Humanities Matters

May/June 2008

Humanities Tennessee has very exciting news to report this time around. This issue focuses largely on how the humanities are affecting people across Tennessee. We have nationally recognized and state recognized winners of awards which will grow humanities content, analyses and resources from Memphis to Maryville.

Memphis Student Named National Winner of Letters About Literature Contest Sponsored by Target® and the Library of Congress

The humanities can enrich a child's life by freeing the imagination, sparking creativity and developing intellectual curiosity. Through reading, Ayesha Usmani, an eleventh grade student who attends White Station High School in Memphis, has been named one of six national winners in the annual Letters About Literature contest sponsored by Target and the Center for the Book in conjunction with the Library of Congress. In honor of Ayesha, Target will donate a $10,000 reading promotion grant to White Station High School's library. In addition, Ayesha will receive a $500 Target GiftCard.
… Read Ayesha's winning letter and find out more about Letters About Literature.

In the classroom with Suzanne Wexler, Teacher of Tennessee's two Letters About Literature National Winners

Humanities Tennessee board member Amy Dietrich recently had coffee with Suzanne Wexler, teacher of Tennessee's two (2006 and 2008) national Letters About Literature winners. Each year more than 55,000 students enter the Letters About Literature contest nationwide. Twice in the past three years, Ms. Wexler's students have taken the top honor.
… Find out how one teacher at one Tennessee high school has shaped young writers into writers of national standing.

Smithsonian Exhibit Tour Continues, Brings In Local Teachers

Our current Museum on Main Street (MoMS) traveling exhibit project, New Harmonies: Celebrating American Roots Music is well under way, wrapping up at its second site in Clinton, Tennessee, in less than a week. Take a look at the full New Harmonies itinerary and upcoming host sites.

For each of our MoMS projects, we develop a Program Bureau, or series of lecture/discussion programs related to local history available to each site free of charge. Exhibition hosts can bring any or all of the fascinating scholars on our roster to their communities for provocative, informative events.
… View a list of New Harmonies programs already scheduled.

2008 Outstanding Teacher Awards Announced

Five Tennessee teachers received Humanities Tennessee's Award of Recognition for Outstanding Teaching of the Humanities. Each teacher receives a $2,000 fellowship and a $1,500 award to purchase humanities materials and programs for their school. Our fellowship awards are unique in that they allow the teachers to pursue professional development activities of their own design. This year we have teachers travelling across New England, Europe, and Latin America.
… Find out more about this year's winning teachers.

Preview the 20th Annual Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word®

On October 10-12, Nashville will be temporary home to approximately 250 authors from across the nation. They are coming here because for twenty years tens of thousands of readers of all ages and interests have welcomed them as part of the Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word.

Since the first Festival in 1989, when President Jimmy Carter and legendary historian Shelby Foote were on the program, the goal has been each year to welcome authors from diverse backgrounds and in diverse genres, with the expectation that anyone can come to the Festival and meet an author whose work they love, or to discover an exciting new voice.
… Find out who will be at the 2008 festival.

Humanities Tennessee Announcements

Thank you to those who participated in the bookfair at Barnes & Noble bookstores by making a purchase to benefit the Southern Festival of Books and to those who came to Cool Springs to hear George Singleton on March 20 and Lynne Berry on March 22.
… Read more about events that support the SFB

We need YOU to help us continue bringing outstanding humanities programming to the public throughout Tennessee. Please consider making a donation to Humanities Tennessee now. Your tax-deductible gift to Humanities Tennessee will make a real difference in 2008 — please make a safe and secure online donation now.

Humanities Matters Reading Picks

The staff and board constantly read a wide variety of books and articles, and as part of each Humanities Matters newsletter we'll offer up some reading suggestions if you're looking for a good book. If you would like to suggest a good read to be included in Humanities Matters, email lacey@humanitiestennessee.org with the title along with a short review or why you suggest it.

  • Robert is reading Escapism, by Yi-Fu Tuan (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)
    After finishing a book that I decided not to recommend to others, I started rereading Yi-Fu Tuan's Escapism. Of the living writers I most admire, Professor Tuan may be the least known among general readers.

