Hidden Meaning

Yes, I know I'm getting tiring. But I wanted to write down something that I thought of today in class—very much on the "hidden meaning" wavelength.

The other day I watched a movie adaptation of Dorothy Sayers' Nine Tailors. In this drama, Lord Peter Wimsey, an amateur detective, sets out to find some missing jewels. (Warning: plot spoiler ahead) He finally does solve the mystery. To do so he must:

1. Figure out that a gibberish letter is really some form of code.
2. Figure out that the code is really a notation for bell patterns in British change ringing.
3. Figure out which of several possible methods might have been used for the change ringing notation
4. Figure out which bell to follow through the changes.
5. Figure out that the code really is writing out two quotations from the Bible.
6. Find the place in the church where those quotations are inscribed.
7. Learn that the church used to have a balcony.
8. Climb up to the place where the inscription indicated, and finally
9. Figure out what to open up once he got up there.

THAT'S a hidden meaning! To unlock it, one had to be a trained bell-ringer AND have lived in the parish when there was a balcony twenty years previously AND known that the bell to follow was named "Tailor Paul." (Not to mention having a certain familiarity with the Bible.)

Many of my students write as if poems and plays worked much the same way. No—it's not like Indiana Jones or National Treasure. It's more like a letter from your mother, mentioning things that make you both happy. Or maybe like someone visiting a zoo and seeing a lot of animals that remind him of frightening predators, then moving on to wonder whether a good God could create things that eat small animals.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could form thy fearful symmetry?

Well maybe that's more obscure than "I looked at the tiger and wondered if God could make something that scary." But Blake's poem isn't hidden. Just deep.

Richard Cory

1. Images of Royalty in Cory — not what you might expect in New York


1. Royal words — many words here do double duty, meaning one thing, connoting something completely different; Robinson often works against the common meaning of the word.
1. Gentleman (l. 3)
2. Crown
3. Favored (dual meaning: facial appearance {archaic} and blessed with advantages)
4. Imperially slim (are emperors normally slim?)
5. Arrayed (means decorative clothing, but this is quiet)
6. Richer than a king
7. Grace ("your grace")
8. In fine — another odd word: precision and superiority


2. Royal attributes
1. Quietly arrayed; human (why make a point of saying so?)
2. Flutters pulses (movie star? what is it like to meet royalty—as in Mrs. Dalloway?)
3. Glitters when he walks
4. Richer than a king
5. Schooled in every grace. Who is schooled that way?


3. His name
1. Richard may recall the kings of England
2. Richard Coeur d'Lion — perhaps, but not necessary
3. Not much made of names, but it is one of the simplest in Tilbury Town


2. Oppositions between Cory and population


1. He comes downtown; we're already there
2. We on the pavement; he's presumably not
3. We are still waiting for the light
4. We work; he's just rich
5. We have no meat
6. We wish we were in his place—we do not wish to be him, just to have his position and stuff


3. About his death


1. Irony of setting: calm summer night at home contrasted to violence of his manner of death. No preparation in the poem prior to the last half of the last line.
2. Irony of motivation: all our observations are of externals (clothing, possessions, behavior that he has been schooled in)
3. Why does Robinson work the nobility thing so hard before the death?


1. Death of aristocracy in the new world? Not likely.
2. Like so many others in Tilbury Town, the facade hides a darker story. Eben Flood, the merry drunk hides a lonely, rejected man. John Evereldown goes sneaking through the night woods to women he cannot resist. The tragedy of Miniver Cheevy and George Crabbe lie on the surface for all to see. Richard Cory's was hidden deep—only he knew.

Hidden meaning

This is one of those phrases that makes most literature teachers cringe: the "hidden meaning" of the piece. It's as if we were in an episode of Indiana Jones. The straightforward meaning of the story or poem might be about romantic love, but there's a "hidden meaning" (only available to the high priests who have gone through certain rituals) that has to do with something totally different.

The whole idea makes me a bit ill, but when I think of it, I've got to admit that the "hidden meaning" idea makes a bit of sense.

We look at Emily Dickinson's poem, "I like to see it lap the miles," and ask, "What is IT?" Students say "racing car" or "river." I point out that racing cars hadn't been invented when Dickinson was alive. I guess that's hidden meaning because I looked up her dates on Wikipedia. I ask whether rivers are "punctual" or "peer in shanties" and the students think I'm making something up.

There is a kind of student paper that says, "What the author was trying to say is ..."

Take it as a fact: most of these authors were actually pretty good at saying stuff. That's how they made it into the textbooks. And the stuff they were saying isn't something that's only for the high priests. It's for everyone. Everyone who will read carefully and look at a dictionary, that is.

Response to Bananas

Response paper, very rough drafty, to Wendy Lee's "Peeling Bananas."

Though Wendy Lee would call herself a Chinese-American and Carolina Miranda perhaps a "Lots of places-American" (RCWW 179) my sympathies lie more with Lee than with Miranda. That's odd, because, so far as I know, my ethnic background spans German, English, Norwegian, American Indian, Spanish, and (probably) Miscellaneous. But the Chinese author is the one who has something to say to me.

Our family never had any hopes of turning out to be nobility. That was dashed when a bit of genealogical research discovered that we never did have an English coat of arms. The Allen family was pretty lucky to have a coat at all. My aunt was truly mortified to discover that my Norwegian side of the family preserved its records from the 1400s, showing that every one of them was an impoverished fisher, and that my grandmother was, by modern standards, an illegal alien. The English side, the one with the fake coat of arms, seems to have been minor shopkeepers and laborers—and their records only consist of cemetery headstones that go back two generations.

Though we sound like the Miranda family, the comment by Lee that the "strictly Caucasian" homes seemed to have "no traces of their heritages at all" (191) caught my attention. That's where I grew up: no trace of our heritage. Yes, my mother has collected antiques for years. The house is filled with old glass and old wrought iron, but none of it relates to us. There's almost nothing that she can point to and say, "My mother used a kettle like that" or "My dad worked with a tool like that." Much of her furniture is fake pioneer, with fake worn places (you have definitely made a mistake, though, if you add to the worn look). I managed to take (with her blessing and relief) several small things that relate me to my father: his fountain pen, his drafting set, and a lamp he made for high school shop class. But there's nothing very Norwegian or old country in the lot. My older daughter felt that sense of rootlessness. She said it was as if our family had simply risen from the sidewalk. That's why she had a tattoo of a Celtic knot on her thigh. She knew it wasn't our heritage, but at least it was some heritage. In a twist of irony, my younger daughter teaches Japanese in the Los Angeles public school system—a white woman teaching the children of immigrants how to speak their parents' language because the best they can do is the Japanese of a very small child. Visit her apartment, and you will see a lot more of Japan than of Norway or England.

I gave my brother a bit of a shock recently when I revealed that we weren't really Norwegian anyhow. We're Lapp. Look it up. We're descended on my grandmother's side from the wandering reindeer herders who live above the Arctic circle in skin tents. Did that change my sense of who I am? Not really. I doubt if I will ever own a "four winds hat"—that Lapp ethnic garment that resembles nothing quite so much as a court jester's garb. Unlike Lee, I'm not longing to return to my homeland, whether it's Lapland, England, Germany, or whatever.

One of my Japanese friends marveled that everyone in the USA is hyphenated: Chinese-American, Polish-American, Mexican-American. Nobody in Japan is hyphenated. They're just Japanese. Maybe that's why I wasn't too shocked to lose Norway and gain Lapland. I've never been hyphenated. But I think my older daughter would appreciate knowing that we came from somewhere.

Carver intro rough

Beginning rough draft of an introduction:

I once asked a choreographer to explain a dance she had just performed. "What? Would you like me to do it again for you?" she asked. Raymond Carver's short stories are a bit like that. They are something close to poetry, and any attempt to analyze, summarize, or dissect seems to somehow fall short of the whole. Bedford refers to Carver's style as "brief and minimalist in style, plot, and setting" (288), so it seems that any trace of non-minimal description that makes its way into a Carver story must be there for a very good reason. That's the point of this little essay, to examine "Popular Mechanics," and pay particular attention to setting details and, most specifically, to light.

