Review: Bastard out of Carolina (a novel)

I just reviewed this novel for LibraryThing. Five stars.

I am in awe of this book. It was given to me but sat on my shelf for years, through at least one house move, until I decided this month that I might as well give it away. That’s when I opened it and glanced at the first lines.

Now that I’ve finished the book, I am personally grateful to Dorothy Allison for putting in the gigantic labor that it takes to make a story this good — especially one that draws on so much dangerous material from the author’s own life.

Where shall I begin? This is a story about people stuck at the bottom rung of the Greenville, South Carolina class system — surplus people living with shame, confusion, and bottled-up rage, which they often direct against themselves and each other. Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright is born to a 14-year-old mother, Anney, and both daughter and mother grow up fast. Bone sometimes leans on, sometimes strains against the bonds of family. Through her eyes, all the cousins, aunts, uncles, and surrogate fathers are so many unique, wonderful and terrible human beings. Their desire and pain cannot be waved away just because they are “white trash” (a term people still use without even a touch of irony).

Yet the book doesn’t just invert the usual standard of blame and praise; least of all does it preach. Even the people who grin with pleasure over the humiliation of Bone’s people are not allowed to become mere types themselves. Allison invites us to glimpse the souls even of minor characters who seem silly and self-deluding. There’s even a spark of desperate yearning within the vicious Daddy Glen, and we gain searing insight into the way a family instinctively forms a screening hedge around a man who preys on a girl. We also see why Bone cultivates burning hatred and numb meanness as sources of strength and self-protection. But she isn’t allowed to get away with it, not completely, not as long as her demoralized mother, crazy aunts, and drunken uncles keep trying to show their love.

Bastard out of Carolina spells out the closely guarded, unspoken wisdom of a brilliant child outcast, forced too early into adulthood, where she must struggle for a life worth living. I think the book is an amazing, almost miraculous achievement. Allison writes about the physical pain and burning emotions of an exploited child with the knowledge of one who has felt these things herself. She also has the discipline of a great writer, so her passion never gets the best of her plain, fine English. There is no lecturing in this book, and only one or two places where I thought things could possibly be improved on. Aspiring novelists should study this book as a model. There is always enough there to be fully convincing, and never too much.

Still, this is not a book for everyone. Some readers will be disgusted by the frank descriptions of masturbation and sexual fantasy as guilty adolescent pleasures. Even though this is a short novel, some readers will chafe at the time it takes to get to know Bone’s extended family as distinct human beings. A few readers, I expect, will just refuse to admit the upsetting Boatwrights into their imaginations. Instead, they’ll make them wait on the front porch while they summon the thought police to pack them off to allegorical jail. (Those trashy people! How dare they live lives that can’t be summed up with an Aesop moral! Don’t they know they are fictional characters?)

I think everyone who finishes the book will have difficulty forgetting it. Consider yourself warned.

I’m still giving away my copy, as promised. But I expect I’ll have to borrow another one someday for a second reading.

English from the treetops

There’s a 400-year-old verse that I consider ideal for demonstrating change in the English language. It’s “The lowest trees have tops,” by a nobody called Edward Dyer.

As poetry, it operates at about the level of forgettable pop music. It’s standard iambic pentameter, and the rhyme pattern is ABABCC. What first struck me is the way all the rhymes in the last stanza fail, because the vowels have shifted.1

The first stanza goes like this:

The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little spark his heat,
And slender hairs cast shadows though but small,
And bees have stings although they be not great.
Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs,
And love is love in beggars and in kings.

In the fourth line, Dyer is awkwardly unclear about whether the bees or their stings “be not great.”2 Still, the parade of images can start fruitful discussions, besides the phonetic problem of why “heat” is supposed to rhyme with “great.” For example, what are “gall” and “spleen”?3 In writing “seas have their source,” was the poet assuming that there is a huge salt spring at the bottom of the ocean?

Only one rhyme failed in the first stanza. In the second, all three rhymes are obsolete, vividly suggesting how the sound of spoken English has changed.

Where waters smoothest run, deep are the fords,
The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move:
The firmest faith is in the fewest words,
The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love,
True hearts have eyes and ears — no tongues to speak:
They hear, and see, and sigh, and then they break.

