Iowa Journal of Literary Studies

Johannesen, Heidi

PERFECTION IS AT ITS HEART SORRYHeidi JohannesenThe night is unworkable. The tree outside never sleeps.Imagine how crazy it is— all the roots and branches it’s stuck in.And the ground—what if it wants to get up and climb into the treein the dark?There is no center unless you choose one. You have to choose one. Even the world needs a home in the dizzy universe.The leaf finds a shape if it canand hangs on.The leaves fall because they are dead.They are not trying to find their roots.They are not symbols.* * *And there is nothing beyond you that hasn’t taken you with it, though maybe it’s holding back needing something to say.Words won’t do. They think they’re doctors.They turn you around and around until you fall off.They say try thinking about a nice place.They say the world might be easier when you are off the list of possibilities.They say pretend the tubes aren’t in your nose and it’s snowing.If they say they don’t know then74they don’t know,but definitely if they chop you up they won’t be able to find youor the good news of the ground where the darkness comes without falling,you understand.75

English

Perfection Is at Its Heart Story

Westbrook, Keith

Do Young People Say "Lord Ham Mercy"

Collins, Mary

Interview with Michelle Collins

Campos, Hector

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 11.1

Boyd, Todd E.

DEEP IN THE SHED: THE DISCOURSE OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN CINEMATodd E. BoydELVIS, H e W as  a h e r o  to  m ost,  b u t  h e  n e v e r  m e a n t  sh it to  m e , y ou  see, s t r a ig h to u t  racist, th e  su c k e r  was s im p le  a n d  p la in , m o th e r fu c k  h im  a n d  J o h n  W ayne .— Public EnemyThe polemical poets, Public Enemy, have in the above sentence conducted a most rigorous critique of American culture and society within the twentieth century. Having deconstructed two of the most prolific icons of white male supremacy, Public Enemy demonstrates what I see as the primary task of African-American intellectual activity, the rewriting of American history, society, and culture with a black pen. Whereas traditional definitions of intellectual activity re­volve around a specifically logocentric white male definition, which primarily argues that intellectuals somehow come from various aca­demic institutions, African-American intellectuals, because of an obvious denial to the academic means of production, have emerged from certain circumscribed places within the society and exist as products of an oral culture, which functions in direct opposition to white Western literate culture. According to Cornel West:[T]here are two organic intellectual traditions in Afro-American life: The Black Christian Tradition of Preaching and The Black Musical Tradition of Performance. Both traditions, though undoubtedly linked to the life o f  the mind, are oral, improvisa- tional, and histrionic. (114)West seems to totalize the intellectual tradition by reducing it down to these two poles, denying the inclusion of Paul Robeson or Malcolm X, for instance. Yet, what seems interesting in this assertion regards the thrust of an American hegemonic exclusionary practice, which has only allowed for articulation in the realm of Eurocentric Christianity and black musician performing for a primarily white-owned music industry.How do we then begin to theorize about those instances of black99intellectual expression which exist outside of the two dominant traditions mentioned by West? My concerns in this paper involve exploring the cinema as an act of black intellectual activity. Black cinema, within American society, especially recent examples, such as the films of Spike Lee or Robert Townsend, utilizes the combination of a technologized visual medium, with tenets specific to black oral tradition, to create a cinema that articulates and rearticulates, estab­lishing an Afrocentric discourse that challenges the dominant white discourse on blacks in American society:Any film whose signifying practices or whose making of symbolic images emanatesfrom an essential cultural matrix deriving from a collective black socio-cultural andhistorical experience and uses black expressive traditions as a means through whichartist languages are mediated. (Yearwood 70-71)Two of the most important eras of black intellectual activity have been the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Aesthetic Move­ment of the late 60s and early 70s. In both time periods, the ideological function of artist products stood at the forefront of most discussions. Yet the cinema remains visibly absent from both eras. In the two most recognized anthologies chronicling the respective move­ments, The New Negro and The Black Aesthetic, the cinema does not exist.In the case of the 1920s, film as an art form existed in its infancy. This is only thirty some odd years since the exhibition of the first film and only twenty-two years after the exhibition of The Great Train Robbery, the film considered to be the first narrative film. Black film production during the 1920s was either sporadic or involved the production of films that used entirely black casts and were directed at primarily black audiences, but were produced by white-owned inde­pendent companies. Therefore, not only did film exists as a relatively new artist form as far as the society at large