Mother Says Research Articles

History in Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth

Ralph Ellison's second novel, Juneteenth, echoes one of crucial themes of his first--how stories get told, whose stories should be told, what is be believed. The title, selected by John F. Callahan, Ellison's literary executor, refers central section which characters remember their rambles. There's been heap of Juneteenths before this one, Reverend Hickman says Bliss, and there'll be heap more before we're truly free! (1) stands for June 19, 1865, day Union garrison announced slaves Texas that they were free. A novel about liberation, Juneteenth explores much more than day history. It argues for necessity keep present, through celebration, art, remembrance. As Ellison says about his characters this novel, the is with them (352). By celebrating it, narrating it, remembering it, becomes living history. is generally defined as an account of what happened or might have happened, especially form of narrative, play, story, or tale. Oftentimes, is assumed tell what has happened life or development of people, country, or institution--in systematic account, usually chronological order with analysis explanation. The Greek root, historia, learning by inquiry or narrative, reinforces current usage of as all recorded events of past. The is be distinguished from that is not recorded or some wise narrated. Derived from Latin passus, which means step, is what has happened, what has occurred pace of time. The past, therefore, becomes source of history, its art. This essay examines Ellison's art Juneteenth, his personal public past, grounded African American culture general. Not only Charles W. Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass, jazz popular folklore, but also Greek historians, Thomas Hobbes, T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin have an impact upon his work. Ellison's theme of throughout emphasizes necessity of telling one's story, remembering past, so that history, of injustice, will never repeat itself. Because is fiction Juneteenth is not technically but extols goals of history. Herodotus's goals, for example, his inquiries into history are to preserve memory of past to show how two races came into conflict. (2) Likewise, Thucydides sets out describe conflict upset of war. History illustrates, he says, that in peace sons bury their fathers, but war fathers bury sons. (3) Juneteenth too is story about race which father buries his son. About his work progress, Ellison stated 1974, I guess that all my work there is an undergrounding of American as comes focus racial situation. (4) His method of is narrative remembrance; his subject, among others, is racial conflict reversals of nature. Juneteenth, set frame of deathbed vigil, tells life story of Bliss, a little boy of indefinite race who looks white who, through of circumstances, comes be reared by Negro minister. (5) That series of circumstances includes false accusation of rape, lynching, birth. Alonzo Hickman, an erstwhile trombonist, delivers baby from woman who caused lynching of his brother death of his mother. Take him keep him bring him up as your own, mother says. him share your Negro life ... Let him learn share forgiveness your life has taught you squeeze from it (308). Bliss is her gift him for causing so much loss, but ignorance of Bliss, his pursuit of his identity, subsequent repudiation of his destroy Sunraider. Hickman, who grapples with this gift, finally chooses put down his trombone, pick up baby, take him on road. …

