• About

stevewiegenstein

~ News, announcements, events, and ruminations about my books, including Slant of Light, This Old World, The Language of Trees, and Scattered Lights, and about creativity, fiction, Missouri, the Ozarks, and anything else that strikes my fancy

stevewiegenstein

Tag Archives: human nature

Close to Home

03 Tuesday May 2016

Posted by stevewiegenstein in History, Missouri, Ozarks, Personal

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Civil War, Fredericktown, historical fiction, history, human nature, Missouri, nostalgia, Ozarks, slavery

Slave salebill

I belong to a Facebook group that shares thoughts about local history in and around Fredericktown, Missouri, the small town that figures in the setting of my novels. Most of the posts to this group are of the “who remembers that quaint cafe on the corner?” or “does anyone recognize the man in this photo?” variety, but yesterday, one of the members posted this sobering reminder that the little town we bathe in nostalgia also participated, like the rest of the slaveholding part of the country, in the great evil that tore the country apart. It’s disquieting to remember, yet with only the slightest effort, such reminders are all around. A recent moment’s idle curiosity into the origins of some old-time songs led to some intense discomfort at the astonishingly racist lyrics of turn-of-the-century popular songs. And I recall a time, some years ago, when I was editing a manuscript of the journals of an early citizen of the Arcadia Valley, reading with horror his childhood account of a lynching on the railroad bridge over Stouts Creek. The horror was particularized because this was a bridge I had idly viewed from my car window hundreds of times.

The task for anyone interested in history is to see it whole, not just the parts that reflect well upon our forbears. I’m reminded of that whenever I give a talk about Missouri during the Civil War, because just about nobody of that era comes out well in the moral light of the present day. People will tell me with an element of pride, “My family never owned slaves” or “My family owned slaves, but treated them well” as though those conditions made them exemplary. Let’s face it, owning a human being pretty much rules out the “treated well” claim, and the overwhelming majority of Missourians didn’t object to the practice of slavery, whether they owned slaves or not. Apart from a handful of abolitionists, and the slave families themselves, most Missourians accepted the practice either explicitly or implicitly, with even those who were against slavery holding only the vague hope that it would wither away somehow in the future.

What does this tell us? Not that our ancestors were evil, necessarily. But that they were flawed, and that they countenanced evil things…..just like us.

Advertisement

Best Review Ever

30 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Literature, This Old World, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

art, Blank Slate Press, blogs, books, Civil War, creativity, Faulkner, fiction, historical fiction, history, human nature, Jim Bencivenga, novels, reviews, This Old World, utopia, war, Yeats

I try to keep my posts on this blog focused on things other than book promotion — that’s really not the point of the blog, which is more focused on offering thoughts and commentary. But once in a while I have to celebrate something about one of my books! And today is one of those days.

Jim Bencivenga, retired book critic for the Christian Science Monitor, recently wrote a review of This Old World that has me simultaneously blushing and making a resolution to work harder on the next book so that it lives up to the expectations it generates. I am grateful beyond words for this review and will do everything in my power to make the next book worthy of this praise.

Here’s the review:

“Since I did not read its predecessor, I came to This Old World, by Steve Wiegenstein, only on the terms inside its covers.

“It is a heart rendering tale in a time of personal and national trauma. Such lasting wounds. Such healed wounds. For Wiegenstein, the war that divided a nation is but background. The hopes and anguish of common people, and more pointedly aspiring women, dominate this book. Utopian hopes, racial hopes, and especially gender hopes play out. The cadenced voice, the agricultural pace of the characters’ colloquial, regional dialog, is the blood flowing through the veins of the narrative.

“The Civil War and the Ozark mountains hold near mythic status in the American experience. Wiegenstein populates these myths with flesh and blood characters literally or psychologically bathed in the blood of battle. Home, family, children – identity – are overwhelmed. He is true to the hymnal inspiration used in the title and which echoes on every page: ‘This old world is full of sorrow, full of sickness, weak and sore —If you love your neighbor truly, love will come to you the more.’

“I couldn’t help but connect the psychological and emotional moods of this narrative work with poems by William Butler Yeats. Both Yeats and Wiegenstein embed the worn and known facets of their nation’s pivotal rebellion/war as spiritual heft for the human hearts animating their writing.


