TOMS Shoes

I’ve been wearing TOMS for about a year and have had some issues with them.  They fall apart pretty easily–the soles wear out–though I’ll admit that I wear them a lot.    Sometimes on 30 minute walks to campus.  I wore the first pair I’d bought (I’m on the second) around New Mexico mountain trails.  My dog chewed the sides out of my first pair, which had already lost the rim of glue over the heels, but I bought another pair in corduroy and hoped it would be more sturdy.

The shoes, though cheap, are cute and simple and great for Florida weather, great for slipping on during the six or seven trips a day  I took down a flight of stairs to take the afore mentioned shoe-devouring dog out.  And I always thought the One for One model was impressive.

My friend just posted this critique of TOMS that has me thinking  (again!) about generosity.  Also about big businesses, Chinese manufacturing of American products, and the third world in need. Another friend (who is taking the crazy road trip and introduced me to Rachel Held Evans’s blog.  I wrote a post about this a while ago) told me she goes to church with the creator of TOMS and I thought–sure, makes sense that this dude would be a Christian.  Who else starts businesses like these?  Probably a lot of people, but it does seem like a Christiany idea.

After reading the critique, I’m thinking about the One for One model, and whether this critic is right to use the word “imperialism.”  She says the trips to the third world countries are imperialist because plane tickets to leave cost more than what the Americans are leaving behind.   Can that really be helped?  I mean, isn’t that more about the airline’s greediness?  Also, she says TOMS:

supports the belief that these people cannot make it on their own, so rather than helping them to develop a healthy economy, we should give them handouts – an imperialist concept if there ever was one.

Does handing out shoes or handing out anything to people need  always send a message that they can’t make it on their own?  I agree that it’s problematic that TOMS is putting local shoe sellers out of business, but these kids didn’t have shoes to begin with, right?  Isn’t this why we have TOMS in the first place?

I don’t expect any company that makes a ton of money, like TOMS makes a ton of money, to be that ethical.  I’m cynical about corporations and big businesses (thank you, The Corporation documentary).  I doubt TOMS creators really care that their shoes fall apart really easily, that they are selling a five dollar shoe for 50 dollars and making a helluva profit.   Every large company, as far as I know of, is making an enormous profit, but they aren’t using any of it to give “hand outs.”

Also, this Manufactured in China thing is more complicated than we give it credit for.  It’s generally terrible, but just because a person makes less than they need to live on in America doesn’t mean they make less they need to live on in Vietnam, Thailand, or China.  There are 104+ arguments about why corporations suck, but the pay rate is not always the worst one.  The critic throws this information out there, while a few paragraphs away she critiques TOMS for doing nothing about local economies.  I wonder what she would think if TOMS built a factory in one of these communities and hired people to boost the local economy.  Would that be imperialist?  Would that be bad for the environment, the people, especially the local shoemakers?  (I honestly don’t know.)

So, I’m still conflicted.  I’m certain TOMS isn’t a perfect company, but it seems better than most, right?

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When the Cold Wind Blows

A good song for a bad day.

On Christians Communicating

Addie Zierman wrote an article I appreciated in Relevant Magazine about rethinking Christian cliches.  The funny thing is, I wasn’t overly familiar with the cliches she referenced in the article, but I know that in every environment, not just Christian communities, we use these verbal shortcuts as part of our common language, for connection.  I’ve attended three churches in six years (lived in different places, that’s why), and one of the most interesting parts of entering a new church community is figuring out the local Christian cliches.  I think they are unavoidable.  But I connected with this article because I’m constantly trying to teach my students about why cliches suck the impact out of whatever they are trying to say, or generally, they do.  Overused language allows the listener/reader to pass by ideas without much thought.

I really like this connection Zierman makes with “fresh language” and Jesus as God’s Word:

But at the heart of the Christian faith is this: we were broken and we couldn’t figure it out and, instead of sending us some tired cliché, God sent Christ. The Word, John called Him. He had hands and feet, dust-covered from all that walking.

Here is what happens when the Word of God brushes against humanity: Stories. Discussion. Fresh metaphor, strung together like so many beads on a string. The Kingdom of God is like this … and like this … and like this other thing over here. It’s a seven-mile walk to a place called Emmaus without a Gospel tract in hand or the Roman’s Road paradigm to quote—just the messy truth of it all, hashed out among new friends.

Stories, fresh metaphor–sounds good to me.