was concerned, but the relative dearth of black films by black directors and producers, authorial identity being a component of both eras, inhibited the inclusion of film as viable political weapon in the expression of the New Negro. Not only that, but Oscar Micheaux, the most prolific black director/producer of the 20s, and any subsequent period for that matter, worked in the Midwest, while the Harlem Renaissance took place in the East, creating a financial and geographical obstacle for the unity of these two practices.The arguments presented about the Harlem Renaissance seem incompatible with the time period for the Black Aesthetic movement. By the 1960s film had certainly etched an indelible mark on American cultural history. Even though black cinematic production had not achieved the commercial success of its larger white counterpart, it did100by this time exist. One wonders why a film like Sweetsweetback’s Baddass Song did not make the pages of the Gayle edited text. The insertion of film into this period of black intellectual activity, or better yet, the exclusion of film, stands as a concern of historical inquiry which should be discussed further, but exists beyond the scope of this paper.I would like to postulate a theory of black cinematic discourse in the absence of a culturally generated one from the time periods already discussed. Black cinema can be described as a syncretic process. Paul Gilroy states:Black expressive cultures affirm while they protest. The assimilation of blacks is not a process of acculturation, but of cultural syncretism. Accordingly, their self­definitions and cultural expressions draw on a plurality of black histories and politics. (155)Black cinema combines the technological medium of film, rooted in Western technology, with certain components of black oral tradition. The use of the technology affirms, while the reliance on the oral expressivity protests against.This process of cultural syncretism can be seen as best exemplified through the idiom of jazz. Early attempts at producing jazz, for example, Buddy Bolden playing the cornet in a New Orleans march­ing band in the late 1800s, combine Western literate music, with various rhythmic stylizations directly from African tradition. The use of the African musical style, based on the culture of orality, rearticu- lates the manner in which music had been played up until that time. The oral segment of the music provides the protestation against Western literate music:It could be said with a certain amount o f accuracy that oral culture was, by nature, an underground culture, in the context of literate America; that simply being a Negro in America was grounds for nonconformity. (Sidran 80)Similar incidents of jazz as protest emerge in the context of Be-bop jazz, where black musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Kenny Clarke alter what had been foregrounded as mainstream jazz, Swing, embodied by white musicians like Benny Goodman. When the dominant culture attempted to define, black oral culture redefined.Following the Be-bop revolution, a series of white jazz musicians attempted to, once again, move the definition of jazz to a position outside of the black idiom. West Coast, or “cool” jazz, emerged. Initially, Miles Davis made an album entitled The Birth of the Cool in 1949. Adapting the “cool” label from Davis a series of white jazz musicians began to perform this “cool” jazz, yet this music sounded totally different from the music performed on the Davis album. Also, the move to the West Coast becomes significant because of its geographical distance from Harlem, the place where Be-bop and the101black musicians existed. So not only does the music become saccharin- ized, but the actual move away from Harlem signals another attempt at taking the music outside of oral culture.Once again, black musicians redefined the idiom by inventing a style of music that reverted back to a specifically blues or “soul” idiomatic style. The pianist, Horace Silver, and the group he was at one time associated with, the Jazz Messengers featuring drummer Art Blakely, personify the blues/soul approach. This foregrounding of an earlier form of black oral tradition mediated through the Western technological instruments demonstrates the syncretic qualities of jazz at its best:The Jazz Messengers, above all, stressed the ability to play the blues. They thus further stressed the advancement of  techniques valid only in terms of an oral approach. The blues techniques developed by black jazz musicians often appeared unschooled, yet they were, in terms of good blues playing, superior techniques. As the black culture began to accept the validity o f uniquely black solutions to problems of structure and content and as these solutions gained greater exposure, a combination of confidence and outrage ̂ unparalleled in black American history—developed. It was on the basis of this new aggressiveness—as represented by the “soul” phenom enon—that many politically active Negroes gained the confidence to claim that integrationist trends in America, for example, were potentially misdirected. (Sidran 132)This same trend can be seen in black cinema, that of definition/ redefinition. For instance, the attempt to define the question of blacks in American society through film by The Birth of a Nation (1915) was championed by then president Woodrow Wilson as “history