BLOCK Letters and Other Tools of Literacy for a New Day

Block Letters and Other Tools of Literacy for a New Day—Part Two

By Charles Peek

The “Ole Miss Brick” about which I wrote in the last post—the second of the awakenings to come my way this summer in the form of a block—was not the only meaningful block of this summer. It was preceded by another and followed by two more.

With each, I was reminded that, when I was first learning to write, we all printed using both upper-case and lower-case letters, often printed out together: Aa, Bb, and so forth, only the letters were more like the block forms one now sees on digital readouts whose shapes always seem to me retro. It’s been a journey from there to this summer’s messages, which have not seemed to come from block letters but from blocks themselves.

The first block was really a rectangular drawing on the wall of B.B. King’s Memphis restaurant. The drawing pictures a person under the caption “No Guru No Method No Teacher”.

                                                     [Insight at B. B. Kings]

The message reminded me of a favorite Camus comment: whoever has no character must have a method! Or of Jesus’ remark that, having received the Holy Spirit, we would no longer have any teachers.

Seeing the sign while listening to a fine blues singer and band suggested to me how much the sign was not a repudiation of guidance or example or mentoring but rather an assertion of holding oneself accountable for learning.

Too often in schools today, teachers are blamed for students not learning.  Too often it is true! But ultimately learning is the responsibility of the learner. “No Guru No Method No Teacher”!

Later, while we were in Milwaukee for August, we visited the Rashid Johnson exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Johnson does a great deal of his work on square white ceramic tiles that together form a grid on which the stunning facades of glass and mirror and fabric and rich designs take shape. The whole of one display that occupies an entire gallery are blocks with the faces of anxiety sketched in…or, in some cases, missing—the faces of those lost on the journey.

                                                [Rashid Johnson ‘s portrait of anxiety]

The Rashid Johnson exhibit was a bold move, on both his and the museum’s part, given the racial history of Milwaukee; it was mounted as part of the city’s 50^th anniversary commemoration of the Civil Rights marches for fair housing led by, among others, Fr. Groppi.  We’d look up and there would be a Milwaukee bus advertising the commemorative events, including the exhibit–in rectangular block posters.

After a panel discussion of the exhibit, we met panelist Venice Williams who, in her talk, had mentioned her cosmetic work with the Shea Butter—a substance which forms some of Johnson’s more powerful (and plentiful) imagery, noting that she has a seller’s stall at most of the area Farmer’s Markets. In the course of our conversation, she invited us to the Fondy Market to see her wares but also to enjoy the other pleasures of the market.

The following Saturday, after watching Willie and Greta take a swimming safety lesson, we drove over to Fond du Lac, a diagonal through a lot of Milwaukee, to the market where we met Venice again.

On this occasion, in our conversation she invited us to visit her Alice’s Garden a few blocks away, a community garden enterprise on a former vacant lot. This garden, like Growing Power and the Mayor’s Garden and the Farmer’s Markets, originated in the desire to alleviate some of the urban food deserts that racism has helped create.

                    [Entry sign at Alice’s Garcen, Milwaukee]

There in the midst of the garden was a shelf fronting a set of block tile squares that formed a panel where enterprising ceramicists (my guess is youngsters) had put messages on blocks and medallions.  One message in particular struck a chord with me, the message “Water is the World.”

                   [“Water is The World” by Nakia in the ceramic comments on Alice’s Garden]

Water is a subject dear to a Nebraskan’s heart! But, because we were in Milwaukee as I wrote this, we were missing things going on in Nebraska while we are gone. Foremost at that moment was the ordination to the priesthood of our friend Tony Anderson who graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary this spring, the latest step in growing into his Baptism by water and the spirit. What we missed almost as much, however, was the huge protest march in Lincoln against the dreadful Keystone XL Pipeline that threatens our water and land and runs roughshod over sacred Native ground and the property rights of ranchers and farmers.

It’s hard to choose which of those issues is most important, but for long- range economic consequences, it is hard not to think the potential destruction of the Ogallala Aquifer isn’t high on the list. Destruction…or, if the water wars in fact come, then the theft of our water! These concerns are what prompted Presiding Bishop Curry, in his visit to a similar site in the Dakotas, to preach on “Water is Life.”  And here we were looking at a panel that read “Water is the World.”

                     [Icon-like celebration of being set free at Alice’s Garden, Milwaukee]

All these blocks—the Ole Miss brick, the ceramic blocks that structure Johnson’s art, the message medallions at Alice’s Garden—seem now to me like the old block letters I learned to write.  They are each a new entry into a new literacy, a new invitation to see the world in a new way and to appreciate different ways of communicating common human need, longing, and affection, different ways to cope with joy and loss. They are, like writing, like the block letters that began our journey to literacy, a means of liberation.

