Mary Travers

Celebrities die seemingly every day, but I was enough of a nerd that those who do didn’t have a formative enough influence in my life that I’m really affected by their death. Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary is a different matter. She died today, the AP says, and I feel bereft, because she’s been a reassuring presence over the past few years. She and Peter and Paul would play a concert at Carnegie Hall, or occasionally even put out a new album, just to let us know that they were there, that they still cared, that they were there making their slow way through the Bush years just as we were. I have their 2003 album In These Times, whose title alone says enough about the sociopolitical context in which it was released. And it can’t have been too hard for Peter, Paul, and Mary to reopen the floodgates of song, as experienced as they were with performing to audiences marching against Vietnam. But when there is an anger and a sadness and a fighting spirit to their music, there is also innocence and whimsy and play—we learned and sang some of their songs in my Montessori preschool class. One of their albums, a cassette that we often played in the car when I was little, contained both the sweet, childlike “The Garden Song” and Woody Guthrie’s migrant workers’ anthem, “Pastures of Plenty.” They sang songs by Tom Paxton, by Guthrie and Seeger, by John Denver. They quietly incorporated progressive Christian themes into some of their music, particularly later in their career, but it would have been impossible for our atheist household to find fault with their themes of unity and friendship and love.

I always thought it was Mary who got the best parts in the group’s three part arrangements. She sang melody more often than harmony, and when the three would take turns singing the verses, she always got the best ones. She sings lead on “Pastures of Plenty” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Her verse of “The Times They Are A-Changin'” is my favorite: “Mothers and fathers throughout the land/Don’t criticize what you can’t understand…” She often gets a verse later in the song, I think, the one at the critical juncture of the lyrics’ plot. In “Puff the Magic Dragon,” she sings the verse when Puff realizes Jacky is gone forever. It’s arguably the most important verse in the children’s song that is so much more than a children’s song, which says so much about the loss of innocence that was the second half of the 20th century.

If you’re listing “Peter, Paul, and Mary,” Mary comes last. It was never “Mary, Peter, and Paul.” But her voice stands among those of Joan Baez and Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell as belonging to one of the strong women of conscience who popularized the antiwar songs and union songs and above all songs of a mass cultural movement written by less accessible folk artists. Mary Travers’ voice is instantly recognizable, and even though it’s a mellifluous alto, it always rises above those of her male colleagues. It’s strident. It’s beautiful. It believes in something.

I’m part of a group at school that gets together once a week to sing together: folk, country, blues, that sort of thing—anything that’s found in this book. We sing more than a few songs Peter, Paul, and Mary popularized—some of our favorites are “Puff the Magic Dragon” and “Marvelous Toy.” We’re not a very political group, and most people didn’t grow up singing left-wing political music like I did. My attempts to teach the union songs and peace songs Peter, Paul, and Mary sing haven’t always gone over well. But I guess it’s just as well, then, that Peter, Paul, and Mary have had songs for every occasion, every mood, every political moment.

Here’s one of my favorite songs in the whole world, “If I Had a Hammer.” Now I’ll shut up, and you’ll watch that video. And listen to that Mary Travers’ voice. And see how much she believes what she’s singing—as may we all.

(cross-posted)

QOTD (2009-09-16)

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), as brought to my attention by Steve Benen:

Well, we just heard last week that the Federal Government now under the Obama administration is calling for a re-ordering of America’s food supply. What is that going to mean? Now will the White House decide how many calories we consume or what types of food we consume?

If the next speech Bachmann makes on the House floor invokes the words “precious bodily fluids,” I will not be the least bit surprised.

(cross-posted)

The Greatest Thing I Have Seen in a Very Long Time

… is this sketch from The Muppet Show, featuring Peter Sellers:

Sellers’ voice always makes me think of The Goon Show, which is of course one of the greatest things ever to come out of what would become BBC Radio 4. It’s interesting that, for all that Americans are not supposed to be able to understand strange British things like The Goon Show, this sketch is hilarious, and the studio audience thinks so too. Then again, The Muppet Show seems to be an anomaly in American TV for its inclination to be simply weird. It almost makes it seem not entirely American. As if to prove the point, here’s more Goon Show influence in the form of a totally bizarre Spike Milligan sketch:

People sometimes find it perplexing that I’m totally obsessed with Sesame Street, but early Sesame Street had a lot of Muppet Show crossover, and the same way of appealing to adults—even though Sesame Street is specifically a children’s show, while The Muppet Show never intended itself that way. The surreal was allowed to exist in early Sesame Street in a way it simply isn’t today. In a comedy show, the freedom to just devolve rapidly into silliness is a wonderful thing, and something you don’t see very much in a genre that—in this country, anyway—seems to prefer either scatological one-liners or storylines about sex, dating, and relationships. It seems incredible that an American laugh track should go that crazy over Spike Milligan—but hey, they did. Maybe someone should think about bringing The Muppet Show or its moral equivalent back. I’d watch.

