Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Beating books...

A bit of serendipity: it was Canadian Jack Cole, already publisher of Coles Notes in Canada, who sold Nebraskan Cliff Hillegass on the idea of creating American study guides similar to Canada's Coles Notes. Bet you never know! On to the subject of our post, the first in which we tackle misunderstandings and misinformations. In an age of the said CliffsNotes, and by analogy, any number of ways of avoiding getting to know the 'thing', whatever it is, really well, it seems laughable to try persuading students that the name of the game is hard work. I hear this kind of discussion among teachers all the time. If I were in the classroom, I'd try telling the tale of the air traffic controller who cheated. How would you like to know that the fellow who has charge of the airplane you're on got his certification by false pretenses? Then there's the woman handling the colonoscope that's peering into your colon, the chap controlling the switches in the nuclear reactor that supplies energy to your town, and so on, and so on... So there's a good case to be made, these days especially, for really knowing what you're supposed to know. That's an important part of teaching: first, how to find the facts, the data, the information, and then how to check those facts, that data, that information. Multiple sources, the journalists would say; triangulate, the researchers would say. In this virtual space, the problem becomes plenty worse! I was disappointed, therefore, when I saw an essay of Eddie Baugh’s in A History of Literature in the Caribbean. (I confess to having a personal interest in this case.) On page 264, Baugh says: "By 1980, however, [Mervyn] Morris and [Pamela] Mordecai edited Jamaica Woman, an anthology of ... fifteen mostly young women poets, whose work demanded serious attention... The flowering of Jamaica Woman had been heralded only a few weeks earlier by the Savacou anthology, New Poets from Jamaica, in which seven of the thirteen poets were women… Neither collection included the talented Rachel Manley, who had already published two slim volumes. Perhaps the admission was purely inadvertent.” I can’t think why Professor Baugh didn’t think to ask the editors, Mordecai and Morris, both well known to him and easily accessible, how come we’d left out Rachel Manley. The thing is, the Preface to Jamaica Woman states (in the first paragraph!) that the poets in the collection are all women who had, up to that time, NOT had a collection of their work published, the idea of the book being to expose the poetry of those women who were writing but whose work was not well known. This is why Rachel Manley (along with other poets like Jean Goulbourne, whose Actors in the Arena Savacou had published in 1977) was not included. So the omission was not inadvertent by any means. (BTW, Jamaica Woman was dedicated to Edna Manley and Louise Bennett. Wat a ting to dedicate de book to Rachel's Granny and lef her out ob it!) The observation also came as a surprise because Professor Baugh was kind enough to comment on the chapter on Literature in Culture and Customs of Jamaica (eds. Martin Mordecai & Pamela Mordecai) in which a note (#12 on page 133) points out that none of the poets in Jamaica Woman had previously published a book of their own. Unhappily, this kind of error has the potential to cause plenty kas-kas, and so much literary writing these days feeds on 'controversy' – manufactured or otherwise. So I thought it important to set things straight. Selah! BTW, ef you doan know, check out what Selah means. Wikipedia says it probably is the most difficult word in the Hebrew Bible to translate. Fascinating.

15 comments:

Jdid said...

double and triple checking isnt in vogue these days. you do one google search and thats it, whatever pops up first is the answer.

i've used google and the internet in general for work purposes on a project a few years back and while its amazing how easy it is to get info that you may not otherwise be privy to its also amazing at how wrong that info can be at times. the key word is diligence.

clarabella said...

Couldn't agree with you more, jdid. "The key word IS diligence." When one thinks of the kind of trouble that might ensue from getting one supposedly "small" thing wrong... For example, the story in the press recently about the baby who died because the person (was it a person?) taking the emergency call got two CITIES mixed up! Just makes the case for back-up – searches, protocols, procedures, etc. Have a great weekend!

FSJL said...

Pam, is it you or Eddie who can't tell the difference between 'admission' and 'omission'?

Oonu big piipl edumacate a dem farin uvinersity; mi iz a small-small man an jis go a U-bline, but mi tink dar iz a difrance. :-)

clarabella said...

Hi fsjl: I think I must make the admission that in this case the omission is mine! (I just went back and checked.) Truth to tell, when story come to bump, I don't think I'm cut out for this blogging thing. You need to write fast, consume information fast, not be addicted to checking and double-checking – which I am. But the example is timely and makes the point, doesn't it? Thank you for being my 'expert' reader. The text should indeed read 'omission' and not 'admission'. The fault is wholly mine. And, as ever, inexpert as I am, I am happy to be corrected...

clarabella said...

fsjl: A oo yu da call 'big piipl'? Cudda neva mi! Mi did edumacate a wan smaal smaal likl kalij we no eevn de inna Gad worl no langa. Tru, it wuz inna farin, but stil, it no belang inna de aagyument! So ef yu did go a U-bline, me neva go a no U- tall tall: no U-see, no U-aaf-bline, no U-bline.

