The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Month: November 2011

  • The Glass Guitar Ceiling: Rolling Stone’s “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”

    The women’s glass ceiling, that invisible, clandestine barrier that separates any upper economic echelon of men from their connected but not equal women counterparts, apparently extends to guitar playing, as evidenced by the latest Rolling Stone list, “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” (Issue 1145: Dec. 8, 2011). There are only two female guitarists on the list, Joni Mitchell (# 75), and Bonnie Raitt (# 89). Joni Mitchell was # 72 in the 2003 RS draft, Joan Jett # 87 (Jett didn’t make the 2011 cut). Lists, of course, are made for argument, so why aren’t there more women guitarists on the list?

    But it should come as no surprise to find that one woman’s floor is not another man’s ceiling, for the disparity in nearly every correlation shows women living on floors far below men in the economic castle. The gender income gap has narrowed in recent years, according to US Census data (see chart), but the disparity that still exists can no longer be attributed to causes like the so-called pipeline factor (that women MBA’s, e.g., relatively new cohorts, need more time to assimilate into the system):

    Source: DeNavas-Walt, Carmen, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-239, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2011.

    A recent study in Catalyst dispels the pipeline and other myths that would explain male-female, gender-income disparity. Worse, the Catalyst study shows that playing louder, faster, or more power chords isn’t likely to increase the struggling female guitarist’s chances to enter the ranks of the top 100. According to the Catalyst study, women fall behind men in job advancement regardless of what promotional strategies the woman employs. In other words, these are women who know how to play the game, but playing the same chords as the men play doesn’t seem to garner the same audience. A 2010 Catalyst census shows that 92% of Fortune 500 company top earners are men, and only 14% of women are executive officers. So what’s a poor girl to do? To make matters worse yet, the Atlantic on-line just posted that “68% of the sons of the top 1% work at their Dad’s company.” The Atlantic post links to a recent study, “The Intergenerational Transmission of Employers,” and a blog post by Miles Corak, one of the study’s authors. Says Corak, of the elite nepotism, one with harmful potential, in the conclusion to his blog post: “If the rich leverage economic power to gain political power they can also skew broader public policy choices—from the tax system to the education system—to the benefit of their offspring. This will surely start eroding the belief that labour markets are fair, and that anyone can aspire to the top.”

    So what women guitarists in particular did we feel were unfairly excluded by the RS list? Here are some suggestions: Emily Remler, Mary Osborne, Ana Popovic, Elizabeth Cotten, Sharon Isbin, Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Ida Presti.

    And the ladies were not the only slighted guitarists omitted from the RS list. We would be remiss if we did not augment the argument with some of our favorite male guitarist no-shows: Gabor Szabo, Bill Frisell, John Williams, Leo Brouwer, Herb Ellis, David Rawlings, Leo Kottke.

    No doubt you have your own greatest list: “God bless the child that’s got his own.”

    Related: Women Under the Glass Ceiling: Parity and Power in the Pipeline

  • A Literary Thanksgiving Feast

    "Hard Times for These Times," Charles Dickens (1854). Drawing: "Mr. Harthouse Dining at the Bounderbys'."

    On a big platter in the middle of the full table sits the fat novel, its dust jacket a cracking bronze, peeling at the edges, its pages sliced and curling, its story stuffed with, well, stuffing: characters mixed with plot in a warm, moist setting, everyone talking at once, voices waxing, then waning, then waxing again, still louder.

    A bowl of essays is passed around the table; there’s plenty for everyone. There’s a new dish, something called “creative non-fiction.” I try some, but find it’s not so new, after all, for isn’t all writing creative? And anyway why would we want to read writing that is not creative?

    “Pass the poems, please,” someone at the other end of the table says. Poems are like olives. Some have pits, putting your teeth at risk; others are pitted, hollow. Some poems are saltier than others, and may be filled with white almonds or cherry red pimento peppers. If you squeeze a poem you get cooking oil.  And like olive oil, the oil from poems might be extra-virgin, refined, or not potable.

    A gravy bowl of APA-style sauce spills across the tablecloth and an argument ensues as to who is at fault, an argument of causation. “Why is that nasty stuff even on the table?” someone asks. A short scene flashes into a drama that quickly subsides with a denouement of dessert: The Emperor of Ice Cream appears with chocolate covered couplets.

    But that’s not all, for then Sestina rolls in a six-layered, short story torte. It’s a literary feast, and in these hard times, we are thankful, at least, for literature.

    Addendum: My sister Barb’s comment reminded me that I neglected to include beverages in the literary feast post, and I suggested she pick up a six pack of Ballads and maybe a couple of bottles of Memoir. Limericks might be served for pre-meal cocktails, unfermented satire for those who like less bite, but large jugs of stream of consciousness should be kept full and within reach, for readers will surely be thirsty.

    Update, Nov. 24: Thanks to Berfrois for joining us at the table!

  • Happy 50th, CSUDH

    My alma mater, California State University at Dominguez Hills, this past year celebrated its 50th anniversary, 1960-2010; they celebrated through commencement 2011, and had invited on their website alumni to share memories. The invitation limited submissions to 200 words, a detail I initially missed (ever the perspicacious student). But while I did eventually whittle my college memoir to the requisite 200 words, I was a little late with it, so I thought I might as well post the whole hog here.