QOTD (2009-09-15)

Over at the NYT college admissions blog, Harvard’s dean of admissions has been answering questions about the application and admissions process. I was struck by one comment that he addressed in his most recent post:

The sad fact is that students whose parents don’t help them with their applications are greatly handicapping themselves in the college admissions sweepstakes, at least at places like Harvard. They’ll be competing against other students whose applications, including the essays, have been exquisitely polished by parents, college guidance counselors at school, private college guidance counselors, and even essay editing services.

That came from an anonymous commenter, so I don’t know whether the person was stating this with any level of expertise or whether, as commenters on blogs often do, was just pontificating into thin air. My sense from having been through the process just a year and a half ago is that admissions folks can tell when someone has received too much help, just as teachers and professors can tell when someone’s plagiarized an assignment. My sense is that I can’t have been hindered too much by the fact that I wrote my own essays, and that I took the fact that I was writing my own essays very seriously. My sense is that can’t have worked against me, because I took some risks that someone who’d had professional college counseling advice would probably have been advised not to take. And, well, things turned out the way they did.

I don’t usually read the NYT college admissions blog because it feeds this insanity over admissions in the worst way. I’ve been interested in what William Fitzsimmons (Harvard dean) has to say, because Harvard’s admissions process is probably not vastly dissimilar from Princeton’s—but it’s not particularly relevant to most people’s concerns, questions, and interests, and it just reinforces this sense that it’s Necessary to apply to Harvard or its moral equivalent, which is most certainly not the case. That the commenter I quoted above was moved to make that comment is as much a product of this type of coverage from the NYT as any other systemic fault.

QOTD (2009-09-14)

From Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind:

The Memorial was published on February 17, 1932. There were a few really favorable notices. The best of them was in the Granta. I remember how one reviewer remarked that he had at first thought the novel contained a disproportionately large number of homosexual characters but had decided, on further reflection, that there were a lot more homosexuals about, nowadays.

Funny, that.

Incidentally, naïve question: who are Christopher’s “kind”? Gay men? Expats? Literary types? None of the above? By “his kind,” does he mean “people like him,” or “people whom he fancies”?

The third-person POV in this book is awfully interesting. I’m trying to figure out what I make of it.

Update

You may know that I write for Campus Progress, but you probably don’t know that we’re trying to get into a blogging swing of things over there. As such, I’ll be cross-posting some of this stuff over there, and adding some content that I don’t post here as well. So check it out—and be sure to see what my colleagues have to say as well, because they’re all smart and interesting people. The CP blog is here, and also linked from our main site at CampusProgress.org.

Calling Ourselves Things; or, In Which I Turn a Statistic Into Wishy-Washy Po-Mo Identity Politics

In the theme I appear to have been developing recently of “Let’s take something I read on the intertubes and use it as an excuse to have an entirely different conversation,” Bilerico pointed out a statistic that, sadly, does not surprise me at all: “While women make up 14 percent of Army personnel, 46% of those discharged under DADT in 2007 were women.”

The saga of Caster Semenya tells us that women who do not behave in “womanly” ways—e.g. by displaying leadership, athletic prowess, skill in combat, fearlessness, or being good at things—wind up having their femininity and their sexuality questioned. In a world that frequently equates gender identity and expression with sex and/or sexual orientation, that questioning could take the form of suspicion about sexual orientation (and subsequently being fired for it), or suspicion about sex and gender (and subsequently having your name, reputation, and career dragged through the mud for it).

I don’t know whether our society will ever come to adopt a model of gender that doesn’t depend on two essentialist categories that have associated with them not only additional expectations with regard to sexual orientation and behavior, but also the notion that one essentialist category represents a higher moral good than the other. It seems impossible that Western society (and many of the societies by which it’s been more recently influenced), which has operated on this model for so long, should change now. But until and unless it does, our headlines will be wracked with these kinds of accusations. Caster Semenya is not really a woman! That Army officer is not really a woman!—but for entirely different reasons that have more to do with how our culture views sexual orientation than with how it views sex. The problem, though, is that over the past few decades it’s proven remarkably difficult to unravel the public’s perceptions of gender and sexuality and all these other forms of identification from one very muddled-up ball of yarn.

For the sake of being able to say “I told you so,” I predicted that Semenya’s battery of tests would result in an intersex diagnosis from the start. But whatever that may mean for Semenya and her sense of identity, identifying as a “girl” or a “woman” is her sole right, something completely apart from whichever internal organs she may or may not have. So is it anyone’s right to identify themselves with whatever sexual orientation labels they wish—only you know who you are. No one else should be able to make that decision for you.

That decision becomes a non-decision when it means being faced with exile from a community of international athletics predicated on a rigid gender binary. And as readers of this blog should well know, it becomes a non-decision when, particularly if you serve in the U.S. armed forces, your career and family life may depend on what you say or what you allow other people to say about you.

Can we force our culture to grant us the right to call ourselves what we please—or, more radical yet, to call ourselves nothing at all?

