Oregon Humanities

Sundays, Too

Kathleen Holt, editor

When my daughter grows up, she wants to be a teacher, a police officer, or a retail clerk in a women’s and children’s resale clothing store. She is six years old and just starting kindergarten. Though smart as a whip, she doesn’t really know what work is. She knows that after we drop her off at school, my husband and I drive downtown to our respective office buildings and sit at desks, on which there are computers, telephones, and piles of paper. When she comes to visit, she favors the cold water from the water cooler and the view from my window of the street below.

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Second Opinions

Seeking professional advice for Oregon's ailing economy

Camela Raymond

In a June 5 Oregonian op-ed, Tim Duy, University of Oregon economics professor and director of the Oregon Economic Forum, looked back over the past twenty years of Oregon’s economic woes, lambasting the too-rosy growth projections underpinning the state’s present catastrophic budget shortfalls. Job gains made in Oregon during the tech boom of the late 1980s and ’90s have been almost completely wiped out by job losses sustained during the 2001 and 2008 recessions, Duy wrote. Wages, sub­­mediocre even at their high point—94.3 percent of the U.S. average in 1997—have shrunk considerably, to a meager 89.4 percent of the U.S. average as of 2008 (which should be noted is not a B-plus, but rather a fraction of a C grade). With positive job growth recorded for the first time since early 2008, the state’s latest Economic and Revenue Forecast contends that the recession has bottomed out here as elsewhere in the country. But with Oregon taking thirty-fourth place in the national Blue Chip Job Growth rankings, job growth here remains relatively sluggish, and it is not expected to exceed 2 percent until 2012. In short, over the past two decades Oregonians have become steadily poorer and less economically secure in relation to their national counterparts, and this trend continues.

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Blank Slate

In a single day, a forty-year-old man finds himself unmarried and unemployed. What to do next?

Dave Weich

Ten days after my fortieth birthday, I walked from the county courthouse in downtown Portland to the office of my former employer. At the courthouse, I signed my divorce papers. Several blocks away, I signed my severance package.

At such moments, a person will take inventory. Mine counted no job, no wife, and no children. Responsibilities numbered a cat, a dog, and a reasonable fixed mortgage on a house that I adored. This was in August of 2009. The job market sucked, but my savings, buffeted by a generous exit check, would cover me beyond the end of the year. Longer if I skimped.

I pursued no leads, filed no applications, distributed no résumés, and ignored job-listing services. A startling fact soon dawned on me: this would be my first summer vacation without a job since junior high.

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Continual Watching

Oregon’s long history of protecting workers

Bob Bussel

In a recent fact sheet outlining highlights from its first year under new leadership, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) declared that it was “Back in the Enforcement Business.” DOL went on to describe some of the new initiatives it has undertaken to protect American workers, including hiring more staff to enforce occupational safety regulations, taking steps to ensure that workers are properly classified as employees rather than independent contractors, and launching a special effort to counter black lung disease.

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The Working Class

Hard times are good times to rethink our attitudes about the fungibility of workers.

Bette Lynch Husted

I grew up in a working-class community. We had our own social distinctions—were you a logging company operator’s daughter or a girl whose father pulled on the green chain at the sawmill? A cattle rancher’s son or a stump rancher’s boy? My father even had his own definition of royalty: a man with compassion as well as integrity was “a prince of a guy.” But our families were working people, or wanted to be. Having work was important.

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The Artist as Worker

Rilke would never have understood the current desire to merge commerce and creativity.

M. Allen Cunningham

In his remarkable book Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton writes, “In a meritocratic world in which well-paid jobs [can] be secured only through native intelligence and ability, money [begins] to look like a sound signifier of character. The rich are not only wealthier, it seem[s]; they might actually be plain better.” Characteristically canny and concise, Botton articulates a dilemma at the heart of any life dedicated to inspiration over income, creativity over commerce. In my life, that dedication is art—namely, literature—or more namely, fiction writing. The economic hazards of art-making cannot be overestimated, and since fiction writing, next to poetry, is the least lucrative of the arts (in my past three years of sustained work I’ve earned virtually nothing), the writer or aspiring writer is peculiarly charged to accept, and over time even affirm, a condition of impecuniousness. Wildly lucky name-grade novelists notwithstanding, most writers—even those with one or more novels to their credit—must labor, often for years, sans payment. In our increasingly doctrinaire publishing climate, even the finest among us labor without any guarantee of eventual publication or income. The greater number of literature’s real practitioners (those who have not let cynicism or status anxiety eat away their gifts) work under such conditions. To paraphrase Emerson on the subject of his ideal American scholar, these artists ply the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. But being cashless and devoid of cachet, they are, according to the meritocracy, inferior to those who earn their keep. Lesser intelligences—or weaker wills—they appear to be (we might as well say it) apostate Americans. Can what they do be classed, by any stretch of the imagination, as work?

