Greetings, literature-loving Dharmiacs.  Last time we discussed gay Harlem Renaissance author Richard Bruce Nugent, who tapped into the experimental cadences of black modernist literature to spin fantasies on queer life long before it became acceptable to do so.  This week we’re going to talk about another American experimental writer, albeit one who achieved enormous popularity both at home and abroad.

With torture and extraordinary rendition so much in the news, it may come as something as a surprise that today’s subject experienced the agony of unjust political imprisonment first hand.  But in 1917, this recent Harvard graduate and volunteer in a World War I ambulance corps found himself thrown in prison for “espionage” without recourse to any legal defense.    Fortunately for history (and for us) the experience did nothing to crush his puckish personality, and he went on to become one of America’s most warmly loved artists.

Follow me below for a jaunt with this 20th century master:

Poet, novelist, painter, and all-around shit-stirrer Edward Estlin Cummings was born in 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, he skipped to France with his old college buddy John Dos Passos and quickly fell in love with the vibrant art scene (especially American) in Paris.  That artistic growth was cut short – or, if you will, significantly advanced – when he was arrested on suspicion of espionage and interred in the village of La Ferté-Macé.  While his father fought for his removal by contacting anyone he could, Cummings himself was discovering the joys of political prisonerhood, an experience he’d memorably capture in his novel The Enormous Room.  

Throughout his life Cummings sought experience in the world: he lived in Paris and New York, traveled to the Soviet Union, North Africa, and Mexico, and incorporated the breadth and depth of life into his enormous poetic output.  In the meantime he developed an idiosyncratic style of poetry that managed to be disorienting and surprising without putting off readers: as far as avant garde poets go, Cummings is easily the most popular this country has produced (although it’s equally fair to argue that his poetry is usually only avant garde on the surface, while the often otherwise conventional poem underneath in some way accounts for his approachability.  I’m not sure I agree 100%, but that’s a not uncommon view.)

Today I want to talk a bit about what makes Cummings so popular, but also – and especially – to encourage people to pick up his first novel, which has a great deal to say about culture of indefinite and indiscriminate imprisonment and the way it is used to stifle dissent in countries that nonetheless need it.  So first, The Enormous Room:

A quick note on the spelling of the author’s name: Norman Friedman has made a compelling argument that caps are called for, and the correct presentation is E.E.Cummings.  Friedman cites a letter from Cummings to his publisher, specifically rejecting the lowercase, punctuation-less form of his name: “E.E.Cummings, unless your printer prefers E. E. Cummings/ titlepage up to you;but may it not be tricksy svp[.]”   Now, does anyone want to place bets on whether over-eager readers skip this to leave me a comment correcting my usage? 🙂

The Enormous Room

Everyone is here for something.

The Enormous Room (full text!) is Cummings’ prose masterpiece, a fast-paced comic brawl with a warm moral heart, a portrait gallery of eccentricity and lunacy and humanity surviving under the shadow of authoritarian cruelty, an exuberant middle finger to authority and a passionate plea for humanity.  And it all takes place in a cramped camp where dubiously labeled ‘political prisoners’ are being held with no chance of legal consul or defense.

In other words, it’s the perfect book for our time.

Cummings transformed his experience as a ‘political prisoner’ into a vibrant testament to the human experience, but not in the way you might expect.  Rather than a litany of suffering appealing to the reader’s moral sense (although there is plenty of both in the book), the main technique of Cummings’ work is humor: the absurdity of the situation cannot be ignored, and might as well be enjoyed.  The jovial narrator spins tales of friendships, gambling, defiance, bureaucracy, and freedom, all the while wearing a giant smile.  That humor – that inability to be crushed by a cold and fearful political machine – is itself the ultimate statement of his defiance.

The absurdity begins in the first chapter: according to Cummings’ version of the events, he did not need to go to prison at all.  His acquisition was one part solidarity with his unfairly sentenced friend, and one part puckish defiance: when the interrogator Noyon decided to throw out one last, loathsome question (“Do you hate the Krauts?”), Cummings refused to give the “correct” answer, even in front of a sympathetic military tribunal (referred to by their most exaggerated physical qualities: “the rosette”, “the moustache”):

    ‘Est-ce que vous détestez les boches?’

