Not my First Rodeo

Intermission at the Rodeo:

Anonymous — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Intermission at the Rodeo: Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/17/2021 - 00:00

Blogs in Abeyance, with Associated Bituminosity

Definition of Abeyance:
A state of temporary inactivity.
Merriam-Webster

Definition of Bituminosity:
You’ll have to wait for this. But not for very long.

An Outpouring of Written Words Demonstrates the Human Capacity for Change

When the lockdowns began in mid-March 2020, many organizations and institutions faced a stark choice: either reinvention, or major acquisition of mothballs and a good-sized storage locker.

Since the Center of the American West is a very sociable organization, reinvention into an arrangement without direct human contact would shake it to the core. And since its Faculty Director trailed at the end of the parade in technological capability and was not even in the parade when it came to keeping up with an unrelenting writing schedule, it seemed possible that the option of the mothballs and storage locker might prevail.

We thought about starting a newsletter. But this presented its own conundrum: with our transformed circumstances, since we were best known for planning and hosting public programs, we would have next to nothing to put in our newsletter.

Perhaps we could create a newsletter where we would tell readers the programs we would have presented if we had been able to hold events? We could go even a little further and describe how much the audiences would have loved these events if they could have attended them. At least, the name for this new literary genre was easy to conjure up: The Center of the American West’s Wishful Thinking Gazette.

But if the goal was to convey to the world that the Center of the American West had not gone dormant, then issuing a regular report on wishful thinking seemed certifiably counter-productive.

So why not a blog, appearing with new material every week?

The idea of starting a Center of the American West blog had come up for consideration in the past. But caution blocked my path. After adventurous years when I said whatever came to my mind, I had developed an unforeseen enthusiasm for thinking before speaking. If I took to making statements fast and frequently in a blog, I would soon demonstrate the accuracy of the saying, “Write in haste, repent at leisure.”

But with remote working and social isolation in the picture, I had to recalculate.

In 2020, when millions of people were making changes that they had never seen coming, I decided I would give blogging a try. After all, the custom had only been around for more than twenty years, so for a person who was not leading the parade in technological capability, I was actually moving really fast.

“Not my First Rodeo” launched on May Day, 2020. With two weeks off during the winter holidays, a post has appeared every week, proofread early on Thursday mornings by Kurt Gutjahr, Roni Ires, and Lisa Cooper, and made handsome and spiffy in layout by Honey Ashenbrenner, who announced its appearance in a Marketing Cloud message every Friday morning. Supplementing the “Rodeo,” “Did Anyone Else Notice?” began in late October of 2020 and has provided a new commentary nearly every week in 2021.

The bedrock goal was to make it clear that the Center of the American West had not gone dormant. Beginning in the Summer of 2020, frequent Zoom public programs, adopting our pre-pandemic format of lively interviews, added robust evidence that—rather than dormancy—the Center had opted for and achieved hyperactivity. Meanwhile, the Center’s project in Applied History, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, moved from in-person conversation to Zoom, giving me the privilege of constant consultation with gifted young historians.

In my pre-pandemic life, the phrase “Never a dull moment” had figured prominently in my responses when people asked me how things were going at the Center. In the last fifteen months, the phrase has never lost its relevance. In truth, at the end of many days, I have felt completely satiated with intellectual stimulation, ready to welcome a moment or two of restful dullness.

The unrelenting production schedule of blog posts was a central feature of that stimulation. No one could claim that every sentence in every “Rodeo” or “Notice” post crackles with insight and amusement. But there was something that passed for adventure in every stage of composing them, from getting struck by an idea (this sometimes felt almost physical—though never with injury!), all the way through to the “Whew!” sensation of sending off the finished text to the proofreading team early on Thursday mornings.

Never a dull moment. And, even more remarkable, never a missed deadline.

Until 2020, I had never even imagined that I could generate more-or-less readable words at such a pace. In the strenuous sport of sticking with a rigorous schedule, without a single failure to deliver over more than a year, this actually was my first rodeo.

The banner for the first post in “Not my First Rodeo,” “My Heroes Have Always Been Rodeo Clowns,” May 1, 2020.

A Website with a Wanderlust Not Shared by Its Principal Proprietor

After months of staying at home, lots of people are starting to travel again.

Proving that the world of material human beings and the world of digital equipment have become strangely integrated, the Center of the American West website has come down with a case of wanderlust. This website has had it with staying in the same place. It wants to rove, ramble, and even gallivant. Most of all it wants to migrate to a new digital platform.

But it didn’t catch wanderlust from me.

Given that I spent four decades making frequent out-of-town trips to give speeches and attend conferences, it would have seemed safe to predict that I’d be overcome with restlessness after fifteen months at home. But I am not making any sudden moves—or, for that matter, any gradual moves—to return to customs that were once the very definition of “normal” for me.

Parting ways with Willie Nelson, I can wait to get on the road again. I cannot work up even a twinge of yearning for those many mornings when I would wake up in a hotel room and confront the same riddle: “Which city am I in, and on which floor of this hotel will I find the fitness room with the elliptical machines?”

Since March 11, 2020, I have awakened with the certainty that I am in �鶹�� and that the elliptical machine is in the basement. Here’s how co-dependent we have become: I believe that my elliptical machine would miss me if I went away for a few days. Worse, I believe that if I returned to my wandering ways, my cat would get a lawyer and sue me for desertion.

Attorneys looking for a client need not waste their time in trying to contact that cat. Her owner—oops, I meant guardian—is now a leading figure in the Homebody Pride Movement.

But the Center of the American West website is desperate to move, and I am not going to argue with it.

Whenever I argue with a website, I lose.

Bracing for a Phase of Blog-Deprivation

So the Center of the American West website is going to migrate.

Thankfully, I have no role to play in aiding the website on its journey. The technologically adept team members at the Center will make sure that the website has a safe trip, concluding with whatever sort of landing—soft or otherwise—that a website prefers.

While this journey is under way, my two blogs—“Not my First Rodeo” and “Did Anyone Else Notice?”—are going to take a break.

In an era when we have had as much as we can take in the way of health warnings, I have one more alarm to raise.

If you have become used to the reliable arrival of the weekly “Not my First Rodeo” blog post, and also accustomed to the almost reliable arrival of the weekly “Did Anyone Else Notice?” blog post, you are at risk of becoming “bituminous from long deprivation.”

In putting a spotlight on human eccentricity, one of Mark Twain’s many triumphs arose from his tribute to Mr. Ballou, an old gentleman (he was at least sixty!) who joined Twain on several prospecting adventures in Nevada. Mr. Ballou had “one striking peculiarity”: he was forever “loving and using words for their own sake, and independent of any bearing they might have on the thought he was trying to convey.” And so, when the prospecting party found itself burdened with horses that had no inclination to pull a wagon, Mr. Ballou diagnosed the problem: these horses “were bituminous from long deprivation.”

With new Center of the American West blog posts ceasing to appear, by late June, you may become bituminous from long deprivation. But if you hold steady until mid-July, your bituminosity will lift.

Or, to depart from Mr. Ballou’s distinctive frame of reference, “Not my First Rodeo” and “Did Anyone Else Notice?” are going to return, though they may not be exactly as you remember them.

In the meantime, should the deprivation of regular postings cause uncomfortable symptoms, treatment is at hand. While it is migrating, the Center of the American West website will not post new material, but it will remain accessible. The whole collection of existing “Not my First Rodeo” posts (all fifty-eight of them!), as well as the “Did Anyone Else Notice?” collection, will be available. Plus, recordings of the Center of the American West Zoom public programs will also remain in your reach, including Historians Imagine, Bipartisanship (and Friendship) Happen!, and an interview series with CU student veterans, called Memories of Service.

The Elves and the Shoemaker Achieve a Breakthrough in Labor Relations:

The Backstage Story of Blog-Writing

When I was a student, I wrote papers in a state of desperation, finished them in a panic, and turned them in with foreboding. Every time I wrote and turned in a paper, I reenacted the Grimm Brothers’ story of the shoemaker and the elves.

The shoemaker was very poor, and not very good at time management. So he would cut out the leather for a pair of shoes and then give up and go to bed. When he got up in the morning, the leather had been transformed into perfectly stitched shoes. These mysteriously produced shoes developed quite a clientele, and even as more leather got cut and laid out in the evenings, pairs of well-crafted shoes kept appearing in the morning.

How did these shoes get made?

More or less the same way my papers got written.

The shoemaker went to sleep, and the elves came out and produced footwear that people liked.

I procrastinated past any possible redemption, and the next morning, I would find that the typewriter, presumably staffed by elves, had produced written work that professors liked.

This would have been a perfectly pleasant system for success in writing—if I had not lived in fear that, on some occasion, the elves wouldn’t show up. Really, why wouldn’t these elves, dealing with very unsatisfactory working conditions, finally go on strike? Surely, at some point, they’d just quit.

“We have saved this person from failure innumerable times,” they would say to each other in solidarity, “and we’ve had it. The next time she gets herself into a pickle and thinks that we’ll show up and produce an essay worth reading, we’ll tell her, ‘Sorry, lady, but this time you’re on your own.’ And then we’re going to get the first good night’s sleep we’ve had in years, but we’ll wake up early just to watch—with the fabled elfish glee—when she realizes that we’re not going to bail her out.”

Years passed, and the elves kept showing up. But my reliance on them continued to feel precarious . . . until our relationship was transformed by the obligation to write a weekly post for “Not my First Rodeo.”

As these posts kept appearing, the elves and I were at last able to negotiate a labor agreement that proved acceptable—even comfortable— to them and to me. They know now that I will never take them for granted, and I know now that they will never leave me in the lurch.

The elves and I have finally figured out how to trust each other.

For various books and articles, I have written acknowledgments stocked with many statements of gratitude to the people who have helped me. But those acknowledgments have always omitted the most important figures of all. At long last, “Not my First Rodeo” and “Did Anyone Else Notice?” have provided me with the occasion to offer a long overdue statement of gratitude:

Thank you, elves. I couldn’t have done this without you.

And now an odd request to all readers: please consider sharing the story of the labor agreement between me and the elves with all the nervous young writers you already know or will meet in the future. The story may just seem silly the first time an ambitious young writer hears it. But I can almost guarantee that the time will come, when it will deliver both inspiration and comfort.

“We Shall Never Again Be as We Were”

This post was going to be consistently cheerful in spirit, conveying the simple message that there will be a moratorium on Center of the American West blogs, and that they will return, though maybe with a different pacing, a different mission, and a different relationship between their producer and their consumers.

So I was aiming at cheer and simplicity, but that solemn and sometimes even ponderous American novelist Henry James kept getting in my way.

If I had been left to determine my own fate in life, I would never have read a word written by Henry James. But his books kept appearing on syllabuses. Every time I thought I had escaped him, another professor sent me back into a literary space that seemed perfectly designed to trigger claustrophobia. Worst of all, by the time I got to the end of his sentences, I had often forgotten how they began. If I suddenly found myself with time to reread a book purely for pleasure, the chances of me settling down with a Henry James novel remain very slim.

The impact of Covid-19 on the world has many tragic dimensions, but the impact also has many aspects that demonstrate the capacity of human beings to change in ways they never saw coming. In one of the most trivial of these demonstrations of change, I have been surprised by the onset of frequent thoughts about Henry James. This might be because his novels involve people encountering each other in close quarters, where even a small gesture or exclamation can devastate or heal, a situation that characterized the lives of many in the last year.

For other reasons, my preoccupation with Henry James accelerated when the number of infections and deaths from Covid-19 began dropping in most areas of the United States. When more and more people got vaccinations, and the idea that our lives might return to normal received more and more and more consideration, I found my mind locked in contemplation of thirty-nine words at the end of James’s novel, The Wings of the Dove.

Why?

Not because of the plot of the novel, which has little bearing on our efforts to determine if we are actually entering a post-pandemic era. But here, to provide context for the thirty-nine words that appear (with utterly uncharacteristic clarity and brevity) at the end The Wings of the Dove, is the world’s most efficient plot summary of a very complicated novel.

In London at the turn of the twentieth century, Kate Croy and Merton Densher are in love, engaged, and very short on money. When an extremely rich young woman enters their social circle, and when it seems very possible that she has an incurable illness, Kate enlists her fiancé in a scheme. Densher will court the young heiress and marry her. The heiress will die soon; Densher will inherit her fortune; and Kate and Densher will then have sufficient money to realize their dream and marry each other.

This scheme—mostly— works. The heiress is dead. Densher has his inheritance. But he has also found his conscience, an awakening that Kate did not see coming and does not welcome.

Here is the ending, a dialogue between Kate and Densher, thirty-nine words that will not stop playing and replaying in my mind:

Then he only said, “I’ll marry you, mind you, in an hour.”
“As we were?”
“As we were.”
But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. “We shall never be again as we were!”

Whenever a public official or a commentator or a friend says, “We are getting back to normal,” I can only hear Kate saying, “We shall never be again as we were!”

I know Kate is only a fictional character but since she won’t stop intruding into my mind, I feel I have been given the right to speak to her directly.

“You are absolutely right, Kate: ‘we shall never be again as we were.’ We have been irrevocably changed by the pandemic. While few of us behaved as badly as you and Densher, we all did some things that were misguided, ill-thought-out, and very self-centered. But your words—“We shall never be again as we were”—carry multiple meanings, and those meanings cover the whole range from hope to despair.”

The impact of Covid-19 on the world has many tragic dimensions. But the impact also has many aspects that demonstrate the extraordinary capacity of human beings to change.

Even if we retreat to old habits of under-estimating our resilience and persistence, we can no longer claim that this is just the way we are, and who we have to be.

For those of us who have been given room to push past predictability and who have been spared lasting sorrow, when we join Kate in saying “we shall never again be as we were,” our next remark will sometimes be, “Thank heavens.”

If you find this blog contains ideas worth sharing with friends, please forward this link to them. If you are reading this for the first time, join our EMAIL LIST to receive the Not my First Rodeo blog every Friday.

Photo Credit:

Old Store front image courtesy of: Pixabay

The Wings of the Dove book image courtesy of: Wikipedia

We will be back soon image courtesy of: Flickr

Traditional

White

The Return of the Dead:

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 06:00:00 +0000

The Return of the Dead: Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/10/2021 - 00:00

Living Under Their Influence

This anxiety, this mode of melancholy, is the anxiety of influence, the dark and daemonic ground on which we now enter.

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence

A checkered past: a past history of having done bad things or been in trouble.

Merriam-Webster

It is probably true that we all have checkered pasts.

And it is unquestionably true that we are all living under the influence of the people of the past—and I borrow the phrase, “under the influence,” with the intention of trading on all its mixed meanings.

Through the history of the United States, Americans have struggled to devise ways to acknowledge the influence that the actions and attitudes of historical figures played in shaping this nation. In recent years, the relationship between the American people and their historical predecessors has been rattled by multiple crises. Though they have varied in emphasis and preoccupation, one pattern in the crises repeats: we put much more effort into pitting the living against each other than in negotiating a peace between the living and the dead.

Here’s a thought.

What if we made this struggle over the past more personal?

What if we tied our struggles over history directly to the intense and conflicted feelings that nearly all of us have toward the people who influenced us— and who sometimes betrayed us—when we were young? Could we gain insights into the national dilemma if we thought harder about our personal dilemmas?

That suggestion surely impresses everyone as a guaranteed way to make a bad situation worse.

But I still think there are good reasons to pair these two questions:

How should we appraise the influential people in this country’s past who played key roles in shaping the nation we live in today?

How should we appraise the influential people in our own pasts who played key roles in shaping the people we are today?

In this “Not my First Rodeo” post, I am heading into very uncomfortable territory. But here’s why I dismissed my initial reluctance to undertake this exploration on public record: I hope that this small-scale enterprise of reckoning with influential people in my past demonstrates a promising way to conduct our reckoning with influential figures from the nation’s past.

Here’s the punchline.

Attempts to confine the people from the past with simple categories will, at best, reveal nothing of interest and, at worst, leave wreckage in their path.

An Instinct for Influence

From a very early age, I took every opportunity to absorb influences wherever I could find them. By the time I entered higher education, I had it down: if an older person gave me an idea, an insight, an observation, or a vision, I instantly absorbed what they offered to me. Since accepting influence from my elders usually came in the same package with accepting their encouragement, guidance, and support, this habit got constant positive reinforcement.

Once I started college, the great majority of the people who influenced me were men. In 1968, women professors were a rarity. With the passage of a few years, female role models would become more common on campuses. But the gender proportions of occupants of faculty offices in the late 1960s and early 1970s matched the gender proportions of California Gold Rush mining towns in the late 1840s and early 1850s. But those proportions did not mean that I found a shortage of people who would exercise a positive influence on me.

The majority of the men who influenced me were people of impeccable character who knew they held power over the vulnerable young and who never took advantage of that power.

But there were exceptions.

A Deep Dive into the Anxiety of Influence

I was barely one year into graduate school when the Yale literary scholar Harold Bloom published a very high-impact book, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Almost as soon as it came out, I read it closely.

Harold Bloom wrote about poetry, but his findings shed light on every form of human expression. Poets write in a very charged and tense relationship with their predecessors, Bloom said. A poet is necessarily under the influence of his predecessor, but if he just follows the older poet’s lead, he will emerge as an imitative, subservient, and weak poet.

By contrast, a strong poet will become familiar with his elder’s work. He will be altogether aware of its power and eloquence, and he will know every aspect of it from the inside. With that knowledge and awareness in place, the anxiety of influence reaches a peak of tension for the strong poet.