Besides the rhyme failures, there are several words here, too, that could bear some historical inquiry. Present-day students might need help interpreting “fords,” “dial,” and especially, “turtles.” Even students who ride horses for recreation will not know the anxiety of deciding where and when to ride across an unfamiliar stream. Clocks have long since ceased to be objects of contemplation, especially as they no longer require daily maintenance, nor do they normally call attention to their presence with ticks and chimes. And the only winged turtles left in our language are probably the two in the pear tree at Christmas.

Edward Dyer’s poem is in The Third and Last Booke of Songs or Aires (London: Thomas Adams, 21 February 1603), by the great lutenist John Dowland. If you prefer your rhymes with earlye moderne spelyng, see “The lowest trees haue tops.”

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Notes
1 This doesn’t mean that the poem accurately represents the state of spoken English in 1603, when it was published. The vowels had already started shifting, and many of the traditional rhymes trotted out by Dyer may have already been verging on obsolescence. Consider how modern choral composers still cram “over” (“o’er”) and “heaven” (“heav’n”) into a single syllable, because that’s how their predecessors did it. ↩
2 I’m inclined to think it’s bees that are “not great.” Dyer probably imagined their stings as resembling tiny swords, and in Dyer’s time and place, the wearing of a sword was one of the markers of a great man, or gentleman. That would make it worth remarking that “bees have stings although [bees] be not great.” ↩
3 I feel sure that gall and spleen are, respectively, choler and melancholy, or yellow bile and black bile, in the humorist theory of human physiology. But don’t take my word for it. ↩

ACT for America has an agenda for Congress

ACT for America, an activist group opposing “radical Islam,”1 is pushing a ten-point agenda for the 112th Congress.

Let’s take a look.

1. Banning shariah: “Reaffirm the U.S. Constitution as the supreme law of the land, and oppose the application of or accomodations to shariah law, which conflicts with the U.S. Constitution.”

This item depends on two myths: first, that shariah is a barbarous medieval law code at odds with American law and values; and second, that Muslims are committed to forcing non-Muslims to submit to shariah, as part of their evil plan for world domination.

American Muslims are concerned, because a shariah ban would limit their freedom of religion. Specifically, Muslims have particular ways of getting married, borrowing money, making wills, and burying the dead. A shariah ban would make these practices invisible in a court of law, while the practices of other religious minorities remained protected.

This is why, after Oklahoma voters approved a shariah ban in November 2009, a federal court quickly annulled the ban as a violation of the First Amendment.

So there’s a rich irony to linking a shariah ban with “reaffirm[ing] the U.S. Constitution.” I suspect that ACT leaders know that a shariah ban can never be enacted by Congress, and if it did happen, the ban would not pass muster with the Supreme Court.

So why do they bother? Perhaps it’s because making noise about shariah serves to increase fear of a Muslim threat, along with alarm that the government might not be doing enough to protect us.

2. Defense spending: “Support a strong national defense, including a comprehensive missile defense, and the elimination of wasteful spending that weakens our defense.”

It’s hard to see how supporting a comprehensive missile defense is compatible with eliminating wasteful defense spending. Missile defense is arguably the most lavishly wasteful, least effective defense program in history.

Letter to the White House

I cannot sleep, I cannot eat. I’m scared to walk to the bathroom because I’m afraid they will hunt me down.… I’m not the same. — An American citizen trapped in Kuwait

Here is my letter:

Sir, please intervene to ensure that Gulet Mohamed, age 19, of Alexandria, Virginia, is returned home from prison in Kuwait. According to the New York Times, the Kuwaiti government is prepared to release him from prison, but the United States will neither cooperate with Kuwait nor allow him to fly home once he is released.

I am alarmed to read that Mohamed was likely arrested at the behest of U.S. authorities; that he incurred our government’s suspicion because he is an observant, non-white Muslim; and that while in detention he was beaten, accused of terrorism, and told that his family would suffer if he did not confess.

This incident and others like it lead me to believe that our government’s efforts against terrorism are too influenced by fear and prejudice, rather than by coherent strategy. Episodes like this are a gift to Salafi extremists who wish to portray the United States as an enemy of all the world’s Muslims.

