Richard Ligon may have been a failed planter, but he was a successful promoter of plantations. His book on Barbados was reprinted in 1673, and, according to April Hatfield, owned by planters in Virginia. She believes his influence there was enhanced by the presence of his brother Thomas, who was a cousin and business partner of William Berkeley. In the late 1650's, Thomas bought 2,000 acres, including some land from William Byrd. Hatfield also thinks Thomas Willoughby may have amplified Richard Ligon’s importance, since Willoughby was the agent for Ligon’s Barbado’s partner, Thomas Modyford.
Ligon didn’t create the structure of the single crop plantation with a cheap, intimidated labor force. That probably happened in Tudor Ireland. What he did was describe how successful men responded to failure within a culturally accepted framework.
When men arrived in Barbados they substituted tobacco in the equation, following the example of Virginia and Maryland. They also replaced the subdued Irish with gangs of indentured servants. They were so successful they failed to make any money: when planters in every colony sent tobacco to London, prices dropped from the glut.
In response to the crisis, Alison Games reports Barbados planters agreed in the 1630's to stop growing tobacco for two years. The problems were repeated in 1640 with a poor cotton crop. That was the year James Holdipp, a land speculator who made money from cotton, tried sugar. Within five years, James Drax had made the crop a success and begun the substitution of slaves for indentured servants.
Thomas Kuhn suggests that when an intellectual structure like the idea of a plantation is new, it’s pliable enough that individuals are rewarded for applying it to new situations. It’s only after time, when there’s less scope for innovation, that the cultural pattern begins to ossify and men begin to blame their failures on their methods rather than examining accepted wisdom.
The tendency to look to the past, rather than experiment was reinforced by religion. Growers in Barbados came from many traditions, including Anglican, Irish Catholic and Scots Presbyterian. As their animosity to Drax shows, most were hostile to John Calvin and Puritanism.
However, while they did not accept Calvin’s idea that an irrational God had determined, before they were born, if they were saved or damned, they did accept the corollary, that success was a sign of grace. Thus, when they were confronted with the failure to make money with a plantation, their response would have been, like good Christians, to reexamine their past actions to see what they had done wrong to violate the natural order of good crops.
In the 1640's, the successful planters were the ones like Drax with the mental abilities to master the distillation process. When he turned to a captive labor force he could train and retain, the flow of knowledge to future small land holders stopped. When Humphrey Walrond was stoking frustrations to find support for the royalists in 1650, many complained Drax was hiding his knowledge, and therefore causing their failure.
Failure was built into the use of sugar because the plant exhausts the soil. For men who did not have the German or Japanese sense of maintaining the quality of land, that meant they needed a constant supply of new land. The solution for failure was migration, more land, more slaves to work that land, and more debt. In 1640, men left Barbados for Trinidad. Then they tried Antigua and Jamaica, then South Carolina. It was a solution with a built in limits: usable land is not an infinite commodity, and after the banning of the slave trade by the British in 1807, neither were slaves.
Kuhn suggests the longer the period of unpredictable results, the more men cling to their ideas, and the more likely a solution, when it comes, will come from an outsider who simply ignores the existing set of solutions. Such concepts are recognized as threats, and, Kuhn says, only become dominant when the followers of the new become more common that defenders of the old.
And so, tobacco and cotton farmers in Barbados attacked Drax before following him.
In the American south, cotton farmers resented the control of New England mill operators who set commodity prices, and thus limited their rewards. Rather than expand their concept of a self-sufficient plantation to one that included its own textile mill, they sought more land to produce bigger crops, unmindful of the arithmetic recognized by building contractors.
When Henry Ford decided the solution to retaining a skilled labor force wasn’t to enslave them, but to pay them more, and noticed the consequence was that he produced more customers, plantation owners were outraged. Their whole economy was built on the cheap labor required to increase their production on new, cheap land for a mill industry that kept commodity prices low, especially after World War I when fashions changed and demand for cotton dropped.
When they finally did bring mills into the south they were substituted into the existing formula. They offered cheap land, meaning few taxes or regulations, and controlled labor. However, there turn out to be limits to how cheap those can be made, and industry owners who have adopted their solution have migrated to areas with even cheaper labor. Again, their failure was inherent in their success: when you look at the areas with serious economic problems today they are along the fall line in the Carolinas where the textile mills have left, and those left behind again are blaming the successful rather than trying to solve the contractor’s conundrum.
Notes:
Cahill, Hugh. "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1673 Edition," King’s College Book of the Month, September 2007.
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Showing posts with label Creativity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Creativity. Show all posts
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Sunday, November 08, 2009
South Carolina - Sugar Production
Some try to rationalize the existence of African slaves as necessary to do work that Europeans could not do in a tropical environment where heat and disease killed so many. Many forget, in the time before central heating, winter cold was as fatal as summer heat. Before men discovered germs, diseases killed everywhere and life was short: Richard Ligon arrived in Barbaros during a yellow fever epidemic and in London during the plague.
We also tend to forget the nature of farm work before John Deer and Cyrus McCormick. When sugar cane was introduced into Barbados as a cash crop in the 1640's, there was little about the cultivation and milling that was something indentured servants weren’t already doing.
Most of the labor was used to clear land, plant canes, keep away weeds, and harvest. The work was hard, but it probably wasn’t any worse that what white men were already doing, and continued to do into the twentieth century in the American south, for tobacco.
The harvested canes were taken to a mill where cut up pieces were crushed by rollers and the juice collected. The rollers were turned by oxen who walked an endless circle. The mill required men who understood machinery well enough to keep it clean and repair it when something broke. These, no doubt, were some of the skilled trades the Portuguese recruited from Europe.
The mill operation also required men who understood how to raise, train, and work animals. Some of the indentured servants, especially those with some knowledge of the agricultural trades, probably already knew this, and would have considered it a better job than working in the fields.
