Duke - Jul - Aug 2006 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/issue/jul-aug-2006 en German 173/English 146/Literature 151E - Fairy Tales: Grimms to Disney https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/german-173english-146literature-151e-fairy-tales-grimms-disney <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width:98%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <table align="right" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="10" style="width:5%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Frank L. Borchardt" src="/issues/070806/images/lg_666borch.jpg" style="height:410px; width:250px" /> <p>Frank L. Borchardt</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>Fairy tales take the world inside us and push it into the outside world, so we're really looking at ourselves," says Frank L. Borchardt, a professor of Germanic languages and literature who teaches "Fairy Tales: Grimms to Disney." In "Beauty and the Beast," for example, the Beast's repulsive exterior reflects his inner anguish. His eventual transformation represents self-realization and redemption , themes that have permeated fairy tales for generations.</p> <p>"Beauty and the Beast" transmits the most important moral in the fairy-tale genre, according to Borchardt: "to have a good heart." Although goodness is usually rewarded with love, wealth, or power, "wickedness is very severely punished," he says. There's "lots of sadism and violence, lots of dismemberment" in fairy tales.</p> <p>Although many of his students have grown up with Walt Disney versions of these stories, Borchardt reintroduces his students to the heroes and heroines, mischief-makers and evildoers of their childhood in the original, tried-and-true versions. "My approach is wildly old-fashioned."</p> <p>He challenges his students to explore various versions and interpretations of the classic tales by contrasting modern critiques and retellings with classic Grimm brothers fairy tales, arguably the most influential works of the genre.</p> <p>The Grimms "brought prestige to this literature," says Borchardt. The brothers collected fables and folk tales from around the world and compiled them into one comprehensive compilation, The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, 210 stories in all. Many of the stories are cleaned up and Christianized versions of traditional folk tales, Borchardt says.</p> <p>Princesses and princes, frogs and wolves, witches and goblins have their place in every culture. Fairy tales transcend boundaries of language, space, and time to convey motifs and morals that speak to every society. Ultimately, Borchardt hopes that by taking his course, his students cultivate "an abiding affection for the stories and for this kind of storytelling from all over the world."</p> <p><strong>Prerequisites</strong></p> <p>None</p> <p><strong>Readings</strong></p> <p>Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces<br /> Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales<br /> Christopher Vogler, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers<br /> Stuart Voytilla, Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films</p> <p><strong>Professor</strong></p> <p>Frank L. Borchardt is professor of Germanic languages and literature and professor of education. From 1983 to 1997 he led the projects that produced the CALIS (Computer Assisted Language Instructional System) markup language for instructional exercises and its successor WinCALIS. He was executive director of the Computer Assisted Language Instructional Consortium (CALICO) and editor of the CALICO Journal from 1991 to 1997. He teaches language and literature in the German department and the occasional educational technologies seminar in the program in education.</p> <p><strong>Assignments</strong></p> <p>Weekly online postings<br /> Become an expert on three designated Grimm fairy tales<br /> Original fairy tale of 800-1,000 words<br /> Bound portfolio including all work from the course</p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <!-- #EndEditable --></div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2006-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, August 1, 2006</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/emily-znamierowski-07" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Emily Znamierowski &#039;07</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/jul-aug-2006" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jul - Aug 2006</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Tue, 01 Aug 2006 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500184 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/german-173english-146literature-151e-fairy-tales-grimms-disney#comments Rocking & Swapping Stories https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/rocking-swapping-stories <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Any connoisseur of post-1950s American popular music would welcome the rare opportunity to sit at the feet of Spooner Oldham and Dan Penn, listening to them perform their classic songs and tell stories about their songwriting experiences.</p><p>On a Saturday afternoon in late April, some 200 appreciative listeners were treated to that experience in the Griffith Film Theater at Duke's Bryan Center, where the two Southern soul-music legends sat onstage looking relaxed and pleased at the warm reception. Resembling a goateed Harry Dean Stanton in a gray sports jacket and red sneakers, Oldham was in easy reach of a compact electric piano. Penn, a jovial ringer for Stanton's fellow actor John Goodman, wore overalls and cradled an acoustic guitar. The two aren't nearly as well-known as their songs--"I'm Your Puppet," "Do Right Woman," "Sweet Inspiration," and others they wrote for 1960s soul singers like Aretha Franklin and Solomon Burke--but they're clearly at home before an audience.</p><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header" style="width: 252px; float: right;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 252px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_46532butlermccorkleblou.jpg" alt="Making conversation: Algonquin Books editor Shannon Ravenel, left, moderates discussion on Southern literature with, clockwise, writers Robert Olen Butler, Jill McCorkle, and Roy Blount Jr" width="252" height="369" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Making conversation: Algonquin Books editor Shannon Ravenel, left, moderates discussion on Southern literature with, clockwise, writers Robert Olen Butler, Jill McCorkle, and Roy Blount Jr. Jon Gardiner</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="articletitle">Their companion onstage was North Carolina novelist Michael Parker--wiry, dark-haired, and a generation younger. He was there to prompt Oldham and Penn with questions and requests and also because the occasion for their appearance was, in fact, a literary event--this spring's 2006 North Carolina Festival of the Book.</p><p>"I'm not a musician or a music writer," Parker said by way of introduction, "but I grew up with the music of Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham."</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 250; float: right;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_496bookfest4.jpg" alt="Ann Patchett" width="250" height="166" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-credit">Chris Hildreth</p></div></div></div></div><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_4996book65.jpg" alt="writer Pearl Cleage" width="250" height="374" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-credit">Les Todd</p></div></div></div><br /><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_4976bookfestival4.jpg" alt="playwright Craig Lucas" width="250" height="374" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-credit">Chris Hildreth. From top, Ann Patchett, writer Pearl Cleage, playwright Craig Lucas</p></div></div></div></div></div></div><p>Not only did he grow up listening to their songs and other classic Southern soul tunes, he added, but their kind of music helped inspire his latest book,<span class="pubtitle"> If You Want Me to Stay</span>, "a novel about an Eastern North Carolina white boy who loves black music, and particularly R & B." He read a pertinent passage of dialogue in which the protagonist's mentally unstable father critically expounds on his preference for Southern soul music over the Motown version of R & B.</p><p>Then, barely able to conceal an ardent fan's enthusiasm, Parker questioned the duo about their careers. "Tell me about how y'all wrote 'Cry Like a Baby,' " he requested, referring to the tune that became the second hit for the Box Tops, a short-lived Memphis rock band.</p><p>"I was about to move to Memphis," Oldham obligingly recalled. "Dan had produced 'The Letter,' by the Box Tops, and he said, 'Let's write a song for the Box Tops.' " They got together in a Memphis recording studio in the morning, Oldham said, and worked all day and into the night. "On this particular night, we had about ten titles that went into the garbage can."</p><p>Penn picked up the story: "We were about to call it a night, and we went across the street to Porky's Barbeque, at five in the morning. We couldn't even buy a buzz. Everything was just flat. So we were about to order at Porky's, and Spooner put his head on the table and said, 'I could just cry like a baby.'</p><p>"I said, 'What did you say?!'</p><p>"And we headed right back across the street. By the time we got there, I had the first line. We wrote the song in about twelve minutes, while the [audiotape] reel was going on. And I told Spooner, 'I'm not leaving this building.' It just felt so good! And the band came in the next day: 'Yeah! We've got something to cut.' It was a million-seller, a number-two hit."</p><p>The elusive, unpredictable, and sometimes startling nature of artistic inspiration was a topic that came up often at the Festival of the Book. This free, weeklong extravaganza of contemporary American letters--and a surprising amount of music--brought an audience of more than 11,000 to Duke and other Durham locations at the end of April. The program consisted of thirty-nine events and involved more than eighty writers, including high-profile authors Pat Conroy, Kaye Gibbons, Barbara Kingsolver, and Tom Wolfe. Other well-known participants included writer-humorist Roy Blount Jr., cartoonist-turned-novelist Doug Marlette, poet C.K. Williams, and political biographer Richard Reeves.</p><p>Parker's appearance with Oldham and Penn was among eight festival events that featured musicians, singer-songwriters, and other writers for whom music is a daily creative practice or a source of special interest. Festival participants with music careers included songwriting singer Mary Chapin Carpenter and legendary North Carolina indy-rock icons Don Dixon, Mitch Easter, and Chris Stamey. (Dixon and Easter produced R.E.M.'s first album, and Stamey was a founding member of the dBs, a pioneering post-punk band.)</p><p>Music was included as an integral component of the festival because it's an important touchstone in contemporary literature. Although writing is a solitary activity, writers' ideas and inspirations generally come from sources outside themselves, and music turns out to be a potent source for many writers. In a session with essayist Hal Crowther on "Politics, Music, and their Intersection," popular-music writer Peter Guralnick--author of music-themed books including the recently published biography <span class="pubtitle">Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke</span>--helped explain the literary fascination with music when he said, "Music is the one thing, perhaps, in which we can place some hope."</p><p>Guralnick recalled a conversation he once had with Bob Dylan during which Dylan wanted to compare notes about writing and what inspires it. Guralnick said that his own work as a writer amounts to an ongoing search for something he can believe in, and that he finds it in the music of Sam Cooke, Elvis Presley, Sleepy LaBeef, Robert Johnson, and others. Artists like these stand out because of the lofty goals they've set for themselves, Guralnick said, and their talent tends to emerge "to the utter disbelief and incredulity of the people around them." Blues legend Robert Johnson's guitar-playing was unexceptional when he left home, distraught after the death of his young wife. When he reappeared two years later he played like a genius, giving birth to the legend that he had sold his soul to the devil. Guralnick said that what draws him to figures like Johnson is "the way in which inspiration flowers into something inexplicable."</p><p>Inspiration was also on the minds of Carpenter, Gibbons, and Marlette in their discussion of "Creative Process" in Page Auditorium--a session in which Carpenter also performed some of her songs.</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 580; float: none;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_5656crowds21.jpg" alt="Worth the wait: high-school student Margo Schall, above, studies for Advanced Placement test while in line to hear author Tom Wolfe" width="580" height="252" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Worth the wait: high-school student Margo Schall, above, studies for Advanced Placement test while in line to hear author Tom Wolfe. Megan Morr</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>"People want to know, 'What is a literary life? How does that go?'" Gibbons said. "The secret is that it costs nothing; it's all about watching and listening to what's around you." Carpenter agreed, adding, "You never know where inspiration comes from. It could be just around the corner."</p><p>When Marlette asked her how she went about writing a song, Carpenter said that she usually writes the music first and later composes the lyrics. Then she immediately recalled an exception: "When I lived in D.C. [after college], I was driving around the beltway, stuck in traffic on a glorious spring day. The sky was Carolina blue, and I had my sunroof open and was looking up at the sky. And where I wished I was was driving down the two-lane highway that runs from Norfolk to the Outer Banks. And I started to think about what I would see on either side of the road." That fantasy, she said, gave rise to the lines that make up her song "I'm a Town."</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 252; float: right;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_476nccu43.jpg" alt="poet Quincy Troupe" width="250" height="374" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-credit">Chris Hildreth</p></div></div></div></div><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_556bookfest7.jpg" alt="musician Spooner Oldham on keyboard" width="250" height="166" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-credit">Chris Hildreth</p></div></div></div> <br /><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_4976bookfestival65.jpg" alt="writer Elizabeth Spencer" width="250" height="166" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-credit">Chris Hildreth. From top, poet Quincy Troupe, musician Spooner Oldham on keyboard, writer Elizabeth Spencer.</p></div></div></div></div></div></div><p>"The lyrics came first, and the music didn't come until much later," she said, making for a perfect segue into her performance of the song.