There Are Heroes and There’s Pete Seeger

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This week, Pete Seeger passed away at the age of 94. If you are not familiar with him or his work, he was a folk singer who popularized songs like “This Land is Your Land” and “If I Had a Hammer.” He also composed controversial songs such as “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a veiled criticism of the Vietnam War. He was a musician, activist, for a while a communist, and as far as I’m concerned he was a hero. He did not have powers beyond his voice; he could not fly or turn invisible, and he did not hide his identity. Instead, he openly challenged what he viewed as wrong. He was a public figure, not private martyr, as so many heroes are portrayed in our TV and movies today.

Unlike many of our fictional heroes, he was not a cyborg, a CIA-trained assassin, or a mutant from a lab accident. He did not use his fame or wealth to fly around cities beating people up. Instead, he relied on his banjo and his voice to make the world a better place. People like Pete make me wish that our media would create more realistic heroes, activists who use music, art, humor, and speech to save the world, rather than fists, guns, bombs, and money. Such depictions, I think, expose a collective fantasy in which a stranger solves our problems with simple violence. Pete, along with heroes like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rigoberta Menchú, saw peaceful activism as the only solution. In stark contrast, the people we often describe as villains are murderers and dictators, those who resort to brutality and violence to bend the world to their will.

I wish we could see more fictional heroes portrayed accurately. I would like to see people use books as weapons. I would like to see heroes replace guns with speeches and super strength with musical talent. Pete Seeger was a hero, and he challenged the world’s villains with nothing more than a few songs and a little determination. If we can learn anything from him, it’s that truly heroic actions are for the commoner, for you and me and everybody else with a little talent and a lot of ambition. We do not need to have been born on Krypton to save the world when traveling with a banjo on our knee will suffice.

So rest in peace, Pete Seeger. You left us with a brighter world than the one you knew.

Successful Photography

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               By the end of December, I had successfully become an independent businessperson. My photography business, found here, proved to be more financially lucrative than I expected (in that I made more than a dollar), and I had managed to network my way into the pockets of friends and strangers with a genuine interest in my photography. More surprisingly, I am on a course to continue successful photography in the future.

                This brings me to an uncomfortable realization. I have been doing photography for about five months, but have been submitting short stories and poetry for publication for almost a decade. I have to acknowledge that my photography is currently more successful than my writing. I do not know how to feel about this: I have invested time and energy into writing, only to see my work politely, if not automatically, rejected. In contrast, my little photography business spiraled beyond what I could have hoped it would become, largely as a result of coincidences. My friends needed a photographer to shoot engagement photos, and another friend happened to work in a coffee shop that puts up art by local artists on a monthly basis. I took advantage of these connections without hesitation.

                There’s no secret to successful art. Networking helps, but it only goes so far. The quality of writing or photography or music or any other kind of artwork has its limits, too. I submitted a poetry manuscript for publication earlier this week, and expect it to go the way of my other submissions. Meanwhile, I am printing out a fresh batch of business cards for my photography in the hopes that my success in that field will continue. As long as somebody takes interest in my work, whatever it is, I will continue to push forward. Even if nobody takes interest in my work, I will push forward. For me, there’s no alternative direction.

Ten Thousand Words Short

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This year, I failed to complete my novel in a month. This is the second year in a row in which I have come up short, making years in which I have succeeded to meet the intended goal of 50,000 words and years in which I have failed both equal. But in looking back at the semester, I think that this may be one of my better efforts, and in looking at my first attempt at a novel so many Novembers ago, I see that my writing has improved.

I intend to finish this novel, because it is part of a larger project on literature as a method of critiquing major social or political or economic issues. In this case, my novel is set in a small, isolated town in northern Idaho (as if any other part of Idaho is not small and isolated) in the autumn of 2001. The September 11 attacks loom large on my characters’ minds. This is the product of a semester of studying war, genocide, and slavery, and I believe that the great sins of this country have yet to fully end. What I have is an extremely rough draft and a lot of ideas. For an English Major, I’m content for now.

NaNoWriMo

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Yesterday marked the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, as well as No Shave November, but for now I’ll stick with manufacturing fictional characters and writing page after page about their exploits from a third-person perspective, exposing their private thoughts to a public audience. Even though it may seem like the sort of behavior for which people are sent to solitary confinement or given special medication, writing fiction is more a religious devotion than a hobby. As a devoted English Major, I participate in this yearly ritual. Like a monk, I lock myself up in a room for hours and hours, tormenting my psyche until I produce a sufficient amount of words. After that, I sleep for a few hours until the sun comes up, and I return to that room again for another day’s word count. It may result in mental anguish, but if I chalk it up to religion, I might find an afterlife in a dusty library with my fellow writers, occasionally resurrected when somebody opens up a book with my name on it and allows me to tell a story from the beyond the grave. Wish me luck.

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Why a Liberal Education? Your Guess is as Good as Mine

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I study English, poetry and fiction writing, literature, twentieth century history, the Western and Central Asia, colonialism, post-colonialism, feminism (waves 1-3), war, culture, comparative religion, social movements, world religions, and philosophy. I spend my time reading, then writing about what I read, and then reading what people wrote about what I wrote about what I read. Why do I do it? Because I have no choice. I am compelled to study the world as it is today by studying the way it was. I read and write fiction and poetry as a way to make sense of the world, only to find that I am still as ignorant. I pore over Persian poetry, Soviet policy records, and Twitter feeds from Tahrir Square, even when I’m not required to for a class, and I still have no answers.

That’s what it feels like to study in the liberal arts. You want answers to questions, but the only answers you find lead to more questions. You are taught to question all answers. There are no answers. For that matter, there are no questions. But that is an answer, so it must be wrong. Right?                                                            When I Return