Going back to the theme I’ve been sort of mulling over lately, about how Jesus’ teachings help us to live better in relationship to God but also to our neighbors, I like this idea of choosing language carefully, paying attention to how we’re communicating ideas, and attempting to prevent, through word choice and storytelling, our own indifference to the things we see and know about God’s work in this world.

Next time you’re in New Orleans…

I’m about to promote some cookies.

We (my boyfriend and I) didn’t go to New Orleans this weekend, but a bunch of our friends went because one of these friends won the Tennessee Williams prize for fiction. Amy Hempel was the judge.  We would have liked to go but a) money and b) I had a paper and a presentation and a short story to write and another short story to revise and 40 papers to grade in two weeks. Plus, I’m writing a novel.  The paper is on The King and I, though, and I’m kind of excited about it.

So we stayed back and took care of people’s dogs.  I wrote stories and novel sections and watched the King and I and reread Orientalism and took notes. We took four dogs to the dog park.  As part of the pet-care-thank you, someone brought us back a box of these:

They are so, so good.  We devoured all six in two days.  Eating one of these cookies is like eating a slice of pecan pie. Really good pecan pie.  Do they sell these in North-Florida?  If so, I need to know where.

On Generosity and Over-Giving

Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat Pray Love fame, wrote an interesting article about “over giving”that has got me rethinking generosity.  You can read it–it’s a fast and easy read–but the main point is that she has caused rifts in her relationships with her generosity.  In paying off her friends’ credit card bills, she neglected their dignity.

She puts it this way:

Sometimes, by interrupting his biographical narrative so jarringly, I denied a friend the opportunity to learn his own vital life lesson at his own pace. In other words, just when I believed I was operating as a dream-facilitator, I was actually turning into a destiny disruptor.

I’m thinking about how when Jesus tells us to be generous, it’s in the context of a relationship with another person.  Somebody asks to borrow your coat, you give them your coat.  Somebody asks you to borrow money, you say, here, no need to pay me back.

I think the key here is that a person is asking for these things.  They are already humbled, in a way, and so you don’t have to worry about their dignity, or interrupting the pace of their own work/goal achieving. Someone asks you for help, then you really help them.

The main point Jesus makes (again and again, and its a point Paul likes to reiterate in his letters) is that we “put others before ourselves.”   That means we treat them the way we want to be treated.  I am not sure it’s Christ-like to make people feel like they owe us something, or to empower ourselves through our giving.  It seems like true generosity takes something much more involved–it takes a relationship with that person, trust.  Someone trusts us so much, trusts our generosity, that they ask us for something, for our help in meeting some need.

I know this is tricky, and I’m still thinking it through.  I’m interested in your thoughts.

Some Academic Advice from Coach Taylor

This is true.  Netflix is devouring my academic career.  You know the habit’s bad when the thing causing your procrastination is reprimanding your procrastination. That said, it’s hard to believe that another academic has time to make this tumbler site.

The internet: 10

My work: 0

History as Fiction

… there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much,invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences.

Hayden White, The Historical Text as Literary Artifact

I’m in this class where we’re learning about theories for literary criticism.  Your Derridas and Foucaults and your Bakthins and your Marxes and your Judith Butlers and your Edward Saids… Hopefully you get the picture.  Like most writers who take the class, I find the stuff really interesting and irrelevant for craft.  But still really interesting. Last week we read New Historicist theory (or was it Cultural Studies? Blech) and I especially liked this guy, Hayden White, for figuring out, or being one of the first to write down the idea that history is not fact but narrative.  (Think: Michael Jackson’s HIStory.)

I’m not sure if other fiction writers out there face stuff like this, but once I told this woman that I was a writer and she said she’d like to read my work.  Then I told her I was a fiction writer and she said, sorrowfully, “I don’t read fiction.”

Huh.

So then this dude comes along and says that history is put together in the same way one puts together a fictional narrative.  Makes sense.  I’d like to write more about this, connect it to how Jesus was a fiction writer if he really made up the parables, but I’m just going to throw the quote out there for now.

Teaching Ideas for Writers Who Teach

I have had great success with both of these activities–success, as in, I really love them and my students seem to enjoy them too.

1. TRADE CRAZY STORIES

I got this from the writer/poet, Jim Heynen, when he taught a fiction sprint course I attended.  Jim is known for his teaching as well as his writing–if you ever get the chance to study with him, jump on it.

Okay, so his activity is so simple you’re just going to have to trust me on it: ask your students to take five minutes or so and list some crazy things they’ve experienced, heard, or read about.  I usually start with my own examples, like…

*When the guy in the Geppetto costume at Disney world silently asked me to share my Nerds (candy) with him through outrageous Disney costumed hand gestures

*Another student of mine said her father threw Tom Cruise into a dumpster when they were in high school.

