LITERATURE'S REST FROM LABOR

Labor Days: An Anthology of Fiction About Work (synopsis/excerpt), is an exception to a trend in the arts and literature: the disappearance of the workplace. David Gates, editor of the volume, writes in the introduction that contemporary writers "prefer not to look at the significant portion of their imaginary people's lives that must … be spent at work.'' Which is too bad, he says, since portraying the workplace ''opens possibilities, introduces complications, gets characters into revelatory conflict, expands the canvas, colors up the palette, cuts down the chances of boring the reader. (Maybe).'' Even though Americans are spending more and more time at the workplace, work is all but absent from contemporary literature—and, if it's not happening in a hospital or courtroom, work is mostly absent from television and movies as well. "Presumably, most novelists would rather be writing and believe that their readers also find work a tiresome and fruitless distraction from what really matters in life," Laura Miller wrote* last month in the New York Times Book Review, even though, she added, "the office (or factory or restaurant) is where people find adventure, camaraderie, meaning and even intimacy," making it good material for fiction.

But if the workplace is a good setting for stories, the act of work itself may have lost its literary power, writes* Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller. She suggests the marginalization of work in the arts owes to the changing nature of work in the last century, from muscle to mind, from sweating and "sod-busting" to sitting in cubicles, as the manufacturing economy gave way to a service and information economy and much of America went from hard work to soft work. As a result, work has lost its visceral immediacy in literature—as it had in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath—and thus its ability to illustrate literary character. As Keller writes, "The opportunities for sweeping physical drama in a beige cubicle are somewhat limited." She quotes author Russell Muirhead, who says, "Maybe it's hard to depict work in a post-industrial economy because so much of it is done at computer screens." Plus, Keller observes, the role of using work to illumine the struggles of the poor has been assumed by non-fiction writers, such as David K. Shipler in The Working Poor: Invisible in America and Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

If so, fiction is missing out on an opportunity—on its duty—to help us understand two new realities of our working lives. First, as cell phones, laptops, and teleconferencing transform our understanding of "the workplace," and make it harder to leave our work behind in our home, church, and civic lives, they tend to reduce our presence in and commitment to these other areas of life. Second, in a "post-industrial economy," work may be even more integrated to our conceptions of personal identity than ever before. The reflexive question to a person we meet, "What do you do?" is an immediate demand for a clue to the question, "Who are you?" Christians should be especially able to discuss these questions, and to address what Muirhead tells Keller: "We want a calling—something that we can feel devoted to." At byFaithonline.com, editor Dick Doster, wonders whether Christians are prepared. "We need to become reacquainted with the notion that God uses our work to meet the needs of his people. Our work isn't supposed to be primarily about the money. It is, above all, about loving our neighbor."

Related:
Keller's sidebar* on memorable portrayals of work in the arts
Work, meaning and choice, and Calvin Seerveld on Jubilee on the Job, from Comment
My entry on the Union Stockyards and The Jungle in my Chicago album

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times :

COPENHAGEN*—According to Sweden, [Danish immigration] laws have led about 1,000 mixed Danish-foreign couples, barred from setting up households in Denmark, to live across the strait between Copenhagen and Sweden. In many cases, the Danish partner crosses the long causeway bridge from Malmo to Copenhagen every day, or takes the ferry … to work or study. The bridge was called the Love Bridge by The Economist, which carried an account of the situation a couple of months ago, though the term does not seem to have caught on among the couples actually living lives divided between two countries … Throwing out Danes was not the intention of the new law, some of the legislation's sponsors say, but an unavoidable result of the effort to reduce the influx of foreigners, often from non-European countries, who, they argue, burden the social welfare system, commit more than their share of the crime and tend to form enclaves within Denmark, defying efforts to integrate them.