“Yeats’s sentiment about humanity’s connection with God in ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’: ‘Now that my ladder’s gone, 
I must lie down where all the ladders start. 
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart,’ is where ‘This Old World’ begins. Things indeed fall apart in the widening gyre of the Civil War. And, much more than in Yeats, the women of ‘This Old World’ (one advantage of a novel over a poem or hymn) are given full voice to speak.


“I am convinced Charlotte Turner would more than hold her own should she sit down with Crazy Jane to lecture the Bishop. By voice, example, and especially sincere doubt, Charlotte lectures us throughout. Want to know how common folk from a proto-typical American locale not only ‘survive, but prevail,’ as Faulkner would have it? Read ‘This Old World’.”

The Sign and the Commons

26 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Personal, Rural

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

childhood, commons, farming, Garrett Hardin, human nature, individualism, Ozarks, rural

photo (1)

When I was a kid, the German Community (where my mother and father grew up) had a huge signpost at the crossroads indicating the direction to each farm. I don’t know who put up the signpost, but I would guess that the Wiegensteins might have been involved, as their place was near the crossroads. It might also have been a Brewen.

Anyway, when we moved out to Reynolds County, my dad duplicated that effort, putting up a post at the fork in the road showing which way to go to each family’s house and how far it would be. When a new family moved in, or an old family moved out, he would saw up a new pine board and paint the name or take down the old sign. When age forced them off the farm, I took down his sign and have kept it ever since. Recently I freshened up the paint with the help of my daughter, and I plan to hang it as a decoration and a memory.

We hear frequent mention these days of the “tragedy of the commons,” a term used in Garrett Hardin’s famous environmental article about the hazards of unregulated common use of such things as air, water, and so forth. And we see examples of the tragedy of the commons everywhere. Yesterday I drove to St. Louis on Interstate 70, the main artery of the state, a highway which is is dreadful repair because our legislators cannot summon up the political will to fund its proper upkeep — not because they don’t recognize the need to improve it, but because their individual self-interest (getting reelected by avoiding the “he voted to raise taxes” canard) outweighs in their mind the general good that would be gained by pulling up their socks and raising the money to fix it.

But the commons — and a proper appreciation of the commons — is also a blessing. It all depends on how you view it. Nobody made a rule that a signpost be created; someone just did it. Someone with an understanding that taking time and effort to promote the general welfare (now where have I heard those words before?) is in itself a value.

Nowadays we spend a lot of time talking about individual freedom; recently I chatted with a visitor from another country, a businessman, who told me with a chuckle, “You Americans will buy anything with the word ‘freedom’ attached to it.” The underside of freedom is selfishness and the tragedy of the commons. The blessing of the commons comes from the recognition that we are all in this together, that our own individual choices have wide impact, and that we make decisions thinking about others as well as about ourselves.

M. M. Bennetts Finalist Review and Interview – 6

12 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Literature, Personal, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

books, farming, fiction, historical fiction, human nature, novels, reviews, writing, Yorkshire

Tizzie

Next stop on my trip through the M.M. Bennetts Award finalists is P.D.R. Lindsay’s Tizzie. Although Lindsay lives in New Zealand, her family roots are in Yorkshire, the setting of this novel.

I mention that only by way of partial explanation of one of the most striking features of this book – its utter and complete mastery of the rural Yorkshire dialect. From the first paragraph onward, Tizzie captures the speaking rhythms and vocabulary of 19th-century Yorkshire farmers with amazing fidelity and precision. I was immediately immersed in the concerns and thought patterns of the main character, Tizzie Cawthra, simply by virtue of her poetic and quaint rural dialect.

And oh, Tizzie has troubles. As an unmarried woman thought to be past marrying age (29), she has been “taken in” by one of her brothers, whose family treats her as little more than a slave, or worse. Her immense store of knowledge about dairying and cheesemaking, handed down through the female side of the family over the generations, serves as the family’s financial bulwark, but Tizzie never sees a penny of it. Scorned as a failure by the family because of her lack of a husband, Tizzie can only find comfort in her beloved niece Agnes, who is similarly abused as a “useless girl.”

Tizzie’s brother’s family surely enters my list as one of the most appallingly vile sets of people I’ve read about in a long time, counterbalanced precariously by the kindly schoolmaster and fair-minded squire of the village, who appreciate Tizzie’s talents and share her aspirations for young Agnes. Tizzie’s struggles to find a sliver of freedom for herself, and a glimmer of hope for Agnes, are depicted with heart-aching care.