Poetic line endings

When we read poetry, we're tempted to come to a sudden, complete stop at the end of every line. Sometimes that really destroys the meaning of the thing, though. Consider this traditional hymn:

Take my life, and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee.

If you sing or recite it with a total stop at the end of the first line, you get "Take me life and then leave me alone" (which is pretty far from the teaching of most churches). Then the second line is simply gibberish. If you simply consider it as a sentence, it's far different, and much better:

Take my life, and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee.

Apply the principle to all poetry. Yes, there's bound to be a slight pause at the end of a poetic line (especially if there's a rhyme), but the thing is bound to make more sense if you read the punctuation, not the line endings. Here's how Shelly's "Ozymandias" reads if we print it like prose:

I met a traveller from an antique land, who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed."

Makes much more sense, doesn't it?

Thesis in Literature Papers

Several kinds of papers are really tempting in a literature course, but you should avoid all of them:

• "I didn't really understand this piece." You're actually telling us that you haven't done your homework and that you were too proud to make an appointment to see the teacher. That's not much of a paper.
• "I didn't like this piece at all. It was dumb." To put this as gently as possible, nobody cares whether you liked it or not. Generations of scholars, critics, and teachers have loved the works of Shakespeare and Frost. Why is it interesting or important for you to write that your level of taste or understanding isn't quite mature enough to appreciate such things? (The reverse of this is also true: it's not scholarship to write about how much you loved a poem.)
  
• "I had to look up a lot of words in the dictionary, and here they are." Sometimes, an intense study of a word and its use in the poem or story is very fruitful, but don't spend the entire paper telling us how limited your vocabulary is. It's not really scholarship to announce that "luve" is the Scottish dialect spelling of "love" in "A Red, Red Rose," or that "melodie" is the 1799 spelling of "melody."
• "Here's a line-by-line translation of the work." Dictionary work and paraphrase are sometimes useful prewriting strategies, but, again, they aren't scholarship. One of my students analyzed these lines from Poe's "The Raven" "Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door; / Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking / Fancy unto fancy," and announced triumphantly that the writer had sat down on a couch and began thinking. Well yes, but that's not really worth saying, is it?
• "Here's a very raw set of observations." If you read "When I consider how my light is spent," and announce that it's fourteen lines (which means it's a sonnet), iambic pentameter, and a rhyme scheme of ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, you haven't really done anything yet.

Thesis basics

The thesis in a literary paper is pretty much the same sort of thing as a thesis in a scientific or historical paper.

• A statement, not a question
• Goes in only one direction
• Makes a statement that you'll have to prove
• Ideally, has enough of an edge that a few readers will say "Really? I never though of that!"

Here are some thesis examples culled from my files of various student and on-line papers:

• Flannery O'Connor loves to pick unlikely, ordinary people and show how, by the sudden and unexpected operation of God's grace, they are transformed into saints.
• By paying close attention to the various fields in the mother’s monologue in "Girl," we discover that, instead of developing a plot, her dictums develop an ideology that prescribes and originates from labor (laundry, cooking, sewing, light farming, etc.).
• Four thematic devices which unify [William Cullen Bryant's poem "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood"] come together in lines five through seven: the spatial organization of the poet’s vision, light and shade, personification of the forces of Nature, and the breeze.
  

Fiction paper prewrite

You rarely get to look over the shoulder of a writer during the writing process, so I'm going to talk my way through the writing of this paper.

I'm working on Raymond Carver's "Popular Mechanics." I began with the whole minimalist idea, and took some notes (mainly from my memory, because I've read the story several times, and I assume that things I remember well will be important in some way).

Non-minimalist things

The story is so minimal (and Bedford's editor uses the "minimalist" label) that non minimal things might be pretty important, so I listed them:

• Cars "slushing" by
• All the description of the first few lines, with the dirty water, etc.
• The fascination with light: getting dark on the inside, turning off the light in the bedroom, the kitchen nearly dark
• Flowerpot crashing to the floor

Minimalist things

It's sort of an "argument from absence," but the whole story is very flat, lacking in even ordinary conversation conventions:

• No dialog blurbs
• Not even quotation marks
• No emotion words during the early part of the argument
• Lots more indications of "minimalist" writing

Little stuff with deep indications

• "getting dark on the inside too"
• "it" (this baby) not "he" or "George"
• grabbed an arm (how many does a baby have? doesn't even matter if it's left or right)
• the darkest time physically is the darkest time emotionally
  

Tension: The changing English language

Nobody likes stability more than I do. Emotionally, I'd love to be on the side of the Grammar Nazis who seem to think that Moses brought the comma rules of English down the mountain along with the Ten Commandments. I cringed when "alright" began showing up in dictionaries as an acceptable spelling. I grit my teeth that "hopefully" has come to mean "I hope it will happen."

Inconveniently, living languages change all the time, sometimes very quickly. English is probably the most living (and changing) language out there. We writers just have to accept that and attempt to keep up with current acceptable usage.

Here's a little item I wrote to a young friend in 2004. He was a high school student, taking a freshman English college course through an Ohio program called PSEO (Post Secondary Education Option). He had written a paper about PSEO students and pluralized the abbreviation as PSEOs. The teacher thought it needed an apostrophe: PSEO's. Because he used this PSEOs construction all through the paper, the teacher marked each one wrong and called the paper a failure. (Never mind the question whether doing the same small grammatical error repeatedly is one error or many—and the question whether a lot of PSEOs make a piece of writing a total failure.) He asked my opinion, and I wrote this response:

---

Jon:

In answer to your question about using an apostrophe for pluralizing abbreviations (as, for example in pluralizing PSEO), I've done a bit of research:

• The Blair Handbook (3rd edition, 2000) is adamant: form the plural with apostrophe + s.


• The Little, Brown Handbook (8th edition, 2001) says the apostrophe is often optional when the abbreviations are unpunctuated, i.e. without the periods.


• Rules for Writers (5th edition, 2004) points out that either use is correct, but that you should be consistent.


• Keys for Writers (4th edition, 2005) [sic] says the apostrophe is "commonly used" and that MLA and APA prefer no apostrophe—but that it's acceptable if you are consistent.

I'd say we're in an evolutionary stage with this one. We seem to be moving away from the apostrophe, but either usage is acceptable if you are consistent. This is one of those style book issues. If your course style book is the Blair Handbook, I'd say you should use the apostrophe without fail. Otherwise, it appears to be writer's choice. If you are submitting a paper to a carefully-edited professional journal, however, I'd suggest leaving the apostrophe out.

Curt Allen

---

Latest Development

Remember that Rules for Writers said in 2004 that either use was correct? By the 6th edition (2008), the book had changed its tune: "Do not use an apostrophe to pluralize an abbreviation" (page 301). Their example is "We collected only four IOUs out of forty." The Quick Access handbook (2007) doesn't even mention the possibility. Its only comment is that we use the apostrophe to pluralize single letters: "Printing w's is hard for some first graders" (page 483). (I'll bet that rule will vanish in the next decade too.)

What's a writer to do?

The French have something called the French Academy. This body decides what's correct French and what's not. When I was in high school, the Academy had been working for several years to decide the grammatical gender for "grapefruit," so I guess we just couldn't write about them until the decision came down. Things are sloppier but easier for English writers. You have to be aware of the usage of good writers and editors (the New Yorker magazine, for example), and keep a current dictionary at hand. And stay kind of loose in the saddle.

Research Paper Topics

For most students, the most difficult part of a research paper is simply finding the topic. In a fit of panic, almost everyone falls into one of the common mistakes.

• To explore strange new worlds. Certainly, it's interesting to read about topics that are new to you, but if you go too far from your field of expertise, you won't even know what questions to ask. You'll write a breathless paper that explores very ordinary basic definitions.


• To seek out new life and new civilizations. A research paper must be grounded. If you get into speculation ("Do space aliens exist? Did they leave crystal skulls to teach us technology and art?"), you aren't writing academic research. Leave that sort of thing for the supermarket tabloid papers.


