September 13, 2023: AmericanStudying The Rising: “You’re Missing” and “Mary’s Place”

[For this particular AmericanStudier, there’s no better way to think through another anniversary of September 11^th, 2001 than to consider some of the many lessons we can learn from the best cultural work depicting that moment: Bruce Springsteen’s album The Rising (2002). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy pairs of songs from that vital work—please share your own responses, nominations for other vital 9/11 cultural works, and further thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On a pair of couplets that reflect two sides and stages of loss and grief.

This feels like a somewhat gross thing to write about, given the (apparently) entirely unfounded rumors about Springsteen having an affair with one of them (I’m not going to hyperlink to that story, but it’s out there if you’re interested in reading more, with the caveat that many of the links will be to the rumors rather than the debunking), but in the years after September 11^th Bruce became an ally to and advocate for the community of folks who had lost their spouse (or another family member) in the attacks. As that hyperlink illustrates, that community has become active in various political and social efforts of the decades (most recently issuing a statement when the PGA Tour merged with the Saudi Arabian LIV tour earlier this year), but of course it started with a very particular and somber purpose: linking those who had lost a loved one in this sudden and unexpected way (ie, differently from those who have lost a loved one to a terminal illness, while fighting in a war, or in other circumstances for which there might be a bit more preparation, as much as there can be for tragic loss at least), and whose experiences of grief were thus a bit distinct from other variations of that emotion.

I’m not sure how much Springsteen had connected with that community prior to writing and recording The Rising, but in any case he certainly made sure to include songs that foreground the perspectives of those who had lost loved ones (that was also true of the firefighter’s spouse whom I discussed in Monday’s post, but here I mean more the surviving family members of people killed in the attacks themselves). And a pair of couplets from the two most overt such songs, located back to back on the album, powerfully capture two very distinct sides and stages of such loss and grief. The latter of the two, “You’re Missing,” is the album’s saddest song, and its final couplet, located after the last chorus, exemplifies how that sadness extends beyond even the speaker’s personal loss: “God’s drifting in heaven, devil’s in the mailbox/I got dust on my shoes, nothing but teardrops.” The second line connects directly to the spouse’s death in the attacks (and the speaker’s unsuccessful search for them among the dust of the aftermath), but the first line links that grief to parallel emotions of uncertainty and fear (ones felt by all Americans, but even more potently by those who had been personally affected by the 9/11 attacks), including those prompted by the ongoing threat of terrorist attacks illustrated by the post-9/11 anthrax mailings.  

There’s not a sadder couplet on The Rising, and I would argue not a more important one either in achieving the album’s emotional and historical purposes. But perhaps Springsteen’s most overarching such purpose was to present multiple layers of this event and its contexts, and so right before “You’re Missing” he includes another, very different song from the perspective of a 9/11 widow: “Mary’s Place.” “Mary’s Place” is the album’s most overt party anthem, and became even more so during the Rising tour, when Springsteen would frequently introduce the band’s rollicking performance of it by saying “Let’s roadhouse!” But while the song is most definitely about a house party, it’s also and even more importantly about where and how we find optimism in dark times (a subject I’ve thought about a good bit over the years), and a beautiful couplet from the song’s final verse captures that tone with particular clarity and power: “I’ve got a picture of you in my locket, I keep it close to my heart/This light shining in my breast, leading me through the dark.” To quote one of the most beautiful lines ever written about loss and love, “What is grief, if not love persevering?”

Next RisingStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 9/11 texts you’d highlight?

September 12, 2023: AmericanStudying The Rising: “Paradise” and “Worlds Apart”

[For this particular AmericanStudier, there’s no better way to think through another anniversary of September 11^th, 2001 than to consider some of the many lessons we can learn from the best cultural work depicting that moment: Bruce Springsteen’s album The Rising (2002). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy pairs of songs from that vital work—please share your own responses, nominations for other vital 9/11 cultural works, and further thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two very different ways to push past stereotypes of Muslims.

It’s not an easy subject to discuss, and of course one that can (and has) far too easily lead to racial profiling and hate crimes of all sorts (in 2001 and across the decades since), but there’s no way to engage September 11^th, in cultural texts as in every form of conversation, without some portrayals of Muslim extremist terrorists, and specifically of suicide bombers. I hope it goes without saying to readers of this blog, and to anyone who knows me in any context, that I would always argue—and not even argue, but simply state, because these are true facts—that the 9/11 bombers in no way represented Islam, nor their Muslim communities, nor Muslim Americans (they were not from the United States at all, of course), and were just as fanatical and hateful as any other terrorists, past or present, foreign or domestic. But in the case of September 11^th, 2001, fanatical and hateful terrorists calling themselves Muslims used suicide bombings to attack New York City and Washington, and I repeat that no cultural works about that day or those events can or should elide that complex but crucial layer to these histories and those involved in (as well as, in the case of Muslim Americans and Muslims worldwide, affected by) them.