    What do I remember about Cal State Dominguez Hills? I was a student there in the 1970’s, first for a Bachelor’s in English, having transferred from El Camino, then, after teaching for a couple of years, for a Master’s in English. It’s been a wonderful world, as Satchmo sang, but those years as a student were the best.

    Many days I rode my bicycle to school from my folks’ place in El Segundo, winding my way through the small towns, finding new routes to avoid traffic, no helmet, no bike lanes – I know, sounds like the clichéd story of how Grandma walked five miles through five feet of snow to get to the school bus stop, then rode the rickety old school bus another seven miles to the one room schoolhouse.

    Actually, CSUDH in the 1970’s had a program something like a one room schoolhouse, called “The Small College.” Students in the Small College created their own, interdisciplinary curriculum. The program was experimental and well suited to the student population at the time. We were a small school yet, no football team; we won the national badminton championship one year when I was there.

    The campus in those days, the rise from the west particularly noticeable if you happened to be approaching the school on a bicycle, was a peaceful, quiet, lovely place, full of open spaces and views of the surrounding South Bay areas. The campus never felt crowded. In the courtyards below the library, one could sit under trees and listen to the music students practice their instruments, the silences filling with breeze. Many of the books in the library were still marked “Cal State Palos Verdes,” the first planned site, before reconsideration following the Watts riots called for a campus nearer the south central inner cities.

    Raleigh Super Course I rode to campus and 9' 2" Hobie – hanging from joists in basement.

    I still have that bike; it’s hanging in my basement, an old Raleigh Super Course, with decals from Redondo, Hermosa, and El Segundo. Between the Bachelor’s and the Master’s, I rode it occasionally (when my VW was down) from El Segundo to Venice, where I taught junior high grades. It’s not been on the road in awhile (the 9’ 2” Hobie surfboard also hanging from the joists hasn’t been in the water in awhile, either).

    CSCDH Catalog, 1977-78, next to stack of books I read for classes.

    I also still have my CSCDH 1977-78 catalog (upright in photo next to a stack of books I read for classes), and perusing it now I realize what I remember and miss most from my days on campus: my instructors. My favorite teachers included Abe Ravitz, whose American lit. exams we wrote in “blue books” (the Huck Finn at the top of the book stack in the photo is the copy I used in one of his American lit. classes – his own worn copy was held together with rubber bands); Marvin Laser, whose bearing as a scholar and a gentle man was unmatched; the lovely and sensitive Violet Jordain – hello Dr. Jordain, if you’re reading this – I still have the big Shakespeare book we used in your class; feisty and energetic Agnes Yamada, who encouraged me to become a teacher; Joyce Johnson, still an assistant in those days, a local prodigy; and my good friend Mike Mahon, whose interests in reading and music, in Cage and McLuhan, Joyce and Beckett, put me on an intellectual path that still interests me today.­­

    With Dr. Mahon in backyard on Mariposa, circa 1978.

    We understood that we were in on the beginning of something, that someday there would be more buildings, more students, that the campus would grow into a cultural center, and there would be different teachers, and new students. What a remarkable time and opportunity, to be among those who helped start and build a college. It was a beautiful place and time, not without conflicts, external and internal, but no regrets; we had a good time, and learned to stay true to literature: Happy 50th, Dominguez Hills!

  • On Shoes: A Barefoot Existentialism

    Another summer unfolded like a dirty sock, stiff and hot. Baseball fell to football, and I kicked off the boat shoes. What to put on? If you’re a ballplayer, you may have uncommon shoe choice, as evidenced by reports of a Fall skirmish, in a bar down in Louisiana, which resulted in the police confiscating 49 pairs of shoes belonging to one of the college athletes allegedly involved in the melee. I’m still a surfer at heart, and a minimalist when it comes to shoes, so I look askance at that number, 49, but one must be a barefoot existentialist to throw the first block.

    The idea of the shoe is really old. In 2008, archeologists found what is thought to be the oldest surviving leather shoe in Eurasia. The shoe, found stuffed with grass, presumably to maintain its shape during the off-season, was radiocarbon dated to the 4th millennium BC (1). Other types of shoes have been found that are even older, shoes made of fibers, sewn or woven, or made from animal skin, and sandals made with different kinds of technology and apparently for different purposes (2, 3). One study suggests that the idea for the shoe may have come from basketry, the shoe conceived as a basket for the foot, the shoe made with basket weaving technique (4).

    An inventory of my own shoes harbors the story out of Louisiana from a sea of hyperbole. Maybe the athlete had never thrown out an old pair – a youthful hoarder of shoes. Still, we might argue that access to more shoes than we need suggests overindulgence, but is this a case of moral relativism? And no doubt athletes are not the only shoe collectors. Besides, in shoes begin responsibilities, to improvise on the Delmore Schwartz theme.