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Public Servant

A cab driver who’s an elected official by day has his work cut out for him.

David Bragdon

It was around ten o’clock on a Saturday night, at Northeast Glisan Street near 28th Avenue. The woman had been in the cab just long enough to tell me the name of the bar she wanted to go to. Within another thirty seconds she said, “Can I ask you a personal question?”

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Bridging the Divide

A forum and exhibition investigate the Columbia River Crossing project.

Lucy Burningham

While there’s nothing simple about building a major interstate bridge connecting two states, the Columbia River Crossing (CRC) project, which will replace the I-5 bridge between Vancouver and Portland, has become an especially convoluted and controversial multiyear effort. To help the public, elected officials, and the design community navigate the latest proposal, the Architecture Foundation of Oregon (AFO) and PDXplore presented the exhibition and forum “Crossing the Columbia: What Does It Mean?”

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Will the Real Environmentalists Please Stand Up?

The debate over the Columbia River Gorge’s crucible of renewable energy

Kristy Athens

On May 13 of this year, just days before a six-turbine wind project on the Hood River Valley’s Middle Mountain was voted down, a hundred people packed into a conference room at the Columbia Gorge Hotel to discuss wind power in the Gorge.

The presentation, organized by the Hood River Valley Residents Committee (HRVRC) and the Columbia Gorge Earth Center (and funded in part by a grant from Oregon Humanities), featured the testimony of five regional experts. Its intent, says HRVRC executive director Jonathan Graca, was to explore the big picture of wind power in the region rather than any particular project.

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Returning Home

Working to better serve veterans

Lucy Burningham

War is an education, says Vietnam War veteran Larry Slessler, one of the organizers of the event “Professionals Serving Veterans” at Southern Oregon University (SOU) in Ashland. “We acknowledge that a college education changes us, but not that war changes us,” he says. At the one-day event in May, Slessler says he saw tears in the eyes of veterans—a sign of appreciation for the mere recognition that veterans return home changed and in need of specific services.

The event, which received a Responsive Program Grant from Oregon Humanities, was organized by members of the Oregon Department of Human Resources diversity team. It attracted around three hundred attendees: students, veterans, and the professionals who serve them.

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Literary Landscapes

The Oregon Legacy Series

Niki Price

From the windows of the Don Distad Reading Room at the Driftwood Public Library in Lincoln City, there is a view of the ocean, Cascade Head, and the commercial bustle of Highway 101. For the past sixteen years, librarian Sue Jenkins and the Friends of the Driftwood Public Library have used this panorama as a backdrop for the Oregon Legacy Series, which asks authors to explain how the state’s landscape has influenced their work.

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Laramie Scarecrows

The winner of our first O. Hm. essay contest reflects on the personal and political aftermath of a brutal hate crime.

Jedidiah Chavez

In October 1998, I was an undergraduate studying art history at Colorado State University, in the small college town of Fort Collins. To make ends meet, I waited tables at a pancake house. While clearing a table early one morning—October 9, to be exact—I scanned a discarded newspaper and read the headline “Student Viciously Beaten and Tied to Fence.” Matthew Shepard, a young gay man from Wyoming, had been brutally attacked in Laramie a few nights earlier.

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O. Hm. Essay Contest Runners Up

Mark Twain in East L.A.

By Tim Gillespie

Thirteen years old, I’m on my elbows reading in a circle of lamplight on a warm spring evening, the low thunder of the freeway down the hill seeping through the window screen, ceaseless traffic always streaming somewhere else.

But I am already somewhere else: transported to a sleepy medieval Austrian village at the far edge of what I can imagine by Mark Twain’s last fiction, The Mysterious Stranger.
My eighth grade teacher has suggested the book.

I am still transported by that text and that act.

My old school photo of Mr. Donald Seif’s eighth grade class of 1962-3 at Fremont Elementary in Alhambra, California, on the East L.A. border, shows thirty-six kids, a diverse urban mix. A tough teaching assignment. I know; I’m a teacher now myself. But in my memory, that room was always abuzz with learning.