Fans of the gauzy PBS version of Yorkshire rural life will find parts of Tizzie hard to take. Farm work during that era was backbreaking and mind-numbing, set against an omnipresent worry that the year’s earnings might not make the rent and the family would be put off. The economic and social pressures that weigh on Tizzie make her battles against them all the more heroic. And I use the term “heroic” most intentionally here; Tizzie is indeed a hero as she labors to carve out a space of freedom for herself and her niece.

Learn more about P.D.R. Lindsay at her website, her publisher’s website, her Twitter feed, or her Goodreads page.

- PDR Lindsay

– PDR Lindsay

SW: Tizzie struck me immediately with its evocative use of Yorkshire dialect. Can you tell us about that dialect, and how you came to have such a mastery of it? Did the use of that dialect pose particular challenges for you as a writer?

I grew up in Yorkshire listening to several of the Yorkshire dialects. My father was strict and my siblings and I were not allowed to speak like that ourselves, but we heard it daily from the men on the farms around us, the women in the street and shops, a sort of general broad accent was used by most Yorkshire people. Being kids we picked up and could use some of the more colourful expressions. I used to love listening to the oldest grannies and grandads who spoke the purer dialects where I could only understand one word in twenty. There was a special rhythm to that speech. Even now I love the sound of the Dales dialects. Many of the words are pure Old English, or Norse-based and have fascinating histories. Sneck and thwaite, yat and mither, thole and crowdie, nipper and laiking, they sound grand. And it is not only the words but the way they are used which is a delight to my ear. I tried to convey some of that musical quality to the readers without losing them but any real dialect expert would not approve of the way I’ve used some of the words. My American Beta readers hated the dialect and asked me to take out as much as possible. It became a delicate balancing act, but Tizzie had to sound on the page as she did in my head.

Dialect is always a difficult choice for a writer as many readers are put off by having to deal with the unknown. As a writer I have to make things clear for my readers so I did try to put every word in context or use it in such a way that a reader could substitute a word they would know and so understand what Tizzie was thinking or saying. I know I did not succeed, but some readers have told me they loved the way she spoke, or they loved it because she sounded just like their old Nan, so perhaps a little of the music of the dialect made it off the page.

SW: A little further on that topic — I noticed that some characters are distinguished by their ability to shift in and out of the local dialect, while others are not. And then there are characters for whom the local dialect is practically a foreign language. Do you see the characters’ language use as a marker of social distinction?

Oh yes, speech marked your social class and from the Regency onwards people were clearly ranked by their speech. The old Squire, Sir Charles’s father, would have been a jolly, broad Yorkshire speaker and not give tuppence for London and London society and their pernickety ways, but his wife had had a London season and did mind about being thought a country bumpkin. Their son and heir, Sir Charles, was brought up to remember that and went away to an expensive public school where any dialect would be beaten out or mocked out of him. It was the language of the peasant not the gentleman. Even servants who wished to be more than gardeners, stable men or kitchen maids had to try and mend their speech. Readers of The Secret Garden will remember that the serving girl, Martha, tells Mary that she is only allowed to help in the house as a favour because her speech is ‘too broad.’ People learned to manage this dual system in order to get better jobs or positions. Dialect at home and standard at work.

The Schoolmaster is an interesting character in this way of dual speech in that he had joined the army and been made sergeant then was invalided out. But his friendship with his captain, Sir Charles, (he’d saved him from a couple of disasters) and their mutual interests meant that he could train as a teacher, with Sir Charles’s support, and so he had to move up the social ranks. As a senior teacher and Sir Charles’s school inspector he needed to speak ‘standard’ English but as a Yorkshire lad he knew his dialect and used it occasionally to good effect.

SW: Tizzie herself is such a great character — so rich and well-rounded. Had you been thinking about this character for a long time? What got you started with Tizzie?

I like cooking, especially old recipes. Dorothy Hartley’s book Food in England had a bibliography which set me chasing up books. I found the wonderful Elizabeth David’s book on bread which had a reference to an old Scottish cook book. I was hunting up oatcake recipes and this book was recommended for its scone and oatcake recipes. The writer aimed to preserve traditional recipes and mentioned their history and why they were made. One of these traditional oatcakes was the St Columba’s cake, an oatcake made on June 9th, St Columba’s eve. Into this cake went a silver coin. The cake was toasted over a fire made of sacred rowan, yew and oak wood and the child who found the coin in their piece of cake got to keep the year’s crop of lambs.

