Short Takes #6

Hayden Carruth: Human Cruelty, 271
Michael Datcher: The Spinners, 292

Datcher shines light on the troubling absence of fathers in project housing and the suburban aspirations repressed within urban culture. There's no men raising children where he grew up, and when a man interacts with the neighborhood boys, they compete for his attention with one-upsmanship and stunts. But the attention is fleeting, the problem of men who have children but aren't fathers cyclical and rampant in the ghetto. A fantastic line in this, after laying out a scene where black kids do backflips to impress a man passing through their project:

"It's likely one of these men laid the seed that spouted into a back-flipper before them." (293)

Datcher says it's easier to give into vice than take the easy road, yet his essay isn't prescriptive; it laments the hardship but neglects to fix anything. Perhaps that simple fact indicates the paradox of the urban problem, identifiable but doomed to repeat.