The third step was entirely new - the boiling of extracted syrup until sugar precipitated out. The heat was intense in the enclosed buildings where a fire was kept stoked to keep the liquid cooking. However, the actual work of skimming the impurities from the pans and transferring the liquid from pan to pan had to be easier than clearing land or harvesting cane.
The problem with sugar, or for that matter tobacco and cotton, is that it needs more labor than one man can provide, but are only profitable if labor costs are low. Families didn’t exist in Barbados at the time sugar was introduced, so small landowners couldn’t rely on their sons. Partnerships were usually only a few men, who could not produce enough to live well.
The problem for the would-be planter was how to avoid the trap of the local construction contractor whose costs are fixed and rise when work increases. They could and did make small improvements in the process, but not enough to cover the costs of production and debt.
When Ligon arrived in 1647, men were just mastering the first two steps. He noted, they originally cut the cane too soon, when it was a year old, but learned to wait three more months. They also needed help knowing the best way to plant the canes and harden the rollers. These things they could, and did, learn from men who traveled to Brazil.
They were still having problems with distillation. He said many of the early barrels were more molasses than sugar, and weren’t worth shipping to England. By the time he left, three years later, many had solved that problem as well.
Once men had mastered the production of sugar and all producers were equally proficient, it meant the only ways men could increase their profits was to increase production by lowering the price of land and labor. The one led to the perpetual demand for cheap or free land. Within years, men were leaving Barbados for other islands.
The other led to the search for cheap, reliable labor. Wage labor was impossible in a frontier society where men could only get food and shelter from plantation owners. Indentured servants had proved a problem, and became a bigger problem for large landowner when they were free and competing for land and export markets on a small island. Convicts would be tried, but they were probably even less tractable. Indians flat refused to work, or died when they were imported from other places.
Slaves, seen through the prism of visits to Brazil and the enthusiastic advice of Dutch traders willing to provide them at a price, seemed like the only innovation that might break the cost cycle and provide reward for effort. What now is seen as a great moral wrong, then was seen as progress.
Notes:
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
We also tend to forget the nature of farm work before John Deer and Cyrus McCormick. When sugar cane was introduced into Barbados as a cash crop in the 1640's, there was little about the cultivation and milling that was something indentured servants weren’t already doing.
Most of the labor was used to clear land, plant canes, keep away weeds, and harvest. The work was hard, but it probably wasn’t any worse that what white men were already doing, and continued to do into the twentieth century in the American south, for tobacco.
The harvested canes were taken to a mill where cut up pieces were crushed by rollers and the juice collected. The rollers were turned by oxen who walked an endless circle. The mill required men who understood machinery well enough to keep it clean and repair it when something broke. These, no doubt, were some of the skilled trades the Portuguese recruited from Europe.
The mill operation also required men who understood how to raise, train, and work animals. Some of the indentured servants, especially those with some knowledge of the agricultural trades, probably already knew this, and would have considered it a better job than working in the fields.
The third step was entirely new - the boiling of extracted syrup until sugar precipitated out. The heat was intense in the enclosed buildings where a fire was kept stoked to keep the liquid cooking. However, the actual work of skimming the impurities from the pans and transferring the liquid from pan to pan had to be easier than clearing land or harvesting cane.
The problem with sugar, or for that matter tobacco and cotton, is that it needs more labor than one man can provide, but are only profitable if labor costs are low. Families didn’t exist in Barbados at the time sugar was introduced, so small landowners couldn’t rely on their sons. Partnerships were usually only a few men, who could not produce enough to live well.
The problem for the would-be planter was how to avoid the trap of the local construction contractor whose costs are fixed and rise when work increases. They could and did make small improvements in the process, but not enough to cover the costs of production and debt.
When Ligon arrived in 1647, men were just mastering the first two steps. He noted, they originally cut the cane too soon, when it was a year old, but learned to wait three more months. They also needed help knowing the best way to plant the canes and harden the rollers. These things they could, and did, learn from men who traveled to Brazil.
They were still having problems with distillation. He said many of the early barrels were more molasses than sugar, and weren’t worth shipping to England. By the time he left, three years later, many had solved that problem as well.
Once men had mastered the production of sugar and all producers were equally proficient, it meant the only ways men could increase their profits was to increase production by lowering the price of land and labor. The one led to the perpetual demand for cheap or free land. Within years, men were leaving Barbados for other islands.
The other led to the search for cheap, reliable labor. Wage labor was impossible in a frontier society where men could only get food and shelter from plantation owners. Indentured servants had proved a problem, and became a bigger problem for large landowner when they were free and competing for land and export markets on a small island. Convicts would be tried, but they were probably even less tractable. Indians flat refused to work, or died when they were imported from other places.
Slaves, seen through the prism of visits to Brazil and the enthusiastic advice of Dutch traders willing to provide them at a price, seemed like the only innovation that might break the cost cycle and provide reward for effort. What now is seen as a great moral wrong, then was seen as progress.
Notes:
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Childhood Memories
Should an historian try to recreate a past era so completely the reader recognizes its very alienness or should he or she focus on those parts of the past that survive into the present and influence its form?
The first is the province of the historical novelist; the second drives the mystery writer.
A few years ago I took down a book by Hugh Walpole thinking then was perhaps the right time to read a genuine gothic novel. I didn’t think too much when it began with an adventure of an eight-year-old boy, but when I was half way through and the boy was only a few months older I realized I’d confused Hugh with Horace.
By then I was hooked on Jeremy, a series of childhood adventures published by Walpole in 1919. Nothing could be more removed from my experience, and yet every vignette rang true. Some were the events of psychological growth, when Jeremy got his first dog or when he realized he’d been tormenting his nurse. Others were just the things that happen, the first exposure to town life at the local fair or to the arts when his uncle took him to the theatre.
After each adventure I thought, yes, that’s how it was, not for Jeremy, but for me. The event wasn’t the same, but the experience was. Walpole wrote fiction, created an imaginary town from places he’d lived, yet he evoked the universal in those adventures.
