I Sometimes Wonder…
By Mitch Berg
…if “educators” – secondary and university-level – in the “humanities” know anything about the history of the “humanities”.
Teachers are worried about teaching the otherwise (ostensibly) brilliant work of artists whose personal lives are, well, problematic, in the #MeToo era:
For Martina Myers, a high school English teacher on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, Sherman Alexie’s novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” seemed too good to be true: funny, well-crafted and focused on Native American youth.
Her students at Piñon High School, many of whom struggled with substance abuse and mental illness, took to it immediately. They wrote poems in response, on native pride, addiction, self-acceptance and suicide attempts.
So when Ms. Myers learned last year of the allegations of sexual harassment against Mr. Alexie, who issued a statement admitting he had “harmed other people,” she felt two waves of betrayal — first for her students and then for herself, a survivor of abuse.
“When the #MeToo movement happened I told my story,” Ms. Myers said. She knew some of her students, too, had experienced sexual assault.
Where do these hamsters come from?
The history of arts and humanities is clogged with deeply dysfunctional people. The drive to be an artist seems, in fact, to be closely linked with personal and emotional instability.
And the “artists” that fit neatly into the bounds of what’s considered socially acceptable today largely aren’t that interesting.
Why, it’s almost as if someone is trying to dumb society down, or something…
October 24th, 2019 at 8:55 am
Looked it up on Amazon, and the thing that comes to mind is whether we ought to be surprised that a man who wrote a book about messy realities on the reservation has some messy realities in his own life, too. I think not. And really, from the reviews, I think that the adults need to step in and ask “is this really appropriate for teens?” Or, perhaps, “for which teens is this appropriate?”
October 24th, 2019 at 9:00 am
Name a great artist who was not a pervert, violent, or a drug abuser.
Being a communist revolutionary or a Nazi was usually the MOST socially acceptable thing they’ve done.
T.S. Eliot you say? Don’t get me started! The dude only had one testicle.
James Fenimore Cooper? Maybe. But he was a terrible writer, as well as an Episcopalian.
October 24th, 2019 at 10:56 am
MP, what about J.S. Bach? I guess you’ve got the Coffee Cantata, of course…..
October 24th, 2019 at 11:11 am
Sherman Alexie’s novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”
Someone wrote a book about Elizabeth Warren’s time as a Harvard Law Professor?
October 24th, 2019 at 11:47 am
“Revealed: the violent, thuggish world of the young JS Bach”
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/21/secret-bach-teenage-thug
October 24th, 2019 at 12:13 pm
MP: but that’s his schoolmates and mentors, not necessarily him. No?
October 24th, 2019 at 3:32 pm
The hamsters are being mass produced by our institutions of higher learning faster than real hamsters can. It’s scary.
October 24th, 2019 at 3:38 pm
Bach was guilty by association, bikebubba.
October 24th, 2019 at 6:21 pm
You’re judging from the wrong standard.
You want to know whether the artistic work is any good.
Liberals don’t care about that. They care whether the person who produced it was “Good.”
October 25th, 2019 at 7:48 am
I think this is an appropriate time to remember we’re all immigrants. Thank God my ancestors who made it to these shores had the Cherokee Nation’s safety net to sustain them until they got on their feet.
And thanks to the Navajo system of universities, so many of our people were able to tap into the Sioux business empire.
Even those who didn’t take advantage of the minority set-asides in education had work in the vast manufacturing empire of the Hopi’s to climb the economic ladder.
Thank the Sky Father Native Americans Mark were here first to lift us from the dirt of our third world shitholes.
October 25th, 2019 at 9:50 am
MP: :^). Then so am I. I guess I’d better start working on my masterpiece now!