What an idea for a story!

I wrote one, not a great one because it was all sweetness and light and a good story needs friction. But the idea grew because I know families. Imagine what happened if the same child found the coin? Would a mother cheat to see all the children had the coin and so those valuable lambs? Would children fight and fall out for ever because one had the lambs and the other did not? The ideas buzzed inside my head quietly for a while and I tried to write a story, but the idea grew too big for a short story. It might be a novel though and I wondered about who and what and where, which is when I first began to hear Tizzie’s voice, this Yorkshire voice, in my head. Other writers will know what I mean, but it does sound a little crazy, this voices in the head business. It comes about, for me, after a lot of thinking and musing and wondering about a story idea. I will find that a character is coming to life, first as a voice I hear, then as a face I see. Thus Tizzie appeared. Tizzie, the aunt who wanted her niece to get the coin and the lambs. Tizzie who had to stop wearing rose tinted glasses and see her life as it really was. Tizzie, who was a simple, kindly soul, trying to cope with a great deal of devious evil. She was, for me, real and alive.

SW: The farther I got in the book, the more I felt that a dominant and growing theme in it is the amount of casual violence that occurs, and the disregard some of the characters have for the harm they cause. Nowadays we would call it “domestic violence,” but in that time seemed to be part of the fabric of existence. Do you see this as a theme in the book?

I have the greatest problem with themes because I always start off thinking I am writing on one theme but the story ends up about others. Any first draft is a confused mess as I try to force it my way and it goes off on its own path. In Tizzie what I wanted readers to understand was that we all wear rose tinted glasses and we need to see truly and honestly to live our lives well, which is not easy. We can choose to see or not to see. I always write about people having choices. But there was also this underlying theme of man’s inhumanity to man, and the casual unthinking unkindness which people with power often show to those who are powerless. It can be seen in families, in groups who have to work together. There is nothing ‘old’ about Tizzie’s treatment. It still happens today. I have seen in schools and in businesses the Killing by Kindness method of putting people down, pushing them out, or rendering them powerless. I have also seen the outright, devious and cruel methods which people use to gain power or get rid of people. Tizzie faces both sorts of ‘violence’ and yes, it became a theme, one I hope readers will think about and may be more aware of it happening around them.

SW: Another element of book that resonated with me is the sense of old folkways and folk wisdom being slowly lost, with Tizzie as an example of someone who possesses an enormous store of folk wisdom. Do you see this time period as a shift in our ways of knowing and doing things?

It seems to me that every generation discards the old, the things the parents did, and takes up the new. Traditions which parents valued are often derided as old fashioned or useless. Sometime traditions had to change for simple economic reasons. With luck the following generation might seize on some of their grandparents’ traditions as quaint or an excuse for a celebration, drinking or stopping work, and there might be a few people around who remembered how the traditional activity went.

In Tizzie’s era, the 1880s in Victorian Britain, economics played a large part in losing traditions. It was a period of economic depression and there was a world-wide slump in agricultural prices because New Zealand had just learned how to send chilled meat to Smithfield market in London and their cheese and butter soon followed. Exports of cheese and butter from America also added to the English farmers’ problems. Prices fell. Farmers had a hard time paying their rents. The pressure was on for change in order to survive.

Maggie was always chasing Tizzie up to make more cheese, butter, and clotted cream. Tizzie used the old, careful, slow methods traditionally successful, but you can see how the pressure would build to become more efficient, cut out some of the traditional ways in order to speed things up and produce more. The blessing of the Hall dairy is one example of a traditional way of introducing the correct bacteria to a new dairy, but it was slow and there were other ways of doing it.

SW: What’s your next project?

Right now I’m fighting my way through the first draft of a novel set in 1872 in the India of the British Raj. I anticipate that the characters end up in New Zealand, however I am not sure where the novel will now end as the characters have done their take over and might go back to Britain. I am at that dreadful writing stage where I have to make the middle of the novel fit onto the end and it is tough going as my carefully planned ending has vanished and I don’t know where I am going. Writing becomes an act of faith until that glorious moment when it all makes sense.

