Endless Knots

Medal of Freedom for the Freedom Fighters 50 years later

 

Next Monday, November 24, the three young men murdered by the KKK in Mississippi on June 21, 1964, will receive the Medal of Freedom from President Obama at The White House. Members of the families of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner will be there to accept the award, including my friend from college days, David Goodman. See his ongoing work with the Andrew Goodman Foundation.

The poignant note: None of their parents lived to see this day. Andy's father was the first to die, just a few years after he was killed, then Mickey Schwerner's father, then Schwerner's mother, then James Chaney's mother in 2007 (unable to find reference to his father's death), followed just a few months later, by Carolyn Goodman (post on her memorial service here.) Imagine if you can (I can't) the horror of being those parents, their children's whereabouts unknown for six weeks until their bodies were discovered mutilated in a ditch.

None of the killers convicted in the first trial served longer than six years of their sentences; in 2005, Edgar Ray Killen (yes, that's his name--"You can't make this stuff up," David said on the phone during the trial), who was described as the mastermind of the executions, was convicted of three counts of manslaughter on the 41st anniversary of the crime and is serving three consecutive 20-year terms. Mickey Schwerner's widow, Rita Bender, who was in MIssissippi as a civil rights worker herself when the murders happened, had the poise to testify at Killen's trial.

I've written a number of posts about the Goodmans. I met David the year after Andy was killed and just a short time after my own father died suddenly. Grief can create indelible bonds and so we have remained friends all these years. I can't wait to see the pictures, David.

World Blogging Tour thanks to BlarneyCrone #WBT

So apparently there's a movement of sorts, passing the blogging baton from poster to poster, under the rubric "World Blogging Tour." The runner who's just come up on me is BlarneyCrone herself, Liz Barron, who's shown up here before. And here. And elsewhere but alas not the point of this post. My job is to reply to the following queries, one of scores, hundreds, thousands, well, at least four bloggers, including Liz (who answered here) participating:

What am I working on?

While I've been blogging less in the past few months, I've been writing more, finishing up some old pieces, including short stories, revising a novel, rough drafting a memoir, and applying to contests and residencies. I'm at the start of a year-long self-imposed writing intensive, which I've been waiting to begin since I was, say, 16.

I got the idea for the novel/trilogy I'm working on walking past the North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, site of one of the early battles of the American Revolution. The novel has nothing to do with that but the nearby visitor center (it's now a national park site) has a bookstore that sells the work of famous Concord writers, yup, those pesky Transcendentalists, among them Ms Margaret Fuller, who was not of Concord but spent much time in it. There, on Patriots Day, in 2004, a Massachusetts-only holiday that the rest of the world knows as Boston Marathon Day, I found a small booklet written by Carolyn Wells Healy Dall, containing her recollections of the famous "Conversations" that Margaret convened in Boston in the late 1830s-early 1840s. By the time we were back in the parking lot, I'd conceived the idea for a story, which turned into the first volume of the novel, which has spawned a second...

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

This question raises so many others that I can barely answer it. Genre? Having written business books, articles, humor, poetry, children's stories, literary fiction, satire, and whatever this blogging thing (now in its 9th year) is, I'll go with "completely."  

Why do I write what I do? 

Phrases and sentences are always running through my head. Before a thought is complete, I'm often rewriting it. Titles appear as I'm trying to park the car, choose an item from the grocery shelf, click on a website. I write out of compulsion and desire, often with someone in mind whom I imagine is interested. (Are you? Only you know for sure.)

Much more wants to be written than is and I spend a good amount of time castigating myself for not writing more. 

So why do I write what I do? Because this configuration of molecules, born of New York parents in a small Pennsylvania Dutch town not far from Philadelphia, is passing through its unique spacetime, absorbing, shedding, observing, ignoring, and desperately trying to make sense of this confusing wonder called life. That's why.

How does my writing process work?

I write very quickly, typing as fast as I can, then stop due to time constraints, hunger, an interruption, or because I'm suddenly pleased to see that I've gotten 1000 words out. Then I go back before going on, retreading the same words. A "final first draft" for me could have 30 or 40 passes before the end. This is probably not the best way to write but it's the only way I've ever written. It's as if starting at the beginning gives me the momentum I need to leap ahead. Although I want to get everything out as quickly as possible, I hold on to material for eons, which means I have cartons and cartons of unfinished stuff. My hope is to get a lot of that material into circulation in the months to come.