written in lightning.” After the release of this film, Emmet J. Scott, secretary for Booker T. Washington, set out to redefine this question by producing The Birth of a Race. Though this film in its final release was totally different than its initial intention, the act itself constitutes a rejection of the white definition of blackness.Another example of this syncretic process can be seen in the Spike Lee film She’s Gotta Have It. This film foregrounds the oral nature of black cinema. The first scene of the film is a quote from the Zora Neale Hurston novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Immediately following this scene we see a series of black images in still photograph. Then the film’s main character, Nola Darling, shot straight on, much like a “talking head” in a television news segment, directly addresses the spectators. Their dialogue can be summed up as an attempt to “clear her name.” She closes out the conversation with a phrase from black vernacular, “This was the deal.” We have heard “Nola’s story” in a specifically oral manner. In traditional Hollywood cinema, charac­ters are introduced through the context of the film, their actions serve to define them. Whereas, in this film characters introduce themselves through oral discourse. Thus, the orality of African-American story­102telling has been combined with the visuals of cinema.This cinematic practice demonstrated by Spike Lee helps to create a vernacular cinema, in the sense that it deviates from the standard cinematic language of Hollywood. Houston Baker states:The vernacular in relation to human beings signals “a slave born on his master’s estate.” In expressive terms, vernacular indicates “arts native or peculiar to country or locale.” The material conditions of slavery in the United States and the rhythms of Afro-American blues combined and emerged from my revised materialistic perspective as an ancestral matrix that has produced a forceful and indigenous American creativity. (2)Black cinema, as it combines the technology of Western society with aspects of black oral culture, must also develop a critical apparatus that looks to explicate these oral tendencies, or as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has stated in another context, the signifying black difference. At­tempts to critique black cinema on “white” terms place the cinematic text on a critical “Procrustean bed,” eliminating that which exists as specific to black culture and focusing on simply the film as text, instead of as an instance of black cultural expressivity.An example of a new critical approach to black cinema can be seen in an episode from Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle. Instead of At the Movies, the Siskell and Ebert movie review program, we get Sneakin in the Movies, movies critiqued by some “real brothers.” The content of this entire scene revolves around a criticism of “white” films from a black vernacular perspective. For instance, one movie, entitled Amadaeus Meets Salarious, is given “the finger,” because, in the words of the critic, “I’m sick of movies that I can’t pronounce the title. A muthafucker got to be able to tell his woman where he gonna take her.” Though comical, the scene demonstrates the need for criticism of black films which pays attention to the intricacies of black cultural and cinematic discourses.This paper can only be seen as a preliminary attempt at a theori­zation of the question of race in American cinema and culture. What seems most interesting about this project revolves around the combi­nation of a Western technological phenomenon, the cinema, and black oral discourse. Because of the means of production in cinema being at times unattainable, the production of black cinematic texts appears sporadically. When these texts do appear, they are often denied distribution on a massive scale, thus limiting the exhibition of these films to art house and film festival circuits, and limiting their audience to a select few black and white bourgeois. This, I argue, makes these films less useful for a theorization of black cinema, because inherent in this theorization is an impulse to theorize black spectatorship as well. If only a few people see the films, what happens to a collective black struggle? This paper only scratches the surface of103what I see as a larger project, that of relating black intellectual output, cultural discourse, and cinematic production and reception in a larger social and political context.WORKS CITEDBaker, Houston. Blues, Ideology, and African-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory.Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Talking That Talk.” “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Ed.Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U o f Chicago P, 1984.Gayle, Addison, Jr., ed. The Black Aesthetic. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.Gilroy, Paul. There A in’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson P, 1987.Gladstone, Yearwood. “Towards a Theory of Black Cinema Aesthetics,” Black Cinema Aesthetics. Athens, OH: Ohio U Center for Afro-American Studies, 1982. Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro. New York: Atheneum P, 1986.Sidran, Ben. Black Talk. New York: Decapo P, 1983.West, Cornel. “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual.” Cultural Critique Spring 1986.104105

