind in 'Big Two-Hearted River.” This article shows the connections between Hemingway and his short story “Big Two-Hearted River.” This will be important because it makes the link between his writing and his connection to Michigan that is at the center of the Wikipedia page.
Another article found using the MLA Database is called “Hemingway’s Michigan Landscapes,” also from Hemingway Review, but this one is from the Fall ’07 edition. In it, Ron Berman explains the influence Michigan had on Hemingway’s stories in general, not just on “Big Two-Hearted River.” He also explains how the use of landscape in a narrative demands that both the writer and the reader make certain choices, choices that are central to the construction of the plot, central to the interpretation of the narrative, and central to the creation within the writer’s overall canon. It’s these choices, argues Berman, that tie the stories to Michigan and specifically to Windemere; this will again work to explain why Windemere is worthy of a page on Wikipedia.
Along with these two articles, many also exist specifically about his story “Up In Michigan” from his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems. In this book, a book which clearly includes only three stories, the second is specifically about his childhood at Windemere so not only will these articles be of use, but the book itself will also. Furthermore, no Wikipedia entry
Peltier 4
about Windemere would be complete without references to the other stories he wrote about Northern Michigan which can be found in the book The Nick Adams Stories which was collected and published posthumously in 1972. Although it was published after his death, it brings together his Michigan stories in one volume, arranged in such a way as to follow his own wishes.
While his own works are obviously useful for a Wikipedia page, works by other writers like Gloria Whelan, a young adult author living in Northern Michigan might also be of use. The novel The Pathless Woods from 1981 is about a young Ernest Hemingway and his life growing up at Windemere. More recently, Ellen Rosewall published the short story collection Sparkle Island about life on Walloon Lake and features a story titled “Ernest Hemingway Sat Here.” These books will be important because they demonstrate the influence his time at Windemere has had on more contemporary writers, and while Rosewall is a lesser known author, Whelan’s influence should not be underestimated. She won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2000 for her novel The Homeless Bird.
Once the Wikipedian includes some references to recent biographies of Hemingway like A Portrait of Hemingway by Lillian Ross from 1999 and The Hemingway Patrols, Terry Mart’s 2009 biography about Hemingway’s military career, the page will be complete. This information about Windemere will be useful to anyone interested in life in Northern Michigan in general or specifically in Hemingway’s childhood. It’s clear that Windemere was an important part of his youth and that writers, scholars, and general fans alike will enjoy learning more about this historic cottage.
Professor Peltier
English 121
10 February 2010
Windemere: The Childhood Summer Home of Ernest Hemingway
The history of the state of Michigan is ripe with art and creativity. From Motown Records in the 1960s to Madonna in the 1980s and from Diego Rivera’s Modernist mural in Detroit to the songs and stories of Native Americans in the Upper Peninsula, the cultural life of our state should never be underestimated. It was in the midst of this cultural history that one of America’s most famous writers spent his summers as he matured into a name among names in American literature. Ernest Hemingway, having written some of the most widely read book of the 20th Century, including To Have and Have Not, A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, has influenced every generation of American life since the 1920s. Another of his books, the short story collection titled In Our Time, is primarily set in rural Northern Michigan, the same rural north where he spent his childhood summers at the family cottage, Windemere, on Walloon Lake in Emmet County. Although clearly an influential area on his life and works, little has been written about this home, a home built by his father as a small shack in 1899 and then expanded over the years before finally becoming a registered National Historic Landmark in 1968.
If one were to begin to begin writing a Wikipedia page about this home, the obvious place to start would be on the internet. Government sites like www.nps.gov, the official site of the National Parks Service, have information about the process through which any landmark goes before actually being registered. There is no information on the NPS site about Windemere
Peltier 2
though, so looking elsewhere on the web would become necessary. The Michigan State Housing Development Authority has a brief description of the home and the home’s history, including when it was built, when it was added to both the State and National Historic Registers, and when Ernest Hemingway actually lived there.
Aside from the official, government sites, Universities and historical societies offer more information. The Clarke Historical library at Central Michigan University yields a complex history of the home and of its construction with many photographs and side-notes depicting what life would have been like in a small Northern Michigan cottage at the turn of the last century. The Michigan Hemingway Society, an organization dedicated to researching and promoting the influence that Michigan had on his works, also dedicates multiple pages on their web-site to his life on Walloon Lake, and particularly to the time he spent at Windemere. They also provide a link to a PDF file of the full text of Frederick Svorboda’s guide-book, Up North with the Hemingways and Nick Adams, a brief view into the life of the Hemingway family in Northern Michigan.