The weak poet will have long ago retreated and subsided into imitation. But the strong poet will swerve and break free into originality.

The start of my second year as an apprentice in an academic discipline was the perfect time to read this book. In truth, even when I only knew him through his writing, Harold Bloom was encouraging and even empowering to an academic newcomer, even a novice as nervous as I was.

The impact on me was immediate. For a semester or two, references to The Anxiety of Influence showed up in many of the papers I wrote. I applied Harold Bloom’s insights to the relationship between the American revolutionaries and the established British political thinkers. I then picked up those insights and plunked them down on the relationship between late-nineteenth century writers from the rural Midwest and the Northeastern arbiters of literary culture.

And, best of all, I found direct, personal inspiration when I adopted the argument of The Anxiety of Influence as a map for my own future. In the next few years, I would become thoroughly, intimately acquainted with my precursors in the field of Western American history, and I would defer, submit, and comply with their authority.

And, at some point, the anxiety of influence would crest, and I would swerve from the route that my precursors had mapped out and traveled. The book called The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West is the result of that swerve.

My indebtedness to Harold Bloom was pretty darned deep.

But I had never met the man.

It’s All Greek to Me:

**The Performance of Clinamen, or The Swerve**

When I traveled on the New Haven Line to New York, I rarely passed up the chance to be influenced by whomever fortune placed next to me on the train. On one ride, sitting next to a carpenter, I learned quite a bit about how carpenters coped with the fact that sometimes, even with the greatest care and attention to detail, a cabinet door will still not close completely.

But then the carpenter made the mistake of asking me what I did.

I tried to speak with clarity, but this was a tough row to hoe. After enduring a few minutes of my reviewing the reading lists for my courses in American intellectual history and theories of American literature, the carpenter gave up.

“Everything you’re saying,” he said, “it’s all Greek to me.”

When I finally met Harold Bloom, I had moments when I fully understood how that carpenter felt.

I had moved to an apartment nearer campus, and it turned out that Harold Bloom lived a few blocks away. We sometimes left campus at the same time in the late afternoons, so I now had the opportunity for multiple conversations with this erudite man. As he did in his writing, Harold Bloom peppered his spoken remarks with Greek and Latin. By this point in my tour of duty in the Ivy League, experimentation had proven that trying to bluff never went well, and I had lost any shame over having to ask for translations.

The Greek word clinamen, I had already learned, was a real “don’t leave home without it” addition to the aspiring scholar’s vocabulary. Clinamen was the term Bloom chose to capture the strong poet’s moment of parting with his predecessor. Laying out his terms in The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom explained that he had taken this word “from the writings of Lucretius, where it means a ‘swerve’ of the atoms so as to make change possible in the universe.”

If the atoms did not swerve, the universe would be duller than dishwater. And if a poet did not “execute a clinamen,” every supposedly new poem would be impossible to distinguish from the poems of the precursor.

Non-academics, you can relax.

It is OK to forget the Greek word clinamen, and simply keep in mind that Harold Bloom made a great case for the performance of the swerve as the moment when liberation prevails over the anxiety of influence.

In this swerve, whether we are poets, historians, carpenters, mechanics, scientists, artists, or musicians, we say to our precursors, “Thanks for taking me this far, but I’m leaving you now.”

We’ll pause here.

A Checkered Past

When referring to someone as having a checkered past, the emphasis is usually on the disreputable or negative things that the person participated in. Someone who is labeled as having a checkered past is considered fairly untrustworthy.

The Grammatist

Harold Bloom died in the Fall of 2019 at age eighty-nine. He was, as his lengthy obituary in The New York Times makes clear, a very unusual person, living under the influence of a compulsion to explore and interpret every written or spoken word that came to his attention. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/books/harold-bloom-dead.html

The obituary in the Times contains this sentence: “In 1990, GQ magazine, in an article titled, ‘Bloom in Love,’ portrayed him as having had intimate entanglements with female students.” The obituary also cited a 2004 article, in New York Magazine, in which the writer Naomi Wolf accused Bloom of having made a decidedly intrusive and awkward move in 1983, when she was “a twenty-year-old senior at Yale.”

I was not cited as a source in the GQ Magazine article, and I have never met Naomi Wolf. But, trying for an impossible combination of honesty and discretion, I will only say that the claims made in GQ Magazine and by Naomi Wolf do not strike me as implausible.

Reading these statements in The New York Times triggered a rapid sequence of two thoughts:

First Thought
I had been planning to write a “Not my First Rodeo” post that would celebrate insights from Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, but now that I knew his personal conduct had been called into question on public record, I would have to come up with another plan.

Second Thought
In the cultural climate of 2021, it was now even more important for me to quote from Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence and to explore the influence he had on me.

How This Deeply Uncomfortable “Not my First Rodeo” Post Came to Be

For weeks, I had been promising myself a good time. Sometime in June, I would write a tribute to the writers who were the major influences in shaping my sense of humor. Preparing this post would permit me to spend quality time with a neglected bookshelf, whose holdings would sustain a prolonged spell of merriment and hilarity. But I would also want this post to have a serious dimension, with reflections on my relationship to the writers who had influenced me.

But this line of thought led me to another bookshelf, in search of my heavily annotated copy of Harold Bloom’s book. This, I felt sure, was going to work really well. I would use Harold Bloom’s idea of “the anxiety of Influence” to explore my relationship to my precursors and predecessors in humor! In fact, the idea of using such a serious book as the underpinning for a celebration of humor struck me as pretty darned funny in itself.

And then I looked up that 2019 New York Times obituary. Simply quoting appreciatively from Harold Bloom, and simply referring fondly to my personal acquaintanceship with him, was not going to be simple at all.

Reluctantly—really, very reluctantly—I realized that I had to delay the piece on humor and embark on an exploration of our relationship to the people of the past who encouraged and influenced us. Or, to use Harold Bloom’s own words, it was time to confront the “immense anxieties of indebtedness.”

The post I was planning to write—about people who influenced my sense of humor—is still alive. But it is spending some time in rehab.

What Did We Know, and When Did We Know it?

Writing this post has rattled me with a recognition of how different the expectations for the behavior of professors were in the 1970s and 1980s. But before my email inbox receives a burst of messages pointing out my obliviousness to the troubles of our times, I urge everyone to read this next statement.

I fully realize that episodes of professors misusing the power they hold over the young have never come to a halt.

And yet I stand by the relevance of a statement initially made by the little-known novelist L.P. Hartley and often quoted by historians: “The past was a foreign country. They did things differently there.” In that foreign country where I lived fifty years ago, when professors and students were in each other’s company, there was very little in the way of recognized rules of conduct, and even less in the way of frameworks for accountability.

If the past is a foreign country, then it is not surprising that I am having trouble finding my way around the alien land of the present. And it is even less surprising that I struggle when I try to speak the language and ask the locals for directions.

Second-Guessing My Former Self, Who Seems to Be Unavailable for Interrogation

I started college in 1968. At that time, the cultural consensus on the conduct of relationships between men and women had been unsettled by the concatenation of changes called “The Sixties.” This statement of historical context has to precede what I now present as a two-part statement of fact:

Several of my professors made overtures or advances that showed little respect for the dignity of women.
Even though these men fell short of the trust I had placed in them, I never registered a grievance or made a complaint in response to any of those episodes.

Pushing hard to extract clarity from cluttered memory, here are the reasons why I never asked for intervention, corrective action, or even advice.

1) Far from thinking that I was witnessing serious wrongdoing, I felt that I was encountering foolish and inconsequential lapses of self-management.

2) I never faced anything in the way of coercion or force, and I never received a threat of punishment or retaliation for rejecting an overture.

3) Even if I had felt in peril, and even if I had wanted to lodge a concern, I did not know of any channels or procedures for addressing misuse of professorial influence and power.

Turning Hindsight into Foresight

The Slogan of the Center of the American West Produces Mixed Results

When I try to apply it to this dimension of my personal history, the Center of the American West’s slogan does not have its finest hour.

Turn hindsight into foresight?

Hindsight might raise the question: If I had spoken up, taken action, or asked for help, would I have saved other women from discomfort and indignity in the future?

This is the unsatisfactory answer that comes to my mind: “Well, maybe, but I doubt it.”

Raising another question entirely, hindsight leads me to a more definitive answer. But it gets there by a winding route, and the destination seems far from ideal in terms of moral clarity.

In my early years in the academic world, I was under the influence of men who, to a person, conveyed to me their belief that my opportunities were unlimited and their confidence that my talents and skills were in good operating order. Not a one of my professors ever said to me: “Here are the things you cannot do and should not even try to do.” Declaring their recognition of my promise and potential, the men who influenced me in those early years created the foundation for my successful career.

In that category of “the people who created the foundation for my successful career,” I include both the men whose conduct met the highest ethical standards and the men whose conduct fell below those standards.

In other words, I cannot argue myself out of the conclusion that a significant share of my success rested on my willingness to accept guidance and encouragement from men whose respect for the dignity of women was decidedly inconsistent.

And here is the paradox (or perhaps I mean inconsistency or contradiction?) that hindsight presents: my professional achievements, as well as any collateral benefits I have been able to provide to others, may have been made possible by my choice not to raise complaints or lodge grievances.

I have been positioned to use my success to encourage young women and men in the field of history and to endorse their work.

The upshot: I cannot now persuade myself to repent for—or even regret—my choice of silence.

If you think I made a devil’s bargain and chose complicity over principled defiance, you should help me understand your viewpoint.

If you think I was in denial and remain in denial, invite me out of that state.

The Return of the Dead

(The Title of the Last Chapter of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence)

Ancient Athenians, Harold Bloom declared in the concluding chapter of his influential book, believed that there were “dismal or unlucky days upon which the dead returned to reinhabit the houses in which they had lived.”

Unlike the ancient Athenians who found themselves having one of those “dismal or unlucky days” when the dead returned, historians spend every day thinking, “Here they come again!” Usually with our consent but sometimes without it, the dead keep showing up in our minds. Most of the time, these are people we never knew, but who we met through their own words or through the writing of historians who traced clues and followed up hints to reveal the lives of the departed. But we also have visits with the dead who we once knew directly and in-person.

Given how much I remain under the influence of the men who influenced me in college and graduate school, I rarely go for more than a few days without these figures reappearing in my thoughts and feelings.

Some of the men whose conduct was beyond reproach still live. But all of the men, who behaved as we would now put it inappropriately, have passed away. This I know as truth: even when they are alive in our memories, especially when they are alive in our memories, the dead respond with indifference to our most earnest condemnations of them.

**Executing the Clinamen, Also Known as the Swerve**

And now for a dizzying shift in scale, moving from a consideration of a few influential people from my own past to a consideration of influential figures from the big picture of history.

Here are the two questions brought together at the beginning of this post:

How should we appraise the influential people in the country’s past who played key roles in shaping the nation we live in today?

How should we appraise the influential people in our own pasts who played key roles in shaping the people we are today?

I rely here on Harold Bloom’s concept of clinamen, by which younger poets resolved the anxiety of influence by swerving from the practices of their elders. Here are the results of applying his concept to the large-scale question and the small-scale question at issue here.

As individuals, we retain the right—sometimes the obligation—to swerve from the practices followed by the people who influenced us in our personal lives.

Citizens of a nation retain the right—sometimes the obligation—to swerve from the practices followed by the influential human beings who brought that nation into existence.

Now to put those rights into practice—first, on the personal scale; second, on the national scale—with a purposefully executed swerve.

Harold Bloom, I admired you, and I remain grateful that I was under your influence. I would achieve little— for myself or for humanity—if I disavowed my appreciation for the impact that your words, written and spoken, have had on me. But if I tried to ignore or obscure your failings, I would do you a disservice. In truth, if I tried to sanctify you, I would dehumanize you.

Founders of this nation, I admired you, and I remain grateful that I live in the country that is under your influence. I would achieve little—for myself or for humanity—if I disavowed my appreciation for the impact that your words, written and spoken, have had on me. But if I tried to ignore or obscure your failings, if I dismissed the centrality of slavery and of conquest in the origins of this nation, I would do you a disservice. In truth, if I tried to sanctify you, I would dehumanize you.

Repeatedly, over the nation’s history, Americans have attempted to perform a moral audit of their predecessors and precursors, and we are now in the midst of another such undertaking. The complexity of human nature, as it is manifested in individuals and in groups, makes it impossible that such an audit will produce findings that are clear and certain. Any enterprise for assessing and judging the dead will rest on a fragile foundation if it assumes that human character is simple.

I conclude with three assertions, arranged in chronological order. The first two are completely debatable. Paradoxically, the third one is beyond dispute, even as it explicitly invites debate.

Assertion #1
My mind became more vigorous and agile because I had the opportunity to know Harold Bloom when I was young.

Assertion #2
My mind became more vigorous and agile because I had this opportunity to deliberate on the influence that Harold Bloom still exercises over me.

Assertion #3
My mind is about to become more vigorous and agile because I will have the opportunity to reconsider what I have said here, if the reactions (with a good share of them likely to be critical) that may now be racing around readers’ minds get typed up and sent to me at pnl@centerwest.org.

A Quotation Worth Repeating
This anxiety, this mode of melancholy, is the anxiety of influence, the dark and daemonic ground on which we now enter.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence

Photo Credit:

Book cover image courtesy of: Biblio

Omnious cloud banner image courtesy of: Flickr by Ankakay

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Pies, Past and Future:

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Pies, Past and Future: Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/03/2021 - 00:00

Claiming our Heritage from Soupy Sales

I think everybody, really deep inside, would some time or other like to throw a pie or get hit by a pie.
Soupy Sales,
Who Had a Lasting Impact (So to Speak) on Me

Nothing sends spirits so high
As the gooshy embrace of a pie.
We lower our defenses;
We give up pretenses;
We find allies on whom we’ll rely.

When we remember that man named Sales,
A force for good nature prevails.
We may not know why,
But with one hit from a pie,
Opposition collapses and fails.

Two Limericks I Should Have Written Fifty Years Ago,
But Better Late Than Never

In the late spring of 2021, millions of people are searching their souls for answers to the question, “If it is time to return to normal life, what does normal mean?”

Experts in mental health keep reminding us that we undertake this search with mixed emotions. Hope, grief, anticipation, regret, relief, and sorrow all compete for our attention.

In that concatenation of mixed emotions, is there any room for humor?

This “Not My First Rodeo” post is a test-run, attempting to answer that question with “Yes.” As one of the last people left on the planet who once thought of getting hit with a pie as a familiar aspect of normal life, I am positioned to reminisce about a very silly custom. This line of thought leads to serious reflections on dealing with unexpected turns of fortune, fine-tuning our sense of proportion in assessing injury, and in recognizing the importance of consent in the building of trust.

How Did This Start?

A Hard-Hitting Discussion

When I was in college, a student threw a pie at a professor who many of us loved.

At the University of California Santa Cruz, we seized every opportunity to take part in intense discussions about the well-being of our community. When an event occurred that had the potential to jeopardize that well-being, we would enter a torrent of discussion, in which we would consider the event from every imaginable angle. When we ran out of angles, we would quickly invent more angles from which we could consider it. When the student hit our professor with a pie, we talked about this for days.

Was the throwing of a pie a legitimate way to express disagreement, or perhaps even a good-humored way to convey an affectionate mockery? Or did the throwing of a pie convey an intolerable disrespect for an elder who had dedicated his life to preparing us for life? Should we defend the pie-thrower’s right to exercise a form of free expression that inflicted no physical injury? Or should we condemn the pie-thrower for insulting the dignity of a mentor whose knowledge and wisdom enriched our lives?

Very early in this process of community deliberation, I reached a judgment from which I have not wavered in fifty years. It came in two parts.

It was wrong to throw a pie at our professor because our professor did not want to be hit with a pie.
It would be right to throw a pie at me because I would very much like to have that happen.

Only twenty-years-old, I had arrived at a prophetic, almost oracular understanding of the crucial role of consent in the ethical domain of pie-throwing.

Moved, if not altogether converted, by my ethical insight, my fellow students continued to hold mixed opinions on the intergenerational impact of pies. But several good friends declared that they would honor my preference by hitting me with a pie on my birthday.

Since my birthday was five or six months away, this required me to cultivate patience. But I knew it was worth the wait.

When it was finally my birthday, my friends’ promise was still very much on my mind. So I sidled, crept, sneaked, and slithered my way across campus, peeking around corners and assuming that behind every door was a friend holding a pie.

But my friends had forgotten their promise.

Probably someone arranged for a cake and candles that day.

But no pie.

Launched at Midnight:

Novus Ordum Seclorum

(Motto on the Great Seal of the United States: A New Order of the Ages)

A year or two later, I started graduate school at Yale, which would seem to be an ill-considered move for a person who yearned to be hit with a pie.

At dinner one night in the Hall of Graduate Studies Dining Hall, I reminisced about that disappointing birthday when I slinked around the Santa Cruz campus, expecting a pie around every corner but finding only a forgotten promise.

An architecture graduate student, Jeff Limerick, heard that story—and remembered it.

At a few minutes past midnight on May 17, 1973, there was a knock on the door of my room in the Hall of Graduate Studies. When I opened the door, Jeff placed a cream pie precisely on its target. He was, after all, an architect who drew plans with a steady hand.

To repurpose the famous line from the end of Jane Eyre: “Reader, I married him.”

A Custom Emerges in a Society

with a Shortage of Rituals Enshrining Humor

In a series of decisions that no one recorded, Jeff and I settled into a custom of observing birthdays with the throwing of a pie. We did not see this as an exclusive dimension of our marriage, and so welcomed other participants into this ritual, but—this is very important—only with their consent.