</p><p>At another Griffith Theater event, Dixon and Easter picked up electric guitars to join guitar-slinging novelist Madison Smartt Bell (also on vocals)†and poet Wyn Cooper (spoken word and tambourine) in performing songs written by Bell and Cooper. (The songs are featured on their CD Forty Words for Fear, produced by Dixon and recorded at Easter's Fidelitorium Studio in Kernersville, North Carolina.) Between performances, Cooper told the story of the fortuitous way in which one of his poems inspired a few Los Angeles musicians and became a hit song.</p><p>"When Sheryl Crow was making her first album, the guys in her band didn't like her lyrics for one song they were recording," Cooper said. During a break in the session, the musicians went around the corner to a secondhand bookstore, where their casual browsing turned up one of Cooper's books, he said. "They liked this one poem in it, called 'Fun,' and they decided to get Sheryl Crow to sing this poem with the music they had," he explained. "They dropped a few of my words, and they set the song in Los Angeles. And they called me on the phone and said, 'We'd love to use your poem. Is that okay with you?' "</p><p>The resulting recording became Crow's breakout hit, "All I Wanna Do." But at the time of the phone call, Cooper recalled, smiling, no one knew who Sheryl Crow was. "And I almost said, 'You don't have to pay me.' "</p><p>The music-themed sessions exemplified the festival's emphasis on the interactive, crossover dimension of literature. Other themes explored at the festival included race relations, writers' relationships with their families and their native regions, making literary use of historical sources, and culture's influence on contemporary poetry. A few writers made solo appearances, but most appeared in conversational pairings or small groups focused on particular themes of special interest to each participant. "Fiction Born from the Legacy of Racial Violence in the South" was the topic of a conversation between novelists Lewis Nordan and Olympia Vernon, moderated by historian Timothy Tyson Ph.D. '94, author of Blood Done Sign My Name. Science-fiction writers Samuel R. Delany and John Kessell conversed about their genre as a platform for raising issues involving race, sex, and politics.</p><p>Some of the discussions were among writers and other individuals who were meeting for the first time, while others were among writers who had longstanding relationships. Robert Olen Butler and his wife, Elizabeth Dewberry--who met after both had established themselves as published novelists--talked about "Falling in Love Through Books." Allan Gurganus and his former student Ann Patchett--both novelists--discussed teaching young writers. And President Richard H. Brodhead, a literary scholar and author, moderated a discussion between two of his former Yale University students--poet Elizabeth Alexander and novelist Tom Perotta.</p><p>Also among participants who knew each other well prior to the festival were Conroy and Marlette, whose discussion in Page Auditorium was moderated by their friend Bill Ferris, director of UNC-Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South, and titled "The Lessons of a Decades-long Friendship." During that session, Marlette recalled coming across lists of words and ideas in Conroy's notebooks. "I noticed that every word was capitalized," he said. "That's the thing that artists have to learn--to uppercase their experience, to say, 'This counts.' " Good writers transform quotidian experience, he said. "The more ordinary it is, the more extraordinary it becomes. That's what the artist does."</p><p>That event was one of thirty-four that took place on the festival's last two days, Saturday and Sunday, when there were often two or more scheduled events going on simultaneously or overlapping by a half hour or so. Because it was physically impossible to attend every event, festival-goers sometimes had to make tough choices. The session with Oldham, Penn, and Parker, for example, began at 3:30 on Saturday, as did Wolfe's talk in Page Auditorium, on the topic "What's Southern Today." Attendance at the former event undoubtedly suffered from the formidable competition.</p><p>Parker was good-humored about the scheduling conflict. "I saw the line for Tom Wolfe," he said, referring to the substantial crowd queued up outside Page a few minutes earlier. "But he can't sing."</p><p>The 2006 North Carolina Festival of the Book was the fourth gathering in a series initiated in 1998 by the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC-Chapel Hill, which was host for the first one. The North Carolina Literary Festival, as that inaugural celebration was called, was created and run by Rachel Davies '72, A.M. '89, now director of education and travel for Duke's Office of Alumni Affairs.</p><p>Davies' festival highlighted Southern writers and those with connections to the South through family, work, or school. Participants included Annie Dillard, Rita Dove (then U.S. Poet Laureate), John Grisham, Reynolds Price '55, and Derek Walcott. It was deemed successful, and a second festival was held in 2002, also at UNC-Chapel Hill, under the auspices of UNC's library, with assistance from its counterparts at Duke and North Carolina State University. N.C. State's library organized and hosted the third North Carolina Literary Festival in 2004. Continuing on the biennial schedule that had been informally set by the last two gatherings, Duke University Libraries oversaw the planning for this spring's festival, which began in April 2005 with the hiring of Aaron Greenwald as the festival's program director.</p><p>Greenwald, a native of northern California, was a newcomer to North Carolina when he applied for the job, but he was well qualified. His previous experience included producing and coordinating country-music videos in Nashville and directing special programs at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. He also helped organize two New Yorker festivals and the Toyota Comedy Festival, the largest comedy festival in the U.S. at the time. In the year leading up to the 2006 North Carolina book festival, Greenwald came up with the underlying concept, recruited sponsors to provide the necessary funds (a little more than $250,000), and booked all of the writers, musicians, and other festival participants.</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 580; float: none;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_56king7.jpg" alt="Creative energy: literature fans pack Duke Chapel to hear Barbara Kingsolver's keynote address" width="580" height="237" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Creative energy: literature fans pack Duke Chapel to hear Barbara Kingsolver's keynote address. Les Todd</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>"I felt that the central goal was to have a festival for the community," Greenwald says. "I wanted to rip the festival from its academic moorings and have it be more public-friendly. I wanted it to be entertaining and decipherable for people who aren't academics. I wanted to get writers who are important, but who would also be able to draw an audience."</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 252; float: right;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_4996book14.jpg" alt="Tayari Jones" width="250" height="374" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-credit">Les Todd</p></div></div></div></div><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_496conroy.jpg" alt="Pat Conroy" width="250" height="166" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-credit">Megan Morr</p></div></div></div><br /><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_556bookfest31.jpg" alt="musician Dan Penn" width="250" height="166" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-credit">Chris Hildreth. From top, novelists Tayari Jones, Pat Conroy, and musician Dan Penn</p></div></div></div></div></div></div><p>To solidify the public-friendly emphasis and further establish a distinct identity for this year's festival, Greenwald decided to give it a new name. Most literary festivals are driven by publishers intent on promoting writers with new books to sell, he explains. "We felt that we had to think of a different approach. I wanted this to be a more finely curated festival. I wanted to find some different ways that writers could talk about their work and articulate the passion behind their work to an audience."</p><p>It was the latter concern that inspired him to devise the strategy of teaming up writers who know each other or whose respective bodies of work engage related themes and appeal to similar audiences. It's an approach he'd seen effectively employed in a few sessions at the two New Yorker festivals he had helped plan, but he didn't know of any literary festivals that had used it as a central organizing principle.</p><p>Greenwald says he chose to preserve the festival's predominantly regional focus in part for practical reasons stemming from its geographical location, and in part to maintain something of the tradition established by the first three festivals in the series. But he also takes an enthusiastic personal interest in contemporary Southern writing.</p><p>"I think there is a diversity and breadth of Southern literature that is often not explored," he says, "and that in some ways the mission of this festival is to think about all of the kinds of writers we have in the South and to find the very best of them."</p><p>In homage to the archetypal Southern storyteller, forever fixed in the American imagination as an eccentric character installed in a rocking chair on a front porch, Greenwald adopted a festival logo featuring a row of rocking chairs in varied designs and colors, hinting at the emphasis on diversity. At the suggestion of Ilene Nelson, Duke Libraries' director of communications, he also arranged for most of the festival participants to sit in comfortable, green-painted, wooden rocking chairs during their public conversations. (Greenwald says he thought this was a corny idea at first but concedes that it worked, helping to maintain the relaxed, conversational tone he was aiming for.) Three of the rockers were raffled off on the final day, and the rest were given to selected participants.</p><p>One festival participant who went home with a rocking chair was Shannon Ravenel, an editor at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. She moderated a ninety-minute session on Friday evening in which Blount, Butler, and Jill McCorkle discussed Southern writing and Algonquin's New Stories from the South series, which Ravenel inaugurated and edited for twenty years. "I told everybody at the beginning that our mission for the evening was to define Southern literature by nine o'clock," Ravenel says. "We failed to do that, but we had a good discussion." The only defining characteristic of Southern literature they were all able to agree on, she says, was that "it had to have chickens in it."</p><p>Ravenel, who attended all three of the previous North Carolina festivals and has been to many other literary festivals across the country, says that this was the only one organized as a series of conversations. She commended Greenwald for bringing "a whole different vision" to the occasion. The North Carolina Festival of the Book was a successful attempt "to relate literature to our experience--through music, news, [and] politics and through issues like social change in the South. It was lively, intelligent, and totally unexpected--a very unusual way to handle a literary festival. I expected it to be lively and interesting, but I had no idea it would be as good as it was."</p><p>Greenwald also pronounced himself pleased with the results. "Every single author was gracious and happy," he says. "And how could you not be? It was a big, free festival, and you were there with your friends. It was a beautiful day on the Duke campus, and there was a whole community of bright people coming to your event. I think we really honored writers in a responsible way."</p><p>"In some ways the festival had exactly the feel I wanted it to have," he continues. "It had a relaxed, North Carolina feel, while at the same time it was absolutely a world-class festival. You see that sometimes around here when it's warm outside, and it's the right performer, and people feel that they're among friends. That doesn't happen in New York, and I don't think it happens in San Francisco, but it can happen here."</p><p>The official theme of the festival was "It's About the Story." But it was the unofficial theme that was clearly on the minds of many participants over the course of the week. In talking about the mysterious origins of inspiration, the varied forms it can take, and how it can be accessed, they all agreed that it can't be forced or faked. They also agreed that it can come from anywhere--often when least expected. The writer's main job is being receptive.</p><p>Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham seemed to be emphasizing this point when, during the musical portion of their appearance at this inspired gathering, they played and sang one of their more widely known songs.</p><span class="text"></span></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2006-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, August 1, 2006</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/lg_5656crowds21.jpg" width="620" height="269" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/tom-patterson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Tom Patterson</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/jul-aug-2006" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jul - Aug 2006</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">This spring&#039;s North Carolina Festival of the Book drew 11,000 people eager to listen towriters,musicians, and other kindred spirits talk about ideas and creative processes.</div></div></section> Tue, 01 Aug 2006 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500202 at https://alumni.duke.edu Practicing Justice https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/practicing-justice <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>A given: By most Americans' standards, Ali Hamza Ahmad Sulayman al Bahlul is probably a bad guy. To believe that requires only a certain perspective--namely, one that does not favor the bloody imposition of an Islamist theocracy--and a very short leap of faith, barely more than a hop, to span the gap between what al Bahlul admits and what the U.S. Department of Defense alleges.</p><p>He concedes that he is a member of Al Qaeda, and he has declared Americans, both soldiers and civilians, his enemies. The U.S. military, meanwhile, alleges that al Bahlul was a confidant of Osama bin Laden himself, training in his camps and sleeping in his guesthouses and producing his propaganda videos. In late 2001, he reputedly worked as a bodyguard for bin Laden. Given all that, if a grunt from the 10th Mountain Division clambering around Afghanistan had put a few rounds into his scrawny frame, no one would have much noticed, except for al Bahlul's wife and kids in his native Yemen and perhaps the White House press office. People, good and bad and indifferent, die on battlefields as a matter of routine.