I just finished Agatha Christie’s autobiography and the reading experience couldn’t have been more different.
She didn’t begin to write for an outside reader, but for herself in 1950 when she was back in Iraq with her husband after World War II. She says she didn’t know why she wanted, suddenly, to record the past, but I rather suspect it was the realization, that as she was turning 60, life as she had known it had changed dramatically during the war.
What’s obvious is that when she returned to it in 1965, at age 75, she was looking at the manuscript as a reminder of her past, not as a literary project. Indeed, her celebrity and her personal experiences prevented her from reworking the material. She knew that many would read it for errors, and so she was inhibited from reworking material the way the obscure Walpole could.
More she knew everyone wanted to know what led to her breakdown in 1926 after her husband announced he was in love with another woman and she had disappeared for a few days. She continually tells you she’s a private person, and the experience of being hounded by the media, omitted from this book, instead appeared in her novels when she focused on the horror of being wrongly suspected and the double villainy of a murderer who is willing to let an innocent person suffer for his crimes.
By the time she published her autobiography, Christie also had the view that "we are all the same people as were at three, six, ten or twenty years old." Youth is a time of inventing oneself and maturity occurs when "it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day."
And so, Christie focused on the points of continuity, her life of the imagination when she created dramas in her mind about some kittens, or later some girls. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember exactly what those stories were or how she created them, only that, in fact, she had done so. Her childhood of unrecallable events and ones unmentioned lest they be used to scout out her psychology makes for very dull reading.
The differences between Walpole and Christie are vast: the second was far more successful and more creative. Although both were writing immediately after wars, one was writing in his mid thirties when life was still unfolding as a series of new adventures, while the other was much older and seeing only what had survived the transformation of war.
Still, it’s Walpole who was the better writer of childhood because he was able to capture the inner life of the child. The older Christie was too wise to consider what she couldn’t recall had mattered very much after all.
The first is the province of the historical novelist; the second drives the mystery writer.
A few years ago I took down a book by Hugh Walpole thinking then was perhaps the right time to read a genuine gothic novel. I didn’t think too much when it began with an adventure of an eight-year-old boy, but when I was half way through and the boy was only a few months older I realized I’d confused Hugh with Horace.
By then I was hooked on Jeremy, a series of childhood adventures published by Walpole in 1919. Nothing could be more removed from my experience, and yet every vignette rang true. Some were the events of psychological growth, when Jeremy got his first dog or when he realized he’d been tormenting his nurse. Others were just the things that happen, the first exposure to town life at the local fair or to the arts when his uncle took him to the theatre.
After each adventure I thought, yes, that’s how it was, not for Jeremy, but for me. The event wasn’t the same, but the experience was. Walpole wrote fiction, created an imaginary town from places he’d lived, yet he evoked the universal in those adventures.
I just finished Agatha Christie’s autobiography and the reading experience couldn’t have been more different.
She didn’t begin to write for an outside reader, but for herself in 1950 when she was back in Iraq with her husband after World War II. She says she didn’t know why she wanted, suddenly, to record the past, but I rather suspect it was the realization, that as she was turning 60, life as she had known it had changed dramatically during the war.
What’s obvious is that when she returned to it in 1965, at age 75, she was looking at the manuscript as a reminder of her past, not as a literary project. Indeed, her celebrity and her personal experiences prevented her from reworking the material. She knew that many would read it for errors, and so she was inhibited from reworking material the way the obscure Walpole could.
More she knew everyone wanted to know what led to her breakdown in 1926 after her husband announced he was in love with another woman and she had disappeared for a few days. She continually tells you she’s a private person, and the experience of being hounded by the media, omitted from this book, instead appeared in her novels when she focused on the horror of being wrongly suspected and the double villainy of a murderer who is willing to let an innocent person suffer for his crimes.
By the time she published her autobiography, Christie also had the view that "we are all the same people as were at three, six, ten or twenty years old." Youth is a time of inventing oneself and maturity occurs when "it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day."
And so, Christie focused on the points of continuity, her life of the imagination when she created dramas in her mind about some kittens, or later some girls. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember exactly what those stories were or how she created them, only that, in fact, she had done so. Her childhood of unrecallable events and ones unmentioned lest they be used to scout out her psychology makes for very dull reading.
The differences between Walpole and Christie are vast: the second was far more successful and more creative. Although both were writing immediately after wars, one was writing in his mid thirties when life was still unfolding as a series of new adventures, while the other was much older and seeing only what had survived the transformation of war.
Still, it’s Walpole who was the better writer of childhood because he was able to capture the inner life of the child. The older Christie was too wise to consider what she couldn’t recall had mattered very much after all.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
South Carolina - Sugar Plantations
The biggest contribution Barbados made to South Carolina is the slave-based plantation economy, and all the social and legal controls that flowed from it.
What I’ve never quite understood is why plantations needed to be so large that they required enforced labor, be it indentured servants, captured Indians, or African slaves. It may simply be that size became a status symbol, especially after a few men were able to acquire such large tracts in Tudor Ireland. But, until the introduction of agricultural machinery in the nineteenth century, each additional acre of land brought under cultivation meant a proportional increase in labor hours, which in turn meant management problems that increased exponentially.
I’ve talked to several construction contractors who are puzzled that when their customers double their income doesn’t follow. Instead, they buy more materials, hire more employees, and personally work more hours. It was after that sort of momentum led to an unstable labor force in 1913 that Henry Ford began improving the assembly process itself.
It may be the scarcity of labor that limited the growth of farms in the area where I was raised in Michigan that influences my understanding. The early settlers weren’t that different from those who arrived in Barbados or South Carolina: land speculators and men with limited means, sometimes very junior members of important eastern families, looking for opportunity.
