2009 May

A Case of the Human Condition: Would My Husband Like to Add My Name to His?

May 29, 2009 By Barbara Falconer Newhall 10 Comments

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

January 8, 1989, The Oakland Tribune

Jon and I had been married nearly 12 years. It was time to pop the question again.

I called him at work.

Jon pouring butter on salmon on kitchen counter. Photo by Barbara Falconer Newhall

Jon after 35 years of not being Jon Falconer Newhall -- cooking dinner for my birthday in 2011. He's still comfortable in the kitchen and at the supermarket. Photo by Barbara Falconer Newhalll

Sometimes, the best way to get Jon’s attention is to phone.

“What do you think?’ I said, going straight to the point. “Are you ready to add Falconer to your name yet?” [Read more...]

Filed Under: A Case of the Human Condition Tagged With: feminist, Kathryn Riess, maiden name, naming children, scottville michigan, sharon lebell, thomas riess, una stannard, women changing name

Writing Room: Rhetoric – What the Heck Is It?

May 25, 2009 By Barbara Leave a Comment

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

What’s rhetoric? I’ve always thought of it as the high-flown, idealistic and/or manipulative language of politics. But really, it’s something we human beings use all the time.

"I want milk and I don't want it in a cup" c 1985 B.F. Newhall

My daughter Christina, for example, discovered the art of rhetoric right around the time she was being weaned from baby bottle to plastic cup.

She’d follow me into the kitchen and say solemnly, “I want milk and I don’t want it in a cup.”

Her heartrending – but unspoken – plea was, “Please, Mommy, I want my bottle.”

I’d cave in, of course, and produce the desired bottle. How’d she do that?

Michael D.C. Drout, a professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, tells exactly what went down in that mother-daughter exchange in his Modern Scholar lecture series, “A Way with Words: Writing, Rhetoric, and the Art of Persuasion.”

This is not a book, btw. It’s one of those recorded college lecture series on CD. And it’s a terrific resource for writers — packed with ideas for creative as well as discursive writing.

Professor Drout defines rhetoric very simply as “the art of using words to change the social world.” In his lectures he talks about the trusty five-part essay of freshman English classes – and why it’s still something to pay attention to. He also outlines how to write a classic medieval sermon, in case you’re working on one of those.

But the handiest creative writing tip from I’ve gleaned in listening to Prof. Drout is the distinction rhetoricians make between locutionary statements, illocutionary statements and perlocutionary effect.

The locutionary statement is what is actually said. “We’ve run out of granola,” I might say to my husband Jon, who does the grocery shopping at our house.

The – unstated – illocutionary statement here is my wish that Jon buy some granola the next time he goes to the supermarket.

The perlocutionary effect is something quite different. If Jon does indeed restock our granola supply by the time I’m ready to pour myself another bowl, then my illocutionary statement has had the persuasive effect that I intended.

Being aware of these distinctions can help writers put some subtext into the dialogue they create. For example:

The mother says out loud, “You’re just like your father. He never wanted to take me to the neighborhood barbecue either.” (Locutionary statement.)

The mother really means (among other things), “I want to go to the neighborhood barbecue, and I want you to take me.” (Illocutionary statement.)

How the son responds to the illocutionary statement can say a lot about his character. Does he let his mother guilt him into taking her to the barbecue? (Which is what she seems to want.) Does he bristle at her whiney, manipulative ways and storm out of the room? (Which is maybe what she really wants.) Or does he perceive her illocutionary statement as a sad ploy and take her to the barbecue anyway? (Which may be what she truly desires in her heart of hearts.) (Perlocutionary act.)

An illocutionary statement can serve all sorts of writerly purposes. Showing a character as manipulative is one. Showing how a two-year-old human being can outwit a fully grown adult of the species is another.

You can read more about rhetoric in J.L. Austin’s book, How to Do Things with Words, Harvard University Press, 2005.

Or you can go straight to the first rhetorician: Aristotle and his The Art of Rhetoric, trans. J.H. Freese. Harvard University Press, 1926.

The Modern Scholar lecture series on CD are too pricey for my pocketbook – around $100 for Prof. Drout’s thoughts on rhetoric. I borrow the Modern Scholar lectures from my public library. These – usually well chosen - lecturers keep me company on long walks. A really good series, like this one, works off a lotta granola.

The rhetorician at 26 months. c 1985 B.F. Newhall

Have you caught any of your characters — or family members – making provocative illocutionary statements lately? You can share them by clicking on ”Post a comment” below.