Mr. Seif was enthusiastic, tough, interesting, approachable and funny. He convinced me algebra was beautiful. His U.S. history curriculum connected the past to the lively argument of current events: the Cuban missile crisis, the fire hoses and police dogs of Birmingham, Alabama. He posed philosophical questions for us to write and talk about. In that classroom, our old flip-lid wooden school desks were bolted to the floor. But all year, I felt unmoored by Mr. Seif.

His greatest provocation was encouraging me to read Twain’s unfinished novella, a personal recommendation for his class bookworm. Mr. Seif knew I was an avid Twain reader who’d already gobbled down Tom Sawyer, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Huck Finn and A Connecticut Yankee. Too callow to catch most of the deeper drifts, I thought these novels grand entertainments. But Mr. Seif’s copy of The Mysterious Stranger was something altogether different—-disturbing, stimulating, a revelation. Transported from my L.A. window to that Austrian village, I identified with the lederhosened schoolboys of the story, lost in the excitement and disquietude of visits from the mysterious stranger who challenged their—-and my—-youthful certainties. Twain railed against religious platitudes, conformity, factory owners, warmongers, and moral self-righteousness employed to protect power and wealth. For this dutiful altar boy, these ideas were troubling and thrilling. I felt—-for the first time, I think—-truly disturbed by ideas. Twain’s tale gave me the unnerving and enlivening notion that I could question the world I’d received.

Decades later, I’m still a bit stunned by Mr. Seif’s act of recommending to me such a subversive and potentially controversial book—-and grateful for his risk and confidence. Twain’s courage as a writer was matched by Mr. Seif’s courage as a teacher, admired figures willing to challenge and discomfort their admirers.

Years later, a teacher myself, I have been buoyed by this example. I learned that a teacher—-that sort of mysterious stranger who enters young lives for a short period—-can have confidence in his students’ capacity to tackle challenging texts, question truisms, think past the low thunder of convention and the window screens of their comfortable rooms. And travel somewhere else.

***
h5. Self-Fulfilling Expectations of Violence

By Susan Pandian

On a late rainy night in Portobello, Scotland, I was turning back from a long walk on the beach when I saw a man coming down the steps that led up to the road. He turned, saw me, and started running toward me.

By the orange glow of the sodium street lights I could see that he was about twice my size, dressed like a biker in leather boots and jacket, with tattoos over his bald head and hands. The light glinted off the steel piercings in his ears, lips, and eyebrows.

The friends with whom I was staying had told me the area was rough, that it was foolish to go alone on a walk on the beach late at night. It was too far to run for the road, and I carried no weapons. As I watched him pound across the sands, I saw Death running toward me.

He stumbled to a halt in front of me. “Have you seen my mum?” he asked, his voice shaking.

After I managed to squeak out, “No, I haven’t seen your mum,” he turned and ran back the way he had come, the chains on his jacket jingling. That moment gave me a disturbing epiphany. I realized that if I had had a gun, I would have used it.

I had been raised in a nonviolent family of Quakers and Conscientious Objectors, and admired Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But in Portobello I realized how American I was; that no matter how much I might mouth the values of nonviolence, I had been raised to think of guns as a culturally appropriate option in extreme situations. The American Revolution. Shootout at the OK Corral. Dirty Harry.

I have been traveling to Britain for forty years—as a student, researcher, teacher, and visitor—and always admired the fact that until recently policemen never carried guns. The assumption that problems could be resolved nonviolently, that carrying guns provoked more violence than it prevented, seemed like a sane, rational policy. In Portobello my admiration multiplied. What kind of cultural courage does it take to declare peace on the world? To insist on an alternative to escalating levels of destruction?

Poetry in Motion

Poet Kaia Sand brings history to the present through explorations of space.

Lucy Burningham

Sitting on a bench overlooking a sea of sun-baked asphalt at the Portland Expo Center, Kaia Sand unrolls a long scroll of paper, the basis for her collection of poetry Remember to Wave. The paper crackles as semi trucks roar along Marine Drive and race cars whine at Portland International Raceway.

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Please Don’t Consume the Art

Fall arts guides are just catalogs for one-stop culture shopping.

Barry Johnson

For the past thirty years or so, I’ve spent late summer thinking about, writing, and editing fall arts guides for Portland-area newspapers. I now think that was a mistake—and not just because it meant missing out on those delicious, precious Oregon summer days. No, it was more pernicious than that.

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