Gatsby at 100 ... from Myrtle's View

A leading contender for "the Great American Novel," Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby turns 100 years old this year, and while there are undoubtedly many writers, professors, artists, and critics weighing in on this anniversary, I am particularly intrigued by a clever retelling of the story from Colorado-based writer Allyson Reedy. Known primarily as a food writer, Reedy has surprised me with news of the upcoming release of Mrs. Wilson's Affair, the story of Gatsby from the perspective of ill-fated Myrtle Wilson. 

It's a fun conceit to take classic stories and re-imagine and re-tell them from alternative views. One of the best, of course, is Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. And another exceptional re-telling was Percival Everett's James, the story of Huck Finn from Jim's perspective, which went on to win the National Book Award.

Son Volt's "Trace" & the rise of Alt-Country Indie Folk

30 years ago a nearly perfect album was made that defined the birth and rise of alt-country, indie folk.

Music writer, fan, and real historian, Steve Hyden recently reflected on The Quiet Legacy Of Son Volt's "Trace" , and I truly love this line: “Alt-country” refers specifically to the generation of ’80s punks and indie rockers who picked up acoustic guitars and wrote songs about small-town drunks."

While I was living abroad at the time of its release and probably didn't discover it for a few years, Son Volt and the alt-country/indie folk rob vibe that it played a prominent role in establishing has a special place in my heart, having grown up in southern Illinois not far from Belleville where Uncle Tupelo formed. 

I can still recall sometime in the summer of 1990 when my mom handed me a copy of the groundbreaking, genre-defying "No Depression."  Amusingly, it was a preview copy, I believe, sent to the newspaper where she was a lifestyle writer and features editor, and the CD had been sent to the paper for a review. I truly wish I still had the copy.

Thoreau Leaves Walden Pond ... Again

For the second time in nearly two-hundred years, Henry Thoreau has left Walden Pond. This time his stay was closer to twenty-six years, unlike the roughly two years Thoreau spent there from July 4, 1845 to September 1847. Of course, I'm speaking of "Henry Thoreau," as played by historian Richard Smith of Concord, MA. 

The New York Times profiled this "Thoreau" in a lovely reflection, fitting of a life spent living a Transcendentalist experience in Walden Woods -- A Thoreau Impersonator Bids a Fond Farewell to Walden Pond:  After 26 years in character as the 19th-century transcendentalist writer, Richard Smith is hanging up his straw hat.

This is a great story, and I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Richard Smith this summer at the Thoreau Society's Annual Gathering in Concord. Richard is truly a great guy, a talented historian, and a true Thoreauvian. 

A bearded man in a waistcoat and tall straw hat emerged from a cabin on Walden Pond and faced a group of people wearing shorts and sunglasses. They were curious about his solitary life in the woods.

They addressed him as Henry David Thoreau, the 19th-century transcendentalist writer, but they were speaking to Richard Smith, a historian who has been Walden Pond State Reservation’s resident Thoreau impersonator since 1999.

Enjoy the rest of the story at the New York Times.

GenZ living its Parents' GenX life

In a new piece of commentary, which seems to somewhat masquarade as policy analysis and reporting, writer Alice Lassman informs us that Gen Z is Forcing Us to Rethink the American Dream | TIME

Lassman's online profiles describe her as a "policy expert with a focus on the global economy and gender." As a former high school teacher and writer who has done a fair bit of writing about Generation X, beginning with my master's thesis which analyzed work, life, and culture in the novels of Douglas Coupland, I key in on generational stories about Gen X and its offspring in Gen Z. And I often view writing about both with a fair amount of skepticism. For example, this line:

"America has never reckoned with a generation unwilling to blame themselves for the failure of its Dream. Gen Z might be the first to reject these goalposts, but they likely won’t be the last. This fracture should be alarming for a nation whose identity rests on the idea that even if you don’t make it, your children might—so long as you work hard."

I immediately took a double take on the idea that "America has never reckoned with a generation ..." For, the subsequent descriptors Lassman makes are the exact characterization made of Generation X in the 1990s. Like, a textbook reiteration of the exact same commentary made of the parents of Gen Z. 