Given that knowledge of one’s own birthday is very common, we had to become very, very crafty in order to position the arrival of the pie as a surprise. I will give just one example of the intricate planning that was soon required.

In 1977, Jeff and I were renting a house with three friends who had been recruited into our ritual. On May 1, 1977, Jeff spent his birthday on campus, teaching a class, consulting with students, and remaining very wary when he approached a corner or when a door opened.

Around 7 p.m. or so, he drove home, still wary as he drove into the garage. The door between the house and the garage opened as he got out of his car, and Jeff was entirely on alert as he looked to see who was coming through the door. But it was only our roommate, Michael L. Smith (later the author of an important book on the history of the California Geological Survey—Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, 1850-1915). As Michael entered the garage, he was carrying what appeared to be a very heavy cardboard box, a state of affairs that was clearly incompatible with pie-throwing.

Or so it seemed.

Lulled into complacency, Jeff confidently walked toward Michael.

With his left hand, Michael suddenly lifted the cardboard box and tossed it to the side, revealing that the box was empty and open at the bottom, and also revealing that he held a cream pie in his right hand, a pie that he placed with precision on Jeff’s face.

Happy Birthday!

It is important to note that Michael’s brother Steven was a clown with Ringling Brothers. So Michael, through the good fortune of kinship, had acquired an expert knowledge on how to make an empty cardboard box look heavy. That is one of the many wonderful benefits of adopting the ritual of pie-throwing: participants get to display skills, talents, and enthusiasms that would otherwise be hidden from the world.

The Dark Side of the Pie

“Non-consensual pieing is a punishable offense in criminal law, and depending on jurisdiction,
a battery, but may also constitute an assault.”
Wikipedia, Accessed on June 2, 2021

The Wikipedia entry on pieing begs for revision. Contemplate this ill-informed, wrong-headed, and mean-spirited assertion:

“In pieing, the goal is usually to humiliate the victim while avoiding actual injury. . .”

Yes, of course, the part about “avoiding actual injury” part is absolutely right.

But “usually to humiliate the victim”?

It is never a good sign when a statement, made as if it carried authority, actually claims an impossible certainty in identifying motives, as if the author(s) had the capacity to x-ray the human soul.

Here’s my first try at a necessary rewrite:

“In pieing, the goal is sometimes to humiliate the recipient, but more often to interrupt the predictability of life with a moment of merriment.”

But even the merriest among us cannot evade the reality that there is a dark side to this practice that cannot remain in the shadows and must be examined in a bright light.

Pieing can convey a message of mockery, insult, or dismissal, and it can convey a message of affection, appreciation, or merriment. These double meanings diverge because of the presence or absence of consent. The difference made by the anticipatory negotiation of consent is stark.

Non-consensual pieing is an affront to dignity and a denial of respect, while consensual pieing is an affirmation of community and camaraderie. Or, to place this contrast in its largest context of meaning, non-consensual pieing represents what’s wrong with the world, and consensual pieing represents what’s right with the world.

In consensual pieing, the pie arrives only after a process of recruitment, invitation, and negotiation has been completed. In other words, everyone should agree to join in the fun before the fun suddenly arrives in front of them.

But our visit to the darker side of the pie is not over yet.

Here is a hypothesis that demands a reckoning. Consensual pie-throwing is so enjoyable because it redirects our darker impulses into a pleasant channel.

An Amateur’s Best Shot at a Social Psychology Appraisal

Ninety-nine percent of our time on the planet, we know that . . .

It is wrong to throw things at our fellow human beings.
It is wrong to catch people by surprise when they have slipped into the assumption that they are living in a familiar, predictable, and conventional world.
It is wrong to scheme and plot behind other people’s backs.
It is wrong to make a mess, purposefully and intentionally, that will have to be cleaned up.

When we engage in consensual pie-throwing, we receive the gift of the one percent of our time on the planet when we know that. . .

It is right to throw things at our fellow human beings.
It is right to catch people by surprise when they have slipped into the assumption that they are living in a familiar, predictable, and conventional world.
It is right to scheme and plot behind other people’s backs.
It is good to make a mess, purposefully and intentionally, because cleaning it up extends the fun, demonstrates responsibility, and permits a happy immersion in a shared experience.

In other words, pie-throwing is a licensed and sanctioned vacation from conventional understandings of good behavior.

What’s not to like?

A Sense of Proportion, Reaffirmed

When you see that you are about to be hit with a pie, in the next seconds, you experience an exhilarating shift in mood.

First, a perfectly normal instinctive response:

“Oh no, a pie!”

Second, the corrective that quickly enters the mind of the consenting recipient:

“Oh hurray, a pie!”

With repetitions of this shift in attitude, you receive steady reminders that it is within human capability to embrace and welcome unsettling events, and thereby to reduce any power that those events would have had to upset you. When life takes twists and turns that catch you by surprise, you will be equipped to draw peace of mind from those intensely memorable moments when the pie is in front of you, and about to make contact. Those moments endow you with a sense of proportion, and that sense of proportion, in turn, positions you to recognize occasions when good-natured acceptance will deliver far better results than brittle resistance.

And then there is an even more enjoyable axis of transformation in this picture.

Just before you are hit with a pie, you are just another pleasant-looking person wandering around in the world, with the majority of people in your proximity having no reason to be glad to see you.

A second after you are hit with a pie, your appearance brings so much joy to others that you might as well let it bring joy to you as well.

Soupy Sales, Proponent for Pies

In those days of yore at the University of California, Santa Cruz, when we were immersed in searching discussions of the ethics of pie-throwing, a television show from our childhood was very much on our minds. While I am not a specialist in the field of intellectual history, it is impossible that lively young people in the late 1960s and early 1970s could have discussed pies without frequent references to Soupy Sales. The show—“Lunch with Soupy”—was on TV from 1953 to 1966, absolutely prime time for the shaping of our young minds.

A lot of people grew up watching me,” Soupy Sales said, later in life. “I’ll probably be remembered for the pies, and that’s all right. That’s fine and dandy. I’m flattered.” As the Los Angeles Times said in his obituary, “The high point of every show came when a sidekick launched a pie into Sales’ face. Sales once estimated that he was hit by more than 25,000 pies in his lifetime.”

Not surprisingly, we now confront a matter of history where precise quantitative calculations are going to be chancy. One complication in counting is that Soupy never monopolized the role of recipient of the pies. In various scenes and skits, the pie-throwing often escalated, and everyone in sight was fair game.

For certain celebrities, getting hit with a pie on Soupy’s show was a sought-after accomplishment. In a number of interviews, Soupy said the idea of hitting celebrities with pies had never occurred to him, until Frank Sinatra brought it up. “I want to come on your show,” Sinatra told Soupy, and “I’ll do it on one condition: I want to get hit with a pie.” It turned out that Sammy Davis, Jr., and singer Trini Lopez shared Sinatra’s aspiration, and the results proved to be a peak performance for all.

(If you think you don’t have time to watch this brief video, take a quick look and see if you actually can stop midway.)

Born in 1926, Milton Supman served in the Navy in World War Two and participated in the invasion of Okinawa. His career in slapstick arose from a childhood shaped by loss (he was only five when his father died) and by unfathomable irony (his Jewish father sold sheets to Klansmen in Franklinton, North Carolina). Anyone determined to keep humor isolated from the sorrows of life and the darkness of human nature had better avoid watching Soupy Sales do the Soupy Shuffle or accept the arrival of innumerable pies.

Every time we watch Soupy take a pie, we are given a reminder of the life-affirming benefits of a sense of proportion.

If we can distinguish injuries and insults that cut us to the core from minor indignities, equanimity is—far more often than we realize—ours to maintain.

Pie Protocol 101

A Beginner’s Guide

On the chance that this “Rodeo” post has made a few converts, here is practical guidance for new practitioners.

For best results, use an aluminum-foil pie pan, and fill it with whipped cream. Yes, this is a waste of food, but there is no need for a scientific study to prove that cardiovascular health is better served by applying whipped cream externally, rather than ingesting it. Do not even think of bothering with a crust, even if it is flaky (which does seem like the right word in this context).
Shaving cream is an option, but it is not a good one. Here is a recent public service announcement from an organization with the interesting name, the Missouri Poison Center: “Shaving cream may sting if it gets into [the] eyes and may cause stomach upset if some of it is ingested.” Having been posted on May 2020, this is cutting-edge science, and not “an old husband’s folktale.’” (Note 2021-appropriate rewording on behalf of a fresher, more inclusive form of gender stereotyping.)
If performed with proper protocol, pie-throwing poses no risk to individuals and presents no public health dangers. The substance is so gooshy, and the aluminum-foil pie plate is so malleable that there is no impact that could possibly cause pain or injury. And yet it is very important to accent here the element of conduct that is essential in avoiding injury. Since only people who have given their consent to be hit with a pie should be involved, everyone can and should be expected to submit and comply. As soon as the pie is in front of the recipient and raised for delivery, protocol requires acceptance, with no resistance and certainly no wrestling over control of the pie.
For a day or two after the incident, the recipient of a pie will look like she or he is wearing mascara composed of Crisco. When the whipped cream arrives in a successful landing, the area around the eye (the bottom of the eyelid and the rim just below the eye itself) will turn greasy. You could use soap to cut the greasiness, but it is almost impossible to wash this area without getting soap in your eyes, which invariably stinging. The best response is simply to recognize that the greasiness will absorb into the skin over the course of a couple of days (it is better not to think too much about this).
People who wear glasses confront a thought-provoking trade-off. If they keep their glasses on, they will be spared the Crisco-mascara look. But they will also then need to invest some quality time in de-greasing their glasses. Noting this trade-off calls for a tribute to the wondrous temperament of Jeff Limerick, who always wore glasses and who never complained once about having to clean his glasses after a successful hit.
When practitioners discuss methods for delivery, the two most-often-considered options are these: throw or push. or But the most skilled practitioners choose a third option: they place the pie, with purposeful calm, directly on the recipient’s face. At that point, there is still the option of twisting, a clockwise or counterclockwise movement that will make sure that a maximum portion of the whipped cream stays in place, but more often than not, at this point, laughter has taken over from action.
Be alert to—and guard against—the temptation to move too fast. There is nothing sadder than the sacrifice of a valuable pie to overthrowing, overshooting, and missing the target entirely. But even that misfortune, sometimes with whipped cream hitting innocent bystanders, can contribute to the multiplier economic effect of pie-throwing: the income support provided to plucky small businesses specializing in dry cleaning.
Even in the midst of hilarity—or, rather, especially in the midst of hilarity—use contemporary digital technology to pay respect to Soupy Sales, ideally watching his appearance on “I’ve Got a Secret,” or his 1990 interview with Bob Costas on NBC.

In fact, whether or not you ever throw or receive a pie yourself, take any opportunity that presents itself to watch this master practitioner at work. And if you watch the interview with Bob Costas, do not cheat yourself of the last four or five minutes, when an ardent Soupy enthusiast makes his appearance, providing Soupy with an opportunity to demonstrate the highest level of his craft.

The International Impact of the Pie

Back in our pieing heyday, Jeff and I hosted a number of international visitors: young people from distant nations who were on their way to attend American universities and who stayed with us for a few days to get acclimated, before they traveled to their chosen campuses. Acclimation, for several of our guests, included an episode of Jeff hitting me with a pie, or me hitting Jeff with a pie. We were forthright in explaining that this was far from a widespread custom in the United States, but many pictures were taken, and I feel certain that those pictures were frequently shared when the visitors returned home and told stories of their travels.

And so, in distant lands, there may be a small but (I hope) influential cohort of people who offer their evidence-based testimony that Americans are a tolerant, adaptable, and good-natured people who have a delightful custom of hitting each other with pies.

These good souls may hold Americans in a higher opinion than we deserve today, but I see no reason to correct them.

**A Pie-Eyed* Concluding Statement of Hope**

(*The phrase “pie-eyed” turns out to mean either “extremely drunk” or “extremely tired,” neither of which applies to me at the moment. And yet, really, how could anyone expect me to resist using this term?)

In an era in which humility is in short supply and rigidity of opinion obstructs any attempt to figure each other out, consensual pie-throwing could be our redemption.

Do I really believe that?

How could I not?

Photo Credit:

Soupy Sales image courtesy of: Wikipedia

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Colorful Characters in a Colorful Relationship with a Colorful Term:

Anonymous — Thu, 27 May 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Colorful Characters in a Colorful Relationship with a Colorful Term: Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/27/2021 - 00:00

Mavericks and Paradox

Maverick:
An independent individual who does not go along with a group or party.
Merriam Webster

With Mr. Justice [Oliver Wendell] Holmes, I think that “there is nothing like a paradox to take the scum off your mind.”
Michael Kammen, People of Paradox (1972)

The Well-Trained Maverick:

Prepared for Paradox

In any and all walks of life, mavericks fare better if they have undergone training.

For people who have not completed (or even signed up for) their own maverick training, that opening statement is almost sure to activate the alarm in their Contradiction Detection Systems.

Doesn’t everyone know that mavericks are people who always insist on doing things their own way? Surely their devotion to their independence would make them flee from anyone who offered them training?

Well, no, that’s not who mavericks are.

A maverick, in my experience-tested opinion, is a person who sometimes feels a strong inclination to say, “Why do we always do things this way? I have been thinking about trying another way.”

Sometimes a maverick will act on that inclination and declare that it is time for a change. Just as often, a maverick will put the impulse on hold, waiting for a better time to unleash it.

Learning how to decide when to propose a change and when to keep quiet is, in fact, one of the main reasons why aspiring mavericks welcome the opportunity for training. A key feature of that training includes the acquisition of a Paradox Detection System, far better calibrated and much more trustworthy than the Contradiction Detection Systems favored by conventional thinkers.

With that detection system in operation, mavericks will have instantly recognized that the opening statement above—“mavericks fare better if they have undergone training”—is a paradox, and a comfortable and familiar one at that.

As experienced mavericks can testify, merely voicing their trademark question—“Why do we always do things this way?”—can set off storms of outrage and fury among loyalists to convention and conformity.

What to do next when encountering such a storm?

Review one of the core lessons of maverick training and set the concept paradox free to work its magic.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes summed up the timeless power of paradox: “There is nothing like a paradox to take the scum off your mind.”

As an established senior figure in the profession of history, I have been doing everything I can to make sure that young mavericks are positioned to challenge the establishment as effectively as possible. Beginning every day in the company of this paradox, I have never had to invest a moment’s thought in scum mitigation, remediation, or removal.

The support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has permitted me to make the mentoring of mavericks—with a focus on the “repurposing” of the academic skills of younger historians—into my major line of work. And so the Applied History program of the Center of the American West has generated stories aplenty of young people making carefully considered choices between courage and caution as they shape their careers in difficult times for higher education. The concerns of confidentiality keep me from telling any of those stories here, but confidentiality does not prohibit me from saying why these stories matter.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said the smartest thing ever about the power of paradox.

Paradox and Persuasion

Let’s say that you are a maverick who dreams of securing the support of a group of people who are ready to take up the role of antagonists rigidly opposed to the very idea of change.

If this scenario is unrolling on Planet Earth, then we know that the group of incipient opponents you want to persuade carries the usual human allotment of mixed-up and scrambled principles and convictions. Moreover, a canyon (or at least a shallow valley) probably separates the group’s actual conduct from their high-minded beliefs.

If you want to give persuasion its best shot, should you refer to the group as

a) People of Contradiction?
b) People of Inconsistency?
c) People of Hypocrisy?
d) People of Paradox?

If you want to lose the audience you would like to persuade, choose Contradiction or Inconsistency. And if you really want to seal the deal on your audience’s alienation and distrust, then Hypocrisy will make that happen—irreversibly.

But People of Paradox opens the door to conversation. At the very least, it will make your audience ask what you mean by that.

And that’s easy to answer.

In a dramatic contrast with contradiction, inconsistency or hypocrisy, when you encounter a paradox, you will soon find out that the features that initially seemed to be opposites actually coexist on terms that approach harmony.

“People of Paradox,” you may have noticed by now, is actually a synonym for “human beings.”

Embracing paradox is an under-recognized—and certainly an under-utilized—way to respond to the fraying of civic trust in the third decade of the twenty-first century. If we continue to play the sport of pouncing on each other for inconsistency, contradiction, and hypocrisy, we remain stuck in polarization. But if we recognize ourselves and others as People of Paradox, we might be able to experience curiosity, take in new information, and begin to figure each other out.

Indebtedness Acknowledged and Celebrated

If I had tried to be an Applied Historian and if I had not had the help of the energetic and accomplished American historian Michael Kammen, the scale of opportunities I would have missed in life is scary.

Michael Kammen coined the phrase, People of Paradox, and his book with that title won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. If he hadn’t written that book, there is no reason to think that I would have awakened to the power of the term paradox. Instead, I would have stumbled around, tripping over the words contradiction, inconsistency, and hypocrisy, until I fully noticed that those words were undermining my efforts and making me irrelevant.

Dropping them from my rhetorical repertoire would have been a positive and smart move. But finding the word to put in their place would have been a struggle. In a recent message, Michael’s widow Carol told me how he and she performed this struggle on our behalf, trying out different words and then settling on the winner.

“I remember we talked about paradox,” Carol said, “and then began seeing it everywhere.” Hardly a day goes by when I do not replicate that experience.

Another round of personal indebtedness geared up in the early 1990s, when Michael Kammen invited me to give the Carl Becker Lectures at Cornell. With that invitation and with the spirit-lifting remarks he made to me during that visit, he played mentor to my maverick. I drew courage from the time I spent in his company, and the force of that infusion of borrowed bravery has never diminished.