Once the Universities and historical Societies have been utilized, one should turn to on-line journals as a final web resource. Magazines like Michigan Country Lines On-Line and Home Life: An Up North Magazine have recently published fascinating articles regarding the home and the history of the area. In these articles, Mike Buda and Beth Anne Piehl respectively, demonstrate the contemporary history of the house, information that will work well on a Wikipedia page once it is coupled with the older information from the other sources. A third on-line magazine, Absolute Michigan, published the article, “Michigan History: Up North with the Hemingways,” in 2007. Although there is no author listed on the article, it is still a strong source for information and will work well as another option when preparing the Wikipedia page.
Peltier 3
After spending a little time with a search-engine like Google, it’s important to also turn to something a bit more academic like the MLA Database, a database that collects information about scholarly articles dealing with literature and history. A simple search using “Hemingway” and “Michigan” as keywords returns twenty articles from peer-reviewed journals. The first of which is from the Spring ’09 edition of Hemingway Review,” and the article titled “I Also, Am in Michigan': Pastoralism of Mind in 'Big Two-Hearted River.” This article shows the connections between Hemingway and his short story “Big Two-Hearted River.” This will be important because it makes the link between his writing and his connection to Michigan that is at the center of the Wikipedia page.
Another article found using the MLA Database is called “Hemingway’s Michigan Landscapes,” also from Hemingway Review, but this one is from the Fall ’07 edition. In it, Ron Berman explains the influence Michigan had on Hemingway’s stories in general, not just on “Big Two-Hearted River.” He also explains how the use of landscape in a narrative demands that both the writer and the reader make certain choices, choices that are central to the construction of the plot, central to the interpretation of the narrative, and central to the creation within the writer’s overall canon. It’s these choices, argues Berman, that tie the stories to Michigan and specifically to Windemere; this will again work to explain why Windemere is worthy of a page on Wikipedia.
Along with these two articles, many also exist specifically about his story “Up In Michigan” from his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems. In this book, a book which clearly includes only three stories, the second is specifically about his childhood at Windemere so not only will these articles be of use, but the book itself will also. Furthermore, no Wikipedia entry
Peltier 4
about Windemere would be complete without references to the other stories he wrote about Northern Michigan which can be found in the book The Nick Adams Stories which was collected and published posthumously in 1972. Although it was published after his death, it brings together his Michigan stories in one volume, arranged in such a way as to follow his own wishes.
While his own works are obviously useful for a Wikipedia page, works by other writers like Gloria Whelan, a young adult author living in Northern Michigan might also be of use. The novel The Pathless Woods from 1981 is about a young Ernest Hemingway and his life growing up at Windemere. More recently, Ellen Rosewall published the short story collection Sparkle Island about life on Walloon Lake and features a story titled “Ernest Hemingway Sat Here.” These books will be important because they demonstrate the influence his time at Windemere has had on more contemporary writers, and while Rosewall is a lesser known author, Whelan’s influence should not be underestimated. She won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2000 for her novel The Homeless Bird.
Once the Wikipedian includes some references to recent biographies of Hemingway like A Portrait of Hemingway by Lillian Ross from 1999 and The Hemingway Patrols, Terry Mart’s 2009 biography about Hemingway’s military career, the page will be complete. This information about Windemere will be useful to anyone interested in life in Northern Michigan in general or specifically in Hemingway’s childhood. It’s clear that Windemere was an important part of his youth and that writers, scholars, and general fans alike will enjoy learning more about this historic cottage.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Claudia Wallis - "The Thing About Thongs"
All in all, I had thought I was doing pretty well in bridging the “generation gap” – though my kids would say even this outmoded phrase betrays a certain cluelessness. In any case, my teenagers and I readily agree on playing Radiohead and Coldplay during car trips. We laugh together at Queer Eye and Jon Stewart. Then there’s Johnny Depp. My fourteen-year-old daughter and I are totally eye to eye on that one (as long as I don’t remind her that he’s closer to my age than hers). Luckily, we’ve been able to skirt such deal breakers as tattooing and body piercing. So far. But my self-image as a cool mom unraveled like a cheap slip last month in the lingerie department of Lord and Taylor, where we were doing some back-to-school shopping. The bottom line point of contention: underwear.