Tizzie had to be written in the 3rd person POV because it was too painful to write in 1st person. This is a 1st person novel simply because my male main character insists on having his story told this way. He is a merchant banker, son of bankers, an observer, thinker, and excellent seeker of new opportunities for banks and business. His family is one of the new Victorian families whose wealth and education made them independent of the mainstream upper middle class Victorian mores. He has a Quaker mother and a Jewish father. He’s been tipped out of his comfortable life in the bank to extract justice and revenge on behalf of a group of families, and himself, and he has to travel to India to deliver it. It’s another difficult story to write because of what the poor MC has to go through.

The Utopian and the Dystopian

19 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Uncategorized, Utopias, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

art, books, bookstores, creativity, fiction, human nature, utopia, writing

The question often comes to me when I’m speaking at libraries and civic groups around the state: “Why are there no utopian novels nowadays?”

I believe the utopian impulse still exists, only in a fashion so modified as to be nearly unrecognizable, but it is true that utopian novels in the vein of Herland or A Traveler from Altruria don’t come out these days. Instead, the dominant literary fashion is dystopian – especially, oddly enough, in books aimed at teenage readers.

The classic utopian novels were designed to present a critique of existing society and an alternative to the ills of that society. Today’s dystopian novels, to some extent, engage in that same critique, but instead of an alternative, they predict the dire future that awaits us if our current ills are not addressed.

The utopian novel arises from faith in human progress; the dystopian novel from its lack.

The utopian novel imagines that our better natures are held down by a faulty social structure; the dystopian novel imagines that the faulty social structure arises from our inner faults.

The absence of utopian novels shouldn’t be construed, though, as a complete absence of faith in human nature. We should remember that the utopian novel also existed as an intellectual argument, and the novel today is much less about argument and more about action. It’s intrinsically more exciting to read about a society in ruins, and the independent survivors who live in its ashes, than about a harmonious society that has solved its problems.

The utopian impulse still exists, though, and I think it has turned inward. What’s one of the largest sections of the bookstore? “Self-help.” We are bombarded with solutions . . . not for the ills of our society, but for those of ourselves. We can, the authors promise us, make ourselves perfect. Or at least darn close.

Books That Change Our Lives

27 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Personal, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

art, books, creativity, human nature, writing

In 2009, I taught a class at Culver-Stockton College called “Writing and Literature.” It was the second half of the college’s two-semester freshman writing sequence, and it’s one of those classes more eagerly anticipated by the teachers than by the students. It’s a composition course, and our job was to improve the students’ writing skills. But as grist for their compositional mills, we were supposed to pick some literary texts for them to write about.

I hadn’t taught a course like that in many years, and in fact I was pressed into service in this one because one of the regular instructors was on sabbatical. But I looked forward to teaching it. I hadn’t taught literature in a long time, even as a source for writing topics rather than for appreciation’s sake, and I was looking forward to the English teacher’s guilty pleasure – making students read works that mean a lot to you in hopes that they will also mean something to them.

The books I chose for the students to read were mostly ones that meant a great deal to me – books that in one way or another changed my life. One of them was Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Walden has that effect on a lot of people. A friend of my family’s told us this story: She spent a semester as an exchange student in England, and while there was talking about American literature with a British student. She glanced over his class reading list, and casually remarked, “I’m surprised that Walden‘s not on there.” He hadn’t heard of it, so he went out and bought a copy. A few months later, she heard from him again. Transformed by his experience of reading Walden, he had gone in search of his true self, wandering across England with minimal money and possessions, seeking authenticity in people and social relations with that kind of blinding enthusiasm that is the property of the young. Now, I wasn’t hoping that any of my students would drop out of school and roam Missouri like Diogenes as a result of my class, but I wouldn’t have minded if the book had the same effect on one or two of them that it had on me the first time I read it – the sense of coming to grips with a truly independent mind, and the thrill of experiencing a writer who is simultaneously deeply dissatisfied with the conformity and dullness that most of us allow ourselves to fall into, and optimistic about the greatness that we are all capable of.