</p><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header" style="width: 400; float: right;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 400px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_ut1537.jpg" alt="Camp X-Ray: U.S. soldiers escort Guantánamo detainee " width="400" height="344" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Camp X-Ray: U.S. soldiers escort Guantánamo detainee. © Reuters/CORBIS</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="articletitle">But al Bahlul was captured. By whom and exactly when and where are not clear--none of those details has been made public--but by early 2002, he was in the custody of the U.S. military and packed off to the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, an extra-territorial spit of sand on the Cuban shore. He has been held there ever since, one of hundreds of foreign nationals accused of being enemy combatants in an undeclared war against an undefined adversary. The only thing exceptional about him is that he is one of the very few Guantánamo detainees (ten as of July) to have been charged with anything--specifically, conspiracy to commit war crimes, a novel indictment that sounds ominous but is, in fact, legally amorphous. He may be innocent of that particular offense, but, still, in the roster of war-on-terror players, most people would probably count him as one of the bad guys.</p><p>For two dozen Duke students helping to defend al Bahlul and others through the law school's Guantánamo Defense Clinic, that detail is irrelevant. Take the long view; see history as it unfolds. Al Bahlul might eventually become mildly renowned, at least among a certain niche of lawyers, a precedent of one sort or another to be inked into textbooks and footnoted in briefs, his name shorthand for a piece of legal architecture, like Miranda or Kelo. There will be others immortalized out of Guantánamo, too--a Hamdan and a Hamdi, perhaps a Hicks--yet not for anything they might have done, but for how the scaffolds of the law were shifted and realigned around them, strengthened or weakened under the weight of the cases.</p><p>When they began in early 2002, the detentions at Guantánamo Bay raised magnificent issues of law and diplomacy, of international warfare and domestic politics, of how the courts and the Constitution would be tweaked and twisted in waging a war on terror. For almost five years, the White House and the Pentagon and their legions of lawyers have been creating new rules and procedures to contain a supposedly new threat. And with them have come the inevitable questions: Can the president indefinitely detain a foreign national in an offshore prison simply by labeling him an enemy combatant? Can that alleged combatant plead his case in federal court? When? Is the scary-sounding conspiracy to commit war crimes even illegal? More fundamentally, is any of this--the detentions, the definitions, the suspension of international conventions--legal?</p><p>It is certainly unprecedented. "We have not tried to carve out a little enclave that sits outside the reach of international law before," says Duke law professor Scott Silliman, who served twenty-five years as a military attorney. "Is what we're doing flying in the face of what we've done historically? The answer is yes."</p><p>Few of these questions have yet been definitively answered (though the Supreme Court addressed some of them in late June) and likely won't be for years. Yet since October, students working under Duke law professor Madeline Morris have been helping to frame some of the arguments, assisting the military lawyers who are defending al Bahlul and the others. Their assignment: "Do a ton of research, go out and read twenty cases," as Greg Sergi, who just finished his second year of law school, puts it.</p><p>Of course, Sergi could have done a ton of research in, say, an education-law clinic, where there are decades of precedents and reams of case law defining the parameters. In the Guantánamo detentions, though, there are only scraps of treaties and international conventions, remnants of dated military protocols, and fragments of federal doctrine, all of which need to be sorted through and stitched together into a coherent body of law. "And that's what makes it interesting," Sergi says. "Or at least historic."</p><p>Yes, that's it, historic. "This will be written about for decades," says Tom Fleener, the Army major representing al Bahlul. "This is so important for our legal history and the makeup of our country. It'll be like the Japanese internment camps, where we'll look back and say, 'Oh my God, I can't believe we did that as a country.' "</p><p>A fair and obvious question: If the legal issues surrounding Guantánamo Bay are so historically freighted, why are students tinkering with them?</p><p>The answer isn't complicated. For one, lawyers like Fleener--part of a lonely cadre of military men who are defending alleged terrorists--need the help. In the Guantánamo skirmishes, they are badly outgunned. The policy of detaining alleged enemy combatants was set by presidential fiat. The practices that flow from that policy are set by civilians in the White House and the Department of Defense. The prosecutorial team alone has some twenty military attorneys, with a concomitantly enormous support staff. Moreover, whatever rules have been laid down so far are still in flux: Some have been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, and others can change at the whim of the president or Congress.</p><p>To take one example, hundreds of detainees represented by private lawyers, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and other legal-aid groups had filed habeas corpus petitions in federal courts to challenge their incarceration. The decisions were mixed, but, in any case, no one got sprung. Then, in November 2005, with 186 of the cases still pending, Congress severely limited detainees' access to the courts, declaring that they could only appeal the final decision of a military tribunal. In a quick floor vote on the so-called Graham-Levin Amendment--formally known as the Detainee Treatment Act--one of the more promising avenues of defense was obliterated. (Whether Graham-Levin applied retroactively to petitions already filed was among the issues argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in March in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Arguments in that case also addressed the more basic questions of whether the president has the authority to establish military commissions, and whether any parts of the Geneva Conventions apply to the detainees.)</p><p>Fast forward to June: The Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld said Graham-Levin was not retroactive, meaning those habeas cases already filed are pending again. More important, the Court ruled that the commissions set up to try the ten formally charged with crimes violated both the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. On the other hand, the Justices, in a 5-3 opinion, specifically said they weren't questioning the government's authority to hold detainees "for the duration of active hostilities." The full impact of that ruling has not yet been gauged.</p><p>Against all that--the White House, the Department of Defense, Congress--the Office of the Chief Defense Counsel had, before Duke law students joined the team, only four lawyers and four paralegals to wrestle with numbingly complicated cases. "Military commission law combines the very worst aspects of federal law, combined with international law, combined with military law," Fleener says. "You get sort of this secretive, incestuous nature of military law, combined with some of the harsher aspects of federal law involving access to evidence and discovery and things like that, combined with all the difficult logistical challenges but none of the benefits of international law." Navigating such a maze required more bodies and brains than the military had supplied.</p><p>So why Duke? "That's all because of Madeline Morris," says Catinca Tabacaru, who will be entering her third year of law school in the fall.</p><div class="media-header"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_5396guantanamolaw47.jpg" alt="Expert guidance: defense lawyer Lt. Col. Bryan Boylesmeets with Guantánamo Defense Clinic" width="580" height="257" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Expert guidance: defense lawyer Lt. Col. Bryan Boylesmeets with Guantánamo Defense Clinic. Jon Gardiner</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>Professor Morris is an expert on international criminal law, both teaching in the classroom and practicing around the globe: senior legal counsel to the prosecutor in the Special Court of Sierra Leone (for which she also ran a law-school clinic), Advisor on Justice to the President of Rwanda, co-convener of the Inter-African Cooperation on Truth and Justice program. More to the point, she also for several years ran a clinic to assist prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) who were trying Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic and other alleged war criminals at The Hague. And she has contacts in the U.S military, including as a consultant and adjunct faculty member of the U.S. Naval Justice School.</p><p>With that reputation, she was asked by Colonel Dwight Sullivan, the Marine Corps officer who heads the Guantánamo defense office, to act as an adviser, and the clinic was born. "Madeline has done some excellent work here at Duke long before the Guantánamo clinic," Silliman says. "I suspect we're unique in providing this function. No question she's done a wonderful job, and her students love her."</p><p>The Guantánamo Defense Clinic was formed in October with six students, then expanded the following semester to twenty-four, all but one of whom were law students. (David Chick, the Rotary World Peace Fellow in the Sanford Institute of Public Policy's Program in International Development Policy, is the exception, though he was a practicing lawyer in his native Australia.) There is a weekly classroom component, but there is also hands-on lawyering. The students are divided into five teams focusing on specific cases, and defense lawyers--Fleener, Marine Corps Major Michael Mori, and Sullivan--have met both with the full clinic and, more frequently, with their assigned teams. They brainstorm together, and the students do their student tasks, researching laws and procedures and cases, writing briefs and memos, critiquing and collaborating as they go along.</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 350; float: right;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 350px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_6214hamerman361.jpg" alt="Professor Madeline Morris spearheads students' legal efforts " width="350" height="233" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Professor Madeline Morris spearheads students' legal efforts. Don Hammerman</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>Yet the clinic, because of the nature of Guantánamo, is far from a simple exercise in the mechanics of established law. Morris, her students, and the military lawyers are all helping to untangle an ad hoc set of rules and laws. If Al Qaeda and related terror groups are truly a new kind of enemy and if the precedents of military justice don't delineate a clear path, they still need to be treated under some proper rules. What needs to be sorted out is a "law that's sustainable in a democracy with checks and balances," Morris says. "Being doctrinaire won't help--not by trying to shove them into an existing category, and not by trying to assert that, because no category exists, no rules do or should apply."</p><p>Her students, too, recognize the stakes. "It all goes to the same questions of why are they being held, and are the procedures fair?" says Sergi. "The way the system is now set up and the way it now works, you have to have a lot of faith that the president and the military won't abuse the enormous power they have."</p><p>Coalter Lathrop '91, J.D. '06 is more blunt. "All these things they said about Saddam Hussein, all these things they said about human-rights-violating regimes around the world--we're doing the exact same thing," he says. "We're a nation of laws. It's not that these guys might not be guilty--it's that this isn't how we prove it. We don't decide these things by presidential fiat." For him, the clinic ultimately comes down to a simple premise: "Let's do this," he says, "because the world is watching."</p><p>And that--the magnitude of it all--is also part of the attraction. "You get to be part of something really big," says Tabacaru. She pauses. "Some of the things I know-- it's so cool." She laughs when she says that, a reminder, after she's spent an hour dissecting all manner of complicated issues, that she is still a student. Which gets back to the original question: Why are students, even students handpicked by an acclaimed expert in international law like Morris, tinkering with this stuff?</p><p>Because they're as good as anyone else, that's why. "Some people might say, 'Ah, they're law students, they don't have any experience," says Mori, the Marine Corps officer. "But nobody has any experience in this. In the military, we have a saying that sometimes it's easier to teach someone without any experience how to shoot, because they don't have any bad habits."</p><p>Fleener agrees. "When you're trying to examine a system that doesn't have any precedent, where there's nothing binding, and everything is essentially being made up, it's so much help having law students involved," he says. "They're not indebted to any particular system. They don't have blinders on. So an issue that would escape us as attorneys, they're able to clue in on and do a much better job of researching than we would.</p><p>"Without Duke Law School and Madeline Morris providing students to assist us--well, the odds aren't fair at all, but we would be horribly outnumbered rather than just being really badly outnumbered."</p><p>A point that should be apparent but needs to be said anyway: No one at Duke's law school is trying to loose terrorists on the world.</p><p>The students are one step removed from any actual suspects, to begin with; their primary client, as it were, is Colonel Sullivan's office. Second, the policy of holding enemy combatants without charge indefinitely likely makes acquittals irrelevant. No one, for instance, believes al Bahlul is going home to Yemen any time soon. "It's heads you win, tails I lose," says Fleener. "If he's convicted, he goes to Guantánamo. If he's acquitted, he goes to Guantánamo. If the military commissions are disbanded, he goes to Guantánamo."</p><p>"If you think you're going to get your client off, and your client walks--if that's your measurement of success--yeah, you're going to get frustrated," says Lathrop.</p><p>Yet it is a fundamental premise of American jurisprudence that every defendant deserves a vigorous defense, even the serial killers and, arguably, the alleged terrorists held offshore. That's what the clinic helps provide. In their small teams, the students research narrow points of law, drawing from antique military commission rules (the last active commissions were in the 1950s), federal criminal procedure, international laws, anything that might apply. "Think laterally and look broadly," is how Chick describes their mission. "And see if we can find something we can use."</p><p>Chick, for instance, is one of four students assisting Major Mori, who is representing David Hicks, the so-called Australian Taliban who was captured by Northern Alliance fighters in Afghanistan in late 2001 and has been held in Guantánamo ever since. He is charged with three crimes, all of which raise complicated questions on their own: conspiracy, which can be construed so broadly as to be virtually undefendable on its face; attempted murder by an unprivileged belligerent, which suggests some belligerents do have a legal right to shoot GIs; and aiding the enemy, which suggests that a non-U.S. citizen has an obligation to shun America's enemies.