Discussion Board 500 words. Must use APA citation.
Literature and the Arts Why Do They Matter?
Imagine a world without fiction, poetry, or drama, without music, art, or other fine arts. We are so accustomed to taking the arts in their totality for granted that it is hard for us to conceive of contemporary culture without them. Our fondness for stories or paintings or any other creative form might help us understand our culture or might even move us to action. Yet the value of various artistic forms doesn’t derive exclusively from their ability to tell us something about life. The arts can also take us into an imaginative realm offering perhaps more intense experiences than anything we encounter in the “real” world.
Think of literature and the arts as an exercise in imaginative freedom. You are free to select the books you read, the music that appeals to you, the exhibitions and concerts you attend, and the entertainment software with which you interact. Some of your decisions might be serious and consequential to your education. Other decisions, perhaps to watch a few soap operas on a rainy afternoon or to buy the latest potboiler, are less important. The way you view the arts—whether as a way to learn something about the temper of civilization or as a temporary escape from conventional reality—is entirely a matter of taste. Regardless of your purpose or intent, you approach literature and the arts initially for the sheer exhilaration and pleasure they provide. Art, as Plato observed, is a dream for awakened minds. The arts awaken you to the power and intensity of the creative spirit. At the same time, you make judgments and evaluations of the nature of your creative encounter. When you assert that you like this painting or dislike that poem, you are assessing the work and the value of the artistic experience. Clearly, you develop taste and become more equipped to discern the more subtle elements of art the more you are exposed to it. Perhaps you prefer to keep your experience of literature and the other arts a pleasurable pastime or an escape from reality. Or you may wish to participate in them as a creative writer, musician, painter, or photographer. Ultimately, you may come to view literature and the arts as a transformational experience, a voyage of discovery in which you encounter diverse peoples and cultures, learn to see the world in creative terms, and begin to perceive your own creative potential in a new light.
Superman and Me Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie (b. 1966) grew up and still lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. A Spokane/Coeur d’Alene tribal member, Alexie contended with a life-threatening illness when he was young, but managed to attend Gonzaga University before transferring to Washington State University (BA, 1991). Alexie writes and creates in many modes, and is also a performer. As many of the titles of his works suggest, the Native American experience informs his short stories, novels, poetry, songs, and films. Alexie’s fiction includes Reservation Blues (1995), Ten Little Indians: Stories (2003), and Flight, A Novel (2007); his poetry has been collected in First Indian on the Moon (1993), The Man Who Loves Salmon (1998), and other volumes. In the following essay, Alexie attests to the importance of literature—all kinds of literature—in his life.
I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I suppose. I cannot recall which particular Superman comic book I read, nor can I remember which villain he fought in that issue. I cannot remember the plot, nor the means by which I obtained the comic book. What I can remember is this: I was 3 years old, a Spokane Indian boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington state. We were poor by most standards, but one of my parents usually managed to find some minimum-wage job or another, which made us middle-class by reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. We lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear, and government surplus food. My father, who is one of the few Indians who went to Catholic school on purpose, was an avid reader of westerns, spy thrillers, murder mysteries, gangster epics, basketball player biographies, and anything else he could find. He bought his books by the pound at Dutch’s Pawn Shop, Goodwill, Salvation Army, and Value Village. When he had extra money, he bought new novels at supermarkets, convenience stores, and hospital gift shops. Our house was filled with books. They were stacked in crazy piles in the bathroom, bedrooms, and living room. In a fit of unemployment-inspired creative energy, my father built a set of book-shelves and soon filled them with a random assortment of books about the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the entire 23-book series of the Apache westerns. My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well. I can remember picking up my father’s books before I could read. The words themselves were mostly foreign, but I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn’t have the vocabulary to say “paragraph,” but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small paragraph within the United States. My family’s house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north, the Fords to our south, and the Tribal School to the west. Inside our house, each family member existed as a separate paragraph but still had genetics and com-mon experiences to link us. Now, using this logic, I can see my changed family as an essay of seven paragraphs: mother, father, older brother, the deceased sister, my younger twin sisters, and our adopted little brother.
