All-State sonneteer Caitlyn Adams (North Richland Hills Senior High School) committed to UT-Austin on Friday, ending months of speculation and raising early hopes of a return to national championship contention for the Longhorn poetry team after a decade-long drought.
“I visited the poetry dens of Chicago, Iowa, UC-Berkeley, and Columbia,” said the D/FW regional standout, “but the facilities in Austin were like totally awesome,” her choice of words causing head coach Gail Postlethwaite to visibly flinch. Adams was probably referring to the results of the $20 million overhaul of the poetry training facility, which now includes a gleaming battery of commercial-grade espresso machines and a world-class wine-bar. Postlethwaite has received sharp criticism for the expenditure, but explained, “you don’t write world-class rondelles on Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and boxed swill. Every penny we spend contributes to our goal: getting to the slam in Carmel in March and bringing home the trophy.”
Postlethwaite was brought in two years ago after the regents fired her predecessor over his lackluster verses and unengaging imagery. “Beating your Harvey Mudd or North Texas was nice,” says Postlethwaite, “but we’re here to prove we’re the best.” Given her $5 million annual salary, she needs to make that intention a reality.
It won’t be easy. The Longhorns had a poor season last year, dropping to last in the Big 12 after a rough handling by Baylor in the free-verse tournament in November. The shocking loss caused Postlethwaite to fire her assistant coaches for meter and enjambment. And next year’s team is handicapped by the loss of junior Rocky Anderson, who went pro after being offered multi-million-dollar contracts by several publishing houses. “Rocky had a winning mentality and a flair for innovative metaphors,” said Postlethwaite. “But we’ll be just fine with our incoming talent. I know that expectations are high in the Longhorn community for a national championship, but as I keep telling our kids, we’ll get there, one tetrameter at a time.”
Postlethwaite has a reputation for keeping her young writers in line. Before her tenure, Longhorn poets were known for getting into late-night fights on Sixth street and acing exams. “When I first got here,” recalls Shaun Jameson, sophomore rapper from Katy, “Coach Gail caught me looking at a chemistry book. She made me throw it in the dumpster. She doesn’t put up with any nonsense.” The practices are grueling, Johnson adds. “We do two-a-days, every day, in the coffee shop. Like I learned from Coach, there’s no substitute for just sitting down with a grande mocha, booting up the Mac, and dreaming for four hours straight. But that first winning submission makes you forget about all the pain that went into it.”
Postlethwaite nods and smiles. “I make no apologies. We’re not here to party or graduate with honors. We are here to write poetry. World class championship poetry, period. Or no period, if you’re omitting punctuation.”
We all have our reasons for looking at the title of a book, maybe reading the blurb and a few sample pages, and saying, nope, not for me. Maybe it’s a genre you have no interest in. Maybe you can’t stand reading a book written in the present tense. I know a guy who refuses to read any book with the words “Billionaire”, “Christmas”, or “Daddy” in the title. Then there’s the Bechdel test, and there’s people who won’t ready anything written by a dead white man. Me, I’ll read almost anything (or at least, give it a try), but I do have my one hard-and-fast rule. I call it
THE SNIFF TEST
I don’t want to read about nostrils. If, by the end of chapter 1, nostrils are already flaring, I’m done. If nostrils are flaring while eyes are glaring, I’m double done. And why can’t a character just smell things anymore? Why must we be informed that the aroma of his mother’s cooking made love to his nostrils, or the smell of the restaurant’s salmon special swam up her nostrils to spawn, or that the sweet pong of Panzer exhaust blitzkrieged his nostrils?
I will never read Cordwainer Smith’s sci-fi novel “Norstrilia”. I know it has nothing to do with nostrils, but it’s just too close. It even bothered me that the ship in “Alien” was “The Nostromo”, but that was a movie, so I give it a pass. Gogol’s “The Nose” is fine—I have nothing against noses—I’m not crazy. Nor do I have a problem with septums, because they aren’t over-used like nostrils are. I think the only time I’ve ever seen the word septum in a novel is when it’s about a cokehead who doesn’t have one. Now there’s an opportunity there for the discerning writer. Consider, for example, the sentence: “The smell of her perfume set my septum vibrating like a prank handshake buzzer.” Isn’t that so much better than that old nostril bit, worn thinner than a cokehead’s septum?
And philtrums—I love philtrums. You want me to read your book, title it “The Philtrum”.
Anyway, No Nostrils. That’s my rule. My one-and-only rule.*
What’s yours?
*Okay, I confess, I’m the guy I know who would refuse to read a book titled “My Billionaire Christmas Daddy.” I make no apologies.
I suppose everyone has had the unpleasant and disappointing experience of wandering into someone else’s racist hang-ups.
A few years ago I was having lunch with a married couple, colleagues from work and personal friends. They were, and are, nice people, well educated, progressive in outlook. Unbidden by me, they began to talk about a gardener who once worked for one of their families back home. He was honest and hard-working, unlike the rest of his kind, who stuck together, were lazy, and would stab you in the back if they got a chance. What’s more, they got preferential treatment from the government, getting all the social benefits without having to do anything to earn them.