Michael Kammen was a consummate historian, and an intense and moving speaker and writer. When he represented our profession, historians were putting their best foot forward. As Douglas Greenberg and Stanley N. Katz wrote in a tribute, Kammen left “a legacy of humanity, warmth, and humor that all who knew him seek to emulate.”

As evidence of how well I have been served by his influence on me, I present to you an observation that Michael, placed in People of Paradox, selecting (as he always did) exactly the right quotation:

“Humorists are serious,” the writer and critic Mark Van Doren remarks, “they’re the only people who are.” “Happiness is a very solemn, serious thing,” Van Doren insists. “Joy is the most solemn thing on earth. You express it with tears.”

Thinking about Michael Kammen’s death in 2013, I am ready to demonstrate the unending truth of those last five words. And every time I use the word paradox, my indebtedness to him is renewed.

Why All Professions Need Mavericks, but Why the Academic World’s Need May Be the Most Acute of All:

A Big Concern that Gets Periodically Aired, but Then Rapidly Evaporates

No profession or occupation has ever escaped the fate of being knocked for a loop by the passage of time. In every field and enterprise, the reigning group of accomplished and established figures has to find a way to bring in the young recruits who will keep the system running when the established cohort has yielded to mortality. In bringing in reinforcements, the elders have to figure out a way to empower the young to carry on the work of the profession and the occupation, while also restraining the young so that they do not get carried away with the power allotted to them.

The exhortation, “Welcome to our world,” issued by the elders to their juniors, comes with an implicit but unmistakable cautionary remark, “but don’t expect to change our world too fast or too much.” Built into the welcome are incentives and even requirements for deference to the arrangements that the elders have put in place.

Professional pressures to submit to orthodoxy and conformity are by no means unique to higher education.

But these forces look particularly paradoxical in the academic world, and maybe especially in the field of history.

Historians, the boilerplate summation of professional practice has long proclaimed, study change over time. A naïve newcomer might misinterpret this to mean that historians will be distinctively agile when it comes to changing over time themselves.

On the contrary, like any people trying to navigate in the currents of time, historians are susceptible to an unexamined loyalty to the customs and assumptions, the demands and the prohibitions, that set the terms of their own professional training.

Meanwhile, in contrast to many other professions and occupations, the domain of the academic humanities hums with earnest declarations celebrating the value of fresh approaches and original findings and interpretations. Even as these declarations proliferate, the processes of training, hiring, promoting, and granting or denying tenure steadily direct novices and apprentices to concede to conformity, trim the sails of originality, and defer to the tenured faculty who are unmistakably the gatekeepers to whatever might be left in the way of tenure-track jobs in universities and colleges.

And now for a venture in the extreme sport of honesty: higher education is structured by an unconcealed hierarchy, and by a directly related fear, among the young, that the holders of power in this hierarchy might turn punitive if challenged or threatened.

Paradoxically, that last statement pairs overgeneralization with understatement.

A significant cohort of established and tenured scholars genuinely encourage and welcome the appearance of mavericks. But an equally sizable cohort of established and tenured scholars can be counted on to resist change, defend their turf, and demand deference. These folks can land hard on the people they cast as dissidents, rebels, and mavericks.

In four years in the Refuge for Mavericks called the University of California, Santa Cruz, and several more years of finding a surprising tolerance for eccentricity at Yale, my faith—in the proposition that the academic world was a distinctive arena of human life in which free expression did not face penalty or punishment—registered at 100%. And my acceptance of my obligation to respect evidence, accuracy, and reasoned interpretation also registered—and still registers—at 100%.

I cannot recall any teacher, professor, or mentor ever saying to me, explicitly or implicitly, “You are too independent and defiant of authority,” or “You should try harder to conform to tradition and orthodoxy,” or “You must do things my way.” Not a one of them ever made the slightest effort to rein me in.

My elders had performed well as mentors of a maverick.

As a result, I never expected conformity to be such a powerful force in the academic world.

An Intergenerational Lunch with an Uncomfortable Serving of Reality

Many years ago, a group of us—two tenured professors and three untenured professors—cooked up a plan to gather for a monthly lunch. We would read each other’s writings and offer useful commentary, while also reserving time to part from the agenda and just talk. Since the two of us with tenure had agreed that our work would be fair game for critical discussion by all, the usual workings of academic hierarchy were pleasantly unsettled.

I remember with joy an occasion when four of us, in a cross-generational alliance, pointed out that an essay written by the other tenured professor had switched its argument and even its subject repeatedly, without once putting on the turn signal. This led the tenured professor to confess to us that, through a successful career, he could never even guess what he really thought until he had written a confused and contradictory first draft, like the one we had all just read.

This confession was empowering and encouraging to young and old.

As the young faculty became completely comfortable with critiquing the work of their elders, good will and freewheeling discussion set the tone for our gatherings. This made it possible, at one of our gatherings, for the young scholars to describe the contrast between the relaxed atmosphere of our lunches and the nervous atmosphere of official faculty meetings.

“We know that we had better hold ourselves back at departmental meetings,” the young professors told us. “We know we have to keep a close watch on ourselves when we speak, and some of the time, we know we had better not speak at all.”

This honest confession placed me in the path of a flood of sorrow that has waned a little over the years, but has never departed.

“Oh, young people,” I had wished I could say, “please do not rob me of my dream that universities are places where people speak freely without fear of penalty or retaliation. Please drop your guardedness and self-restraint! Please plunge right ahead and jeopardize your chances of a majority vote for tenure by speaking freely at department meetings.”

But these were sensible and realistic young people. In a proposition equally true in any workplace governed by hierarchy and gatekeeping, they recognized that if they challenged authority in the academic world, unhappy consequences could come their way fast.

In hierarchical institutions, conformity and orthodoxy are forever sweeping in like a tide, reclaiming the areas where they might have seemed to retreat. It takes constant vigilance—which is to say, it takes the constant effort of mavericks—to hold back that tide.

Darkest Before the Dawn:

The Best Paradox of All

You may have thought this blog post was headed to a glum conclusion.

Now you can cheer up.

In my experience, mavericks are indeed at risk of condemnation, but that condemnation is likely to be poorly aimed, feverishly overstated, and correspondingly ineffective. And so, in a wondrous pattern, the tables often get turned in a very satisfying way, and the mavericks come out OK.

I was a recent arrival in the University of Colorado’s History Department when I encountered the iron fist of authority that can suddenly flash into view in a department hallway.

I had invited a visiting professor—an expert on Indian treaties—to give a talk hosted by the department. I had gone through all the proper channels to clear the time and date with the department chair and the administrative assistant.

And then it turned out that a CU tenured full professor of History had a plan to give a talk himself at that time and date. So it was entirely clear to him that he could and should tell the untenured assistant professor—me!—that his plan would overrule mine.

But to his surprise, the department chair and the administrative assistant stuck by their commitment to me, and the tenured full professor had to find another date.

When we next met in the hallway, the tenured full professor said to me, “You had better watch your step.” And, somewhat gratuitously, he added the remark that no one would be interested in attending a talk on Indian treaties.

Perhaps telling me to watch my step was his idea of mentoring a young scholar, showing her the ropes, and helping her to get better acquainted with the allocation of power in the new world she had entered?

Maybe.

But it sounded like a threat.

Fortunately, I was already far down the road as a well-trained maverick. I knew that I had been offered, at best, an invitation to mudwrestling, an invitation that one should always turn down, even when it is tempting.

And, as it turned out, keeping quiet—and simply sticking with the plan to host the speaker I had invited—turned out to provide me with one of life’s happiest moments.

When the time came for my guest speaker’s presentation, the room was packed to the gills: another professor had assigned the students in her class to attend this talk. With this hearty turn-out, we had to migrate down the hall to a bigger classroom.

This gave providence a chance to be very kind to me.

The power-wielding full professor—who had told me to watch my step and who had assured me that no one was interested in Indian treaties—came out of his office just as our crowd swept down the hallway.

“Hi,” I said to him, in the congenial manner that only a well-trained maverick can adopt without smirking or seething. “It turns out that a lot of people want to learn about Indian treaties, so we had to move to a larger room.”

And it gets even better.

Right at the time that my senior colleague told me to watch my step, I was putting heart and soul—and nearly every waking hour—into following exactly the opposite strategy. At the time that he spoke to me, I was mid-way through the manuscript that became The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. As a direct challenge to the establishment of Western American history, the publication of this book will probably hold the standing of my lifetime peak performance as a maverick.

Here’s yet another paradox: I didn’t have tenure, and I was challenging the orthodoxy in an entire field.

I really didn’t have time to watch my step.

When I wrote Legacy of Conquest, my belief in the promise of academic free expression was still at 100%. In another “Not my First Rodeo” blog post, I might try to figure out how that percentage is now closer to 50%. But I will also try to figure out how I can get it to climb again.

Back to the cheerful ending.

When an enforcer of orthodoxy tells a well-trained maverick to watch her step, it is likely that the maverick’s next step is going to be all the more forceful, made with a strategic calculation of courage and caution.

In maverick training, this is the best paradox of all: the moment when the enforcers of conformity believe that they are going to prevail could turn out to be the moment of the maverick’s greatest success.

Photo Credit:

Smiley Face Image courtesy of: Illustration 8138791 © Dmitry Sunagatov | Dreamstime.com

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes image courtesy of: Wikipedia

People of Paradox book cover image courtesy of: Amazon

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Horses Out Of Barns, Cats Out Of Bags, And Trains That Have Left The Station:

Anonymous — Thu, 20 May 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Horses Out Of Barns, Cats Out Of Bags, And Trains That Have Left The Station: Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/20/2021 - 00:00

Socialism, Then And Now

As I raced along in life, I could have spared myself a lot of time and trouble if I had paused to notice a consistent and conspicuous pattern. Every time I learned a lesson the hard way, it turned out that I had taken the long route to what I could have learned—with far less trial and error—from familiar folk sayings.

Like plenty of over-educated folks, I had drifted into the habit of thinking of those sayings as superficial and banal platitudes. But when I compared them to the lessons I had chosen to learn in the College of Hard Knocks (an educational institution that sometimes shares a campus with actual universities), these sayings were revealed to be tightly packed bundles of meaning.

That horse is out of the barn.
That cat is out of the bag.
That train has left the station.

With these three different ways of phrasing the same proposition, the folk of the past apparently realized that they were making a point that was too important to say just once. In each of those statements, the phrase makers of the past offered this guidance to posterity: “If you can pause to think about the larger context of the situation you face, you will get better results than if you head straight to alarm and agitation.”

Attending to Time:

What Century Is it?

In our times, an audible set of Americans have been sounding an alarm over the potential of socialism to inflict calamity on our nation.

To Western historians, those expressions of alarm seem to be a century too late.

The American West has already been there and done that.

Here’s what we know: Socialism held the loyalty of a significant number of Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Here’s what we don’t know: will that historical configuration of loyalty make a resurgence in the twenty-first century?

Some historical movements came into being and continued at full force over centuries. Other historical movements got going and then faded quickly into a shadowy vestige only remembered by a few.

And here is a third possibility that might apply to Socialism: some historical movements seemed to disappear, and then suddenly resurfaced with greater force than they had in their initial appearance.

If that third pattern is in the picture, people who fear that Socialism is going to make a resurgence as a political force will want to keep a close watch on North Dakota and Utah, two states where enthusiasm for socialism was particularly notable a century ago.

Could I really be proposing that North Dakotans and Utahns should be kept under close surveillance, on the chance that they may relapse into the ideology embraced by some of their ancestors and predecessors?

This idea meets every standard for dismissal as ridiculous.

But the idea also comes with a serious dimension: I am hoping to call attention to a form of public service that historians can offer to society today. When individuals and groups undertake to decide what seems alarming and disturbing in our own times, historical perspective could add an element of calm, good sense, and even humor.

Oh, Give Me a Home, Where the Socialists Roam:

North Dakotans Give Conventional Thinking a Rough Ride

In the years 1918-1919, an insurgent movement called the Nonpartisan League dominated the government of the state of North Dakota. As its name indicates, the Nonpartisan League (henceforth, NPL) was not a satellite or affiliate of the Socialist Party, nor the Republican Party, nor the Democratic Party. The main constituents of the NPL were small farmers who were facing every variety of economic trouble.

And yet the NPL—in its origins and its leadership—had a very direct connection to Socialism. In Political Prairie Fire, Robert L. Morlan’s thorough history of the League, references to Socialism appear frequently. Here is one reference worth reading in its entirety (and yes, I know that normal human beings always skip over long block quotations, but I swear this one is really worth reading):

It is not surprising that the overwhelming majority of the League’s organizers throughout the years were Socialists. Most of the League’s coterie of early leaders were Socialists or had some connection with the movement, and it was only natural that they picked men with whom they had been associated. Moreover, they found that men who had always been in the minority tended to be strong on argument and to know how to turn opponents into friends. They understood the underdog point of view, and in many cases had sharpened their speaking techniques in the rough and tumble of street corner oratory [the italics are mine, as you already guessed].

In other words, in North Dakota in the 1910s, the Socialist horse was already out of the barn. Even though many members of the NPL were farmers who would never have called themselves Socialists, through the NPL’s leaders and organizers, Socialism had an unmistakable impact on the main currents of political thought in that state. To a significant share of the NPL members, in Robert Morlan’s words, “Socialism was the ultimate objective, and the League was simply a means to that end.”

Socialism holds an unmistakable place in the history of North Dakota. Still, it would take a remarkably jumpy person to anticipate and fear a resurgence of Socialist thought and conviction in Bismarck and Fargo.

“Socialist Saints”

What was needed, according to the early revelations propounded by the church, was a system of relationships in which self-seeking individualism and personal aggrandizement would be completely replaced by common action, simplicity in consumption, relative equality, and group self-sufficiency.

Leonard Arrington (former Church Historian)
Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-Day Saints (1958)

In 1901, the national Socialist Party was founded. In that same year, the first Socialist Party locals were founded in Utah. The movement had an impact statewide: twenty out of twenty-nine Utah counties had Socialist organizations.

In an examination of nearly 1500 Utahns who ran for public office as Socialists or who held a position in a Socialist organization, historians John Sillitoe and James McCormick found that 40% of these people were Mormons. These “Socialist Saints,” Sillitoe and McCormick wrote, “combined allegiance for both Socialism and Mormonism.”

In the mining town of Eureka, Utah, four elections placed Socialists in the position of mayor, and in two elections voters chose Socialists as the whole roster of the town’s elected officials. Predictably, Utah Socialism had a greater foothold in mining communities, where non-Mormons were represented in greater proportions. But Sillitoe and McCormick still asserted that Socialism “appealed to a wide cross-section of Utahns, including many Mormons.” They held a range of occupations from educators to small businesspeople, from farmers to skilled workers, and including an occasional bishop or other officials in the church network.

In Springfield, Utah, in 1913, a Socialist Saint named A. L. Porter placed a statement addressed “to my posterity” in the cornerstone of the new high school. “Our political faith is socialism,” Porter wrote, “our religious faith is (Mormon) the Latter-day Saints.”

A year earlier,

In Emery County, Utah, when a Mormon woman named Lillie Engel ran for the office of County Recorder, she declared that she was “an advocate of scientific socialism . . . . born of thought and investigation.” In a longer statement, Lillie Engel explained her political choice:

Having concluded that Socialism is the only political movement that offers a solution for social ills, political corruption, undue wealth for the capitalist and unjust poverty for the workers, I have embraced Socialism for my politics . . . and now hold the office of secretary of the local branch of that party.

Anyone, who might be inclined to think that A. L. Porter and Lille Engel were rarities in early twentieth-century Utah, can recover from that inclination by scoping out John McCormick’s and John Sillito’s book, A History of Utah Radicalism: Startling, Socialistic, and Revolutionary (2011). Those two historians made a compelling contribution to a chorus of recognition of the distinctive reason why Socialism found strong support in Utah. As McCormick and Sillito put it, “The Mormon Church has a strong communitarian tradition.”

A crucial phase in that tradition took place in the 1870s, when President and Prophet Brigham Young put forward a program of economic cooperation called the United Order of Enoch. (In Latter-day Saint scripture, Enoch was a very honorable and wise figure who inspired the founding of the city of Enoch, where people lived with such virtue that the city itself was taken straight to heaven.)

Aligning themselves with the United Order, some Utah communities asked residents to consecrate their property to communal benefit and to unite in a shared economic destiny. Other communities took up less demanding—but still strenuous—enterprises in the creation of cooperatives, ranging from textile factories to tanneries. A few towns went much further in adopting customs of disciplined, communal living.

Here is how historian Leonard Arrington summed up the Church leadership’s appraisal of the United Order in the 1870s. This movement, the leaders believed, had “tempered the growing spirit of acquisitiveness and individualism with a more saintly selflessness and devotion to the building of the Kingdom.” Spiritual and material concerns came together: the United Order of Enoch contributed to the Utah economy, while also “heighten[ing] the spirit of unity and ‘temporal oneness’ of the Saints.”

Only a generation removed from the peak of activity in the United Order of Enoch, the early twentieth-century Socialist Saints had reason to see themselves as stewards of a tradition of communal commitment. There was no surprise in the fact that, as McCormick and Sillito summed up this story, “many Mormons found membership in the Socialist party compatible with their membership in the Mormon Church.”

Awaiting a Call:

Historians Ready to Lend a Hand

The dimensions of Western American history briefly presented here do not seem to have come to the attention of the public figures who are sounding the alarm over the rise of Socialism in our times.

