East and West Flow into Mark Twain

As you are probably aware, Washington University will host the fourth Presidential Debate, scheduled for 8 p.m. Oct. 8 in the Athletic Complex.

Whether or not we realize it, almost everything is political. My introduction to the writings of that famous American author, Mark Twain, is a case in point. Many Chinese readers might remember reading Mark Twain's humorous sketch entitled Running for Governor (1870) made available in translation, first, during the 1960's and then, in1980's. The reason why Twain’s story was distributed during two very different periods in China's political fortunes (prior to the Cultural Revolution and the reopening of diplomatic links to the West) was the assumption that Chinese readers would miss Twain's humor but focus on his criticism of the American two-party campaign system. Given the fact that few Chinese had visited a western country or participated in an election or experienced the rough give-and-take involved in two-party campaigns, this was a reasonable calculation. Reasonable but wrong. Many Chinese readers did appreciate Mark Twain’s humor because they saw in it something with which they were only too familiar: the sharp outline of games played for political power.

Written in 1870, the story begins with Twain being nominated for Governor of New York. Twain felt that he had an advantage over his opponents because he was a man of good character - a decent man. He based this belief on newspaper accounts about how his opponents "had become familiar with all manner of shameful crimes." In fact, in the beginning, Twain was inclined not to campaign because he was embarrassed to have his good name associated with such people. Just as he declared his candidacy, however, newspapers begin publishing the most sensational news about him. Now that he was a gubernatorial candidate, one newspaper stated, perhaps he would explain how he came to be convicted of perjury by thirty-four witnesses in Wakawak, Cochin China in 1863. Worse yet, he was supposed to have caused a poor widow and her family to be thrown off their farm. Twain noted he had never seen Cochin China, let alone heard of Wakawak, but, stunned by the baseless accusations, he did not reply. Next came a newspaper story detailing Twain's theft of valuables from cabin-mates in Montana. Although he had never been to Montana, Twain was hereafter referred to in the newspapers as "Twain, the Montana Thief" as well as the "Infamous Perjurer." Then, in quick succession, came a story about Twain's slander of his opponent's deceased grandfather, earning him the title of "The Body-Snatcher," and another noting his failure to give a speech due to his state of "beastly intoxication" for which he came to be called "Mr. Delirium Tremens Twain." Twain's silence in the face of these false stories was seen as admission of guilt, and the public soon jumped on the bandwagon with letters accusing him of still other crimes. By the time Twain decided to respond to the charges, his 'character' was no better than that of his opponents. Rather than reply, he decided that he "was not equal to the requirements of a Gubernatorial campaign" and sent his withdrawal, signing it, "Truly yours, once a decent man."

Everyone who read this translated sketch along with me twenty years ago laughed so hard they cried. The news today reminds me of Twain's story. We are now squarely in the crosshairs of two campaigns to elect the next President and, like it or not, the stories that make the headline news every day contribute to our collective decision. How do they influence our voting behavior? Louis Menand notes in "The Unpolitical Animal" (The New Yorker, August 27, 2004) that there are at least three theories about democratic politics. The first is that voters who have a reasonable grasp of affairs and a coherent political belief system (about ten percent of the population) are hugely outweighed by the faction that responds to slogans, misinformation, sensational news stories, last minute surprises, and random personal associations. The claim is that most people simply do not understand what it means, as a practical matter, for a candidate to promise to be "fiscally conservative" or to support "faith-based initiatives." To be fair to this group, even my short time as an observer of American politics leads me to believe that the candidates do not always understand the practical implications of their promises, either.

A second theory is that people’s voting preferences are shaped by opinions of the elite. This group of people do understand the positions as well as the implications and communicate their preferences to the rest of us by various cues. Unfortunately, the loudest cues I notice are coming from the same political and cultural 'celebrities' over the same media sources that helped create misinformation and sensational news stories that obscured campaign issues in the first place. Still, the primary cue for many voters comes from their own political party, and the party elite are far more polarized than the majority of voters. In fact, according to surveys, most people identify themselves as moderates.