    I had won my own case.  The question was purely perfunctory.  To walk out of the room a free man I had merely to say yes.  My examiners were sure of my answer.  The rosette was leaning forward and smiling encouragingly.  The moustache was making little oui’s in the air with his pen.  And Noyon had given up all hope of making me out a criminal.  I might be rash, but I was innocent; the dupe of a superior and malign intelligence.  I would probably be admonished to choose my friends more carefully next time, and that would be all….

   Deliberately, I framed the answer:

    ‘Non.  J’aime beaucoup les français.’

    Agile as a weasel, Monsieur le Ministre was on top of me: ‘It is impossible to love Frenchmen and not to hate Germans.’ (15)

The Enormous Room is less a narrative than a portrait gallery, and this contributes a great deal to the book’s warm humanism.  After all, before gaining notoriety as a poet, Cummings worked as a painter – his sense of portraiture is exact and revealing.  Each inmate of La Ferté is sketched from a lovingly comic angle, as if the artist Cummings can hardly conceal his joy at being imprisoned with such delightful company.  Take for example Jean le Nègre:

[Jean’s] mind was like a child’s.  His use of language was sometimes exalted fibbing, sometimes the purely picturesque.  He courted above all the sounds of words, more or less disdaining their meaning.  He told us immediately (in pidgin-French) that he was born without a mother because his mother died when he was born, that his father was (first) sixteen (then) sixty years old, that his father gagnait cinq cent francs par jour (later, par année), that he was born in London but not in England, that he was in the French army and had never been in any army.

    He did not, however, contradict himself in one statement: ‘Les français sont de cochons’ – to which we heartily agreed, and which won him the approval of the Hollanders.  (206)

Cummings and his friends rename everyone in the room, and soon the reader becomes acquainted with the strangest collection of “criminals” imaginable: the Machine-Fixer, the Silent Man, Emile the Bum, the Schoolmaster, Bathhouse John, the little man in the Orange cap, the Holland Skipper, Garibaldi, and my personal favorite: So-and-so, being a Turk.

The exaggerated nicknames initially feel like caricatures, but Cummings’ instincts are right on: by the book’s end, you’ll remember nearly every character and a bit of their back stories.  The nomenclature shorthand makes everyone ‘stick’ in a way that dry lists of names would not.

Four of the prisoners receive their own chapters: the Delectable Mountains.  As a framing device, Cummings loosely outlines his book according to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Paradise, in which the Delectable Mountains were four peaks so high that one could see the Heavenly Kingdom.  In The Enormous Room, the Delectable Mountains are four prisoners so pure of heart that their inclusion among the already eclectic band of misfits at La Ferté was the greatest crime of all: the Wanderer, Zulu (sometimes Zoo-loo) Surplice, and Jean le Nègre.  Any system, Cummings argues, that is capable of putting men like these behind bars as “dangerous criminals” is a system rotten to the core; Cummings expresses great admiration for his fellow prisoners to endure (especially the women, who have it even worse).

In the nickname game, the French guards fare much worse: Cummings labels the head of La Ferté “Apollyon”, a nickname he certainly deserves for his casually brutal treatment of the prisoners.  However, Apollyon is just one of many toadies in the machine that crushes the rights and freedoms of other human beings under the guise of necessity during wartime:

Who was eligible for La Ferté?  Anyone whom the police could find in the lovely country of France (a) who was not guilty of treason, (b) who could not prove that he was not guilty of treason.  By treason I refer to any little annoying habits of independent thought or action which en temps de guerre are put in a hole and covered over, with the somewhat naive idea that from their cadavers violets will grow whereof the perfume will delight all good men and true and make such worthy citizens forget their sorrows. (88)

Despite the book’s strong critical success (including such advocates as T.E. Lawrence and F. Scott Fitzgerald), The Enormous Room has faded in popularity.  I have no idea why: I’ve read it half a dozen times and never failed to enjoy every single page.  It’s a miracle of language, humor, and heart, and one of the best American books of the first half of the 20th century.  