FSJL said...

Pam, you just have to have an eagle eye -- and a sense of humour.

A who mi a call big piipl? Yu si mi dyin trial? Coo pon di Anbook fram 1906 an si how many Mordecai mention inna it? Plenty-plenty. An Ledgister? Nat wan deggeh wan. :-)

clarabella said...

Aha! fsjl: It was the habit of slavemasters, as you know, to call their slaves by their surnames, which of course necessitates subsequent disentanglements... There are therefore various Nugents and Nosworthys. Besides which, that is my name by marriage, nuh?

FSJL said...

Slavemasters? In 1906? (How ex-slaves took surnames was a complicated matter, not always a matter of imposition either. And, of course, we also have to deal with the fact that quite a few of us are not of unmixed African origin and that stories about heroic African resistance to oppression are just that, stories.)

clarabella said...

fsjl: Lawd, I'm not really as stupid as I look. No, the children of the children (of the children?) of those slaves who WERE named by slave masters, hence the need for the SUBSEQUENT disentangling of Nugents and Nosworthys (names I have picked arbitrarily). I also know that the process of slaves and ex-slaves taking surnames was a complicated matter, but I'm aware of the case of which I speak. Remember, it was you who called the names. And yes, some of us are very mixed up, but nation-family DNA is a powerful thing, as is the disposition of some folks to resist 'miscegenation'. I'm not sure where the stories about heroic African resistance to oppression fit in, but I count on you to tell me, since it's my impression that, at least here and there, there was indeed resistance of that kind...

FSJL said...

Pam: I would never call you stupid. (Nor do you look stupid. Good grief!) I'm finding the 1906 Handbook fascinating reading; it contains a potted, year-by-year history of the island that says a lot about the preoccupations of the powers that were at the time. And 'Nosworthy' is one of the names that crops up. So is the name of the person who at the time owned the farm that my father was to buy (he was a nominated member of LegCo). I was struck by the fact that the surgeon attached to the General Penitentiary was a Dr Grabham (he was also the surgeon at Victoria Jubilee, and on the board of the Institute).

I'm currently reading Rastafari and Other African-Caribbean Worldviews in which the theme of resistance plays a major role, and I'm having a hard time buying some of it. This is because reality, as I keep finding out is complex and, ahem, nuanced, not simple and straightforward the way I'd like it to be. Certainly, there was resistance. There was also accommodation and interpenetration. And DNA has been both shaken and stirred, a lot.

clarabella said...

fsjl: Yes, the Handbooks are extraordinary documents, aren't they? We worked for a long time in the 1990s on an effort to revive the Handbook that eventually came to naught – as far as I know, that is. Your time to clarify: was it your father who was a nominated member of the Legislative Council, or the man from whom he was to buy a farm? For if it was your father, im wuz a big piipl an yu is wan to! I couldn't agree with you more about how complex and nuanced reality is, has always been. Mintz and Price's The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective was a book that I found eye-opening when I first read it. One of the reasons for my little skirmish with the scholars is that we in the oh-so-honest-and-true Western world are as capable of rewriting history – whether by means of genuine errors, deliberate tweaking or determined overhauling – as the folk in the Kremlin. Consider the recent military encounters (?) in the Middle East, as reported by North American media embedded with the fighting forces. (As you know better than me, newspaper reports are often, down the road, important primary sources for scholarly research.) It is the scholar of rare talent who engages with material and allows it to incubate and then to birth its truths. Bias, sometimes aka wishful thinking, occurs more often than we think.

FSJL said...

This was the 1906 Handbook. My father was born in 1919, to a peasant family in Mountainside (granted, his mother was halachically Jewish which meant that he and all his siblings were Jewish). I meant the man who at the time owned that farm. My father bought what was left of it (most of it was bought by Reynolds Jamaica Mines in the 50s) in 1968, by which time it had already passed through the hands of another family (a brown, rather than a white one).

History has a tendency to be written by the person who owns the printing press. As we know all too well.

clarabella said...

How much have you talked to your mother? She must be a gold mine of rare social history...

FSJL said...

My mother? Quite a bit, and I know quite a bit about the history of the village of Callobre in the municipality of Miño in the province of A Coruña in the 1930s and 1940s.

clarabella said...

fsjl: So have you written on this, anywhere? As fact or fiction? Do you plan to?