If this is still a land of liberty and justice, Gulet Mohamed must be returned home as soon as possible, with a formal apology for the terror we have caused our ally to inflict on him.

I am deeply saddened and alarmed for the future of my country.

Citizens of the United States should be free to travel the world at their own risk. That rule does not change because the citizen is named “Mohamed.”

Traveling to Yemen is not a crime. I considered doing it myself in 2001, to study Arabic, until 9/11 changed my mind.

Recently I had begun to think it might be OK to go there now. I should not have to hesitate out of fear of my own government.

Beating a prisoner on the soles of the feet is incredibly painful, yet it leaves no marks that could prove mistreatment. And this has become an acceptable way to treat U.S. citizens.

We’re not talking about the fantasy life of Jack Bauer. In real life, torture is used to terrorize the innocent and make them say they’re guilty.

This must stop. We are no longer talking about a few rogue officials, or over-zealous reactions to 9/11.

We are getting to the point where torture is a routine instrument of U.S. policy. That is a line we never have crossed, and we must not cross it now.

I hate to be a drag. But if we once cross that line, you can kiss all that liberty-and-justice stuff good-bye.

And make sure you don’t get caught doing it.

Don’t call me “an” historian

I object to using the determiner an instead of a in front of the word historian. It seems pretentious and unnatural. I believe almost nobody says “an historian,” yet I read it all the time.

I’ll grant that some English dialects do talk of ’istory and ’istorians. But in most dialects, as well as in what I consider standard usage, people always pronounce the initial h. Because that’s so, I insist that “an historian” (used in writing) is unambiguously pretentious or archaic.

The tradition
The Oxford American Dictionary tries to explain when it’s OK to use an in front of a word beginning with H.

The traditional rule . . . is that if the h is sounded, a is the correct form (: a hospital;: a hotel). But if the accent is on the second syllable (: historic;: habitual), there is greater likelihood that, at least in speaking, ‘an habitual’ will sound more natural. One form is not more correct than the other, although some constructions may strike readers as pretentious or old-fashioned (: an heroic act;: an humanitarian).

I differ with the OAD as to how “natural” it sounds to refer to “an habitual offender,” for example. In the American English I’m familiar with, the initial H in habitual is always audibly pronounced, even in rapid speech.*

It follows that other H-words with stressed second syllables ought to take an as well, if “historian” and “habitual” do. Historians should not be the only professionals distinguished in this way. I should be able to find “an” histologist and “an” hydraulic engineer or two out there, right?

So why can’t I?† Anybody have “an” hypothesis?

Don’t stress out
English has ambiguous rules for stress placement, so the second-stressed-syllable rule that permits “an historian” is, shall we say, a/an haphazard guideline.

Let me offer an hexample or three. Can you distinguish the acceptable usage from the unacceptable?

1. There’s no need for an hysterical outburst just because an hippopotamus escaped.
2. Ursula considered herself an heroic sufferer; her nurse thought she was an hypochondriac.
3. Max is an habitual drunk. But to hear him tell it, he’s an hydroxylation researcher boldly experimenting on his own bloodstream.
4. Just before taking an hiatus, Professor Test-Case railed against “an hierarchocentric academic regime that unconsciously fears to establish an hypothesized theoretical foundation for an historically rigorous contribution to critical theory.”
5. Samuel called his lecture “an hypnotic discourse”; I called it an histrionic fit delivered in monotone.

It’s not immediately obvious, is it?

My advice: Keep it simple. If the word starts with an audible H, use a as the indefinite determiner.

And don’t call me “an” historian.

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* I was going to say that the N of an collides with the H in a way that seems anything but natural in English. But I have to allow that there are common words like unhappy in which N and H cooperate in a peaceable manner. What matters more, I think, is the sound of the respective vowels in a and an.
In front of H words, a is usually pronounced like the letter A [IPA: /eɪ/]. Sometimes a is umlauted to a schwa [IPA: /ə/], and in that case the vowel, being more frontal, seems more compatible with a following N, i.e., an. So if you habitually say “an historian,” you probably pronounce it much like “un-historian.” ↩

† OK, I can find examples of “an histologist” and “an hydraulic.” I’m exaggerating for rhetorical effect, and in order to set the stage for “an hypothesis.” So sue me. ↩

A list of history blogs

Something called History Masters just published a Top 50 list of blogs about American history. [link]

I only knew about roughly one-tenth of them.