Filed Under: Book Openers, The Writing Room Tagged With: j.l. austin, michael drout, modern scholar, rhetoric, writing dialogue

A Case of the Human Condition: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and the Indian I Wanted to Be

May 22, 2009 By Barbara Leave a Comment

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

When I was a little kid growing up in Michigan, I liked to pretend I was an Indian. A real one.

My imagination didn’t have much to go on. At my school in Detroit, Michigan history started with the French trappers who arrived from Canada during the eighteenth century. From there, it moved on to the British and American settlers, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the light bulb and the assembly line.

As a girl, I couldn’t name the various Indian groups who inhabited Michigan before the Europeans arrived. Thanks to the Internet, I now know some of them: the Ojibwe, the Kickapoo, the Menominee, the Potawatomi, the Fox and the Sauk.

What’s more, no one ever told me that during the nineteenth century, Michigan had produced an Ojibwe poet and storyteller named Jane Johnston Schoolcraft – also known by the magnificent Ojibwe name, Bamewawagezhikaquay, or ”The Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky.”

Ferns grow among the fallen oak leaves in Michigan. c 2007 B.F. Newhall

Ferns grow among the fallen oak leaves in a Michigan woods. c 2007 B.F. Newhall

All this ignorance of our Michigan predecessors didn’t stop my cousin Jeannie and me from spending our summer days pretending we were Indians. We went barefoot through pine and oak forests and picked our way through sunny blueberry patches, carrying our twentieth-century beach towels and bologna sandwiches, and imagining what it was to hunt and fish and gather berries and survive in the Michigan woods.

Jeannie and I heard rumors of a local Indian burial ground somewhere in these sandy hills, underneath the ferns somewhere, but none of our elders could — would? — tell us exactly where it was. As for the Indians themselves, they were gone. “They all died off,” we were told.

Not so, it turns out.

Plenty of Native Americans lived — and are still living — all over Michigan. And my alma mater, the University of Michigan, has taken it upon itself to help preserve the language and culture of one of those groups, the Ojibwe people. (If you’re a student at Michigan these days, you can learn Ojibwe. It’s like French; you sign up and you take a class.)

The folks teaching American Culture at Michigan are also reviving the memory of Bamewawagezhikaquay, a woman I would love to have read about as a girl. A real Michigan Indian. And a real poet whose stories, it turns out, were a source for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha.

Now, two centuries after Schoolcraft’s birth, her writing is finally taking its place as an important moment in American literature. A collection of her work has been published. (Which I’ll tell you more about, if I can get my hands on a copy.) It’s The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, edited by Robert Dale Parker and published in 2007 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Schoolcraft was born in 1800 in what is now Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She was the daughter of John Johnston, a Scots-Irish fur trader, and the grandaughter of Waubojeeg, an Ojibwe war chief and storyteller. She married the ethnologist and geographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft , who for years was the famous one in the family — with a big thoroughfare in Detroit named after him, just for starters.

When I was at the University of Michigan taking education courses, minority and poor children who weren’t doing well in school were labeled “culturally deprived,” a euphemism that soon fell out of favor as arrogant and Euro-centric.

But maybe the old label can still apply. How else to explain why, as a child, I never heard about the Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky? Why did I never see a round dance or hear the original people of Michigan sing?

Because I was a middle class white kid, and I was culturally deprived.

Oak leaves growing near Lake Michigan at Manistee.

Can any of you Michigan folks identify these oak leaves for me? They were growing near Lake Michigan outside Manistee.

Filed Under: A Case of the Human Condition, Book Openers Tagged With: culturaly deprived, detroit, Henry Schoolcraft, Hiawatha, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Michigan Native Americans, Ojibwe, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania Press

A Case of the Human Condition: When a Young Mother Dies

May 18, 2009 By Barbara Falconer Newhall Leave a Comment

Today, the Qur’an and two different translations of the Christian Bible share a shelf in my writing room with the Bhagavad Gita. I still haven’t replaced the Jewish prayer book that I gave to Beverly so many years ago.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

The Oakland Tribune, Dec. 11, 1988

It was a copy of the old Union Prayer Book that had stood on a bookshelf next to my Bible and Koran for years. The three books there together had given me a comfortable sense of completeness, of having my spiritual bases somewhat covered. But now, the time had come to split up the set.

“What?” Beverly said to me and Jon as I put the book into her hands. “You mean you pray? My friends pray? How come no one’s mentioned it to me before?”

Beverly shook her head in mock disgust and gave us her slow, sweet smile. It was an ironic smile, made of equal parts joy and grief. She wrapped her hands resolutely around the old book and took it home with her.

Beverly had breast cancer. From the time I had met her some months earlier, I had known that eventually I might lose her.