It’s been an education! Sincerest thanks for the Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, bestowed by BB King’s wall art, Jay Watson (see the previous blog), Rashid Johnson, Venice Williams, MAM, and Alice’s Garden. Believe me, I’ll work more on my blocks, not maybe my block letters but certainly the learning blocks that keep extending my literacy.

And Miss Omler and Miss Noren, surely by now ahead on the journey, since you started me on this path in first and second grades at Orrington School in Evanston, Illinois, not so far from where I am writing—I hope you will think I’m making some good progress or, at least, keeping up. Along with my block letters, you taught me that there are always new ways the world teaches us.

                              [Fondy Market, Milwaukee]

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

September 2017

 

 

 

My Ole Miss Brick

My Ole Miss Brick, part one of Block Letters and Other Tools of Literacy for a New Day

By Charles Peek

A series of meaningful moments have come my way this summer, all in the form of blocks. One of these block shapes is a red brick to which some mortar dust still clings, a brick somehow rescued from the Ole Miss Power House when it was torn down these past months.

I’m going to write about the brick—and things Faulknerian—in this blog and then follow up later with a post about other blocks and the reason they’ve affected me.

There’s no better place to start in expressing my feelings about this brick and telling something of my story than to thank Jay Watson for his current leadership of Ole Miss’s Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference—the longest continuously running conference devoted to a single author in America!

The conference is what takes my wife and me to Ole Miss and Oxford. We’ve traveled across the Ole Miss campus to the see the Power Plant a couple of times, once recently and once years ago, because it is the plant where Faulkner worked nights, taking time from his duties stoking furnaces to write As I Lay Dying, the novel about which I wrote my doctoral dissertation. Faulkner died in 1962; I began the dissertation in 1969.

                                                [Chuck at the Ole Miss Power Plant]

Faulkner said he wrote As I Lay Dying propping up a scoop shovel and using its back as a desk for his tablet. It’s even possible that this is so, although Faulkner not only wrote fiction but often made up fictions about the fictions he wrote!

Forty-five years ago—well before the publishing of revised dissertations became fairly common—I was encouraged by a press to think the dissertation was a shoo-in for publication until one of their in-house readers surprisingly torpedoed it. It wasn’t until a year later that I discovered the reader had been a member of my dissertation committee, disgruntled that he was not its chair. (Interestingly enough, I’ve often been asked to vet publications for that press over the years since.)

Had I had much background in Faulkner at that time, I likely would have known where else to try to publish it, but I spent most of my graduate years thinking I would write on Medieval literature with Paul Olson.

The unfortunate death of Professor Hough, a much-loved faculty member, occurring just before a semester was starting, changed all that. Thanks to Dudley Bailey, our department chair (and the best I ever knew), I was asked to pick up one of Hough’s classes, a liberal studies survey of the novel.

I was teaching four sections of first-year composition at the time, all on a MWF schedule. Pity the fourth section—I never could remember whether what I taught them seemed familiar because I’d just taught it to the third section or because I’d already taught it before in the fourth. At any rate, the chance to swap one of the four sections for a survey of the novel was too good to pass up.

The first reading Professor Hough had scheduled was Joseph Andrews, which (saints be praised) I had already read in a course with Ken Moeller, so my plan was to take my head start and read one book ahead of the students. The plan worked until I hit a novel I’d never heard of called As I Lay Dying. I confessed to the class I had no idea how to read the novel but we’d work on it together. Those classes periods, the last of the semester, turned out to be the best, and I not only learned something about teaching but found myself hooked on Faulkner.

Because my dissertation took a philosophical look from several angles at a close reading of the text, and because As I Lay Dying came early in Faulkner’s career, I didn’t have to read a lot of other Faulkner to produce the dissertation. My friend Don Cunningham was teaching composition using The Sound and the Fury (yes, you read that right!), and our conversations filled me in a little on the principal Faulkner piece I would need also to know.

Some writing I did early on in my life now seems pretty bad when I look back on it, but not the dissertation.  I still feel some press missed a bet! To be fair, the same reader who scuttled its publication also made sure I knew about Ole Miss’s first ever Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in 1974, and beginning with speakers like Joe Blotner and Malcolm Cowley, Shelby Foote and Cleanth Brooks, Michael Millgate and Elizabeth Kerr, the conference speakers and discussions became my running seminar in Faulkner, making up for what I’d missed before.

Not publishing the dissertation, so far as I can tell took nothing away from my academic life, which I never intended to be and never made into a so-called career. It may, indeed, have added to it, since no early publication prompted me to narrow my focus or make it more academic or follow academic trends.