A Stone House

A Stone House Bay Anapol (bio) Now that her mother is dying—will, in fact, die very soon—Kit manages most of the time to forget her. She types her dissertation. She weeds the garden. But her mother creeps in anyway: unannounced, unwanted. Kit imagines 1938 , the year her mother's parents rented a stone beach house on the unfashionable edge of Cannes. They took their daughters out of the heat of Paris as if they were any other middle-class French family. Kit imagines the stone house as small, gray, and perfectly square, the kitchen stocked with ingredients for Croque Monsieur, buttered croissants, chocolate pieces tucked in baguettes. Kit's mother, Solange, is perfectly calm, like all French schoolchildren, the part in her hair not the slightest bit crooked. She strokes each stone of the house with her little hands. She is smiling. She does not know what Kit knows: that in less than a year, the war will take over her life, and she will lose her father, her sister, everything. But now—in this last wonderful summer—Solange sheds her clothes, her city skin, and runs down to the water slapping the white sand cold and pure, far from the smelly streets of Paris. It is only 1938. She dips a clean toe into the sea. This may or may not be the real story, but Kit adds details to the one she tells Jon. She adds a German boy swimming with a blonde girl very close to the stone beach house, so close her mother's heartbeat stops and starts again at the words: Werner, nein. Nein. Kit adds a broken-down train on the way back to Paris, her grandfather searched and taken to Auschwitz, never to return. In the true story, Solange returned to Paris and to school, and the terror, the important things happened later. But Kit cannot help twisting her mother's fate for effect. She's been with Jon for more than a hundred nights, but every night, she spins a tale to capture his attention once again. Her ordinariness is like a birthmark—how can Jon not see it? There is no other dramatic incident to share with him, so she makes the most of what she has. Kit continues to curl up in the bed, under her mother's old silver comforter. It's true that the stories she tells Jon come from her grandmother, second-hand. Her mother said almost nothing of her life before the war, [End Page 14] before she left France, before she married a dull American who called her So. There are many stories Kit doesn't know about her mother: her first kiss, her first love, what it was like sailing into Ellis Island. I don't remember, her mother says, brushing aside all her questions. It isn't important. Her mother was strong. She had willed her past to evaporate as completely as clear water in a jar. "That was the last time she felt safe" is the way Kit ends the story of the stone house. Jon is not listening. He comes into her bedroom with carefully washed strawberries and whipped cream in a small blue bowl. It's like a movie scene, Kit thinks, a perfect movie scene of passion. In a movie, however, the stems from the strawberries and the red stains on the sheets would magically disappear. Jon smiles, but his smile is far away. "Organic berries are the best." Kit understands this is not the first time he has eaten strawberries in a woman's bed. She feels for her heart's relentless pound, buried under clothing and skin, refusing to halt. There is another story she could tell him, but what would it help? In this story, it is Kit who is nine and at a beach house with her parents. The beach house is in America, not France; it is made of pink stucco instead of stone. Florida, where the sun shrieks all day and the cars are white and turquoise, the color of wind-up toys. Her mother is standing by the doorway, calling for her, unsmiling, impatient. Kit is always late. For the...

Want that is understood well before say that, think that, and false belief: a test of de Villiers's linguistic determinism on German-speaking children.

Two experiments with 79 monolingual German speaking children between 2.5 and 4.5 years showed a consistent developmental gap between children's memory/inference of what someone wanted and what someone wrongly said or thought. For instance, when John is still playing and mother says, "John should be going to bed," more than 70% answered correctly that mother wanted John to go to bed. However, when mother said, "John is going to bed," about 70% answered wrongly that she thought/said that he was still playing. Correct answers emerged with the mastery of the false-belief task. In German, want sentences (about something to happen) obligatorily take the same grammatical that complement as say or think sentences. Therefore, the observed gap constrains de Villier's (1995) linguistic determinism, which claims that acquisition of the necessary grammatical structures for talking about the mind drives children's ability to think about the mind.

THE PLIGHT OF PART-TIME FACULTY

ITS A ROUGH LIFE, AS DESCRIBED BY those who teach chemistry part time. It's extremely difficult to make a living wage as an adjunct professor, one says. courses need to be taught, then you have a If for some reason courses don't need to be taught, then you probably don't have a job. Unless you really like to teach, you wouldn't do it, says another. Another professor laments that is no feedback from the tenured faculty. could be teaching geography and they wouldn't know any different. But there are enough positives to keep part-timers going. I love seeing the light bulb go on over the students' heads when they get something, one notes. I'm not doing research, so don't have to worry about writing grant proposals, says a second. It gives me the freedom to travel. And a new mother says, I have the opportunity ...

Giving and Loving

Giving and Loving

Family-based interventions for the treatment of childhood obesity

Family-based interventions for the treatment of childhood obesity

What it means to be daddy: fatherhood for black men living away from their children

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Fathers' Lives in ContextPart 1: The World in Which Fathers Live1. There's No Such Thing as a Good Father: Standards of Fatherhood2. Slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction: Creating a Context for Live-Away Fatherhood3. Times Are Going to Get Worse...: Fathers Chasing the American DreamPart 2: Expectations of Others4. Just Be There for the Baby: What Fathers Say Others Expect5. Black Men Can Do Better: What Mothers Say Fathers Do for Their ChildrenPart 3: Being Fathers6.What Fathers Say They Do as Daddies7. Live-Away, but Absent?8. Ain't Nothing Like Trying to be a Father and Trying to be a Man: Barriers to Being DaddyConclusion: Got to Make Fatherhood Work for Us-The Meaning of Fatherhood for Men Who Do Not Live with Their ChildrenNotesBibliographyIndex

Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist (review)

252Fourth Genre Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist by Kazuko Kuramoto Michigan State University Press, 1999 189 pages, cloth, $28.95 It's the Fourth ofJuly and I'm sitting with thousands of other spectators in a long grass field watching the Cincinnati Pops play a medley ofArmed Forces anthems. I'm hiding my face because I don't want anyone else to see me getting choked up. My friends make fun of me for being patriotic. They say, Why'sAmerica better than otherplaces?They say, What about Vietnam? What about the GulfWar? They say, Would you love it here so much ifyou weren't white? Ifyou weren't middle-class?'They say, Come on already. But I can't help it. My affection doesn't always feel rational, but I feel it anyway. And it is that confusion— how does one love a people, a place so historicaUy socially and politicaUy flawed—that draws me to Kazuko Kuramoto's Manchurian Legacy. In the Author's Note, Kuramoto sums up the book's narrative in this way: This memoir includes my childhood memories of a then colonial city, Darien, at the south end of Manchuria. . .; how I saw World War II as a teenager, how we survived the hellfire of Manchuria at the time ofJapanese surrender; how we were finally rescued and shipped back to Japan; how as a repatriate I survived in the ruins of postwar Japan; and how I came to the United States as a young girl. Certainly her memoir is about aU of these things, but more importandy it's about a difficult defining and redefining ofnationaUty/nationaUsm, class/classism and selfhood. Kuramoto was born in 1927 to affluent Japanese parents and raised in Darien, Manchuria—a Japanese colony on mainland China won from Russia in the Russo-JapaneseWar of 1904-1905. Her story begins, more or less, with the onset ofWorldWar II, when she decides to join the Red Cross Nurses corps. Brought up on a steady diet ofJapanese nationaUst rhetoric, Kuramoto argues vehemently with her parents to aUow her to go: "It was not hard for me to recite what I had been taught aU of my life. World War II in the Pacific theater was then called Dai To-a Senso, the Great East Asia War. It was a sacred war, of course, and Japan was the self-appointed savior and leader." Kuramoto's entire family pleads with her not to go. Her brothers have already joined the army, are already headed for the front. Her mother says, weeping, "... and I thought the girls were safe from the war." But Kuramoto "had fallen in love with patriotism: self-sacrifice, total dedi- Book Reviews253 cation, honor, and the possibility of the ultimate heroic death." Though she cannot be dissuaded from joining the ranks of the Red Cross by her family, her confidence in her country's supremacy and the sacrifice she would make for it is, however, shaken soon after by Japan's surrender at the close of the war, leaving her searching for an identity no longer shaped by a certainty of national superiority. And it is that search for self that dominates the rest of the Manchurian Legacy. Who is Kazuko Kuramoto if she is no longer a Japanese "savior" of Asia? Who is she when she discovers that the Chinese, who have inhabited Manchuria as second-class citizens, have never inwardly accepted their social standing underJapanese rule?Who is she ifshe is no longer part ofa wealthy ruling class, forced to seU her family's prized possessions just to get by? How can she claim love for a country that doesn't send help for its people, that aUows them to starve, to go homeless, to be vulnerable to attack at any moment? The answers to those questions come slowly as Kuramoto rebuilds her past on the page. One might be surprised by just how generous those answers are, after seeing her neighbor's house stormed and destroyed by a Chinese riot, after surviving a harrowing escape by train to Darien from the northern country in an open-roofed boxcar that is pelted with rocks, after hearing of the staggering...

What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say about Marriage?

Current theories of marriage under-predict the extent of non-marriage, have not been adequately tested, or do not apply well to women with low-socioeconomic status. Furthermore, scholarly research on marriage attitudes among low-SES women suffers from a lack of up-to-date qualitative work. This study draws on qualitative interviews with 292 low-income single' mothers in three U.S. cities. Inductive analysis reveals five primary motivations for non-marriage among low-income single mothers. Most mothers agree that potential marriage partners must earn significantly more than the minimum wage, but also emphasize the importance of stability of employment, source of earnings, and the effort men expend to find and keep their jobs. Mothers place equal or greater emphasis on non-monetary factors such as how marriage may diminish or enhance respectability, how it may limit their control over household decisions, their mistrust of men, and their fear of domestic violence. Affordability, respectability, and control have greater salience for African American mothers, while trust and domestic violence have greater salience for whites. The author discusses these findings in relation to existing theories of marriage and in light of welfare reform.

