Wordle

My good friend Jill (whose well-written blog is here) told me about a creative and free tool on the net: Wordle.

You can create word clouds by typing in related words, and retyping the words that you want to be the largest.  Or, as I experimented with, you can have the program scan a blog or webpage to create a word cloud.  I guess I write a lot about racism, huh!


(click for larger image)

I like the idea that this tool could create poetry or word artwork.  I'm going to play around with it for sure!

Here's how I see God:

 

Here's someone else's Wordle of the first chapter of "The Scarlet Letter."  
I love how "virgin" is by itself and "human" and "prison" meet up. 
And also that "beetle-browed" is one of the main words!

Colour Discourse

I've just finished another essay dealing with racial issues in the United States, this one for my 20th Century American Novel class. In fact, I haven't even turned it in yet! Here's the introduction and some of the main points. Of course, if you'd like to read it all, let me know.


Or just check out the main terms from wordle.net: (click for larger image)

When O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder in 1995 the media focused on the contrasting reactions of Blacks and Whites. The opinions of other racial groups were not actively sought (Enomoto 146). Similarly, societal debates surrounding Michael Jackson in the last decade of his life questioned whether his very pale skin colour overrode his African ancestry. These contemporary examples illustrate the historic tendency of Americans to identify people according to the binaries of White and Black, and this based on skin colour. Historically, pseudo-scientific racism, propagated by eugenicists, categorized people into the dualities of the desirable White and the undesirable Black, in an effort to ward off the reversal of the evolutionary process through racial intermarriage. Similarly, the “one-drop rule” adopted by eighteen states between 1910 and 1931 reinforced the dualistic categorization of people since it determined the legal definition of “Black” to include anyone with at least one drop of African blood (Herring 129). Because of these racist concerns, Whites enacted Jim Crow laws to segregate Blacks from Whites in hopes to reduce the births of interracial children.

During the 1920s, in an era when eugenicist’s arguments, Jim Crow laws, and one-drop rules were commonly accepted, a strong emphasis was thus placed on skin colour as both Blacks and Whites appropriated racist rhetoric that deemed light skin tones and European features to be more desirable than dark skin tones and African features. Two novels from this era, Langston Hughes’ Not Without Laughter, which takes place in 1910 and was published in 1930, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, set in the Roaring Twenties and published in 1925, reveal this preference for lighter skin tones in both Black and White communities. Through the inclusion of a panoply of skin tones in his novel, Hughes critiques racial binaries and also the intraracial schisms brought on by the preference in the Black community for lighter skin, while the characters in Fitzgerald’s novel are described on the more limited colour scale of white, tan, brown and golden revealing the characters’ acceptance of eugenic arguments for the conservation of the pure Nordic race.

Through the use of colours, Hughes critiques the prejudice within the Black community which considers lighter-skinned Blacks, the “high-toned” or “yellow” skinned, as more sexually and socially desirable. This stereotype creates racial divisions among Blacks. One reason for this intraracial prejudice is that light skin refers to a white ancestry which connects the light-skinned to the dominate culture and people of the United States. Blacks that hold this view accept the power structure created and upheld by Whites in which Whites are superior to all other races. This racist ideology claims that pale skin and European facial structures are beautiful and all others are undesirable (Fanon 183). The novel’s protagonist, Sandy, appropriates this aesthetic, identifying the Africans in his geography book as “ugly” (175). That other Blacks in the novel, besides Sandy, have also appropriated the ideology of considering whiteness as more attractive than dark-skinned complexions is evident. For example, at the jazz club, black girls are told to “stay where [they] are” while “[h]igh yellers” and “brown-skins” are beckoned to “draw nigh” and to “come near” (100). Obviously, the women are being divided into the sexually attractive light-skinned and the undesirable dark-skinned. Sandy’s teenaged aunt, Harriet, wants to be among the sexually desirable as she powders her face and neck which gives the impression of “pink on ebony,” before going to a barbeque with teenage boys (57). Men, too, try to be whiter to appear sexually attractive, such as the stranger Sandy meets in Chicago whose face is powdered with white talcum.

