I was in the mood for book buying when I walked into University Bookstore in Madison on Spring Break. I did not have a book in mind, but that was my typical modus on such trips. As I browse the aisles and sale tables, I wait for the book to call to me, rather than me searching for it. I do keep a list of titles on Amazon for Kindle reading and there are monthly book club book selections, but I don't access those lists when I walk into a real live bookstore. That would seem like cheating. The adventure in the bookstore is in the tracking, chase, discovery and capture of words.
I have two other bookstore shopping rules: one, I can only purchase one volume from a single store area (like 20th Century Austrian Nature Writing, or Wall Street Autobiographies from the One-Percent, or Fiction from Authors with the first name of Stephen and the last name of King). One selection from one area and I must move to another section of the store.
My second rule is that I must buy a book from every bookstore that I enter. As a reader and a writer, I think it is important to support the book business. When I buy from brick and mortar bookstores, I am also buying from the distributor, publisher, cover artist and designer, paper maker and ink supplier, editor, agent, writer, and most important, the local bookstore owner. A published book is a noble and honored collaborative profession and the reader and the bookstore are the final links in the chain.
As I said, I was in a book-buying mood when I walked up to the main floor of the University Bookstore, a favorite bookstore in past years, but instead of books, saw a sea of red and white clothing. Shelves, racks, displays, even the college-age cashiers and their managers displayed the latest UW Bucky-wear, dozens of variations of t-shirts, sweat shirts, hoodies, flip-flops, swim suits, long-sleeve and short sleeve polo shirts, running pants, running shorts, golf pants, and pajama bottoms. After wandering aimlessly in the jersey section looking for a printed word that was not silk screened in three-inch letters, I saw floor decals pointing the way toward books, new and used. Ahh, finally the main feature of a bookstore. The floor decal arrows led me down to a sad-looking, lifeless lower level with picked-over shelves labeled for college courses. Been there, done that, have the red and white diploma.
Just as I was about to leave red and white land, I saw a series of shelves sticking up behind a rack of red and white door posters. Across the store, back in the corner, the entire non-textbook inventory of books were crowded on a short stack of shelves not much larger than those I have at home. Even though the books looked at me hopefully looking for a home, I broke rule number two and did not make a purchase. I averted my eyes and walked out.
Fortunately, three other non-UW privately-owned bookstores were within an easy walk of the campus, so I returned from Madison with a bag of books to keep me a happy reader. But, thinking about the book-less University Bookstore, I recall a line from Mark Twain who said there is little difference between a person who cannot read and a person who will not read. Neither one, he said, is functionally literate. Both are rather sad. Along the same line of reasoning, when we surrender college bookstore shelf space to red and white paraphernalia, is that a sign of school pride or the warning of something else? If a college bookstore does not carry books, does it stop being a bookstore? And if it is not a bookstore, what does it become?
Sunday, March 29, 2015
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Parrhesia: Hard Lessons in Unintimidated Speech
My GED Language Arts class project asked students to compare and contrast two inspirational black leaders from the 1960s: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X. I used the exercise to add a little GED Social Studies context talking about civil rights timeline from antebellum amendments through the signing of the Civil Rights Act by President Johnson in 1964. I also used that exercise to talk about the risks of free speech especially when that speech goes against established power.
I assumed students knew about Martin Luther King, Jr. and tried to fill in a little history of Malcom X through a short biographic video and an article from the February 2015 issue of Smithsonian Magazine by Cornel West adapted from his 2014 book, Black Prophetic Fire. Feb. 21 was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcom X by a rival Muslim faction.
King is the better known of the two, "commodified" according to West. He called Malcom X in contrast a great example of the Greek word "parrhesia" in the black tradition. West uses the term from Plato's Apology, "where Socrates says, the cause of my unpopularity was my parrhesia, my fearless speech, my frank speech, my plain speech, my unintimidated speech. The hip hop generation talks about 'keeping it real.' Malcom was a real as it gets."
The class exercise was successful. Students learned about how to set up a compare-contrast essay for the GED test and a little American history was also learned. I was happy with the class and didn't think much more about it until I saw photos of candle-lit mourners from Bangladesh the next day.
It was reported that a Bangladeshi-born American blogger, known for criticism of Islamic fundamentalism, was hacked to death by machete-wielding attackers in Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital, on Thursday night, Feb. 26. Avijit Roy, 42, wrote a blog called Mukto-Mona (the title means "Free-Minded"). A group calling itself Ansar Bangla 7 claimed responsibility for the brutal killing in a Twitter post of all places, "Anti-Islamic blogger US-Bengali citizen Avijit Royt is assassinated in capital #Dhaka due to his crime against #Islam."
Then a day later, another voice that courageously spoke with parrhesia was silenced. Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot and killed late Friday, Feb. 27, on a bridge near the Kremlin, Red Square and the multi-colored domes of St. Basil's Cathedral, according to news accounts. Fired at least six shots from a passing car, four hit Nemtsov in the back. A woman he was walking with was not hurt. No one tweeted responsibility for that assassination.
