Centennial Commencement

"May I have your attention, please! This is your first call for the Continental Trailways five-fifteen P.M. Air-Conditioned Silversides Thruliner to Houston and Dallas, now leaving from lane one next to the building for: Inez, Edna, Ganado, Louise, El Campo, Pierce, Wharton, Hungerford, Kendleton, Beasley, Rosenberg, Richmond, Sugarland, Stafford, Missouri City and Houston. Connecting in Houston for Huntsville, Buffalo, Corsicana, Dallas. . . . Connecting in Dallas for . . . Ardmore . . ." (23)

Paul's Valley . . . and Ada.

So began the Centennial Commencement address given by Jim Lehrer (see photo at left), anchor of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. [The above passage was taken from his 1992 memoir, A Bus of My Own (New York: Putnam, 1992).] Lehrer memorized the bus call when he was a teenager and, as he explained, his ability to recite it from memory today proves that "If you learn something early, you learn it well; and if it's totally irrelevant, you'll never forget it."


Lehrer's address included recycled passages from his 1997 novel, The Sooner Spy (Tulsa: Council Oak Books), when he advised graduates "about the need not to consider yourself well educated. Ever. To always keep reading and listening and have your mind open to new ideas" (14).

The "ultimate recycled quote" (that's how Lehrer introduced it) taken from The Sooner Spy was originally written by Lehrer for a commencement speech he gave at his eldest's daughter's graduation from college: "As you search for your place in life I hereby advise you to take risks. Be willing to put your mind and your spirit, your time and your energy, your stomach and your emotions on the line. . . . It is unlikely that any of you will have occasion to remember either me or my commencement address. I don't blame you. But if by chance something does linger, I hope it's just that there was a one-eyed guy up here who kept saying, 'Risk. Risk. The way to happineess is to risk it'" (14-15).

Thirteen English majors were listed in the program as candidates for Bachelor's Degrees: Robin Desarae Baker, Megan A. Bateman, Kathleen Elizabeth Benson, Drew Ryan Butler, Tina A. Casey, Jeffrey B. Gaylor, McKae Michelle Goetzinger, S Caleb Holton, Rachel Celeste Warner McCready, Laurie Lea Schweinle, Jason Levi Tootle, Haley Michelle White, and Angela Hope Woods.

ART by Jack Myers

ART
is a quality of attention,
the way color says how
light feels: yellow for the
aerosol of happiness, black
for the zero of what isn't;
the way light, lined up right,
can cut through steel. Anything
is art if the mind's flawed right:
how soup feels being stirred,
how silence, broken open just so,
releases its essence and graces
the mind as a mint leaf in the air.

It's those who can't understand and
are dumbfounded by the obvious,
who thrive on dissonance and
subverting the ordinary into the
extraordinary who end up being
artists. What good is that, you ask?
No practical use as far as I can see.
In fact, Archimedes could've been
bragging about art's uselessness when
he said "Give me a long enough lever,
a place to stand, and I will lift the earth."

JACK MYERS is the author/editor of 17 books of and about poetry and the 2003-04 Poet Laureate of Texas. Myers has won numerous awards including the 1987 National Poetry Series, selected by Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney; the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award from the Texas Institute of Letters (twice); the SMU Author's Award (twice); and two Poetry Fellowships from the NEA. He is the past Vice President of AWP, former field faculty member in Vermont College's MFA program, and current Professor of English at Southern Methodist University. In 2002 he was a featured writer in the new "Poetry in Motion" program; and in 2001 his collection, The Glowing River: New and Selected Poems was selected as "Best Literary Book" for the Barnes & Noble Violet Crown Award; and his latest poetry collection, Routine Heaven, won the 2007 Texas Review Press Award. He is currently the featured "Honorary Guest" of the upcoming issue of the Oak Bend Review.

This poem was recommended to us by Dr. Hugh Tribbey.