In The Great Gatsby, Whites idolize a standard of whiteness which is different from that of the Blacks in Hughes’ novel. Fitzgerald’s characters base their scale on the supposed perfection of the Teutonic physical features of the Nordic nations. Miscegenation is therefore conceived as a threat to the conservation of this pure Nordic race. The ideal Aryan body would be blond, blue-eyed and tall (Stoddard xiv), in short the embodiment of Fitzgerald’s character Tom Buchanan. It is thus noteworthy that it is he who voices the racist opinion that Whites and Blacks should not marry. His theory is based on the writings of eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, which Buchanan, in ignorance, or by the narrator’s mis-remembering, identifies as Henry H. Goddard. Both Stoddard and Goddard advocated scientific racism, dividing races along the scale from the most evolved White to the least evolved Black, including the races of Yellow, Brown, and Red in between the two extremes. The United States, with its influx of immigrants, was thus a battleground for the conservation of the Nordic race. As Madison Grant writes in the introduction to Stoddard’s book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,

Democratic ideals among an homogeneous population of Nordic blood, as in England or America, is one thing, but it is quite another for the white man to share his blood with, or intrust (sic) his ideals to, brown, yellow, black, or red men. This is suicide pure and simple, and the first victim of this amazing folly will be the white man himself. (xxxii)

Through the influence of these men, Buchanan warns his white friends of the threat of the downfall of modern civilization occasioned by the pure race being submerged by the “colored empires,” a grouping which includes the inferior White races of southern and eastern Europe (13).

At each recounting of Buchanan’s racist views, his companions mock them, such as when his wife tells Nick, in Tom’s presence, that she and her friend Jordan passed a “white childhood” together in Louisville or assures Tom that she and Nick were talking about the Nordic race during Tom’s absence (19). Nick, as narrator, treats Tom’s views as “gibberish,” and is tempted to laugh aloud at Tom’s ignorance, but neither he nor any other of Tom’s acquaintances openly confront Tom’s racist rhetoric (130). In fact, they have internalized it without vocalizing it. The Whites live in “white palaces,” wear white clothing, and powder their white skin in the attempt to convey racial purity (5). The desire of Whites to reflect a pure whiteness is based on the eugenicist Stoddard’s insistence on three races of White peoples, of which the Nordics were the most evolved. People hailing from the Mediterranean regions, including the Republic of Ireland, or from southeastern Europe were considered less sexually and sociably desirable, as well as being less intelligent (Stoddard xiii-xiv). Although Gatsby is white, Tom does not consider him to be of the pure race because he is of the working class and is descended from ambiguous European ancestry. Gatsby’s “brown,” “tanned” skin is a testament to his years as a sailor on Lake Superior and also excludes him from the purer white skinned of the leisured upper class (98). Tom’s contempt for Gatsby as an inferior White is evident in his consideration of a relationship between Daisy and Gatsby to be comparable to “intermarriage between black and white” (130).

Racist preferences of lighter skin tones are evident in both Not Without Laughter and The Great Gatsby, yet Hughes’ inclusion criticizes the practice, while Fitzgerald upholds it. Hughes’ unflattering portrayal of Tempy and her snobbish attitude toward her family and other dark-skinned poor Blacks, whom she considers “niggerish,” (158), reveal that haughty attitudes based on skin tone divide a community already oppressed in American society. Fitzgerald’s characters mirror Fitzgerald’s own questioning of eugenics. During his undergraduate degree at Princeton eugenics theories were “palpably in the air,” mainly due to the teachings of biology professor Edwin G. Conklin (Bender 225). Like his character Tom Buchanan, Fitzgerald seemingly embraced Nordicism, writing to Edmund Wilson four years before the publication of Gatsby, that Americans should “[r]aise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo Saxons and Celts to enter” (Fitzgerald 47). However, Buchanan’s views are dismissed by the other characters, revealing Fitzgerald’s own uneasiness with the claims of eugenics. Rather, Fitzgerald’s concern with the “rising tide of the colored empires” is disclosed in Nick’s apprehension of the presence of Blacks and “inferior” Whites on the bridge crossing to New York City, a city where “anything can happen [...] [e]ven Gatsby” (69). Americans had to choose in the opening decades of the 1900s, and presently have to choose, if racism will continue to segregate a nation based on the colour, and more appropriately, the shade of colour, of the skin of its citizens.

