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GHP 1985. |
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
I don't know where to start. My friend Spencer Cox is dead. My first reaction to the news was to admonish him, on Facebook, that he wasn't allowed to die, dammit, and if he'd just admit it was one of his jokes I wouldn't be mad. Because. It couldn't be true.
***
"What would give light must endure burning." - Viktor Frankl
I met him in 1985, at the Georgia Governor's Honors program. We were admitted in a particular major, based on nominations and competitive applications and interviews, then we could choose a minor. Six hundred high school students from across the state, and even in that crowd of bright and talented teenagers he stood out, like a shooting star wisecracking across the sky. We were Philosophy minors together. He was loud, alternately vulgar and erudite (sometimes both at the same time), fast-talking, vivid, good-looking, charismatic, and kind.
"Always be a first-rate version of yourself, and not a second-rate version of someone else." - Judy Garland
He was also gay, and quite vocally so. This was Georgia, in the mid-Eighties; this was high school. Many of us had never met someone who was openly gay in person...even those of us who were gay ourselves. It didn't quite register with me then how brave he was to be that open; I think I just figured things were different in Atlanta. They were, but not that much. He was just fearless.
I remember him as a laughing, dark-haired dark-eyed boy, full of energy, one of the elusive Drama majors (they were always in rehearsal). According to him, I was so weird he decided I was going to be the next Flannery O'Connor.
I'm not Flannery O'Connor yet, and I'm in my forties. Like Spencer. Flannery died in her forties. Like Spencer. I still have time, maybe. I don't know. No one is guaranteed tomorrow. I think creative people fear dying with our art unmade, we scribble and paint and act against the darkness.
"Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.” - Flannery O'Connor
I am wary of making him out to be a saint (I can hear his voice in my head saying, "Why not? Go ahead and write me a fagiography, honey") but what I mean is that we polish real goodness up until it seems unattainable. Spencer as an adult was a chain-smoking, debaucherous enfant terrible with a scathing wit so sharp it could sever limbs. He could be maddening and, in the words of many of the descriptions of him written in the last 24 hours, caustic. He was also a genuinely decent and compassionate human being who accomplished real, valuable and lasting good in the world, not merely for his immediate circle or community (which is the normal lot of even the best people) but for literal millions he didn't know and will never know. He was valiant. He looked killing bigotry in the eye, battled it and won.
You and I could be like that, even a little. We don't have to be perfect, be even-tempered, or have our closets organized before we are allowed to accomplish great and valuable things. Not everyone has his gifts, but I believe that he accomplished what he did through a combination of cussedness and moral compass. I believe those are available to all of us, like grace.
"All we can do is go around telling the truth." - Carson McCullers
Many of us who knew him when we were young have said that he changed our lives. He didn't do it with a self-help book or a weight loss program or a religion. I don't think he did it on purpose. He did it by being himself.
I was raised Southern Baptist when that was very different than it is now, at least in some places. They used to ordain women. My predominantly white church, in a tiny place in north Georgia that wasn't even a town, was attended by a black man. We had a copy of Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret in our church library. The Fundamentalists had taken over the Southern Baptist Convention in 1981, the same year I was baptized, but had not yet consolidated their grip over the denomination or run the moderates out. This is context.
The local churches in Valdosta would come and get students from the Governor's Honors Program for services. I decided to go, possibly so that if my mother asked if I'd been I could say, "Yes." I had already experienced creeping Fundamentalism, mostly from my friends at school. People I had known since kindergarten were telling me that Satan was in rock music and role-playing games and starting to go to the Church of God and being loudly Christian in a way that made me want to bring up Matthew 6:5. None of that prepared me.
The church I went to first of all had posters on the wall of their Sunday School room depicting the racist interpretation of the Curse of Ham, which I had never seen before and it shocked me. I didn't feel sure enough of my ground to challenge anyone over it; I was conscious of being far from home and dependent on someone else to get back to campus. I remember wondering if there was a way for me to leave without causing a big stir.
There wasn't. I went to services, where the preacher proceeded to declare that America was fighting God's enemies and therefore all our wars were justified and therefore anyone who didn't believe that was against God.
Being the same person who stood up in my eighth grade class and told off the teacher when he said that women should keep to their place, I seriously considered standing up and saying something. But it was not my church. It was most definitely, decidedly, unequivocally not my church, and I was sixteen. I kept my mouth shut.
When I got back to campus, I was incoherent with outrage. I saw Spencer and made a beeline for him, because of all the people there I figured he would understand. I sputtered out some kind of report of what had happened, and expressed regret that I had not said anything.
He laughed, said, "Oh, I love you" and hugged me.