• To boldly go where no man has gone before. If there's nothing written about your topic, no primary research, you'll have to fly to the Amazon yourself to come up with a decent paper. Maybe it's really intriguing to ask the enormous questions, but save that for your doctoral dissertation. Right now, you've got really limited time and no foundation grant.

Three more paradoxes

• Big topics make small papers. Students often figure that the more generalized and enormous topic will make a long paper more easily, but it's the tightly focused topics that suggest a LOT of further research. Consider which would make a longer paper (because it suggests more fertile research questions). "High gasoline prices" or "Effect of high gasoline prices on family-owned businesses in two ocean resorts: Ocean City, Maryland, compared with Rehoboth Beach, Delaware."


• Easy topics make difficult papers. (Difficult to find enough material, that is.) Students often go for no-brainers like "how to change a tire" or "reasons to quit smoking." The problem is that a three-page pamphlet has thoroughly covered the topic, so there's nothing to do except summarize it and get frustrated. There's nothing to prove, nothing to discuss.


• If you know it in your heart, you will have trouble proving it. When you approach a "research" project to teach the rest of us that you were right in the first place, you'll only look at sources that support your point of view. That's why nobody is in love with faith-based papers (except the writer and those who already agree). That's also why topics such as creationism, acupuncture, and macrobiotic diets usually don't fly in the academic world. You have to already believe the main point to accept the basic premise of the paper. There's no possibility for the "research" to change the writer's opinion, even the smallest amount.

Those Grade Appeals

It's time again for the grade appeals. They always fascinate me because the student often does everything possible to guarantee that I won't be receptive. Here's an example of a last-ditch appeal:

mr. allen i missed class on wensday due to my job i had to fill out these papers and turn them in be wensday or eles i would not have a job yes bad excuse but the truth and then i had to work from 4 till 10 and was unable to email you from work sorry. i had the paper done the final porfolio just wondering if you wanted me to email it to you or to drop it off in your mail box i am trully sorry for the inconvinis and i did not mean for this to happen came up at the last min and i have to have this joe other wise no school next year. i was wondering if too you could send me the topic for the inclass wrighting so i could make that up if i am alowed i really can not afford to miss this i can not get lower then a B in this class for i will lose my exceptince into usf next year im very sorry that i missed class and will do anything to get this B pleas email me back and tell me what to do i will do anything email you paper or drop off right extra papers
thanks

Ethos

In classic argumentation, we discuss whether the writer is believable. That's ethos. Is this the sort of person who should be believed? Or, to look at that sample above, should this student get the "B" he requested? (Keeping in mind that this student had just finished his second semester of college English.) By his own admission, he has fouled up his schedule and not fulfilled the requirements. If this is his best work (keeping in mind that he's asking a superior for a favor, so he should be trying his hardest), I really don't feel that he's nailed down the content of the course.

Logos

This is the part of an argument where the writer gives reasons for the argument. It's the "show, don't just tell" part. This would be the place for a student who has done well in previous work to point out that he's a great student and just needs a final small favor. This student hadn't done very well at all in previous work. In class (when he attended) his behavior was disruptive, and his writing had terrible grammar and an obnoxious in-your-face assertiveness that didn't win it any friends. The student really has no factual argument to fall back on.

Pathos

This is the emotional side of the argument. The student makes a real try to get the reader's emotions on his side, with apologies and an appeal to the student's dire situation. Unfortunately, pathos will not carry an argument such as this one. When you're asking a teacher to change a policy, you need to bring everything good that you have—this should be the best writing you do in the semester.

Tension: Word Count versus Creativity

I'm not too thrilled with arbitrary rules, especially in writing. One reason, of course, is that when I make a rule, I have to enforce it. Another is that poor teachers love rules so much that students become convinced that rules are the only point to English class.

So why have a rule about minimum length of an essay? If I ask for, say, a 1000-word narrative about a turning point in your life, what do you do if you only have 500 words in your head? Can't 500 words be good? Isn't there a danger that the student will write 500 words of quality stuff surrounded by 500 words of trash?

Well, yes. And you'll notice that the really good professional writers seem to get things done very efficiently, concisely, and briefly.

In spite of all this, I've got a couple of reasons for the word count.

Developing an Idea
Five hundred words, for many people, is just about enough to say the obvious material that everyone knew anyhow. It's the sort of essay you can throw together in one draft, taking perhaps an hour. You don't learn to explore an idea deeply in one page. You don't learn to answer the question, "What else?" There's no room for examples, for discussion of the other side, for developing details. There's no room for "Show, don't just tell."

Learning Structure
A really short essay doesn't need much structure. Sure, in high school you wrote five-paragraph essays that were 500 words, but they really didn't need an introduction or a conclusion very much. You often got by with a single-sentence lead and a single-sentence wrap. If the teacher hadn't told you how many paragraphs to write, you would have done the whole thing in a single paragraph. At 1000 words, you can't make the whole thing a single block—the reader gets mired down. You must have a structure.

Learning Correctness
If you really don't know how to form sentences, you might squeak by writing a page and a half. Three pages, though, gives you enough space to demonstrate that you really don't know grammar. Or that you do.

The abuses

I always know who wants to write and who is simply laying down words in hope of getting out of this class. The tricks are so obvious: large type, enormous margins, 2½ line spacing, two inch indents for paragraph beginnings (with an extra line skipped between paragraphs), and a full four-line MLA header on each page instead of just the first one. Is that writing? Why is that good? It only profits the paper company. When I receive a paper like that, I sigh because the student assumed I was too stupid to see the tricks, then I run the whole thing through the scanner.
Last semester I received several really undersized papers. The final assignment was a five to seven page research paper. One student gave me less than three. Was his work a model of brilliant concision? Did it resemble the writing of the best newspaper feature writer? Nope. It was obviously thrown together in less than an hour. It said nothing of any value and the student learned nothing from it.

Help

So what do you do when you realize that you aren't going to fulfill the minimum length requirements? If you aren't too arrogant to accept help, it's available. Every school has some form of writing lab. The textbook is usually full of advice on developing a topic. All writing teachers keep office hours. You just have to get up the humility (or courage) to ask.

It's All About the Grades

Well the grades have been posted for about a week, and (as you might guess) protests are rolling in. It seems worse this year, somehow. Here's a guide to my reactions to grade protests:

I might react favorably:

• Well, I've been a good student and shown up for all the classes. How close is my "A minus" to a full "A"?
• Did you receive this paper that I e-mailed you?
• Why does your gradebook show a different grade from what you wrote on my paper?

I'm less likely:

• Your records are wrong: I really did attend class all those times.
• I'm going to send my mother to talk to your boss.*
• I know I didn't show up much or turn in all my papers. Is there ANYTHING I can do to raise my poor grade?
• Even though I didn't attend class and just sort of guessed when I wrote that last assignment, I think it was pretty good and deserved a better grade.

Face it. Some students suffer from a form of burnout about three-quarters of the way through a term. They stop attending and their papers become shorter and shorter and show less and less real thinking. This is the point where the real students are separated from those who simply take up space: the real students carry through to the end.

*You should know that sending your mother to plead for a grade rarely works, and (assuming you are over 18 years old) it's not even really legal for a teacher to reveal your grade to your parents without a signed release.

Between Terms Advice

Because I write this blog mainly for my students, I feel like I can give you some teacher's advice. Here are three things that would have revolutionized the lives of many of my students (about a third of them).

Show Up! The previous blog entry said something about attendance. I'll say it again. Unless you're in college as a sort of expenses-paid vacation, you need to pass courses and learn information. You can't do that if you're not in class. My students with poor attendance records are always surprised when they turn in papers that I don't approve of. They thought they had guessed right on the assignment! Why not actually show up and make sure? The student with tapering attendance is always fascinating. Pretty good at the start, then less and less. What? Did you learn it all in the first month? Did you discover alcohol? Or are you just so arrogant that you figure nobody can teach you anything?