(cross-posted)

QOTD (2009-09-12)

I have nothing to add to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ excellent point:

One of the great tragedies of the past half century or so, is how patriotism has been coopted by people who claim the Confederate flag, while black leaders, from King to Obama, are dismissed as communists/socialists and now Hitlerite. These are people whose heroes routinely flouted the federal government and assaulted black troops carrying the Union flag.

(cross-posted)

Sunshine, and Metaphors Involving It

My friend Jim wrote recently about his experience going to see the Tony-winning Broadway revival of Hair (which I saw last April). Jim has a very interesting critique of how the revival stages the final song of the show, “The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine In,” which you should definitely read, and so I’ve had the song floating around in the back of my mind for the past few days.

I realized a while ago that it was pretty impossible to categorically rule on what my “favorite” things are (my Facebook profile notwithstanding), but if there were ever a contest for Emily’s Favorite Song, “The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine In” would be a strong contender. I think it’s because it represents to me what is so intoxicating about the hippies and their version of counterculture: they’re one of the very few countercultural movements I can think of which, in addition to acting against the dominant society, offers up its own alternative portrait of what dominant society could be (it may not have been a truly viable alternative, but it was an alternative all the same). “Let the Sunshine In” is a prayer born out of anguish and betrayal, out of the built-up anger of a generation sent to die in a needless war and denied any institutional voice. The hippies and other disaffected late-’60s youth made their own avenues for communication, their own ways to speak out. And while I’ve written many, many words about the degree to which Hair actually reflects the counterculture it commercialized, that final plea the cast makes to the audience is an echo of an alienated counterculture’s voice, getting through.

But the late-’60s youth counterculture is such a tragic entity because its various visions were never realized. Every time I listen to “Let the Sunshine In” I think—in a totally secular sense, mind you—about how prayers go unanswered, and after a while we just stop asking. I think about how the world I’m living in is full of insanity, equal to that which produced the war and the generation gap which drive Hair and the culture it reflects. I admire the resolve of fictional characters from a halcyon time when someone thought it was still worth asking, and I wonder why, today just as 40 years ago, we need actors in a Broadway musical to say, “Let the Sunshine In”—is it just such a ridiculous premise to broach in any more “serious” setting? (1975’s Government in the Sunshine Act notwithstanding. Joke. See what I mean?)

Because I’m from San Diego, getting anywhere in my adolescence necessitated driving. My mom and I have spent a lot of time in the car, and we’ve spent a lot of it listening and singing to music, and talking politics. I have vivid memories of the times my mom and I have listened to the Hair soundtrack (original Broadway cast) and sung along, and the times my mom has used the songs to launch into one of her nostalgia trips, longing for a better, more optimistic time that even she knows may not have really existed. I have equally vivid memories of our discussions of all-too-current events: in the aftermath of 9/11, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, during presidential and midterm campaign seasons alike for the past ten years. I cannot tell you how often my mom has drummed the steering wheel in anger and I’ve stared flatly out the window as one or the other of us intoned, “The world is going to hell in a handbasket.” And then maybe one of us would put Hair in the CD player, and skip to track 32, and sing, “Let the sunshine in!”—willing for it to be true.

But Generation Y’s answer to some hippies who may never really have existed except in the minds of a couple out-of-work actors who decided to write a book and lyrics based on their times as they saw them is that the clouds don’t part. The sunshine doesn’t shine in. All the prayers in the world won’t cause our country to live up to its ideals of justice and fairness and freedom; all the cries and pleas and all the singing won’t (to quote Ginsberg) “end the human war.”

It doesn’t seem inappropriate to appropriate Christian terminology to express how I feel about the never-realized ideal of the country I call home. I’m returning to the US in two days, and I guess you could say I’m having a crisis of faith. You can shout “Let the sunshine in!” from the rooftops, but who will hear you? Love, peace, and justice don’t make a good headline.

At the time of the inauguration in January, when Pete Seeger sang all the verses to “This Land is Your Land” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I believed that I could see the sun shining at last. But while I do still cry when I watch that video, and I do still cry when I hear the last song in Hair, it’s more because of my present feeling: no matter whom we put in office, the winds of change are never really more than a rhetorical device. They aren’t strong enough to blow the clouds away and let the sunshine in.

QOTD (2009-09-09)

In a poem called “Ego Confession,” Ginsberg describes himself as someone:

who saw Blake and abandoned God.

His references to his Blake visions can get a bit tedious at times, and I like this take. It’s a refreshing change. Of course, given who Blake was it’s also an awfully interesting statement to make, and it also indicates how Ginsberg saw himself as heir to a Whitmanic tradition that holds (as Ginsberg says in his “Footnote to Howl”) that “Everybody’s holy.”

It’s also just a really, really good line, and there’s intrinsic merit in that.

Sometimes I think it’s embarrassing that seemingly the only subject on which I can speak with any knowledge is Ginsberg, but mostly I don’t mind. At least I know that, unlike most of the time I try to talk about lit, I’m not bullshitting.