In Cameron, Patricia Averill found those who stayed on their claims for more than a few years became wheat farmers and those that did best usually had sons or other dependent family members to help. The speculators, who didn’t resell immediately, continually mortgaged their lands to newcomers, most of whom moved on, leaving speculators with their land and the accrued wealth from rents.
The first thing farmers needed was access to markets. In the earliest years, they drove wagons a hundred miles to Detroit to sell their harvest to traders shipping it east on Lake Erie and the Erie Canal. They welcomed the state’s efforts to build railroads, and didn’t prosper until those railroads were fully functional.
The second thing they needed was a local mill to grind their wheat for food. At the time, mills were turned by running water, and speculators had claimed all the potential sites before others even saw the land. The mill owners didn’t wish to own all the farm land that produced their raw material, and most farmers didn’t have the technical skills to build and operate their own mills.
From the very beginning, settlers from all economic classes assumed financial transactions would bind them together, that none were sufficient unto themselves.
In contrast, we’re told, when sugar production was introduced to Barbados from Brazil, it brought with it the assumption that each grower would have his own mill, and would need enough acres to justify the mill’s operation. The social structure of the island changed quickly when men with access to capital took over most of the land, and pushed out the men who’d been making a living on small holdings and weren’t willing to work for others for low wages.
Yet, large, self-sufficient plantations with captive labor weren’t inherent with sugar cane. The culture and technology for processing the crop was introduced to the Mediterranean by the Arabs when they expanded west after the death of Mohammed. The Portuguese took cuttings to the island of Madeira and then to Brazil where they improved the milling techniques; Antwerp became the primary refiner.
The large Portugese-Brazilian landowners, the senhores de engenbo, owned the mills which were maintained by skilled tradesmen recruited from Europe. They didn’t expect to raise all the cane needed to make their mills profitable. Instead, they made arrangements with small landowners, the lavradores de cana, to process their cane in exchange for a percentage. They also leased their spare land to poorer men as share croppers.
People at each level of production owned slaves, so slaves lived in smaller units. The wealth was distributed, but so was the risk of poor harvests, and the problems of labor management. To be sure there were contractual problems between mill owners and dependent farmers, but there are always problems when individuals need to co-operate.
The Brazilian model of the 1640's with its community of interest was more like Cameron in the 1830's than it was an antecedent for the self-sufficient, isolated units of South Carolina.
Notes:
Bethell, Leslie. Colonial Brazil, 1987.
What I’ve never quite understood is why plantations needed to be so large that they required enforced labor, be it indentured servants, captured Indians, or African slaves. It may simply be that size became a status symbol, especially after a few men were able to acquire such large tracts in Tudor Ireland. But, until the introduction of agricultural machinery in the nineteenth century, each additional acre of land brought under cultivation meant a proportional increase in labor hours, which in turn meant management problems that increased exponentially.
I’ve talked to several construction contractors who are puzzled that when their customers double their income doesn’t follow. Instead, they buy more materials, hire more employees, and personally work more hours. It was after that sort of momentum led to an unstable labor force in 1913 that Henry Ford began improving the assembly process itself.
It may be the scarcity of labor that limited the growth of farms in the area where I was raised in Michigan that influences my understanding. The early settlers weren’t that different from those who arrived in Barbados or South Carolina: land speculators and men with limited means, sometimes very junior members of important eastern families, looking for opportunity.
In Cameron, Patricia Averill found those who stayed on their claims for more than a few years became wheat farmers and those that did best usually had sons or other dependent family members to help. The speculators, who didn’t resell immediately, continually mortgaged their lands to newcomers, most of whom moved on, leaving speculators with their land and the accrued wealth from rents.
The first thing farmers needed was access to markets. In the earliest years, they drove wagons a hundred miles to Detroit to sell their harvest to traders shipping it east on Lake Erie and the Erie Canal. They welcomed the state’s efforts to build railroads, and didn’t prosper until those railroads were fully functional.
The second thing they needed was a local mill to grind their wheat for food. At the time, mills were turned by running water, and speculators had claimed all the potential sites before others even saw the land. The mill owners didn’t wish to own all the farm land that produced their raw material, and most farmers didn’t have the technical skills to build and operate their own mills.
From the very beginning, settlers from all economic classes assumed financial transactions would bind them together, that none were sufficient unto themselves.
In contrast, we’re told, when sugar production was introduced to Barbados from Brazil, it brought with it the assumption that each grower would have his own mill, and would need enough acres to justify the mill’s operation. The social structure of the island changed quickly when men with access to capital took over most of the land, and pushed out the men who’d been making a living on small holdings and weren’t willing to work for others for low wages.
Yet, large, self-sufficient plantations with captive labor weren’t inherent with sugar cane. The culture and technology for processing the crop was introduced to the Mediterranean by the Arabs when they expanded west after the death of Mohammed. The Portuguese took cuttings to the island of Madeira and then to Brazil where they improved the milling techniques; Antwerp became the primary refiner.
The large Portugese-Brazilian landowners, the senhores de engenbo, owned the mills which were maintained by skilled tradesmen recruited from Europe. They didn’t expect to raise all the cane needed to make their mills profitable. Instead, they made arrangements with small landowners, the lavradores de cana, to process their cane in exchange for a percentage. They also leased their spare land to poorer men as share croppers.
People at each level of production owned slaves, so slaves lived in smaller units. The wealth was distributed, but so was the risk of poor harvests, and the problems of labor management. To be sure there were contractual problems between mill owners and dependent farmers, but there are always problems when individuals need to co-operate.
The Brazilian model of the 1640's with its community of interest was more like Cameron in the 1830's than it was an antecedent for the self-sufficient, isolated units of South Carolina.
Notes:
Bethell, Leslie. Colonial Brazil, 1987.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Realism and Romanticism
Recently I started reading a novel by Marge Piercy, Braided Lives, that I abandoned after 160 pages because I really didn’t care about the sex life of the heroine and her oafish boyfriend as they got through a joyless freshmen year at the University of Michigan and a summer in Detroit.