1925: The City by Franz Masereel

The Author:
Franz Masereel
Considered the greatest twentieth-century master of the woodcut, and by many as the grandfather of the graphic novel, Franz Masereel (1889-1972) was born in Belgium and lived throughout Europe in the years before WWI (that’s his self-portrait on the right). Honing his craft as a graphic artist in various journals, Masereel perfected an expressionist style influenced by contemporaries such as Delaunay, Braque, and Marc. Additionally, his literary influences can be seen in the numerous illustrations he did for authors such as Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, and Emile Zola. Masereel emerged as a pacifist in WWI with strong Communist sympathies—ideals embodied in his most ambitious works, his so-called “novels” in woodcuts. These works tell visual narratives about capitalism, man’s isolation in his modern metropolis, the decadence of the bourgeois, and the rising might of the proletariat. His most famous works are A Passionate Journey (1919), an allegorical narrative of modern man’s existence, and The City, a “vision in woodcuts,” which documents the decline and eventual fall of a Berlin-like metropolis. Though he sided with no one political movement, his works were warmly championed by Socialists and banned by the rising Nazi movement (forcing him to flee Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation). However, his humanity and sheer artistic appeal make it impossible to read his works as propaganda. The pioneering graphic novelist Will Eisner (The Spirit, A Contract With God) cited him as a seminal influence on his work, and one of the first true visionaries of the comic book form—though he never viewed his work in this medium. His influence has been further cited by notable comic book critic, Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics), and undoubtedly influenced Marjane Satrapi’s woodcut-style drawings in Persepolis I & II.

The Text:
The City
Perhaps his most universally appealing work is the compact, but sprawling narrative of The City, which takes the reader through a bustling European metropolis in the years after World War I. The work is prefaced by a quote from Walt Whitman: “This is the city and I am one of the citizens,/Whatever interests the rest interests me.” Fittingly, the first panel shows a man sitting down amidst flowers, contemplating the dread abyss of smokestacks and skyscrapers that swallows the horizon. Though the “vision in woodcuts” has no story per se, it does flit us from one souring image of modern life to another, creating a loose narrative of oppression, isolation, and bourgeois decadence. Every aspect of the city interests Masereel as an artist, from the small apartment of a struggling family to the posh bordellos of the rich and famous. Yet the most prominent feature of The City is the artwork itself, starkly black and white images which deftly portray caricature, terror, sublimity, and beauty. Click here to find the entire series.

In one of the opening images (above left), we see the sprawling cityscape—building climbing atop building, blotting out land and sky. Yet Masereel is alive to the human presence of this towering terrors, the peep-hole windows allowing us to see the citizens at their daily routine. A young woman works at her sewing while the man beneath her broods. Other windows reveal a woman dressing—bare bottom displayed to all lookers—a young couple amidst a passionate embrace, and other faces, expressionless, peering back at us. This image of the city stands out as one of Masereel’s most iconic of the modern city—a voyeuristic display of exhibition and isolation.

In another representative image (at right), we see demonstrators being forcibly driven off by soldiers, a scene that echoes the events of pre-Communist Russia, particularly the peaceful protest of 1905, when soldiers opened fire and killed hundreds of civilians. Masereel documented the protests, speeches, and common humanity of people trying to rise above the metropolis, many of them in quasi-journalistic style. Here we see terror of the government, depicted simply as a cloud of gunfire confronting the terrified and dispersing crowd. Only one man stands defiantly to greet them, taking aim at the amorphous mass—a willing martyr for the cause. Like Marx, Masereel seems to have felt that “Modern bourgeois society…is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (Oxford UP, 8). The decline of “the city” was inevitable in his mind, as the people would soon wrest the power from its greedy, smoke-like tentacles.

Masereel's The City meets Kachaturian's Violin Concerto

Lana Trotovsek performs Kachaturian's Violin Concerto in D minor (2nd movement - Andante sostenuto) with the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by George Pehlivanian (June 2005). The accompanying woodcuts by Frans Masereel are taken from his novel, The City (1925).

Eve Kosofsky Segwick: 1950-2009

From the New York Times:
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a Pioneer of Gay Studies and a Literary Theorist, Dies at 58

By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: April 15, 2009

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose critical writings on the ambiguities of sexual identity in fiction helped create the discipline known as queer studies, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 58.

The cause was breast cancer, her husband, Hal Sedgwick, said.
Ms. Sedgwick broke new ground when, drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault, she began teasing out the hidden socio-sexual subplots in writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James. In a 1983 essay on Dickens’s novel “Our Mutual Friend,” she drew attention to the homoerotic element in the obsessive relationship between Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone, rivals for the love of Lizzie Hexam but emotionally most fully engaged when facing off against each other.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

IMAGE SOURCE:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eve_Kosofsky_Sedgwick_by_David_Shankbone.jpg

A Tip from Dr. Grasso

Dr. Grasso, who got his Ph. D. at Miami University of Ohio, recommends this link to his alma mater's webpage, where you can find Ten Tips from Seniors to First-Year English Majors. Check it out!