Deep in the Shed: The Discourse of African-American Cinema

Smith, Shannon M.

SUSAN EATS DINNER ALONEShannon M. SmithThe air is ripe tonight, and the kitchen table is unclean. The tabby cat crunches his lonely cat-food in the corner, and the ordered-in Peking Duck is quiet, though polite.Sadie, that woozy, woeful bitch, snuffs her muzzle into her two front paws and sleeps, while General Electric commands: Wake Up, Little Susie, Wake Up.Susie’s slipped her darling Mickey a you-know-what, and where he’s gone, nobody knows. She robes herself in her glory and blows with the wind onto the front porch.She shrieks: O lead on, neon planets, electric stars!The pine trees drop their cones quickly in the wild air. They are silent; they have known this secret all along.79

Susan Eats Dinner Alone

Garland, Max

CHICKENSMax GarlandFor the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of foolsshall destroy them. —Proverbs 1:32As it turns out, it was a farm of only seven-and-a-half acres. Everyone thinks his own childhood was bigger. Everyone thinks his childhood would make a compelling movie, for example. It’s hard to believe that the great scope and depth of childhood experience is not, at least in part, a result of vast physical scale. So it was barely seven-and-a-half acres, a small country to me, and therefore, a typical childhood. Beginning with pigs.The pigs were huge, muddy lumps of earth that somehow grew curious, or ravenous, developed snout and tail, and began jogging early one evening toward the barn. They were creatures without discrimination, as well as sources of great comedy. Like most comedy, the comedy of the pigs was based upon incongruity: the barrel shaped body upon the stick legs, the tail curled like an auger, the grotesque snout, the coy eyelashes. The piglets were explosive combinations of energy and imagination. They would, for instance, stampede head­long across the pen, then veer suddenly, or even slide to a terrified halt for no visible reason, the danger lurking only within their tiny rocklike skulls.The pigs could also be frightening. To think that they were capable of devouring anything tossed into their paths: hard corn, over-ripe tomatoes, apple cores, pumpkin rinds, dinner scraps, dishwater. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that they might even tackle a small, careless boy if conditions were right. My grandfather, who owned the farm, did nothing to dispel this notion. It seemed simple enough. To the pigs, the world was food.Another element of pig life was their repertoire of sound: grunt, squeal, snort, snuffle. Their communications with one another were direct and involved simple combinations of these sounds, accented at appropriate times with a swift kick from a hind hoof, or a quick123nipping motion. There was, of course, an element of disgust in my attitude toward the pigs. How could they live the way they did? There seemed to be complete and passionate acceptance of filth, as if given the choice, the pigs would always prefer a tiny fly-infested barnyard for a home. It didn’t occur to me that a lazy pig was a fat pig, and therefore, a valuable pig, or that the pigs were living our versions of their lives.It was partly from the pigs I learned the art of turning away. I learned how to avoid the thought that connected the huge ear- flapping comedians with the links of sausage or strips of bacon that appeared regularly on my grandmother’s flowered plates, or the country hams hanging from the garage beams. There was simply a blank space, a little bridge of amnesia where the connection might have been. I didn’t want to know how much of the squeal, grunt, and ear-flapping we had stolen, or that the pigs, for all their eccentricities, would ultimately be measured in pounds and ounces. The turning away was easy. The pigs would simply be loaded on a truck one day, and the next thing I knew it was Christmas: gifts, vacation, the reappearance of hefty, vaguely familiar relatives, and of course, tables covered with plates of dressing, potatoes, pies, and slices of sugar- cured ham. The