What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say about Marriage?

A primary goal of the landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation is to increase marriage rates among unskilled women with children. Current theories of marriage under-predict the extent of non-marriage, have not been adequately tested, or do not apply well to women with low-socioeconomic status. Furthermore, scholarly work on marriage attitudes among low-SES women suffers from a lack of up-to-date qualitative work. This study draws on qualitative interviews with 292 low-income single mothers in three U.S. cities. Inductive analysis reveals five primary motivations for non-marriage among low-income single mothers. Most mothers agree that potential marriage partners must earn significantly more than the minimum wage, but also emphasize the importance of stability of employment, source of earnings, and the effort men expend to find and keep their jobs. Mothers place equal or greater emphasis on non-monetary factors such how marriage may diminish or enhance status, how it may limit their control over household decisions, their distrust of men, and their fear of domestic violence. The author discusses these findings in relation to existing theories of marriage and in light of welfare reform.

When Mother Says To Do One Thing and Teacher Says To Do Another: Preschoolers' Responses to Mother-Teacher Differences

Thirty-two White 4- and 5-year-olds from middle-income families responded to hypothetical scenarios in which their mothers and their preschool teachers issued opposing commands. Children were asked what they would do and how they would feel in this situation. All children were interviewed twice—once in their homes and once in their child care centers. All children had attended their current child care settings full day for at least 6 months, and all had teachers who were rated as sensitive and involved. Mothers completed the Attachment Behavior Q-sort, age and length of time in the current teacher's care were related to favoring of the teachers', rather than the mothers', commands in the center interviews. In the center interviews, security scores, age, and length of time in the current teacher's care were related to favoring of teachers' rather than mothers' commands. Conversely, in the home interviews, dependency scores were positively correlated with favoring of mothers' commands over teachers'. The one sex difference indicated that boys found the situation less upsetting than girls did.

Her New Last Name

HER NEW LAST NAME/Franklin Fisher NELL SLEEPS with her hand on her mother's breast until Mrs. Pope comes in, carrying chickens to pluck. Nell is put outside. She hears the door close behind her, and feels the wind warm on her back. The wind whistles in the trees. Children down in the haystack yard climb the shed and jump into the haystack and vanish. Abig boy tosses a little girl into the hay and she vanishes. Nell catches her dress on the barbs and the big boy comes and untangles her and throws her into the haystack, where she vanishes. Her brothers have typhoid fever. Nell carries their food to them from the kitchen and eats what they leave on their plates. Nell may die. Dr. Brownfield pulls up her nightgown, places a hand on her belly. She pushes his hand away. Her brother Dave will give her marbles if he can cut her hair. She keeps her eyes closed and drifts inside her fever but holds the marbles tight in her hand as she feels the hair drop from one side of her head, then the other, and gather on the cot under her neck. For a long time she is pulled everywhere in the little red wagon by her mother. Her mother takes her everywhere she goes. She is with her mother all the time. She kneels in the potato cellar while her brothers pour potatoes down onto her from the kitchen floor. Her job is to push the potatoes aside as they pour in, to make room for more. Stink bugs crawl over her hands as she pushes the potatoes. Potatoes pour in so fast she is afraid of being smothered. They cover her thighs as she squats there; they strike her arms and shoulders. The Missouri Review · 139 A man the others call George sits at the table and rocks it back and forth on his knees while everyone laughs. He breaks his potatoes open with his fingers. When he comes again Nell runs to her mother in the kitchen and whispers: That big man who makes the table go back and forth is in the house. That's your brother, her mother says. Nell goes back and watches him from the doorway until her mother tells her to move. A dark-haired man with a careless smile stays with them for a month. Nell falls in love with his teeth. She follows him around the house and into the yard, and would follow him into town if he didn't reach down from his horse and pick her up and carry her back to the yard. She learns his name is Gil and he's her brother too, but he has a different mother and she's dead. In the evening he plays I see you, I see you, hiding behind that chair for Nell on his harmonica while she peeks out and ducks her head again, dissolving in love for Gil. When he leaves he lifts her up for a kiss and tells her when he's a millionaire he'll buy her a silk dress. An angry man her mother's age comes to town once and disappears with her father for the afternoon. Her sister Phebe tells her he is their brother Moroni, who hates their mother. On Decoration Day they go into the fields and gather Johnny-jumpups . The boys and men gather the lilies that cover Lily Hill and put bands of them around their hats. From the back yard she hears Doc Pope swearing, and she knows his chickens have flown over the fence into his vegetable garden again, and he is throwing rocks at them. Bishop's going to excommunicate you for swearing, Doc, a man Nell can't see says. Anybody says I swear's a damn liar, Doc says. Her mother visits Doc Pope at home, taking Nell. His house is a oneroom cabin with a dirt roof. Inside, near the door, is a cobbler's bench. Old shoes and pieces of leather lie scattered on the floor. His bed is in a corner; his table with a chair in front of it is...