My daughter made it very clear that I just didn’t get it. Why did I not grasp that one couldn’t be seen in the girls’ locker room sporting those packaged bikini underpants from Jocky or Hanes? Granny pants is what some kids call them. “Mom,” my daughter wearily explained, “basically, every girl at school is wearing a thong.” The only viable alternative, one that my daughter favored, was an item called boyshorts, a low-riding pair of short shorts loosely, or should I say tightly, based on Britney’s stage-wear. Either way, it was going to be 8 to 10 bucks apiece, not three for $9. “But who sees them?” I spurted. My daughter explained that besides the locker-room scene, girls like to wear their overpriced thongs with a silky strap showing – not unlike the way they wear their bras. She was right about my not getting it. How did a risqué item popularized as a tool of seduction by Monica Lewinsky become the de rigueur fashion for eighth- and ninth-graders? Yet the trend is undeniable. Sales of thongs to tweens a market now defined ridiculously broadly as ages seven to twelve) have quadrupled since 2000, from a modest $400,000 to &1.6 million, according to NPD Fashionworld, a market tracking firm. And there’s nothing skimpy about what girls ages thirteen to seventeen spent on thongs last year: $152 million, or 40 percent of their overall spending on underpants. Do their mothers know?
Where this thing for thongs comes from is obvious: Britney, Beyoncé, The Real World, even PG movies like Freaky Friday. When a twelve-year-old wears a thong, it’s not about rebellion against adults,” says child therapist Ron Taffel, author of The Secret Family: How Adolescent Power is Changing the American Family (St. Martin’s Press, 2001). In Taffel’s view, the adult establishment has become too weak and weary to inspire rebellion. Getting thongs or tattoos or body piercing, he argues, is actually a “statement to other kids that they are part of this very, very intense, powerful second family of peer group and pop culture that is shaping kids’ wants, needs, and feelings.” This phenomenon is gripping kids at even earlier ages. Peer pressure is at its most intense between fifth and eighth grade, say Taffel, “but it can begin in first and second grade.”
Adult forces – parents, schools, churches - find it hard to compete with pop culture. Some schools have dress codes that outlaw visible underwear, but enforcing a ban on something as subtle as a thong isn’t easy, as a vice principle as a San Diego high school learned to the detriment of her career last year. Her methodology left something to be desired: She was demoted after she lifted skirts for an undies inspection before allowing girls into a school dance.
Is the underwear battle worth picking? Those who think so are worried that the thong is a blatant sexual advertisement or, at least, a tempting tease for the opposite sex. This may not be so, according to developmental psychologist Deborah Tolman, author of Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (Harvard University Press, 2002). “Kids are engaged with their sexuality at younger ages, but they’re not necessarily sexually active,” she says. The tween thong is, in a sense, the perfect symbol for the schizoid way that girls’ sexual role has evolved. On the other hand, girls are expected, as always, to be the “gatekeepers” to sex. (God forbid that boys should be held responsible.) And, yet, she says, nowadays even young tweens feel social pressure to look sexy – without crossing over the murky line into seeming slutty. In short, says Tolman, “the good-girl, bad-girl thing has grown much more complicated.”
Which is exactly what troubled me in the lingerie department. It wasn’t until we got to the parking lot that I did what psychologists say a perplexed parent should do: I asked why the underwear matter and listened hard to the answer. Tolman calls this the “authentic ask.” My daughter’s answers reflected her sense of style. But for many girls who want thongs, it may be a sense of pragmatism: What else works under tight, low-rider jeans? I gave the O.K. to boyshorts at $8.50 a pair. She’s delighted. “Mom,” she said the other day, “you really ought to try them.”
My daughter made it very clear that I just didn’t get it. Why did I not grasp that one couldn’t be seen in the girls’ locker room sporting those packaged bikini underpants from Jocky or Hanes? Granny pants is what some kids call them. “Mom,” my daughter wearily explained, “basically, every girl at school is wearing a thong.” The only viable alternative, one that my daughter favored, was an item called boyshorts, a low-riding pair of short shorts loosely, or should I say tightly, based on Britney’s stage-wear. Either way, it was going to be 8 to 10 bucks apiece, not three for $9. “But who sees them?” I spurted. My daughter explained that besides the locker-room scene, girls like to wear their overpriced thongs with a silky strap showing – not unlike the way they wear their bras. She was right about my not getting it. How did a risqué item popularized as a tool of seduction by Monica Lewinsky become the de rigueur fashion for eighth- and ninth-graders? Yet the trend is undeniable. Sales of thongs to tweens a market now defined ridiculously broadly as ages seven to twelve) have quadrupled since 2000, from a modest $400,000 to &1.6 million, according to NPD Fashionworld, a market tracking firm. And there’s nothing skimpy about what girls ages thirteen to seventeen spent on thongs last year: $152 million, or 40 percent of their overall spending on underpants. Do their mothers know?