The third theory gives voters credit not only for sifting through cues given by the campaigns and the media and interpreting those of elite opinion-makers, but also for employing other shortcuts such as hunches ranging from 'the candidate seemed likeable' to 'the economy is doing pretty well.' This is why political campaigns are filled with such impassioned, optimistic, but ultimately vacuous clichés about the future. This is what a large number of voters apparently want to hear and it reminds me of something Nikita Khruschev once said, "Politicians are the same all over: they promise to build a bridge even where there is no river." Perhaps it is a desire for a 'bridge,' be it over an actual river, through economic straits, over troubled waters, or simply to a better but unspecified future that leaves voters exposed to just those hopes, fears, assumptions, and prejudices that respond to party slogans, misinformation, and sensational news stories. Twain's story reminds us that the presidency is, as Twain’s contemporary, Ambrose Bierce, once wrote: "The greased pig in the field game of American politics."
Despite the power politics and character assassination that make up so much of recent campaign politics, we will have to try to come together as a people for the common good once the election is finished. Like Twain, we believed we were decent people when we started this process, and we want to be decent people at the end of it, no matter who wins the election.

Jian Leng, Assistant Director
The Center for the Humanities

Hugh Macdonald, Avis Blewett Professor of Music in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis will be the first 2004-05 speaker in the Center for the Humanities’ continuing Translation Series. His lecture is entitled “On Translating Opera.”

Professor Macdonald has translated two operas, Haydn's Armida and Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers for Opera Theatre of St. Louis, which presents all of its operas in translation. He has also translated Debussy's Pelleas and Melisande, which has been performed several times in England and the USA. This presentation should not only be of interest to those who think about the art of translation, but to those who are concerned with adapting art to meet the temperament of today’s audiences.

“The worldwide trend towards singing opera and classical songs only in the original language is not to everyone's taste,” said Macdonald, “there is a strong argument for singing in the language of the audience.” Having translated a number of operas and cantatas for singers, he is conscious of the special problems presented by translation for music, but equally convinced that the artistic benefits can be unexpectedly abundant.

Macdonald is the Recipient of the Szymanowski Medal (Poland), and the founding editor of the New Berlioz Edition. He has published books on Berlioz and Scriabin, and articles on many facets of 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century music.

The event will take place at 4:00 pm on Wednesday, October 13, in the McMillan Café (Room 115) in Old McMillan Hall on the Hilltop Campus of Washington University. A reception follows the program. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, please call the Center at (314) 935-5576.

Loosely Identified: A St. Louis Women's Poetry Collective

One Saturday morning in the spring of 1975, I found a group of women poets in St. Louis that met in the Women’s Counseling Center near the University City Post Office. We sat on cast-off couches and beanbag chairs or the floor. Afterwards, we lingered outside and chatted. This group survives still, known as “Loosely Identified,” the collective authors of Breathing Out. Now in its second printing, it can be found at local bookstores. These are my memories of the group and our work past and present.

The group came together at a Women’s Art Fair in 1974. It was the early days of second-wave feminism, and we worked to reclaim ourselves and our art. In her book, The Dream of a Common Language, published in 1975, Adrienne Rich celebrated the nourishing language of women’s intimate relationships. We wanted that language for ourselves. Our membership grew, and our workshop met, sometimes every two weeks.

For Helen, Yiddish gave insight into this common language. It was the vernacular of her childhood home, which was imperiled by the Holocaust. Her poetry would later honor that common language, but as a younger woman she wrote of her mother, “I am not a right or wrong remnant of yourself.” Helen demonstrated the precarious dilemmas of gender and culture that all of us shared in some way.

For Marlene, reclaiming language meant rising early before work to write and, once at work, mobilizing women to fight for equal rights and equal pay. For her, poetry spoke for women in public and powerful ways. She marched with “Women Take Back the Night.” Marlene was the first of us to turn forty, and we celebrated with a potluck featuring taped readings by Adrienne Rich. Marlene’s poetry acknowledged the traumas that women experience—and the sanctuary that poetry offers in our common life.

Christina-Marie wrote poetry about her blue-collar life in St. Louis’s hippy community. She showed her independence by driving to our meetings on her motorcycle, with her large white dog in the sidecar. We assembled at her home for a party where my new partner, Martha, also a poet, met the group.
Christina-Marie got us our first reading, at a post-Gaslight bar named Frank Moskus in Exile. Helen read her “Geography of a Relationship” (“I will draw you a picture, an ideograph if you like.”) We scheduled readings at the University City Public Library and the Dead Dog Gallery and began calling ourselves the St. Louis Women’s Poetry Workshop.