What Mothers Say About Why Poor Children Fall Behind on Immunizations

To develop a more thorough understanding of the factors that impede poor parents' utilization of health care services for their children and to refine interventions to improve immunization rates. We conducted focus group sessions with mothers whose children received care at the health departments in five North Carolina counties. Mothers were uninsured or were receiving Medicaid. A total of 50 women participated; group size varied from three to seven mothers. Socially disadvantaged mothers faced barriers at multiple points in the process of obtaining preventive care for their children. Organizational barriers, such as a lack of flexibility in scheduling and long waiting times, were exacerbated by personal barriers, such as a lack of reliable transportation, chaotic home environments, and employment conflicts. Lack of knowledge regarding the timing of childhood immunizations and misperceptions about the safety of immunizations were also important obstacles. Mothers made several suggestions, such as changes in scheduling, greater assistance with transportation, improved waiting facilities, and increased health education. Our study suggests that even with improved financing of well-child care, many important barriers to adequate immunization will remain. Many of the changes that mothers in our focus groups advocated are not related to insurance coverage and would be simple and inexpensive to implement. To help with these changes, we developed a checklist for use by health departments to determine which organizational barriers exist at their facility and suggest strategies to overcome the problems. Organizational, personal, and attitudinal barriers pose serious problems for socioeconomically disadvantaged families. To improve vaccination rates for children, new personnel and programs are probably less important than careful strategies to maximize existing resources.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words, but That's the Problem: The Role of Syntax in Vocabulary Acquisition

ing the Relevant World Event A related problem is that the scene that accompanies utterance of a verb includes many events, only one of which is encoded by that verb. Consider the plight of the child to whom the mother says, Do you want this ice cream cone? The mother is speaking, smiling, holding and waving the cone, and perhaps pointing to it; the cone is observably something good to eat, dripping, Copyright ? 1992 American Psychological Society This content downloaded from 207.46.13.118 on Sun, 11 Sep 2016 06:25:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 32 VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1, FEBRUARY 1992 melting, an object of present desire, I and so forth. None of these aspects of the scene is irrelevant to the con versational intent, yet only one of them is correct to map onto the item want. A picture is worth a thousand words, but that is the trouble: A thousand words describe the varying aspects of any one picture. Usually, investigators have solved these problems only by beg ging the questions they raise. For ex ample, children are said to ignore adult utterances whose meanings are unrelated to the present context. But then, how do children avoid positing a different (and incorrect) pairing of the verb heard with some event that is present in the environ ment? That is, if the learner assumes that speech maps onto current events, and does not know the meaning of some utterance heard, she must attempt a pairing between that utterance and whatever is hap pening. Woe to such a learner, for in a case we mentioned earlier, she must then try to pair up Come take your nap with the cat-on-mat ob servation, a decidedly false step. As for abstract verbs, the prob lems they pose for observational learning are often waved aside be cause their acquisition is relatively late compared with the acquisition of action verbs?as if this lateness answers the question of how they are learned, in the end.