Read the Assignment! I mean this in two senses:
1. Read the stuff in the book. I don't know about you, but when I spend $90 for something, I want to get some good out of it. And no, the teachers don't get a cut of the profits. And no, we don't hear whether you did buy the book—so we don't grade on spending. We do grade on whether you absorbed the stuff inside the book. And surprisingly enough (this may be different from high school books) there's actually something inside most college textbooks that's worth reading!
2. Read the directions for the thing you're supposed to be writing. When I ask my students for a research paper that's five to seven pages long, I'm not going to give full credit for two pages of unsupported opinion.

Make a Gradebook! You need to know how many absences you have in a class, particularly if you have trouble showing up. You need to know what your grades are, so you know how much it will hurt you when you don't choose to turn in a major assignment. Many of my disappointed students this semester had no idea they were in trouble, even though they might have missed a quarter of our class meetings and not bothered to turn in a major paper. Here's a little hint: few college instructors will seek you out and try to talk you into doing the work. We feel we have better things to do.

Winding down thoughts

I'm sitting here at University of Akron on the last day of finals week. Department policy requires me to give back the final portfolios in a face-to-face conference this week, so this all feels very final and almost a little sad. I feel like we should do a little ceremony here.

We don't do office conferences that much. For one thing, students are generally terrified of their teachers (I think it's hilarious that anyone would be terrified of me), so it's really rare for anyone to come talk with me unless I've announced to them that I'm failing them for plagiarism. For another thing, someone brought a lawsuit at Akron a while back because classes were canceled for conferences. They claimed that a personal 20-minute meeting taught them less than three hours of group lecture. So we can't cancel classes for conferences. (NCSC is its own world. I can't do conferences there because students assume that anyone who has a one-on-one conversation gets an unfair advantage in the course.)

The result is that the last time I see these people is also the first time I talk with them personally. Odd. And sad, too, because these are some very interesting students, and we get to actually talk about their writing for once. But it's the worst time in the semester to do this, because their minds are on summer, and the next formal writing they will do is in September.

Most of these guys really will do well in their future. I look at the grade book and "B" is the most common grade I give out. About 22% of my students, though, won't be passing. For most of them, the issue is simple dishonesty or simple lack of attendance. It seems like every class I teach has at least two students who have "issues" with attending (often I suspect that the "issues" are related to alcohol). I used to assign a paper on "differences between high school and college." I hoped for people to write about maturity or about the new emphasis on thinking for oneself. Usually, though, they write, "The main difference is that you have to attend classes in high school and you don't have to attend in college." Alas. None of the people I'm failing this semester had a good attendance record. Some missed as many as 20 class sessions.

That's a dreary note to end on. A happier one: Several of my students reported that their thinking changed significantly for the better. They figured out important things about their careers. They learned how to think. They learned how to respect the opinions of others. This is the stuff that's supposed to happen to freshmen, and it did here.

My boyfriend the expert

I'm looking over the current crop of Ashland definitional argument papers, and I'm surprised at how many of them use interviews as research sources. I'm also surprised at the qualifications of some of the people interviewed. Sometimes it really worked. One student, answering the question "Are cheerleaders athletes?" interviewed the faculty member who is in charge of the cheerleading squad. This faculty member happens to be part of the Physical Education Department, and could speak (with some authority) about the number of injuries suffered nationwide by cheerleaders. Another, writing on the question "Are NASCAR drivers athletes?" interviewed her boyfriend. His qualification is that he watches a lot of car races on TV and even attended a couple of races in real life. Yet another, writing on the question "Are band members athletes?" (we seem to be on a roll here) interviewed several band members and learned that they really like being in the band and feel like they have to work hard.

Did these strategies work? Or, more specifically, would anyone call these real research? Or are they just fulfilling the requirement to find outside sources?

Let's review.

• Both the author and the audience must respect the source. The cheerleader source seems to work that way. She's got expertise (and academic qualifications) in the specific field the paper was discussing. Do I respect the boyfriend who put down his beer long enough to say, "Yeah, they look like they're working hard"? Nope. Would I respect the opinion of a Ph.D. in English who watches a lot of NASCAR? No more than I'd respect the opinion of a truck driver or anyone else—the degree only counts in the area it relates to.


• The source must have something to say. The band people only got to say that they enjoy band and work hard. They didn't get to talk about much of anything else. Nobody among the band interviewees was asked to compare the band experience to (for example) being on a swim team or being a football player.


• You have to ask the right question. The greatest interview source in the world won't help you much if you don't ask the right question and edit the response. The NASCAR boyfriend was allowed to ramble for about half the paper. The band members were asked if they liked being in band. The cheerleading advisor was asked how cheerleaders' injuries and workouts compare with those of other athletes.

What a research paper is about

This is the bottom line: it's about learning something new and reliable, not about simply filling space and accumulating things to put on a "Works Cited" page.

By the way #1: It's all in the question you're trying to answer. If the research paper question was "What do beer-drinking NASCAR fans think about the drivers?" the boyfriend would have been an expert. He just wasn't an expert on what sort of workout and exertion the drivers actually go through.
By the way #2: There's a way to actually cite these interviews. Look it up.

Sample Annotated Bibliography

When I began to work on this assignment, I first thought of doing an easy topic. I read the daily news and saw a lot of material about George Bush leaning on the EPA to weaken ozone standards. That looked promising, but all the sources seemed to rely on the same Associated Press story, and I was faced with either doing a very superficial survey of news articles or doing an incredibly technical thing on ozone (about which I know nothing). I could do the standard student stuff about abortion or alcoholism or gay marriage, but I don't think I could face it—those three topics will probably cover sixty percent of my papers this year, and it's impossible to come up with anything very new.

Then I remembered one of the hottest issues in the teaching of English: Ebonics. It seemed perfect. For one thing, it's not exactly a settled issue. For another, it matters because Black English is the natural language to a significant number of my students. It also matters because I have pretty much stopped reading about this important issue during the last five years, and it's about time to start again.

Defining a few terms:

In the Annotated Bibliography itself, I'm assuming that the reader is aware of some basic definitions, so I have to help you become that reader. Here goes:

• AAE: African American English (sometimes referred to as AAVE—African American Vernacular English). This is the technical name for distinctively nonstandard Black United States English, emphasizing the independence of the latter from standard English.


• Ebonics: A term that comes from combining "ebony" and "phonics." It's a popular word for AAE. (Both of these definitions come from the Wikipedia definition of Ebonics.)


• Language versus Dialect (versus slang or sloppy talking). This is close to the heart of the whole discussion.
  
  
  • If AAE is just carelessness by people who know better, it should be easy to eliminate—it would be like the current habit of forgetting the "not" in the phrase "he could not care less." (Everyone knows that means he does the least possible caring, and the "not" gets dropped by people who aren't thinking about what they are saying or are trying to be cute.)
  
  
  • If AAE is just slang, the speakers are really modifying standard English, and it's still a pretty easy matter to deal with.
  
  
  • If AAE is a dialect of standard English, it's still pretty close, and most of the differences will be in the lexicon (words used and their definitions).
  
  
  • If AAE is a separate language, we can expect different word order, different verb structure, and so forth. The change-over from one language to another isn't easy, and frequently a person who is making the change (from French to English, for example) will take years and years before becoming as fluent as a native speaker.

After all that introduction (which would perhaps appear in a paper introduction, but not in the annotated bibliography), here's the annotated bibliography itself.

Notes:

1. This assignment took me about two hours. I spent some time messing about on the Internet, just long enough to find the Oakland Resolution, then had to leave and do some other work. Then this morning, I returned and did the whole thing in about 90 minutes. Of course, I was working in a field that I know something about. If I had been a total stranger here (a bad idea, by the way, for a research paper), I would have needed more time in general articles to find out just what is going on.


2. When I did this as an MLA bibliography, I lifted all the formatting straight from Son of Citation Machine. It's not that difficult.


3. Converting this to APA was a bit more difficult, so I ended up referring to the latest version of Rules for Writers by Diana Hacker. It's still not too difficult. The APA part took perhaps half an hour.


4. I can't close this without a quick tribute to Akron professor of linguistics Arthur Palacas, who has published several foundational articles on the topic and opened my eyes to it when I was in graduate school.