Superman comic book. Each panel, complete with picture, dialogue, and narrative was a three-dimensional paragraph. In one panel, Superman breaks through a door. His suit is red, blue, and yellow. The brown door shatters into many pieces. I look at the narrative above the picture. I cannot read the words, but I assume it tells me that “Superman is breaking down the door.” Aloud, I pretend to read the words and say, “Superman is breaking down the door.” Words, dialogue, also float out of Super-man’s mouth. Because he is breaking down the door, I assume he says, “I am breaking down the door.” Once again, I pretend to read the words and say aloud, “I am breaking down the door.” In this way, I learned to read. This might be an interesting story all by itself. A little Indian boy teaches
himself to read at an early age and advances quickly. He reads “Grapes of Wrath” in kindergarten when other children are struggling through “Dick and Jane.” If he’d been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity. He grows into a man who often speaks of his childhood in the third person, as if it will somehow dull the pain and make him sound more modest about his talents.
A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by Indians and non-Indians alike. I fought with my classmates on a daily basis. They wanted me to stay quiet when the non-Indian teacher asked for answers, for volunteers, for
help. We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid. Most lived up to those expectations inside the classroom but subverted them on the outside. They struggled with basic reading in school but could remember how to sing a few dozen powwow songs. They were monosyllabic in front of their non-Indian teachers but could tell complicated stories and jokes at the dinner table. They submissively ducked their heads when confronted by a non-Indian adult but would slug it out with the Indian bully who was 10 years older. As Indian children, we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world. Those who failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately pitied by non-Indians. I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky. I read books late into the night, until I could barely keep my eyes open. I read books at recess, then during lunch, and in the few minutes left after I had finished my classroom assign-ments. I read books in the car when my family traveled to powwows or basketball games. In shopping malls, I ran to the bookstores and read bits and pieces of as many books as I could. I read the books my father brought home from the pawn-shops and secondhand. I read the books I borrowed from the library. I read the backs of cereal boxes. I read the newspaper. I read the bulletins posted on the walls of the school, the clinic, the tribal offices, the post office. I read junk mail. I read auto-repair manuals. I read magazines. I read anything that had words and paragraphs. I read with equal parts joy and desperation. I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life. Despite all the books I read, I am still surprised I became a writer. I was going to be a pediatrician. These days, I write novels, short stories, and poems. I visit schools and teach creative writing to Indian kids. In all my years in the reservation school system, I was never taught how to write poetry, short stories, or novels. I was certainly never taught that Indians wrote poetry, short stories, and novels. Writing was something beyond Indians. I cannot recall a single time that a guest teacher visited the reservation. There must have been visiting teachers. Who were they? Where are they now? Do they exist? I visit the schools as often as possible. The Indian kids crowd the classroom. Many are writing their own poems, short stories, and novels. They have read my books. They have read many other books. They look at me with bright eyes and arrogant wonder. They are trying to save their lives. Then there are the sullen and already defeated Indian kids who sit in the back rows and ignore me with theatrical precision. The pages of their notebooks are empty. They carry neither pencil nor pen. They stare out the window. They refuse and resist. “Books,” I say to them. “Books,” I say. I throw my weight against their locked doors. The door holds. I am smart. I am arrogant. I am lucky. I am trying to save our lives.
Finding Neverland David Gates
David Gates (b. 1947) is an American journalist and fiction writer. Gates attended Bard College and the University of Connecticut in the mid-1960s, subsequently working as a cab driver and in other capacities while refining his literary craft. His first novel, Jernigan (1991), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Both his second novel, Preston Falls (1998), and the collection The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories (1999), were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gates is a senior editor and writer at Newsweek, covering books, music, and the arts. He also teaches in the graduate writing programs at Bennington College and New School University. In this essay from the July 13, 2009, issue of Newsweek, Gates surveys the life, death, and career of music legend Michael Jackson.