Now, according to Liz, I'm supposed to pass the baton to four other bloggers. Here goes, Bill Ives, whose blogging helped get me started, the inimitable Alex Bain, Myfanwy Collins, to whom very good writing things are happening, and to Jon Keller, author of Of Sea and Cloud, who's just started blogging.

Megan wins a Pulitzer for Margaret

If they'd been awarding Pulitzers during her lifetime, Margaret Fuller surely would have been deserving -- first in nonfiction for the ground-breaking books she wrote (including Woman in the Nineteenth Century) and in journalism for her insightful and daring reporting that she did on the Roman Revolution of 1848 for the New York Tribune. Well, let's be honest: given where woman was in the 19th century, she probably wouldn't have received the highest writing honors but thanks to the talented Megan Marshall, her name is in big lights these days.

For any of us who know her, happiness abounds for Megan Marshall's having won this year's Pulitzer in biography for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. It took chuztpah to write a biography of Fuller after so many others -- I don't know the full count of the body of bios but it's got to be at least 50, some superb, some not so superb. Megan's falls into the former category, with her having chosen and faithfully executed her desire to have history read like a novel. Many a biographer has tried this but not all succeed where Megan has.

I am so happy for her. Megan and I met as a result of her having written her Pulitzer-finalist biography of The Peabody Sisters. I told this story here seven years ago. Shortly after she began work on the Fuller book, we arranged to meet again (also at Whole Foods -- you have to click the link to understand). Megan was asking questions of people like me, people for whom Fuller has served as an inspiration. It was an interesting way for her to be gathering insight into Fuller because there are so many people like us.

Forty years after I first discovered her in the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women, Margaret Fuller is with me still as I progress with the second volume of a novel-trilogy that I'm writing about her and her contemporary counterparts, "Woman in the 21st-Century." I am grateful to Megan for this too as she's provided many new windows into this eternal soul.

"I need something to eat" -- Roland's reflection on the same

Walking the streets of New York is a game of dodgeball. If it isn't a busker in the subway or a homeless vet on the corner or an activist with a clipboard, it's a person, like the one who approached me at the corner of Park Place and Vanderbilt in Prospect Heights last Thursday. I'd just come from a delicious meal with Daughter #2 at Cheryl's Global Soul, an extra-good and reasonably priced family fave; we'd had a lovely time and I was plenty full.

She was probably my age, maybe even 10 years younger, with a makeshift cast on her foot, a cane, a tattered coat, and large gaps between her teeth. I can't remember if she apologized first but however she approached me, it wasn't threatening. Just sad. She said the obvious: "I need something to eat." And because the received wisdom on the streets is that you "shouldn't" just give people money because, of course, they're all junkies and drunks, she was a step ahead. "You can buy it for me." Embarrassed at the wealth of riches in my wallet -- credit cards, Metro cards, and the almighty cash -- I reached right in. My impulse was to give it all to her but I didn't though I gave her the most I've ever handed out in a situation like this: a twenty. 

It happened right here (Google Street View)

She was so diminished that I'm not certain she took in that she could buy a couple of meals with that (in my mother's newly hip hometown, probably 1.5) but thanked me and shuffled off. I wanted to go with her, buy her several meals, find her an apartment and a job, and reform the entire economic system that results in her being where she is and me being where I am. Not to mention the Iraq War vet sitting on 23rd St in Manhattan the next morning with a big sign saying who he was and holding up his Army ID in case anyone would think someone would impersonate such a person. I'm sure it's possible but if ever anyone looked the part...

I didn't drop a dime for him or the half-dozen others I saw; maybe three dozen because at a certain point you have to screen it out or the pathos becomes overwhelming, paralytic. Big cities magnify the divisions and few places render them in greater 3D than New York.

All of which is prelude to Roland Merullo's reporting ("The table of the hungry") on the hornet's nest of greed and stupidity that is going on in Washington at the moment, making many more streets full of people like my friend from last Thursday. And reservations. Here (Boston Globe opinion page) he confronts a similar situation at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Roland says it all so well and with such precision. His lede:

I’ve been thinking lately about an expression I once heard from a Russian friend: “The full to the table of the hungry do not go.” I suppose it’s on my mind because of the news from Washington: the well-fed insisting on political grandstanding they surely know will cause great hardship to the poorest among us. It’s quite a sight, isn’t it, men and women earning six-figure salaries and pontificating about the need for cuts to programs that overwhelmingly give succor to the worst-off — the poor, the ill, the handicapped, the helpless. Then you see these same folks making a public spectacle of kneeling in prayer and asking God to help our nation. Where I come from we have a word for that. It is “hypocrisy.”

