The Jungle

The Jungle was relentless. There is no redemption, no hope, no joy in the story that is not immediately destroyed. It is exhausting to read and it feels incomplete. Even the most desperately poor find time and energy for laughter. While Sinclair worked for a time in the stockyards to research the industry, it seems he skipped the part where he lives among the working poor to understand their lives. At times the Jungle reads like an outsider’s view of what it is like to be poor: nothing but horror. It is a one-sided portrait.

I thought one of the best social observations in the book was the depiction of the wedding. There is a timeless lesson there about the confusion that immigration brings and the failure of translating traditions. Marija was intent on giving Jurgis and Ona a proper wedding. A wedding is a symbol of ethnicity, religion and class – all the important social signifiers that announce and assure us of who we are and where we belong in the world. Literature and history is full of characters and people who are left unmarried because their families cannot afford a proper wedding. It was deemed better to be an old maid than to marry in a manner unfit to your class or culture. So Marija wanted to make sure that Ona was not dishonored (by the old country’s standards) with an improper wedding. But the traditional wedding the family was expecting, where the family fronts the costs and the community pitches in at the end, had been lost in translation and the community of new Americans did not meet the old world expectations. The family was financially ruined by the event. I was trying to come up with a modern day equivalent that has faired better and I think of the very successful translation of the Quincenieras party to American culture. I wonder what other traditions have been lost by modern migration.

Whatever financial security was not destroyed by the wedding was ruined in the family’s buying of the house. That story line affected me greatly because it is such a familiar story these days with the collapse of the housing market. I could feel myself tensing up as I read. The predatory lenders, inscrutable financial documents, uninformed buyers and lousy construction are familiar refrains. While the lawyers and bankers can assure the buyer that everything is standard and legal, the buyer still has no idea what lies in store for them. It is only in hindsight that they recognize they never stood a chance.

Sandburg's Chicago Songbook (first reading)

In my first reading of Sandburg’s Chicago Poems it was helpful to follow the perspective Urrea mentioned in class to think of the book as an album where each song was a part of a whole instead of individual works that could each stand on their own. Most of the individual poems sounded obvious to my ear, and while I understand Sandburg’s coarse tone was most likely intentional, rather than a function of poor writing, at times it felt like a sledgehammer in verse.

I was frustrated by Sandburg’s idealization of “the old country” which reads as willfully naïve. In Happiness and Child of the Romans he fails to recognize the circumstances that lead immigrants and other rural populations to Chicago. Instead of acknowledging the complicated realities of Chicago’s newest residents he chooses to simplify to the point of caricature: things were so great back home (a “home” which Sandburg probably had never visited) and here they are horrible. It seems like much of what Sandburg is responding to is the Industrial Revolution and the resulting devaluing of manual labor and the laborer, which was going on all over the world at that point, not just in the US. So while some of the laborers experienced it as an issue of migration is was a much broader phenomenon and I guess I just wish he presented a more nuanced perspective.

If I focus instead on the general themes of the work and the feelings the collection evoke in me, I am able to appreciate the Chicago Poems in a new way. The “album” carries themes of happiness, the working man, class, race and migration. I like how he is bringing together the experiences of the many different groups that populated the city to produce one portrait. It feels very human in that way. I also like that he is able to recognize a more rounded representation of the human experience, the joy and the frustrations, rather than getting stuck on one point.

One of my favorites of the collection was Anna Imroth. The final line is a bit of a sledgehammer, but with a lovely wry tone, “the hand of God and the lack of fire escapes.”

The Devil in the White City

I first got DITWC (Devil in the White City) when it came out however many years ago. I remember bringing it to class, possibly during my junior year of high school, with every intention of reading it. Fast forward to two weeks later and it was at the bottom of my locker under several tons of paper, where it stayed until I was forced to clean it out at the end of the year. I remember putting it in the stack of books I was taking home and the dean commenting on how great a book it was. I nodded and murmured in agreement, despite knowing only that the cover was pretty. Eventually it made it's way back to my bookshelf and sat for another year or so, until I exhausted all other reading options and was faced with eye-gouging boredom or DITWC.
Looking back I should have chosen the eye-gouging, because dear christ in heaven DITWC was the most boring painful book I have ever had the misfortune of reading. It took me a week and a half to get 2/3 of the way in only to throw it down in fit of rage and block it from my mind.

Four years later. while looking at Luis' syllabus, I cringed at the thought of reading it again after my traumatic first experience; however I reasoned with myself that I was older and more mature and maybe it wouldn't be as bad as my teenage self made it out to be. Wrong. It still blows. It takes a lot to make Chicago and a serial killer boring and terrible, but Larson some how does just that. The problem is, DITWC was never meant to be one book. Larson should have split it into "The White City" and "The Devil," thus not torturing lovers of architecture with stylized serial killer anecdotes and vice versa. That being said, I still wouldn't buy them. Burnham's bio stopped being interesting 80 pages in and the saga of H.H Holmes? Lets just say if purple prose and wordy wordiness was sugar, I would be a diabetic. It seems like Larson at last minute, realized that a dry architectural biography wouldn't line his pockets so he spiced it up with the murderous H.H Holmes. It sure worked! I hear he sold the rights to be made into a movie.....

It's a pity though, both stories if done right, had huge potential to be great works of literature and not just the flavor of the month, eventually to be replaced with whatever hyped up, so and so book is next on the market.