One of the most complex and interesting songs on The Rising, the penultimate track “Paradise,” engages with suicide bombers and bombings very overtly and centrally. The song seems to move through distinct and equally ambiguous speakers in each verse, all dealing with death and the losses and uncertainties it produces (including about whether there is such a thing as the titular place beyond death), but the first verse’s speaker is pretty clearly a suicide bomber, one who takes “the schoolbooks” from a child’s “pack” (presumably the speaker’s own) and replaces them with “plastic, wire, and your kiss,” all of which that speaker then takes to a “crowded marketplace” where they will apparently detonate their bomb. We get no more specific identifying information than that, but in an album so clearly focused on September 11^th, it is impossible not to think of this suicide bomber as a Muslim extremist like those behind the 9/11 attacks. On the one hand, then, this song seems to reinforce certain stereotypes about Muslims (if ones linked to specific 9/11 contexts to be sure); but on another, it adds multiple humanizing layers to those images, both in the opening verse (the relationship with the child who is the speaker’s addressee) and in the song as a whole (analogizing this bomber, at least in some ways, to the other speakers who have lost loved ones, quite possibly in the 9/11 attacks).

Again, complicated and difficult stuff, and if it were the only way that Springsteen’s album engages with Muslims I think that’d be a missed opportunity. But it’s not, and in the other overt such engagement, “Worlds Apart,” Springsteen offers a vitally distinct vision of that global community. The speaker and situation are similarly ambiguous, but to my mind the speaker is a Muslim and Arabic man, perhaps from Afghanistan (a “dry and troubled country” that longs for “Allah’s blessed rain,” and of course one very connected to the aftermath of 9/11 as of 2002), in an interfaith relationship with a Western woman (presumably an American one, given Springsteen’s own identity and the album’s overall focus). I would argue that the song’s best verse, and one of the very best on the album, is its second “Sometimes the truth just ain’t enough, or it’s too much in times like this/Let’s throw the truth away, we’ll find it in this kiss/In your skin upon my skin, in the beating of our hearts/May the living let us in, before the dead tear us apart.” I’m not sure I need to say much more after those potent lines, but will just add that that’s a reflection on intimacy, identity, community, and times like 9/11 and its aftermath—for Muslims and for all of us—without which this album would be sorely impoverished.

Next RisingStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 9/11 texts you’d highlight?

September 11, 2023: AmericanStudying The Rising: “Into the Fire” and “The Rising”

[For this particular AmericanStudier, there’s no better way to think through another anniversary of September 11^th, 2001 than to consider some of the many lessons we can learn from the best cultural work depicting that moment: Bruce Springsteen’s album The Rising (2002). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy pairs of songs from that vital work—please share your own responses, nominations for other vital 9/11 cultural works, and further thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two complementary but also contrasting ways to see 9/11 firefighters.

The Rising is about many different things, as I hope this week’s series will make clear, but there’s no doubt that Springsteen’s inspiration for and main perceived focus of the album was the experience of New York City firefighters and first responders and their loved ones on and after September 11^th, 2001. Bruce and New York have been intertwined for his whole career, as illustrated by both the famous May 1972 Columbia Records audition for John Hammond and an early song like “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” that he played there (not to mention his youthful sojourns to the city, through which he first truly encountered live rock music as he describes at length in his autobiography). And when a passing driver shouted out “Bruce, we need you” on the afternoon of September 11^th, 2001, it seems clear from the album that eventually resulted from that moment that Springsteen took the first-person plural pronoun to mean not just all Americans (although yes) but specifically the community of New Yorkers, and more specifically still that first responder community.

A number of the album’s songs connect to that first responder community and its 9/11 experiences in one way or another, but two of the album’s bookends do so very specifically and centrally for NYC firefighters: the second song, “Into the Fire”; and the thirteenth, the title track “The Rising.” The two songs share a very similar through-line, imagery of those firefighters climbing the steps of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11^th, ascending into the fire that was both their expected (if still courageous) professional destination and the source of their tragic deaths. But their speakers and perspectives represent two distinct if interconnected sides of the coin when it comes to that subject and experience: “The Rising” is narrated by one of the firefighters himself, thinking about his wife and family at home as well as his 9/11 experiences; while “Into the Fire” is narrated by the spouse (presumably wife, although the gender is unspecified) of a firefighter, reflecting on their family life as well as her husband’s (again presumably) 9/11 experiences.

Of course those two perspectives are complementary, and they don’t present radically different views of the experiences or events (this isn’t Springsteen’s Rashomon, that is). But there is one interesting and important way in which they contrast, and that’s in their overarching tone. “Into the Fire” certainly strives for optimism at times, particularly in the repetition of lines like “May your strength give us strength”; but to my mind the song’s central tone is that of loss and mourning and grief, one captured in more intimate lines like “I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher” and “You lay your hand on me/Then walked into the darkness of your smoky grave.” “The Rising” acknowledges those darker emotions, especially in lines from the bridge like “Sky of blackness and sorrow” and “Sky of longing and emptiness”; but to my mind its central tone is that of the power and potency of shared sacrifice, one captured with particular clarity by the opening lines of the chorus: “Come on up for the rising/Come on up, lay your hands in mine.” The speaker of “Fire” remembers the intimate laying of hands that was lost on 9/11, while “The Rising” reflects the communal laying of hands that can result from such tragedies—both pretty crucial perspectives to remember on the anniversary of such events.