next thing I knew the gifts were scattered across the living room floor, my father had fallen asleep in his chair, and I was beginning to nod, lulled to sleep by the dinner and the familiar wash of sound from the television.At some point my grandfather stopped keeping pigs. I don’t remember why. Maybe it was the economics, maybe just the odor. Anyway, as far as I was concerned, the pigs, as remarkable as they were, were not the true stars of the farm. They just provided a rather raw and sluggish background, like a series of living bass-notes. The real objects of my affection were the chickens; mostly White Leghorns, usually about eighty of them, with an occasional New Hampshire or Rhode Island Red, or more rarely, a speckled Plymouth Rock.Like the pigs, the chickens were capable of comedy at times. For example, the exaggerated fear of some sudden innocent motion, the tendency to flap away dramatically at the tiniest threat. There was also the trick of standing on one leg, body frozen, eye rolling and pivoting to take in the henyard.And oddly enough, the chickens were beautiful to me. From a distance they reminded me of small white sails, or pieces of tissue paper torn from gifts and blown across the scrabble of grass. If the pigs were the bass-line, the chickens provided the melodic complica­tions for the farm: cackle, crow, squawk, wing-flutter, scratch, a kind124of throaty ticking sound, even, at times, something resembling a purr.We called them a flock, but they seemed more like a tribe to me. There were always two or three roosters, arrogant and chiefly, with puffed feathers and sharp spurs at the back of the claws. And then the hens, which individually appeared rather frightened, comical, and somewhat reptilian, but as a group possessed a certain grace and intelligence, as if they were eighty complicated and scattered parts of a single body. I couldn’t say it at the time, but I felt strangely supported by the presence of the chickens. The combinations of sound and image were like a net under the summer days.Enhancing the mystery of the chickens was the chicken house itself. A dim, labyrinthine structure, actually a collection of sheds built at various times and connected by a system of hallways and doors. Rooms led to other rooms according to no discernible pattern. My grandfather kept adding to and subtracting from the chicken house as the years passed. The building was constructed of old lumber, new lumber, corrugated tin, old metal signs with faded advertisements, anything that would take a nail and turn the rain.On the wall of one of the corridors deep in the maze of the chicken house, hung a portrait of my great-grandfather. I never asked, never seriously thought of asking, why the portrait hung there. It was a huge hand-tinted photograph surrounded by an imitation hand-carved frame. It was also water-stained, dust covered, and draped with a decade of spider webs, but nevertheless there he was, my great­grandfather laid out in his coffin, his mustache thick and frosted, cheeks tinted, hands crossed in an attitude of rest, the network of veins faintly visible through the cobwebs. Much later I would discover that many families had funeral portraits made. I suppose, then, it became a matter of what to do with such an emotionally charged relic. It wasn’t the sort of thing even the most devoted mourner would care to look at often, but on the other hand it was impossible to throw away. As the years passed, my great-grandfather was partially covered and obscured by empty feed sacks and pieces of harness and eventu­ally disappeared altogether, but not before adding his strange weight to the atmosphere of the chicken house, and lacing the memory of childhood with an important element of ghostliness.At the other end of experience, the chicken house was part of the first myth of origin I ever heard. My grandfather told me that as an infant I had been discovered in a nest under one of the sitting hens. Naturally, I was picked up, dusted off, and carried into the house to be raised as a normal child. Since my grandfather was not