I lived that life. If I read someone else’s experience, I want it leavened by perspective and I want it in a style better than my own.
In frustration, I took down a book from the shelf as different as I could find. I ended up with a movie promotion edition of Alexandre Dumas’ Camille written more than 130 years before. It was one strange object, a thick paged Grosset and Dunlap from 1927 with photographs from the Norma Talmage production set in the 1920's interspersed with Dumas’ 1840's text.
The first problem was language. I was never sure how much simplification had been done beyond translation from the French. However, since the plot concerned a "kept woman" with a friend who provided the narrator with information on the economics of such a life, I figured it couldn’t be too bowdlerized.
The second reading problem was the conventions of the genre. While Piercy wrote about her experiences in the first person, Dumas used a third person to narrate his personal story. The anonymous narrator retells the story of a man he met when he bought a book at Marguerite Gautier’s estate sale that the stranger had given her. The lady of the camellias’ final days are described through the journal she left with a friend.
By the end of 150 pages I was bored by Dumas and went to bed. The next evening I tried again, and resumed at the point where the narrative crosses the threshold of engagement to takes on its own compelling life. This engagement existed despite the fact that the story concerned a prostitute dying from tuberculosis who gave up her pampered life to life with a jealous young man who truly loved her only to be punished by his family for her earlier ways.
At the time it was published the stereotype was fresh, but its very success - by Wikipedia’s count at least 20 movies starring women like Theda Bara and Greta Garbo, as well theatrical adaptions with Eleanore Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Lillian Gish, and Tallulah Bankhead and the opera La Traviata - has rendered it too familiar.
So why does the one autobiographical novel work better than another? I can only think the distancing required by the romantic conventions makes it easier for the author to transform private experience into the public domain without destroying the reality of the personal for the author. The imaginative leap necessary to produce art is simply easier when one can deny it’s my true life.
I lived that life. If I read someone else’s experience, I want it leavened by perspective and I want it in a style better than my own.
In frustration, I took down a book from the shelf as different as I could find. I ended up with a movie promotion edition of Alexandre Dumas’ Camille written more than 130 years before. It was one strange object, a thick paged Grosset and Dunlap from 1927 with photographs from the Norma Talmage production set in the 1920's interspersed with Dumas’ 1840's text.
The first problem was language. I was never sure how much simplification had been done beyond translation from the French. However, since the plot concerned a "kept woman" with a friend who provided the narrator with information on the economics of such a life, I figured it couldn’t be too bowdlerized.
The second reading problem was the conventions of the genre. While Piercy wrote about her experiences in the first person, Dumas used a third person to narrate his personal story. The anonymous narrator retells the story of a man he met when he bought a book at Marguerite Gautier’s estate sale that the stranger had given her. The lady of the camellias’ final days are described through the journal she left with a friend.
By the end of 150 pages I was bored by Dumas and went to bed. The next evening I tried again, and resumed at the point where the narrative crosses the threshold of engagement to takes on its own compelling life. This engagement existed despite the fact that the story concerned a prostitute dying from tuberculosis who gave up her pampered life to life with a jealous young man who truly loved her only to be punished by his family for her earlier ways.
At the time it was published the stereotype was fresh, but its very success - by Wikipedia’s count at least 20 movies starring women like Theda Bara and Greta Garbo, as well theatrical adaptions with Eleanore Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Lillian Gish, and Tallulah Bankhead and the opera La Traviata - has rendered it too familiar.
So why does the one autobiographical novel work better than another? I can only think the distancing required by the romantic conventions makes it easier for the author to transform private experience into the public domain without destroying the reality of the personal for the author. The imaginative leap necessary to produce art is simply easier when one can deny it’s my true life.
Sunday, August 09, 2009
School Shootings
Gun violence has become so common, it rarely stays in the news for more than a few days. The ones that shocked me, Columbine and Virginia Tech, were the ones that could not be dismissed as individual anomalies but indicated institutional failure.
Most of us survived high school, and wondered what on earth was going on in Littleton. Some of the initial explanations, since disproved by Dave Cullen and Jeff Kass, were the ones that resonated with graduates who knew first hand the status system that allowed one group to scapegoat another or led people to feel persecuted when they were simply overlooked like the strongly religious.
But, we think, something had to fail for routine nastiness or teenage angst to propel Eric Harris into buying automatic weapons and luring Dylan Klebold into his maelstrom. Society’s verdict that they were psychopaths beyond help simply offers a self-serving label in place of recognizing a cultural or institutional failure.
At Virginia Tech we know a lot more, because the parents and school did not blind themselves to Seung-Hui Cho’s problems as people had done in Colorado. They simply had no idea what to do with someone who had stalked people and been diagnosed with mental problems, but could not be institutionalized or even expelled on probability.
The part that shocked me was the role of the creative writing program. Art is supposed to exist as a means people use to externalize and contain their demons, to explore what they know is inadmissible We know the biographies of too many published writers who drank or drugged themselves to death to still believe art is a cure, but we do still think it is a way to explore our worst feelings without letting them become too destructive.
I’ve never taken a creative writing class, and fall into that group that is skeptical about what possible job market a middling school like Virginia Tech hopes to serve with an entire major in creative writing and just what future they see for their graduates after they have provided themselves with employment.
I’ve taught English composition and realize the necessity of helping students learn to write a decent sentence and become knowledgeable enough about their writing to be able to edit themselves. I always stayed with prosaic, factual assignments because I believe the process is the same for all writing - poetry, novels, or essays - and it’s easier to critique something the writer is not personally involved with than something that has required they reveal their feelings.
Louis Menard’s recent article in the New Yorker suggests the central methodology in many creative writing programs is public, group criticism. He makes classes sound more like the self-accusatory sessions of the communists and evangel prayer meetings, than anything I would tolerate.