Check out the books here:

     

Creative Prayer

There are more ways to worship God than just through talking to God through prayer and singing to him worship songs written by other Christians. I've been using art to pray to God for several years. As I make a collage, paint, or draw, I praise the Lord and pray for specific people and needs. Last week in our small group we made collages in prayer to God. Here's one I did that night:

and here's another one:

(click on either image to see larger)

God is creative, and as we are made in his image to glorify Him, I can use the creativity He's given me in prayer and praise. How do you worship God creatively?

There's some great ideas at the "Praying in Color" site.

And here's a video from that site:

And the book she's written:

Frederick Douglass, An American Slave

At the moment I'm reworking an essay I wrote last year about the ex-slave and abolitionistFrederick Douglass. My argument is that his title Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave reveals the paradox of the American slavery system in that someone could be both American (from a country that prides itself on being democratic, on capitalistic ideals of property ownership, and of being the home of the free) and Slave (a position of absolute submission without any rights). Here are the first two paragraphs, after the introduction, to this paper that I hope to present at Bishop's University's literary conference for English lit undergrads.

The status of Douglass' own parents exposed the absurdity of the dichotomy between "American" and "slave." His father was a white slaveholder therefore having all the rights of an American citizen. His mother, however, was a slave with no rights in American society. To further complicate the familial incongruities, his mother was most likely Douglass' father's slave. By introducing himself as an American slave, Douglass reveals the irrationality of such a system that would allow one's father to own one's mother. Through this persona, he also asserts that he should have the right to inherit his father's status, even though by law (established by white males to uphold the slave system) he inherits only the status of his mother."

"Frederick Douglass asserts his persona in the title of his autobiography, identifying himself to his readers as an "American Slave." The apparent oxymoron would shock his contemporary readers. It seemed impossible that a person could be both American: white, property-owner, free, rich, and proud and yet also slave: black, property, constrained, owning nothing, and humiliated. His choice of identifiers was deliberate. They displayed the inherent hypocrisies of American slavery. Douglass had been born in America, "the land of the free," the country that declared that "all men are created equal." Additionally, at the time he wrote his narrative, Douglass had attained freedom "in form" in the North, yet legally he continued to be a slave and could always be recaptured according to the Fugitive Slave Law (Douglass 78). He considered himself to be a "fugitive in slavery," not to be a "fugitive from slavery" (Fisch 208).

Get the book here:

Watch Danny Glover reciting one of Douglass' most famous speeches, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?.

(if you're lacking in time, watch from 3:40 - 5:21.)
Read it here.

Yesterday I submitted three haikus to a poetry contest. I only had one ready, but since the flat submission fee was $5 whether I submitted one, two, or three haikus, I rewrote some of my existing poems into haikus, trying to capture the poems' essence into 17 syllables. Here's an example of one I didn't send in.

The original:

Picture Day

Click

And another year is captured

Connecting you to that morning your mother lovingly dressed you in a plum jumper with a gray mouse sewn on the chest.

Bringing back

Memories of recess, research papers, and rejections

Memories of friends, Friday night dances, and your first French kiss.

As a child-

Frilly dresses, thick stockings, and Mary Janes

Striving to look as girlish as possible

(Even with buckteeth and while resembling your brother in a pearl necklace)

As a teen-

Braces flashing

Practicing your smile in the mirror

Dazzling,

Or refined,

Perhaps playful

Thrusting your fingers through your tangled hair - frustrated.

Finally satisfied - Wandering to the end of the line

Sitting up straight, ‘Oh Please don’t blink!’