Who were my colleagues, and who were the “they” they feared and resented? Well, they weren’t white Americans talking about African-Americans or Hispanic immigrants. They happened to be Romanian, and their “they” were gypsies.
But I was struck by how comfortably their stereotypes fit into racism around the planet.
That lunchtime conversation came back to me as I was reading the recent book by Enrico Deaglio, La storia vera e terribile tra Sicilia e America (The True and Terrible History of Sicily and America, Sellerio:2015), a fascinating and appalling account of the experience of Sicilian immigrants to the United States in the late 19th century. The core of the book is a detailed analysis of a mass lynching of five Sicilian immigrants in the town of Tallulah, Louisiana in 1899. The town was enraged by the murder of a white doctor. As the rumor-mill had it, one of the Sicilian’s goats had wandered onto the doctor’s veranda, and the doctor, tired of this recurring annoyance, had shot the goat. The hot-blooded Sicilians, who loved their livestock like family, and took such an outrage as a matter of personal honor, spent most of a day secretly planning their revenge, then tracked down and killed the doctor. That night, the Sicilians, by then locked up in the city jail, were dragged out of the prison and hanged. Three of them comprised the alleged murderer and two close relatives. The other two were lynched for being Sicilian in the wrong place and the wrong time.
Too late it was discovered that the doctor, an alcoholic quack, was not only alive but had suffered only superficial wounds—a blast of birdshot—from which he quickly recovered! (The story is a corrective for anyone who thinks The Oxbow Incident is far-fetched.) Deaglio casts serious doubt on the rest of the goat-revenge story as well and suggests more material motives behind the lynchings: its victims were successful local merchants with valuable holdings that afterwards ended up in the hands of white citizens.
There is much to be appalled at in this sordid tale, such as the hypocritical indignation of the Italian government over the incident and its less-than-halfhearted attempt to seek justice: Italy’s official position was that since all the victims were either American citizens or intending to become American citizens, they and their relatives had given up any right to have the Italian government seek redress on their behalf.
But the most astonishing and sad aspect of the story for me was the institutionalized and quite open racism by Italy’s establishment towards its southern Italian citizens—and how enthusiastically that racism was endorsed by Americans. In a chapter entitled “Nel cranio dei dagos” (“In the Dagos’ cranium”) Deaglio recounts the work of the progressive (northern) Italian sociologist Cesare Lombroso, who scientifically “proved” that Sicilians were actually a race, and a genetically inferior race at that, prone to laziness, stupidity and violence. Sounds depressingly familiar?
It should, because Lombroso’s work was welcomed by Americans who shared the Italian establishment’s distinction between its own nice, superior northerners and its darker, dangerous southerners. It’s not hard to imagine why many whites in the post-Reconstruction United States would have been attracted to the idea that Sicilians were inferior to their northern compatriots, due to the historical “mixing” of the island’s European population with Africans and Arabs.
Deaglio quotes Theodore Roosevelt as stating, in response to the even more horrific lynching of 11 southern Italians in New Orleans in 1891, “It was time that race was given a lesson.” And he wrote to his sister shortly afterwards, “Monday we dined at the Camerons; various dago diplomats were present, all much wrought up by the lynching of the Italians in New Orleans. Personally I think it rather a good thing, and said so.”
So Roosevelt, who later became one of this country’s most progressive presidents, had drunk the racist koolaid.
It is depressing to witness the universal nature of racism. I have personally been invited to commiserate with various ignoramuses (including Italians and American tourists) on the dangers posed by gypsies. As a white boy growing up in Denton, Texas, U.S.A. I was sometimes expected to share ugly opinions and ugly jokes about black people. I have been regaled with snarky comments and stupid jokes about Jews by people who didn’t know a whole lot about me. I was treated to a racist (if that’s the right word) Irish joke once by an Australian of English descent—evidence of how well racism travels and survives over time and across continents. I have conversed with some northern Italians who don’t vacation in Sicily because they are afraid (as well as others who, like me, adore the island and its people). I’ve listened to an Indian friend and colleague talk trash about Pakistanis.
And that’s just on the personal level, not including all the garbage spewed these days in public forums.
It’s all wrong, it’s all stupid, it’s all evil.
But we always try to find a bright spot here in the Garden, and maybe it’s this. Racism seems even more ridiculous and absurd than usual, when it’s someone else’s. And maybe we can use that ridiculousness to reflect back on our own racism.
Is there anyone (outside of Burma) who thinks the Rohingya deserve the appalling treatment they are getting at the hands of their own country just because, after all, they are Rohingya? No, that would be ridiculous. As ridiculous as the idea that black people are genetically inferior. Or Sicilians.
After reading in Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch 22 about the hilariously erudite (and often obscene) word games he used to play with Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and other friends, such as coming up with failed book titles (Good Expectations), we decided to come up with our own list of proposed film titles that never made it past a producer:
![Storia vera e terribile tra Sicilia e America (Italian Edition) by [Deaglio, Enrico]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/415-oTuPKjL.jpg)
The Garden of Eaton 