True, for a while he was the king of pop—a term apparently originated by his friend Elizabeth Taylor—and he’s the last we’re ever likely to have. Before Michael Jackson came Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles; after him has come absolutely no one, however brilliant or however popular, who couldn’t be ignored by vast segments of an ever-more-fragmented audience. Not Kurt Cobain, not Puffy, not Mariah Carey, not Céline Dion, not Beyoncé, not Radiohead—not even Madonna, his closest competitor. When the news of his death broke, the traffic on Twitter caused the site to crash, even though he hadn’t had a hit song for years. But starting long before and continuing long after he lorded over the world of entertainment in the 1980s—his 1982 Thriller remains the bestselling album of all time—Jackson was the Prince of Artifice. As the prepubescent front boy of the Jackson 5, he sang in a cherubic mezzo-soprano of sexual longing he could not yet have fully felt. As a young man, however accomplished and even impassioned his singing was, he never had the sexual credibility of a James Brown or a Wilson Pickett, in part because of his still-high-pitched voice, in part because he seemed never to fully inhabit himself—whoever that self was. In middle age, he consciously took on the role of Peter Pan, with his Neverland Ranch and its amusement-park rides, with his lost-boy “friends” and with what he seemed to believe was an age-less, androgynous physical appearance—let’s hope he believed it—thanks to straightened hair and plastic surgery. (No one—least of all Jackson himself—would have wanted to see the Dorian Gray portrait in his attic.) He did his best to construct an alternate reality on top of what must have been an initially miserable life: Imagine Gypsy with—as Jackson claimed in interviews—a physically abusive father in place of Mama Rose, set among Jehovah’s Witnesses. Which was the more imaginative creation: his music or his persona? In retrospect, so much of what Jackson achieved seems baldly symbolic. This was the black kid from Gary, Ind., who ended up marrying Elvis’s daughter, set-ting up Neverland in place of Graceland, and buying the Beatles’ song catalog—bold acts of appropriation and mastery, if not outright aggression. (Of course, Elvis and the Beatles had come out of obscurity, too, but that was a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away.) He made trademarks of the very emblems of his remoteness: his moonwalk dance and his jeweled glove—noli me tangere, and vice versa. He morphed relentlessly from the most adorable of kiddie performers (his 1972 movie-soundtrack hit, “Ben,” was a love song to a pet rat) to the most sinister of superstars: not by adopting a campy persona, like those of his older contemporaries Alice Cooper or Ozzy Osbourne, but in real life, dodging accusations of child molestation, one of which led to a trial and acquittal in 2005. (One shrink concluded at the time that he was not a pedophile, but merely a case of arrested development.) The 2002 episode in which he briefly dangled his son Prince Michael II (a.k.a. Blanket) over a balcony in Berlin, above horrified, fascinated
fans, seemed like a ritualized attempt to dispose of his own younger self. And eventually his several facial surgeries, a skin ailment, serious weight loss, and God knows what else made him look like both a vampire and a mummy—Peter Pan’s undead evil twins. That is, like the skeletal, pale-faced zombies he danced with in Jon Landis’s 14-minute “Thriller” video. When you watch it today, it appears to be a whole stage full of Michael Jacksons, the real one now the least familiar-looking, the most unreal of all.