    A few years ago, he came to the Southern Festival of Books, and I was embarrassed by the size of his audience, though the twenty or so who came were clearly rapt admirers. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised since he's an academic geographer, published mainly (perhaps solely) by university presses. But he certainly writes for the general reader, and anyone interested in the humanities would enjoy and admire his unique and compelling analyses of our relationships to nature and place, particularly through the intermediaries of art, culture and the imagination.

    If you haven't read Tuan, starting with Escapism might be like starting to read Jane Austin by reading Emma, since it's arguably the culmination of much of his earlier work. Instead, you might start, as I did, with Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values, or with Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, or, if you're a not-too-sentimental pet lover, with Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets.

  • Melissa is reading The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano (Picador, 2007, English translation), a lusty, feverish road epic of high-minded young writers living hand to mouth, having sex, traveling the world, and sharing a passion for poetry that seems to pervade the globe, or at least Mexico City. For fans of Latin American writing, writing about writers, and a good road trip.

  • Lacey is reading Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez (Knopf, 1988), a painfully and dramatically romantic, though at times practical, story about love. García Márquez's narrative is rarely linear and he weaves his characters in and out of time as if it were nearly inconsequential. He fully engages the reader's senses — smell, sight, taste, touch — throughout, providing a sensual journey from beginning to end. A terrific writer and brilliant storyteller.

  • Serenity is reading A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, by Tony Horwitz (Henry Holt and Co., 2008)
    Tony Horwitz, a former New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, focuses his new book on the period of exploration between Columbus' voyage of 1492 and the settlement of Jamestown in 1607. A lifelong student of history, the author was surprised at his own ignorance of this period, and at the perpetuation of myths at the expense of reality (i.e. Ponce de Leon). Horwitz's years of research and travel are evident, and his writing style here, as in his other books, is smart and engaging.

    He also maintains the trademark New Yorker talent of the perfectly placed quote, rich in irony.

    Horwitz's description of two different bands of heavily-armored Spanish conquistadors, bungling through the prairies of what would become Kansas while searching for lost cities of gold, is strikingly vivid. The book is particularly effective when directly linking the lives of American Indians today with the ominous crawl of Europeans across the continent 500 years ago. The concluding chapter, a meditation on the significance of myths and their role in the development of the American persona, carries a different tone, more thoughtful, and is a fitting philosophical ending to a fascinating read.

  • Paul is reading Where Dead Voices Gather, by Nick Tosches (Little, Brown, 2001)
    When I read the author describe this work as "a mad labor for which no audience exists," I figured it must be right up my alley. The book is, on the surface, a biography of Emmett Miller, an obscure southern minstrel singer in the 1920s and 30s. In tracking down Miller's story, the author discusses the foundations and foundational myths of popular music and the intersections of country, blues, Tin Pan Alley, and rock and roll.

  • Tim is reading The Lime Twig, by John Hawkes (New Directions, 1961)
    If Jorge Luis Borges had adapted a screenplay written by Dick Francis and David Lynch, he might have come up with something just like this. There's a plot about stealing a racehorse, but there's not much like a traditional linear narrative in this disarming classic of post-modern American fiction. Part heist-thriller, part full-blown nightmare poetry, The Lime Twig demands that you pay attention. Hawkes, most well-known for novels such as The Beetle Leg and The Blood Oranges, tells this story with newspaper clippings, broken chronologies, and an omniscient narrator that pauses, at times, to address the reader in first person. In the end, the novel seems to intend more on "feeling" than on "meaning," largely because Hawkes is such a master of language that he knows how to create atmospheres of dread and anxiety with the weight of words.

  • Emily is reading The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones, by Helen Hemphill (Front Street, 2008)
    Born on the day Abraham Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation, Prometheus Jones is an African American cowboy headed from Texas to Deadwood, South Dakota. Hemphill is one of my favorite authors writing for young adults, so I'm excited to be reading her third novel.

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