April 8, 2022: Tree Tales: The Overstory

[This month we celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Arbor Day, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of tree-tastic stories. Leading up to a special weekend post on the holiday’s histories!]

On the long legacy of cli fi, and a stunning recent novel that reveals the genre’s true potential.

The term “cli fi” (for “climate fiction”) has only been around for the last 10 years or so; it was apparently first coined in 2011 by activist and author Dan Bloom to describe Jim Laughter’s novel Polar City Red, and then gradually picked up by various media voices and stories around 2013-2014. But as with so many literary genres, there are numerous earlier authors and works that can productively be classified within this frame, including Jules Verne’s The Purchase of the North Pole (1889), Laurence Manning’s The Man Who Awoke (1933), multiple novels by J.G. Ballard, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), among others. While all of those works are distinct and specific, I’d say that all of them fall under the broad umbrella of science fiction, wedding as they do their realistic depictions of science and the natural world to imagined futures in which (generally) worst-case climate and environmental scenarios have come to pass and humans (individually and/or collectively) are dealing with the aftermaths.

Sci fi cli fi (say that five times fast) has continued to be a prominent sub-genre here in the 21^st century, as exemplified particularly clearly by science fiction legend Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capitol trilogy (comprising the novels Forty Signs of Rain [2004], Fifty Degrees Below [2005], and Sixty Days and Counting [2007]). But as we’ve moved further and further into a world where climate change is not an imagined future scenario but a very, very real present reality, we’ve concurrently seen authors begin to produce as well cli fi novels and stories that depict, respond to, and engage in more socially realistic ways that present world. That list includes, among others, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure (2018), a number of the stories in John Joseph Adams’ edited anthology Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction (2015), and one of the most acclaimed and powerful American novels in recent memory, Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory (2018).

Yet in truth, to classify The Overstory as an example of more contemporary and/or socially realistic fiction is no more accurate than to describe it as science fiction. Powers’ book does trace the individual yet ultimately interconnected stories of nine realistic fictional characters, all Americans living in our early 21^st century moment, all descended from family and communal histories involving trees in central ways. But through that shared theme, and through his structural and narrative choices as well, Powers ultimately produces a work that I would call a historical novel in which the history (as well as the present and future) of the world is viewed through the lens of trees and forests, rather than through the perspectives or experiences of humans (individual or collective, fictional or real). Which is to say, Powers’ first cli fi novel (his latest, 2021’s Bewilderment, has been described that way as well, but I haven’t had the chance to read it) isn’t just about climate change or environmentalism—it makes the environment, and specifically trees, its main character, main narrative perspective, and ultimately main emphasis, above (in every sense) and beyond us transient humans.

Next tree tale tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other tree texts you’d throw in?

April 7, 2022: Tree Tales: Into the Woods

[This month we celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Arbor Day, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of tree-tastic stories. Leading up to a special weekend post on the holiday’s histories!]

On the deep dark heart of fairy tales—and musicals?

No AmericanStudier can be equally familiar with every part of our culture and history, and I’d be the first to admit that musical theater is an area where my knowledge is relatively thin (despite my Mom’s best efforts to share the collected works of Rodgers & Hammerstein among others, efforts which at least did result in that weeklong blog series!). But even a relatively newb like myself knows that when Stephen Sondheim passed away this past November at the age of 91, it was the passing of a true titan, not just in literary theater or theater but in all of American culture. He achieved that success and influence across a fifty-year career that included writing the music & lyrics to more than 15 musicals, the lyrics to another few, and collaborating on countless other theatrical, film, and cultural projects. But throughout that long and varied artistic career and life, it seems to me, at least from the testimonies I’ve encountered from fellow AmericanTheaterStudiers, that 1986’s Into the Woods was and remains a particularly important and impressive high-water mark.

One reason for the prominence of that particular musical has to be the way in which it offers a witty, sophisticated, timeless yet modern meta-commentary on its fairy tale characters, settings, and plotlines. And to my mind, that starts with the musical’s title, its recognition (pace Bruno Bettelheim among others) of the central role that deep dark woods play in our collective acts of storytelling (across so many different eras and cultures). Theorists like Bettelheim have often focused on the psychological and pedagogical sides to such settings and stories, the ways for example that the woods both reflect and allow us to explore our unconscious fears and desires (a central thematic thread of Sondheim’s musical as well). But I would add that there’s a pretty strong cultural and historical component to these fairy tale woods as well, and not just in the medieval past or other distant times—I think for example about the “wild beasts and wild men” that William Bradford feared lay just beyond the walls of the very small and very isolated Plimoth Plantation in 1620. That was part genuine uncertainty, part psychological horror, part prejudice—and all one of so many instances of the ubiquitous collective “woods” into which Sondheim’s musical taps.