Something else that I think about a lot is the right relation between humans and nature, how we are supposed to live in the world and yet not claim it, how we can achieve a good level of comfort and pleasure without ruining the world for future generations. I’m not what you would call a “back-to-nature” zealot, but some of my most meaningful moments have happened in the woods or on the river. So in addition to Walden, I asked my students to read Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Wendell Berry’s What Are People For? Into the Wild tells the story of a young man who is a back-to-nature zealot, whose rejection of society’s artificiality leads him to a tragic estrangement from friends and family, and ultimately to his own death. I can’t say that this book changed my life, but it serves as a very useful counterbalance to the unalloyed worship of nature that we are all a little prone to sometimes. Wendell Berry is one of the contemporary apostles of living the small and local life. His essays in What Are People For? articulate this viewpoint. I didn’t ask or expect my students to read the book and then become small country farmers; that wouldn’t be sensible, and besides, the world needs journalists and clinical psychologists and business entrepreneurs and everything else we were trying to teach at Culver-Stockton. But I did hope that they would develop some appreciation for their region and their origins. I wanted them to understand that they’re not inferior to anyone if they come from Canton, or Palmyra, or Hull, or Hamilton, and that beautiful and fulfilling lives can be led in such places as well. And I wanted them to think about their food – where it comes from, who grew it for them, what had to happen for it to reach their tables. Part of being a responsible human being is awareness of the impact of your actions, and too often we put food in our mouths, clothes on our bodies, or toys under our tree without giving much thought to the human and natural expenditures that lie behind those seemingly simple actions.

Another book that I had my students read was Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and this really is a book that changed my life. I first read it when I was in high school; wandering in a used book store, I was intrigued by the title and bought it for ten cents without knowing a single thing about it. For those of you who don’t know the book, it was a big seller in the late 1950s and early 1960s – part Holocaust memoir, part pop philosophy. The thing that I remembered about Man’s Search for Meaning, and the quality that led me to require it for my class, was its remarkable blend of horror, realism, and optimism. Before the war began, Frankl was a successful psychiatrist in Vienna, the director of an institute that focused especially on the prevention of suicide and the treatment of those for whom life had lost its meaning. Then very swiftly he found himself in a concentration camp, stripped of his family, his possessions, his dignity, even the simple essentials of life itself, and forced every day to confront those questions that most of us rarely if ever confront: what is the purpose of my life? Is there a purpose to my life? Why should I bother to get out of bed today? Why not just die?

Perhaps because of his background and training, Frankl was able to view these questions with a measure of objectivity, even while enduring the terrible suffering of the camps. And he emerged from his experience with what he called a “tragic optimism,” and in this book he makes the case for it. His tragic optimism is perhaps best thought of as the living embodiment of existentialist philosophy, the idea that “the meaning of life” is not something outside oneself waiting to be discovered, but rather something that each of us creates through our own actions. At one point he writes, “Man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.” And to quote again, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” While this attitude is somewhat bleak, it is also quite bracing – sort of that cliff-edge sensation. From the time I first read Man’s Search for Meaning, I have reminded myself occasionally, when I get busy blaming my surroundings for some undesirable situation, that although I am subject to circumstances beyond my control, my response to those circumstances is under my control. I’m not responsible for the situations in which I find myself – but I am responsible for how I deal with those situations, and it’s in the way I deal with them that I make my life mean something.

I also had them read Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Emerson, specifically the Divinity School Address and the essay entitled “The Over-Soul.” I am not sure if my students got anything out of those essays, because they are tough, tough pieces of reading – and they are the easiest essays in the book! But being a teacher means being an optimist. You always think they might just get it – and I hope the students at least experienced what I always experience when I read Emerson: the sense of having engaged a great mind, successfully or unsuccessfully, and having come away with at least a partial understanding. Emerson is not afraid of talking about the divine, about the universal, the eternal. I find Emerson’s essays very difficult; the sentences glance off each other sometimes with little apparent connection, they are full of allusions to other works and figures from history, and of course he never stops to explain anything. But there’s always a sense that something is going on there; you catch glimpses of it, and the harder you work at his essays, the more you get out of them. There is great value to be gained from tackling something tough, even unsuccessfully. And that’s an experience every student ought to have.

If the privilege of a teacher is to inflict upon your students the books that mean a lot to you, the curse of a teacher is to have those students hate them. Or perhaps even worse, to fail to appreciate them. And I am sure that by the end of this semester, most of my class cussed my choices, once, twice, or many times. And I cussed their lack of understanding an equal number of times. But that’s all right. It’s not so much what book a person loves that is important, it’s the act of experiencing books, and perhaps coming to love a book. Books have a permanence to them; I like the way they feel in my hand, solid and stable. I like the concentration that goes into a book, the fact that someone took a long time and sustained effort to create it, and the fact that it takes time and effort to draw out its meaning. So if my students didn’t respond to my chosen books, okay. Maybe they will choose books of their own to hold dear. I think that’s the real secret to books – they speak to us in different ways and at different times. The book that resonated in my heart when I was twenty-five may leave you cold, and indeed may not speak to me in the same way today that it did then. We all have our own list of books that have changed our lives, and those lists are never the same. I’ve told you about mine – now I’d like to hear about yours.