You could spend an entire hour and fifteen minute class period trading these stories.  It’s one of the hardest things to cut off, because each story spurs the next.  Make sure you tell your students that it’s possible that you will steal one of their stories for your own work.  And also, optionally, if you are a good person, that they may steal one of yours.

NEWSREEL MEMORY GAME

I just came up with this today (on David Foster Wallace day, see below) and I wish I’d had more time for it because this, too, could take up a chunk of college time if you needed it to.  I asked the students to list, in five minutes (again), every single media story they can think of that happened in their lifetime.  These can include:

-natural disasters

-celebrity deaths

-inventions

-scandals

-political events

They can be local or global.  The only requirement is that they must have been covered by some kind of media.

After five minutes, we go through the class and each student reads their list.  Much like Boggle or Scattergories, if another student has written down the same event, both or all students must cross it out.   For instance, if you write down 9 /11 (especially if you play this right after you discussed David Foster Wallace’s essay about 9/11), you can be sure that you’ll have to cross it off because everyone else will have that one, too.

I am not a huge fan of playing games with my students–except I am.  I hate it when it feels like a baby shower game, and it’s always possible that pedagogical games will end up being like baby or wedding shower games, but this one, thank God, did not turn out that way.  I think it’s because people weren’t as interested in winning as they were just seeing if other people remembered what they remembered.  Okay, some students were interested in winning.  It was hard to keep them from going off and telling these media stories to each other, which I had to do because we were pressed for time.  This is why I wished I had given it at least 45 mins instead just a half hour.

As a writer who teaches, I love these activities because I hear a lot of crazy stories that I’ve either forgotten or haven’t heard in the first place, and I  can use them in my own writing.

For teachers who just teach–I think these are also great brainstorming exercises.  The students get exposed to a lot of good things to consider writing about.

For humans who don’t teach or write but who like to stay curious–I recommend finding a good group of people to play these games with, especially if you are in need of fascinating stories to keep your brain happy.

David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Address

It’s David Foster Wallace day in the creative nonfiction class I’m teaching to advanced freshmen.  I just played for my students the (ultra famous) commencement speech he gave to graduates at Kenyon College back in 2005.  If you haven’t heard it, I recommend you listen–especially if you’re feeling kind of sad/frustrated/in your own head lately.

If you would prefer to just read it, you can read it here, though you will probably miss some of the speech’s most charming moments, which come from audience response and interaction.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes (though I left the even better moments to surprise and delight you if you take the time to listen):

[On] most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider.

Here’s part one:

and part two:

Enjoy!

Why are we tolerating this?

Remember when people on Craigslist got busted for using the website to sell sex?

My writing teacher/mentor sent me this OP-ED by Nicholas Kristof from the NY Times (because it relates to the novel I’m writing for my thesis/breakout into the novel-writing-world).   In summary, Kristof gives a morbid and disturbing account of a teenage girl who has been sold several times on Backpage.com, a classified ads website monitored by Village Voice Media (the same people who put out the paper).  He says that the website,

accounts for about 70 percent of prostitution advertising among five Web sites that carry such ads in the United States, earning more than $22 million annually from prostitution ads…

Here’s an online petition that he gives from Change.com to help put an end to this.   The petition writers say this about the cause:

Sex trafficking of girls and boys on Backpage.com, owned by Village Voice Media, is becoming a disturbing trend.

A Georgia man was arrested for pimping two 17-year-old girls around the Nashville area. Detectives responded to a suspicious ad on Backpage.com and drove to a motel. There, they found the teens and their 37-year-old pimp, as well as a laptop computer, likely used for the online advertising. Just four days prior to that, four people in Denver were arrested for forcing a teen girl into prostitution. They also advertised her sexual services, including semi-nude pictures, on Backpage. And last year, a South Dakota couple was arrested for selling underage girls for sex on …. wait for it … Backpage.com yet again.

Village Voice Media has a moral responsibility to ensure that young girls and boys aren’t being abused in the commercial sex industry with help from their website.

Now, a rising movement of people of many faiths and backgrounds, motivated by their shared moral convictions, are taking action to end this practice.

Please join us in demanding that Village Voice Media – Backpage.com’s parent company – stop selling ads that others use to sell minors on Backpage.com by shutting down the Adult section of the website.

Maybe I am naive, but my mind is shot at the thought that this company/website hasn’t been severely punished yet for this.