Scott Bidstrup

I recently picked up my Ashland essays, this group a set of responses to Andrew Sullivan's "Conservative Case for Gay Marriage," and I was surprised when the same Internet source kept appearing. Four of thirteen essays referred to to a web article by Scott Bidstrup, "Gay Marriage: The Arguments and the Motives." I've got some experience in the whole discussion, and I've got to admit that his name was new to me. I knew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer, Tony Campolo, Mel White, and the Gay Christian Network, but this is a new name, so I decided to follow it up. One third of my students read Bidstrup? Is it some sort of assignment? Is there a sale on his stuff at the bookstore?

Turns out that the explanation is much simpler. Type "gay marriage" into Google, and Bidstrup is the first item to come up. Since he's a webmaster who owns a server hosting over 7000 websites, I'd assume he knows how to optimize a site to get it to the top of the Google heap. It's a matter of getting the right words into the hidden meta keword headers, putting the right stuff in boldface and italics, wisely using header labels, and getting lots more people to link to a site (from "good" websites) than you have links outbound. All easy material for someone who is fluent in HTML, but not necessarily the kind of thing that determines whether a site is a good source for academic discussion.

Turns out that Bidstrup is quite good on this topic, though my students didn't often delve very deeply. He's apparently:

• Gay and not too effeminate about it either
• Politically liberal and convinced that George W. Bush is one of the worst things to happen to America
• Not at all in sympathy with right-wing Christian religion, especially the form that tries to take control of the government to impose its standards on everyone else
• Living in self-imposed exile in Colombia because he's convinced that Bush's Patriot Act surveillance endangers everyone who has a contrary opinion to the official government line

He looks like a good project for Internet reliability and bias study!

Is Ethnocentrism Racism?

In "Making The Case For Teaching Our Boys To ... 'Bring Me Home A Black Girl,'" Audrey Edwards attempts to deflect the criticism that her attitude is racist. She claims that there is quite a difference between being "racist" and "ethnocentric." (Actually, she puts the distinction in the mouth of a source, Gwendolyn Goldsby Grant, on this matter—a good strategy to put some distance between oneself and a potentially damaging comment.) So there are two "what is it?" questions here: Is ethnocentrism racist? Is Edwards' attitude pure ethnocentrism?

Racism goes beyond simply recognizing racial differences. Informally, at least, it is not too difficult to make some harmless generalizations about race: Africans have dark skin; Asians are often less hairy than Europeans, and so forth. None of this means much, and nobody ever got too upset about the assertion that few Asians or Africans are naturally blond. There always seems to be something deeper in racism: a claim that in the categories that count—intelligence, dignity, and basic humanity—race determines who has "got it" and who hasn't. Much like the schoolyard bully, the racist makes claims to appear superior by denigrating those "lower beings." Adolph Hitler gives us the paradigm: "If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity for the shedding of precious German blood, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin." He gives us both sides of racism, the "flower of the German nation" with its "precious German blood" and below these wonderful Germans, the "inferior race that breeds like vermin." Note the comparison: Germans are flowers and the others are rats, mice, and cockroaches. Friedrich Otto Hertz, a sociologist and historian who left Germany and settled in England in 1938, adds, "At the heart of racism is the religious assertion that God made a creative mistake when He brought some people into being."

There we have a basic definition of racism: We're good, and you're a mistake. We're flowers and you're cockroaches. Most of the racist manifestations you can think of probably derive from this frame of mind. Flowers and cockroaches shouldn't use the same water fountain. We don't belong in the same end of the bus. During the 1930's, railroads in the South had "Jim Crow cars"—minimal coaches with wooden benches for black riders. Why should they deserve the plush seats reserved for the whites if they are some lower form of life anyhow? The whole emphasis of the racist formula "separate but equal" was on the separate part. And the point of that was that lower forms were being separated from higher.

How does ethnocentrism fit into this definition? To begin with, the concept of ethnic group is very fuzzy, but usually refers to a shared culture, language, or religion ("Ethnic group"). The "centric" part is probably going to cause trouble. Galileo had to contend with thinkers who supported the geocentric model of the universe (everything revolves around the earth). Nearly everyone has had an egocentric roommate or coworker (everything revolves around me). Putting all this together, an ethnocentric point of view says everything tends to revolve around my culture, language, or religion.

To some extent, we all are ethnocentric. Jokes abound concerning tourists who go to foreign countries and yearn for "normal" food. It's not surprising when a down-home country type (such as my uncle) listens to Beethoven and wonders when we will get to hear some "good" music. No matter what I do about it, I'm probably going to always be white, male, Midwestern, and somewhat true to my religion and upbringing. There is a very thin line, though, between "I'm judging the whole world according to my culture," and "Your culture falls short because it isn't like mine." There's another thin line between "Your music and food aren't as good as mine" and "You aren't as good as I am." Stepping over that line is the move from "ethnocentric" to "racist."

In Edwards' article, Grant makes the point that "to want to be with people who share your values, religion and culture is very normal" (342). So far, so good. Even when nobody is forcing anybody, immigrants will tend to settle near folks like themselves. Most American cities have an Italian section, a Polish section, and so forth. When my brother-in-law, a good German Catholic, announced that he was marrying a good Catholic girl, there was a family uproar. The girl was Italian. Never mind that both families had been in the USA for at least two or three generations. Normal is "we want to be with people we understand."

Leaving aside the question of whether culture and skin color are equivalent, much of Edwards' article is focused on affirming the value of being black. This is the point of her comments about the beauty of black women. This is the point of reinforcing the self-image of black children. Substitute "Hispanic" or "Asian" for "Black" in these statements, and you get pretty much the same message: "we're good and we need to believe in ourselves." Nothing blameworthy about that.

Then there's Valerie Williams: "I want to have grandchildren who look like me [...] I don't want to be sitting around the dinner table at Thanksgiving feeling I have to bite my tongue" (Edwards 344). Why would she bite her tongue? She would be looking at the offspring of her good black son and a white woman who feels "superior to a former slave." Williams assumes (and Edwards quotes her with approval) that all white people are racists. Because racism is an attitude that puts one in the same villainous category as Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan, obviously there is something wrong with all those terrible white women. It is not an attitude of a few oddballs, either. "[T]here's not a White person in America who doesn't feel superior to a former slave," says Williams (Edwards 344). It's a racial characteristic of whites. Something really terrible is wrong with white people, all of them.

We get the feeling from Williams (and Edwards) that when wealth passes out of the hands of the black entrepreneur who originally earned it and gets laid at the feet of white women, something bigger than a sharing of community property has happened. Those white women do not deserve it. There is the intimation that a white woman would never think of marrying a wealthy black man for any reason except to get his money.

So where does this leave us? Is ethnocentricity a variety of racism? Probably not, in its pure form. Learning about the heroes of one's own cultural heritage, celebrating one's own cuisine, participating in one's own religious observances, and wanting to feel comfortable with a spouse who is generally from the same culture are all very normal. Wikipedia's root definition, though, strikes at the heart of the problem:

Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of one's own culture. Ethnocentrism often entails the belief that one's own race or ethnic group is the most important and/or that some or all aspects of its culture are superior to those of other group. ("Ethnocentrism")

It's much too easy to slip from "we're pretty good" to "there's something wrong with you," which is the root of racism, and Audrey Edwards (with those disparaging comments about white women) steps over the line. Her form of ethnocentrism really is racism.

---

Works Cited

Edwards, Audrey. "Making the Case for Teaching Our Boys to ... 'Bring Me Home a Black Girl.'" 75 Arguments: An Anthology. Alan Ainsworth, ed. Boston: McGraw, 2008. 340-44.

"Ethnic group." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 9 Mar 2008, 18:25 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 11 Mar 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ethnic_group&oldid=197044792>.

"Ethnocentrism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 10 Mar 2008, 05:13 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 11 Mar 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ethnocentrism&oldid=197168631>.

Hertz, Friedrich Otto. "Friedrich Otto Hertz quotes." Find the famous quotes you need, ThinkExist.com Quotations. ThinkExist. 10 Mar 2008 <http://thinkexist.com/quotes/friedrich_otto_hertz/>.