</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_gtmo444sims12across.jpg" alt="Home base: familiar label, unfamiliar setting for U.S. troops " width="580" height="297" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Home base: familiar label, unfamiliar setting for U.S. troops. Christopher Sims '95</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>Mori, and surely Hicks, would prefer never to face trial. So the team thought laterally, looked broadly. His defense--his gambit, really--was to get out of Guantánamo by using British law and diplomatic precedent. In 2003, after Hicks had been captured, Britain extended citizenship to the children of British women born outside of the United Kingdom. Because Hicks' mother is English, he qualifies. A British court granted his petition over the objections of the government, and an appeals court upheld the decision. It was a smart approach, considering that every other British national had been released from Guantánamo as a diplomatic nicety. In late June, however, the U.K. said it would not press for Hicks' release.</p><p>Al Bahlul, meanwhile, is gumming up his proceedings by insisting he wants to represent himself. Any American in his position would correctly consider that a fundamental right guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. Even despots--Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic--are allowed to defend themselves.</p><p>"Everybody gets to," says Fleener, "except here and in the Star Chamber of the 1600s." Considering al Bahlul was captured by the U.S. military, is being held by the military, and will be tried by a military commission, he's understandably not enthusiastic about the prospect of a military lawyer--a man he considers his enemy, to boot--defending him. But the commission rules require each of the accused to be represented by a military attorney with a security clearance (much of the evidence in these cases is classified).</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 282; float: right;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 282px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_gtmo527sims12across.jpg" alt="Marking Mecca: arrow stenciled on concrete points to holy city " width="282" height="387" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Marking Mecca: arrow stenciled on concrete points to holy city. Christopher Sims '95</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>Not surprisingly, al Bahlul's request was denied. Also not surprisingly, his alternate request to have a Yemeni lawyer--who wouldn't have a U.S. security clearance--defend him also was denied.</p><p>To make things more complicated, those denials put Fleener in an ethical dilemma. When he's not on active duty with the Army Reserve, he's a federal public defender in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where, in a similar situation, he would have to step down. Long-established federal law, in other words, seems to be in direct conflict with newly minted military commission rules.</p><p>"So how, procedurally, do you get that issue in front of a court other than a military tribunal?" says Lathrop, one of the four students who worked with Fleener until graduating in May. "You've already asked the question in this chain, and the answer's come back no. So how do you get it outside?"</p><p>You think creatively, look for an offbeat option. Al Bahlul had no standing in federal court, but there is a mechanism that allows third parties to bring an action on someone else's behalf. "That had some legs, I thought, until Graham-Levin cut them out," Lathrop says. "But that was real lawyering."</p><p>(The late-June decision in Hamdan might have remedied both those issues; at the least, it appeared to renew al Bahlul's access to the federal courts.)</p><p>In the end, who defends al Bahlul probably won't matter. He intends to boycott his trial, and, as Fleener points out, he'll still be an enemy combatant even if he's acquitted.</p><p>But the exercise matters, the lawyers and the students say. Simply making the arguments matters because rules and transparency and fairness matter. "The point is, it's not useless, because you're writing about it, because people will find out about it," Tabacaru says. "If we weren't doing this, everyone would think like most people in this country already think: 'Oh, my God, you're helping those terrorists.' " And it's not like that at all. Almost the opposite, actually: Morris and her students, by helping to defend the Guantánamo detainees, are helping the country figure out how to deal with terrorists, both actual and alleged--and the Hamdan decision validates that effort. "What the Supreme Court has done is really inspiring," says Morris. "It's demonstrated that our system of government really does operate as a system of checks and balances." They're helping, in other words, to define and refine a system that will allow America to still be America.</p><p>"It's like a big ball of clay," Lathrop says, "and to get into it, and to be able to say, years later, 'Hey, that's where I poked my finger....'" He trails off, smiles. "I'm not going to be the one making the bowl," he says, "but I'm going to have a hand in it."</p><p> </p><p class="byline" style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;"><em>— Flynn is a correspondent for GQ.</em></p><span class="text"></span></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2006-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, August 1, 2006</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/lg_5396guantanamolaw47.jpg" width="620" height="275" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/sean-flynn" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sean Flynn</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/jul-aug-2006" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jul - Aug 2006</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Duke law students fight for transparency and fairness and help to define the rights of suspected terrorists being held at Guantánamo Bay.</div></div></section> Tue, 01 Aug 2006 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500201 at https://alumni.duke.edu Duke Daredevilry https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/duke-daredevilry <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header"><div class="caption mceTemp draggable"> </div></div><p>Over fall break of his junior year, Chris Davis '06 went whitewater kayaking on the Narrows of Western North Carolina's Green River. He had just finished negotiating several of the river's Class Five rapids, including the infamous "Gorilla," when he figured he was home free. That's exactly the moment that Davis got into trouble. He tried to coast through a "piddly" Class Three and flipped his craft. His elbow shattered against a rock, forcing him to swim to safety with his single good arm.</p><p>Davis' friend and classmate Carl Hulit suffered a similar misfortune. The experienced mountain biker was practicing his skills on a bike teeter-totter when he and his bike fell sideways. He landed awkwardly, breaking his C7 vertebra. "You're most likely to get hurt when you think you're least likely to get hurt," observes Hulit, who wore a neck brace for several weeks his senior year in visible testimony to this hard-learned principle. "You can spend a day ripping hard runs and then at the end of the day wipe out coming off a ski lift," he adds. When the brace came off, he returned to biking, alpine skiing, and his other passion, cyclocross racing. (This summer, he planned to take a National Outdoor Leadership School mountaineering course and work as a ranch hand in Colorado.)</p><p>While concerns about liability and costly insurance have put the skids to some of the most structured university daredevilry--the Duke skydiving club disbanded several years ago because of rising insurance requirements, according to Mike Forbes, director of club and intramural sports--there are plenty of students who still find dramatic ways on their own to push their personal envelopes.</p><p>Before they graduated in May, both Davis and Hulit were diehard members of Duke's Outing Club, a student outdoor-adventure club. They describe themselves as "adrenaline junkies." When they travel in Third World countries, they prefer to hitchhike and to stay in strangers' homes rather than hostels or hotels; they don't mind group undertakings but are often more comfortable going solo, even if--or perhaps because--being alone holds the promise of greater adventure. Davis even braves danger in his volunteer work: For two years, he's been a firefighter and EMT for the Parkwood Fire Department in Durham.</p><p>Davis and Hulit are what psychologists often refer to as "high-sensation seeking" personalities--an adventuresome lot who thrive on putting their bodies through difficult and even dangerous situations. Society calls them thrill-seekers. Whether it's a short-term thrill (the few seconds it takes to do a free-fall ride at an amusement park) or a months-long adventure (hiking the Appalachian Trail solo), the thrill-seeker is a marvel to the rest of us, who just can't understand why, for example, someone would jump out of a perfectly good airplane.</p><p>Though there has always been a subgroup of humans given to daredevilry (recall that in August 1914, Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton was able to recruit his Endurance crew with an ad promising, "SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL"), such behavior has perhaps never been so ubiquitous among people so young. Today's youth don't have to head to the South Pole for a sanctioned adventure; they need only seek out the nearest skateboarding, snowboarding, or motocross park. "Kids who are in their late teens and twenties do all kinds of things that we didn't do," says John Thompson, a professor of history at Duke. Thompson, a baseball scholar who has studied trends in other sports, grew up in the 1950s. He says that advances in technology and mass communications and more abundant and affordable travel options have all helped to steer thrill-seeking into the mainstream.</p><p>"Have you ever looked at an inline skate? For all that today's activities require of physical courage, they all require a certain degree of contemporary technology, too," Thompson observes. Mountain Dew commercials, not to mention a plethora of niche trade magazines, cable-television stations, and websites, have made it possible for young people to educate themselves about the latest thrill and "gain access to the places where they can do it," he says. World travel is no exception. In the 1960s, Thompson's wife was offered a rare treat: the opportunity to travel to Africa as a student. "Today," says Thompson, "thanks to cheap airline tickets, half of the kids in arts and sciences at Duke travel or study abroad."</p><p>The major television networks have capitalized on the public's fascination with thrill-seeking with successful, high-impact reality shows such as Fear Factor, The Amazing Race, and Survivor. Though simply viewing a TV show is enough vicarious danger for most people, the Outing Club daredevils snicker at such armchair adventure, arguing that the shows are overtly staged. "It gets [the participants] out of their comfort zones, but it's not dangerous," says Jessica Evans-Wall '08, who grew up kayaking white water in the Northwest and West Virginia.</p><p>The reality-show participants clearly do it for the big bucks, but these daredevils find themselves having to constantly explain their odd proclivities to the rest of us. "A lot of people don't understand why we do some of the things we do," Davis says. "They just don't get it."<br /> Rick Hoyle certainly gets it. As a research professor in psychology and associate director of Duke's Center for Child and Family Policy, Hoyle has studied the thrill-seeking personality, in part, for help in crafting effective public-health messages aimed at this group drawn to risk. Hoyle says high-sensation seekers can embrace activities that are, by and large, positive (such as snowboarding and firefighting) or, by and large, negative (such as drug taking and reckless driving).</p><div class="media-header"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_img563.jpg" alt="White water: Evans-Wall, in dark helmet, piloting adventure-seekers through Pillow Rock rapids on upper Gauley River in West Virginia " width="580" height="262" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">White water: Evans-Wall, in dark helmet, piloting adventure-seekers through Pillow Rock rapids on upper Gauley River in West Virginia</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>The thrill-seeking tendency often shows itself early, says Hoyle. That was certainly the case with Gracie Sorbello '06, who is spending the summer traversing the country on a unicycle; she would be the youngest person and the first woman to complete such a feat.</p><p>"She climbed up a jungle gym and hung off the monkey bars at ten months," recalls her mother, Kim Sorbello, who with horror watched her daughter grow into a climber of sixty-foot redwoods around their home in Davis, California. "She was always begging to go higher. She just didn't have physical fear." Her devil-may-care approach to sport also made her a strong competitor on Duke's highly successful field-hockey team, and she hopes to try out for the 2008 U.S. Olympic squad later this year. "If there's a tree, I think to climb it," says Gracie Sorbello, speaking metaphorically, as well as literally. "It keeps things exciting."</p><p>It doesn't help parents' nerves that the thrill-seeking effect is often compounded in the teenage noggin. Studies have shown that adolescents' brains tend to be undeveloped in the delayed-gratification department, making them more susceptible to activities with quick payoffs, such as taking drugs. So, when the Outing Club daredevils refer to themselves as "adrenaline junkies" who need a constant "endorphin fix," the drug-user terminology is not completely coincidental. Dopamine's effect in the brain is similar to that produced by amphetamines such as speed. "And then you get this double whammy with drugs," Hoyle points out. "Pharmacologically, drugs produce a reward, and, because they are illegal, they provide an additional allure." Making drugs legal might reduce their appeal, he says; conversely, making snowboarding against the law might draw more kids to the slopes--and the next Winter Olympics.</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 225px; float: right;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 225px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_hulahula2.jpg" alt="Wilderness route: Huffman in 14-foot rubber raft on Hulahula River in Alaska" width="225" height="363" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Wilderness route: Huffman in 14-foot rubber raft on Hulahula River in Alaska. Cindy Lindsay</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>Even so, thrill-seekers in many cases are no more likely to use drugs than the average person. It may be instructive, Hoyle explains, to divide thrill-seekers into two camps: those who are highly impulsive, and those who are not. "Impulsivity is the idea of doing things without intention, without planning." So the thrill-seeker may be quite impulsive and decide, on a whim, to try to cross a track before the train barrels by. Or he may be quite deliberate, packing his own parachute and jumping only on a clear day.