Generation X was the "Nation at Risk," the first generation predicted and expected to have a lower standard of living than its parents. Gen X was the group that heard endlessly about but rejected its parents story of corporate loyalty and a respectable retirement, and the first that chose, and often had no choice but to choose, "lifestyle over career." The recession of the 1990s, the downsizing of factory populations, the off-shoring of jobs, the rise of contract or "gig work" that lacked benefits and security but was housed in the same companies that once employed Boomers and Silent Generationers for a lifetime, ... all these factors played a prime role in Xers quickly souring on and losing faith in the American Dream.

Heck, this was the first generation that grew up suspicious of societal institutions like government, education, and church, and it was a group who watched a president resign in disgrace as the US military withdrew from a decades long military quagmire. 

So, I have to say, I don't think Lassman is much of a policy expert and certainly not one who has done any significant research into her parents' generation, the parents of Gen Z.

What Literature Can Do

A student is writing a piece about literature and the impact it can have on individuals and beyond. Specifically, she is asking people about favorite books, the personal impact of such books, and ideas about "the weight a book can carry." And two particular books and quotes came to mind.

When Abraham Lincoln met Uncle Tom's Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, he supposedly said, "So, you're the lady whose book started this war."

And, when Upton Sinclair was interviewed about the success and impact of his book The Jungle, he responded, "I aimed for the country's heart, and I hit its stomach."

David French & GenX Parenting

Columnist David French poses an interesting and important question in his recent New York Times column:  "How Did the Latchkey Kids of Gen X Become the Helicopter Parents of Gen Z?"

It's not unreasonable to suggest that parents of a certain age should be a bit less obsessive about micromanaging every detail of their children's lives. And, to be clear, the current generation of parents did not invent the idea of helicoptering in the child rearing game. That's reserved for the Baby Boomers who coddled their Millennial offspring to ridiculous and unprecedented degrees. Subsequently, anyone with much experience with the youngest of young people these days might suspect that the Boomers' parenting was not particularly effective in that Millennials are specifically bad at the parenting game. 

Granted, all this talk of generational trends and inclinations is obviously greatly overgeneralized. There are effective and ... pathetic parents at all ages in all eras. I wrote about GenX and the parenting game five years ago, though I had a different view than French. In fact, my piece suggests that "GenX Parenting" is the opposite of helicopter parenting. Of course, that view also implies that the very concept of "Generation X," at least in the manner that sociologist Paul Fussel and writer Douglas Coupland used it, is more about an attitude and lifestyle choice as opposed to an age range.

Gen X parents don’t hover, they don’t helicopter, and they certainly don’t snowplow. However, they are neither aloof nor disengaged. Generational writer and sociologist Neil Howe has termed Gen X parents “Stealth Fighter Parents.” They are aware and involved in the lives of their children, choosing where and when and how much. If an issue “seems below their threshold of importance,” they will let it go, “saving their energy” and probably their nerves. But if the situation “shows up on their radar … they will strike, rapidly and in force, and often without warning.” The target might be their kids’ friends or their teachers or a neighbor, or most likely the kids themselves. Gen Xers are post-9/11 “security moms” and hands-on dads. And our kids, the neXt generation, share our pragmatic, somewhat jaded, and pessimistic view of society while also being rather attentive to themselves, like Xers who had to be while we let ourselves in to the houses after school and fixed our own snacks while waiting for our parents to get home. They are woke, and to borrow from David Bowie (and John Hughes) “quite aware of what they’re going through.” That’s the scoop on Gen Z, a derivative nickname for Xer’s kids, who are out, open, authentic, transparent, and inclined to change the world themselves rather than wait for their elders.

Labor Day -- New Year's in the Fall

It's Labor Day, or what some of us like to call "New Year's in the Fall." 

Any day is a new opportunity for reinvention and a fresh start. And, this year seems kind of apropos with Labor Day falling on September 1, and the first of the month also falling on a Monday.

Here's a reflection from September of '22 about the idea of reinvention and new year's and "spring" cleaning and making a fresh start to, as Thoreau said, "advancing confidently in the direction of your dreams and endeavoring to live the life you have imagined."

Write the Power, No. 2 -- The Voice of Freedom

 I recently finished a second piece in the Write the Power series. This version with Frederick Douglas, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Sojourner Truth, and Public Enemy is actually the first idea I had envisioned for the theme. This one is subtitled "The Voice of Freedom" -- mixed media collage on canvas with acrylic and paint pen. I like the way the script worked out on this one, just playing around with letters.