But maybe a custom adopted by Hollywood’s movie makers could be of use in this arena?

Many movies now include the disclaimer, “No animals were harmed in the making of this film.” Perhaps the time has come to ask public figures—when they are headed to the microphone to express alarm and agitation over socialism or any other political belief systems that have been around a long time—to begin with a similar disclaimer, “No historians were enlisted in the writing of this speech.” After a few deployments of that admission, a novel line of thought might suddenly come to mind: “Then why don’t I enlist a couple of historians before I give my next agitated and alarmed speech?”

In innumerable arenas of national life today, horses are out of barns; cats are out of bags; and trains have left the station. To undertake a productive reckoning with these situations, historians could be the essential workers.

But we wait to be summoned.

In ordinary circumstances, no one holds the right to speak for the dead. But in our unusual circumstances in 2021, I am—briefly and with great humility—going to exercise that right.

Here is what I think the Western American Socialists of a century ago might say to us today:

We would like you to remember that this nation, for all its troubles, has at its core a streak of idealism. We want to believe that this streak of idealism still survives a century after our lives ended, and we hope that you will be drawn, as we were, to dreams driven by that idealism. But we can pass on to you what we learned for ourselves: such dreams vary widely in practicality. And we can assure you that people who refer to themselves as Socialists are rarely of one unified mind when it comes to defining the actions that Socialists want to see at work in the world.

Burdened with my ventriloquism, these Western American Socialists of a century ago are proving to be very chatty time travelers. But when I plead with them to be succinct, here’s the result:

Howdy, posterity.
Here’s what we know, and what you will find out.
You, too, shall pass.
That horse is really out of the barn.

Photo Credit:

Horse & Barn image courtesy of: Pixabay

Cat in a bag image courtesy of: Pixabay

Train image courtesy of: Pixabay

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The Reality of Lizards:

Anonymous — Thu, 13 May 2021 06:00:00 +0000

The Reality of Lizards: Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/13/2021 - 00:00

The Constant Conundrum of Figuring Out What We Meant When We Contemplate What Seem to Be Reliable Quotations of What We Said

A Verse I Just Wrote, Though I Should Have Written It 25 Years Ago

A very few gurus and wizards
Can grasp the reality of lizards.
From their tightly knit scales
To their very long tails,
Their kinship to us has been scissored.

A Pair of Intentions Figure Out How to Team Up

My initial plan was to write about a funny incident that happened twenty-five years ago, when I put a statement on permanent record in a public venue. This statement had a certain vitality, but it made no sense to me or to anyone else. Since this small-scale misadventure in communication occurred at a time of large-scale trouble in my life, it was my initial intention to use this story as evidence to support a proposition I have often tested: humor and merriment can cohabit with misery and calamity.

That intention turned out to need a little help.

But another intention—to use this story to help society deal with the inescapable reality that public figures sometimes say goofy things—stepped forward to lend a hand to the first intention, and thereby saved the day.

A Misadventure in Proofreading in a Very Difficult Time

In the summer of 1996, “The West,” a documentary made by Ken Burns and Stephen Ives, was released on public television. Since the project had benefited from support by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and since I had been an adviser for that film, the NEH’s magazine, Humanities, featured a long interview with me. Sheldon Hackney, a very good soul who was the Chair of the NEH, conducted the interview.

Toward the end of our conversation, Hackney said this to me:

Now, for the question that I’m not sure has an answer, how do you account for this great flowering of scholarship and writing in general about the West, fiction as well, in the last fifteen years?

I took the bit and ran with it.

I drew a stark contrast between what I saw as the inward-looking, self-preoccupied nature of the literature associated with the Northeast, and the equally intense, but far more expansive and grounded spirit that characterized the literature of the West in the 1980s and 1990s. Here is my response, as it appeared in the published interview:

When I was in graduate school [in the 1970s], there were all those New Yorker stories of people sitting by pools in the backyard in Greenwich [Connecticut] talking agonizingly about their relationships. I like Updike and John Cheever and so on, but it seemed like there was something missing. . . . So I think there was a niche to fill. In the West, there were writers ready to write about the reality they had grown up with, the reality of small human communities in big open spaces, and the reality of lizards. . . . Those were real stories. They were such a world apart from these people in Manhattan restaurants sorting out their relationships.

To give this massive generalization some ballast, I referred to “stories like Ivan Doig’s agonizing story about his grandmother and his father and him trying to save a flock of sheep that were trying to kill themselves running from a thunderstorm.”

After Sheldon Hackney and I concluded our wide-ranging exchange, the interview was transcribed. By the time the transcript was completed and ready for review, my life had gone off a cliff.

My first husband Jeff Limerick had his first stroke at age forty-eight. He was in the Intensive Care Unit at �鶹�� Community Hospital when a packet from the National Endowment for the Humanities arrived at home, containing the transcript of the interview with Sheldon Hackney. I was instructed to review it fast and note any corrections before it went into print.

So there I sat in the ICU waiting room, pushing myself to pay close attention to this lengthy document. As I look back at my dutifulness, I am myself a little mystified as to why I designated this proofreading as a priority in such dire circumstances. But I surely had reasons for seizing distraction when it came into my reach, though distraction did not entirely maximize effective error-detection. For instance, the printed version spells Ivan Doig’s surname as “Doeg,” strong evidence that my mind was elsewhere.

Despite an error or two of spelling, whoever transcribed this lengthy interview was a person of strong character, well-endowed with the qualities of bravery and determination. Nearly every statement, quoted from me in the transcription, still made sense to me—except for four words.

What could I possibly have meant by “the reality of lizards”?

Which Western author had written with force and eloquence about this?

Stationed in the ICU waiting room, I tried as hard I could to think of the short story or novel or memoir or poem that had conveyed this zoological reality with such memorable intensity.

The search for symbolically powerful reptiles failed.

Completely.

So I gave up and authorized the reality of lizards to appear on permanent public record.

But I never stopped wondering about what I could have been thinking: Which writer? Which lizards? Which reality?

The Search Continues, and Finally Reaches a Surprising Conclusion

Quite miraculously, Jeff recovered from that first stroke, and he and I returned to something pretty close to normal life. When the special issue of Humanities on “The West” appeared in the Fall of 1996, there was Sheldon Hackney’s interview with me, and there were the lizards.

But I kept wondering.

These were the days when, as my treasured friend Alvin Josephy used to observe, the circuit of Western writers’ conferences was more packed than the circuit of Western rodeos. So I often found myself positioned to ask creative writers, English professors, and historians if they could help me identify those literary lizards.

They couldn’t.

A year or so after the Humanities interview came out, Ivan Doig himself—properly spelled this time—visited the Center of the American West as a distinguished lecturer (several years later, he returned as the winner of our Stegner Award). Since Ivan was a preeminent figure in the renaissance in Western American literature, it seemed very likely that he would be able to help me.

Charles Wilkinson presents the Stegner Award to Ivan Doig.

And so, as several of us from the Center of the American West were having lunch with him and his very knowledgeable wife, Carol, I asked them if they had even a guess as to what I had meant when I invoked the reality of lizards.

But, no, they did not have a clue.

Our conversation then moved onto more promising topics. As we chatted about the robust state of Western American writing, Tom Precourt, who was then my valued comrade in his role as the managing director of the Center of the American West, seemed lost in thought.

And then illumination hit.

“Blizzards!” Tom suddenly exclaimed

“What about blizzards?” we all asked him.

And then we all got it.

The reality of blizzards.

Tom Precourt

There is no shortage of memorable blizzards in Western American literature. And, just as I had intended when I brought them up in my Humanities interview, as stark encounters with life and death, those blizzards offered a dramatic contrast to my characterization of the writings of Northeastern writers like Cheever and Updike.

At the lunch gathering where this mystery was finally solved, merriment ruled. And comparisons between the reality of lizards and the reality of blizzards kept the hilarity in motion for quite a spell.

In truth, I can’t say that the merriment brought into being by this ridiculous misunderstanding has ever let up, even though its association with loss and tragedy never let up, either.

Jeff Limerick died in 2005. Ivan Doig died in 2015. Sheldon Hackney died in 2013. But even when I face up to this context of lives cut short, the merriment aroused in me by that phrase—the reality of lizards—does not diminish.

If there is an equation that could add up the experiences of tragedy and the experiences of merriment to produce a coherent sum, someone else is going to have to invent it.

But another form of public service has been placed within my reach.

Multiple misadventures in communication have positioned me to address a great vacancy in our society in 2021. I have conjured up ways for people who express themselves on public record to say to the world:

Here is a statement I apparently made. But I actually don’t know what I meant by it. Can you help me figure this out?

Staying Anchored in the Reality of an Adaptable Schoolteacher

I conclude with a story that only needs to be enjoyed, rather than figured out. This story is thematically on point: it is about a Western lizard who encountered an unusual reality, and who had the good fortune to share this reality with a schoolteacher who knew when she was having experiences she should record.

Born in 1854, Angie Mitchell and her family moved to Prescott, Arizona in the 1870s. As a teacher, she was resourceful, good-humored, self-reliant, and very attentive to the interesting twists and turns of her classroom work.

Here, in her words (quoted in bulk, and not paraphrased) is the story of a lizard and a human who collaborated to endow us with a valuable lesson in adaptability and tolerance.

I furnished a good deal of amusement for my school today quite unexpectedly. I was hearing a Geography class & feeling something tugging at my dress as if there was a weight on it—shook it and went on with my class; presently feeling it again I looked down & there lying on my dress skirt in a ray of sunlight was as hideous a reptile as I’ve ever seen. He was black & yellow & tawny & had a body like a monstrous lizard & a “spiky” looking tail & a head like a snake & was over a foot long—Lord! I gathered up dress & with a yell one could hear a mile jumped on the stool [where] I had been sitting. The commotion that ensued beggars description. Ida & Laura nearest me—glanced down saw the reptile & promptly followed my example—the littler ones cried from fright at our strange antics, and everything was confusion, but when the Arizonans saw the hideous thing—they laughed and said, “Why, teacher, that’s nothing but a Gila Monster.” Well, I’ve heard lots of stories about these uncanny dwellers in Arizona but I’ve never seen one before—at least on his native heath. I was sufficiently reassured to collect my wits but I took pains to jump off my stool on the side the “monster” was not—then I gave a sudden recess & asked for information.

And now we return to Angie Mitchell’s schoolhouse, three weeks later:

I’ve forgotten to say that the Gila monster who gave me such a scare comes out every morning and sun’s himself & I’ve taken to picking him up gingerly by the tail & putting him back of my desk where he lies out at full length in the sun & sometimes snaps up an unwary fly & seems to enjoy himself greatly. I’ve ceased to fear him tho’ it will be long before I shall consider him handsome. I stroke his scaly back with a pencil & he likes it apparently.

In Conclusion, an Opportunity for Readers

The next time you encounter the stereotype of young women as frail, anxious, and needing to be rescued from challenging situations by protective men, you can quickly challenge that stereotype by saying, “This reminds me of a story I once heard about the reality of Gila Monsters . . .”

Reading You Are Likely to Find Interesting

National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Sheldon Hackney, “Borderland vs. Frontier: Redefining the West,” interview with Patricia Nelson Limerick, Humanities, September/October 1996 (Volume 17, Number 4).

Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind (1978). The story of the storm, referred to in the quotation from the Humanities interview, appears on pp. 217-222; the power of that story is summed up in Doig’s statement, “As much as at any one instant in my life, I can say, Here I was turned.”

Excerpts from Angeline Mitchell Brown’s diary appear in Ruth B. Moynihan, Susan Armitage, and Christine Fischer Duchamp, editors, So Much to Be Done: Women Settlers on the Mining and Ranching Frontier (1990), pp. 270-288.

Photo Credit:

Dragon Lizard image courtesy of: Pixabay

Charles Wilkinson and Ivan Doig image courtesy of: CAW, by Honey Ashenbrenner

Gila Monster image courtesy of: Wikipedia

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The Rodeos to Come:

Anonymous — Thu, 06 May 2021 06:00:00 +0000

The Rodeos to Come: Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/06/2021 - 00:00

A Reckoning with Brevity and Abundance in the Allocation of Words

An Achievement with a Recognizable Shape

When I finished my dissertation, I achieved two successes: I earned a Ph.D., and I created a text that—in its shape and proportions—bore an unmistakable resemblance to the Goodyear Blimp.

Written fast to deliver on a promise that I had made to secure my first job, my dissertation was nearly 400 hundred pages long. After the dissertation was accepted, I wrote three more chapters, bringing this academic affront against brevity to 600 pages.

When it emerged from a rigorous treatment program as a published book, Desert Passages was one-third of the length of the dissertation. The Goodyear Blimp had downsized, receiving a liberation from rotundity.

Every writer has encountered this paradox: if you write very fast, the text that emerges will be proportionately bulky.

If you are not in a rush, you can distinguish between what you need to say and what you do not need to say. Even if some of your choices need to be reconsidered, you have time to reconsider, revise, and abbreviate.

Not long after my dissertation had acquired its resemblance to the Goodyear Blimp, I was recruited to write columns for USA Today. Brevity then drove wordiness into exile. Compared to the Blimp, my columns were light, agile, balsa-wood constructions that sat lightly on the earth, ready to lift off in a stiff breeze.

The word limit for a USA Today column was—strictly, inflexibly, non-negotiably—three-hundred-and-fifty words.

Try telling that to the author of a dissertation that was three times longer than it needed to be.

Brevity Is the Soul of What?

I once had a close friend who was certain that people lost the capacity to change very early in life. Despite earnest efforts to understand him, I could not give up my conviction that people can change in significant ways throughout their lifetimes.

As you instantly noticed, the irony here was quite deep: whatever I and my no-longer-so-close friend thought about the human capacity for change, he did not change his position, and I did not change mine. I guess that must mean that he won the argument.

Back in 1984, if that friend had hefted my Goodyear Blimp of a dissertation, and if I had then told him that I was going to start writing really short columns, my friend would have declared, very understandably and very convincingly, “That’s never going to work.”

There is no denying that I did not make an easy adjustment to this new regime.

At first, I wrote drafts that sailed way past the 350-word limit. When my efforts to make them shorter failed, I would then ask for help from my editor, Sid Hurlburt, a person who was as gracious as he was smart and capable. In one of my smarter moves in life, after Sid had gone to work, tightening and subtracting, consolidating and removing, I would not let myself compare his draft to my original. Denying myself the chance to grieve over the forced departure of really cute phrases and perfectly adorable metaphors, I was able to thank Sid and move on without even the slightest sense of injury.

Nine or ten columns into this new regime, a gear shifted in my mind. Brevity suddenly became my default operating system. My first drafts came in at fewer than 300 words, even though I felt I had said everything I needed to say. So I would then have to conjure up a remark or two that would bulk the column up to 350.

This shift toward succinctness turned out to be lasting, thanks to a stream of positive reinforcement. I felt the satisfaction that I believe is very familiar to carpenters, woodworkers, and other craftspeople. In fact, I seemed to have evolved into a creature more like a “wordworker” than like the high-strung, anxious dissertation-writer who seemed to have hoped that an excess of words would provide insulation, cushioning, or even concealment.

Even better, readers of USA Today did not consign me to the seclusion and isolation that had been the habitat of the dissertation-writer. Instead, they wrote me nice letters. An added benefit was that, next to each column, there was a little photograph. This made it possible for one flight attendant to look at me with surprise, exclaim “I love your column,” and insist on giving me a free drink. On another trip, the check-in agent made the same declaration and gave me an upgrade to first class.

Brevity delivered many rewards.

Equally important, some of what might have seemed like negative feedback came with a subtext of unintended affirmation. One CU departmental colleague, noting that I wrote for USA Today, remarked, “If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.” I was free to interpret comments like this as I wanted, so I took them to be sincere expressions of envy.

So there’s the upshot: my training run with Sid Hurlburt and USA Today did me a world of good, cultivating many of the skills that I have relied on in my adventures as a public intellectual.

Some readers of “Not my First Rodeo,” who have never seen anything like the compactness of my USA Today columns, may be surprised to learn that I was once such a high achiever in the practice of brevity. To glimpse the interplay between consistency and inconsistency in human behavior, those readers might want to look at the Denver Post on the third Sunday of every month, where I regularly re-stake my claim on brevity in my column in the “Perspectives” section. Though I am far more tractable and compliant than I was when Sid Hurlburt was assigned to convert me to brevity, the Post’s Megan Schrader has succeeded him as my very capable coach and trainer. For nearly ten years with the Post, I have stayed within the limit of 550 words, even if there have been a few episodes when Megan has taken me off the leash and let me run wild at 1100 words.

If Shakespeare was right, and “brevity is the soul of wit” (a principle that Shakespeare himself seems to have doubted from time to time), then the strict word-limit of column-writing has given me a much bigger arena in which wit can stretch its soul.

The Recent Response to Beseeching

Two weeks ago, in anticipation of the one-year anniversary of the launching of “Not my First Rodeo,” I beseeched readers to tell me if they wanted this blog to continue. If they felt it had served its time, then I beseeched them to tell me what they thought the Center of the American West should do with the energy and time that “Rodeo” had absorbed.

The majority of people who responded to my request said, “Keep it going.” I am grateful to everyone who wrote, though given my failures at time management, it will be a while before any of them hear that from me directly. When several people said that “Not my First Rodeo” had been a lifeline during the pandemic, I felt a more intense sensation of connection than I had felt over my many years of in-person public speaking, where my sensations of connection had been very intense indeed.

