How to shout Minnesotan: Pawlenty and the authentic voice

Minnesotans have been talking lately about how their former governor Tim Pawlenty talks Minnesotan, or doesn't.

Along with some at the Washington Post and New York Times, Minnesota Public Radio detected a marked change in Pawlenty's accent at a recent speech in Iowa. While the Times noted that Pawlenty, a native of St. Paul, "suddenly developed a Southern accent as he tried connecting to voters by speaking louder and with more energy," Minnesotan commentators characterized the change as a deliberate attempt to come across as "folksy" and more like "an average person."

This characterization might strike those outside the state as odd since for many of them, the elongated vowels and regional idioms could hardly seem more folksy, even quaint, something the Coen Brothers (raised in a Jewish household in a suburb of Minneapolis) played with in their mostly-accurate and mostly-loving send-up of Minnesotan speech disguised as a crime drama, Fargo.

The debate hits home for me, not just as a native of rural Minnesota, but as one who consciously shed his accent while in college on the West Coast. I've come to regret this, but to recover it now would be as much an affectation of my actual roots as Pawlenty's drawl is an affectation of his counterfactual roots. My explanation of his embarrassing attempt, apart from bad judgment, is that Northern Midwestern English lacks a tradition of mellifluous shouting in public life, a way to deliver ringing, stirring oration at a high volume and emotional pitch. By contrast, Southern-inflected oratory--with the fluid musicality of its multisyllabic vowels--has a tradition that has benefited hugely from Southern Baptist and Methodist preaching styles. What is soul in Minnesotan?

Walter Mondale sounded too nice, like a middle school civics teacher who could be terrorized by 13-year-olds. Former governor Jesse Ventura is a formidable bellower, but he comes off a bit like, well, a professional wrestler. The elegant senator, poet, and five-time Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy had a style that was not unappealing, but it shied away from the broad vowels of the deep accent. For inspiration of a tradition that could be, I would point to the late poet Bill Holm, undoubtedly one of the most soulful people I've ever met. As Garrison Keillor eulogized him in 2009, Bill was

a great man and unlike most great men he really looked like one. Six-foot-eight, big frame, and a big white beard and a shock of white hair, a booming voice, so he loomed over you like a prophet and a preacher which is what he was. . . . the sage of Minneota, a colleague of Whitman though born a hundred years too late, a champion of Mozart and Bach, playing his harpsichord on summer nights, telling stories about the Icelanders, and thundering about how the young have lost their way and abandoned learning and culture in favor of grease and noise.

I had the privilege of growing up around Bill, not far from Minneota, and witnessing how he held forth from the piano bench with hours of cigarette-stained ragtime at the house parties thrown by my mother and my father, a colleague of Holm's in the English department of Southwest Minnesota State University (also the home of Howard Mohr, author of the hilarious How to Talk Minnesotan). Here is a brief video clip of Bill speaking to kids about the death of Senator Paul Wellstone and a radio remembrance that captures his wonderful voice.

And so I say to my fellow Minnesotans: If we must augment our voices when we get behind a podium--there being nothing objectionably "inauthentic" about this inherently--we can do no better than this Holm-spun soul.

Isaiah Berlin at SXSW: The cacophony of liberty

From the afternoon-sunlit rooftop patio of a club called Light, a crew of gansta-style rappers is shouting "One is for the money / Two is for the show / Three is for the money / Four is for the hos" while across the street a rock drummer is throwing himself with abandon into their set's climax, and down the block an aging man with an acoustic guitar is softly revisiting Don McLean songs for change. The sounds reverberate off downtown Austin's glassy Frost Bank Tower and collide in a cacophony stirred by a strong westerly wind.

I came to the massive SXSW (South By Southwest) music festival to promote The Casualty Process, an electronic rock duo from Iran, whose U.S. debut was scheduled for a showcase this evening. But after nine months of struggle with a cumbersome immigration bureaucracy, requiring a costly trip for an interview at the U.S. embassy in Ankara, Turkey, and another to Malaysia to retrieve a police report proving good behavior during a stay in late 2009--which turned out to be unavailable, The Casualty Process finally received their artist visas a day before their show--too late to get out of the country.

As I listen to the street-level mashup, I'm thinking of Isaiah Berlin's most enduring essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty," first published in 1958, in which he distinguishes between negative liberty, the absence of interference in one's life by others, and positive liberty, the availability of a number of worthwhile options and the ability to pursue them. Negative liberty of expression and movement are worth little without some positive liberty to be heard and some places to be heard.

There is also a paradox of positive liberty. At the annual music festival boasting thousands of bands appearing at hundreds of venues almost around the clock, audiences face the challenge of having too many options, some of them worthwhile--I saw a marvelous showcase of international hip hop curated by the excellent NomadicWax Records--and some of them not. And those artists who have the real option of being here must overcome the challenge of being heard over the din of all the others who do.

The man with the mic initiates the familiar call-and-response:
"When I say 'South By' you say 'What?'
"South By!"
And the crowd calls, "What?"

The blessings of Hermes on Music Freedom Day

While I am not a praying man, as showtime drew near my thoughts turned positively propitiatory. Since my petition was for the increase of bandwidth and transfer of packets, I was thinking not of Yahweh--definitely an analog sort--but Hermes, the winged-footed herald of the gods, conduit between the world of the mortals and the world of the immortals. It was Thursday 3 March, Music Freedom Day, and I was gathered with a group of young volunteers and expectant audience members in a performance space provided by the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center.

Since 2007, Music Freedom Day has been designated by Freemuse as an occasion for standing up for the human right to freedom of musical expression around the world. This year, the day had already been observed at events in Mumbai, Amman, Cairo, Paris, Amsterdam and a dozen other locations. In Duala, Cameroon, the wrongfully imprisoned singer Lapiro de Mbanga appeared in court. In Kabul, DJ Shakeb Isaar, exiled since 2005, returned. In Beruit, a free jazz group played a tribute to the Egyptian musician Ahmed Basiony who died of an asthma attack in the teargas of the Cairo uprising. In New York we were to broadcast a live performance via video chat by two musicians in an authoritarian regime who were remaining anonymous while trying to get out of the country. It was far from certain that the technology, or their U.S. visa applications, would come through.

The offspring of one of Zeus’ clandestine couplings with the nymph Maia, Hermes was born at dawn in her dusky cavern in the mountains of Arcadia. Before noon he had wandered across the threshold and stumbled upon a tortoise. He throttled it, then gouged out its flesh to fashion from its shell the first lyre, promising the animal that in death it would sing.

When the time came, our internet conduit held, but it was not fast enough to transmit the image and the sound at the same time. At my request, the performers switched off the camera and we contemplated their non-appearance while hearing their music. "We do not want anyone to shed a tear for us," said the young songwriter, who has suffered imprisonment and intimidation by his government because of his musical enthusiasms. "There are many people in the world like us, in our situation."

Hermes is a god of play. It was a youthful prank of stealing 50 head of Apollo's sacred cattle of the sun that landed him in front of Zeus. Thanks to his cleverly witty and winking testimony in self-defense, Zeus smiled on him and appointed him a guardian of borders--and therefore a crosser of borders. He is not a god of solemn covenants, like Yahweh at Sinai. He cannot promise you certain delivery to a promised land. But if you have the courage to offer up your open throat, he will carve you out and make of your body an instrument for the reverberations of the immortal--sound. As the Homeric Hymn to Hermes tells us: "With all mortals and immortals he consorts. Somewhat doth he bless, but ever through the dark night he beguiles the tribes of mortal men."