    Perhaps my parents tried to prepare me for athletic success requiring extra closet space by ensuring an early shoeful habit, but it seems unlikely. I’ve two old photos in which I appear to be wearing the same formidable Buster Browns, and if my parents were trying to prepare me for anything, they must have been thinking of circus lion taming. In any case, assuming one new pair of shoes per year, I went from shoeless to ten pairs of shoes by the time I reached Little League.

    The Buster Browns were worn at Churchill Downs; Little League was a mile from the Pacific. I don’t know how many shoes my parents packed, with everything else they owned, into their Plymouth sedan with their four children for the move out west, and no doubt what shoes we had comforted our Westward Ho! feet, but the adventure must have been riskier for our having no spares in the trunk.

    In Little League I preferred sneakers to cleats. I spent three years playing ball for the El Segundo Major League Red Sox. Add another three pairs of shoes, but I’m sure I still owned only one pair at a time, and wore that pair everywhere, to school, church, baseball. I also wore rubber go-aheads, wore them down to the skin of my heels before tossing. Should these be counted as shoes? If so, add a pair every year, from the age of ten, when I started Little League, to 18, when I left home for the Army.

    In boot camp, at Fort Bliss, Texas, we were issued two pairs of Army boots, comfortable and substantial, and we wore them for every purpose save the few, formal occasions when we wore our dress greens with low quarters. Add another three pairs of shoes. I wore those same Army boots for six years, in and out of uniform. In barracks, we displayed our surplus shoes on our footlockers at the end of our bunks. The South Central boys displayed their spit shined cowboy boots along with their G. I. shoes. I put out my Jack Purcells, wiping clean the blue stripe.

    I left my low quarters in my usher’s locker at the Paradise Theatre one Saturday morning, soon after my military discharge. I had reflected too long on my chore of the day: chipping the gum off the bottoms of all the theatre seats. I couldn’t recall a detail as absurd from my Army experience. I snuck out of the dark theatre into a solid gold South Bay weekend, not my first existential decision, nor my last, wearing my Purcells, leaving my low quarters to an unknown successor, heedless of the shoe choices in my future.

    In college and in my early teaching assignments, I wore sneakers or the old Army boots, still wearing well. Few judgments, in those days, seemed shoe-based. It wasn’t until I abandoned teaching for the corporate world that I purchased a pair of wingtips, ignoring Thoreau’s advice to “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes” (5). I wore the wingtips stiffly into the office on my first day, spit shined; I was the only guy in the office wearing wingtips.

    Twenty-five years in a carpeted corporate world doesn’t wear out many shoes. Add another six or seven pairs. The story of my corporate career might be told in cordovan loafers, some with tassels, or boat shoes. Add a few golf shoes, slippers under the tree most years, then suddenly some cranky Dr. Martens, shoes I wore in the yard, on walks, and to work; and perhaps it was the insidious Martens that put me on the track to an Indie early-retiree lifestyle. I began to wear, like Eliot’s Prufrock, “the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” but with little regret (6).

    So I have owned more than 49 pairs of shoes, but never that many at once. I recently purchased some new Dr. Martens, made in China; my original pair, which I finally wore out, was made in England. One can’t fully appreciate new shoes until one has worn out old ones. For an athlete in sneakers, the shoe precedes the foot, and wearing the shoe out is not the essence of the game. Whatever legal tackles our contemporary athletes end up breaking, no shoes will be worn out, and any thoughts about going existential must wait for the off-season.

    Shakespeare’s bumbling Polonius might have offered another aphorism for Laertes’s consideration, though probably not putting the Western world on a new footing: treat each new pair of shoes as your last; perhaps then they might be worn more wisely, and one may more fully realize one’s barefoot potential, for the more shoes we have, the more schemed and distracted our purposes, but the closer we go to barefoot, the more deliberate and sure-footed our steps.

    Footnotes:

    1. Pinhasi R, Gasparian B, Areshian G, Zardaryan D, Smith A, et al. (2010). First Direct Evidence of Chalcolithic Footwear from the Near Eastern Highlands. PLoS ONE 5(6): e10984. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010984
    2. Ravilious, Kate. (June 9, 2010). World’s Oldest Leather Shoe Found—Stunningly Preserved: “Astonishingly modern” shoe preserved by sheep dung and dryness. National Geographic News: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/06/100609-worlds-oldest-leather-shoe-armenia-science/
    3. Connolly, T. & Cannon, W. (1999). Comments on “America’s Oldest Basketry.” Radiocarbon, Vol 41, Nr 3, 1999, pp. 309-313.
    4. Berger, R., Bendat, M., & Parker, A. (AMERICA’S OLDEST BASKETRY: RAINER BERGER, MILLIE BENDAT and ANDREA PARKER) Isotope and Archaeometry Laboratory, Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095-1567 USA. ABSTRACT: We have determined the earliest calibrated dates on three types of basketry from the Great Basin & Proceedings of the 16th International 14C Conference, edited by W. G. Mook and J. van der Plicht RADIOCARBON, Vol. 40, No. 2, 1998, P. 615-620. This is publication number 5084 of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, UCLA.
    5. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, (New York: New American Library, 1960), chap. 1.
    6. T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” poem.