An Interview with Isabel Allende

MP: Where do you think you got your sense of story telling? IA: In the kitchen. Listening to the maids tell stories. Listening to the radio. In Latin America there is a long tradition of soap operas that started with The Right to Be Born. Imagine what that was! I remember being very small and coming back from school running to hear the next chapter of the soap opera. Always very tragic stories and very sad stories too. I have that in Eva Luna. When Eva Luna is a child she lives in the kitchen. She is a maid, and she listens to the radio. That's the only contact she has with the world. And all the stories that she hears she believes are true stories—I believed when I was a child that they were all true stories. So I thought that the world was full of very interesting people and it was just me that was always bored. Everybody else was having these wonderful love affairs ex cept me. VI: When did you start telling stories? IA: When I was very small. My mother says that I terrorized my brothers with horrible long truculent stories that haunted their days and filled their nights with nightmares. After I had my own children I also told them stories. They would give me the first sentence and immediately I would start the story. I was trained then. I've lost that training now. I've always liked it. I remember always having told stories—and making them up and inventing and exaggerating and lying all the time. VI: Lying? IA: Yes, they were not lies for me because I thought those things really happened, but my mother says I was a terrible liar. I was always punished for lying. MP: How would you describe the difference between lies and truth? IA: For me, I can no longer say. At the beginning there is some truth always. For example, I just went to Switzerland and I received an award. It was a bronze statue. I no longer know what size the bronze statue is. When I

The Spy and the Poet: Young Girls as Writers in Harriet the Spy and Anastasia Krupnik

The Spy and the Poet: Young Girls as Writers in Harriet the Spy and Anastasia Krupnik Writers of children's fiction during the 1960s and 1970s such as Louise Fitzhugh and Lois Lowry created female characters who would have been destined for reform in earlier works of fiction. John Rowe Townsend sees these contemporary females as "highlyidiosyncratic " characters "whose personalities have been allowed by their authors to develop without too much regard for what constitutes a proper example" (277). Harriet Welsch (Harriet the Spy 1964) and Anastasia Krupnik (Anastasia Krupnik 1979) exhibit their sometimes "eccentric" characteristics in their writings: Harriet's "spy" notebooks and Anastasia's "important things" notebook. Writing, an occupation which had to be "tamed" out of earlier characters, such as Jo March (Little Women), helps these contemporary females order their worlds. Jo March is a prime example of a young woman who must be "reformed" before she can become a proper lady. Jo's first love is her writing, but this artistic ability is ultimately "tamed to laud domestic and moral virtues" (Clark 81). Cadogan and Craig explain the taming process which was "accepted by writers and readers of nineteenth-century girls' fiction" (54): "Wild" girls were tamed by 1) friends and family, 2) religion, or 3) falling in love. And for these girls writing was not "considered a suitably modest profession" (55). However, for Harriet and Anastasia, writing is a way of ordering their lives~a way that is ultimately encouraged by their parents and by society. Beverly Lyon Clark states that "seemly feminine behavior" (83) for nineteenth-century females required self-control, with aspirations towards "domesticity and moral goodness" (82) and away from the self-expression of art and fiction. Jo March must give up her "castle in the air" of being a famous writer and "outgrow it, like her strong language and her tomboy exuberance" (84). Unlike the "devaluation of writing" (90) that occurs in Alcott's book, writing skills are beneficial in Fitzhugh's and Lowry's works. Harriet's "spy" notebooks and Anastasia's "love-hate" lists are forms of self-expression, preliminary writing exercises which will continue to help them discover other interests and talents. Harriet M. Welsch (the middle initial is one she gave herself) is at the start of Fitzhugh's book a "neat compulsive, upper middle class, urban child" (Bosmajian 72) who is often "inelastic" in her habits. Her daily routine-tomato sandwiches for lunch, special "spy" clothes, cake at precisely 3:40 every afternoon, and reading under the covers with a flashlight until Ole Golly tells her to stop-gives her a "tenuous connectiveness" (76) to the world around her. Spying on other people is the real way Harriet connects with her world. It is an activity she does alone; Sport and Janie, her best friends, are not allowed to go along, and her parents are not even aware that she is spying and recording everything she sees and hears. Harriet fills fifteen green spy notebooks with her insights to the fragments of people's lives she glimpses. When asked why she writes about strangers she observes, Harriet responds, "Because I've seen them and I want to remember them" (11). Ole Golly encourages Harriet's writing and tells her that description "is good for the soul" (32). 200 Harriet takes her seriously. She writes about her teachers, mostly unflattering remarks: "I think Miss Elson is one of those people you don't bother to think about twice" (33); "Miss Whitehead has buck teeth, thin hair, feet like skis, and a very long hanging stomach" (34). And even about her best friends: "Sometimes I can't stand Sport. ... He's like a little old woman" (182). However, Harriet does not use her notebook merely for reports about people on her spy route or to record brutally honest descriptions of teachers and friends. She also tries to figure out people closer to home: her parents and Ole Golly. For instance, when she finds out that Ole Golly has a boyfriend, Harriet writes: "Is everybody a different person when they are with somebody else? Ole Golly has never been this way" (97). At one point, Harriet's mother says...