Hitler, Adolph. "Adoph Hitler quotes." Find the famous quotes you need, ThinkExist.com Quotations. ThinkExist. 10 Mar 2008 <http://thinkexist.com/quotation/if_i_can_send_the_flower_of_the_german_nation/198051.html>.

Reactions to Sullivan Reactions

I'm about to sit down to read the last stack of reactions to Andrew Sullivan's "The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage." Now I know that it's quite difficult for a college freshman to disagree with a teacher and it's pretty obvious that I generally agree with Sullivan. Here are a couple of my own reactions to the student papers:

Several students have commented that Sullivan plays loose with statistics. He says, "the majority of people 30 and younger see gay marriage as inevitable and understandable," and my students ask, "How do you know? What surveys? Where were they taken? When?" The students have a point. Sullivan's argument would have been stronger if he'd given some indication of where his "majority" comes from.

I get disturbed, though, by simple misreading of the article.

1. The opening refers to action by the Canadian Federal Courts. Canada is a separate country from the USA, so actions they take (even if they also call their judiciary "Federal Courts") have no legal effect in our country. The United States Supreme Court hasn't made any ruling yet (five years after the writing of this article) on the legality of gay marriage.
2. In a similar vein, a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court doesn't directly affect the other states. If gay marriage becomes legal in Massachusetts (as it did after this article was written), that only affects Ohio and the other states indirectly.
3. The U.S. Supreme Court issue was much more limited: should a specific sexual practice be illegal for gay people but legal for straight people?
4. Sullivan isn't really saying he's leaving the Roman Catholic Church on this issue. The Catholics only come into the discussion because they have a stricter view of divorce than the civil courts (though those who know the Catholic stance on homosexuality should realize that Sullivan is pretty far from Catholic orthodoxy on this issue).
5. The "when I grew up and realized I was gay" paragraph doesn't say so directly, but the perspective seems to be a young man looking forward to his life and wondering how he will fit into the world. It's certainly not reflecting on a divorce that took place because he "decided to be gay."
6. Perhaps the most frustrating misreading refers to Sullivan's opening paragraph. He begins by saying that the winner for dull, unimaginative writing in the New Republic's humorous little contest was "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative." Sounds like something announcing a new rule for salmon fisheries. The irony is that that incredibly dull contest-winner would turn out to be an appropriate headline for something so earth-shaking as gay marriage in the Western Hemisphere. Sullivan wasn't saying he learned of Canada's decision by reading an article with that title. He's doing irony (a variety of humor).
   

Progress on Ethnocentrism

A prewriting

I've got this great quotation from George Bernard Shaw: "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."

The dictionaries aren't much help at this point, and quoting them will simply result in a very short paper. The online Merriam-Webster gives for "Ethnocentric:"

characterized by or based on the attitude that one's own group is superior

My Apple computer's Oxford New American Dictionary gives

evaluating other peoples and cultures according to the standards of one's own culture

I'm also thinking of that "-centric" suffix. Galileo had to deal with the geocentric theory of the solar system (the earth is the center of everything). Many of us have had egocentric coworkers or roommates (I am the center of everything). Following this, "ethnocentric" would be "my ethnos is the center of everything." (Which leaves aside the question whether a race is the same thing as an ethnos.) Is it just that my race is mine? Of course, I think as I do because I am me—I can't easily think as a woman or a child or an Eskimo. In that sense, I'm always going to be egocentric and ethnocentric, but that doesn't appear to be what Williams and Edwards are getting at. Should I take my ethnos to be the standard by which everyone else is judged?

The essential corner gets turned when I move from "we're pretty good" to "there's something wrong with you" (and perhaps around another corner: "you're so substandard that I don't want you around me").

There's a lot of ground to be covered here. Which option?

• My grandma's Cornish pasties were really good.
• My grandma's Cornish pasties were the best food in the world.
• Those Finnish pasties just don't measure up.
• Finns don't deserve to even MAKE pasties because theirs are so terrible!
• Don't you dare bring one of those disgusting Finns into my presence.

Pondering a Definitional Argument

Think of this as "getting ready." I wanted to actually write one of these definitional arguments to give you a pattern or model.

First Thoughts:

I began with the word "gourmet." It's interesting, because the dictionary meaning (yes, I know that it's really dull to begin with the dictionary) is either "a connoisseur of good food" or "food suitable for a gourmet." I thought that would be a fun word to work with because of such things as gourmet cat food and frozen gourmet meals. I remember working for a restaurant where "gourmet sauce" came in a can and was poured over things like pork chops to make them "gourmet." Odd little questions came up:

• Does "gourmet" have to be cooked fresh or to order? Is it possible to have a "gourmet" can of soup?
• Does "gourmet" have to be rare? Can a place like Olive Garden (or even McDonald's) be truly gourmet?
• Does it have to be weird? Snails and quail eggs and odd French fungus that grows underground? How about beans and franks? A hot dog and a Coke? Can those be gourmet?

This all ran aground, though. I really couldn't think of a good reason to write this paper. I just didn't give a hoot whether a Big Mac is gourmet or not.

Second Thoughts:

I can't quite let go of Audrey Edwards. Her sex-therapist source, Gwendolyn Goldsby Grant, makes a distinction between being ethnocentric and being racist (342). This, at least, sounds more important than pondering whether Wolfgang Puck soup is truly gourmet. Is it possible to be strongly in favor of one's own race without being racist? Where's the line? And is it racism to tell one's son that he must marry within the race? There's a song in the Broadway Musical Avenue Q called "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist." Seems to be true too. Maybe this is where I begin.

Response to Audrey Edwards

The Incredible Non-Vanishing Negro

Audrey Edwards' article, "Making the Case for Teaching Our Boys to ... 'Bring Me Home a Black Girl'" is useful for many things. She's provided a textbook case in misusing statistics (for example, when she conveniently forgets to mention that interracial marriage was illegal in much of the USA in 1960, but cries out in alarm at the increase in interracial marriages between 1960 and 2002). She's great at quoting experts who are speaking outside their field of expertise (for example, citing a sex therapist's opinions on economics and cultural change). The most interesting thing about Edwards' article, though, is that she doesn't know what she is talking about.

Edwards is worried that an increase in Black men marrying White women (she capitalizes the races as if they are political parties or religious denominations) will lead to a "weakening of the culture and economic resources of the Black community." The issue she raises is how to "ensure our cultural and economic survival as a people" (341).

I'd counter with the question, "Who is Black?" As far back as Frederick Douglass, interracial unions were producing "a very different-looking class of people" (Douglass 14). (Douglass' mother was Black and his father White.) Barack Obama is often cited as a model for the new generation: a black man who can run for president. Obama's DNA, however, is only about fifty percent African, and his Black father was an immigrant from Africa (so never had any experience of American Black culture). Edwards is terrified that Blackness will vanish, but most American Blacks have some White blood. Edwards seems to worry that when a black man and white woman (I'm dropping the capitalization because it's much too political) have a baby, the child will be lost to the black community, but her instructions to Ugo ("Dark, light, shades in between—it don't matter to me as long as she's Black") show that she buys the idea that a mixed-race child is black (340). Not white, not 50/50. She calls a "light" girl Black. We've made a lot of progress since the North Carolina legal definition of "Negro" (which I found in my trusty 1919 Funk & Wagnalls dictionary): "a person who has in his veins one-sixteenth or more of African blood." (that's one great-great-grandparent), but Americans seem to agree with Edwards—blackness sticks with a child more than whiteness.