It may be that Cummings the poet was simply so overwhelming that he overshadowed everything else:

The Poetry

E.E. Cummings was not only one of America’s most successful poets, but also one of best-loved avant garde poets in any language.  The reasons are relatively easy to discern: Cummings’ experimentation can be radical but never inaccessible, and it never fails to be entertaining.  This is largely because Cummings’ experimentation is usually visual rather than poetical: as a painter he understood the power of visual presentation, leading to his often jarring arrangement of words and punctuation.

Among the most famous and earliest was “Buffalo Bill’s / defunct” (see image).  Note that contrary to popular belief Cummings uses both capitalization and punctuation: the important thing is how he uses it and when he chooses not to.

Cummings was not the first to recognize the importance of visual presentation in literature, but his experiments are among the best known, from the extended sex-as-driving metaphor of “she being Brand” to the initially unreadable “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” (it makes sense after you work with it a while).

The disorientation caused by radically unexpected alignments also allows Cummings to slip in some sneaky bits of information for the careful reader, as in the popular “in Just- / spring” (Chansons Innocents), which creates a dizzying joyful portrait of children playing “when the world is puddle-wonderful”, but subtly undercuts it in its epithets for the Balloonman.  If you catch the references, the last line suddenly feels sinister.

Cummings’ concerns expressed in The Enormous Room also figure prominently in his poetry, which mocks superficial moralism and facile patriotism, especially when they are used to crush people underfoot:

why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-

iful than those heroic happy dead

who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter

(link)

Again and again, in poems like “i sing of Olaf glad and big“, “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls“, and “pity this busy monster,manunkind” Cummings shows little tolerance for the idiocies that lead to oppression, war, and hopelessness.  “Humanity”, he writes, “i hate you“.

All this would make him a curmudgeonly old misanthrope, except that the single most common topic in his poetry is the reverse: love.  Cummings is first and foremost a poet of love, whether of a significant other, of family, or of this stupid race of idiots we’re so wonderfully trapped with:

love is a deeper season

than reason;

my dear one

(in april’s where we’re)

(link)

In fact a great deal of his poetry concerns the disorientation of being in love, with the confused syntax and unorthodox spellings allowing the sheer giddiness of love to burst through the prisons of language and grammar.  Cummings was sensitive to the relationship between form and theme, and his twisting explorations of grammar and punctuation and alignment are often tied indelibly to the topic at hand.

Along these lines, my personal favorite of all Cummings’ poems is “anyone lived in a pretty how town“, a brief storybook-like lyric about a lifelong love that’s nonetheless heavy with nostalgia and loss.  Check out these opening lines:

anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)

This is radical even for Cummings: the second line involves a complete dissociation of grammar from meaning.  But it’s one of the most beautiful lines Cummings ever wrote, and powerfully sad when it returns unexpectedly later in the poem.  

Though I earlier described Cummings as a visual poet, poems like these demand to be read out loud.  His singsong, nursery rhyme cadences deepen the portrait of childhood, memory, forgetting, and the inevitable cycles of life.  And this very life-ness of life at the center of his artistic work is the reason that Cummings can tackle so many of the concerns that keep the rest of us awake at night, but do so with humor, heart, and humanity.  

Further Reading:

• Cummings page at Modern American Poetry: includes bio and links to poems
• Practically all of his poetry at PoemHunter
• E. E. Cummings at kirjasto
• Spring: Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society
• Full text of The Enormous Room

Excerpts taken from The Enormous Room as published by Penguin Classics.  Image of Cummings taken from Wikimedia commons (source)

Some afternoon news and Open thread.

1. Torture doesn’t work… even the FBI knows this. According to the Washington Post, the FBI and CIA disagree on significance of terror suspect.

   Al-Qaeda captive Abu Zubaida, whose interrogation videotapes were destroyed by the CIA, remains the subject of a dispute between FBI and CIA officials over his significance as a terrorism suspect and whether his most important revelations came from traditional interrogations or from torture.