6: What Do Father and Mother Say?

6: What Do Father and Mother Say?

SKWL DAS: Emerging literacy in children

“There Mommy.” A little girl turns to her mother from the kitchen blackboard on which she has written SKWL DAS. “That's to help you remember the name of the song my class will be dancing to in the recital.” The mother observes the proud look upon her kindergartner's face and looks at SKWL DAS on the board. Quickly, the mother says, “Thank you for writing the name of the song. Now I will remember it. Can you read what you wrote, too?” “Of course,” retorts the girl. “It says SCHOOL DAYS.”

Theodore Roethke: The Journey from I to Otherwise by Neal Bowers

380 Western American Literature Along with the depersonalization coming from the modern over-use of Pike’s name is a failure to participate in the localized beauty of the region as symbol­ ized by the antelope. The incident is repeated in the same place in modern times as a mother and child ride a bus toward Colorado Springs. Upon arrival at the bus terminal (on Pike’s Peak Avenue), the mother says I must have dozed off back out where The driver said we saw a beautiful antelope jumping over a bush. To the child’s question “Mama, did we see the antelope?” the mother echoes the sad failure to personally experience events: We must have, dear, The driver said we did. Above all else, Ferril participates in the world around him and records the duality of finitude and infinitude inherent in each act, facing directly the granite world but finding more than rock. JAMES R. SAUCERMAN Northwest Missouri State University Theodore Roethke: The Journey from I to Otherwise. By Neal Bowers. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. 228 pages, no price stated.) The question of mysticism in Theodore Roethke’s poetry haunts the Roethke criticism like a bad dream or an interminable visit by a sickly maiden aunt. The problem is that the term is loaded: it insists on its own indefinability. Anyone who has looked into the matter at all knows that what sits at the heart of the “mystical experience” is “the ineffable.” That’s the way it is— one bows to that. But the irritating fact is that as soon as the word mystic crops up in criticism, critics begin spending too much time bowing and not enough time explaining. And anyone who stops bowing and starts asking questions can be dismissed as a philistine. Neal Bowers’ book not only fails to escape from the consequences of selfrighteous mystic-mongering, it positively embraces them. The result is an unhappy mixture of solid research, sloppy method, thesis-writing, and a severe case of intentional fallacy which keeps asserting itself like a nervous tic, dis­ torting and ultimately spoiling what might otherwise be a useful study. It is clear enough, from his drafts and notes as well as from the poetry itself, that Theodore Roethke was intensely interested in mysticism, knew a great deal about the subject, and studied many significant works dealing with it, notably Evelyn Underhill’s monumental work. Bowers notes these things, as have other critics before him. There are two main questions arising from all this: first, how does Roethke employ both the substance and the structure of mysticism (as described in its various stages, for instance, by Underhill) ; Reviews 381 and second, what does he mean by it? These questions are difficult; and like all difficult questions, they require a precise and subtle approach. Bowers’ thesis is enough to cast doubt on his subtlety. “The basic premise of this study,” he tells us, “is that Roethke’s manic-depressiveness, which troubled him most of his life, produced in him a propensity for mystical insight,” which in turn is the foundation for much, if not all, of Roethke’s poetry. Beyond that, Bowers (after alluding to friends and colleagues who look at him askance for his interest in mysticism, a subject they suspect, he says, because they obviously do not understand it) gives us his working definition of mysticism, which he borrows from S. N. Dasgupta: “ ‘a theory or doctrine or view that considers reason to be incapable of discovering or realizing the nature of ultimate truth, but at the same time believes in the certitude of some other means of arriving at it.’” There are many problems inherent in this approach — so many it is difficult to detail them all. In the first place, Dasgupta’s definition is inade­ quate, and Bowers does not stick to it (is mysticism a “theory or doctrine or view,” or is it as Walter T. Stace has it, an experience which cannot be embraced by any doctrine; and doesn’t all mysticism, whatever its religious affiliation, or lack thereof, contain certain assumptions about the nature of “ultimate truth” which Dasgupta’s definition does not address?). Further­ more...