A notable gap in the list is the excellent Civil War Memory. It definitely belongs among the top 50, and has a lively community involved with it. I’m not a Civil War historian, but I think it’s imperative to stop by CWM now and again.

The best title on the list, I’d say, belongs to a military history blog: Mark Grimsley’s Blog Them Out of the Stone Age.

It’s a great read, as you’d expect from this author. I just learned that one of the latest crises to occupy members of our fearless Congress is the supposed demise of military history in the schools. I think Grimsley’s comment is worth your time.

Update: As of January 2012 Grimsley’s blog has been obliged to migrate because of malicious code that got onto the web server for the warhistorian.org domain. I have updated links to point to the safe site, but because of resemblance to the content of the corrupted site, you may get a warning from your browser.

Miscellany

There’s a lot, so I’ll resort to bullet points.

• I spoke at another Ignite event, this time performing “Ignite karaoke.” That’s where you’re presented with a PowerPoint deck, sight unseen, and must weave a presentation out of it.
• I’ve renewed acquaintance with the Birmingham Stammtisch, a weekly gathering for speaking German. On Sunday several of us headed to Tuscaloosa to hear Gottesdiesnt in German; a Tuscaloosa Deutschsprachige sang a Mozart aria very well.
• A day earlier, I went to a historic African-American cemetery here in Birmingham, Shadow Lawn, where a neighbor of mine had organized a little ceremony to commemorate “buffalo soldiers.” John Lanier has done impressive research on several of the men buried at Shadow Lawn, and is acting president of the cemetery association. There were JROTC students, members of the Buffalo Soldiers Motorcycle Club, and descendants of one soldier on hand. John led an impromptu tour of the cemetery, where one tombstone honors a Medal of Honor recipient whose name, however, is not on any official list. These days the most visited grave at Shadow Lawn is that of Michelle Obama’s great-great-grandfather, made famous by a recent New York Times article.
• Apparently I live in an endangered global ecoregion, say scientists at the World Wildlife Fund.

Giving an Ignite talk

I’m on the program for this evening’s Ignite Birmingham at a downtown restaurant called Matthews Bar and Grill. My topic is Islamic finance and the prospect of starting a credit union in Birmingham to offer fair credit to “unbanked” people — the ones who get fingerprinted when they venture to cash a paycheck.

Should be fun. I’ve met exactly two of the other presenters.

America’s dashboard GPS of war

Sad to say, this earlier post still applies. It’s all I have to say about l’affaire McChrystal et Petraeus.

I’ve read more than one news item describing how drivers sometimes place too much faith in their GPS navigation devices. Guided by the disembodied voice coming from the dashboard, some have doggedly followed dirt roads to nowhere, faced oncoming one-way traffic, or narrowly avoided driving over cliffs. The authority of the voice-in-a-box overrules … Read More

via à la Rob

Yes, I WILL boycott BP

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about how boycotting BP is an empty gesture that only harms local retailers. Maybe so, but I’m doing it anyway.

Here’s why.

• Knowing what BP has done to the Gulf of Mexico, I can no longer buy BP products without feeling like a shmuck.
• Not being a petroleum products distributor myself, either I boycott BP retail outlets or I take no effective action at all.
• It is not my responsibility to ensure the profitability of anyone’s convenience store. There’s this thing called risk. Deal with it.
• I’m told that BP retailers get most of their revenue from drinks, candy, and so on. So fine, if I happen to pass your store on a bike or on foot, I’ll feel free to stop in and buy a coke. But I won’t drive a car in to your lot, much less buy your gas.
• I’ve managed to avoid buying Exxon products since 1989, when the company’s Exxon Valdez tanker dumped up to 32 million gallons of oil in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Failing to boycott BP for a much larger and more serious offense would be inconsistent at best.
• Boycotting Exxon, BP, and Amoco (a BP trademark) is likely to be inconvenient on road trips. This is OK with me. We’re supposed to be weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels, so the least I can do is put up with some inconvenience when it comes to buying gasoline.

You might be able to talk me into boycotting even more gasoline retailers, but you won’t talk me out of boycotting BP.