   While CIA officials have described him as an important insider whose disclosures under intense pressure saved lives, some FBI agents and analysts say he is largely a loudmouthed and mentally troubled hotelier whose credibility dropped as the CIA subjected him to a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding and to other ‘enhanced interrogation’ measures…

   FBI officials, including agents who questioned him after his capture or reviewed documents seized from his home, have concluded that even though he knew some al-Qaeda players, he provided interrogators with increasingly dubious information as the CIA’s harsh treatment intensified in late 2002…

   A rift nonetheless swiftly developed between FBI agents, who were largely pleased with the progress of the questioning, and CIA officers, who felt Abu Zubaida was holding out on them and providing disinformation. Tensions came to a head after FBI agents witnessed the use of some harsh tactics on Abu Zubaida, including keeping him naked in his cell, subjecting him to extreme cold and bombarding him with loud rock music.

2. According to the AP, Judge orders hearing on CIA videos. “A federal judge has ordered a hearing on whether the Bush administration violated a court order by destroying CIA interrogation videos of two al-Qaida suspects. U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy rejected calls from the Justice Department to stay out of the matter. He ordered lawyers to appear before him Friday morning. In June 2005, Kennedy ordered the administration to safeguard ‘all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.’ Five months later, the CIA destroyed the interrogation videos.”

3. The Bush administration is racing against the deadline to reward the corporate ‘news’ organizations that helped them gain and keep power. The Washington Post reports, FCC’s contested cross-ownership rule set for vote. “The Federal Communications Commission is pushing ahead to pass a rule today that would allow more consolidation of local media ownership in the nation’s largest cities, despite the fresh threat of a legislative rebuke and continued protests from advocacy groups. The rule, proposed by Chairman Kevin J. Martin, a Republican, has been assailed by members of his own commission, denounced by a unanimous vote of the Senate Commerce Committee and called harmful to media diversity by a number of groups who say Martin is rushing it through without adequate public comment… Martin’s action is backed by the White House”.

4. This is how our Congress works. Behold! War Pork! The Hill reports Rep. Courtney scores submarine funding win for Connecticut. “Freshman Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) came to Congress this year with one obsession: getting more money for attack submarines, a staple of significant employment in his district… That victory, widely considered a strong boost for the vulnerable Democrat, stemmed in part from a decision of several powerful lawmakers to push Courtney’s cause… Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), chairman of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee; Murtha’s Senate counterpart, Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii); House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.); and Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Armed Services Seapower and Expeditionary Forces Subcommittee.”

A bonus, if you can even call it that, story about Willard Mitt Romney is below the fold.

5. A story in The New York Times suggests that Like W, Romney too has ‘Daddy’ issues.

   George W. Romney made his fortune turning around the American Motors Corporation before becoming governor of Michigan, then staged a bid for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, only to watch his hopes collapse on the eve of the first votes. Now nearing that pivotal time in this year’s race, Mitt Romney said he felt as if his own campaign to become the Republican nominee was, in a sense, an extension of his father’s.

   “Like a baton has passed, like a relay team where the baton passed from generation to generation,” Mr. Romney said in an interview. He added, “I am a shadow of the real deal.“

So, what else is happening?

this is crossposted from Daily Kos, which will explain some of the dkos specific references

Our No. 1 education program is incoherent, unworkable, and doomed. But the next president still can have a huge impact on improving American schooling.

   So says perhaps the most cogent writer on educational matters, Richard Rothstein, in a piece in he American Prospect whose title, like that of this diary, is Leaving “No Child Left Behind” Behind   Before The New York Times lost its senses, Rothstein wrote columns regularly on educational matters.   Those of us who try to help the general public and policy matters  understand the reality of educational policy have often drawn some of our bgest arguments from his work.

The article, which became available online yesterday, presents the key issues as well as they can be presented, and there is little I can add, although I will offer a few comments of my own.  The notable educational figure Deborah Meier has said that we should blog about this and distribute the article as widely as possible.    I urge you to consider doing what you can, including if warranted recommended this diary, to make the article as visible as possible.

