COASTLINE JOURNAL

Patricia Kelly, Simon Fraser University.

download this essay: Kelly_Beauty

“Beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chance of seeing it go down.” Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

What woman hasn’t felt the attention of a man? Women live with the effects of the subtle and direct gaze nearly everyday of their life. In the three Matisse Stories, A.S. Byatt writes of five intelligent, talented women – Susannah, Gerda, Peggy, Debbie, and Mrs. Brown – and the different ways they each live with the attention and gaze of men.

Susannah is a woman much like myself. She has reached or surpassed a mid-point in her life; she has each day of her existence been presented with the opportunity to struggle with the hazy and shadowy inner thoughts that could propel her into action. As an aging woman, she is quite used to the gaze, the attention of men and of women: starting with her own parents, her extended family – aunts and uncles, grandparents, too. Teachers would see her and decide in their own mind just how much attention she deserved and what behaviour would be rewarded. But Susannah would grow up to be a woman comfortable with herself, and for decades comfortable without the rituals of the beauty salon. As she grew through her twenties and thirties, men would pass judgment on her every feature. Attention is not always desired, but the gaze would not likely cause any damage to her. Susannah does not require the expert services of a stylist until the changes in her outward appearance become obvious.

(more…)

By Michael Cox

One of my favourite books of all time, which also happens to be one of my favourite movies of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, has been thoroughly downgraded, one might even say trashed, by an article in the New Yorker.  The novel, Malcolm Gladwell writes in the August 10 issue, teaches us that there is one law for blacks–and white trash–and another for good old folks, the decent white folks of Maycomb, Alabama.

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, Mary Badham as his daughter Jean Louis "Scout" Finch.

At the conclusion of the book, Bob  Ewell, who has been embarrassed by Atticus in court (and accused of attacking his daughter), attacks Scout and her brother. The reclusive next-door neighbour Boo Radley comes to their defence and accidentally kills Ewell. But the sheriff convinces Atticus that it is in everyone’s best interest to say Ewell fell on his knife, saving Boo a trial and possible jail time. “Can you possibly understand?” Atticus asks Scout, after explaining to her that she must tell everyone who asks, that Ewell fell on his knife, and not that Boo stabbed him when he came to the children’s rescue.

“His response is to adopt one set of standards for respectable whites…and another for white trash,” Gladwell writes. “A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb Alabama.” (more…)

by Shelly Nixon, University of North Carolina at Asheville

download this essay: Personifying Tragedy

The power of the artist [is] to find and illuminate the profoundly human in the midst of chaos, and to produce art as a bulwark against the will to inhumanity.  Arnold Rampersad

According to Muriel Rukeyser in her book The Life of Poetry, poetry itself is often described in an angry, degrading way.  “The angry things that have been said about our poetry have also been said about our time.  They are both ‘confused,’ ‘chaotic,’ ‘violent,’ ‘obscure’” (1996, 11).  Indeed she meant this not only about the art of poetry itself, but also about the time in which she was writing.  However, if poetry is art, and thus poets are artists, then these criticisms are in direct contrast with Rampersad’s view that artist’s job is to “produce art as a bulwark against the will to inhumanity,” and to “illuminate the profoundly human in the midst of chaos.”  No two collections of poetry illustrate this concept better than Kyrie by Ellen Bryant Voigt and Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam Fisher.  Indeed in both of these works, that which is profoundly human plays a central role in the midst of chaotic, inhumane circumstances.

Ellen Bryant Voigt

Voigt’s Kyrie is set during the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, and opens with a quotation from Alfred Crosby’s America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918: “Nothing else – no infection, no war, no famine – has ever killed so many in as short a period.”  Arguably, the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 was a largely impersonal and chaotic episode in U.S. history, involving vast numbers of the American public.  As such, it is difficult to completely comprehend the deeply personal effects of the loss of life.  Voigt, however, brilliantly draws the reader directly into the lives of people experiencing this chaotic and terrifying time period. (more…)