Where this thing for thongs comes from is obvious: Britney, Beyoncé, The Real World, even PG movies like Freaky Friday. When a twelve-year-old wears a thong, it’s not about rebellion against adults,” says child therapist Ron Taffel, author of The Secret Family: How Adolescent Power is Changing the American Family (St. Martin’s Press, 2001). In Taffel’s view, the adult establishment has become too weak and weary to inspire rebellion. Getting thongs or tattoos or body piercing, he argues, is actually a “statement to other kids that they are part of this very, very intense, powerful second family of peer group and pop culture that is shaping kids’ wants, needs, and feelings.” This phenomenon is gripping kids at even earlier ages. Peer pressure is at its most intense between fifth and eighth grade, say Taffel, “but it can begin in first and second grade.”
Adult forces – parents, schools, churches - find it hard to compete with pop culture. Some schools have dress codes that outlaw visible underwear, but enforcing a ban on something as subtle as a thong isn’t easy, as a vice principle as a San Diego high school learned to the detriment of her career last year. Her methodology left something to be desired: She was demoted after she lifted skirts for an undies inspection before allowing girls into a school dance.
Is the underwear battle worth picking? Those who think so are worried that the thong is a blatant sexual advertisement or, at least, a tempting tease for the opposite sex. This may not be so, according to developmental psychologist Deborah Tolman, author of Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (Harvard University Press, 2002). “Kids are engaged with their sexuality at younger ages, but they’re not necessarily sexually active,” she says. The tween thong is, in a sense, the perfect symbol for the schizoid way that girls’ sexual role has evolved. On the other hand, girls are expected, as always, to be the “gatekeepers” to sex. (God forbid that boys should be held responsible.) And, yet, she says, nowadays even young tweens feel social pressure to look sexy – without crossing over the murky line into seeming slutty. In short, says Tolman, “the good-girl, bad-girl thing has grown much more complicated.”
Which is exactly what troubled me in the lingerie department. It wasn’t until we got to the parking lot that I did what psychologists say a perplexed parent should do: I asked why the underwear matter and listened hard to the answer. Tolman calls this the “authentic ask.” My daughter’s answers reflected her sense of style. But for many girls who want thongs, it may be a sense of pragmatism: What else works under tight, low-rider jeans? I gave the O.K. to boyshorts at $8.50 a pair. She’s delighted. “Mom,” she said the other day, “you really ought to try them.”
Monday, February 1, 2010
Mark Jackson - "The Liberal Arts: A Practicle View"
Many students question the reasoning behind a liberal arts education. But even tough they may have been forced to swallow liberal arts propaganda since junior high, students seldom receive a good explanation for why they should strive to be well-rounded. They are told that they should value the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake, yet this argument doesn’t convince those, like myself, who believe that knowledge must have some practical value or material benefit to be worth seeking.In “What is an Idea,” Wayne Booth and Marshall Gregory argue convincingly that “a liberal education is an education in ideas – not merely memorizing them, but learning to move among them, balancing one against the other, negotiating relationships, accommodating new arguments, and returning for a closer look” (17). These writers propose that a liberal arts education is valuable to students because it helps to develop their analytical thinking skills and writing skills. This is, perhaps, the best argument for taking a broad range of classes in many different subjects. Other more radical arguments in favor of the liberal arts are less appealing. Lewis Thomas, a prominent scientist and physician, believes that classical Greek should form the backbone of a college student’s education. This suggestion seems extreme. It is more reasonable to concentrate on the English language, since many students don’t have a firm grasp of basic reading and writing skills. Freshman English and other English courses serve as a better foundation for higher education than classical Greek could.The opposition to a liberal arts curriculum grows out of the values that college-bound students learn from their parents and peers: they place an immeasurable value on success and disregard anything that is not pertinent to material achievements. Students often have trouble seeing what practical value studying a particular discipline can have for them. Teenagers who are headed for the world of nine-to-five employment tend to ignore certain studies in their haste to succeed.My parents started discussing the possibility of college with men when I was in the sixth grade. They didn’t think that it was important for me to go to college to become a more fulfilled human being. My mom and dad wanted me to go to college so that I might not have to live from paycheck to paycheck like they do. Their reason for wanting me to go to college has become my primary motivation for pursuing a college degree. I remember getting into an argument with my high school councilor because I didn’t want to take a third year of Spanish. I was an A student in Spanish II, but I hated every minute of the class. My councilor noticed that I didn’t sign up for Spanish III, so he called me into his office to hassle me. I told him that I took two years of a foreign language so I would be accepted to college, but that I didn’t want to take a third year. Mr. Gallivan told me that I need a third year of foreign language to be a “well-rounded” student. My immediate response was, “So what?!” I hated foreign languages, and no councilor was going to make me take something that I didn’t want or need. I