Such group sessions might possibly work in the sort of summer sessions and graduate programs where each member has to first prove him or herself to be capable writer to be admitted. Such criteria are not possible in a state undergraduate program. Interviews with his classmates make it sound like Cho was exposed to the voices of the very unthinking, conventional students who were first suspected of persecuting Harris and Klebold.
One instructor, poet Nikki Giovanni, had him removed from her classes because she thought he was "menacing" and wrote a letter for the record to the department chairman, Lucinda Roy, who in turn notified school authorities. Another instructor, Lisa Norris, asked the dean’s office about him and was told he had mental problems.
His male play writing teacher, Edward Falco, was less bothered and simply recognized Cho’s writing wasn’t "good" and that he probably took the courses to find a means of communicating.
Writing requires risk taking. A school that turns homework into an opportunity to enforce conformity by reporting deviance betrays the student. The fact Giovanni and Norris were correct in perceiving danger does not negate the ways their reactions and those of their students contributed to Cho’s growing sense of isolation. They, and everyone involved, should know the dangers of liberating the imagination in a creative writing program and either know how to respond or not offer the courses.
Notes:
My memories of comments at the time by Virginia Tech instructors and students confirmed with Wikipedia.
Cullen, Dave. Columbine, 2009.
Menand, Louis. "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?," New Yorker 8 June 2009.
Kass, Jeff. Columbine: A True Crime Story, 2009.
Most of us survived high school, and wondered what on earth was going on in Littleton. Some of the initial explanations, since disproved by Dave Cullen and Jeff Kass, were the ones that resonated with graduates who knew first hand the status system that allowed one group to scapegoat another or led people to feel persecuted when they were simply overlooked like the strongly religious.
But, we think, something had to fail for routine nastiness or teenage angst to propel Eric Harris into buying automatic weapons and luring Dylan Klebold into his maelstrom. Society’s verdict that they were psychopaths beyond help simply offers a self-serving label in place of recognizing a cultural or institutional failure.
At Virginia Tech we know a lot more, because the parents and school did not blind themselves to Seung-Hui Cho’s problems as people had done in Colorado. They simply had no idea what to do with someone who had stalked people and been diagnosed with mental problems, but could not be institutionalized or even expelled on probability.
The part that shocked me was the role of the creative writing program. Art is supposed to exist as a means people use to externalize and contain their demons, to explore what they know is inadmissible We know the biographies of too many published writers who drank or drugged themselves to death to still believe art is a cure, but we do still think it is a way to explore our worst feelings without letting them become too destructive.
I’ve never taken a creative writing class, and fall into that group that is skeptical about what possible job market a middling school like Virginia Tech hopes to serve with an entire major in creative writing and just what future they see for their graduates after they have provided themselves with employment.
I’ve taught English composition and realize the necessity of helping students learn to write a decent sentence and become knowledgeable enough about their writing to be able to edit themselves. I always stayed with prosaic, factual assignments because I believe the process is the same for all writing - poetry, novels, or essays - and it’s easier to critique something the writer is not personally involved with than something that has required they reveal their feelings.
Louis Menard’s recent article in the New Yorker suggests the central methodology in many creative writing programs is public, group criticism. He makes classes sound more like the self-accusatory sessions of the communists and evangel prayer meetings, than anything I would tolerate.
Such group sessions might possibly work in the sort of summer sessions and graduate programs where each member has to first prove him or herself to be capable writer to be admitted. Such criteria are not possible in a state undergraduate program. Interviews with his classmates make it sound like Cho was exposed to the voices of the very unthinking, conventional students who were first suspected of persecuting Harris and Klebold.
One instructor, poet Nikki Giovanni, had him removed from her classes because she thought he was "menacing" and wrote a letter for the record to the department chairman, Lucinda Roy, who in turn notified school authorities. Another instructor, Lisa Norris, asked the dean’s office about him and was told he had mental problems.
His male play writing teacher, Edward Falco, was less bothered and simply recognized Cho’s writing wasn’t "good" and that he probably took the courses to find a means of communicating.
Writing requires risk taking. A school that turns homework into an opportunity to enforce conformity by reporting deviance betrays the student. The fact Giovanni and Norris were correct in perceiving danger does not negate the ways their reactions and those of their students contributed to Cho’s growing sense of isolation. They, and everyone involved, should know the dangers of liberating the imagination in a creative writing program and either know how to respond or not offer the courses.
Notes:
My memories of comments at the time by Virginia Tech instructors and students confirmed with Wikipedia.
Cullen, Dave. Columbine, 2009.
Menand, Louis. "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?," New Yorker 8 June 2009.
Kass, Jeff. Columbine: A True Crime Story, 2009.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Michael Jackson and Creativity
It was bad luck for Gale Storm and Billy Mays to die the weekend everyone’s attention was focused on Michael Jackson. Buried in the June 27 edition of the New York Times was a notice that an important diamond cutter had passed on the 15th.
Margalit Fox’s notice was that rare obituary that not only told you the usual information about Antonio Bianco’s survivors, but also described what made him special in his trade. She first needed to explain how diamond molecules react to being violated, before it was clear why it took several months to cut particularly large stones without permanently marring their internal structure.
I sent the notice to a friend of mine who’s drawn to the mystery of what’s inside externally drab rocks she finds in her neighborhood. Her return comment was "He must have made a lot of money."
She was a great Michael Jackson fan and we had spent part of Saturday talking about him and what his death meant. No one would just say, "he made a lot of money," although there are those who wonder who will inherit and what will be left after the debts are settled.
I used to wonder what people meant by materialism, because I was raised to respect work well done and to acknowledge the greatness of artists and artisans. I’m still shocked when, regardless of what people feel, they can only express their reaction in monetary terms.
It’s that simple equation that truncates artistic creativity. Someone is always afraid of the cost - the dependent family, the record companies, the concert promoters. As soon as large sums appear on bank statements, representatives of capitalism fear the kind of risks that create wealth in the first place.