known for his wit or imagination, I had no reason to doubt this version of my beginnings. Like the portrait of my great-grandfather, the infant-in-125the-nest story enlarged the experience of the chicken house by a factor impossible to measure.As for the hens, they laid their eggs in nests made of wooden milk crates filled with straw. I remember reaching under the sitting hens with apprehension and nostalgia, feeling for the warm shapes of the eggs. I liked the sense of accumulation: two eggs here, another five there. It felt good, like the beginnings of wealth, that rich strain in the muscles of my shoulders and back as I carried the egg buckets toward the house. It seemed right that the chickens worked for us, laid their eggs for us, although sometimes there was a minor flare-up of reluctance. A hen would momentarily threaten, making a sound remarkably close to a growl as I stole the eggs.Sometimes, of course, the eggs weren’t gathered at all, but were left in the nest to hatch. This happened rarely, and primarily for my benefit I think. My grandfather was usually too impatient to wait for the hens to hatch their own broods. Also, being a Protestant, I think he found it difficult to watch the hens sit idly, day after day, for the time it took the hatchlings to appear. Most of the new chicks were obtained from Austin’s Feed Store. I would help my grandfather carry the long, flat cardboard boxes of baby chicks to the car, listening to the fragile peeping and the sounds of sliding, scratching, and gentle tumbling as the chicks tried to balance themselves. Every Easter he would allow me to pick out a couple of brightly dyed chicks at Austin’s: red, purple or green. Every year I fell for the same illusion. Each time I believed the chicks would retain their colors, that in a matter of months I would possess huge purple or green chickens capable of producing eggs of the same colors, giving birth to new generations of brightly colored hens. I remember the gradual fading of the dye and the increasing difficulty in locating my chicks among the others, until finally all the pullets looked the same and there was nothing to distinguish the ones with the brilliant early careers.It was easier to turn away from the deaths of the pigs than the deaths of the chickens. The pigs simply disappeared. For a child, that left any number of illusions possible. With the hens, the fact of assassination couldn’t be avoided. There were two basic methods: the simple jerk, employed by my grandfather, snapping the neck of the hen; and the more grisly method used by my grandmother (my sweet, tear-prone, hymn-singing grandmother). This was the axe-murder method, which led to the unforgettable sight of the doomed hen dashing about the yard headless, stumbling, rising, finally recaptured and held by her feet at arm’s length by my grandmother. It was hard to find a place for this vision in my mind. It was hard to incorporate the fact that this creature could live and move separated from its tiny126brain, bill, and eyes. And even harder, that the hand of rosewater and tenderness, the hand that so delicately riffled the pages of the Methodist hymnal, or the tissue-thin pages of King James, could grasp death so easily and yet so firmly. My grandmother would remove the organs in the kitchen sink, then soak the plucked carcass to loosen the remaining feathers. It was a spectacle that sent me back to the yard toward some game or diversion, something that would rescue me from understanding the connection between the death of the hen and my own life, between my grandmother’s bloody hand and tenderness.It was a delicate mental trick—to see and not see at the same time. I had no way of knowing how much of my life would depend upon this trick, how many of the words I would speak or write over the years would be versions of this turning away. On one hand, I believed the chickens had emotions like mine, hunger like mine, a certain element of devotion, a very evident capacity for fear, a sense of exuberance. They could, after all, actually fly a little, though most attempts