My role in the Workshop became a link for the group with the academic settings where I studied or worked. Mentored at Washington University by Don Finkel, I welcomed his support of our group—and that of his wife, poet Connie Urdang. In the late 1970s we read in a pocket-park near the Women’s Eye bookstore in DeMun. Friends’ motorcycles, arriving and leaving, competed with our words.

We began to meet in the Women’s Self Help Center on Newstead: more worn couches and a key for Saturday entry into a “women’s safe space.” Becky, a newly arrived feminist refugee from an MFA program, gave us insights into the academic New England male establishment poetry, which we might consider but not emulate. Becky added Information Technology to her skills, but her impeccable phrasing continues to distinguish her poetry. She also helped forge our practices: for instance, the poet whose work is discussed at one meeting serves as facilitator at the next.

Still active on the local scene, poets Jane E. Ibur and Jane O. Wayne participated in the group around 1980. Ibur’s quick humorous insights and Wayne’s aesthetic accuracy blended well with our readings of American women poets such as Louise Bogan and Hilda Doolittle. The list of our poet-members grew to include Anna Lum, Carole Cohen, and as many as eighty women attending at some point over thirty years.

Buffeted by the anti-feminism of the Reagan years, the Workshop gained new energy in the 1990s from poets like Deborah, Frances, Elaine, Carol, Tess, and Mary Ruth at local college. One evening at Kaldi’s Coffee, as I explained to a new member that we were “loosely identified” with UMSL, another member snatched the phrase out of the air for our name. We like its combination of freedom and affiliation, its mix of the collective and anarchic.

Since 1996 we’ve read every other year for River Styx. In April 2004, we launched Breathing Out: Poems by Loosely Identified at Duff’s. Gaye contributed the original cover; Linda produced the design and layout. Martha found the title via Muriel Rukeyser’s line “Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.” The book’s first run sold out in six weeks, and a second printing is selling at Left Bank Books, Subterranean, and Dunaway bookstores in St. Louis, Piece of Mind in Edwardsville, and the campus bookstores of UMSL and SIU-Edwardsville. Edited collectively, featured and reviewed in the Post-Dispatch, Breathing Out brings visibility to women’s poetry in the region.
Above all, Loosely Identified remains an artistic setting, anchored in its monthly workshop. As long-time member Rebecca Ellis writes, “it has been a brace and pulley, hauling me out of my own depths. It has reminded me of the valuable treasure of surprise, whether found in someone else’s poem or my own.” Loosely Identified aims to preserve a collective identity in an individualist age.

Anyone interested in LI may visit our web site: www.looselyidentified.com.

Nanora Sweet, a member of this Workshop since 1975, teaches Romanticism, poetry, and women’s writing at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Staging the Awakening

The Awakening (1899) by St. Louis author Kate Chopin was perhaps the most controversial novel of its day. Its frank, unsentimental depiction of a New Orleans matron who leaves her husband set off a firestorm of critical denunciation. Yet today The Awakening is considered an American classic, required reading in literary courses and a touchstone for contemporary, particularly feminist, authors.

In October, Washington University’s Performing Arts Department will mark the centennial of Chopin’s death with an original stage adaptation of The Awakening by Henry I. Schvey, Ph. D., chair and professor in the PAD. The play, set in two acts, tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a New Orleans wife and mother who, while on holiday at a seaside resort off the Gulf of Mexico, undergoes a powerful emotional and spiritual transformation. Unable to resume her socially acceptable roles, she takes up painting, moves into a cottage of her own and begins an affair, only to find that none of these paths truly fill her.

"Edna discovers that her place in the world is not what she assumed it to be," Schvey explained. " The Awakening dramatizes a quest for freedom which is as authentic today as it was when it was written more than a century ago."

Performances begin at 8 pm Thursday, Friday, and Saturday October 14, 15, 16, and 2 pm Saturday and Sunday, October 16 and 17. Tickets are $12, or $8 for students, senior citizens, and Washington University faculty and staff. Edison Theatre is Located in the Mallinckrodt Student Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd. Tickets for all shows are available through the Edison Theatre Box Office, (314) 935-6543, and all MetroTix outlets.