My daughter-in-law is from Central America. She was adopted as an infant by a family in Ohio. Her maiden name is decidedly north-European. She doesn't speak a single word of Spanish. Is she a "person of color"? Is my son in a mixed marriage? Only if you do a DNA test; culturally, they are identical. This brings up an interesting point: does culture follow skin color? What is Black culture? Is it the conspicuous consumption of a rap star covered with gold jewelry? Is it the single mother in the ghetto struggling to raise her children in a neighborhood filled with gangs warring over drug territory? Is the gangs themselves? Is it John Lee Hooker, playing blues from the rural Mississippi delta? Is it Maxwell Manning, assistant professor of social work at Howard University? Is it the African Methodist Episcopal Church? Or perhaps the Black Muslims? Or maybe a more traditional Muslim group? Black culture isn't monolithic; about the only thing my examples have in common is that people with dark skin are part of them. I suspect that Manning, Hooker, and a hip-hop singer wouldn't find much to talk about over dinner—in fact, they'd have a difficult time understanding one another at all because of language and cultural differences.

Or perhaps there is another question: why is anyone worried about black culture vanishing? Listen to American popular music, not just rap and hip-hop, but almost anything written since 1900, and you are very likely to find African roots. George Gershwin, good Jewish boy that he was, couldn't have written "Rhapsody in Blue" without including its jazz roots—roots that go right back to Mama Africa. Or look at American teenagers. I'd wager you'll find more white boys in clownishly oversize clothing with a waistband near their crotch and a sideways baseball hat (styles that came directly from the black ghetto gangs) than you will find black boys in Dockers and polo shirts. The typical customer for hip-hop music is a young white male. He buys the CD after watching his hero, a black basketball player, sink a three-pointer. We may love it or hate it, but African culture is the engine that drives much of our music, clothing style, and speech patterns. (If you want to get all of the Africa out of your speech, just try to stop saying "OK"—a slang term directly from west Africa.) The white supremacists may have a point about white culture vanishing; the black supremacists don't.

White supremacists and bigots may abound in our culture (alas), but Edwards and her mouthpiece Valerie Williams don't seem to know much about them. Williams claims that "there's not a White person in America who doesn't feel superior to a former slave" (Edwards 344). Perhaps that's true—I haven't interviewed all the white people in America (as Williams appears to have done—but she missed me). I do have a pretty intimate experience of white bigots, however. I've been a blue-collar worker for most of my life and have a fair number of family members who are less than generous in their opinions of black people. I've heard a lot of talk about black people (much of it very insulting), but "former slave" isn't on the list. Lots of other insults are there, often focusing on intelligence or cleanliness, but slave status just never occurs to the bigots.

I realize that this essay wasn't aimed at me; its target audience is young black men—or perhaps their mothers (which may explain why it was first published in Essence, a magazine for black women). They may see the black community as a hermetically sealed enclave that tries to keep its money and marriages for its own, a place where culture and color are pretty much equivalent. I suspect, though, that most people who read this essay echo the concerns of Martin Luther King, and want Edwards (and her stepson Ugo) to learn to look at the heart, not at the skin. Edwards knows this too, and she really does agree. After all, with lots of historically black colleges to choose from (She must be aware of Howard University; she quotes an assistant professor), Ugo ended up at a predominantly white college. Why? Presumably because Ugo (and Audrey Edwards herself) wanted more from a college than a simple color match to his skin.

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Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Ed. William L. Andrews and William S. McFeely. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1997.

Edwards, Audrey. "Making the Case for Teaching Our Boys to ... 'Bring Me Home a Black Girl.'" 75 Arguments. Ed. Alan Ainsworth. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008. 340-44.

"Negro." Funk & Wagnalls American Dictionary. 1919.

Equivocation on Gay Marriage

OK, so this isn't really a writing sample, per se. Think of it as a response to Andrew Sullivan's article (and to those who write against his position).

Equivocation is an argumentative fallacy that uses a word in two different senses to create the impression of proof where none exists. Here's an example:

• Nothing is better than cheesecake.
• Breadcrumbs are better than nothing.
• Therefore, breadcrumbs are better than cheesecake.

(No, I didn't come up with that example myself. It's pretty good, though.)

The confusion comes because "nothing" is being used in two different senses. In the first statement, it means ne plus ultra: cheesecake is the highest that can be obtained. Top of the heap. No foods above it on the list. In the second it means "lack of food." Having breadcrumbs is better than being totally devoid of food.

Now to apply the equivocation idea to gay marriage. We often hear that allowing gays to marry will "destroy marriage." Well yes, it will, but not in the sense that some people imagine.

Marriage has already been destroyed a lot—at least in the sense that our previous definition has been replaced by a newer one. Parents no longer arrange the marriage of their minor children in order to unite two political units. Fathers no longer sell their daughters to the highest bidder. We no longer assume that a man can have multiple wives at the same time. More recently (certainly within the 20th century in America), there was a time when a husband could hold a wife in an undesirable marriage by refusing to grant her a divorce. All of these definitions have been destroyed, and the new paradigm is a more democratic union between two equals, not a master/subordinate relationship.

But when people hear that allowing gays to marry will "destroy marriage," they often take it to mean that heterosexuals will stop marrying, that existing marriages will become more unstable, and that in general people will hold marriage in lower esteem.

Sorry—that's already happened, courtesy of easy divorce, acceptance of unmarried couples living together and producing children, and a general feeling that marriage ties one down too much. Gays didn't do it.

And that easy equivalence of "redefining who may get married" with "make the whole marriage institution less viable" just doesn't hold. It's equivocation.

Summary of Andrew Sullivan

"The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage," by Andrew Sullivan, discusses the possibility of same-sex marriage becoming legal in the United States. Now that Canada has followed several other countries by legalizing gay marriage and several United States courts are considering provisions to loosen legal restrictions, real marriage (not a pseudo-marriage) has become a real possibility. This is a very conservative move because it will tend to foster stability within the gay community while encouraging family ties, something older gay people really regretted losing. The world is changing: under-30 straight people seem to have less difficulty accepting gay marriage so younger gay people will feel less social stigma about coming out and finding partners. The move toward gay marriage isn't really a religious issue, though; it's matter of civil law. Many religions already have marriage or divorce restrictions that are stricter than the civil law, so there should be no problem with them following their own conscience. The central issue is learning to respect even those we disagree with.

168 words

Quick Link for Fallacies

The Nizkor Project (a website dedicated to refuting Holocaust Denial Theories) has this helpful page discussing Fallacies of Argument. It's tempting to work my way through the Audrey Edwards article and see how many of the 42 fallacies are present in her short article, but I think I'll resist the temptation. I do intend, however, to write a short response to her article and post it here.

Reading Response

"Does Race Exist?"

I have to admit to being racially confused. I grew up in suburban Washington, D.C., in the late 1950s (well south of the Mason-Dixon Line) and remember racially segregated restaurants and motels. My deeply prejudiced parents and my environment should have produced a bigot, but one of my most beloved teachers was José Garcia, whose hometown was Austin, Texas. He was about as Hispanic as anyone can be, yet I saw him as white. I didn't see any racial difference between myself and a couple of Japanese kids in my class either. It was during my childhood that the District police, frustrated with the traditional driver's license racial designations of W, N, O, and I (White, Negro, Oriental, and American Indian) instituted photo driver's licenses so officers wouldn't have to figure out whether a mixed-heritage person actually belonged to this particular card. And yet, with my East-coast delicacy, it always seemed gauche to talk about race, especially with someone whose heritage was obviously different from my own.

All of this is a long preamble to point out point out why the title of this article attracted my attention. It also points out why I felt relieved that some of my gut-level thinking turns out to be true: there ARE legitimate differences between people groups; American Blacks ARE difficult to classify; simplistic categories such as skin color ARE pretty much irrelevant. And one more, implied at the end of the article: political correctness DOES muddy the waters when we are trying to answer medical questions that are related to race.

I'm an English teacher, not a medical researcher, so even though this article was written for the mass-market Scientific American, some of the technical stuff flew right over my head. After three readings, I'm not yet sure I have the whole business of the Alus nailed down. I'm not sure that matters. What does matter is that we can begin to talk to each other without panic.

I remember when The Bell Curve was published. It was denounced as a piece of bigotry, and then the subject seemed to simply drop. What should have happened instead was the kind of discussion we see in Bamshad and Olson's article. First a discussion of what we really mean when we apply racial labels, followed by a discussion of how mixed the globe (and especially the USA) has become, and finally an attempt to unravel causes and effects (in the case of The Bell Curve, causes for low performance on standardized tests). Perhaps incidence of sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, and diabetes is a little less threatening to discuss than racially determined intelligence level. At any rate, I'm glad for a clear-headed discussion of what race is really about.