Anvil of Roses by Thomas Hornsby Ferril

Reviews 379 Anvil of Roses. By Thomas Hornsby Ferril. (Boise, ID: Ahsahta Press, 1983. 40 pages, $2.50.) Just as most of Tom Ferril’s poems are best appreciated when read against the backdrop of the front range of the Rocky Mountains, so are the poems in Anvil of Roses best read against the background of Ferril’s earlier poems. Personal experience and historic time are juxtaposed to the seemingly eternal geologic time in order to find an ever-present mythic eternity actualized in particular place. Local human experience in settling the West establishes sacred ground because, in Mircea Eliade’s words, “To settle a territory is . . . equivalent to consecrating it.” Happily, that consecration of the common­ place still exists in some of the twenty-two poems of the present volume. Several of the short poems have the simple power we have come to expect of Ferril. “Cecropia” establishes a quick analogy between “a boy named Wilbur” and a “midnight moth”; after a rather conventional opening, the poem ends with Tonight in some forsaken crucible Of memory Wilbur glows a moment and goes out. In “Night of Datura,” the narrator looks back on the love of one person and “that luminous night,” remembering in the final lines There may have been a thrust of swanlight On your hair. Cygnus was over usas I recall. As ever in Ferril’s poems, Cygnus is astral constellation but with a hint of an allusion to Zeus as swan. Ferril’s longer poem celebrating the nation’s bicentennial and Colorado’s centennial, “Stories of Three Summers,” makes good use of two of his char­ acteristic devices: recalling events from several time periods occurring at one location and identifying geographically scattered incidents occurring at one particular moment in history. He recalls different events of the three inescap­ able time periods (1776,1876,1976) happening in the same location: Colo­ rado. He also cites seemingly unrelated events taking place during one of those particular times. For instance, in the first part of the poem two friars suffer the hardships of travel, “goading their mules” over Uncompaghre Mesa while “Lord Cornwallis / Was prodding his red-coat musketeers” and “Foreshadow­ ings of Figaro / Were lilting in the singing heart / Of Mozart.” Only the mind, in this case the mind of the artist Ferril, identifies archetypal patterns, thus reaching beyond the temporal and spatial limitations to a spiritual (and aesthetic) unity of which the individual participants are unaware. The same device is used more successfully in perhaps the best poem of the volume, “Metamorphosis: 1806.” Unaware of each other, Pike, Beethoven, Napoleon, and Utamaro share a moment in 1806 when a prong­ horn antelope leaps over a clump of greasewood near what will be Pike’s Peak. 380 Western American Literature Along with the depersonalization coming from the modern over-use of Pike’s name is a failure to participate in the localized beauty of the region as symbol­ ized by the antelope. The incident is repeated in the same place in modern times as a mother and child ride a bus toward Colorado Springs. Upon arrival at the bus terminal (on Pike’s Peak Avenue), the mother says I must have dozed off back out where The driver said we saw a beautiful antelope jumping over a bush. To the child’s question “Mama, did we see the antelope?” the mother echoes the sad failure to personally experience events: We must have, dear, The driver said we did. Above all else, Ferril participates in the world around him and records the duality of finitude and infinitude inherent in each act, facing directly the granite world but finding more than rock. JAMES R. SAUCERMAN Northwest Missouri State University Theodore Roethke: The Journey from I to Otherwise. By Neal Bowers. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. 228 pages, no price stated.) The question of mysticism in Theodore Roethke’s poetry haunts the Roethke criticism like a bad dream or an interminable visit by a sickly maiden aunt. The problem is that the term is loaded: it insists on its own indefinability. Anyone who has looked into the matter at all knows that what sits at the heart of the “mystical...