felt Spanish was a waste of time. I frequently asked my high school councilor why I needed to take classes like foreign languages and art. He never really gave me an answer (except for the lame idea about being “well-rounded”). Instead, Mr. Gallivan always directed my attention to a sign on the wall of his office which read, “There’s No Reason For It, It’s Just Our Policy!” I never found that a satisfactory explanation.Norman Cousins, however, does offer a more reasonable explanation for the necessity of a liberal arts education. In his essay, “How to Make People Smaller Than They Are,” Cousins points out how valuable the humanities are for career-minded people. He says, “The irony of the emphasis being placed on careers is that nothing is more valuable for anyone who has had a professional or vocational education than to be able to deal with abstractions or complexities, or to feel comfortable with subtleties of thought or language, or to think sequentially” (31). Cousins reminds us that technical or vocational knowledge alone will not make one successful in a chosen profession: unique problems and situations may arise daily in the context of one’s job, so an employee must be able to think creatively and deal with events that no textbook ever discussed. The workers who get the promotions and advance to higher positions are the one who can “think on their feet” when they are faced with a complex problem.Cousins also suggests that liberal arts teach students communication skills that are critical for success. A shy, introverted person who is a straight A student in college wouldn’t make a very good public relations consultant, no matter how keen his or her intellectual abilities. Employees who cannot adequately articulate their ideas to a client or employer will soon find themselves unemployed, even if they have brilliant ideas. Social integration into a particular work environment would be difficult without good communication skills and a wide range of interests and general knowledge. The broader a person’s interests, the more compatible he or she will be with other workers.Though it is obvious that liberal arts programs do have considerable value, a college education would not be complete without some job training. The liberal arts should be given equal billing in the college curriculum, but by no means should they become the focal point of higher education. If specialization is outlawed in our institutions of higher learning, then college students might lose their competitive edge. Maxim Gorky has written that, “Any knowledge is useful” (264), and of course most knowledge is useful; but it would be insane to structure the college curriculum around an overview of all the disciplines instead of allowing a student to master one subject or profession. Universities must seek to maintain an equilibrium between liberal and specialized education. A liberal arts degree without specialization or intended future specialization (such as a master’s degree in a specific field) is useless unless one wants to be a professional game show contestant.Students who want to make the most of their college years should pursue a major course of study while choosing electives or minor courses of study from the liberal arts. In this way, scholars can become experts in a profession and still have a broad enough background to ensure versatility., both within and outside the field. In a university’s quest to produce “well-rounded” students, specialization must not come to be viewed as an evil practice.If educators really want to increase the number of liberal arts courses that each student takes, they must first increase the popularity of such studies. It is futile to try to get students to learn something just for the sake of knowing it. They must be given examples, such as those already mentioned, of how a liberal education will further their own interests. Instead of telling students that they need to be “well-rounded,” and feeding them meaningless propaganda, councilors and professors should point out the practical value and applications of a broad education in the liberal arts. It is difficult to persuade some college students that becoming a better person is an important goal of higher education. Many students want a college education so they can make more money and have more power. This is the perceived value of higher education in their world.
Works Cited
Booth, Wayne and Marshall Gregory, eds. The Harper and Row Reader. 2nd Ed. New York: Harper, 1988.Cousins, Norman. “How to Make People Smaller Than They Are.” Booth and Gregory 30-32.Gorky, Maxim. “On Books.” Booth and Gregory 255-66.Thomas, Lewis. “Debating the Unknowable.” Booth and Gregory 797-803.
Works Cited
Booth, Wayne and Marshall Gregory, eds. The Harper and Row Reader. 2nd Ed. New York: Harper, 1988.Cousins, Norman. “How to Make People Smaller Than They Are.” Booth and Gregory 30-32.Gorky, Maxim. “On Books.” Booth and Gregory 255-66.Thomas, Lewis. “Debating the Unknowable.” Booth and Gregory 797-803.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
"Premature Pragmatism" - Barbara Ehrenreich
Premature Pragmatism
(Originally published in Ms Magazine in 1986)
Barbara Ehrenreich
Ehrenreich 1
The setting was one of those bucolic Ivy League campuses where the tuition exceeds the average American annual income and the favorite sport is white-water rafting – so far, in other words, as one might hope to get from the banal economic worries that plague the grown-up world. The subject, among the roomful of young women who had come to meet with me, turned to “life after college” - :if there is one” (nervous giggles). “My dream was to go into psychiatric social work,” offered a serious young woman in overall and a “Divest Now” button, “but I don’t think I could live on that, so I going into business instead.” When I protested and said that she should hold on to her ideals and try to get by on the $30,000 or so a year psychiatric social workers earn, she looked baffled, as if I were recommending an internship with Mother Teresa.