 

Punk Rock and Beyond

Henry Thoreau's essays, Walt Whitman's poems, and Huckleberry Finn's narrative are all proto-punk -- precursors to punk rock, punk philosophy, and punk culture. In fact, when Huck declares, "All right, then, I'll go to Hell," he utters one of the most punk rock lines in all of American literature. 

That thinking, of course, requires understanding punk beyond the stereotypes of spiked hair, mosh pits, and ferocious three-chord downstrokes. Moving punk beyond the music has been asserted and explored by musicians, artists, writers, critics, and scholars almost since its inception. From Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces to Craig O'Hara's Philosophy of Punk to Greg Graffin's "Punk Manifesto," punk is as much about attitude and intent as it is about volume and pace in music.

Moving punk "beyond the music" is at the heart of the new book Punk Beyond the Music: Tracing Mutations and Manifestations of the Punk Virus from long-time punk and American culture scholar Iain Ellis of the University of Kansas. Ellis' knowledge and scholarship is vast, and the work is informative while also being immediately accessible for readers of all familiarity, or no familiarity, with punk.

Not the Summer of George

If you're a Seinfeld fan, you likely remember the episode where George received a severance package from one job in late spring and has a new job that doesn't begin until early fall. He has the entire summer off, which he declares "The Summer of George," making plans to do all the things he never has time to do. He says, "I might read a book." Instead, he purchases a Lazy Boy recliner with a built-in fridge and proceeds to waste away the summer watching television (ultimately atrophying his body so much that when he falls, he spends the rest of the time in traction -- "It was supposed to be the Summer of George!")

As educators who have always had summers off, my wife and I often joke about the Summer of George when we make plans. We ironically use the phrase because we actually do quite a bit, even as we do enjoy the time off and the much-appreciated relaxation. This summer was truly the intended "Summer of George," and I've been meaning to post about the highlights. While I've been working a lot this summer on the Walden Punk Project, there were many great adventures.

We began the summer with a week in St. Maarten, staying on the Dutch Side at the Divy Little Bay Beach Resort near the port of Philipsburg. While Aruba is our happy place, we decided to branch out a bit, and with St. Maarten, we were not disappointed. The best part of Divy is the beautiful half-moon bay that provides for excellent swimming and snorkling. More on that later. 

Following a week on the island, we returned to the Washington, DC, metro area and did some exploring around the Chesapeake Bay region. With our daughter in college and close family in DC, and our son just up the coast in New York City, we are planning a move to the East Coast, and we took advantage of the time to scout out potential areas to move. We hit Baltimore, Wilmington, Philly, the Eastern shore towns of Chestertown and Easton, and finished up in Annapolis. It was all delightful, with Baltimore and Annapolis winning our hearts.

We also spent about a week in Boston, while I attended the Annual Gathering of the Thoreau Society out in Concord, and we rounded out the summer with a week in Paris. The primary reason of the Paris trip was a trip to the Louis Vuitton Foundation for a once in a lifetime art event -- the career retrospective on David Hockney, featuring more than 400 of his works gathered from museums and private collections around the world. It was a sublime art experience, and as an added bonus, we just happened to being staying in the Montmartre neighborhood where the final stage of the Tour de France came through.

It was all and all a wonderful "Summer of George."

Write the Power - Thoreau Society Annual Gathering

 

In the essay “In Wildness is Thoreau,” scholar Lewis Leary calls Thoreau “... a revolutionary of absolute faith … who started a one-man revolution, which has overturned worlds – not through what he did, but through what he wrote.”

That’s the spirit of my piece “Write the Power, No. 1 – Thoreau,” a mixed media collage which began serendipitously as I sat on the couch listening to music while reading, writing, and researching my idea to synthesize the worlds of Henry Thoreau and punk rock. The phrase “write the power,” stems from the 1980’s Public Enemy hip hop anthem “Fight the Power,” and I envisioned a power salute fist holding a pencil. Both punk rock and hip hop can be considered cultural and political revolutions of a sort, and a cultural revolutionary is a lens through which I see Thoreau.