I was bemused. I wasn't sure what I had done to earn this praise. Generally speaking, growing up girl in the South means you get told to "be nice" a lot. Righteous anger in women is not viewed with favor by the world at large.
Spencer thought it was awesome.
It was just a little thing, but little things can be important. I was frequently ferociously indignant in the way that only an idealistic teenager can be, and most people tended to argue with me or temporize or smooth it over or present the other side of the story as if I didn't know it or generally let me know that it made them uncomfortable. My parents did not discourage me, but they didn't explicitly encourage me either. Spencer is one of the first people I can remember listening to me rave about something that was wrong in the world and expressing effusive approval. I mean, my eighth grade class applauded, but my teacher gave me the first D of my life and got away with it, so that reaction was mixed.
Perhaps more importantly, he did not offer a critique. He didn't tell me what I should have done, or what he would have done in my place. He loved my indignation and regret, and didn't second-guess me.
It was a shift in perspective, leading to a shift in thought, leading eventually to a shift in action. I came to believe that speaking up was not just OK, it was vitally important, and that in fact we have a moral obligation to speak up when things are not right. While many moments and many ideas have reinforced my convictions along the way, that conversation was one that stands out in my mind, twenty-seven years later. I'm pretty sure that Spencer was not trying to impart a moral precept. He was just being himself, true as an arrow.
This is what we mean when we say that knowing Spencer changed us.
"SILENCE = DEATH" -- AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power
They meant it literally, in the case of AIDS; the silence surrounding the disease, the unwillingness of politicians to even mention it except in opprobrium and bigoted rhetoric, the dearth of public outcry; all this meant that people were dying...and would continue to die unless something changed. That was a stark example of a universal truth. Much of the time it is more subtle. Silence in the face of abuse, of corruption, of injustice, of hatred, leads to death of the spirit.
Spencer and the other people who were part of ACT UP and TAG might have been fighting for their lives and in some cases losing them. Many of them died of the disease before the treatments he helped bring about became available. Spencer now is gone too.
But they were not silent. They acted up, they spoke out, they fought AIDS. Their spirits were and remain very much alive.
Speak up. It is the only way. Speak truth. It matters.
"How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?"--Carson McCullers
Friday, December 7, 2012
Reviews!
Some reviews of The Moment of Change:
Cascadia Subduction Zone, review by Rachel Swirsky
Intersectional, Feminist, Diverse: The Moment of Change, edited by Rose Lemberg, by Brit Mandelo
Review in Cabinet des Fées
In Versification by Francesca Forrest (my favorite, because it mentions my poem by name)
Cascadia Subduction Zone, review by Rachel Swirsky
Intersectional, Feminist, Diverse: The Moment of Change, edited by Rose Lemberg, by Brit Mandelo
Review in Cabinet des Fées
In Versification by Francesca Forrest (my favorite, because it mentions my poem by name)
Monday, December 3, 2012
Strumming the Sacred Harp
This article was originally published in Flagpole Magazine, April 8, 2009. Photographs by Andrew Flenniken.
Not everyone loves
it; H.L. Mencken reportedly described it as “a cross between a
steam calliope and a Ukrainian peasant chorus.” Mencken
notwithstanding, it sounds like nothing else you've ever heard.
Four groups of singers face the center, raising their voices for no
one but the song leader and themselves, harmonies meeting and
diverging, wild but measured, eerie and joyful. This is Sacred Harp
music.Sacred Harp is one example of a larger American shape-note tradition which began in the late eighteenth century, drawing from the rural church-singing tradition in England but adding innovations of composition and especially notation. A seven-note scale is represented by four (or sometimes seven) shapes which give the tradition its name. The purpose of the shapes is to make sight-reading easier; the larger purpose is to make music accessible to all. Singing-schools sprang up in New England and beyond, teaching the populace how to make a joyful noise. It may have been this populist and inclusive impulse which really disturbed Mencken, who was a cheerfully obnoxious elitist, but it contributed significantly to the original popularity and later resurgence of the style.
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Hugh McGraw, in blue sweater, sings along. |
Now there are regular “singings”
all over the United States and well beyond. The South, especially
Alabama and Georgia, is still the center of the tradition and if you
attend a singing in Ila, Georgia, or Jasper, Alabama, you may
encounter people who have driven down from Michigan or New York just
to come and sing. For those who are fascinated by the form it is a
powerful draw. There are shape-note singers who grew up with it in
churches where the hymnals are still in ongoing use, or who heard
about it from older relatives, but many more simply ran across it
somewhere. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds, religious
and musical, and may or may not be interested in Christian sacred
music or folk music per se. They simply come for the singing.