“Ideal are alright when you’re young,” declared another woman, a campus activist who certainly seemed to fit the age group for which she found idealism appropriate, “but you do have to think about earning a living.” Well, yes, I thought to myself, we older feminists have been saying for some time that the goal of higher education for women is not the “MRS” degree, but when did we ever say that it was banking?
Not that a little respect for the dollar isn’t a fine thing in the young, and a useful antidote, in my day anyway, for the effects of too much Hesse or Kahlil Gibran. But no one in the room had gone so far as to suggest a career in almsgiving, washing lepers’ feet, or doing literacy training among the Bushmen. “Idealism,” to these undergraduates, was defined as an ordinary, respectable profession in the human services. “Realism,” meant plunging almost from pubescence in to the stone hearted world of finance capitalism.
Ehrenreich 2
I find this mindset, which you will find on almost any campus today, “premature pragmatism,” and I’m quite qualified to comment because I, too, was once a victim of it. I had gone to college with an intellectual agenda that included solving the mind-body problem, discovering the source of human evil, and getting an tentative reading on the purpose of life. But within a few months, I had dropped all that and become a chemistry major – partly because I had figured out that there are only meager rewards, in this world, for those who know the purpose of life and the source of all evil.
The result, twenty odd years later is pretty much what you’d expect: I’m an ex-science major with no definite occupation (unless you count “writing,” that universal cover for those who avoid wage slavery at all costs), and I’m still obsessed with the Ultimate Questions, such as What It’s All About and Whether the Universe Will Expand Forever. I could have turned out much worse; I could have stayed in chemistry and gone into something much less idealistic like nerve-gas or plastic, in which case I might have become rich and would almost certainly have become an embittered alcoholic or a middle-aged dropout. The point is that premature pragmatism didn’t work for me, and I doubt it will work for any young person intending to set aside a “Divest Now” button for one reading “You have a friend at Chase Manhattan.”
Yet premature pragmatism has become as popular on college campuses as, in past eras, swallowing goldfish to impress ones friends or taking over the administration building to demand a better world. There has been a precipitous decline, just the seventies, in the number of students majoring in mind-expanding but only incidentally remunerative fields like history and mathematics. Meanwhile, business – as an academic pursuit – is booming: almost one-fourth of all college graduates were business majors in 1983, compared to one-seventh in 1973, while the proportions who major in philosophy or literature have vanished beyond the decimal point to less than 1 percent.
Erhenreich 3
Even more alarming to anyone whose own life has been scarred by premature pragmatism, is the decline in “idealism” as expressed by undergraduates and measured by pollsters. In 1968, 85 percent of college students said that they hoped their education would help them “develop a philosophy of life,” etc., etc. In 1985, only 44 percent adhered to such lofty goals, while the majority expected that education would help them “earn a lot of money.” There has been, in other words, almost a 50 percent decline in idealism and a 100 percent increase in venality, or to put it less judgmentally, premature pragmatism.
I concede though, that there are good reasons for the hard-nosed pragmatism of today’s college students. They face rougher times, economically, than did my generation or the generation before mine. As economists frank Levy and Richard Michel have recently shown, today’s baby boomers (and especially the younger ones) are far less likely than their own parents to be able to buy a home, maintain a family on one income, or to watch their standard of living improve as they grow older.
So the best comeback for the young woman in overalls would have been for her to snap at me, “You think I should live on thirty thousand dollars a year! Well, perhaps you haven’t noticed that the National Association of Homebuilders now estimates that it takes a yearly salary of thirty seven thousand dollars a year to be able to afford a modest, median priced home. Or that if I want to send my own eventual children to a college like this I will need well over fifty thousand dollars a year. Or are you suggesting I rely on a rich husband?” And she would have been dead on the mark: in today’s economy, idealism is a luxury that most of us are likely to enjoy only at the price of simple comforts like housing and education. The mood on campuses isn’t so much venality as it is fear.
But still, premature pragmatism isn’t necessarily a winning strategy. In the first place, what looks like realism at age eighteen may become sheer folly by age thirty-eight. Occupations go in and out of corporate favor, so that chemistry, for example – which seemed to be a safe bet two decades ago – has become one of those disciplines that prepares people for life in the retail end of the newspaper business. The same may eventually happen to today’s campus favorites – like law, management and finance. At least it seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world’s total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.