seemed more like leaping and then gliding back down with nothing much accomplished. The chickens possessed a nervous curiosity and a sense of thoroughness. Nothing edible, not the tiniest grain blown into the henyard, could escape their combined attentions. Also, there was the sense of community. In the evenings the chickens roosted on a series of bean-poles placed horizontally at different levels, a sort of bleacher effect. They clucked, rustled feathers, and held on in ascending rows of white. Domestic, tired, maybe even dreaming.On the other hand, there was something impenetrable about them. At some point in school I would learn there was a long chain of bird-life leading all the way back to the reptiles, but much earlier than that, I felt the intuition of that chain. There was something in their eyes that no amount of humanizing could fix. A distance, a remote­ness, a feeling that in spite of their domesticity they were not totally amendable. There were other, deeper allegiances. This was the view that helped me acquit my grandmother of the axe-murders. I would simply demote the chickens back down the evolutionary scale until they were reptiles with feathers, an act excusing both slayer and witness.This happened in delicate conjunction with the instant of turning away. The creatures I had granted humanity were still in the henyard clicking and fluttering like sails. Their lives were comparable to my own. At the moment of death, however, they became ridiculous creatures, beings with brains so small and superfluous their bodies could actually function a short time without them.During dinner at my grandmother’s house there was generally talk of the weather, small family grudges, the mysterious rise or inevitable127decline of some aunt’s health, and frequently, the delicious greasy plates of golden legs, breasts, and thighs, by that time thoroughly and convincingly transformed into food, prayed over, divided, and en­joyed. But enjoyed in part, I think, because of a missing connection, an ability, at least on my part, to absolve myself of a certain knowledge. I wonder now at the consequences of that absolution, that curtain that descended and allowed the creatures I loved, the ones I considered comical, musical, and beautiful, to become delicious. It’s another of those things I can’t find a place for. I begin to wonder what else might be happening behind that curtain, behind the turning away, which occurred even though I watched the killing of the chickens. The turning away hand nothing to do with watching or not watching. It had to do with disconnecting and denial. I’m not sure I was wrong. Maybe a certain amount of aversion is necessary for survival, helping deliver us from needless self-hatred or even ghoul­ishness. I think it’s the question of cost that bothers me. What is the price of turning away from such small, unpleasant, yet normal events? How deeply ingrained is the habit, and at what point does the phenomenon occur in my own recollections, conversions, relation­ships, and dreams?Maybe there was a third possibility for the chickens, neither human nor reptilian. Maybe there was a realm in which fear, pride, comfort, hunger, sleep, dream, accident, and even forgiveness occurred, but in ways not open to my understanding. In other words, an emotional, or even spiritual life that was real, though not the one I had imagined or defined for the chickens. Maybe it was the same for the hogs, I don’t know.About twenty-five years after witnessing my first chicken-killing, I was walking through a piazza in Florence and came upon a huge dark statue of Perseus, his arm raised and extended, holding the bloody, severed head of the Gorgon. I didn’t know much about Greek mythology, and still don’t, but strangely, I thought of my grand­mother, and realized that someday I was going to have to confront the turning away, the ordinary slaughters; maybe even dig among the roots of the word sacrifice in order to understand the world in which I lived as a child, and still carry with me in faint constellations of habit and thought.128129