At one time Nemtsov, only 55, was a powerful Kremlin insider. He served as deputy prime minister in the 1990s and might have been successor to then-President Boris Yeltsin, but fell out of favor during President Vladimir Putin's regime. He has been arrested for participating in antigovernment protests but until Friday was never silenced. Nemtsov and other opposition leaders were planning a march against government policies in Moscow on Sunday, March 1. That march, turned into a memorial, drew thousands of Russians. It remains to be seen what that display might mean to those now in power in the Kremlin.
Malcom, Martin, Avijit and Boris all knew that their words were dangerous. Their opponents were many, powerful and ruthless. All four could have stopped speaking out and lived, but all seemed to have, what West wrote of Malcom X and King, a "moral fire" that burned from within that forced them "to get it out, to cry out, to shout".
West wrote of the black experience in America for Smithsonian, but I can't imagine that he would mind if I extended his words to cover both the blogger from Bangladesh and the opposition politician from Russia. All those burning with the righteous fire of parrhesia might say, according to West: "We're just going to keep on pushing. Its a matter of what has integrity, of what is true, which is right, and what is worthy of those struggled and died for us." This week's class project sadly turned into a compare-contrast between those who have the fire to speak out and those who seek to silence that fire with violence.
Hard lessons learned, but I still have faith in parrhesia over ignorance and violence.
I assumed students knew about Martin Luther King, Jr. and tried to fill in a little history of Malcom X through a short biographic video and an article from the February 2015 issue of Smithsonian Magazine by Cornel West adapted from his 2014 book, Black Prophetic Fire. Feb. 21 was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcom X by a rival Muslim faction.
King is the better known of the two, "commodified" according to West. He called Malcom X in contrast a great example of the Greek word "parrhesia" in the black tradition. West uses the term from Plato's Apology, "where Socrates says, the cause of my unpopularity was my parrhesia, my fearless speech, my frank speech, my plain speech, my unintimidated speech. The hip hop generation talks about 'keeping it real.' Malcom was a real as it gets."
The class exercise was successful. Students learned about how to set up a compare-contrast essay for the GED test and a little American history was also learned. I was happy with the class and didn't think much more about it until I saw photos of candle-lit mourners from Bangladesh the next day.
It was reported that a Bangladeshi-born American blogger, known for criticism of Islamic fundamentalism, was hacked to death by machete-wielding attackers in Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital, on Thursday night, Feb. 26. Avijit Roy, 42, wrote a blog called Mukto-Mona (the title means "Free-Minded"). A group calling itself Ansar Bangla 7 claimed responsibility for the brutal killing in a Twitter post of all places, "Anti-Islamic blogger US-Bengali citizen Avijit Royt is assassinated in capital #Dhaka due to his crime against #Islam."
I thought that Roy's parrhesia was courageous to challenge a fundamentalist faction that places little value in human life. His assassination shames the memory of the Prophet who was much more ecumenical than these modern "followers" according to historical sources that I have read. But what do I know? I have no value. I am an unbeliever in their eyes.
Then a day later, another voice that courageously spoke with parrhesia was silenced. Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot and killed late Friday, Feb. 27, on a bridge near the Kremlin, Red Square and the multi-colored domes of St. Basil's Cathedral, according to news accounts. Fired at least six shots from a passing car, four hit Nemtsov in the back. A woman he was walking with was not hurt. No one tweeted responsibility for that assassination.
At one time Nemtsov, only 55, was a powerful Kremlin insider. He served as deputy prime minister in the 1990s and might have been successor to then-President Boris Yeltsin, but fell out of favor during President Vladimir Putin's regime. He has been arrested for participating in antigovernment protests but until Friday was never silenced. Nemtsov and other opposition leaders were planning a march against government policies in Moscow on Sunday, March 1. That march, turned into a memorial, drew thousands of Russians. It remains to be seen what that display might mean to those now in power in the Kremlin.
Malcom, Martin, Avijit and Boris all knew that their words were dangerous. Their opponents were many, powerful and ruthless. All four could have stopped speaking out and lived, but all seemed to have, what West wrote of Malcom X and King, a "moral fire" that burned from within that forced them "to get it out, to cry out, to shout".
West wrote of the black experience in America for Smithsonian, but I can't imagine that he would mind if I extended his words to cover both the blogger from Bangladesh and the opposition politician from Russia. All those burning with the righteous fire of parrhesia might say, according to West: "We're just going to keep on pushing. Its a matter of what has integrity, of what is true, which is right, and what is worthy of those struggled and died for us." This week's class project sadly turned into a compare-contrast between those who have the fire to speak out and those who seek to silence that fire with violence.
Hard lessons learned, but I still have faith in parrhesia over ignorance and violence.
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