A few folks did converge on the conclusion that it was time to bring the “Rodeo” to a close. Surprisingly, only two or three people complained about the lengths of the posts.

Perhaps most surprisingly, none of the complaints about the length of “Not my First Rodeo” posts bore my signature.

But, really, whose reasons for making this complaint could carry more weight than my own?

Here is what I know with an immediacy and intensity that no one else shares: writing the extensive and expansive “Rodeo” posts takes a lot of time.

And yet the experience has—nearly always—delivered a strong dose of enjoyment. Reliably and regularly, finishing an essay always left me with me with the feeling summed up by the phrase, “feeling higher than a kite.”

Or higher than a dirigible or a light, agile, balsa-wood construction.

Nonetheless, here is what would be the basis of my complaint, lodged fervently against myself: while I have been working away on “Rodeo” posts, a bunch of valuable Center-generated findings have continued to languish in seldom-consulted files, while a significant number of opportunities to write forewords or prefaces or introductions, to celebrate the work of young historians, have been postponed way past their deadlines.

Whither the “Rodeo”?

And that brings us to my vision for “Rodeo’s” second year.

For reasons that were compelling and even inarguable during the pandemic, meeting the deadlines for “Not my First Rodeo” became my priority. But keeping up with the “Rodeo” posts stood in the way of my hopes and desires to help out in a number of good causes.

What to do?

I can redirect, repurpose, and reorient “Not my First Rodeo” in its second year so it will serve—and not obstruct—those good causes.

“Rodeo” posts will continue to appear every week. But they will vary—wildly—in length. Some of the posts in the future will be as short as my Denver Post columns, and some may even be as short as my old USA Today columns. In fact, since some of those columns still seem weirdly relevant in 2021, it is possible that I will be tempted to freshen up one or two of those relics and send them back for Round Two of public exposure. Maybe people will notice that their shelf-life expired long ago.

But don’t get complacent and assume that consistent brevity will be “Rodeo’s” new normal.

Some of the upcoming posts will revert to greater length because they will expand to accommodate my enlisting younger scholars as my co-authors. Having come into the Center’s circles through a variety of routes, particularly through the Mellon-Foundation-supported Applied History project, these young folks have chosen subjects of research that offer both intrinsic interest and potential benefit to society. “Not my First Rodeo” offers a fine venue for giving their ideas and findings a test run at engaging a wider public.

Other posts will break from brevity because I will use “Not my First Rodeo” to present the valuable insights and interpretations that emerged from earlier Center workshops and convenings. Reposing in digital files and even in old-fashioned file cabinets, the subject matter of these findings ranges from case studies in community responses to drought to the never-diminishing tensions between the Rural West and the Urban West, from the wide variety of interventions and intrusions that humans have made into the earth’s subsurface to the dilemmas faced by workers when local industries hit downturns or close entirely. All these topics are elbowing and pushing for their right to appear in the “Rodeo.” First in line is my introduction to a Center-initiated book called No Country for Old Stereotypes, a collection of illuminating and pace-setting articles from the Western Historical Quarterly and the Pacific Historical Review. In the Spring of 2020, my draft of this introduction was close to completion, but then “Not my First Rodeo” claimed my attention and a good share of my time. It is time for “Not my First Rodeo” and No Country for Old Stereotypes to quit competing with each other and, instead, to work in common cause.

From time to time, a post in “Not my First Rodeo’s” satellite blog, “Did Anyone Else Notice?” is still going to dash into the world to point out some odd feature of our lives that has come to preoccupy me. Since my ambitions and intentions for “Did Anyone Else Notice?” are usually inconsequential, posts for this blog are easy to write. Allotting just enough time to rethink and revise, the time between the appearance of the idea and the completion of the piece is joyfully brief.

Every now and then, “Rodeo” posts will defy brevity purely because I want to tell a tale that didn’t find a place in the first year of “Not my First Rodeo.” So you should brace yourself for the tale of my adventures as a (mostly responsible) sixteen-year-old, lucky enough to wander around Haight-Ashbury during San Francisco’s Summer of Love (this visit was brought to an abrupt halt by a misunderstanding arising from too many people in a shower, though it is important to clarify that they were showering sequentially, not simultaneously). I also feel that I owe the world a recounting of the improbable way that I escaped the corrals of specialization and ended up as the author of respected publications on subjects as disparate as the policies of space exploration, the transformation of Western landscape photography, the confounded state of nuclear waste storage, and the configurations and undertones of Western American poetry. And then there’s the yet-to-be-told story of how an excellent and forceful friend from my hometown (yes, Banning, California) relocated to Idaho, and thereby set in motion a chain of events that led directly to my professional success, to the revitalization of Western American history, and to the creation of the Center of the American West.

Is This Going to Work?

Maybe, or Maybe Not

When I reviewed the columns that I wrote for USA Today, I had a revelation. When I looked at the dates of my column-writing, I thought, “I don’t see how this could have been possible.” My first years of writing those columns coincided with the years when I was writing the book, Legacy of Conquest. Unlike my dissertation, Legacy was not exactly modeled on the Goodyear Blimp, but that book was certainly not characterized by brevity.

Until now, I had never fully realized that brevity and abundance have, more often than not, coexisted in my writing life. In the mid-1980s, I was working steadily away on a book that turned out fine. And yet, every few days, I stepped away from that exercise in persistence and wrote a short USA Today column that moved briskly into nationally visible print, leaving me free to return to writing the book.

Putting the Center’s slogan, “Turning hindsight into foresight,” to the test, I am going to try to orchestrate the workings of “Not my First Rodeo” to reenact the era when I wrote texts that covered the range from brevity to abundance. The goal of this reenactment will be to harvest the riches of stories, case studies, and parables that have been awaiting liberation from storage.

Will this work?

I wouldn’t bet on it. Then again, I wouldn’t bet against it.

I return now to reminiscing about that one-time close friend who was convinced that, early in their lives, people became unable to change their characters, temperaments, practices, customs, and habits. After many hours spent listening to him, and after even more hours spent writing “Rodeo” posts that fell into a pattern that I stuck with for a year, I still believe that people can change in significant ways throughout their lifetimes.

Let’s see if I am right.

Thank you for reading “Not my First Rodeo” during its first year, and for sticking with it—and me—into our future.

A Memorable Radio Ad, Tailored for this Occasion

When I lived in New Haven and listened to radio stations in New York City, I often heard an ad for a menswear store. With glorious New York inflection, an announcer earnestly informed listeners, presumably of a wide range of shapes and proportions, that Gramercy Park Tailors sold men’s suits in four sizes: “small, medium, large, and portly.”

At one time or another, my written work has fit into every one of those sizes, sometimes shifting among all four of them, one after the other, on the very same day.

Why quarrel with success?

Traditional

White

Recruiting and Unleashing Youthful Talent:

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Recruiting and Unleashing Youthful Talent: Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/29/2021 - 00:00

The Best Imaginable Way to Observe the One-Year Anniversary of the “Not my First Rodeo”

There was once a small little frog,
And one day he hopped on a log.
Then out jumped a bug
Who gave him a hug,
And together they fell in the bog.

There once was a small piece of bread
Who wanted to stand on his head.
When he tried to get up,
He fell into a cup,
And then someone ate him instead.

Having taken a number of graduate English classes from prestige-laden professors at Yale, I am well-equipped to provide erudite commentary on these two poems. As similarly sophisticated readers will have noticed, a rich supply of themes and patterns unite these lyrical compositions. In both of these verses, the poets wrestle with the unintended consequences that so often characterize the fate of aspiration and ambition for humans, amphibians, or even grain-based products. We think we are just going to jump on a log or stand on our heads, and instead we set in motion a chain of events that deliver us to an unchosen immersion in fluids. Similarly, both poets pay tribute to the force of gravity as a factor that scrambles the alignments and arrangements that we mistakenly take to be predictable and even foreknown, with a fall suddenly reminding us of our precarious and uncertain positioning in life. Noting these striking thematic similarities (and others too numerous to mention), you might begin to think that these limericks—both beautifully illustrated—are the creation of authors who are, in some way, kin.

Perhaps sisters?

How’d you guess?

A Promise, Fulfilled

Here is the promise I made in last week’s “Rodeo” post:

As a commemoration of its one-year anniversary, “Not my First Rodeo” will present the most charming and spirit-lifting collection of words ever sent out into the world by the Center of the American West. I make this promise with confidence because I have recruited two talented and energetic co-authors who will be making their literary debuts.

As you can tell from the opening limericks and their accompanying illustrations, I am delivering on that promise by recruiting my two great-nieces as co-authors. Piper is ten, and Daisy is eight.

In other words, you can now remove “the decline of the limerick” from the list of troubles that come to your mind when you consider the prospects for the twenty-first century.

Just before we return to the charm, wit, and energy that run through this blog post, I will make that return all the more welcome by putting forward a somber statement.

As the twenty-first century unfolds, there are reasons to think that babyboomers are not going to register in history as impressive performers in the sport of intergenerational transition. For the members of my demographic cohort who are fortunate enough to be in good health, the Spring of 2021 is an auspicious time to try to improve the performance ratings that posterity will give us.

My success in recruiting and welcoming the next generation of limerick-writers may not seem like the “make it or break it” moment for the future of the planet. But as this “Rodeo” post shows, my efforts in this particular arena are delivering better results than many other undertakings in intergenerational succession these days. In truth, I would do a disservice to people of every generation—including those not yet among us—if I didn’t put this success on permanent public display.

How This Recruitment Occurred, and What Lies Ahead

I have long known that my great nieces (and my niece, whose gift with words I would like to present in a future “Rodeo” post) have very lively minds and enjoy the company of words. But for reasons that remain hidden to me, I never once thought to myself, “You’d think a great aunt would prove her ‘greatness’ by introducing these young folks to the art form of the limerick.”

The route to this recognition was not linear, to the point that I was not actually the one who provided that introduction.

Here’s what happened.

A few weeks ago, in a phone conversation, my sister Sunnie (Daisy’s and Piper’s “Grammie”) and I got to talking about a man who held an important administrative position in our hometown’s schools. This man had an unusual personal quality. This statement might stir up curiosity in readers, but I am compelled to stay within the bounds of small-town discretion, concealing both this man’s name and his unusual personal quality.

For now, I will just say that reminiscing about this well-known figure in our hometown stirred up quite a bit of merriment. Early the next day, Sunnie realized that this merriment had turned into a limerick. This was not her maiden voyage in limerick-writing, but she estimates that five or six decades had passed since her last venture into this literary genre.

And now for a shamelessly manipulative act of building expectation and curiosity in readers.

If you want to see the result of Sunnie’s homecoming to the land of the limerick, and also if you want to get a hint as to which “unusual personal quality” made us laugh so hard, you have to keep reading until the end.

(No scrolling! Keep reading!)

One thing then led to another, and Sunnie was inspired to build training in the composition of limericks into her homeschooling curriculum for her grandchildren. Meanwhile, on a parallel track, I had been on a fruitless quest to think up some amusing and energetic way to observe the one-year anniversary of “Not my First Rodeo.” As this limerick renaissance took off, the quest was resolved.

This “Rodeo” post has seven parts that proceed along at a brisk pace:

First, two limericks I wrote about my co-authors.

Second, the debut of Piper and Daisy as prolific writers of limericks, a literary event that now registers as a spectacular episode, setting an example for the planet, in babyboomer intergenerational transition.

Third, a symphony of quotable statements in which Daisy and Piper capture the satisfaction and the joy that limerick-writing provides to its practitioners.

Fourth, the Bulkly Tribute, a celebration of another novel (in every sense of the word) writing project that my sister and her grandchildren are now completing.

Fifth, a visionary prescription for writing instruction in childhood, offering a magic combination of precise word choice, vocabulary expansion, brevity, and fun.

Sixth, scenarios for considering words to be our friends, with guidance on how humans can enjoy the company of words, and how words can enjoy working with us.

Seventh, Sunnie’s initial verse on the “unusual personal quality” of our townsman, along with examples of her continuing commitment to the well-being of the limerick.

Part #1

Limericks by the Great-Aunt Who Has the Luckiest Surname Ever,

and Who Has Had Equally Good Fortune in Kinship with Verbally Agile Great-Nieces, Niece, and Nephews

A wondrous young person named Daisy
Is now writing limericks like crazy.
She thinks all the time,
Quite often in rhyme,
With a viewpoint that never goes hazy.

With a gift for words that’s uncanny,
Encouraged by her exuberant grammie.
Piper writes verse that’s a hit,
Filled with humor and wit,
Storing insights in each nook and cranny.

Part #2

The Literary Debut of Two Authors

Limericks by Daisy and Piper

I once was the owner of poodles.
My poodles would only eat noodles.
I tried all in my house,
Even added a mouse,
But my poodles had left by the oodles.

There once was a man who would sneeze
Each time that he said, “If you please.”
When he said an “Achoo,”
Then off flew his shoe,
And he finished it off with a wheeze!

There once was a great big old lion
And his name was Catastrophe Ryan.
When he jumps in his tracks,
He is looking to scratch.
And to tell you truth, we’re not lyin’.

At the farm was a significant pen
That housed a magnificent hen.
A fox came to check it,
But the hen chose to peck it,
In seconds, the fox ran away in just ten.

Limericks by Piper

I know a man named my Daddy.
He has a fine aunt named Aunt Patty.
She speaks with long words,
That no one has heard;
My Daddy’s a super great laddie!

One day there was a black pen,
And his friends called him Barry Ogden.
On the day of his birth,
He was blessed with great mirth,
But the first thing he wrote was not then.

I am in need of a warm winter coat
When I go out in my cold little boat.
Or else I shall freeze
Each time there’s a breeze,
And be unable to cross a small moat.

Limericks by Daisy

There once was a man who was funny,
So he went to the store for a bunny.
He could only buy half,
So there was no way to laugh,
Because he had not nearly the money.

There once was a half of a cookie,
Who decided to become a new rookie.
He joined with a team,
His chin up like a beam,
And he called to his friends, “Lookie, lookie!”

There once was a girl with a bonnet
That had flowers and ribbons upon it.
It was lost in the hay
On a very sad day,
So she decided to write a nice sonnet.

Part #3

Quotable Remarks in which Piper and Daisy Convey the Experience of Writing Limericks

Sparkles of ideas fall around you all the time. If you can get hold of a few and put them into a limerick, then you have it forever, and now the ideas can’t escape.

We can write a limerick if we just think up a few rhyming words. Then they pretty much find their own way into a limerick.

A limerick is like a container where you can keep words safe so they won’t ever get lost.

Writing limericks is like building your own amusement park.

Limericks are easy to remember. Maybe we can put the multiplication table into a limerick.

Part #4

The Bulkly Tribute:

A Novel Way to Defy and Exceed Standard, Strict Limitations on Having Fun While Revising and Proofreading

I might strike some people as an adventurous sort, but that is only because they haven’t met my sister. To mention one notable example of things she does routinely that I will never do at all, she has made a couple of voyages in the South Seas, traveling by cargo ship.

Meanwhile, back at home, she had the occasion to look over a big collection of books from the 1930s and 1940s, looking for a book that Piper and Daisy would enjoy reading with her.

A book called Mr. Bulkly on a Cargo Boat won first place in this unusual literary competition. This was a fictional work by a man named Hugh Lound, who arranged his novel as a first-person tale told by Mr. Bulkly.

So Piper and Daisy and their grandmother undertook a close reading of Mr. Bulkly on a Cargo Boat. They all found reading this book to be so fun that they hoped it was part of a “Mr. Bulkly” series.

But it wasn’t.

When Mr. Bulkly disembarked from the cargo boat, he implied that he was looking forward to his next journey.

But then he went silent.

What to do?

At this point, many fans would have given up.

Not these fans.

They resolved to write the sequel, Mr. Bulkly and the Grand Reunion.

Here was the authorial process they followed, which I will lay out very clearly on the assumption that many others are going to want to imitate it.

The writing of each chapter began with a brainstorming session, in which Daisy and Piper conjured up what Mr. Bulkly and his comrades would do in that chapter.
My sister kept track of these ideas and then wrote a draft of the chapter. But—and this is very important—she dashed this off, without taking a moment to review the result and certainly not to proofread it.
Piper and Daisy then put on their hats as editors and got to work on a critical reading and careful proofreading. (I actually don’t know if they have “editor hats,” but this is a useful idea to keep in mind for the 2021 Holidays.)
Finalized and polished, the chapter was then carefully stored, and the brainstorming moved onto the next chapter.

I celebrate all four steps, but it is Step 3 that could make me weep.

I started grading papers in 1974. Over nearly fifty years, I have read wonderful student writing. But my reading experience has often led me to say to myself, “Something has gone wrong here, and I am not sure how to fix it.”

In that context, when I think of two young children, regularly engaged in editing, proofreading, and generally scoping out opportunities for improvement in a written text, I feel as if I am having a dream that is soaring past my wildest hopes.

But Mr. Bulkly made this dream come true.

And now for a spectacular statement that the authors reported to me: As they became immersed in the writing process, they realized that they had spent so much time with Mr. Bulkly that when they spoke, they sounded just like him.

That Mr. Bulkly was one lucky fictional character.

Here are two summations-in-verse (the first one by me, and the second by my sister) of this extraordinary literary enterprise.

As you know from the surname of Bulkly,
This man didn’t qualify as “sveltly.”
Since he’s been given new life
And—very possibly—a wife,
He’s lost every right to be sulkly.

The first Bulkly book was so clever,
We grieved for what seemed forever.
Then to work we began
And what you hold in your hand
Is a reminder to never say never!