But whatever strictly personal traumas Jackson may have reenacted and 3
transcended—and then re-reenacted—he performed his dance of death as a cen-tral figure in America’s long racial horror show. He was, quintessentially, one of those “pure products of America,” who, as William Carlos Williams wrote in 1923, “go crazy.” To take the uplifting view, enunciated after his death by the likes of the Rev. Al Sharpton, he was a transracial icon, a black person whom white Americans took to their hearts and whose blackness came to seem incidental. In this he resembles such figures as Nat (King) Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Sam Cooke, Jimi Hendrix, Arthur Ashe, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, and, inevitably, Barack Obama. As a singer-dancer, he clearly belongs not just in the tradition of Jackie Wilson, James Brown, and the Temptations—who seem to have been among his immediate inspirations—but also in the tradition of such dancing entertainers as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, who, in turn, drew from such black performers as Bill (Bojangles) Robinson. In the 1978 film version of The Wiz, Jackson even seemed to appropriate and reinvent Ray Bolger’s role as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. And as a messianic global superstar, he resembles no one so much as his father-in-law, Elvis Presley (who died long before Jackson married his daughter), a transracial figure from the other side of the color line. When Presley’s first records were played on the radio in Memphis, DJs made a point of noting that he graduated from the city’s all-white Humes High School, lest listeners mistake him for black. Given the ubiquity of television, nobody mistook the wispy-voiced young Michael Jackson for white, but it seemed, superficially, not to matter. Yet Jackson, always the artificer, surely knew that part of his own appeal to white audiences—who contributed substantially to the $50 million to $75 million a year he earned in his prime—lay initially in his precocious cuteness, and when he was a grown man, in his apparent lack of adult sexuality. He was energetic, charismatic, and supremely gifted, but sexually unassertive—unlike swaggeringly het-erosexual black male performers from Big Joe Turner (“Shake, Rattle, and Roll”) to Jay-Z (“Big Pimpin’”). He neutered himself racially, too: his hair went from kinky to straight, his lips from full to thin, his nose from broad to pinched, his skin from dark to a ghastly pallor. You can’t miss the connection between these forms of neutering if you know the history of white America’s atavistic dread of black male sexuality; the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, for supposedly flirting with a white woman, is just one locus classicus. That happened only three years before Jackson was born; when he was 13, he was singing “Ben.” No wonder Jack-son chose—with whatever degree of calculation—to remake himself as an American Dream of innocence and belovedness.
No wonder, either, that the artifice eventually turned scary, and the face of the icon came to look more and more corpselike. Readers of Toni Morrison’s latest novel, A Mercy, might recall the passage in which an African woman tells about her first sight of white slavers: “There we see men we believe are ill or dead. We soon learn they are neither. Their skin is confusing.” That’s the middle-aged Michael Jackson to a T. Jackson arguably looked his “blackest” on the original cover of 1979’s Off the Wall; by Thriller, the transformation had begun. Off the Wall was his declaration of manhood: It came out the year he turned 21, and you could make the case that it was his greatest purely musical moment. Why did he feel so deeply uncomfortable with himself? The hopeless task of sculpting and bleaching yourself into a simulacrum of a white man suggests a profound loathing of blackness. If Michael Jackson couldn’t be denounced as a race traitor, who could? Somehow, though, black America overlooked it, and continued to buy his records, perhaps because some African-Americans, with their hair relaxers and skin-lightening creams, understood why Jackson was remaking himself, even if they couldn’t condone it. As with Ernest Hemingway—another case of deeply confused identity and (who knew?) androgynous sexuality—we need to look past the deliberate creation of an image and a persona to appreciate the artistry. A more masterly enter-tainer never took the stage. In 1988, the New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff called him “a virtuoso . . . who uses movement for its own sake. Yes, Michael Jackson is an avant-garde dancer, and his dances could be called abstract. Like Merce Cunningham, he shows us that movement has a value of its own.” Better yet, Astaire himself once called Jackson to offer his compliments. As a singer, Jackson was too much of a chameleon—from the tenderness of “I’ll Be There” to the rawness of “The Way You Make Me Feel” to the silken sorrow of “She’s Out of My Life”—to stamp every song with his distinct personality, as Sinatra did, or Ray Charles, or Hank Williams. But these are demigods—Jackson was merely a giant. (And how’d you like their dancing?) As a musical conceptualizer, probably only James Brown has had a comparable influence: Jackson and his visionary producer, Quincy Jones, fused disco, soul, and pop in a manner that can still be heard every hour of every day on every top-40 radio station—only not as well. Tommy Mottola, former head of Sony Music, called Jackson “the corner-stone to the entire music business.” The best recordings by Jackson and Jones—“Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” “Billie Jean”—belong identifiably to their time, as do Sinatra’s 1950s recordings with the arranger Nelson Riddle. Yet like Sinatra’s “I’ve Got the World on a String” or “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” they’re so perfect of their kind that they’ll never sound dated. The night before he died, Jackson was rehearsing at the Staples Center in Los Angeles for an epic comeback—a series of 50 concerts, beginning in July, at London’s O2 Arena. If that sounds impossibly grandiose, consider that all 50 shows had already sold out. People around him had been wondering if he was re-ally up to it, and the opening had already been put off by a week. He was 50 years old, after all: long in the tooth for a puer aeternus—eight years older than Elvis when he left the building, and a quarter century past his peak. Jackson had had health problems for years. Drug problems, too, apparently: In 2007, according to the Associated Press, an L.A. pharmacy sued him, claiming he owed $100,000 for two years’ worth of prescription meds. And money problems: In 2008, the ranch nearly went into foreclosure—he defaulted on a $24.5 million debt—and even the $50 million he stood to realize from his potentially grueling London concerts might not have helped that much. And of course, just problems: His very existence—as a son, as a black man—was problematic. In his last days, did the prospect of a comeback, of remythologizing himself one more time, excite him as much as it excited his fans? Did his magical moments in performance have an incandescent density that outweighed what must often have been burdensome hours and days? Ask him sometime, if you see him. Whatever his life felt like from inside, from outside it was manifestly a work of genius, whether you want to call it a triumph or a freak show—those are just words. We’d never seen anyone like this before, either in his artistic inventiveness or his equally artistic self-invention, and we won’t forget him—until the big Neverland swallows us all.