Musicians and Hollywood have taken
notice: Three hymns from The Sacred Harp appear in the movie
Cold Mountain (“I'm Going Home,” #282, “Vernon,” #95,
and “Idumea,” #47). The soundtrack for Cold Mountain was
compiled by T-Bone Burnett, the same man who brought you the
“old-timey” sounds of O Brother! Where Art Thou? Georgia
filmmakers Erica and Matt Hinton made a documentary about Sacred Harp
titled Awake, My Soul. The soundtrack, called Help Me to
Sing, features recordings of traditional Sacred Harp singers on
one disk, and various musicians performing songs from the book on a
second. On disk two you can hear Doc Watson singing his own version
of “Idumea,” sometimes called “And Am I Born to Die?”;
Rayna Gellert and John Paul Jones harmonize on “Blooming Youth”
(#176), while Danielson performs a quirky, weird version of “Sermon
on the Mount” (#507). Tracks by Liz Janes, Innocence Mission, The
Good Players, Mac Powell, John Wesley Harding, Jim Lauderdale with
Jeni & Billy, Cordelia's Dad, All Things Bright and Beautiful,
Tenement Halls, Woven Hand, Richard Buckner, Sam Amidon, Rick Moody
with Nina Katchadourian, Tim Eriksen, DM Stith, Murray Hammond, and
Elvis Perkins in Dearland also appear. Other musicians have drawn on
the shape-note tradition for inspiration or performance as well;
“The Dying Californian” ( #410) is one of the tracks on the VOCO
album Blink, while #47 is the title track on Am I Born to
Die? An Appalachian Songbook by Mason Brown and Chipper Thompson.
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Judy Mincey leads the singing. |
With traditional Sacred Harp, or the
other shape-note traditions such as Southern Harmony or Christian
Harmony, the point is not performance, but participation. Everyone
who attends a singing is not only allowed but encouraged to sing, and
nearly everyone who sings eventually gets up and leads a song.
Singings are orderly, focused, and cheerful, accompanied by food and
a good deal of laughter. Everyone is welcome, and welcome to sing.
That is its power; among other things, it is a living folk musical
tradition that has yet to be packaged or professionalized, and is
easy to access if you are simply willing to put in the effort and
time to show up and do it. It has a spiritual core which is
inherently democratic and resistant to co-option. Along with the wild
beauty of the harmonies, the music is participatory in its very
essence. It is meant to be sung, not only listened to, and you are
supposed to sing loud.
Athens is close to shape-note central; there is a regular monthly singing at West End Baptist Church, and another in Ila, just down the road. The system is intended to be easy to learn and if you have any choral singing experience you will find it very easy to pick up (though you may have to unlearn some of your trained-in habits). If you need a little more preparation, regular singings at the Emory Presbyterian Church in Decatur include a short explanation of the shape-note system and an opportunity to sing a probably-familiar tune in the shape-note style.“Old Hundred,” also known as “Doxology,” should be well-known to anyone raised in a Christian church in the U.S. There are also frequent “singing schools” and two yearly week-long camps held within driving distance: Camp Fasola in Nauvoo, Alabama (a second session in 2009 will be held in Anniston), and Camp Doremi (seven-shape system) held at Wildacres Retreat in Little Switzerland, North Carolina. More information about local singings and events can be found at www.atlantasacredharp.org, and national listings, resources, and general information about shape-note can be found at fasola.org.
Athens is close to shape-note central; there is a regular monthly singing at West End Baptist Church, and another in Ila, just down the road. The system is intended to be easy to learn and if you have any choral singing experience you will find it very easy to pick up (though you may have to unlearn some of your trained-in habits). If you need a little more preparation, regular singings at the Emory Presbyterian Church in Decatur include a short explanation of the shape-note system and an opportunity to sing a probably-familiar tune in the shape-note style.“Old Hundred,” also known as “Doxology,” should be well-known to anyone raised in a Christian church in the U.S. There are also frequent “singing schools” and two yearly week-long camps held within driving distance: Camp Fasola in Nauvoo, Alabama (a second session in 2009 will be held in Anniston), and Camp Doremi (seven-shape system) held at Wildacres Retreat in Little Switzerland, North Carolina. More information about local singings and events can be found at www.atlantasacredharp.org, and national listings, resources, and general information about shape-note can be found at fasola.org.
Come on down. Bring a covered dish.
And sing loud.
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Singers as well as song leaders mark time with their hands in a characteristic style. |
Labels:
andrew flenniken,
athens ga,
being southern,
hugh mcgraw,
ila ga,
judy mincey,
sacred harp,
shape note
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