No one minds if famous performers spend their money on useless possessions or self-destructive substances. After all, each purchase creates wealth for someone, as do any medical consequences. In their uselessness such transactions are materialism at its purest.
However, none of those petty traders of human frailty can step back at the end of a day and take pleasure in a well-cut stone or a new combination. Obituaries don’t yet record what people made, but what they did. Tombstones still have dates, not dollar signs.
Margalit Fox’s notice was that rare obituary that not only told you the usual information about Antonio Bianco’s survivors, but also described what made him special in his trade. She first needed to explain how diamond molecules react to being violated, before it was clear why it took several months to cut particularly large stones without permanently marring their internal structure.
I sent the notice to a friend of mine who’s drawn to the mystery of what’s inside externally drab rocks she finds in her neighborhood. Her return comment was "He must have made a lot of money."
She was a great Michael Jackson fan and we had spent part of Saturday talking about him and what his death meant. No one would just say, "he made a lot of money," although there are those who wonder who will inherit and what will be left after the debts are settled.
I used to wonder what people meant by materialism, because I was raised to respect work well done and to acknowledge the greatness of artists and artisans. I’m still shocked when, regardless of what people feel, they can only express their reaction in monetary terms.
It’s that simple equation that truncates artistic creativity. Someone is always afraid of the cost - the dependent family, the record companies, the concert promoters. As soon as large sums appear on bank statements, representatives of capitalism fear the kind of risks that create wealth in the first place.
No one minds if famous performers spend their money on useless possessions or self-destructive substances. After all, each purchase creates wealth for someone, as do any medical consequences. In their uselessness such transactions are materialism at its purest.
However, none of those petty traders of human frailty can step back at the end of a day and take pleasure in a well-cut stone or a new combination. Obituaries don’t yet record what people made, but what they did. Tombstones still have dates, not dollar signs.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Design - Part 1 - Engineers
Mustang, Corvette, Muscle Car. What’s the last car you remmber from Detroit?
Who’s the last creator you remember? How about, Lee Iacocca, Ed Cole, John DeLorean? Afficionados, Detroiters prefer men like Harley Earl and Bunky Knudsen.
Who’s the last CEO you recognize from one of the Big Three car makers? Alfred P. Sloan, Robert McNamara? Business historians will name others like Roger Smith and Arjay Miller.
Who mattered most to you when you bought your first car? Which do you associate with failed enterprises?
As car dealer Hoot McInerey said, when asked about the latest reorganization at Ford, "If you've got the right product in the right market, any fool can be a hero."
But why hasn’t General Motors or Ford been able to produce a vehicle consumers want?
Ed Cole was lead engineer for Corvette in 1953 when he was 44; he became president of General Motors when he was 58, in 1967, and retired at 65.
He was the one of the last engineers to rise so far. Since, production men have had their careers stymied.
Lee Iacocca was behind the introduction of the Mustang in 1964 when he was 40. He became president of Ford in 1970, at 46, and was fired by Henry Ford II eight years later.
John DeLorean developed the Pontiac GTO in 1964 when he was 41. He aborted his promotion path when he divorced a second time and began dating celebrities. He left General Motors when he was 48.
Today, the top men and lone woman at Ford and GM are in their 40s or 50s, but their experience is in finance and international operations. Almost none mention time in a plant on their resumes. None are associated with a single product innovation, but several are credited with salvaging operations by downsizing.
The talent of several generations rose in the 1960s and left in the 1970s. What was happening in the 1950's when the young men were coming of age who would be in their 40s then? What’s happened in the 1970s that stopped those men from getting new projects? What suppressed the culture of mechanical innovation and design since?
When I was growing up, sons of storekeepers and professionals did not consider engineering. It was the route to upward mobility for children of plant workers. Then, in the Nixon years, the aerospace industry laid off highly paid engineers. Parents who valued education for concrete, pragmatic reasons began to question the wisdom of their ancestors.
The oil embargo by OPEC and quality problems publicized by Ralph Nader should have been challenges, not insurmountable crises. The reaction of automotive executives was panic, the first of the hiring freezes and layoffs. Kids began to see their parents’ jobs threatened, and saw accountants were more valued than engineers.
When GM transferred its data processing functions to EDS in 1984, engineers feared they would be next. Teenagers either saw their fathers lose their jobs, or saw cousins and older brothers have problems finding berths out of college. No doubt, parents advised their children to consider other fields.
The number of engineering students in the United States peaked in 1983 in the United States with 441,000 baby boomers, and fell to 361,000 in 1999, according to Ed Cohen. Using rough calculations that multiply the percent of the population between the ages of 5 and 19 by the total population, it appears the actual decline was from .78% of available young people to .67%.
Statistics on engineering enrollments are tricky, because they combine disciplines. ASEE reports nearly a third of the 394,148 students in 2003 were in computers and electrical engineering. If we only count a third of those as traditional engineers, then the current total falls to 306,107 students, or .52% of the available young people.
A quarter percent decline in engineering students nationally seems statistically insignificant, but the percentage of truly creative men in any generation is even smaller, and they may be the ones who first considered computer science or business administration.
The more critical problem is the thirty year dearth of jobs. ASEE tell us the state of Michigan had 22,865 undergraduate engineering students in 2003. Two years later, Michael Ellis reports GM employs 22,000 engineers world-wide, and is planning to transfer more work to Brazil and eliminate more positions at its Tech Center in Warren.
Students know they have to leave. Michigan ranks 4th in the number of engineering students but 37th in the percent of residents with bachelor’s degrees. Even immigrants know there’s no future. GM says it is transferring engineering work because it can pay lower wages and admits it’s recruiting Indian nationals at Wayne State, hoping to lure them back to Bangalore.
How long can an industry deny opportunity to those critical to its success before it finally discourages too many? How long before the ambitious and creative are gone, leaving plodders to fill the slots? GM and Ford can still recruit engineers, but they can’t produce exciting cars.