</p><p>The members of Duke's Outing Club are careful to plan ahead and use the proper equipment when they approach an outing. And, for the record, the trips they take as a group are highly regulated and don't involve much of the daredevilry--the whitewater kayaking, the spelunking, the cliff jumping--that some of the members pursue on their own time. Even then they show caution. "If you were to rock climb without ropes, that would be the riskiest thing that any of us did," says Brian Wright '07, a past president of the Outing Club. "None of us do that." Hulit, for one, says he would not consider sailing off-shore by himself because "there's no safety net." Adds Davis, "I wouldn't walk on rocks by the river."</p><p>One former member of the outing club who plans his adventures carefully is Matt Burney '06. Burney, who is five feet four inches tall, is used to having people tell him he's not physically capable of achieving large feats. That only adds fuel to his fire. He hiked the Appalachian Trail alone the summer after high school and later biked the Pacific Coast Highway from Oregon to Mexico. He's hiked the 500-mile Colorado Trail from Denver to Durango, and, last summer, he and a girlfriend drove from Bryce Canyon to Moab, Utah, burying buckets of food they later dug up while retracing their path on foot. "Hiking the Appalachian Trail gave me confidence to chase down random big dreams that seem just crazy," Burney says. After graduation in May, he and three friends hopped on bicycles in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, and headed for the West Coast. By the end of June they'd gotten as far as Colorado.</p><p>Certainly there has been the rush of danger in all of Burney's adventures--like the time during the Utah trip that he and his friend were caught in a flash flood and nearly cut off from a life-saving food cache, or the time he was hiking the Colorado Trail and was chased down Vale Mountain by a black bear. "I wasn't thinking," he recalls. "I was just running!"</p><p>But he insists that it isn't the near-death experience he searches for; rather, it's the satisfaction of using a finger on a globe of the world to trace a path he's trekked. Hoyle would classify Burney as a particular kind of thrill-seeker, the kind who is drawn primarily to novelty. Evolutionarily speaking, "to orient toward, and attend to, novel stimuli would be very useful," says Hoyle. The theory holds that such individuals were more likely to comprehend their surroundings with all the accompanying opportunities and dangers--thereby showing the rest of us the way to a safer locale.</p><p>Of course, savvy on the slopes or the rushing river does not prevent disaster from occurring in other aspects of a daredevil's life. "In order to take physical risks, you have to be strong in yourself," says Evans-Wall, who has difficulty finding boyfriends comfortable with her weeks-long whitewater adventures. "In order to take emotional risks, you have to become vulnerable, open yourself up." But she acknowledges that letting one's guard down is difficult for someone who relies on herself--and herself alone--to land upright in her kayak. Davis, shaking his head, says he can relate all too well. "My relationships have gone terribly. I feel like I'm not good in a relationship, because I have to have control over things." At least at this stage in his life, the firefighter who rushes unflinchingly into burning buildings is not willing to risk too much emotionally.</p><p>The apparent contradictions within thrill-seekers is no surprise to John W. Payne of the Fuqua School of Business, who, with his colleagues at the Center for Decision Studies, has researched and studied the ways in which people make decisions that involve risk. "Very few people are risk-takers across all aspects of their lives," Payne says. "The same person who skydives will keep his money in a savings account. Often when we talk about people who do [seemingly risky] things, they don't talk about it as that much risk. It just looks risky to the uninformed."</p><div><div class="media-header" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 571px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_746davis3.jpg" alt="In the line of fire: Davis, Durham firefighter and EMT " width="571" height="241" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">In the line of fire: Davis, Durham firefighter and EMT. Megan Morr</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>Similarly, thrill-seekers are biased toward one thrill over another and may confess fears that few would suspect. "I have never wanted to skydive," says Jan Hackett, who directs Duke's Outdoor Adventure program. He would rather cliff jump. Evans-Wall, perfectly at home in a torrent of water and rocks, finds riding on the back of a motorcycle "really scary." Former Apache helicopter pilot Shannon Huffman '93 can't imagine bungee jumping and doesn't like roller coasters. "Most people who don't know me really well would say I'm a risk-taker," she says. "Those who do know me really well would be less likely to say that." Her current job is with Microsoft, perhaps one of the most secure companies in the world for an employee.</p><p>Self-contradictions notwithstanding, some people are programmed to seek out thrills in some aspect of their lives. "It's a biochemically based aspect of their personality, the hand they were dealt," Hoyle says. "The dopamine system seems to be attuned to risk as a rewarding stimulus." In other words, for some people, the payoff from taking a physical risk is similar to what others would feel winning a lottery jackpot. Who wouldn't want to recreate that rush if they could, and often? And risk-taking may run in families: A Canadian study of 336 pairs of adult twins found that a love of roller coasters was shared between siblings more often than most other activities, especially intellectual interests, which showed little connection to genetics.</p><p>Huffman, for one, can point to an environmental and a genetic basis: She credits her own love of outdoor adventure to her father, who took her camping at a young age. "He encouraged me to take big risks and challenge myself," she says. Huffman also followed her dad's footsteps into the military, where for eight years she flew Apache helicopters for the U.S. Army in Bosnia and Korea. An avid triathlete and endurance runner who has also skydived, Huffman has climbed several difficult peaks, including Mt. McKinley (while just a nineteen-year-old undergraduate), Mt. Rainier, and Mt. Kilimanjaro. In most cases, what moves her is not the thrill of cheating death or even the rush of reaching a task's literal or proverbial summit, she says. Rather, paradoxically, her feats have had a calming effect on her, providing "the ability to feel close to God ... and be at peace."</p><p>Huffman draws more than ever on the spiritual aspect of adventuring since last summer, when her father and stepmother were killed by a predatory grizzly bear during a rafting trip in northern Alaska. "There's nothing good about it," says Huffman of the bear attack, which struck the couple in their tent as they slept, even though they had taken precautions. "But I don't wish that he didn't go on the trip, because he was living life to the fullest. He jumped into the deep end of the pool." She, too, planned to dive into that pool this summer by retracing the route her father and his wife were following before they were killed.</p><p>Testimony from sensation-seekers, no matter what their stripe, shows that they always find a way to satisfy their needs. That's why it is important, Hoyle says, for parents to steer young people toward positive risk-taking--as Huffman's father did. Merely forbidding negative risks without replacing them with a positive counterpart will only serve to make the negative exploration more desirable. "The more you put the clamps on, the more a high-sensation seeker is attracted to the activity." If a parent doesn't convey a powerful message, the child's peers will: Thrill-seekers tend to find each other--and invent risks to take together, Hoyle says.</p><p>So it's better that they find more structured activities, says Thompson, even if watching a child on a balance beam threatens to give a parent a stroke. "We drank and drove a lot more than today's kids do," he says, reflecting on his younger days in a small Midwestern town, where there was little positive activity to attract him and his thrill-seeking friends. "Kids today have access to more and different kinds of risks. I don't see the good old days as 'good old' at all. I like the new days, even if the occasional student gets in trouble skydiving or snowboarding."</p><p>Whether your sensibility is closer to Pee Wee Herman's or to Evel Knievil's, no matter what your palate for danger happens to be, there's always another, bigger thrill just over the horizon. "My goal in life is to sail around the world in a sailboat," says Burney. "I think that pretty much takes the cake."</p><p>"But first," he adds, "I've got to learn how to sail."</p><p class="articletitle"><em>Larson '93 is a freelance writer and president of Stellar Media, a communications company that provides writing, editing, marketing, and video services.</em></p><span class="text"></span></div><span class="text"></span></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2006-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, August 1, 2006</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/lg_canyon3dpi.jpg" width="657" height="265" alt="Top of the world: Matt Burney perched on edge of Dark Canyon near Hite, Utah; Carl Hulit races his mountain bike, opposite, top; Burney, shoulder deep in Escalante River in Utah, bottom. © Andrew Gombert /epa/Corbis" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/eric-larson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Eric Larson</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/jul-aug-2006" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jul - Aug 2006</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Why some daring young men and women are driven to seek out thrills-and spills.</div></div></section> Tue, 01 Aug 2006 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500199 at https://alumni.duke.edu Hip-Hop: Not Your Pop's Culture https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/hip-hop-not-your-pops-culture <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header"><div class="caption mceTemp draggable"> </div></div><p class="articletitle">Earlier this spring, the movement to institutionalize the study of hip-hop in academe received a boost. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History announced that it would enshrine hip-hop culture with an extensive exhibit tracing its evolution from a Bronx pastime in the 1970s to today's global juggernaut.</p><p>Mark Anthony Neal, associate professor of black popular culture in the African and African American Studies Program at Duke, has explored the effects of hip-hop culture on black popular culture, black women, and black intellectual production through both his studies and his writing. His four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture; Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic; Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation; and, most recently, New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity, have earned him praise for his ability to bridge the divide between academe and the public. Critic Michael Eric Dyson has characterized him as "one of the most brilliant cultural critics of his generation" and says that Neal "writes gracefully, thinks sharply, speaks cogently, and is old school and new school at once."</p><p>In April Neal, who is also a regular contributor to seeingblack.com and to National Public Radio's News and Notes, had a public conversation with Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, director of the program in African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University, at the fourth annual <em>Duke Magazine</em> Campus Forum. Sharpley-Whiting teaches a variety of subjects, including comparative diasporic literary and cultural movements, critical race studies, feminist theory, and film and hip-hop culture. She is also a professor of French and director of the W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies and has written several books: Negritude Women; Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narrative in French; and Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms.</p><p>At the forum, the two scholars sought to investigate how hip-hop culture influences a wide spectrum of human interaction, ranging from the idea of the strip club as a new "church" to the tension between artistry and commercial values in music. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.</p><p class="articlesubtitle"><strong>On his intellectual "alter ego"</strong></p><p class="articletitle"><strong> I want you to talk a little bit about your "thugniggerintellectual" concept. You know that is going to rattle some people. </strong></p><p class="articletitle">I have an alter ego--my intellectual alter ego. My intellectual alter ego is thugniggerintellectual--one word. And it's been something I've been playing with for a while, because I've been trying to work through in my mind a way to make the life of the mind available and accessible to people who would never think about it as such.</p><p>I just became really attracted to this notion of where we look for intellectual production. And it's not always in the places where we think we're going to find it. So, I began to try to work through this kind of persona. It's come to me at different moments, particularly, in the past, doing my work in Starbucks. And folks just fundamentally don't have an understanding of why I'm there at two o'clock in the afternoon with a laptop and a bunch of books.</p><p>Folks are saying things to me, like, are you a numbers runner? Are you taking bets? Are you a DJ? Do you sell mix tapes? The last thing they're thinking about is that this cat is an intellectual. So, I actually think of myself differently than people may perceive me. I understand that. But folks will be more apt to think of me as a thug and a nigger before they would ever think about me as an intellectual. In fact, thinking of me as an intellectual is the more dangerous thing because they have no grasp on that. I mean all kinds of things that come up except this idea I'm an intellectual.</p><p>I wanted to embody this figure that comes into intellectual spaces like a thug, who literally is fearful and menacing. I wanted to use this idea of this intellectual persona to do some real kind of "gangster" scholarship, if you will. All right, just hard, hard-core intellectual thuggery. And what it really personifies is how I'm thinking about being in these spaces when I'm not trying to fit into these spaces. When I'm not trying to be the collegial colleague. When I'm not trying to sell books. When I'm not trying to get students into my classes. When I'm not trying to be politically correct. This is this other persona. I wanted to really do a book project that spoke to raising these kinds of questions, ultimately, within this guise that, in some ways, identity is all performance. And thugniggerintellecutal is just one of the identities that I perform.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>But there are those who, of course, are quite resistant to the idea of the black intellectual intervening in this space and talking over the dialogue of hip-hop. And so, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about that and what kind of interventions do we make, specifically, with respect to hip-hop? </strong></p><p class="articletitle">Folks like Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr., Cornel West, bell hooks, Michael Eric Dyson--black intellectuals, public intellectuals--were called to duty to provide the labor to explain what these new urban phenomena were.