Sorry, readers, but the phrase, “what you hold in your hand,” cannot be literally true just yet. But opportunities may be on the horizon.

Part #5

We Interrupt this Good Time for Recommendations for Curricular Reform

I do not know much about the techniques and strategies for the teaching of writing in 2021, but I feel certain that assignments to write limericks and sequels are absent from most lesson plans.

So here’s what I’m thinking.

Even though I believe many teachers work persistently and heroically to encourage good writing, the quality of the papers submitted by college students is not a feature of societal success.

Why?

Maybe because the requirements of standardized testing foster an environment that seems actively hostile to good writing—and even more hostile to enthusiastic writing. Maybe because there is so much subject matter to cover in a school year that there is little time left for the cultivation of writing skills. Since research is constantly expanding the material to cover in many areas of study, lesson plans that were already bursting at the seams can’t stretch much further.

This leads to one unmistakable conclusion: teaching strategies that embrace brevity are the great hope for the future.

Reading a paper closely, offering suggestions for improvement, takes forever. And, as evidence has repeatedly proven, few students have acquired a willingness to work their way through that labyrinth of commentary, improving as they go.

Ready for the recommendation for curricular reform?

Consider the enormous advantages that would come into play if we put limericks at the center of writing instruction. Having on hand, at the moment, a multiplicity of samples on which to perform word counts, I can offer this good news with precision: the average limerick is only thirty words long.

Here’s the punchline: this brevity would permit teachers and students to concentrate on 1) figuring out what is essential to say, and 2) working hard to choose exactly the right words in which to say it.

Having spent nearly a half-century reading student papers (well, OK, I actually did a few other things as the decades rolled by), I can identify with certainty the two greatest weaknesses of the writing submitted in college classes: 1) not having figured out what is essential to say, and 2) not working hard to choose exactly the right words in which to say it.

Make limerick-writing the core of writing instruction, and the quality of life for teachers will soar, even as student grades undergo an entirely earned and deserved inflation.

And we cannot omit Mr. Bulkly’s contribution to curricular reform.

Let’s add this to our recommendation for curricular reform: 1) Pick a book that students, more often than not, enjoy reading, and 2) assign the students to write a sequel for that book.

Of course, given our embrace of the value of brevity, we should offer options that are far less demanding than writing a whole new book. Sticking with the program of selecting an essential message to convey and choosing exactly the right words to capture that message, we could assign the students to write—and rewrite and then rewrite again—a one-page summary of the sequel they propose. Needless to say, we should not surrender an inch on the continued obligation to edit and proofread those drafts.

Sequel-writing would have been a perfect activity to take up during the lockdowns of the pandemic, but the opportunity remains entirely viable for deployment in households as well as schools. Following the instructional precedent set by Mr. Bulkly and The Grand Reunion, teachers—and parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, great-uncles and great-aunts—have an arena of adventure open to them. Identify a shared enthusiasm for a particular book, and you are launched on a merry intergenerational collaboration, yielding a product that will keep delivering pleasure whenever it is pulled out of the past and reactivated to enliven the present.

Part #6

Words as Our Pals and Collaborators

At my request, Sunnie told Piper and Daisy about a document called “Limerick’s Rules of Verbal Etiquette.” Even though only a very small population has ever read this document, I have always thought that these rules could be really useful as guidelines on writing. And now that Piper, Daisy, and Sunnie have read this text, its readership may have just doubled, a geometric increase which seems very auspicious indeed.

Perhaps inducing another geometric increase in readership, you will find “Limerick’s Rules of Verbal Etiquette” in the Appendix.

Sunnie first asked Piper and Daisy to ponder the stated premise of “Limerick’s Rules of Verbal Etiquette:

Words are our friends, and people should not put their friends in awkward positions.

She then invited them to write their own scenarios putting that premise into operation.

Here are the results.

Words Want Us to Play with Them

by Daisy

Words are great comedians. For example, we can have fun with waist and waste. Waist: a part of our body is our waist. Waste: waste like wasting food or throwing it away. (We would never want to throw a part of our body away. We don’t want to waste our waist.)

Also flour and flower. Flour would be the cooking ingredient, or a flower would grow in your garden. (You could never make a bouquet of ground-up flour or you shouldn’t put a flower from your garden in your cake. You could put it on your cake, but don’t eat it.)

The brave knight traveled through the night. It was enough to tire him because he had to change the tire on his horse, and then he got kicked, and it made him scream, and then he was hoarse.

Well, that settles it! Goodbye for now!

A Conversation with Words

By Piper

“Hello, Reader! Today we are going to have a conversation with words. Here we go!”

“Are you ready, Words?”

“Yes!”

“We gotta work together now . . . “

“Excuse me. You mean ‘we have to work together now.’”

“You ain’t gonna stop corre . . . “

“That is, ‘You are not going to.’”

“I don’t wanna get corrected no mor . . .”

“Say, ‘I do not want to be corrected anymore.’”

“Sorry.. I . . . do . . . not . . . want to . . . be rude.”

“You did it!”

“Yay!”

I learned not to get too upset and ignore what someone is teaching me, especially when it comes to being nice to Words and having them as friends.

Part #7

The Acorn Does Not Fall Far from the Tree:

Limericks by Grammie Sunnie

My sister’s last name is fortuitous.
Its value has really come through-to-us.
The lines we compose
Blossom like a rose.
I think they reflect at least two of us.

I am radically tired of my phone.
It never just leaves me alone.
When it dings in the night,
I awake with a fright,
But I’m left with merely a groan.

When all of us sing karaoke,
Some songsters incline toward the croaky.
Yet with some voices bad,
And songs super sad,
They somehow still sound okey-dokey.

A limerick brings clarity to life,
It cuts through the fog like a knife.
If you’re leaning toward sadness,
It shifts you toward gladness,
A tool that spares us all strife.

And now the long-awaited reveal of Sunnie’s limerick about the “unusual personal quality” of a leading citizen in our hometown, with a change of name to protect us from (what would be somewhat vague) charges of libel and from the resentment of any of his descendants:

Mr. Watson had an issue with toes,
The nature of which no one knows.
Haphazard or tainted,
Thickened or painted,
On his secret, we must not impose.

A Concluding Demonstration that It Is Not Easy to Tell Babyboomers,

“OK, You’re Through Now!”

Yes, of course, I could and should quit here, but Part #3, Quotable Remarks in which Piper and Daisy Convey the Experience of Writing Limericks, inspired me to do what I had never done before: to write a short statement on why I have loved writing limericks for fifty years, a custom that was already in full swing when I met Jeff Limerick. (Just a hint to students: writing limericks is a great way to present a deceptive appearance of rapt attention in lecture classes).

Why You Might Want to Join Piper, Daisy, Sunnie, and Me in Writing Limericks

Of all the ways you can spend your time when the world is not making sense, writing a limerick is the activity most likely to permit you to say to yourself, “I’ve got it now!”

APPENDIX

Limerick’s Rules of Verbal Etiquette

Words are our friends, and people should not put their friends in awkward positions. When an author mistreats them, words and sentences feel discomfort, even pain, and certainly resentment. And yet, unlike human beings, words have no capacity to hold a grudge. As soon as the writer relieves their misery, words and sentences will work wholeheartedly for the writer’s cause. The empathy, commitment, and attention that produces good relationships among people match, exactly, the qualities that build friendships between writers and their words.

Weak subjects and verbs tremble and strain to hold up under the weight of important content. Kindness often requires you to relieve them of this impossible task and to replace them with strong subjects and verbs.
When the passive-voice verb tries to drain the energy from sentences, you must rescue the sentences and bring them back to life with an active verb.
Sentences want to be limber, flexible, sleek, and agile. Often, this means that they want to be small and manageable in size. They do not want to be bulky, awkward, and overweight, nor do they want to be overloaded or overdressed. They especially resent having to carry around an excess of prepositional phrases and polysyllables.
A sentence fragment knows and resents the fact that no one is going to listen to it or have any respect for it, because it lacks either a verb or a subject. Kindness requires you to move fast to transform a sentence fragment into a whole sentence.
Words hate it when you ask them to convey unclear thoughts or no thoughts at all. They are very uncomfortable when readers ask them, “What on earth are you trying to say?” and they have no answer to give. They feel, at that moment, all the misery of a person who has been introduced to give a speech and who does not, in fact, have a speech to give. The good news is this: if you place your words in sentences with clear and direct content, they will gratefully do everything they can to support your cause. But if you force a word to take its place in a confusing sentence without a clear message to convey, it will—in the manner of a baby seal or puppy—look at you and say, “Why would you want to hurt me?”
When you ask a group of sentences to form a paragraph, they expect to arrive in the paragraph and find that they have a lot in common. They expect, moreover, to find that one sentence is in charge of the paragraph, and ready to introduce the other sentences to each other and to remind them why they have all gotten together. When, instead, they show up in the paragraph and realize that they have nothing in common, they are as uncomfortable and lonely as people who have arrived at a party where they know no one, and the host does nothing to put them at ease

Photo Credit:

Banner image cartoons and limericks courtesy of: Piper (frog) & Daisy (bread)

“Mr.Bulkly on a Cargo Boat” image courtesy of: abebooks

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“The Thinker” Goes Western, and Also Upside Down:

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 06:00:00 +0000

“The Thinker” Goes Western, and Also Upside Down: Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/23/2021 - 00:00

Pondering Inconsistency

Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again,
though it contradicts everything you said to-day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

I used to be contentious and controversial, and then I became congenial and collaborative.
Limerick’s Consistently Repeated Summary of An Inconsistent Life

And Now, Before We Take A Deep Dive into Inconsistency,

**A Plea for Everyone to Take the Role of the Thinker, Rest Your Chin on Your Hand, and Put Everything You Have into Pondering a Question I Need You to Answer**

When the Center of the American West blog, “Not my First Rodeo” first appeared on May 1, 2020, it had one mission: to make sure that the Center’s friends, affiliates, followers and, for that matter, antagonists knew that this organization had not gone dormant.

As the one-year anniversary approaches, I beseech you to help me figure out what happens next with this blog. Receiving your help matters so much to me that I am using the word “beseeched” for the first time in my life.

Here is the question I want you to ponder.

If the Center were to close down this rodeo of stories and reflections, would that leave a vacancy in your life or in the intellectual life of the American West?

If your answer is “Yes,” write a couple of sentences letting me know why you think “Not my First Rodeo” should continue.

If your answer is “No,” write a couple of sentences letting me know how you think the Center should redirect the time and energy that has gone into this blog.

In case you are wondering, both “Yes” and “No” count as right answers.

At this point, you should feel free to leap into action and send your answer to pnl@centerwest.org.

Whatever becomes of “Not my First Rodeo” in the long run, there are two things you should know about its immediate future.

Next week, as a commemoration of its one-year anniversary, “Not my First Rodeo” will offer the most charming and spirit-lifting collection of words ever sent out into the world by the Center of the American West. I make this promise with confidence because I have recruited two gifted co-authors who will be making their literary debuts.

But this week is another matter entirely, and you may want to find better uses for your time than reading what follows.

An Inconsistent Address to Readers

Until this week, I have always hoped that people will read what I have written. At the moment, I am suspending that hope. But this moratorium will be very short-lived, and I will instantly return to writing words and statements that I wish people would read. (Indeed, that return occurs in the subsection here called “Consistent Cheer, Constantly Confirmed.”)

But here is the reader advisory for this week.

I wrote the next section, called “Optimism Takes Time Off,” with the aspiration that I will regret having written it. I hope that everything I say there will soon come to seem outmoded and wrongheaded. It is my dream that events and trends will soon require me to acknowledge the depth of my misjudgments and misapprehensions.

I would like to find many occasions to say this:

I don’t know what got into me in the Spring of 2021. For reasons I cannot now imagine, I was moved to write a statement that was utterly inconsistent with the problem-solving spirit I have embraced all of my life. Thank heavens, the dejection that I tried to impose on readers who deserved better from me turned out to be overwrought and misguided.

In truth, at this very moment of writing, I am still tempted to delete this statement that I so look forward to regretting, renouncing, and recanting!

Here’s why I am letting the statement stay.

First, I want to know if I have company in the intensity of my alarm over current circumstances in our nation.

Second, forthrightness and full disclosure seem far more honorable than concealment and evasion.

Third, I am eager to benefit from energetic efforts to guide me in course correction, pointing out the reasons why I should reconsider and reconfigure my dismay.

And then there’s the fact that, when it comes to optimism, hope, and cheer, I may be incorrigible.

If you can endure the passage through gloom, you will then find me making a completely improbable, utterly inconsistent return to my usual spirit and character. The gloom will be on record, but I will also put on record a faith in human beings that gets overwhelming confirmation every day of my life.

The two statements set forth in this “Rodeo” post are incompatible and inconsistent. Indeed, they will seem to have been written by two different people. But I am the author of both statements. These contradictory viewpoints cohabit and coexist in one soul, which—so far—is more troubled than tormented.

Optimism Takes Time Off

In the past, I have always been able to persuade myself that the problems faced by the United States are within the reach of human ingenuity, enterprise, and good will.

That confidence is wearing down.

What is my honest appraisal of the state of the nation and the world today?

The rattled and contentious state of our society has reduced its problem-solving capacity to the vanishing point. In the absence of agreement on truth, fact, and accuracy, it has become nearly impossible to identify and assess problems, much less to lay out and execute plans of action to resolve them. Even if the disputes over truth could be transcended, there would still be an insufficient supply of good will and collaborative spirit available to put remedies and solutions to work.

The problems that preoccupy me range from the uncertain state of national recovery from the pandemic to the intense divisions between the political parties, from the multiple variations of gun violence to the capacity of social media to spread antagonism and misinformation, from the deep divisions over race and ethnicity to the climate “weirding” [aka “warming”] of temperature extremes, uncertain patterns of precipitation, and enhanced risks of wildfires, from the stalemated effort to design a humane but consistent policy on immigration to the uneven distribution of economic hardship among different groups and communities.

That was a paragraph sufficiently packed with despair.

And yet, when I contemplate the social, cultural, and political capacity to deal with these problems, the freight of despair only grows. A swirl of antagonism and dispute surrounds every dimension and aspect of human well-being. Enthusiasm for blaming, condemning, and demonizing has fractured prospects and possibilities for common cause and shared enterprise. Empathy has been pushed to the margins by anger, resentment, and fear. The idea of the United States setting an example for the planet—by demonstrating the viability of democratic self-governance—has edged into parody. The nation is locked in contention, and I have no idea where we might find the key.

If there is a key.

Remember: I wrote this statement—and then chose not to delete it—with the hope that I will soon be given opportunities aplenty to recant and renounce its pessimism.

And now, as promised, I perform a public act of utter self-contradiction and reclaim my familiar character traits.

Consistent Cheer, Constantly Reaffirmed

Here is the conviction that I return to at the end of every day:

The world is densely populated by wonderful people who are fully committed to problem-solving and who are guided and governed by good will.

Thanks to my constant immersion in good company, brought into my reach by Zoom, email, texting, and even by my old-fashioned landline, this conviction gets constant reinforcement.

The upshot: good will and good nature provide the environment, the ambiance, and the habitat in which I live.

I am learning constantly from the stories, reflections, and often perfectly phrased and quotable comments from people who dazzle me with the originality and vigor of their minds. For minutes—actually, hours and days and weeks!—after I have heard their remarks or read their messages, my own thinking keeps getting enlivened and stirred up by memories of what these people tell me. They keep me entertained, and they often make me laugh, sometimes to the point of extreme and, for all I know, inappropriate merriment. These folks raise my spirits. They restore my hope.

The consistency of my good fortune can almost make me wonder if I have landed in one of those frequently lamented bubbles of communication, in which my contacts are somehow filtered, screened, edited, and narrowly curated. Could it be that I am the subject of a strange social psychology experiment, by which only individuals who I will find to be people of insight, integrity, and charm are given access to me through my landline, my cell phone, my iPad, and my computer? Is some surprisingly benevolent digital tyrant trying to impose homogeneity and sameness on my social circles and on my professional associates and colleagues?

If so, that tyrant is performing poorly at the job of constraining the diversity of opinions, values, and perspectives, the variety of interests and aspirations, and the range of ages, ethnicities, and geographical locations of the people who are enriching my life.

I repeat the conviction I return to at the end of every day: The world is densely populated by wonderful people who are fully committed to problem-solving and who are guided and governed by good will.

And What on Earth Is the Takeaway from This Immersion in Inconsistency?

I have put forward two completely inconsistent appraisals of the state of affairs in April of 2021.

What could possibly explain the wild disparity between my day-to-day experiences and the troubles that overwhelm my nation? Why is there such a discrepancy between the national and international problems I read and hear about, and the abundance of congeniality and good nature that is always registering on my Zoom screen?

Here are some speculations.

Might it be that my gloom originates primarily in the fact that I draw the evidence of national dysfunction and contention primarily from stories that I read in The New York Times and hear on “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered”? Should I make a more consistent and purposeful effort to expand the sources of information I take to be credible?

Would my mournfulness lessen if I made a more complete acknowledgment of the many Americans who are hard at work figuring out solutions and resolutions to problems and conflicts? Could it be that my lifelong preference for alliance-building, coalition-creating, and peacemaking keeps me from properly recognizing and valuing the principled enterprises of activists and protesters?

Does my desire to proclaim my dismay add up to an exercise in self-indulgence, made possible by my own good fortune as a person who has been spared infection with Covid-19, spared an encounter with violence, either as a victim or a witness, and spared financial hardship?