Next RisingStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 9/11 texts you’d highlight?

September 9-10, 2023: Update on My Current Book Project

[This week marks the start of the Fall 2023 semester and my 19^th year at Fitchburg State. So as ever, I’ve kicked off the semester with preview posts, this time focused on ongoing challenges and leading up to this update on my current book project!]

I’m not gonna lie, when I planned this series a few months back I was pretty hopeful that I would have a real update about my current book project to share in the weekend post. The short answer is that I don’t, as the project continues to seek a home. It does so under a new name and frame, however, as Two Sandlots has evolved into The Celestials’ Last Game (same subtitle: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America). I believe that frame allows me to lean into the 19^th century baseball stories and histories that are at the heart of this project, while still connecting to all the other social and cultural contexts that make the Celestials and their last game so important (from the Chinese Educational Mission and Chinese Exclusion Era to the Workingmen’s Party of California, the 1877 San Francisco massacre, and much more). I’d really love the chance to share my revised proposal with interested agents and/or editors, so please feel free to reach out by email (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu) with any such interest and/or contacts for me. Thanks in advance!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Fall previews or work in progress you’d share?

PPS. Speaking of baseball histories, I’m very excited to note that I’ll be talking about this project at the 9-Online Virtual Baseball Conference in October. Please let me know if you’ll be there too!

September 8, 2023: Fall Semester Previews: Departmental Program Review

[This week marks the start of the Fall 2023 semester and my 19^th year at Fitchburg State. So as ever, I’ll kick off the semester with preview posts, this time focused on ongoing challenges and leading up to an update on my current book project!]

Semesters and academic years are about more than just teaching, of course, and this year my English Studies Department will be embarking on a particularly significant project: our departmental Program Review. We create that review for outside accreditors every five years, which can feel pretty quick but is enough time to really have to rethink where we are, where we want to go, and how we might get there. A key layer to all those questions are the challenges we’re facing, and for this Program Review the unavoidable and quite frankly overwhelming challenge is that of enrollments: the student of Majors in our department has contracted quite significantly in the five years since the last Program Review, and represents a clear crisis point here in 2023-24. That trend is far bigger than one department, and there are many elements to it that we can neither control nor change. But obviously that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t engage it, nor think about the ways we can respond and recruit and reimagine and so on. At the very least, I believe all of us in the Humanities need to do a far more consistent job talking about all the amazing and vital things we do, and all the ways students and communities can and will benefit from them. Looking forward to being part of those conversations during this Program Review process!

Update post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Fall previews you’d share?

September 7, 2023: Fall Semester Previews: American Lit Online

[This week marks the start of the Fall 2023 semester and my 19^th year at Fitchburg State. So as ever, I’ll kick off the semester with preview posts, this time focused on ongoing challenges and leading up to an update on my current book project!]

Everything I wrote in yesterday’s post certainly holds true for today’s subject as well—indeed, it’s in my online courses that I’ve seen the most examples of ChatGPT/AI-aided papers. (FYI, if you use ChatGPT to write a paper about a text, it will quite literally invent characters and plotlines that are not present anywhere in that text. Just saying!) But along with those newer challenges, I continue to face a longstanding challenge in my asynchronous online lit classes (one of which I teach every semester, including Am Lit II this Fall): sharing historical and cultural contexts with the students as a secondary but relevant layer to our primary texts/readings. I’ve tried Word documents discussing such contexts (asking students to engage them somehow in their weekly Blackboard posts), and I’ve tried short videos of me doing so (ditto), but I’m not convinced that most students are taking a real look at them, or at least that they’re truly becoming part of our conversations. It’s too close to the Fall semester for me to come up with a radically new way of presenting the contexts this time around, so a combo of documents and short videos it is. But I’m very open to other ideas, for my Spring online course and for the future of my teaching in this medium.

Last preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Fall previews you’d share?

September 6, 2023: Fall Semester Previews: First-Year Writing I

[This week marks the start of the Fall 2023 semester and my 19^th year at Fitchburg State. So as ever, I’ll kick off the semester with preview posts, this time focused on ongoing challenges and leading up to an update on my current book project!]

I don’t imagine the First-Year Writing challenge I’m going to highlight here will come as a surprise to anyone who’s been connected to the news over the last year or so. Few if any subjects have dominated those current events conversations more than the rapid evolution of AI, and certainly few if any subjects have dominated higher ed debates more than ChatGPT and its ilk. For a long time, I said and meant that I wasn’t interested in those debates—I’ve never wanted to be a policeman in the classroom, and have always believed in giving students the benefit of the doubt and then responding if and when there are instances of plagiarism. All of that’s still unquestionably the case, but also unquestionable is the ready and attractive availability of such AI programs for student writers (and I know from my two high school-age sons how frequently students take advantage of those programs). So I do plan to talk briefly about ChatGPT on the first day, and mainly to say this: as with literally everything else, I hope students will talk to me about it, about when and how they might think about using it, about what it seems to offer as well as its limitations, about how we navigate this new layer to our moment. That’s about the only answer to this challenge that I’ve got, but I can’t imagine a better one.

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Fall previews you’d share?