Upton Sinclair

Upton's Sinclair's flat characters were the target of our group discussion's on his book. Most people believed that he would have reached the heart if he had spent more time in the character development phase. I am stuck in the middle of that argument. It seems that in the literary world most readers would like to see hope, wishes come true, some happily-ever-after story. However, what if this was not the case. I wonder if it would have made better sense for Sinclair to pen in a birthday party for one of the kids, or have the wedding guest pay their portions so that the newly-weds would not be left in debt, or omitting the little kids ear falling off from frost-bite from the novel all together. Would these adjustments have made that much of a difference to incite a reader to action?

I believe the authorial choice that overshadowed Sinclair's topic was a difficult one. In fact, I think even with better character development the story would have still missed the heart and hit the stomach. This is because as a people, many of us are often times self-centered. As readers, whether the characters were well developed or not, Sinclair provided a lens for us to view human suffering in the novel but, we were sick of it. Yes, it was drawn out, one catastrophe after the next, but it was present. But one was not moved by the suffering. However, when the thought of that poisoned, diseased food being placed on one's table for nourishment entered the minds of the reader's of his time, self survival instincts superseded characters, tone, and rhetoric. Reader's and critics alike ventured to solve the food problem in an effort to save their lives and the lives of their families and protect them from suffering like the stockyards workers. I would argue that Sinclair thought in this fashion before penning the novel. It was the choice of two evils, should he choose humanitarian efforts as the foci or politics. In the end, we learned from professor Urrea that he chose politics and his reason's why. In a way, for all of us who were just plain tired of the chaos and desired one glimmer of hope, I think Sinclair was saying to the people of the time that he was that hope - vote for me.

Off Topic - Yet Important

Last week my History 441 class was invited to attend a discussion on the crisis in the Congo. I was extremely shocked by the overwhelming statics presented. I left the meeting quite confused as to why the news media fail to cover this type of news and I felt cheated by out government. Let me explain why I felt this way.

I was told that more people in the Congo have died than all the deaths of World War II combined. There has been over five million murders in the Congo. I have never heard this before but I watch the daily news every morning as I dress for work. As a matter of fact, we saw a clip from a documentary and there was a guerrilla soldier picking up bodies from the ground and tossing them into the garbage truck just as you would any rubble, on of which was a baby of no more than 6 months old. I cried. I am a mother of three children and that visual touched my heart like never before. I was saddened to know that there isn't more being done about it.

Afterwards it was reported that over 80% minerals comes from this poverty stricken land, especially the Coltan used in this very computer I'm typing on right now. As I type my fingers feel like I'm touching the backs of the people who are dying, suffering, and being robbed of their land. The most horrifying part is I was ignorant to all of this before last week. Now that I am aware my heart is open and what I read and saw not only missed the stomach, it has touched my heart in such a way that I hope this message can feed the curiosity of others to research this matter as well to try and help these innocent people - BABIES. I can't speak for the world, I can't change the world alone, but I do think that any effort beats idleness. Honestly, I can't even look at my cell phone and laptop the same way as I did before. This is why I chose to type this as my random post.

I hope I didn't come off as preachy, I am just passionate about what I learned.

Random Blog #2: Be A Tourist In Your Own City

So I was driving down Lakeshore the other day, which is something I hardly ever do, as I live quite far away.  I’m not from around here, and the farthest I go into the city on a regular basis is our campus.  But anyway, I’m driving down Lakeshore in rush hour, on the way to a friends’ place on the north side, and I found myself so enraptured.  It sort of feels dorky, you know, to be to taken by something most take for granted, something I should be over by now, be exposed to enough.  And maybe it was the weather; it was windy, cloudy, but the air was clear and it was dusk, and the waves of Lake Michigan crashed against each other and spat up onto the shoreline as I drove along.  It seemed so Chicago, to have that kind of not great but not horrid weather.  I found myself taking pictures.  I thought about how the people in the cars around me would be pissed, how I could rear-end someone, how I looked so obviously tourist-y.  Oh well.

 

When I got to my friend’s house I told her about the drive, how the lake was so menacing, and how I love getting to the shore.  She said she drives Lakeshore everyday, and she often sees people taking pictures, and she thinks how lucky she is, to be able to see those scenes everyday.  And I was thinking, indeed, we’re all so lucky, even me, for being in proximity to this, even if I don’t take advantage of it enough.  Last May I was sharing summer plans with some fellow instructors, and one instructor said her plan was to, “be a tourist in her own city.”  I thought that sounded amazing.  Unfortunately for me, I worked all summer so being a tourist wasn’t exactly high on my list of priorities.  However, now I think it should be.  Chicago: what a great place to explore.  Maybe I’ll start at the shore and work my way in.  Maybe I’ll start now.

Poetry of the Day - Jane Addams

On August 25, 2008, Vachel Lindsay's poem won poem of the day on AmericanPoems.com.

I. SPEAK NOW FOR PEACE   Lady of Light, and our best woman, and queen, Stand now for peace, (though anger breaks your heart), Though naught but smoke and flame and drowning is seen.  Lady of Light, speak, though you speak alone, Though your voice may seem as a dove's in this howling flood, It is heard to-night by every senate and throne.  Though the widening battle of millions and millions of men Threatens to-night to sweep the whole of the earth, Back of the smoke is the promise of kindness again.   II. TOLSTOI IS PLOWING YET  Tolstoi is plowing yet. When the smoke-clouds break, High in the sky shines a field as wide as the world. There he toils for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake.  Ah, he is taller than clouds of the little earth. Only the congress of planets is over him, And the arching path where new sweet stars have birth.  Wearing his peasant dress, his head bent low, Tolstoi, that angel of Peace, is plowing yet; Forward, across the field, his horses go. 

I thought the tone was beautiful in a sense that brings about a sense of freshness to Jane Addams Legacy. I am no poet so I do no think I would can provide accurate commentary on this poem besides commending its beauty.