So in fairy tales, a central presence of a deep dark that needs confronting is pretty familiar stuff. But in musicals, at least throughout the 20^th century, that would seem generally not to be the case. Again I’m far from an expert, and I welcome any and all disagreements and other responses in comments (as always!). But it seems to me that even when musicals feature dark or tragic plotlines, they have often if not consistently represented them in relatively cheery ways; I’m thinking for example about the snapping, dancing, choreographed gang fights of West Side Story (for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics), or the spectacular (literally and figuratively) helicopter evacuation at the end of Act 1 of Miss Saigon. I’m not suggesting that Into the Woods is a Tarantino film brought to the stage or anything, and indeed its cleverness and humor are frequently its most celebrated elements. But at the same time, Sondheim’s musical does plumb the deep dark depths of both individual and collective psyches in a way that feels distinct from many musicals—and perhaps offers another factor in what has made these musical woods so enduringly popular and powerful.

Last tree tale tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other tree texts you’d throw in?

April 6, 2022: Tree Tales: The Learning Tree

[This month we celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Arbor Day, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of tree-tastic stories. Leading up to a special weekend post on the holiday’s histories!]

On Parks’s autobiographical novel and its even more ground-breaking film version.

If Gordon Parks were just the hugely talented and influential photographer on whose career and works I focused in these two prior posts, that would be more than enough to merit much fuller collective memory of Parks and perhaps even a coveted spot in the under-construction American Hall of Inspiration. But in truth Parks was far more multi-talented than that, producing substantial and meaningful work in a number of artistic forms and genres, and as a result he left a cultural legacy that extends well beyond the worlds of photography and art. I’ll focus here on one of the most singular and impressive texts and moments in that legacy, his work telling the story of his own childhood as first a writer and then a filmmaker.

Parks told that story first in his one published work of fiction (he published numerous autographies and poetry collections as well as photography collections and textbooks), the autobiographical novel The Learning Tree (1963). I would locate Parks’s readable, compelling, and thought-provoking young adult novel alongside a work like William H. Armstrong’s Sounder (1969) in its ability to turn African American history into the kind of story that can engage and entertain as well as educate young readers. Parks’s book might not be quite as successful as Armstrong’s (which remains one of the greatest American young adult novels), but on the other hand it is both drawn from the author’s own life far more closely (which has its own interest and appeal) and represents, in its portrayal of 1910s and 20s Kansas, a period of African American and American history more consistently overlooked than the post-war sharecropping era of Armstrong’s book. Not bad at all for the man’s one published work of fiction!

A few years after publishing his novel, Parks took an even more radical and significant artistic step: directing a feature film version of The Learning Tree (1969), and in the process becoming the first African American director of a Hollywood studio film (it was made for Warner Bros./Seven Arts). That Parks also wrote the screenplay, produced the film, and, just for good measure, composed the musical score to boot makes this truly one of the most virtuoso artistic performances in American film or cultural history. But all that behind the scenes history shouldn’t overshadow a simpler but even more crucial way in which the film made history: representing an African American childhood as the central story of a Hollywood movie. That is, there had been plenty of other novels like The Learning Tree; I don’t think there had ever been a film remotely like it, just one more way that Gordon Parks profoundly influenced and altered American culture and history.

Next tree tale tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other tree texts you’d throw in?

April 5, 2022: Tree Tales: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

[This month we celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Arbor Day, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of tree-tastic stories. Leading up to a special weekend post on the holiday’s histories!]

On historical, cultural, and literary contexts for a beloved novel’s central symbol.

One of my favorite things about this blog is how much I learn from researching just about every post, and especially those where I start with a basic topic—“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn makes sense for a series on tree stories”—and not much more. In this case, I learned (first from the book’s Wikipedia page, natch; but verified with another source to which I’ll link, also natch) a really striking historical context for Betty Smith’s 1943 novel: that it was one of the books distributed to WWII soldiers in pocket-sided Armed Services Editions (ASE); that it was popular enough to be one of the select few ASEs chosen for a second printing; and that Smith received countless fan letters from grateful GIs. Of the letters I’ve seen quoted, the most striking such response seems to me to closely parallel the book’s titular symbolic story, the image of the resilient “Tree of Heaven” outside protagonist Francie Nolan’s childhood window: that Marine wrote to Smith, “I can't explain the emotional reaction that took place in this dead heart of mine...A surge of confidence has swept through me, and I feel that maybe a fellow has a fighting chance in this world after all.”