TUCURUÍ, Brazil* - A funny thing happened back when the Brazilian government was building the giant $8 billion dam that bears the name of this town in the eastern Amazon. Somebody neglected to cut down the trees and clear the other growth in the 1,100-square-mile area that would be flooded, and 20 years later that has become a problem. Decomposing vegetation has resulted in the emission of millions of tons of greenhouse gases. Submerged tree trunks hinder navigation, scientists worry that increasing acidity of water in the reservoir could corrode the dam's turbines, and mosquito infestations have been so intense that some settlements have been forced to relocate. To solve the problem, until recently, divers using special hydraulic chain saws had been swimming down 70 feet or so into the reservoir, attaching themselves to submerged tree trunks, cutting them and then watching as the trunks were hauled to the surface by iron cables. … Early this year, however, Eletronorte, the government agency that administers the dam, ordered a stop to the tree removal … [saying] that they now see environmental benefits in leaving the reservoir intact.

WEEKLY DIGEST

• The New York Times Magazine may be making a belated discovery when it finds that evangelical colleges, like Biola University, are not all fundamentalist drill centers of conformity, but are "encouraging a new level of engagement with the secular world." The point was made in a 2000 cover story of the Atlantic Monthly by Alan Wolfe (discussed here by John Wilson and here by Mark Noll). But the Times Magazine piece is notable for writer Samantha Shapiro's patience and care to explore the tension between fundamentalism and cultural engagement at Biola, and to understand, rather than caricature, the students she meets. She may be overeager, however, to endorse Biola professor Craig Detweiler's message that, as Shapiro summarizes, "creative people who start with a message are propagandists, not artists." Article*
• Is it true, asks a letter writer to the Chicago Reader's answer man, Cecil Adams, that the diamond trade is a scam, and is this an excuse not to buy one for one's wife? At the risk of endorsing one husband's cheapness, Adams says there is indeed reason to see a conspiracy lurking behind the world diamond market, even without tackling the question of worker exploitation. Affirming the view of journalist Edward Jay Epstein in his 1982 book The Rise and Fall of Diamonds, Adams says, "Prices are kept high by a cynical cartel that preys on vanity and stupidity," he writes. De Beers in South Africa stifles its supply to keep demand sky-high, and manipulated the 1930s-era media to resurrect the custom of buying engagement rings. As a result, the diamond market soared from $23 million in 1939 to $2.1 billion in 1979. The only thing that can stop it, perhaps, are new artificially produced but high-quality diamonds, such as those made by chemical vapor deposition—a vast improvement on cubic zirconium knockoffs. Column
  Related:
  Sapphires in space, from Slate
• When Melanie Preston, 28, the daughter of a Jewish mother and Irish Catholic father, made her first trip to Jerusalem, one of the first things she did was order a cheeseburger. Preston was visiting on the Birthright Israel program, which provides free trips to Israel for young Jewish visitors, no matter their heritage or degree of religiosity, says syndicated religion columnist Terry Mattingly. The program, supported in part by the Israeli government and non-religious philanthropists, brings out the "tension between Judaism the faith and Judaism the culture," Mattingly says, even as it urges visitors to realize their "Jewish identity." Says Preston: "It's almost impossible to get involved in the life and politics of Israel without getting underneath that into the religious questions." Column
• What was the most "vigorously opposed war with a foreign power in our history," according to one historian? Not Vietnam or Iraq, but the War of 1812, says Smithsonian magazine. Among the dissenters to America's tussle with mighty Britain was Washington lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key, who favored a diplomatic resolution to America's dispute with Britain over maritime rights. But when he found himself on a British ship observing the Royal Navy's withering attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore, and when it was the Stars and Stripes, not the Union Jack, that ascended over the fort in the morning, Key was moved to write the poem that would become the United States' national anthem. Smithsonian tells the story of the battle and the poet who captured it. Summary and PDF
  Also:
  Smithsonian in Antarctica
• Miscellaneous:New editor* for The American Scholar, from the New York Times - One scholar's weeklong journal from Iran, in Slate -World Trade Center lives on in New York City art,* from the Times - The sociology of summer camp,* from the Times - Lost D.C.: Historic buildings that have disappeared, from Reason - What Al Gore is up to, from the New Yorker- Extraterrestrial real estate and other domains of space law, from the Christian Science Monitor
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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant atBooks & Culture. He writes the weekly "On Language" column for the Chicago Tribune.