Could it be that my alarm soars because of a small-scale, personal frustration? Because I am a person who compulsively wants to pitch in and be helpful, when I pay attention to national and international news, I am quickly demoralized by the way that the scale of problems exposes my own insignificance and impotence. It seems entirely imaginable that I would benefit—and, indeed, humanity might benefit—if I adopted the custom of reciting to myself that excellent aphorism, “Don’t just do something. Stand there.”

And now for a ridiculous conclusion.

If I could, I would trade.

I would reverse the current allocations of hope and dismay.

I would yield the spirit-lifting manifestations of human character that fill my days to the nation. I would, in this trade, devote my own time to confronting the disturbing and disheartening features of human nature.

Having made that noble and generous offer, I am now set up to conclude with one more public performance of inconsistency: I enjoyed making this lovely offer of self-sacrifice, and I am enormously relieved that I can’t possibly deliver on it.

And now, if I am really going to embrace inconsistency, I might as well put aside (temporarily!) my chattiness and offer a “Not my First Rodeo” post that is half the length of my normal posts.

Back to Beseeching

Please help me figure out the future of “Not my First Rodeo,” by responding to the question I posed at the start.

If the Center were to close down this rodeo of stories and reflections, would that leave a vacancy in your life or in the intellectual life of the American West?

If your answer is “Yes,” write a couple of sentences letting me know why you think “Not my First Rodeo” should continue.

If your answer is “No,” write a couple of sentences letting me know how you think the Center should redirect the time and energy that has gone into this blog.

In case you are wondering, both “Yes” and “No” count as right answers.

Send the results of your pondering to pnl@centerwest.org.

More Thoughts for Pondering

“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Sage of Concord

“Getting an audience is hard. Sustaining an audience is hard. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, of action, over a long period of time.”
Bruce Springsteen, The Sage of New Jersey

Photo Credit:

“The Thinker” banner image courtesy of: Wikimedia

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The Role Of The Activated Bystander: A Rope to Hold Onto In A Frayed Nation

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 06:00:00 +0000

The Role Of The Activated Bystander: A Rope to Hold Onto In A Frayed Nation Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/15/2021 - 00:00

A Multiple-Choice Question That Is Harder to Answer than You Might Realize at First

In the photograph that appears above, what is this woman doing?

A.) She is cultivating inner peace through the practice of transcendental meditation.

B.) She is preparing to take the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT).

C.) She is facing up to the fact that her motionlessness might mislead an unsophisticated bystander into thinking that she needs help.

D.) She is cultivating inner peace by preparing for a moment when something will go awry for another person, and she will want to be ready to join other bystanders—maybe even to galvanize and lead those bystanders—in trying to help.

Since none of us is acquainted with this individual, we cannot be certain that we will guess the right answer. And, drawing on my own experience, I know that we cannot instantly eliminate any of these answers.

For people of a certain sophistication and savoir faire, Answer A will look like the only possible choice. But for people with more limited holdings in urbanity and worldliness, the first reaction to Answer A might well be “transcendental what?”

Answer B might seem easy to dismiss, but evidence argues otherwise.

In December of 1971, early on a Saturday morning, I showed up to take the LSAT at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Sitting in the front of the lecture hall, at the center of everyone’s view, one test-taker was shredding every stereotype imposed on aspiring law students. Arrayed in a long white robe, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor, humming quietly and meditating up a storm.

This person’s approach to test-taking anxiety was unusual, though I have no reason to think it was unique. In fact, if you think about this for a moment, there are several thousand worse ways to prepare to take the LSAT.

And that brings us to Answer C, which is also a lot more plausible than you might think, as an impending story is about to demonstrate.

And then there’s the most compelling answer of all: Answer D, carrying a constantly accelerating importance in the world we confront today.

The upcoming stories will clarify why this multiple-choice question is harder to answer than you thought when you first read it. The stories will also demonstrate that the category of people, mentioned above as having “more limited holdings in urbanity and worldliness,” composes a sizable sector of society, which I know from having spent time in that category myself.

These stories, it is important to note right from the start, are about an activated bystander who has regularly risked her dignity as well as her chance of being perfectly understood, but who never risked her life.

An Unsophisticated—but Very Activated—Bystander Enters the World

When I went to college, even a very lengthy freshman orientation could not possibly address all my deficits. I had been born and raised in a small town, and when I arrived at UCSC, the list—cataloging well-established practices, customs, and understandings that I had never encountered—was vast. This lack of sophistication provided me with a treasure trove of incidents as awkward as they were funny.

Just a few weeks after school started, I was studying in the small library of our residential college. Ten or fifteen feet away from me, a fellow student was sitting in an armchair placed between two rows of bookcases and facing a window. From the corner of my eye, I could see that he was very still. I kept studying, but I also kept glancing in his direction. After he had remained completely motionless for fifteen or twenty minutes, I got worried.

In no time at all, I had conjured up mystifying medical calamities that could have befallen him. And it was soon clear that I was incapable of staying out of a situation where a fellow human being might be at risk.

So I carefully approached the young man who I now knew to have been stricken by affliction, and I touched his arm.

No response.

Uh oh.

Another tap or two, and then I shook his arm.

He opened his eyes.

I had revived him! Hurrah!

“Have you ever heard of transcendental meditation?” the young man asked me, in a tone of voice that carried more in the way of heated vexation than warm appreciation for my concern.

I had been born and raised in the hinterlands, where none of us meditated, with or without transcendence. But now I had learned that “transcendental meditation” meant “holding very still for a surprisingly long time.”

The Moral to this Story

Sometimes a person who is motionless is in trouble and needs help. Other times, a person who is motionless is intentionally engaged in practice unknown to bumpkins like me. With luck, I might eventually figure out which was which.

Apparently, a Lesson Too Late for the Learning

(Apologies to Tom Paxton for Misappropriating His Song,

The Last (not Lost) Thing on My Mind)

As a bystander, I have rarely had a moment’s hesitation when I thought someone needed my help. This has not given me much opportunity to recognize situations where my help was unwanted and unnecessary.

Hardly a year or two after my interruption of the attempted meditator, I was at it again, though expanding my zone of operations from interventions in meditation to interventions in napping. This time, I was in a parking garage at a Los Angeles shopping center. Waiting in a car for a friend to complete her shopping, I noticed that a man in a car in my line of sight was not moving. I watched carefully, and he seemed immobilized, frozen, very likely incapacitated by the onset of a sudden frailty.

I gave him what seemed to be my standard allocation of patience—fifteen or twenty minutes.

Then it was time to intervene.

I got out of my car and tapped on this poor, weakened man’s window.

This woke him up, earning me the glare of annoyance that signals that a pleasant nap has been disrupted.

The Moral to this Story

The boundary between intervening and intruding is not easy to distinguish. But that reality does not require us to hold back when we have reason to think that we are confronting a dire situation, though it does require us to make our peace with the goofiness of mishaps that good intentions have a striking capacity to produce.

Provider of Parables:

The Bus Route from Harvard Square to Park Circle, and a Trio of Tales

When I lived in Massachusetts, the buses that carried me between Arlington and Cambridge were my mobile social psychology lab. Sometimes I just observed and eavesdropped the human subjects who rode with me. Sometimes I took the role of the human subject whose character was being rigorously tested.

Here are three stories that have to be told as a trilogy.

The First Tale

The route from Cambridge to Arlington sent the bus through a couple of rotaries—not civically engaged service clubs (that would come later in life)—but those odd roundabouts where vehicles enter and race around in a circle and then exit, and surprisingly few accidents occur.

On one commuter journey, as the bus went around a rotary, an elderly woman stood up in order to get off at the upcoming stop. Since the bus was moving rapidly around a circle, she wobbled and swayed a little, in a way that made me think she was going to fall.

So I jumped up from my seat, grabbed her, and held her steady.

Within a second or two, it was clear to me that she had not actually been about to fall. She had a good grip on a seatback, and the only thing that had unsettled her was the fact that a stranger had leapt up and grabbed her for no imaginable reason.

Oops.

I apologized and sat back down, resolving to keep my eyes on my reading whenever I was on a bus going around a rotary.

The Second Tale

One morning, when I walked up to the Park Circle bus stop, I found an elderly woman seated on the bench, waiting for the bus. She had two canes, and she struck me as frail.

When the bus came, I got on, and the driver started to pull away. “Oh, wait!” I said to him. “There’s a lady who is just standing up from the bench.” So the driver stopped, and I got off the bus and helped the lady up the stairs, and then helped her to sit down on a seat near the front of the bus. When she was seated, she got out her bus pass to show the driver. As she struggled to position her two canes so she could stand up, I moved fast and asked if I could take her bus pass and show it to the driver. I returned the bus pass to her, and she then enjoyed a few minutes of peace. When I was getting off at Harvard Square, I saw that the lady was once again struggling to stand up with her two canes. So I paused and offered her a hand . . . at which point, she shook both canes at me and asked—fervently—for me to leave her alone.

And, at that point, I tried to assure the universe, “OK, I got it this time.”

The Third Tale

Just a week or two later, as I was getting off the bus in Harvard Square, I almost stopped to help another elderly woman who was struggling to stand up. But as I started to speak to her, sharp memories of my earlier excesses in helpfulness came quickly to mind. “Stop,” I instructed myself. “Do not get in this person’s way by seeming to condescend to her and thereby reminding her of her frailty.”

So I did not stop. Just seconds after I refused myself the temptation to be an activated bystander, the woman fell just behind me. Even though I turned around to join others in helping her up, I knew that if I had not repressed my bystander compulsions, this fall would not have happened.

The Moral to this Ensemble of Stories:

Embarrassment lifts comparatively quickly. Regret hangs around.

A Cohort of Activated Bystanders Vie for Supremacy

I was headed home to Arlington, when a mishap occurred. An older woman, getting off at a stop in Cambridge, missed the curb and lost her footing when she stepped off the bus. The bus driver threw on the parking brake and hurried to help her. Right in his wake, three or four of us passengers trooped off the bus.

The woman had a few scrapes and probably some bruises-to-come, and her glasses had not fared well. She could stand and walk without pain, but she was very rattled.

The activated bystanders then began to compete to determine who was best equipped with steadiness and availability to make sure she got safely back to her home. As the bus driver watched in amusement (having a bus to drive, he was eliminated as a competitor), we put forward our credentials. In truth, we all seemed to be pretty good souls, but the competition came down to who had the most flexible schedule and so would be least inconvenienced by walking her home and returning to the corner to catch a later bus.

I won.

So I got to escort the rattled lady to her home, to assess her condition, and then to confuse and frighten her elderly next-door neighbor, who saw us approaching and thought her friend had somehow fallen into questionable company and needed to be rescued from the clutches of an unknown intruder.

Well, no one ever said that activated bystanders are always going to get recognition for the qualities that they would like everyone to see in them.

But I am everlastingly glad I got to see our little group of volunteers striving for selection as the humanitarian who would get to put her principles into action. As the very insightful CU history graduate student Micaela Cruce put it when I told her this story, we were four Good Samaritans competing to see who was the Best Samaritan.

The Intersection of Trouble and Tranquility

Several years ago, as I was walking toward the intersection of 29^th Street and Broadway, a car going south on Broadway suddenly made a left turn onto 29^th Street. This was surprising to see, because there was an oncoming car—unquestionably with the right of way—heading north on Broadway.

And so, as I watched, one driver made an inexplicable left turn directly into the path of a driver who could not possibly have anticipated this situation, and certainly couldn’t stop in time.

As an activated bystander, I quickly joined the people who got out of their cars in the middle of the intersection. Thankfully, no one was injured. One driver was a young woman whose mind had clearly been elsewhere when she made her left turn; the other driver was a mild-mannered, middle-aged man who was surprised and distressed to find himself a participant in a collision.

Neither of the drivers were, post-accident, posing a problem. But the task of posing a problem had been taken up by a burly young man who had been a passenger in the young woman’s car. He was very angry—not at his young female companion for her stupid left-turn, but at the mild-mannered, middle-aged man who, a moment or two ago, had had the right-of-way, but now had a battered car.

So the burly young man shouted at the middle-aged man, and I told the young man to be quiet because I was calling the police on my cell phone.

The young man then shouted at me, “Give me that phone! I want to talk to the police!”

I did not give him my phone.

Instead, I told him that it was great that he wanted to talk to the police, because they would be joining us very soon. I then deployed a barrage of spoken words where they could serve as buffer, padding, insulation, shield, shock absorber, etc. to keep him from hitting the middle-aged man.

It worked.

A person who saw this scene, and who did not know me, might have thought I had placed myself in a disturbing situation.

On the contrary, I had placed myself in a situation where I got to do what I was meant to do in life: heading in fast as an activated bystander to prevent a bad situation from getting worse.

The Moral to this Story

After the first few practice runs, the activated bystander repeatedly receives one of life’s greatest gifts: you have reason to expect that you will get calmer as others get more agitated.

The Weighty Context for these Light Stories

As every reader will have noticed, the bystander stories I have told are stories in which humor can figure because no one gets hurt. In all of those stories, I intervene without risking my well-being—or my survival.

The context is a very different matter.

I wanted to write on the subject of bystanders because, like millions of others, I start every day by learning about the stories of what happened the day before. In 2021, for those of us who cannot break this habit, the day ahead is instantly populated by people facing trouble from which we would like to rescue them. Because of our distance and remoteness from the people we want to help, this desire goes nowhere.

A good share of the troubles we learn about will include the stories of people who suddenly found themselves in the role of bystanders to calamity, but who felt themselves to be powerless.

To the core of my soul, I believe in the power that enters the world when activated bystanders get moving. But I am completely at a loss when I contemplate situations in which bystanders have compelling reasons to think that—if they intervene—they will only succeed in adding their own names to the lists of the victims of an unfolding calamity.

The bystanders who have watched other people die from violence, or who have watched other people suffer random attacks on city streets, have faced dilemmas that bear no resemblance to the stories I have told. In these times—really, in any times—there are people beyond counting who have had to choose whether to be activated bystanders who risk their own lives, or to be passive bystanders who have made an entirely understandable choice to protect their own lives first.

I have never come near having to make that choice, and I am eager—in truth, desperate—to be in the company of the people who have made those choices and to learn from their stories and their reflections.

And yet, in my manner, I am still driven to propose that we take what might seem an indirect route to rescuing our troubled society.

I want to change the default definition of bystander.

In today’s dictionaries, the word bystander is stuck in its own version of a lockdown, confined to incapacity and irrelevance.

Contemplate the standing definition [this one is from Merriam-Webster]:

Bystander: One who is present but not taking part in a situation or event.

Thankfully, words are dynamic and evolving. Their meanings change as a society’s relationship to them undergoes transformation. And if definitions that deserved a transformation on behalf of societal well-being ever arranged themselves in a line by urgency, bystander would take first place.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the circumstances in which we are living, we are all bystanders now, and we all have a stake in getting rid of the misconception, enshrined in dictionaries and in common speech, that bystanders “do not take part in a situation or event.”

Here’s a revised and refreshed definition that we could put in place by say, 2030:

Bystander: One who is present and joins with others to take part in a situation and event,
when there is a chance of stepping in without making things worse.

Trying—with uneven results—to live in compliance with that definition, I have acted from compulsion, rather than lofty principle or personal virtue. Nearly always, I have found myself in action before I had decided to act.

Where did that compulsion come from?

When I was a kid, we lived at an intersection where traffic accidents happened too often, as people driving fast on an open road suddenly found themselves entering a small town. The screech of tires was a familiar sound.

Living at this intersection, my father and mother were activated bystanders. When the sounds of calamity at the intersection reached us, my father headed out the door, while my mother called to report the accident and kept us all calm. Repeatedly, our father offered company to people in serious trouble, waiting with them for the ambulance to arrive. In one story that stays in the mind of my sister and me, a sports car had flipped, and the driver was trapped inside it. As my sister remembered this, “We were banned from going close, of course, but Dad was right there.” The driver of the sports car did not survive, and, as my sister said, “Dad attended him as he died.”

That sister became a nurse. Our other sister became a minister. I became a teacher.

We were raised by activated bystanders.

To this second, I believe this: when we can be helpful, not taking action will destroy us.

A Neighborhood of Activated Bystanders

In this concluding story, I am only a bit player.

In New Haven, we lived on a block of two-story houses, most of them divided into an upstairs-and-downstairs pair of apartments. The four years we lived there were the utopian days of the porch. In the summers, we sat on our porch, chatted, played dominoes, and even sang songs. People walking by stopped, talked, and sometimes sat down and joined us.

One evening, I was riding my bike home from a meeting. It was dark, and late for porch-sitting.

But as I turned onto Livingston Street, I was surprised to find nearly all the neighbors were out on their porches, though standing, rather than sitting.

What was going on?

Here’s what had happened.

On the street, a young woman who had been walking by herself had been approached and grabbed by a man. She screamed, and the porches filled with neighbors. The perpetrator left fast; everyone made sure that the young woman was OK; and a couple of folks walked home with her.

I turned the corner onto Livingston Street, and as I got off my bike, fifteen or twenty neighbors welcomed me home.

Holding Onto a Rope: Why I Wanted to Tell These Stories

In one familiar item of Western American folklore, people who lived in rural places knew that they should anticipate and prepare for blinding blizzards that could end visibility. Thinking ahead meant running a rope from the farmhouse to the barn.

In a time when events come at me like a dense snowfall driven by wild winds, a string of stories running through time serves the same function for me.

I realize that this string of stories is a weak rope that might lead me further into the blizzard.

But it is the rope that has been placed in my hands.

Photo Credit:

Banner image courtesy of: Pixabay

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