Lifetime Learning in Newton -- beginning Sept 16

I got one of those delicious little gigs this summer, the kind that's satisfying to do, short in duration, and which puts you in touch with great people. Such was the situation when my friend, Ed Hauben,director of Newton Community Education (my hometown, the one and only Garden City, Newton, Massachusetts, just outside Boston for my global friends), asked me if I could find speakers for Newton's Lifetime Learning program.

The Dr. George Altman Distinguished Speaker Series has been going for 34 (!) years, drawing scores of local notables and listeners from 40-some surrounding communities. The program is aimed at the "older folk," people from their late-60s to late-90s, and it draws crowds up to 250! Former Mass Governor Mike Dukakais is emblematic of the type of person who speaks. And, the program is paired with the Harriet Altman Classical Music Performance Series. Here's a link to the brochure, which includes the music program as well.

So if you fit the profile (Gen W? or before, i.e. boomer and beyond), mark your calendars for Monday mornings, beginning Sept 16, and head for Wilson Chapel at Andover Newton Theological Seminary. For the record, I "sourced" the speakers through networking: first I wrote to a handful of friends whom I knew would be great; then I wrote to another handful of people whom I knew would know great speakers. Kudos to Ray Elman, who recommended two of those below: Denise Blumenthal and Stephen Kinzer. Ed Hauben knew Bob Gerst; Ruth Nemzoff and Judith Kurland are friends of mine; and Marion Stoddart is a friend of my sister-in-law, Susan Stamps. Here's the list of speakers -- all very interesting! I'll be there for some if not all of the sessions. See you there?

• Ruth Nemzoff, Brandeis Scholar and author, on intergenerational relationships
• Judith Kurland, Director, UMass Boston Center for Community Democracy, on what to look for in candiates
• Denise Blumenthal, Director, WGBH Education Department, on educational technology
• Bob Gerst, Mass College of Art, Liberal Arts Chair, on the movies
• Stephen Kinzer, veteran NY Times correspondent and author, on the Dulles brothers
• Marion Stoddart, 85-year-old activist, on "The Work of 1000" 

 

Sylvia Nasar's statement about her suit against Columbia

Photo by Dario Cantatore/Getty Images from NY Times, March 19, 2013

Earlier this week, Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind and a tenured professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, filed suit against Columbia "accusing the university of misdirecting $4.5 million in funds over the last decade," according to Christine Haughney's article in the NY Times.

The suit arises from Nasar's appointment in 2000 as the John S. and James L. Knight professor of business journalism at Columbia and claims, among other charges, that while Knight provided $1.5m for endowing the chair she holds, the university failed to provide matching funds required by the grant. According to the complaint, Columbia instead paid her salary out of the Knight funds and failed to meet a number of other stipulations of the agreement, including supporting research, which, the suit says, she had to pay for out of pocket.

It's a bold move and a difficult thing to do, i.e. a lone professor is bringing a suit against one of the biggest, best endowed, and most powerful universities in the world. Sylvia, who's been a close friend since we met on our first day as students at Antioch College, has issued a statement, which I'm posting here with her approval:

Statement by Sylvia Nasar re: 

Nasar v. Trustees of Columbia University

 

Filing a lawsuit against Columbia, and having concerns about a key source of funding -- the Knight endowment -- become public, is not a course of action one chooses. But after more than two and a half years of attempts to engage university officials to discuss, and remedy, the issues described in the complaint, Columbia’s refusal to respond has, regrettably, led to this painful step. 

What’s at stake here: a great university must be able to assure donors that it will honor its promises. The default mode of a great journalism school must be one of transparency.

I love Columbia and intend to remain the Knight professor of business journalism until I retire.

The Knight Chair is a unique opportunity to make a difference in the way economics and financial reporters are trained in the digital age.  

In creating the Chair, Columbia’s, and Knight’s, original intentions were the best. And, partly, they were fulfilled.

In crucial ways, unfortunately, they were not and, as a result, Columbia has short-changed the very students and faculty the Trustees pledged to support. For that reason, I feel compelled to take this action.

 

Danny Hauben's Beautiful Bronx

Yesterday's New York Times profiles Daniel (to those lucky enough to know and love him, Danny) Hauben, the realist/muralist/"touched with whimsy" (Times description) painter who won the commission to create the art for the new Bronx Community College Library. Stupendous.