Erhenreich 4
Furthermore, with any luck at all, one becomes a rather different person at age thirty-eight than one was at age eighteen. The list of famous people who ended up in a different line of work than the one first embarked on includes Clark Gable (former lumberjack), artist Henri Rousseau (postal clerk), Elvis Presley (truck driver), St. Augustine (playboy) and Che Guevara 9physician). Heads of state are notoriously unprepared for their mature careers; think of Adolph Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Min (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan. Women’s careers are, if anything, even more unpredictable, to judge from my own friends: Barbara (a biochemist turned novelist), Sara (French literature professor now a book editor), cousin Barb (anthropology to medicine).
But the saddest thing about today’s premature pragmatists is not that they will almost certainly be unprepared for their midlife career destinations, but that they will be unprepared for Life, in the grand sense, at all. The years between eighteen and twenty-two were not given to us to be fritted away in contemplation of future tax shelters and mortgage payments. In fact, it is almost a requirement of developmental biology that these years be spent in erotic reverie, metaphysical speculation, and schemes for universal peace and justice. Sometimes, of course, we lose sight of these heroic dreams of youth later on, as overdue bills and carburetor problems take their toll. But those who never dream at all start to lose much more – their wit, empathy, perspective, and for lack of a more secular term, their immortal souls.
But what about the fact that it take nearly a six-figure income to achieve what used to be known as a “middle-class” lifestyle? What about my young ivy League friend forced to choose between a career in human services and what she believes, perhaps realistically, to be an adequate income? All I can say is that there is something grievously wrong with a culture that values Wall Street sharks above social workers, armament manufactures above artists, or, for that matter, corporate lawyers above homemakers. Somehow, we’re going to have to make the world a little bit more habitable for idealists, whether they are eighteen or thirty-eight. In fact, I suspect that more and more young people, forced to choose between their ideals and economic security, will start opting for a career in social change. “The pay is lousy,” as veteran writer-historian-social-change-activist Irving Howe like to say, “ but it’s steady work.”
(Originally published in Ms Magazine in 1986)
Barbara Ehrenreich
Ehrenreich 1
The setting was one of those bucolic Ivy League campuses where the tuition exceeds the average American annual income and the favorite sport is white-water rafting – so far, in other words, as one might hope to get from the banal economic worries that plague the grown-up world. The subject, among the roomful of young women who had come to meet with me, turned to “life after college” - :if there is one” (nervous giggles). “My dream was to go into psychiatric social work,” offered a serious young woman in overall and a “Divest Now” button, “but I don’t think I could live on that, so I going into business instead.” When I protested and said that she should hold on to her ideals and try to get by on the $30,000 or so a year psychiatric social workers earn, she looked baffled, as if I were recommending an internship with Mother Teresa.
“Ideal are alright when you’re young,” declared another woman, a campus activist who certainly seemed to fit the age group for which she found idealism appropriate, “but you do have to think about earning a living.” Well, yes, I thought to myself, we older feminists have been saying for some time that the goal of higher education for women is not the “MRS” degree, but when did we ever say that it was banking?
Not that a little respect for the dollar isn’t a fine thing in the young, and a useful antidote, in my day anyway, for the effects of too much Hesse or Kahlil Gibran. But no one in the room had gone so far as to suggest a career in almsgiving, washing lepers’ feet, or doing literacy training among the Bushmen. “Idealism,” to these undergraduates, was defined as an ordinary, respectable profession in the human services. “Realism,” meant plunging almost from pubescence in to the stone hearted world of finance capitalism.
Ehrenreich 2
I find this mindset, which you will find on almost any campus today, “premature pragmatism,” and I’m quite qualified to comment because I, too, was once a victim of it. I had gone to college with an intellectual agenda that included solving the mind-body problem, discovering the source of human evil, and getting an tentative reading on the purpose of life. But within a few months, I had dropped all that and become a chemistry major – partly because I had figured out that there are only meager rewards, in this world, for those who know the purpose of life and the source of all evil.
The result, twenty odd years later is pretty much what you’d expect: I’m an ex-science major with no definite occupation (unless you count “writing,” that universal cover for those who avoid wage slavery at all costs), and I’m still obsessed with the Ultimate Questions, such as What It’s All About and Whether the Universe Will Expand Forever. I could have turned out much worse; I could have stayed in chemistry and gone into something much less idealistic like nerve-gas or plastic, in which case I might have become rich and would almost certainly have become an embittered alcoholic or a middle-aged dropout. The point is that premature pragmatism didn’t work for me, and I doubt it will work for any young person intending to set aside a “Divest Now” button for one reading “You have a friend at Chase Manhattan.”