I can’t imagine a more moving response to, or context for, Smith’s titular image nor her book as a whole. But there are always multiple meaningful contexts for any work, and I would add a couple more layers to the conversation as well. On a cultural level, Smith’s Tree offers a unique but tellingly representative symbol of the multi-generational immigration experience in America: Francie’s father Johnny Nolan is an Irish immigrant and her mother Katie Rommely Nolan an Austrian one, and Francie both witnesses their struggles with early 20^th century urban poverty and American society and experiences her own 2^nd-generation challenges. Yet she not only perseveres but by the novel’s end is (at the age of 17) as mature and thriving as the Tree, which thus becomes as moving a symbol of these multi-generational immigrant American sagas as Tan’s Joy Luck Club, Cisneros’ House on Mango Street, or Lahiri’s Namesake. Smith’s novel would pair with any and all of those books in an Ethnic American Lit course.

That’s of course already a literary as well as a cultural context for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but I would add one other literary context into the mix as well. I’ve written and talked a good bit in the last year and a bit about why and how we might replace To Kill a Mockingbird in our classrooms and curricula, including with the book (and film adaptation) to which I’ll turn in tomorrow’s post. But at the very least, if we’re going to keep Mockingbird I think we should find ways to reframe it, to push past the (to my mind) largely inaccurate sense of it as a novel about racism and justice and to read it for the complicated coming-of-age story it truly is. One way to do so would be to pair it with another such coming-of-age novel like Smith’s, and for example to think about how Smith’s titular Tree might be compared and contrasted with the neighborhood tree that becomes such a pivotal part of the setting and the story of Scout Finch in Lee’s book. One more way and reason to read, teach, and share Smith’s novel and its Tree.

Next tree tale tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other tree texts you’d throw in?

April 4, 2022: Tree Tales: The Giving Tree

[This month we celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Arbor Day, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of tree-tastic stories. Leading up to a special weekend post on the holiday’s histories!]

On two ways to frame and teach “one of the most divisive books in children’s literature.”

First things first: I’m a big Shel Silverstein fan (and that was even before I learned that he wrote “A Boy Named Sue”). In my experience, it’s very rare to find children’s literature that genuinely and fully appeals to both kids (of all ages, no less) and adults, and the Silverstein poems featured in classic books like Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974) and A Light in the Attic (1981) absolutely succeed at that tough task. They, like Silverstein’s style and voice overall, are also truly unique, unlike any other children’s lit that I’ve encountered (which is likely a main reason, along with that broad audience appeal, why they have remained popular for nearly fifty years). I say all that not just to praise a very deserving author and artist, but also and especially so that when I say The Giving Tree (1964) is on the short list of books I hate most, you’ll know that I don’t make that claim at all lightly.

I’m not alone in that hate—but at the same time, as my opening quote above (from librarian and author Betsy Bird) illustrates, those who deeply love the book are likewise far from alone. That kind of incredibly varied range of readings can be enough to make one throw one’s hands in the air and mutter my sons’ and my favorite phrase to diffuse many arguments: de gustibus non est disputandum. But it also offers teachers (in and out of classrooms) a chance to, as a familiar pedagogical saying goes, “teach the controversy”—and in this case, I would add, through highlighting and engaging directly with the book’s divisiveness to teach and talk about the idea of reader-response criticism: how we can read and analyze readers and readings to think about what they tell us about audiences, perspectives, communities, how cultural works work, and more. Just the range of “Interpretations” traced on the book’s Wikipedia page offers a fascinating window into late 20^th and early 21^st century readers, communities, and ways of thinking about what culture does and means.

For all those reasons I don’t think it makes sense to privilege any one reading of the book as more “correct”—but in the spirit of this week’s series, I do want to say a bit more here about what it would mean to take The Giving Tree seriously as an environmentalist parable. I don’t know that there’s any direct evidence that Silverstein was particularly concerned with such issues, either with this book or overall in his career and life; but at the same time, it’s interesting and important to note that he makes a tree one of his book’s two characters, and moreover makes the tree the one who gives so much and is so thoroughly wrecked in the process. To take the reader-response idea one step further—whatever Silverstein may have intended, it seems impossible for any 21^st century reader not to think about that tree in the context of all that humans have done to the Earth; and even if children and all of us are deeply bothered by reading Silverstein’s images, indeed perhaps especially if we’re bothered, that particular reader-response feels like a very worthwhile one to produce and engage.

Next tree tale tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other tree texts you’d throw in?

April 2-3, 2022: March 2022 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

March 5-6: Megan Kate Nelson’s New Book on Yellowstone: A National Parks series concludes with a special tribute to the great Megan Kate Nelson’s new book!