It may be the only culture GM and Ford have been able to change is the one they need to survive, the one that produces men who might create the next generation of muscle cars. Once the formative environment is gone, it’s almost impossible to recreate. Detroit may become the equal of the places it sends work, Brazil and BangalPrismore.
Sources:
American Society for Engineering Education. "State of Engineering,"
Prism 13 (2) October 2003 on internet.
Cohen, Ed. " Enrollment Trends: Too many students are choosing the same academic paths. What's a college to do?," Notre Dame Magazine Winter 2005-2006 on internet.
Evans, Michael. "Engineers' work goes overseas, GM says," Detroit Free Press, 6 April 2006.
George, Mary Anne. "Michigan’s College Graduate Rank Sinks to 37th in Nation," Detroit Free Press 29 March 2005.
McInerey, Martin. Quoted by Tom Walsh, "New team to drive F"ord," Detroit Free Press, 7 April 2006.
Who’s the last creator you remember? How about, Lee Iacocca, Ed Cole, John DeLorean? Afficionados, Detroiters prefer men like Harley Earl and Bunky Knudsen.
Who’s the last CEO you recognize from one of the Big Three car makers? Alfred P. Sloan, Robert McNamara? Business historians will name others like Roger Smith and Arjay Miller.
Who mattered most to you when you bought your first car? Which do you associate with failed enterprises?
As car dealer Hoot McInerey said, when asked about the latest reorganization at Ford, "If you've got the right product in the right market, any fool can be a hero."
But why hasn’t General Motors or Ford been able to produce a vehicle consumers want?
Ed Cole was lead engineer for Corvette in 1953 when he was 44; he became president of General Motors when he was 58, in 1967, and retired at 65.
He was the one of the last engineers to rise so far. Since, production men have had their careers stymied.
Lee Iacocca was behind the introduction of the Mustang in 1964 when he was 40. He became president of Ford in 1970, at 46, and was fired by Henry Ford II eight years later.
John DeLorean developed the Pontiac GTO in 1964 when he was 41. He aborted his promotion path when he divorced a second time and began dating celebrities. He left General Motors when he was 48.
Today, the top men and lone woman at Ford and GM are in their 40s or 50s, but their experience is in finance and international operations. Almost none mention time in a plant on their resumes. None are associated with a single product innovation, but several are credited with salvaging operations by downsizing.
The talent of several generations rose in the 1960s and left in the 1970s. What was happening in the 1950's when the young men were coming of age who would be in their 40s then? What’s happened in the 1970s that stopped those men from getting new projects? What suppressed the culture of mechanical innovation and design since?
When I was growing up, sons of storekeepers and professionals did not consider engineering. It was the route to upward mobility for children of plant workers. Then, in the Nixon years, the aerospace industry laid off highly paid engineers. Parents who valued education for concrete, pragmatic reasons began to question the wisdom of their ancestors.
The oil embargo by OPEC and quality problems publicized by Ralph Nader should have been challenges, not insurmountable crises. The reaction of automotive executives was panic, the first of the hiring freezes and layoffs. Kids began to see their parents’ jobs threatened, and saw accountants were more valued than engineers.
When GM transferred its data processing functions to EDS in 1984, engineers feared they would be next. Teenagers either saw their fathers lose their jobs, or saw cousins and older brothers have problems finding berths out of college. No doubt, parents advised their children to consider other fields.
The number of engineering students in the United States peaked in 1983 in the United States with 441,000 baby boomers, and fell to 361,000 in 1999, according to Ed Cohen. Using rough calculations that multiply the percent of the population between the ages of 5 and 19 by the total population, it appears the actual decline was from .78% of available young people to .67%.
Statistics on engineering enrollments are tricky, because they combine disciplines. ASEE reports nearly a third of the 394,148 students in 2003 were in computers and electrical engineering. If we only count a third of those as traditional engineers, then the current total falls to 306,107 students, or .52% of the available young people.
A quarter percent decline in engineering students nationally seems statistically insignificant, but the percentage of truly creative men in any generation is even smaller, and they may be the ones who first considered computer science or business administration.
The more critical problem is the thirty year dearth of jobs. ASEE tell us the state of Michigan had 22,865 undergraduate engineering students in 2003. Two years later, Michael Ellis reports GM employs 22,000 engineers world-wide, and is planning to transfer more work to Brazil and eliminate more positions at its Tech Center in Warren.
Students know they have to leave. Michigan ranks 4th in the number of engineering students but 37th in the percent of residents with bachelor’s degrees. Even immigrants know there’s no future. GM says it is transferring engineering work because it can pay lower wages and admits it’s recruiting Indian nationals at Wayne State, hoping to lure them back to Bangalore.
How long can an industry deny opportunity to those critical to its success before it finally discourages too many? How long before the ambitious and creative are gone, leaving plodders to fill the slots? GM and Ford can still recruit engineers, but they can’t produce exciting cars.
It may be the only culture GM and Ford have been able to change is the one they need to survive, the one that produces men who might create the next generation of muscle cars. Once the formative environment is gone, it’s almost impossible to recreate. Detroit may become the equal of the places it sends work, Brazil and BangalPrismore.
Sources:
American Society for Engineering Education. "State of Engineering,"
Prism 13 (2) October 2003 on internet.
Cohen, Ed. " Enrollment Trends: Too many students are choosing the same academic paths. What's a college to do?," Notre Dame Magazine Winter 2005-2006 on internet.
Evans, Michael. "Engineers' work goes overseas, GM says," Detroit Free Press, 6 April 2006.
George, Mary Anne. "Michigan’s College Graduate Rank Sinks to 37th in Nation," Detroit Free Press 29 March 2005.
McInerey, Martin. Quoted by Tom Walsh, "New team to drive F"ord," Detroit Free Press, 7 April 2006.
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