"Tip #1: Don’t second-guess your decision. If you’re passionate about literature and writing, you picked the right major. Don’t pick a major because there’s a clear-cut job at the end of it—the people who tell you there are no careers for English majors are wrong anyway. See tip #2."

1938: "Realism in the Balance" by Gyorgy Lukacs

The Author:
Gyorgy Lukacs
Born in Budapest in 1885, Lukacs (pronounced: loo KOTCH) earned a Ph. D. in law and philosophy from the University of Budapest in 1906. In 1918, he joined the Communist Party of Hungary and when the Party took power in 1919, he was appointed the People’s Commisar for Education and Culture and political commissar for the Fifth Division of the Hungarian Red Army. When the Soviet Republic of Hungary fell after a mere five months in power, Lukacs fled to Vienna, where he lived until 1929. While in Vienna, he published his best-known essay collection, History and Class Consciousness (1924) which was subsequently censured by the Stalinists who seized control of the Russian government following Lenin’s death. Though Lukacs opposed the leadership of Hungarian Communists supported by Stalin, he moved to Moscow in 1933 and remained there until the Communists came to power in Hungary at the end of World War II. In 1956, he became a minister in Hungary’s Anti-Soviet Communist government, but after the Soviet Union crushed the Revolution, Lukacs publicly retracted the anti-Soviet positions he had previously advocated. He remained loyal to the Party until his death in 1971.

The Text:
“Realism in the Balance"
Written while Lukacs lived in Russia and first published in a German literary journal, “Realism in the Balance” accuses modernist art of alienating “an already alienated audience” and champions realist art that reveals “the economic system responsible for reducing human beings to things.”(Leitch et al, 1164)

Excerpts:
“If literature is a particular form by means of which objective reality is reflected, then it becomes of crucial importance for it to grasp that reality as it truly is, and not merely to confine itself to reproducing whatever manifests itself immediately and on the surface.” (1037)

The goal of every major realist is “to penetrate the laws governing objective reality and to uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society.” (1041)

“When the surface of life is only experienced immediately, it remains opaque, fragmentary, chaotic and uncomprehended.” (1042)

Photomontage, the “pinnacle” of the symbolist movement, “is capable of striking effects, and on occasion it can even become a powerful political weapon. Such effects arise from its technique of juxtaposing heterogeneous, unrelated pieces of reality torn from their context. However, …the final effect must be one of profound monotony. …After all, a puddle can never be more than dirty water, even though it may contain rainbow tints.” (1045)

“…the realist must seek out the lasting features in people, in their relations with each other and in the situations in which they have to act; he must focus on those elements which endure over long periods and which constitute the objective human tendencies of society and indeed of mankind as a whole. Such writers form the authentic ideological avant-garde since they depict the vital, but not immediately obvious forces at work in objective reality.” (1049)

“Great realism . . . does not portray an immediately obvious aspect of reality but one which is permanent and objectively more significant, namely man in the whole range of his relations to the real world, above all those which outlast mere fashion….[It] captures tendencies of development that only exist incipiently and so have not yet had the opportunity to unfold their entire human and social potential. To discern and give shape to such underground trends is the great historical mission of the true literary avant-garde . . . [O]nly the major realists are capable of forming a genuine avant-garde.” (1049)

“…even the most passionate determination, the most intense sense of conviction that one has revolutionized art and created something ‘radically new’, will not suffice to turn a writer into someone who can truly anticipate future trends, if determination and conviction are his sole qualifications. This ancient truth can also be expressed as a commonplace: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” (1050)

“…in contrast to the one-dimensionality of modernism[,] Cervantes and Shakespeare, Balzac and Tolstoy, …Thomas and Heinrich Mann—all these can appeal to readers drawn from a broad cross-section of the people because their works permit access from so many different angles. The large-scale, enduring resonance of the great works of realism is in fact due to this accessibility, to the infinite multitude of doors through which entry is possible….The process of appropriation enables readers to clarify their own experiences and understanding of life and to broaden their own horizons.” (1056)

“A campaign against realism, whether conscious or not, and a resultant impoverishment and isolation of literature and art is one of the crucial manifestations of decadence in the realm of art.” (105)