And now the last Picture Day of your life

Your senior year of college- a degree almost earned

And you think on the quote you read just yesterday:

“Change is survival’s praise.”

Smile, Cheese, Click.

Here are two haikus I wrote from this poem:

Snap – moment captured

Flashes - connect you back

To who you once were.

Mary Janes spotless

Blond pigtails and frilly dress

Picture Day again

And why not a Wordle haiku?

A New Year, A New Look

I thought I'd play around with the blog templates a bit. So far this is my favourite for 2010. The beach, the waves (can you hear them?), plus lighthouses always remind me of Grandma, so it seems like a winner.


Here's a picture of me with my Grandma Keller feeding the seagulls popcorn.

Back to School

Today I start back for my last semester of complementary undergrad classes...which means I can start my master's in the fall. Since I last posted I've been doing a lot of reading. For Christmas presents I found some great literary journals that I gave to some of my high school friends that love to read. A quick overview:

Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century:
A monthly poetry-only journal. The December 2009 issue was dedicated to the sonnet (a 14-line poem made famous by Shakespeare). All sorts of sonnets were highlighted: traditional Shakespearean to inventive backwards sonnets. As the blurb of the magazine aptly says: "there’s nothing more liberating than a little restriction." When writing poetry I've found the same thing, having a pattern beforehand helps to reduce the anxiety of filling the blank page before me. Interesting and innovative, this review is great for those who like to play with language and only want poetry in their issues.

Tin House: A quarterly filled with all types of literature and artwork. Each issue has a theme (work, love, obsessions, winter reading...) and is full of both fiction, non-fiction, and stories related to the theme. And on top of that there's great artwork. I was immediately drawn to the Fall 2009 issue which had the whimsical design of having half the issue dedicated to "dread" and the other half to "hope," each having its own front cover and meeting in the middle. To top it off the pages were upside down of each other. It's hard to explain in fact. I remember having childhood books like it, that had two stories in the same book that started from either end of the book and met in the middle. Anyway, it immediately caught my attention. Since I bought it I learned that my best friend, and poet, has submitted a poem to be published in it. Crossing our fingers!

H.O.W. Journal : A semiannual journal with a great mélange of poetry, short stories (fiction and non-fiction), photography and artwork. I'll let the website speak for itself: H.O.W. Journal is an art & literary journal that publishes an eclectic mix of today's prominent writers and artists alongside upcoming talents with an effort to raise money and awareness for the 15 million children worldwide that have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS. Honestly I wanted to keep this one for myself, but I gave it to a friend for Christmas anyway. I may just buy myself a copy soon!

White Wall Review: An annual publication of poetry, short stories, artwork, and photography (all in black and white). This one I did keep for myself! Published by the literary society of Ryerson University in Toronto, the stories and poetry are excellent. I especially enjoyed Jennifer Burwell's exerpt from her first work of fiction, Thrown. I also read and reread Adam Seelig's poetry, especially "Irises Flower." The one drawback, (okay, get ready, I'm a horrible person), was that every issue showcases the writing of two or three students enrolled in Ryerson's writing workshops. Of course this encourages a new generation of writers, but really the writing is sub par, especially compared to the professional writers included in the volume.

Poetry Magazine: A monthly poetry review. I also kept this one. It's affordable price (only $3.75 American and $5 Canadian, newstand) makes this a no-brainer. Half original poetry and half a review of poetry collections, this slim volume is great for reading on public transit. (I get mine out on the bus ride to the university). This is for those that want poetry, and only poetry, nothing fancy.

Of course, I also perused the December and January issues of The Sun. As always, the Readers Write section is my favourite. December's theme was Anger and January's is Narrow Escapes. Do you have any stories to share about either of these topics?

Well...it's time to get ready for class. I hope this list gives you some ideas about what to read in 2010.

For those of you in the Quebec City area who would like to look through these and other literary journals in both English and French, there's a good selection at Lecto Magazines on Quatre-Bourgeois near the 2nd Cup.