Let me begin by offering verbatim Rothstein’s first two paragraphs:

The next president has a unique opportunity to start from scratch in education policy, without the deadweight of a failed, inherited No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. The new president and Congress can recapture the “small d” democratic mantle by restoring local control of education, while initiating policies for which the federal government is uniquely suited — providing better achievement data and equalizing the states’ fiscal capacity to provide for all children.

This opportunity exists because NCLB is dead. It will not be reauthorized — not this year, not ever. The coalition that promoted the 2001 bipartisan law has hopelessly splintered, although NCLB’s advocates in the administration and the Congress continue to imagine (at least publicly) that tinkering can put it back together.

Let me make a slight discursus with my own comments. I’m not quite as confident as Rothstein is in that second paragraph.  It is true that most who follow educational policy believe that having failed to get reauthorization during the Congressional session about to end the administration will have to content itself with a continuing resolution.  I have written often of the horrors of that – the funding continues as the same insufficient level as the current law while the clock on punitive sanctions continues to run.  I think that is likely, but because of the fear of the damage that might do there may be the possibility that a new coalition could pass something different, and then the question would be if Bush would veto it, or accept it as a validation of his cheif domestic policy legacy.  I think in that case a veto would be possible, but not absolutely certain.

But let’s focus on what Rothstein has to say. In the beginning of his piece he provides an analysis of how the law came to be, including Rove’s ability to persuade some Republicans that the bill might be a way at making inroads into the African-American vote and Democrats equally as cynical in accepting impossibly high goals (100% proficiency) as a means of justifying huge increases in federal expenditures for education.  But as Rothstein notes

What few Democrats understood, however, was that test-based accountability might spur teachers but would also corrupt schooling in ways that overshadowed any possible score increases. Excessive testing is now so unpopular that Congress’ newly elected Democrats campaigned in 2006 against NCLB and now won’t support reauthorization. Senior Democrats are also hearing from parents, teachers, school boards, and state legislators.

.    And despite urgings form George Miller and Ted Kennedy, without whose support the original proposal would not have become law, that they can fix the legislation, Republicans are now inclined towards their normal traditional emphasis on local control of schools and many of the Democrats elected in 2006 campaigned against NCLB and are unwilling to support reauthorization.  

Rothstein provides a cogent analysis, understandable to the layman, of the basic flaws with a test-based accountability system.  He focuses on four key points.

GOAL DISTORTION On this Rothstein points to Edward Deming who warned

business to “eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals” because they encourage short-, not long-term vision.

 He offers additional support for a qualitative approach from Peter Drucker.  Given how often some people want to argue that schools should be run more like businesses (although on that point I would disagree and would remind people of businessman Jamie Vollmer’s famous Blueberry Story which illustrates how schools are different) it is interesting that Rothstein can provide evidence from two of the most admired figures who have written about business management.  Of equal importance is his reference to two well-known early supporters of the law, both of whom worked in the Bush 41 Department of Education, Checker (that is what he likes to be called) Finn and Diane Ravitch, and he quotes them in two snippets, both of which I reproduce:

We should have seen this coming … more emphasis on some things would inevitably mean less attention to others. … We were wrong.

[If NCLB continues,] rich kids will study philosophy and art, music and history, while their poor peers fill in bubbles on test sheets. The lucky few will spawn the next generation of tycoons, political leaders, inventors, authors, artists and entrepreneurs. The less lucky masses will see narrower opportunities.

TEST RELIABILITY Rothstein provides a readily comprehendable explanation of the limits of our approach to testing.  He references the work of Kane and Staiger, who raised enough warnings that those working on the original proposal delayed enactment for six months while they tried unsuccessfully to address the problems.

