September
5 , 2003
Front-Page
News
Mount Holyoke garnered
much media coverage this summer. This week’s Front-Page
News presents the second half of an overview of significant College-related
stories that have appeared in recent months.
Praise and Poetry Writing in the August 3 edition of
the New York Times, reviewer Stephen Metcalf finds much
to like in Open Shutters, the latest collection of poetry
by Mary Jo Salter. “An anti-modernist in presentation, she
has nonetheless been resolutely modern in subject matter, writing
about sonograms, satellite hookups, astronauts kissing in space,”
Metcalf wrote of Salter, Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the
Humanities. “Where poets from the early part of the 20th
century—those famous category killers Yeats, Eliot, and
Pound—had employed radical technique as a way of confronting
the century’s massive dislocations, Salter’s task
has been precisely the opposite. Technology no longer displaces,
she seems to be saying, so much as it throws us together in ways
that simulate intimacy. Perhaps we need the contrast brought on
by a calm, sheer, and sometimes self-consciously antique style
of writing to highlight just how strange this postmodern condition
is.” The collection’s finest poem, Metcalf concluded,
is “Another Session,” in which the poet comes to terms
with the news of a former therapist’s death. “How
can a poetry of total formal composure contain Chernobyl, Hiroshima,
and now 9/11 without seeming maudlin or small?” Metcalf
asks. “Open Shutters extends the question further,
challenging us with the discovery that something lucid, forthright,
and fantastically undisheveled might also be sublime.”
Catching the Wave Christopher Benfey, professor of English
and codirector of the Weissman Center for Leadership, brings “a
scholar’s thoroughness, a critic’s astuteness, and
a storyteller’s sense of drama” to The Great Wave:
Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old
Japan, wrote William Deresiewicz in a review in the July
20 edition of the New York Times Book Review. Praising
Benfey’s “tact and humor,” Deresiewicz wrote,
“One can’t find too much fault with a writer who tells
us that a Japanese description of American toilets c. 1851 includes
the observation that ‘it is customary to read books in them,’
or who produces illuminations like this: ‘The collector
thrives by turning chaos into order. His patron saint is Noah—two
of each.’” The Great Wave tells the story
of “what occurred in both countries during the half-century
before World War I, Japan’s Meiji Era and America’s
Gilded Age… the emergence of a set of individuals who placed
themselves, or found themselves placed by circumstance, at the
hot edge where two very different cultures were coming into contact,”
Deresiewicz wrote. He praised Benfey for the subtlety with which
he traces the interactions among the intellectual aristocrats
of New England and their Japanese counterparts. “Bit players
in one chapter assume leading roles in the next; crucial events
return again and again, gradually accumulating significance. The
lives of certain key figures unfold across the whole arc of the
book, attaining something approaching the weight of fiction,”
he wrote. “The structure is symphonic, a symphony not only
of characters but of ideas.” The Great Wave received
favorable reviews earlier this year in the New York Review
of Books and Publisher’s Weekly.
Tiebreaker “Why do we get Dad a wallet or a tie?
Because ‘good’ fathers take care of the financial
needs of the family, and these gifts symbolize his role as the
provider. And because Dad works so hard, he needs to remember
to play, so gifts that support his favorite sport or hobby are
also very common,” wrote Nicole Gilbert ’99, ’03G,
in “Maybe Dad Doesn’t Want Another Tie,” an
op-ed column published in the June 13 edition of the Hartford
Courant. Gilbert’s column was based on her study comparing
Mother’s Day with Father’s Day and examining how the
two holidays tend to reaffirm traditional gender roles. Gilbert
found that while families tend to do more to celebrate Mother’s
Day than Father’s Day, dads tend to be more satisfied with
their special day. “ Why should it matter what families
do, what gifts they give or what feelings they have about Mother’s
Day and Father’s Day?” Gilbert wrote. “These
two occasions provide insight into what society values about motherhood
and fatherhood and reinforce normative conceptions of what ‘good’
mothers and fathers do. These values are deeply rooted in stereotypes
about masculinity and femininity, and such stereotypes are a form
of social control. We are all held accountable to normative conceptions
of masculinity and femininity, and when we contest gender, we
are often met with criticism. I am certainly not arguing for a
movement to abolish Mother’s Day and Father’s Day,
but instead hoping that one day the gifts that we give and the
ways in which we celebrate will not be as gendered.”
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