March 7: The Pacific Theater: Guadalcanal: For the 80^th anniversary of “I Shall Return,” a Pacific Theater series kicks off with three texts to help us analyze the Guadalcanal campaign.

March 8: The Pacific Theater: Midway and The Thin Red Line: The series continues with clear and telling differences between two star-studded WWII epic films.

March 9: The Pacific Theater: Model-making and Tarawa: A childhood building war models and what they can help us understand, as the series rolls on.

March 10: The Pacific Theater: U.S.S. Midway Museum: Trying to make sense of two distinct and even contradictory public roles of a unique historic site.

March 11: The Pacific Theater: “I Shall Return”: On its 80^th anniversary, how one moment can exemplify the best and worst of a controversial military leader.

March 12-13: The U.S. and the Philippines: A special weekend post on what we should better remember about three stages of a defining international relationship.

March 14: AmericanThaws: Eliot and Williams: A start of Spring series kicks off with two Modernist poems that exemplary contrasting yet complementary narratives of Spring and hope.

March 15: AmericanThaws: The U.S. and the U.K.: The series continues with how a longstanding animosity began to thaw, and why the specifics matter.

March 16: AmericanThaws: William Mahone: On which late-in-life evolutions impress me more than others, as the series springs on.

March 17: AmericanThaws: Chivalry in War: A unique and amazing moment of wartime humanity.

March 18: AmericanThaws: Nixon Goes to China: The series concludes with two ways to AmericanStudy an undeniable international turning point.

March 21: Rock and Roll Groundbreakers: The Moondog Coronation Ball: On the 70^th anniversary of the first rock concert, a groundbreaking series kicks off with three layers to that foundational moment.

March 22: Rock and Roll Groundbreakers: Alan Freed: The series continues with two contrasting sides to the foundational DJ and how to bridge the gap.

March 23: Rock and Roll Groundbreakers: Fats Domino: A few iconic moments in the career of the legendary artist, as the series rocks on.

March 24: Rock and Roll Groundbreakers: Chuck Berry and Little Richard: A pair of foundational icons whose stories represent some of the worst and best of rock and race.

March 25: Rock and Roll Groundbreakers: Elvis Presley (and Frank Sinatra): The series concludes with the differences between influential and interesting.

March 26-27: 21^st Century Rock and Roll: A special weekend tribute to a handful of the many contemporary rockers extending the genre’s legacies.

March 28: Stand-Up Studying: Anthony Jeselnik: An April Fool’s series on great stand-up bits kicks off with the darkly sweet humor of my favorite current comic.

March 29: Stand-Up Studying: Roy Wood Jr.: The series continues with an example of how Wood engages social and political issues without preaching (and hilariously).

March 30: Stand-Up Studying: Jim Jefferies: The bit on gun control that’s so smart my son used it in an argumentative essay, as the series jokes on.

March 31: Stand-Up Studying: Katherine Ryan: When an American expatriate in England turns her attention to a #MeToo response to Hamilton, the result is cross-cultural comic gold.

April 1: Stand-Up Studying: Five More Faves: The series concludes with five more great bits from a handful of awesome current comics!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

April 1, 2022: Stand-Up Studying: Five More Faves

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I wanted to highlight one great routine each from a handful of the many wonderful stand-up comedians doing their thing these days—in case, y’know, you’re (like me) looking to move on from a problematic fave. Add your faves, present and past, in comments!]

On a representative routine from five more great stand-ups:

1)      “Horse in a Hospital”: I know John Mulaney’s been in the news a lot recently for less humorous reasons, but to my mind this segment from 2019’s Kid Gorgeous is not just the funniest bit about Trump I heard, but also perhaps the smartest.

2)      “Prepping His Son for a Racist Bully”: I’m not sure how much folks paid attention to John Leguizamo’s Latin History for Morons (2018), but it’s a truly unique combination of stand-up, performance art, and actual history lesson. Highly recommended!

3)      “Homeless or Hipster?”: Ali Wong is pretty edgy, at times more so than I tend to go for; but she’s also damn funny, as this bit from Baby Cobra (2016) illustrates quite perfectly.

4)       “Civil Rights Update”: Michael Che might be best known as the co-host of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update for a good while now, but he’s a super-talented and topical stand-up comic too, and this bit is one of the best I’ve seen about our current moment.

5)      “High-Functioning Autism”: Hannah Gadsby’s been the most-covered stand-up comic of the last few years, and at times (to contrast with what I said about Roy Wood Jr. on Tuesday) I find her a bit preachy. But this segment, from her 2020 special Douglas, is not only quite funny but very thoughtful about autism without being the slightest bit pedantic, and one more great example of contemporary comedy.

March Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on these comics and/or other faves you’d share?