(This piece adapted from a talk I gave to the Quincy, Illinois, Unitarian Church)

Honest Work, Just Reward

26 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Illinois, Personal

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

human nature, Illinois, Quincy, reviews, theater, writing

– That’s the way to please the Lord,

or so says Javert in the musical version of Les Misérables. I had the pleasure of seeing that show at the Quincy (Ill.) Community Theatre last weekend, and for various reasons, that line stuck with me more than it had in previous performances.

Before I go on about that passage, let me gush for a moment about the QCT’s production. Quincy is a town of 40,000, with a community theater that relies on all-volunteer casts (although this production brought in a professional singer to play Jean Valjean). Yet despite those limitations, the QCT brought in a version of Les Misérables that was remarkably robust and accomplished. I give the music director, Larry Finley, a lot of credit for coordinating a tight 20-person pit orchestra with the singers. The performance was a real triumph for a small-city community theater group and a fitting 400th production in its history.

But back to Javert. He speaks that line when he is sending Fantine on her path to ruin, and of course we are meant to recognize it as the heartless abstraction that it is. It’s a way for Javert to not-think about the human being in front of him, casting her as an example of a principle rather than a person with particular circumstances. We all know people like that; I work with some of them, and there are few more frustrating sorts to deal with than those who insist on an inflexible abstraction in the face of compelling circumstances before them.

What struck me about the line this time, though, was not merely that it shows the limitations of Javert’s spirit, but that it’s so palpably false. Some of my dearest people live for their honest work – devote themselves to it – and receive no reward at all. We’ve all known people who have seen their honest and devoted work get snatched away by workplace politics and the selfishness of others.

So what’s a person to do? There’s no good answer. Persist in your work and ignore the reward or lack of reward that may come from it? Nice idea but it feels like surrendering to those who choose to play the game instead of focusing on their proper work. Play the game yourself? That’s abandoning your principles.

Dealing with our fellow human beings is a messy business, and only the Javerts of this world make it tidy in their own minds with comforting, fake abstractions. And who wants to be a Javert?

Hillbillies

19 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Missouri, Ozarks, Rural

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

hillbilly, human nature, Missouri, Missouri Writers Guild, Ozarks

I have avoided discussion of the word “hillbilly,” for the most part, on this blog because I think it’s an endless distraction. But I have to thank my good friend Bill Hopkins for this amazing disquisition on “hillbilly,” from a 1960 court decision in a divorce case, in which one of the “general indignities” that the plaintiff (husband) accused the defendant (wife) of was that she referred to his family as “hillbillies”:

“In respect to plaintiff’s evidence that Minnie once referred to relatives of the plaintiff as hillbillies: We suggest that to refer to a person as a “hillbilly,” or any other name, for that matter, might or might not be an insult, depending upon the meaning intended to be conveyed, the manner of utterance, and the place where the words are spoken. Webster’s New International Dictionary says that a hillbilly is “a backwoodsman or mountaineer of the southern United States;—often used contemptuously.” But without the added implication or inflection which indicates an intention to belittle, we would say that, here in Southern Missouri, the term is often given and accepted as a complimentary expression. An Ozark hillbilly is an individual who has learned the real luxury of doing without the entangling complications of things which the dependent and over-pressured city dweller is required to consider as necessities. The hillbilly foregoes the hard grandeur of high buildings and canyon streets in exchange for wooded hills and verdant valleys. In place of creeping traffic he accepts the rippling flow of the wandering stream. He does not hear the snarl of exhaust, the raucous braying of horns, and the sharp, strident babble of many tense voices. For him instead is the measured beat of the katydid, the lonesome, far-off complaining of the whippoorwill, perhaps even the sound of a falling acorn in the infinite peace of the quiet woods. The hillbilly is often not familiar with new models, soirees, and office politics. But he does have the time and surroundings conducive to sober reflection and honest thought, the opportunity to get closer to his God. No, in Southern Missouri the appellation “hillbilly” is not generally an insult or an indignity; it is an expression of envy.”

