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

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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.

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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

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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.

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.”

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.