The Times interactive page shows four of Danny's works with the ability to mouse over and see them in more detail. Click-worthy, for sure.

This photo, from Danny's website, says what words cannot, him painting, what he's painting, and how he paints it.

 

It was my good luck to meet Danny when he was a teenager. His brother, Eddie Hauben, and his wife Jan (Ward) Hauben, were our first friends in Boston, whom we met in the context of bringing Bucky Fuller to Boston to stage World Game here in the summer of 1970. The story, of course, has many twists to it -- Eddie worked for Bucky; Jan worked for Gus Jaccaci, a futurist who had previously been a Harvard admission's office who had tried to recruit my late husband, Jeff Stamps, to Harvard so that he would ski with the Harvard team. (FTR, he chose Dartmouth instead, where he lasted for less than a year--it was all-male then and far too conservative for him--before transferring to University of New Hampshire.) Gus was working at Boston College at the time and in his role as Arts Assistant to the President was able to sponsor World Game.

And it was evident from first meeting Danny that he was a major talent. Most people (everyone?) in our lifelong network of friends who grew out of that 1970 confluence of interests own Danny's pieces, including one of our house, a pastel from the perspective of the back yard, that has hung in the dining room since 1985 when I asked Danny to do it. Just superb.

Which all of this is.

"Make bureaucracy sexy"

Give yourself the gift of 12 minutes listening to Jennifer Pahlka's TED talk, "Coding a Better Government." She knows. Jen founded and is executive director of Code for America. Simple description: "Helps governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web."

 

I met Jen about five years ago when she called asking me to participate in what became Enterprise 2.0, then called Collaborate 2.0 ... I think. Liked her instantly. Plus she gave her daughter one of the all-time very cool names: Clementine.

We'll be posting more on this shortly but in the meantime listen to what she has to say. This great quote is at about 9 minutes.

 

 

Jazz/Art/NOLA via Ralston Crawford

My high school friend, Neelon Crawford, passed through recently on his way from South Pole-sium, a gathering of Antarctic "veterans of the ice, historians, authors, artists of various kinds, descendants of those who had staked their lives on the pursuit of science and exploration" (see David Hirzel's post) to New Orleans for the opening of "Ralston Crawford and Jazz," his father's show at the New Orleans Museum of Art (through Oct 14, 2012).

Neelon and his brother John Crawford, both fine artists in their own right, were there for the opening and surrounding festivities and did this NPR interview with Diane Mack explaining their father's love for and connection with New Orleans.

Here's a snippet from NOMA's page on the show, along with one of the photos.

Though he is often remembered for his pre-World-War II precisionist paintings of urban and industrial subjects, Ralston Crawford produced a significant body of work after 1949 inspired by the culture of New Orleans. This summer, NOMA will present Ralston Crawford and Jazz, an exhibition that considers the relationships between music, photography, painting, drawing and film as they intersect in Crawford’s work in New Orleans. Organized by the Sheldon Art Galleries, in Saint Louis, MO, the exhibition includes over 150 photographs, prints, paintings, drawings and films, many never before published.

Different aspects of New Orleans have inspired many artists and writers, but for Crawford, New Orleans jazz music had the most profound effect. In his work, Crawford imported the elements of jazz—syncopation, polyphony, and improvisation—and transformed them into visual strategies. Thinking along these lines, Crawford produced photographs of jazz musicians that are as punchy and rhythmic as the music that his subjects played. He made equally strong, graphic photographs of the cemeteries, weathered buildings, signage, and boats at dock. Always inventive, Crawford also interpreted these same scenes in lithographs, paintings, and films. This exhibition brings together works in all of these media and, in some cases, displays the painting, lithograph, or drawing, next to the photograph that inspired it.

 

Ben Taylor's Vietnam Rising

As a reporter, my friend Ben Taylor traveled around the world, picking up on the nuances of geopolitics, among other heady pursuits. Now he's written an insightful piece about Vietnam, to which he recently traveled. He took very good notes and his article in this morning's Boston Globe, "Vietnam Rising," is a must read for all of us who lived through what the Vietnamese call "the American War." I first heard that reference from a Vietnamese ex-pat some years ago and that alone tells its own story. When I visited Laos 15 years ago on a "mission" for the UN Development Program, we went to a cafe along the Mekong River. I couldn't reconcile sitting along its banks without expecting strafe bombing and "Viet Cong" to rise from its waters, this after the war had been over for more than two decades. Vietnam's indelible mark on all of us from that era remains -- thank you, Ben, for bringing it into focus in a new way.