 

 

Juggalos in the Ozarks

07 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Ozarks, Personal

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

human nature, Insane Clown Posse, Juggalos, Missouri, Ozarks

From the news today comes the report that the fans of the rock group Insane Clown Posse, collectively known as Juggalos, will be holding their annual Gathering at a campground near the Lake of the Ozarks. Prepare for the general wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed by promises of good behavior, followed by excitable media reports of wild behavior, devil worship, and who knows what else.

Fact is, the Ozarks have long been thought of as a convenient hideaway for anti-mainstream activity, from Jesse James on down to Schwagstock. As long as the miscreants don’t impinge too much on the lifetime locals, the usual tendency is to wring our hands, thunder from the pulpit a bit, sell the outsiders some supplies, and then wave goodbye. I wouldn’t expect much different this time. When I was a youngster, it was the Rainbow Family that supposedly collected somewhere in the national forest for a few summers, although I never actually saw any of the purported members. They were always in the next county over, or the next.

I don’t expect the Juggalos to have much trouble, or to be much trouble. I’ve met a couple, and they were harmless enough guys with painted faces. The campground they’ve chosen is conveniently across the Osage River from the main swing of things at the Lake, down a long county road. The address is Kaiser, but it’s really more like trans-Bagnell. Besides, the Lake has developed a history of toleration for drug-addled obnoxiousness, although the more common drug is alcohol. I’m sure all the Casey’s General Stores on Highway 54 will be stocking up on Faygo.

I hope this doesn’t sound too cynical, but it often feels like the prevailing attitude is “Come, leave your money, and go. We’ll smile at your face and talk when your back is turned. Have your fun, but remember, we always lie to strangers.”

Major Website Update!

02 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Daybreak, Utopias, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

creativity, education, human nature, teachers, writing

I generally use my website for relatively “static” information – things that won’t change rapidly and only occasionally need updating. This blog, my Facebook page, and my Twitter feed are where I put breaking news.

So I want to mention that the website has a whole new section! It is specifically for teachers. I’ve been getting some great feedback from college instructors who are using Slant of Light in their classes, and my friend Alexis Engelbrecht-Villafane has put together a comprehensive teachers’ guide to the book. Alexis’ background is in English education at the pre-college level, so the teachers’ guide follows the format typically used for books to be used in high school classrooms.

We agree that Slant of Light poses some issues for the typical high school instructor. It has offensive language, graphic violence, sexual encounters, and adult situations – just the sort of stuff that would invite a parent complaint. But as a choice selection (not a required reading) for an advanced class, it would be a great option. It deals with big themes from start to finish, and it is an excellent introduction to the atmosphere of pre-Civil War America. (Sorry to toot my own horn so energetically here.)

Take a look!

← Older posts

Blogroll

  • Blank Slate Press
  • Cornerpost Press
  • John Gibson – Missouri Ozarker
  • John Mort's Blog
  • Kaitlyn McConnell's Ozarks Alive
  • Larry Wood's Ozark history blog
  • Lens & Pen Press blog
  • Missouri Writers' Guild
  • My website
  • Ozarks Law and Economy
  • River Hills Traveler
  • Sarah Johnson's Historical Fiction Blog
  • Show Me Oz
  • Show Me Progress
  • The Course of Our Seasons
  • The Opulent Opossum
  • The Outside Bend
  • Vincent Anderson's Ozark history blog
  • WordPress.com News

My Facebook page

My Facebook page

My Twitter feed

  • RT @JBDailyAuthor: Launching today, a Public Defender Turned Novelist @reynagentin and Award-Winning Short Stories @SWiegenstein. Great int… 8 hours ago
  • RT @JBDailyAuthor: Art and Design Inspired one novel @susansetkin and A Path Darkened by Tragedy @barbararubinauthor, another. Listen today… 1 day ago
  • Women can't show their arms on the Missouri House floor, but the legislature is perpetually showing its ass. npr.org/2023/01/13/114… 1 week ago
  • Saints preserve me from ever reaching a point so low that I have to blurb my own book. twitter.com/ammarmufasa/st… 1 week ago
  • I read a book a while back about the Republican House leadership struggle. It was called "Lord of the Flies." 3 weeks ago
Follow @swiegenstein

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Follow me on social media!

  • View stevewiegensteinauthor’s profile on Facebook
  • View @swiegenstein’s profile on Twitter

Slant of Light Facebook page

Slant of Light Facebook page

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • stevewiegenstein
    • Join 284 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • stevewiegenstein
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...