</p><p>So, whether it was the race riots in L.A. in 1992 or the case of Skip Gates and 2 Live Crew recording a song that some felt was vulgar or the O.J. Simpson trial, these folks were called to duty to explain the significance of what this stuff was. And in some ways, black, public intellectuals are able to dictate what kind of conversations are going to happen in our society around race and class and popular culture. The best example of that recently is Michael Eric Dyson's very timely book on Hurricane Katrina [Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster]. He's still out there trying to push his book, and, of course, selling his ideas, but at the same time keeping the focus on what happened and what didn't happen last September.</p><p>He understands better than anybody that part of selling your ideas in the marketplace is selling the person behind the ideas. The only way the ideas circulate is if a person does. And part of that is about celebrity and personality culture. And so much of contemporary hip-hop journalism, really, is about celebrity journalism. But then, when you have that attention, what do you do with it? What do we do when we have that kind of significant space?</p><p>We always have to [ask] ourselves, when we're dealing with the bright lights, are we still having the kind of conversations that allow us to bring the kind of ideas that we're committed to politically into a wider forum?</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 301; float: left;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_396dukemagforum4.jpg" alt="Cultural commentators: Sharpley-Whiting, left, and Neal " width="300" height="450" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Cultural commentators: Sharpley-Whiting, left, and Neal. Chris Hildreth</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="articlesubtitle"><strong>On the definition and commercialization of hip-hop</strong></p><p class="articletitle"><strong>What is hip-hop?</strong></p><p class="articletitle">Hip-hop is an art form and social movement that we can trace back to the West Bronx. Afrika Bambaataa will say the specific date that hip-hop was born was August 11, 1973, only because that's the evening that he gave a [now famous] party.</p><p>Bambaataa brought to the United States his own sense of what they call sound systems in Jamaica, and really wanted to replicate that space in the Bronx--basically, to get kids off the street and away from the gangs. He began giving house parties in the Bronx. The more technical definition--the folks will say, originally, [had] about four elements--emceeing, DJing, break dancing, graffiti art. We now talk about a fifth element, consciousness. And the last fifteen years of intellectual production around hip-hop would suggest that that's a legitimate plan.</p><p>It's gone from basically a fringe underground culture that was seen as only to be embraced by black and brown kids in urban spaces into a global phenomenon. We find hip-hop in Prague. And we find hip-hop in Italy. And we find hip-hop in South Africa. We find corporate versions of hip-hop that I don't like to actually refer to as hip-hop anymore.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>We have celebrity hip-hop artists and the celebrity hip-hop journalists. Which came first? Which cultivated the one or the other?</strong></p><p class="articletitle">Oh, I think the celebrity artist comes first. And, if you talk to some of the very good journalists, one of the things that they're faced with is that urban magazines don't move magazines based on ideas. They move magazines based on people and their lives. So, when Young Jeezy talks about folks using his image simply to sell magazines, he's dead on.</p><p>And if you want to be a successful journalist writing for mainstream vehicles at this point in time, that's part of the process of what you have to do now. And I think that's a very big transition from what the magazine coverage was of hip-hop.</p><p>So, you have someone like [the journalist] Elizabeth Mendez Berry and the difficulty she had in terms of publishing her groundbreaking piece on sexual violence propagated by prominent hip-hop artists. She had a real difficulty selling that to many of these magazines that just don't want to deal with having folks who read the magazines actually think about anything. And I think that is reflective of where hip-hop has gone. It's less about ideas and more about personalities and lifestyles and products.</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 301; float: left;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_113711.jpg" alt="Artistic rendering: graffiti in Los Angeles " width="300" height="202" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Artistic rendering: graffiti in Los Angeles. Neil Emmerson</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="articletitle"><strong>What you do get is a great deal of pushback against what is happening within the context of the culture in terms of the fashion and the videos and the dance. And that's part of the problem when you think about the whole commercialization of hip-hop, and what has,</strong></p><p class="articletitle">I guess, come to be recognized as hip-hop, [about] which, of course, we say, "Well, that's not really hip-hop."</p><p>I made the point in my class ["Black Popular Culture"] early today, there's this ongoing question about why [socially] conscious rappers don't sell any records. In some basic way, it's because, aesthetically, the stuff just isn't very good.</p><p>What I'm curious about as a scholar is, how do we work through and find spaces within that very, very commercial hip-hop--the stuff that people are actually consuming--that can generate certain kinds of political and social sensibilities? How do we tease out possibilities in 50 Cent? In a song like "Many Men," he has a great line about, "Cat got shot nine times, he's dead. I got shot nine times, I'm still here. I must be here for a reason." Okay, this guy is actually philosophizing about his presence in the world. I can use that for those folks who are listening to 50 Cent.</p><p>Now, I can name ten other rappers who have been doing the same thing, who aren't even a blip on the screen to this fifteen-year-old kid that just wants everything 50 Cent. So, [as a scholar,] how do I politicize the 50 Cent moment in ways that become useful? Because this is the stuff that folks are consuming.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>In what way does that work with your critique, and mine, of this different kind of hip-hop that we see moving to the forefront?</strong></p><p class="articletitle">I think my comment at an academic panel was that I'm about to retire from this hip-hop thing. Because the reality is that, at forty years old and living with hip-hop now for more than twenty-five years in my own life, the kind of conversations that I want to have about hip-hop are not the kind of conversations that folks who listen to hip-hop necessarily want to have. Hip-hop is old enough now to have two kids and pay a mortgage and have car loans and then think about changing its career.</p><p>So, you have this very interesting generational shift within hip-hop. And the hip-hop generation [old] guard--Russell Simmons is forty-seven, forty-eight years old. Flavor Flav is forty-seven years old. Chuck D is forty-five--these aren't young people anymore. [Queen] Latifah will be forty shortly. And how I feel about hip-hop is very different than how Young Jeezy talks about hip-hop.</p><div><div class="media-header" style="width: 301; float: left;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_569562665.jpg" alt="In the mix: DJ turns old sounds into new" width="300" height="450" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">In the mix: DJ turns old sounds into new. Andersen Ross</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="articletitle"><strong>I know there are people who would be hard pressed to believe that hip-hop will eventually go the way of some other forms.</strong></p><p class="articletitle">It will morph into something else. We'll always listen to it, but it won't have the same sort of currency.</p><p>We are much more focused [now] on the music as opposed to the lyricism, unlike more traditional forms of hip-hop. And for me, crunk is post hip-hop. It's hip-hop morphing into these other things. There's this kind of Northern-Southern bias that somehow Northern culture is so much more cerebral than Southern culture, and rappers get played into that. So, when you get a group like Little Brother, who is an example of cerebral, Southern hip-hop, folks are like, "no that's New York. That's not Southern hip-hop. That's rappers in the South trying to sound like they're from New York." That's the critique.</p><p>When you think about criteria of good hip-hop--lyricism, story telling, and flow--these cats ain't got lyricism. I don't know what the story is they're telling, and some of them really are flow challenged. But, I had to come to terms with the power of crunk. What is it about crunk in its natural space that gets people off the wall? And I'm wondering....</p><p class="articlesubtitle"><strong>On "crunk," strip clubs, and black female bodies</strong></p><p class="articletitle"><strong>Maybe we should explain what crunk is.</strong></p><p class="articletitle">Crunk. Wow, how do you describe crunk? A particular Southern strain of what some folks would call hip-hop that takes part of its roots from the strip-club culture in the South--and, I would argue, the black church.</p><p>Crunk has its own development. It has its own steam. It has nothing to do with East Coast hip-hop. And again, if you look at the church, crunk is the new spirituality. The strip club is the new church. That raises all kinds of interesting possibilities around spirituality and black bodies, dealing with issues of spirituality outside traditional notions of what spirituality in a church is supposed to be.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>So, with that understanding, we have the glorification of the strip club with people like Lil Jon. Because, as you say, if we look at the strip club as the new church, as the new dating scene, as the new whole bunch of other things...</strong></p><p class="articletitle">As the new hook-up. And the ways in which black female bodies are at the center of this. It's a little troubling because of what it is, that it is selling strip clubs as viable employment opportunities. And they are for women who mostly will be forced into low-paying jobs in the service industry.</p><p>When we think about women who work in strip clubs, the key component there is that word "work." In some ways this is legitimate labor, and we need to be clear about that. And women make these decisions based on what kind of legitimate labor is in their best interest. While it's important that black women's sexuality not be exploited, at the same time, I don't want to get into the business of policing black women's sexuality, which is just as dangerous.</p><p>I think we've raised a generation of men--regardless of race--who see black women's bodies as available. It's that moment in bell hooks' book Black Looks, where she talks about walking down the street in New Haven--when she's teaching at Yale--and she's eavesdropping on a conversation with three or four college students, who are having a conversation about, "Before I graduate I want a black one. Nah, nah, before I graduate I want a Chinese one. Nah, nah, before I graduate I want a Spanish one." That's the conversation that they're having. What is their conversation in fantasy--at that moment--corporate America has given to them as reality via the circulation of black women's bodies and the circulation of bodies of women of color in hip-hop. I think that's part of what we have to take very seriously. And the simple indictment has always been--the default indictment has been--well, this is hip-hop's fault.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>I write about women who are exotic dancers. After interviewing these women, I know many of them look at that particular moment in their lives with the understanding that it is something that they will do short term; it's a launching pad for their careers. And some of them will do some of the most outrageous things.</strong></p><p class="articletitle">And so, at this moment, I'm a little troubled by that--that's what women have been reduced to.</p><p>I think one of the things that we do that's very dangerous is to talk about what hip-hop is doing to women. And we very rarely ask the question about how women are using hip-hop, which is a very different question. And I think, when you talk about the ways in which women are using hip-hop, one way is to develop a certain kind of consciousness about who they are--particularly young women. Look at someone like Joan Morgan [the journalist and author], who in some ways, coined the term hip-hop feminism. Joan is forty years old and trying to get off the hip-hop bandwagon. And I think that, for that generation of third-wave feminists, it probably is very problematic to identify yourself with a dying musical genre.</p><p>And you're right. This is the pushback against feminism. This is the pushback against women's-studies programs. This is the pushback against women who have been successful in corporate America. This is the pushback against Hillary Clinton. And the conversation gets really murky when it gets brought back into the context of the black community.</p><p>For me, it's about broadening our sense of what hip-hop is. So that when we hear folks saying that hip-hop is not doing this, hip-hop is not doing that, well, hip-hop is in fact doing that. The fact is that hip-hop has, in its own way, grown a generation of feminists, young women who claim feminism and claim hip-hop in the same space. They don't claim hip-hop feminism as simply a pushback against a gender and sexual politics of hip-hop, but actually claim hip-hop feminism as a space to work through ideas of young women and their sexuality, young women and their femininity.</p><p class="articlesubtitle"><strong>On hip-hop scholarship</strong></p><p class="articletitle"><strong>I think one of the big problems that we face today is that we are in a post-movement era. We would like hip-hop to be a political movement. But there are those who say that scholars in the academy are, in some respects, doing what the celebrity hip-hop journalist is doing.</strong></p><p class="articletitle">I circulate beyond the academy in large part because of the assumption of how I am attached to hip-hop, whether or not that's a legitimate understanding of what I do. But this idea, for instance, is going to allow me to circulate much more easily, much more fluidly than being a black male feminist, which, in some ways, doesn't allow me to circulate beyond my classroom. But I also don't think that it's exploitative in that we are a generation of folks who came of age with hip-hop and have taken it seriously as a mode of scholarship.