And, three years later, I have.

Beverly Bondy Rose died on the evening of Nov. 21, leaving behind a host of treasured friends, her husband, Jordan, her father and mother, Irvin and Anne Bondy, her sisters Linda Bondy-Ives and Paula Bondy, and her 5-year-old daughter, Amanda.

Soon after Bev and I met, our then 3-year-old daughters became friends. The two of us followed suit. We liked to get on the phone to arrange a carpool and then keep on talking. We talked of schools, carseats, temper tantrums, husbands and prices at the Mousefeathers factory outlet.

Once in a while we talked about cancer, but mostly Bev did not care to feel sorry for herself. If her time was limited, she was going to have fun with it.

Beverly’s idea of a good time was a day at the Galleria with her decorator friend Laurie Joseph. Or inviting Christina and me over to watch Maria and Luis get married on “Sesame Street.” Or throwing a 40^th birthday/farewell party for herself with hot dogs and dancing.

Beverly enjoyed the things of this world, but understood that they were only things.

It was a long illness – four years – and at the end, Beverly was in pain. But the sense of humor that had given her and her friends so much pleasure, continued to serve Bev.

“If I die, I want a big funeral,” she told her friend Miriam Brown. “I want everyone to come.”

“They’ll cry their eyeballs out, you know,” warned Miriam.

“Good,” said Beverly with a laugh. “I want them to. They’re losing someone special.”

Friends crowded the Home of Eternity Chapel at Mountain View Cemetery. Rabbi Joseph Schonwald talked of visiting Beverly at Alta Bates Hospital last summer and watching her grow more beautiful even as she moved closer to death. Finally, after surviving a series of strokes, Bev came home, partially paralyzed.

Immediately, she set to work on the immobilized arm and leg. By the first day of kindergarten, Bev could walk from the car to Amanda’s new classroom.

On Yom Kippur, Rabbi Schonwald looked out over his congregation to see Bev, back from near-death, sitting in a wheelchair at the rear of Temple Beth Abraham. She was “radiant and confident,” he said. “She illuminated the sanctuary.”

That a beautiful and caring woman with a young child should die at 40 is beyond understanding. Bev’s friends prayed for a miracle and thought it a reasonable request.

But there was no miracle. There was only Beverly’s pain and finally, for her friends and family, an empty place where Beverly had been.

We mustn’t try too hard to understand, Rabbi Schonwald admonished the mourners. “We have been shown more than we can comprehend.”

At the gravesite, bouquets of flowers and a grass mat could not hide the reality of the empty hole. Beverly’s casket was lowered into it, and Jordan shoveled dirt into her grave.

Beverly Bondy Rose on a trip to Children's Fairyland, Oakland, 1988.

A journalist once asked Albert Einstein what he thought was the single most important question that could be asked.

“Is the universe friendly or unfriendly?” was the scientist’s reply.

Bev’s place in the universe was infinitesimal, a grain of sand, but she did her best to make it a friendly, safe place for the people around her.

Back at the Roses’ house, tables of food and a 5-year-old, very much alive, Amanda awaited the mourners. We ate, told our favorite Beverly stories, wiped away the tears, and looked into each other’s eyes. There, we saw Beverly looking back at us, with love.

Filed Under: A Case of the Human Condition Tagged With: amanda rose, beverly rose, breast cancer, jordan rose, orphan, young mother's death

A Case of the Human Condition: The Day She Popped the Question

May 15, 2009 By Barbara 1 Comment

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

May 31, 1987, The Oakland Tribune

Things were getting serious. My boyfriend had moved his goldfish into my apartment.

I returned from a long weekend with my parents to find that Jon had moved his dimestore pets from his place on Telegraph Hill into mine on Russian Hill.

He was sheepish about having done this; he knew that I would object.

Jon and I the year he didn't pop the question. c 1975 Ruth Newhall

Jon and Barbara the year that he didn't pop the question. c 1975 Ruth Newhall

I had my reasons. Jon and I had had a perfectly viable relationship up until then. We had fair fights. We shared the housework. We divided expenses – restaurant tabs and grocery bills – right down the middle.

We liked each other’s friends. And, although Jon did not like Ingmar Bergman and I was not keen on baseball, we stayed calm about these differences and took turns picking out our weekend activities.

Above all, Jon and I were honest with each other. Right down to admitting it when one of us went out with someone else – something that Jon did often in the early days of our relationship, now in its fifth year.

I should have seen the goldfish coming.

Jon had begun eating more and more of his meals at my place, doing more and more of the dishes, showing more and more disappointment if I opted for supper with a female co-worker instead of him. [Read more...]