Chickens

Kennon, Robert

The Dim Light

Haddock, John

Cutout Man in Suit on Board

McCourt, Tom

BOOK REVIEWTom McCourtInventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922 by Susan J. Douglas. Balti­more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. 363 pp. Illustrated.Inventing American Broadcasting is an exhaustive, well-written, and admittedly revisionist account of the pre-history of radio broadcast­ing, beginning with the American unveiling of wireless in 1899 and culminating in the “radio boom” of 1921-22. The book traces the “social construction” of radio—how individuals and institutions shaped the applications of broadcasting, and how these applications were legitimated in American culture. The author, Susan J. Douglas, is a professor at Hampshire College and media critic for In These Times. Her work focuses on the public significance of inventions/ technology: How machines develop meaning. To Douglas, technology develops through multiple actions and reactions, rather than linearly. She carefully explains how radio was ultimately transformed from private, or coded, directional medium to a public, omnidirectional medium as business, technology, and press wrested the medium from individual to institutional control. Douglas views the history of radio through a hegemonic lens, in which the media trumpet the “superi­ority of capitalism” while denigrating alternative views. According to Douglas, cultural hegemony of the medium was complete with the arrival of commercial broadcasting in the early 1920s: Amateur activists were replaced by programmers, passivity was promoted as empowerment.The figure of Guglielmo Marconi dominates the first half of the book. Although other inventors independently realized successful wireless radio transmission within a short time of each other, Marconi was the entrepreneur who bridged science, commerce, and popular imagination. Marconi perfectly fit the heroic archetype of the self- effacing inventor/entrepreneur, as opposed to “eccentric” scientists Reginald Fessenden of boisterous hustlers like Lee DeForest, his two main competitors. Marconi’s entrepreneurial acumen was displayed141when he allegedly transmitted across the Atlantic in 1901. Although no reporters were actually present, they were so in thrall of Marconi that they unhesitatingly reported the event. In Douglas’s phrase, Marconi “had managed to shout and whisper at the same time” (58). Douglas repeatedly contrasts Marconi’s beneficent public image with his privately stated desire to create a corporate monopoly. He con­centrated on selling to major commercial customers, rather than hobbyists, and quickly established a monopoly on the sale and service of wireless equipment. His successful attempts at privatizing the air created one of the basic issues in American broadcasting—battles over airspace. Douglas credits Lee DeForest with conceiving radio broad­casting as an educational and entertainment medium and finds him the most fascinating of the wireless pioneers, in that he most clearly embodies the contradictions of dreamer and huckster so often found in inventor/entrepreneurs. In light of his trials for stock fraud, one could scarcely call DeForest an altruist, yet he ceaselessly pushed his concept of music broadcasting. He “dreamed of bringing music, especially opera, into the houses of those unable to attend in person” (193).The mass media played a major role in the evolution of wireless, and Douglas repeatedly frames broadcasting developments in terms of press response. According to Douglas, “[press] coverage was hardly neutral or objective; it legitimated certain uses of the invention while condemning others, and it formed a narrow, romantic technical journalism” (xvii). These romantic tendencies were displayed in dewy-eyed editorials speculating on the potential of wireless to establish a permanent world peace, most frequently in press accounts of amateur wireless operators. These operators, or “boys,” were praised in the press for their pluck and resourcefulness; technical mastery replaced physical robustness as the test of manhood in urban society. Douglas is particularly effective when she describes how inventors, institutions, the press, and the public all interacted to spin a fabric of meanings around the medium. The media contextualized technical change in the form of familiar characters, as it does today in descriptions of teenage computer wizards. Press coverage of wireless provided a balm for Americans ambivalent about technology. The “robber barons” had earlier personified the fear of an unrestrained technics running amok in society, but the “hero/inventor” resolved the contradictions of tradition (individualism, self-denial) and change (technics)—taming natural forces and humanized technology (and, correspondingly, industrialism).The second half of Inventing American Broadcasting shifts from entrepreneurial to institutional concerns—specifically, the increasing142regulation of wireless in the aftermath of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. With the Radio Act of 1912, amateurs were exiled to the shortwave end of the spectrum, while military and commercial inter­ests (most notably, the Marconi Company) were awarded the choice frequencies. Broadcasting had become a privilege, not a right. Ac­cording to Douglas, World War One hastened military and corporate control of wireless, in addition to eliminating dissident elements: . . the subculture of American men and boys who had previously fought with the Navy over who owned the ether now supplied the armed forces with thousands of wiling, cooperative recruits. They were no longer outside the system, they were part of it” (298). The Navy’s desire to deal with American suppliers, rather than the British-based Marconi Company led to the creation of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) through the merger of General Electric and the American Marconi subsidiary.According to the author, “technically, economically, legislatively and ideologically, the elements of America’s broadcasting system were, thus, in place by 1922” (317). Douglas claims that the “radio trust” was able to “advance values consonant with consumer capital­ism” (320), a critical point in the corporate shaping of consumer culture. To Douglas, the early history of radio broadcasting symbol­ized corporate hegemony’s myth of consumer choice and ensuing corporate domination of mass communication. The insights she presents in Inventing American Broadcasting have implications relevant to the nature of today’s communications industry. Douglas’s media criticism in the popular press is frequently rabid, but Inventing American Broadcasting is devoid of such bluster. Her careful scholar­ship constructs a persuasive argument of how the mass media, abetted by corporate and military interests, effectively discourage pluralism in American society.143

Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1902 by Susan J. Douglas

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