</p><p>We as scholars have to take seriously what hip-hop represents in the social and political and cultural moment. And we have to think about hip-hop not just as this thing that has grown out of the Bronx from 1973, but that has worldwide tentacles, that affects a wide range of people and movements. And how do we bring a kind of critical scrutiny to the way that hip-hop circulates around the globe? That's part of our responsibility. And it's also part of our responsibility to take it seriously enough that we don't have to defend why it's being taught and talked about in a university framing.</p><p>In some ways, the conversations that we're having about whether or not hip-hop studies is a legitimate course of study in the academy is not unlike discussions about American literature seventy years ago in the academy. It's not unlike discussions about sociology fifty years ago in the academy. The idea is that hip-hop reflects the humanity of the people who create it and the people who consume it in much the same way that literature gives us a window into various humanities. Hip-hop functions the same way in 2006.</p></div><span class="text"></span></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2006-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, August 1, 2006</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/lg_it2517.jpg" width="620" height="350" alt="Pioneering spirit: Afrika Bambaataa, left, Bronx DJ credited as the godfather of hip-hop, on stage with rap artist Flavor Flav in 1990. © S.I.N. / Corbis" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/jul-aug-2006" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jul - Aug 2006</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A conversation with cultural critic Mark Anthony Neal, associate professor in the African and African American Studies Program.</div></div></section> Tue, 01 Aug 2006 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500198 at https://alumni.duke.edu Learning by Ear https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/learning-ear <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" width="631"><p class="articletitle">Oral historian and audio artist Judith Sloan, along with her husband and collaborator, Warren Lehrer, embarked on a documentary project in Queens, New York, in 1999, that spanned four years and several media. The award-winning project, Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America, explored the lives of immigrants and refugees living in Queens through storytelling workshops, extended interviews, and photographs.</p><p>During a recent presentation at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, Sloan shared voices, stories, and images from the project. But she was not on campus simply to demonstrate her own work. She was also there to teach and converse with amateur documentary makers. As a guest lecturer with Hearing is Believing, CDS's summer audio institute, she led a session on the topic of interviewing.</p><p>The audio institute, now in its fourth year, teaches participants technical skills in audio documentary--for example, recording and editing techniques--but also presents to them, according to CDS's learning outreach director, Dawn Dreyer, "the holistic experience of collaborating with communities and the kind of relationships that are necessary to do documentary work."</p><p>It does that by giving students experience immersing themselves in the community. For the past two years, the institute, led by John Biewen, a correspondent-producer for American RadioWorks and an award-winning documentary maker himself, has teamed with Duke's community affairs office and the Southwest Central Durham Quality of Life Project to come up with documentary story ideas so that students, who are only there for one week, can jump into their work immediately. The Quality of Life Project, supported by Duke, brings together residents, nonprofits, and businesses to address community issues. The documentary focus this year was on community issues as seen through the eyes of local businesses and nonprofits.</p><p>Participants included anthropology instructors, a library archivist, a medical doctor, local community organizers, and, says Dreyer, young people "who have heard [Public Radio International's] This American Life." The program kicked off with a bus tour of Southwest Central Durham and an information session about Durham and the Quality of Life Project. Aspiring documentary makers were assigned subjects that included a local hair salon, a woman who performs homeopathic medicine, and a woman living in a retirement community. The product was a series of short audio documentaries, many from first-time producers.</p><p>Participants benefited from formal sessions and presentations, as well as informal front-porch chats, with Sloan and Chris Brookes, an independent radio producer and experienced documentary maker. According to Dreyer, Sloan was so excited by the project that she stayed for three days even though her presentation took only one. Producers like Sloan find "it is refreshing that we take audio so seriously," Dreyer says. "A lot of people, when they think of documentary work, think of video.</p><p>"There is a lot of audio work out there that is complex enough, multi-layered enough, that it really deserves to have people sit and listen to it rather than catching it in the background while caught in traffic."</p><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="80%" /></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2006-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, August 1, 2006</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/jul-aug-2006" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jul - Aug 2006</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Tue, 01 Aug 2006 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500195 at https://alumni.duke.edu Too Few Engineers? https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/too-few-engineers <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr valign="top"><td colspan="2" height="15"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" width="49%"><table width="18%" border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_6756vivekwadhwa1.jpg" alt="" width="250" height="403" border="1" /><p class="caption-text">Vivek Wadhwa</p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="center"> </td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">Is America about to lose its competitive edge to India and China? University deanfs, business executives, and political leaders have cited statistics showing that these countries graduate twelve times as many engineers each year as the U.S. does. Some say we're going to be in trouble unless we dramatically increase the numbers of engineers we graduate.</p><p>There would be reason to worry if there were indeed a looming shortage of engineers and if the numbers in this debate were accurate. But a team of student researchers at the Pratt School of Engineering has determined that some of the most frequently cited statistics on engineering graduates are inaccurate. We're actually in good shape on the numbers of engineering graduates and far ahead in the quality of education we offer.</p><p>Having founded two tech companies, I've long been at the center of the outsourcing debate and understand the issues. I knew that with a master's in engineering management from Duke, these students were destined to be leaders. As Pratt Dean Kristina Johnson says, "leadership can't be outsourced." But I was embarrassed that I couldn't answer basic questions from our engineering students: What courses would lead to the best job prospects? What jobs were "outsourcing proof"?</p><p>At Johnson's suggestion, we decided to research the topic. With the help of Duke sociology professor Gary Gereffi, we picked a team of our brightest engineering students and set out to compare international engineering degrees and analyze employment opportunities. First we wanted to get a handle on the facts.</p><p>The most commonly cited numbers for annual engineering graduation are 600,000 from institutions of higher education in China, 350,000 from India, and 70,000 from the U.S. We simply couldn't find the basis for these numbers. It seems that the first reference to them was made by an American technology executive in Taiwan in 2002. The same numbers have been used repeatedly ever since, with sources citing each other.</p><p>Our team determined that in 2004, in an apples-to-apples comparison, the U.S. graduated 222,335 engineers; India, 215,000. The closest comparable number reported by China is 644,106, but this likely includes majors that we would not classify as engineering, such as auto mechanics. Looking strictly at four-year degrees, the U.S. graduated 137,437 engineers vs. 112,000 from India and 351,537 from China. All of these numbers include information-technology and related majors.</p><p>We also noted a difference between the skill and education level of engineers and concluded that those with higher-quality educations would always be in demand. We differentiated between what we called "dynamic engineers" and "transactional engineers." Dynamic engineers are capable of abstract thinking and high-level problem-solving. These engineers thrive in teams, work well across international borders, have strong interpersonal skills, and lead innovation. Transactional engineers may possess engineering fundamentals but not the experience or expertise to apply this knowledge to larger problems. These individuals typically perform rote tasks in the work force.</p><p>One of the key differences between the two types of engineers is their education. The capstone design course that many U.S. engineering students take in their senior year enables them to integrate knowledge gained from fundamental coursework in the applied sciences and engineering. Programs like Duke's Master of Engineering Management take this a step further and provide students with the skills needed to become business-savvy engineers who are better able to address the complex technical and business issues associated with technology innovation.</p><p>Contrary to the popular view that India and China have an abundance of engineers, recent reports show that both countries may actually face severe shortages of dynamic engineers. The vast majority of graduates from these counties have the qualities of transactional engineers.</p><p>Our report received international media coverage and created quite a stir in the outsourcing debate. It caused the National Academies to revise an assessment they recently published on U.S competitiveness. Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times columnist, added a page to the 2006 update of his book The World is Flat discussing our findings. We even got the attention of top political leaders.</p><p>The question one could ask is why it took a bunch of Duke engineering students to shed light on such an important issue. Late last year, both the Democrats and Republicans announced major initiatives to bolster U.S competitiveness and cited faulty graduation data as one of the justifications.</p><p>There are calls by political and business leaders to double the number of engineering graduates in order to stay competitive with India and China. Yet if you analyze U.S. salary data, there doesn't seem to be any indication of a general shortage of engineers. We may gain competitive advantage by graduating more in certain fields of engineering, but no one has conducted research on what we actually need. It also seems that 25 to 40 percent of engineering graduates from top schools like Duke find better opportunities in fields outside engineering.</p><p>We're now taking our research a step further. We want to determine what types of engineering jobs have already been outsourced, what jobs companies expect to outsource, and what skills or education will give us a long-term advantage.</p><p>As a technology executive, I learned to sleep with one eye open. There is always looming competition, and it doesn't take much to lose your edge. India and China have growing economies and a big advantage in their numbers. But they don't have what we have--the best universities in the world, which produce broadly educated graduates who can think creatively. Rather than battling our new competitors on their turf and competing on numbers, let's focus on quality and innovation.</p><p class="byline">Wadhwa, the founder of two software companies, Seer Technologies Inc. and Relativity Technologies, is an executive-in-residence and adjunct professor at the Pratt School of Engineering.</p></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2006-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, August 1, 2006</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/vivek-wadhwa" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Vivek Wadhwa</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/jul-aug-2006" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jul - Aug 2006</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Tue, 01 Aug 2006 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500194 at https://alumni.duke.edu The Untitled Pink Corset Book https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/untitled-pink-corset-book <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><table border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_pink.jpg" alt="The Untitled Pink Corset Book" width="580" height="257" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><em>The Untitled Pink Corset Book</em></p></div></div></div></div><div class="media-h-caption"> </div></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">New York artist Tamar Stone addresses women's body images as viewed through historical, social, and feminist lenses in a one-of-a-kind book acquired recently by the Duke Libraries' Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture.</p><p><em>The Untitled Pink Corset Book</em> challenges the traditional definition of a book; it is made from old corsets that the artist found on eBay. The corsets are sewn together in layers, with text embroidered between the ribs of each garment.</p><p>The narrative "unfolds" as each internal section is untied and opened, one after another. This visually arresting book entices the reader to decipher its metaphors and consider its deeper meaning.</p><p>Stone has a personal connection to her subject: She suffered from scoliosis as a child and had to wear a corset-like brace for many years.</p><p>She saw a similarity between the use of the brace to bind and reform her body and the use of corsets in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to confine and mold women's figures.</p><p>In <em>The Untitled Pink Corset Book</em>, Stone uses texts from early advertisements and etiquette books, as well as the accounts of scoliosis patients, to draw parallels between the physical restrictions imposed on women's bodies and the social limitations placed on women's lives. In the process, she gives the history itself new meaning and shape. Untying the corsets to read the text opens, unbinds, and frees what is inside. The artist empowers the reader to become a participant in the process.</p><p><em>The Untitled Pink Corset Book</em> is an important addition to the Bingham Center's collections and an example of the center's documentation of the many dimensions of women's history, from domestic culture to body image and feminist politics, all of which are visible in Stone's art.