Regarding the Torture of Others Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag (1933–2004), one of the most influential critics of her generation, was born in New York City and grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and Los Angeles. After graduating from high school at the age of 15, she started studies at the University of California at Berkeley; subsequently, she received degrees from the University of Chicago and Harvard University. As an art critic as well as a political and cultural commentator, Sontag brought intellectual rigor to her subjects. The main body of her work in prose consists of two collections of essays, Against Interpretation (1966) and Where the Stress Falls (2001), as well as Trip to Hanoi (1968), Illness as Metaphor (1978), and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988). In addition, Sontag wrote fiction, including Volcano Lover (1992) and In America: A Novel (2001), and several films and plays. In this essay, published in the New York Times Magazine in 2004, Sontag offers a meditation on the photographs of torture taken by American troops at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
I. 1
For a long time—at least six decades—photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events, and it now seems probable that the defining association of people everywhere with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein’s prisons, Abu Ghraib.
The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a public-2
relations disaster—the dissemination of the photographs—rather than deal with the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by the pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality onto the photographs themselves. The administration’s initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs—as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word “torture.” The prisoners had possibly been the objects of “abuse,” eventually of “humiliation”—that was the most to be admitted. “My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. “And therefore I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.” Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the strenuous avoidance of the
word “genocide” while some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered, over a few weeks’ time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago that indicated the American government had no intention of doing anything. To refuse to call what took place in Abu Ghraib—and what has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay—by its true name, torture, is as outrageous as the refusal to call the Rwandan genocide a genocide. Here is one of the definitions of torture contained in a convention to which the United States is a signatory: “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession.” (The definition comes from the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Similar definitions have existed for some time in customary law and in treaties, starting with Article 3—common to the four Geneva conventions of 1949—and many recent human rights conventions.) The 1984 convention de-clares, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency may be invoked as a justification of torture.” And all covenants on torture specify that it includes treatment intended to humiliate the victim, like leaving prisoners naked in cells and corridors.
Whatever actions this administration undertakes to limit the damage of the 4
widening revelations of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere—trials, courts-martial, dishonorable discharges, resignation of senior military fig-ures and responsible administration officials and substantial compensation to the victims—it is probable that the “torture” word will continue to be banned. To ac-knowledge that Americans torture their prisoners would contradict everything this administration has invited the public to believe about the virtue of American intentions and America’s right, flowing from that virtue, to undertake unilateral action on the world stage. Even when the president was finally compelled, as the damage to America’s
reputation everywhere in the world widened and deepened, to use the “sorry” word, the focus of regret still seemed the damage to America’s claim to moral superiority. Yes, President Bush said in Washington on May 6, standing alongside
King Abdullah II of Jordan, he was “sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families.” But, he went on, he was “equally sorry that people seeing these pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America.” To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem, to those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of the monster tyrants of modern times, “unfair.” A war, an occupation, is inevitably a huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions representative and others not? The issue is not whether the torture was done by individuals (i.e., “not by everybody”)—but whether it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All acts are done by individuals. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the …