Instead, the rejection prompted me to continue a broad, interdisciplinary approach to all my work.  In addition to being, at least in this field, something of an autodidact, I’m secretly at heart just a sort of Black Friar oblate, preferring to teach or preach rather than belittle or scorn those who live and work and think in manifold venues where error or confusion seems to crop up so readily.

My lack of “career credential” is even worse than never having had a course in Faulkner, and do not mistake me here: I often envy those who had a good mentor in all things Faulknerian. But, to boot, I’d not only missed much Faulkner background. I’d never even had a class in American Literature. I’d skipped the high school year when the English subject was American writing in order to take a journalism class. My undergraduate major was all European and British except for a class in Modern poetry from Karl Shapiro that included some American poets.

When my dissertation committee first formed, one of the members, Mordecai Marcus, expressed some horror that I was going to write a dissertation in American literature without ever having taken a course in it and insisted that the committee stipulate I had to take an American Literature course that summer to complete my course work. The only class offered (also in American poetry) was being taught by the same Professor Marcus!  But it was a good class from a good teacher who was also a pretty fair poet himself. Not long before his death, at something of a reunion of the old gang, Mordecai regaled me with the chronicle of his last twenty years of health issues. It was a detailed chronicle!

What I lacked in academic background, however, I had somewhat made up for on my own. Graduating high school feeling as ignorant as a stump, I read the summer before college everything in our town library by John Steinbeck. (Incidentally, that library was one of the old square block buildings that were typical of Carnegie libraries in small towns.)

I followed that up the next summer by reading everything by Ernest Hemingway.  Hemingway and Steinbeck were the only names I knew at the time except for the author of one book I’d read in Junior High much to the shock of my parents and teachers…Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre.

It turns out, I had read one Faulkner novel without knowing it was by Faulkner.  At a motel where my family stopped on a vacation, someone had left behind two paperback novels, one of which had its cover missing. The proprietor allowed as how, if I wanted them, I might as well take them.  I read them both in the car as we travelled. One was The Sandpiper. It was only in later listening to a conference paper that I realized the other was Soldiers Pay, Faulkner’s first novel.

First it may be, but it is decidedly not where I’d recommend starting to read Faulkner! That would still probably be where I thought I’d started: As I Lay Dying. I have friends that are fond of A Fable, but I recall Norman Podhoretz’s comment that A Fable may not be Faulkner’s worst novel but that he declined to re-read Mosquitoes to find out! So, OK, there were a couple of clunkers. But there were also some great short stories and there’s Go Down, Moses and the Snopes trilogy, and he was still writing great stuff in his last novel.

Anyway, this explains why I took such interest in the brick.

It is not at all clear how some of the power house bricks found their way across campus to Bondurant Hall where the English Department is to be found, but by whatever mysterious means this happened, some fell by the law of proximity into the hands of an alert faculty member, who knew what they were and had some idea what he wanted to do with them.

I can say no more about the gifting except that one brick somehow ended up going to each of us who has been leading sections on “Teaching Faulkner” for the conference. The gift joins the many good friends we’ve made at FY across the years.

     [ Friend Grayson Schick with other regular conferees at the old Yokna Inn near Oxford]

I’ve been invited to help offer those sessions the last 27 of my 32 times at the conference, beginning after Bob Hamblin started the sessions and then, in the following two years asked Jim Carothers and me (in some order we can’t now recall) to join him. Bob was the lead editor on A William Faulkner Encyclopedia that I co-edited and co-editor on the Companion to Faulkner Studies for which I was the lead editor. He went on to write a Faulkner biography, a biography of Evans Harrington who was the conference’s first director, and collections of fine poems, as well as directing Southeast Missouri State University’s Faulkner Center and its own biennial Faulkner Conference before he retired and Chris Regier took his place.

           [Chuck with Theresa Towner, the late L. D. Brodsky, and Jim Carothers at FY]

I’ve been well compensated for each appearance, especially so the year Don Kartiganer, the second conference director, invited me to give a plenary talk. One of my great rewards has been a friendship with Ann and Dale Abadie.  Look at the list of editors of the papers for each year of the Conference (U. Miss P.) and you will see that Ann has been the backbone of Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha for all these years.

[Brunch hosted by Abadies in Oxford–Chuck, Jack Barbera, Jennie Joiner, Dale Abadie, Nancy Peek, Colby Kullman, Bob Hamblin at far end, Ann Abadie, Theresa Towner, Jim Carothers, John Lowe, and Bev Carothers]

Aside from that and many other lasting friendships, however, no remuneration or accolade can quite match for me the gift of the brick. It now continues to hold up a monument—it’s a bookend propping up my copy of the never published dissertation.

My thanks to the giver of such a good thing as he may not even have imagined!

 

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

September 2017