</p><p> </p></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2006-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, August 1, 2006</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/jul-aug-2006" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jul - Aug 2006</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Tue, 01 Aug 2006 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500193 at https://alumni.duke.edu Forum: July-August 2006 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/forum-july-august-2006 <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr valign="top"><td class="text" colspan="2"><h3 id="southern" class="articletitle"><strong>Darwin v. Intelligent Design</strong></h3><p class="articletitle">With the recent <strong><a href="http://dukemagazine.duke.edu/article/in-defense-of-darwin">"In Defense of Darwin" article [March-April 2006]</a></strong> in addition to the "Evidence of Evolution" article that appeared in September-October 1999, Duke Magazine has emphasized one side of the controversy.</p><p>However, notwithstanding the arguments and opinions of attorney [Eric Rothschild '89] and Judge Jones in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case, there are many who still believe that the "theory" (hypothesis) of macro-evolution (molecules to man)--as distinguished from micro-evolution (variations of shapes, sizes, coloration, and traits within the same kind, genus, or species)--is no more, and perhaps less, demonstrated by empirical or other proofs than Intelligent Design and that a fair and balanced presentation of each of these concepts is warranted both intellectually as well as legally.</p><p class="articletitle">William J. Alsentzer Jr. '64, J.D. '66, Scottsdale, Arizona</p><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="80%" /><p>Regarding your article "In Defense of Darwin," I do not think Duke University was established as a secular university. James B. Duke, in the Indenture to Establish Duke University, stated that the central building should be a church, a great towering church, which would dominate all the surrounding buildings, because such an edifice would be bound to have a profound influence on the spiritual life of the young men and women who come here. I suggest that James B. Duke would have preferred a university magazine with scholarly discourses supporting God as the maker of Heaven and Earth and all things visible and invisible. While ruminating on this and other Duke matters, if James B. Duke were alive, I doubt an Islamic study center ["Centering on Islamic Studies," March-April 2006] at the university would have a high priority.</p><p class="articletitle">A. Ray Bottoms '56, Pinehurst, North Carolina</p><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="80%" /><p class="articletitle">..."In Defense of Darwin" opened my eyes to some of the arguments that have been proposed against Intelligent Design and its support or lack thereof as a science. I also appreciated Matt Cartmill's statement that, although evolution can't explain life's beginnings, ID is merely saying that I don't have an explanation, so there must be an intelligent designer.</p><p>My argument as a physician trained in the treatment and cure of the human body is that no amount of random change or coincidences can logically explain the complexity of any biological organism beyond the one-celled amoeba, much less explain the human body. I agree that there are imperfections in the human body, and I agree that religion and faith must and do play a role in this and any debate where there is a lack of evidence on both sides.</p><p>Yes, I believe in a Biblical view of creation. Although there is no tangible evidence like a fossil that has God's handprint on it, I strongly feel that ID better explains the complexity of life than random evolution. I think the travesty of this whole debate is the fact that proponents of evolution are also served by religious convictions, but pretend that they are not. Neither evolution nor ID can be proven or disproven....</p><p>If by logical reason, one cannot explain the complexity of life and the interaction of several life systems that would have had to evolve at the exact same moment, why not be open to the idea that maybe there was a designer? Why not allow schools/scientists/students/clergy/parents to say, "Look, evolution has its holes, and many believe that another explanation may be an intelligent designer?" Why are so many afraid of the debate? My only explanation is that they are afraid there actually may be a Creator.</p><p class="articletitle">Chris Duggar '94, Montgomery, Alabama</p><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="80%" /><p class="articletitle">"In Defense of Darwin" was excellent. I very much enjoyed your description of the Dover case straight "from the horse's mouth," being pleased to find that a Duke alumnus was at the head of the legal effort. However, your discussion of the public support for creationism and the attitude of the political organization currently in power was upsetting to read....</p><p>I am aware that too few people understand the nature of the scientific process.... But to have you confirm my suspicion that the politicians currently in power consider scientists as adversaries who use their label of expert for nothing other than to advance their own political agenda is truly disturbing. I usually hold hope that those in power acknowledge that there are some fundamentals that have to be obeyed, and that such things are taken into account when decisions are made.</p><p>Your indication that those in power feel free to advance their own goals with no regard to foundations provided by academia is frightening.</p><p class="articletitle">John Kozacik, Instructor, Duke zoology department, 1980-81, Mariemont, Ohio</p><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%" /><h3 class="articletitle id="><strong>Belafonte Resonates</strong></h3><p class="articletitle">I am very proud that Harry Belafonte was invited to give the keynote address for Duke's Martin Luther King Jr. celebration <strong><a href="http://dukemagazine.duke.edu/article/belafonte-uplifts-angers">["Belafonte Uplifts, Angers," March-April 2006].</a></strong> It is heartening that he received frequent applause and a standing ovation. I have had the great pleasure and honor of sharing a platform with Harry Belafonte in New York City, and I admire his commitment, integrity, and courage.</p><p>The article points out that the Duke Conservative Union "took out an ad in The Chronicle contrasting King's calls for unity and civility with Belafonte's criticisms of Bush administration members." Obviously the Conservative Union is not familiar with King's speech at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, when he said: "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today--my own government." He went on to speak at length about the war in Vietnam, saying America's soul "can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over."</p><p class="articletitle">Jane Morgan Franklin '55, Montclair, New Jersey</p><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%" /><h3 id="k" class="articletitle"><strong>K Going Corporate</strong></h3><p class="articletitle">Though the issue may seem trivial compared to Duke's current lacrosse woes, as alumni, we have a strong negative reaction to Coach K's television ads, which, we contend, reflect no credit on him or the university. Regardless of his motives or the disposition of the fees, the appearance of impropriety is unmistakable. He is using his squeaky-clean reputation ... to shill on national television for commercial ventures, only one of which (the Steve Nash video) is related to his field of acknowledged expertise. It's cheesy and crass behavior, and it becomes downright tacky when the commercials are repeatedly shown during Duke basketball games. We are unaware of any other coach of a major sport so blatantly hawking a commercial product during a major national collegiate sports tournament.</p><p>Rival coaches may complain to the NCAA that this is an improper recruiting technique, and some members of the university community may suggest that Duke should not sanction such behavior. In our opinion, the best solution is for Coach K simply to exit the advertising business and stop embarrassing himself and the university.</p><p>Can you imagine Reynolds Price on TV shilling for Random House? Or the dean of the Chapel touting Lehman Bros.? Or President Brodhead puffing Burger King? Of course not; and neither can they. How is a coach of Duke's "scholar-athletes" any different? Perhaps, the scholar-athletes should be allowed to shill likewise or receive compensation from the coach, as they have been obviously instrumental to his success.</p><p class="articletitle">John D. Johnston Jr. '54, L '56, Asheville, North Carolina<br /> Paul C. Parker '54, M.A.T. '57, Gainesville, Florida</p><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%" /><h3 id="campus" class="articletitle"><strong>Campus Construction</strong></h3><p class="articletitle">The <strong><a href="http://dukemagazine.duke.edu/article/stones-bricks-and-mortar">article covering the "construction boom" at Duke</a></strong> was remarkable in that it resembled a sanitized PR real-estate spread rather than evenhanded criticism. What the article did reveal was that recent design of new projects hardly mirrors the image Duke endeavors to project--that of a comprehensively progressive institution. Part of that menu should also have included cutting-edge architecture, not the stodgy neo-traditional buildings which have been added to the mix. In the world of academic architecture, replicating traditional styles went out long ago at the most traditional of universities, i.e., Harvard, Yale, Penn, etc.</p><p>Duke's only modern buildings either appear at the edge (Fox student center), or, as in the case of the Nasher Art Museum, are situated in an obscure location, we might conjecture, so as to not "clash" with the Gothic. One of the most incomprehensible decisions was to locate the student center at the far edge of West Campus. How many students will make that journey by foot can only be a matter of speculation. Student centers are normally found at the center of the campus, not at the edge. There were some lost opportunities here; whether the blame rests on the administration or the donors can only be a matter of speculation. In any case, Duke will be saddled with some very mediocre architecture for decades.</p><p class="articletitle">Stanley Collyer '54, author, Competing Globally in Architecture Competitions, Louisville, Kentucky</p><p class="articletitle"><em>Editor's note: The Lafe P. and Rita D. Fox Student Center, located between the Thomas F. Keller Center's east and west wings, is intended to serve Duke's Fuqua School of Business.</em></p><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="80%" /><p class="articletitle">I am dismayed that in an article titled "Stones, Bricks, and Mortar: Building for Success" [March-April 2006] the new Duke University School of Nursing building scheduled to open August 2006 was not also featured. A faux pas on par with not memorializing Ozzie Davis' death at this year's Oscar ceremony.</p><p class="articletitle">Catherine A. Caprio M.S.N. '06, Bahama, North Carolina</p><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="80%" /><p class="articletitle">I enjoyed "Stones, Bricks, and Mortar," but was left with a feeling of, well, loss when I realized you did not include the new School of Nursing building.... This new building will finally unite the school under one roof. We are justifiably proud of our new building and I am sure I will not be the first or last to point out this "oops" on the map.</p><p>Thank you for providing an excellent bimonthly read.</p><p class="articletitle">Connie B. Bishop B.S.N. '75, Gibsonville, North Carolina<br /> Editor's note: The story focused on buildings completed by the time of publication.</p><p class="articletitle"> </p></td></tr><tr><td class="text" colspan="2"><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%" /></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2006-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, August 1, 2006</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/jul-aug-2006" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jul - Aug 2006</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Tue, 01 Aug 2006 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500192 at https://alumni.duke.edu Little Admissions Impact from Lacrosse https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/little-admissions-impact-lacrosse <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" width="631"><div class="media-header" style="width: 252; float: right;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070806/images/lg_gutt11423repro.jpg" alt="Admissions paperwork" width="250" height="373" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-credit">Les Todd</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="articletitle">Officials at Duke expect 2006 to be among the most selective years on record for undergraduate admissions, despite the extensive media coverage of the men's lacrosse program. According to Christoph Guttentag, dean of undergraduate admissions, Duke admitted only 21 percent of applicants, its lowest percentage ever. The number of applications this year was almost 19,400, exceeding last year's total--itself a record--by 1,300. The entering class also will be Duke's most ethnically diverse, with the proportion of students of color increasing to 40 percent from last year's record of 37 percent.</p><p>In a memo to provost Peter Lange, Guttentag said that as measured by strength of curriculum, grades, test scores, recommendations and interviews, extracurricular activities, and essays the new class will equal last year's as Duke's strongest ever in terms of overall quality.</p><p>Noting that the recent controversy involving the men's lacrosse team "unfolded just as applicants were deciding where to attend college next year," Guttentag said he expected that the percentage of students accepting an offer of admission would drop, and it did: from 43 percent last year to 40 to 41 percent. But, he added, that level falls within the usual range of between 40 percent and 44 percent for Duke's admissions "yield."</p><p>"Under the circumstances, it is a confirmation of Duke's enduring reputation that our yield this year remains within that range," Guttentag wrote. According to the latest statistics, the university is seeing a roughly 5 percent decrease in the percentage of both white and African-American students accepting offers of admission, but no decrease among Latino and Asian students. Among the top 300 applicants, the percentage enrolling at Duke is about the same as last year's. Enrollment increases among international students are expected.</p><p>As a result of the slight decrease in yield, Guttentag says he anticipates enrolling about 125 more students than expected from the waiting list to fill the 1,665 places in the class that will enter this fall.</p><p>Saying he has not received much feedback from admitted students about the lacrosse situation, Guttentag speculates that the intense news coverage "probably caused some students to have second thoughts about coming here." He says the admissions office will participate in research over the summer to learn more about the factors affecting student decisions.</p><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="80%" /></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2006-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, August 1, 2006</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/jul-aug-2006" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jul - Aug 2006</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Tue, 01 Aug 2006 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500191 at https://alumni.duke.edu