THE PROFICIENCY MYTH  I note that researcher Gerald Bracey has long criticized the proficiency levels of NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Progress) and that a study just put out by Brookings agrees with Bracey’s criticisms.   On this let me simply offer the first paragraph Rothstein presents under this category, and urge you to read the rest of what he has to say on the topic:

Even with inordinate attention to math and reading, it is practically and conceptually ludicrous to expect all students to be proficient at challenging levels. Even if we eliminated all disparities based on socioeconomic status, human variability prevents a single standard from challenging all. The normal I.Q. range, 85 to 115, includes about two-thirds of the population. “Challenging” achievement for those at 115 would be impossibly hard for those at 85, and “challenging” achievement for those at 85 would be too easy for those at 115.

 Whether or not you accept the idea that IQ is all that meaningful, or even that it is fixed (and the latter point is currently under serious challenge) it is amazing to me that the obviousness of the point Rothstein is making has NOT been part of the discussion, Perhaps people were afraid of the attack of ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations” but dishonesty and lack of reality do not serve the interests of anyone.

THE BUBBLE KIDS  This refers to the strategy being taken by schools, of ignoring those who will succeed on the mandated tests and those with little hope, and focusing the vast amount of efforts on those around the cut point, whose scores could slip below success or those just below possibly be raised.  Having all of these kids succeed results in the gross measure of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) going up.  

Rothstein explores three more main topics.  In SCHOOLS AND SOCIAL POLICY he starts by emphasizing how NCLB betrays core Democratic principles by

denying the importance of all social policy but school reform. Inadequate schools are only one reason disadvantaged children perform poorly.

  Rothstein reminds us of all the factors that contribute to poor school performance, and this is subject on which he has written extensively in recent years.  At the end of this section he offers a stark warning:

The continuation of NCLB’s rhetoric will also erode support for public education. Educators publicly vow they can eliminate achievement gaps, but they will inevitably fall short. The reasonable conclusion can only be that public education is hopelessly incompetent.

Rothstein next explores the possibility of “FIXING” NCLB.  Summarizing briefly, he tells liberals they are going to have to abandon the long-cherished idea that the Federal government is going to be able to solve our educational problems.   He puts this in the context of the history of federal aid to education, acknowledges that the underlying Elementary and Secondary Education Act will at some point be reuathorized, although probably increasingly ignored by states upon whom the burden o fixing our educational problems will likely fall.

Rothstein follows this with a section entitled WHAT THE NEXT PRESIDENT CAN DO.  He offers two key suggestions.  The first is to provide data on student performance not for accountability but to guide state policy makers.  He argues for an extension of NAEP for those purposes.  He also argues for the federal government providing more fiscal equalization.  He observes that new Jersey spend 65% more per student than does Mississippi, not because the latter state cares that much less, but because it lacks the economic base and resources to spend that much. He points out that current Federal spending policy exacerbates the underlying inequities.  But to achieve a policy which will take money from high income states like New Jersey and send it to lower income states like Mississippi will take, as Rothstein notes,

political courage not typically found in either Washington party. There’s a role here for presidential leadership.

Rothstein offers his suggestions in the context that the Congress will continue in Democratic hands (he is writing for the American Prospect) and the White House will also switch parties.  it is in that context that he offers his final paragraph:

Abandoning federal micromanagement of education has a hidden benefit: helping to reinvigorate American democracy in an age of increasingly anomic and media-driven politics. Local school boards in the nation’s nearly 15,000 school districts (but not in the biggest cities) can still provide an opportunity for meaningful citizen participation. Debating and deciding the goals of education for a community’s children is a unique American privilege and responsibility. Restoring it is a mission worthy of a new administration.

I have often written online about educational policy.  I have pointed people at a variety of published pieces, to important studies.  I have written about my own experiences and observations, in the hope that people might begin to understand the reality of what our educational policies have been doing.   I do not think I have ever written about a more important published piece than I do in this posting.   Regardless of what you may think of my writing, I urge you to make the Rothstein piece as widely visible as possible.  If you have contacts with the presidential campaigns, insist that their policy people read this.  If you are connected with school boards and superintendents, at local or state level, pass this on to them as well.   It is that important a piece of writing.

And now I will get ready myself for another school day, attempting to enable my students to have a positive learning environment despite the depredations of NCLB upon meaningful learning.

Peace.