Yet premature pragmatism has become as popular on college campuses as, in past eras, swallowing goldfish to impress ones friends or taking over the administration building to demand a better world. There has been a precipitous decline, just the seventies, in the number of students majoring in mind-expanding but only incidentally remunerative fields like history and mathematics. Meanwhile, business – as an academic pursuit – is booming: almost one-fourth of all college graduates were business majors in 1983, compared to one-seventh in 1973, while the proportions who major in philosophy or literature have vanished beyond the decimal point to less than 1 percent.
Erhenreich 3
Even more alarming to anyone whose own life has been scarred by premature pragmatism, is the decline in “idealism” as expressed by undergraduates and measured by pollsters. In 1968, 85 percent of college students said that they hoped their education would help them “develop a philosophy of life,” etc., etc. In 1985, only 44 percent adhered to such lofty goals, while the majority expected that education would help them “earn a lot of money.” There has been, in other words, almost a 50 percent decline in idealism and a 100 percent increase in venality, or to put it less judgmentally, premature pragmatism.
I concede though, that there are good reasons for the hard-nosed pragmatism of today’s college students. They face rougher times, economically, than did my generation or the generation before mine. As economists frank Levy and Richard Michel have recently shown, today’s baby boomers (and especially the younger ones) are far less likely than their own parents to be able to buy a home, maintain a family on one income, or to watch their standard of living improve as they grow older.
So the best comeback for the young woman in overalls would have been for her to snap at me, “You think I should live on thirty thousand dollars a year! Well, perhaps you haven’t noticed that the National Association of Homebuilders now estimates that it takes a yearly salary of thirty seven thousand dollars a year to be able to afford a modest, median priced home. Or that if I want to send my own eventual children to a college like this I will need well over fifty thousand dollars a year. Or are you suggesting I rely on a rich husband?” And she would have been dead on the mark: in today’s economy, idealism is a luxury that most of us are likely to enjoy only at the price of simple comforts like housing and education. The mood on campuses isn’t so much venality as it is fear.
But still, premature pragmatism isn’t necessarily a winning strategy. In the first place, what looks like realism at age eighteen may become sheer folly by age thirty-eight. Occupations go in and out of corporate favor, so that chemistry, for example – which seemed to be a safe bet two decades ago – has become one of those disciplines that prepares people for life in the retail end of the newspaper business. The same may eventually happen to today’s campus favorites – like law, management and finance. At least it seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world’s total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.
Erhenreich 4
Furthermore, with any luck at all, one becomes a rather different person at age thirty-eight than one was at age eighteen. The list of famous people who ended up in a different line of work than the one first embarked on includes Clark Gable (former lumberjack), artist Henri Rousseau (postal clerk), Elvis Presley (truck driver), St. Augustine (playboy) and Che Guevara 9physician). Heads of state are notoriously unprepared for their mature careers; think of Adolph Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Min (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan. Women’s careers are, if anything, even more unpredictable, to judge from my own friends: Barbara (a biochemist turned novelist), Sara (French literature professor now a book editor), cousin Barb (anthropology to medicine).
But the saddest thing about today’s premature pragmatists is not that they will almost certainly be unprepared for their midlife career destinations, but that they will be unprepared for Life, in the grand sense, at all. The years between eighteen and twenty-two were not given to us to be fritted away in contemplation of future tax shelters and mortgage payments. In fact, it is almost a requirement of developmental biology that these years be spent in erotic reverie, metaphysical speculation, and schemes for universal peace and justice. Sometimes, of course, we lose sight of these heroic dreams of youth later on, as overdue bills and carburetor problems take their toll. But those who never dream at all start to lose much more – their wit, empathy, perspective, and for lack of a more secular term, their immortal souls.
But what about the fact that it take nearly a six-figure income to achieve what used to be known as a “middle-class” lifestyle? What about my young ivy League friend forced to choose between a career in human services and what she believes, perhaps realistically, to be an adequate income? All I can say is that there is something grievously wrong with a culture that values Wall Street sharks above social workers, armament manufactures above artists, or, for that matter, corporate lawyers above homemakers. Somehow, we’re going to have to make the world a little bit more habitable for idealists, whether they are eighteen or thirty-eight. In fact, I suspect that more and more young people, forced to choose between their ideals and economic security, will start opting for a career in social change. “The pay is lousy,” as veteran writer-historian-social-change-activist Irving Howe like to say, “ but it’s steady work.”
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