Pondering that image of the fist and pencil, I imagined a series of mixed media pieces featuring revolutionary writers, artists, and musicians, celebrating the power of language and the written word. I even imagined variations such as a fist throwing a punch or flipping the middle finger, as I envisioned different writers and artists ranging from Frederick Douglas and Mark Twain to Chuck D of Public Enemy and Joe Strummer of The Clash. But I started with Henry Thoreau who was a true revolutionary, as significant, in my opinion, as any Founding Father, in his questioning and criticism of America in the early 19th century for failing to live up to the promise of its premise.

Scholars Laura Dassow (Dah-soh) Walls and Bob Pepperman Taylor emphasize how Thoreau’s work intentionally challenged America in relation to the ideals of its revolution. Revolution is also fundamental to my Thoreau-Punk alignment for both the man and the movement are grounded in what Walls describes as Thoreau’s belief that “The American Revolution was incomplete: inequality was rife, materialism was rampant, and the American economy was entirely dependent on slavery” [and injustice]. Walls says Thoreau’s “dilemma [was] how to live the American Revolution not as dead history, but as a living experience that could overturn hidebound conventions and comfortable habits.” Bob Pepperman Taylor echoes this idea in his book America’s Bachelor Uncle asserting “No writer has more powerfully portrayed the American betrayal of its own commitment to individual liberty.”

Thoreau was indeed a revolutionary with a pencil – and interestingly he also was a revolutionary pencil maker. His personal innovations literally changed the industry and made “Thoreau & Son” pencils the premier American pencil. That idea is behind my image of the pencil, and the phrase “The Power of the Pencil” is written in a style mimicking Thoreau’s more legible script. The pencil covering Thoreau’s mouth clearly draws attention to his face but also symbolizes that Thoureau did his talking on the page. Granted, at his time, his many essays were delivered at the Lyceums. But the written word enables them to live on long past the night of the performance.

The collage style for this piece and for the planned series blends text and images, emphasizing the power of words. With Thoreau in regards to this year’s theme, collage can reflect both the messiness of revolution and of art while also presenting a mosaic of the complex ideas behind Thoreau’s words, their impact, and his legacy. Graffiti style text is intended to invoke a punk rock spirit, a renegade art form. The power salute fist clutching a pencil resembles a classic tag, and of course, it is a revolutionary symbol used by many protest movements. You’ll also notice in gold paint pen various scribbles mirroring Thoreau’s looser handwriting style, which I display with several versions of his original text, the lower left being the most freeform example.

Background images making up the collage include the cover of the original edition of Walden over which I placed the fist, and the cover of the play The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee. Published at the time of the Vietnam War and subsequent protests, it’s reflective of the revolutionary spirit behind Thourea’s protest and subsequent essay known as “Civil Disobedience.” In the upper right corner I have an image of another of my Thoreau artworks which is the minimalist “Portrait of Henry David Thoreau” by Swiss/French artist Felix Vallotton over two Thoreau selections, “Walking” and “Civil Disobedience.”

The cabin in the bottom right is obviously an iconic image associated with Thoreau, and the simple act of building the cabin and living there was a revolutionary act, as Laura Dassow Walls notes in her exceptional biography, Thoreau: A Life. The cabin truly unsettled the people of Concord. I’d describe it as a punk move precisely because it agitated others and disrupted the status quo. I also included an image of the sign and quote at the original cabin site.

Thoreau was determined to be a writer, and he honestly hoped to change the world with his words. Writing is power, and we all remember the origin story of Thoreau’s epic two million word journal – Emerson asked if he kept a journal and he wrote “So, I start today.” In my research I’ve pulled countless quotes which evoke to me Thoreau’s revolutionary punk rock spirit, and I incorporated them in the piece as banners and slogans, and more are painted around the outside edge of the piece.

So, with all that, I give you “Write the Power”

Thoreau, Punk, & the Art of Nonconformity

Both Punk Rock and Henry David Thoreau are grounded in the simple act of nonconformity. Walden, a Life in the Woods is at its heart and in its central thesis an exercise in nonconformity. It truly was meant to be and remains a guidebook for nonconformists. The same is obviously true for the subculture, nay culture, that sprang up around and because of punk rock.