Plot Summary

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

The movie opens with Harry's cousin Dudley taunting him at a playground. Soon, however Dudley has problems of his own: Dementors from Azkaban attack the pair and only Harry's magic can save them. For the offense of underage performing of magic (and in the presence of a non-magic person), Harry is put on trial and only narrowly escapes. Early in the movie, three opposing groups are defined: Voldemort, the evil wizard and his followers; Dumbledore and the Order of the Phoenix, who oppose Voldemort; and the Ministry of Magic, personified by Cornelius Fudge and Dolores Umbridge, who claim that Voldemort doesn't exist and that talk of his return is simply a façade Dumbledore has contrived to conceal his own attempt to seize power. Umbridge arrives at Hogwarts at the beginning of the term and quickly rises from Dark Arts Master to High Inquisitor to Headmaster, while Harry and his friends suffer under her increasingly strict rules. Harry and his friends organize "Dumbledore's Army," sort of a student auxiliary of the Order of the Phoenix, so they can actually learn how to perform spells to combat dark magic, rather than simply reading about them in books. Harry has seen Voldemort attacking Phoenix members in a series of visions, and when he finally sees an attack on Sirius Black, he gathers several friends for the journey to the Ministry of Magic. There, they confront Voldemort and his followers in a final climactic battle. This is where we learn of the prophecy that neither Harry nor Voldemort can survive while the other lives. As the movie closes, Voldemort fails in his attempt to possess Harry, and the world is temporarily safe again.

Informal Definitional Argument

This isn't a formal Definitional paper, just a few thoughts that might turn into one.

When I was a boy, I was, like many boys, fascinated with cars. I often spent my pocket money on car magazines, so I remember the discussion about whether certain cars were "true sports cars." Chevrolet had their first Corvettes out, and Ford was selling its first Thunderbird (which shows just how old I am, since I was obviously reading magazines in 1956), so the automotive purists were debating whether these new cars could be called "sports cars." This, of course, led to the question, "What is a true sports car?"

• Two seats? (No. Several very unsporty cars, such as the Plymouth Business Coupe were two-seaters.)
• Built low to the ground? (How low is "low"? There were some pretty low Studebakers.)
• Floor shift? (Many European economy sedans had floor shift at the time.)

The purists were really trying to somehow keep out the Corvettes and Thunderbirds, but let in the MGs and Triumphs. They finally hit on door handles! If you look at pictures of old MGs, Triumph TR2s and Morgans, none of them had door handles. They had canvas tops and flimsy side curtains, and the driver was supposed to simply push that side curtain open, reach inside, and open the car with the inside door handle. That's what made it a sports car! You couldn't lock it. The Corvettes and Thunderbirds offered genuine hard tops, roll-up windows, and lockable doors.

Then Triumph (whose credentials as a sports car were unquestioned) came out with the TR3. It had more power and DOOR HANDLES!

Looking back, it's interesting that the definition never focused on the car's abilities or purpose. Cars such as the early BMWs and Volvos (which routinely won road rallies) couldn't be called "true sports cars" because they had rear seats, heaters, and door locks. It was all focused on a tiny bit of trivia.

Make It Go Faster by Yelling

The scene is actually quite common. It requires three players, minimum: the intractable object (flowers, furnace, or traffic light), the desperate person who needs some action now, and the amused (or frustrated) bystander who realizes that all the noise and action on the part of Desperate won't make anything happen more quickly. Consider these scenes (all from my personal experience in the past month):

A teenager who is frustrated at not being able to perform a tricky Nintendo jump yells at the TV screen and throws the controller against the wall. (Will a broken controller make the jump more effectively?)

A friend who was borrowing my apartment thought it was too cold, so he pushed the thermostat up to 80 to make it warm up faster.

Frustrated by my slow pace on the Interstate (only 70 in a 65 zone), the driver behind me flashes his lights, zooms around, cuts in front of me, and exits—so he can wait at a red light at the end of the off-ramp.

This is all a version of the old saying, "A watched pot never boils." With a given amount of heat, that quantity of water will take the same amount of time to boil, whether you are standing there yelling at it or doing something else entirely. Some things just are what they are (to borrow a cliché). The genius Japanese programmer who made the Nintendo game doesn't know (or care) about the kid's frustration, and neither does the game itself. It's made to do what it does, waiting for the exact sequence of keystrokes so that jump will execute. My electric baseboard heat is either on or it's off. Set it to 70 or set it to 90—it will cover the ground between 65 degrees and 70 in exactly the same time. And speaking of 65 and 70, the guy who drives an Interstate like a NASCAR race can rarely shave more than a few seconds off his trip because most of us travel about the same speed and we keep getting in his way.

We would like to believe we can intimidate the world into cooperation. It seemed to work when we were kids on the playground, so we keep trying it. Citizens yell at helpless government employees at the Welfare Department when a claim has been denied. Mothers yell at principals and school board members when their kids fail courses. But ask yourself whether it really works. When was the last time a baseball coach got an umpire to change a call?

For my part, I try to act the role of the Amused Bystander. When the computer (or video game) doesn't do what I want, I stop and take a second look. I ask how things like furnaces and stoves work, so I know whether to hope for more action if I change the setting. And I use the toilet before I leave work, so that extra nanosecond on the Interstate really doesn't matter very much to me.

Movie Review

Order of the Phoenix—only for members

I guess I'm an oddity among Harry Potter fans. I'm an English professor (which should mean that I always compare Harry with Shakespeare), and I saw the movies before I read the books. I'm not like one of my colleagues who has been complaining about the Lord of the Rings movies for years because they "left out the important stuff" and didn't match up with his imagined landscape. I had no imagined landscape of Hogwarts aside from the material in the movies. To me, Harry will always look like Daniel Radcliffe.

For a Harry Potter nut like me, a new movie is always a treat.

Last summer, a friend and I were among the first to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when it hit the movie houses. It was great stuff. Kids zoomed around on brooms. Fire shot out of wands. We updated the old cliché of smart kids triumphantly defeating stodgy adult stupidity. My friend whined a bit about inaccuracies, but I didn't let that bother me. I even overlooked the age discrepancies—Radcliffe and the other principals are all 18 (and look it), but they are playing 14-year-olds (and people in the movie keep mentioning their ages, apparently in an attempt to convince us that these strapping young men and women are still in their early teens).

Then I read the book.

Mind you, it's quite a book (870 pages) to cram into a movie, even a long movie. The book plods along slowly, but I think it's supposed to. It's the story of the bureaucratic machinery of the Ministry of Magic steadfastly eroding the fighting spirit of those who oppose the Dark Lord through an endless series of regulations and interferences. There's something about Cornelius Fudge that reminds me of Neville Chamberlain. Fudge's refusal to deal with Voldemort somehow parallels Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Adolph Hitler. It all makes for a richly-textured book, but one without a great deal of fireworks or magic until the end.

Then I got the DVD.

Eagerly I slipped it into the player, only half-remembering the movie from last summer. While it's a great tale and a lot of fun, I kept being amazed at how little the movie actually says. Who is that woman with the changing hair color? Why do people start believing in Harry again? Why is Harry so upset when he dreams about the snake attacking Mr. Weasley? Over and over—even more than in previous movies—details appear that only make sense to someone who has read the book.

I'm not like my friend the LOTR nut (who has never forgiven the movie makers for dropping Tom Bombadil). I realize that some complexities of the book (for example, the whole subplot of the centaurs) aren't even necessary for the main flow of the plot.

Movies are ultimately visual, and need to be simple and fast-paced. We would never have endured a movie that conveyed the long, grinding oppression that we feel in the book. But we are rewarded with the scenes of Mr. Filch nailing up dozens and dozens of framed proclamations and fruitlessly spying on the kids. And can anything ever be as deliciously scary as the noseless white face of Voldemort?

I just wish would stand on its own, though, and not act like a series of wonderful illustrations for the book.