tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60044236966758384672024-03-17T20:03:21.052-07:00Essay Daily: Talk About the EssayA filter for and a conversation about essays, essayists, essay collections. Published at least weekly.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1171125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-87755303243416453782024-01-08T09:18:00.000-08:002024-01-08T09:18:58.526-08:00The Essay in a Time of Genocide: Two Palestinian Writers and a Continuing Call<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi90bYtZhWs2x21BhYCccRUZ66GdiFt-8uRC6YPylii4OYXyYJAKklXsbuiRdi18d1QXOUU02cGrVs-QXMVMcbXnY7UWHvOwCPBH6spz5fCeIA71Ar5vC8vFjfba4y468xxpo7jkwHbQySw6dAAo72mBGMwfpT32jBFGDCoeCYSXx57pyaJDvB5ljyWLhJy/s511/Maram%20Humaid's%20five-month-old%20baby.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Maram Humaid's five-month-old baby" border="0" data-original-height="511" data-original-width="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi90bYtZhWs2x21BhYCccRUZ66GdiFt-8uRC6YPylii4OYXyYJAKklXsbuiRdi18d1QXOUU02cGrVs-QXMVMcbXnY7UWHvOwCPBH6spz5fCeIA71Ar5vC8vFjfba4y468xxpo7jkwHbQySw6dAAo72mBGMwfpT32jBFGDCoeCYSXx57pyaJDvB5ljyWLhJy/s16000/Maram%20Humaid's%20five-month-old%20baby.png" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">Maram Humaid’s five-month-old baby in Southern Gaza [Maram Humaid/Al Jazeera]</span></div><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>For the past five weeks, Essay Daily has regularly featured pieces on the essay in a time of genocide. </p><p>When we extended the invitation to contribute to this feature on November 27th, approximately 1,200 Israelis and 14,854 Palestinians had been killed in the current conflict in Gaza. As of today, January 8th, at least 8,000 more Palestinians have been killed, including 249 in the last 24 hours. </p><p>Right now, according to the United Nation’s World Food Programme, half of Gaza's 2.2 million people are suffering from extreme or severe hunger, and the World Health Organization reports that Gaza is “experiencing soaring rates of infectious disease.” People are suffering from upper respiratory infections, meningitis, skin rashes, scabies, lice, and chickenpox. Over 100,000 cases of diarrhea have been reported since mid-October. This horrific situation has been made worse by Gaza’s current lack of sanitation, clean water, and the collapse of its healthcare system. Approximately 1.9 million people in Gaza have been forced to flee their homes.</p><p>Essay Daily has currently published all of the work that's been submitted by our contributors. We are grateful for their essays and for how they’ve illuminated what it means to write as global citizens. Like we do with our other features, we will keep open the <a href="https://www.essaydaily.org/2023/11/the-essay-in-time-of-genocide-invitation.html" target="_blank">call</a> for this feature as we continue to live and write in a time genocide. If you’re an essayist interested in contributing, contact Eric LeMay (eric@ericlemay.org).</p><p>As this part of our feature ends, we would like to direct you to two essays by Palestinian writers. The first, “<a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/december/don-t-look-away" target="_blank">Don’t Look Away</a>,” is by the London-based lawyer and fiction writer Selma Dabbag and was published on the <i>London Review of Books</i>' blog on December 13th. Dabbag begins her essay:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p>I wonder whether there is a right way to respond to grief, to loss, to a risk of genocide of one’s people. Whether one should go out or stay in, whether it is unseemly to visit cinemas and theatres, to eat out in restaurants, or to laugh. I know a young woman in London whose home was bombed in Gaza City on 10 October. Her family are (or were, the last time I spoke to her) in a tent in a school in Khan Younis. They have no walls, she says. No roof. Some days they eat nothing but a small tin of pineapple, or mushrooms. It is getting cold. Like thousands of others, they had no chance to pack anything from their home before it was bombed. On one occasion there was fighting outside the school, men fearful for the safety of their wives, their daughters, trying to get them inside the gates. The bombing is non-stop. ‘Some days I find everything very funny,’ she told me. Some evenings she spends in tears, but everything is unstable. ‘I feel I am going mad,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop laughing.’</p></blockquote><p>The second essay is by Maram Humaid, a Palestinian journalist and storyteller who lives in Gaza. It’s entitled “<a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/1/1/israel-flattened-my-home-killed-my-family-but-i-lit-a-candle-for-gaza" target="_blank">Israel flattened my home, killed my family. I still lit a candle for 2024</a>" and was published on January 1st by <i>Al Jazeera</i>. Humaid's essay ends:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p>Three weeks ago, my aunt, her family, and grandchildren were killed when their six-story home was bombed. Forty-five people were killed and their bodies remained trapped under the rubble for days.</p><p>My father and I mourned while offering condolences to my only surviving cousin, who was displaced with her husband to Deir el-Balah.</p><p>She told us that no one was able to get them out because of the presence of tanks and snipers around the place. Neighbours told them that they heard some of them alive screaming and pleading for help from under the rubble, but they could not help them. Then these voices eventually faded away after a few days.</p><p>This is how lives end in Gaza. This is how people are killed. They get bombed in homes, left to bleed to death under rubble, without rescue. Pain eats away at the hearts of their loved ones who watch their deaths helplessly.</p><p>The wider world’s inability to stop this highlights how little our lives are valued. Our death and killing, our spilled blood, have become permissible.</p><p>While the world was illuminated to celebrate the New Year last night, I lit a candle for my five-month-old child, amidst the darkness of continuous bombings around.</p><p>Our only wish is survival, an end to the war. Farewell to a sorrowful and painful year. Long live Gaza.</p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10884498346855741172noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-19556320058669500422024-01-01T14:09:00.000-08:002024-01-01T14:39:30.812-08:00Zachary Ostraff on Glass Eyes<p style="text-align: center;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-4JJzeie6SIj3qJbBUC-kk7wNXM2s4s-lwzk8qmh1pXKY0uKFGYWpR2o60G2mhbm-oI4DK844mq-5KtsZpCR_CKF_5rSKvwIo_6ziliThpQO3LGGSuOF9O5RyM_ovPkea7M3pgNoNAiFMGjzsN8G1tOwtsGZo32v_-tjuqO-6L01kDNA2buU8AxxaX_nN/s1194/Glass%20Eyes.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="829" data-original-width="1194" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-4JJzeie6SIj3qJbBUC-kk7wNXM2s4s-lwzk8qmh1pXKY0uKFGYWpR2o60G2mhbm-oI4DK844mq-5KtsZpCR_CKF_5rSKvwIo_6ziliThpQO3LGGSuOF9O5RyM_ovPkea7M3pgNoNAiFMGjzsN8G1tOwtsGZo32v_-tjuqO-6L01kDNA2buU8AxxaX_nN/s320/Glass%20Eyes.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>In London, England, I find myself looking at a display case of 16 glass eyes. These eyes show a variation of color. The darkest eye is dark brown, almost black. The lightest is sky blue. These eyes were used as part of a study of eye color, vision, and intelligence in immigrant Jewish children that looked at their eugenic “worth.” This case is a part of a larger exhibit at the Wellcome Collection about the inherent racism and antisemitism embedded in the practice of eugenics, an overlapping practice to phrenology and the creation of many life and death masks. </p><p>The problem with statistics is that the numbers can dehumanize the individuals. The problem with the news is that it saturates our minds with distanced trauma while avoiding the harshness of reality. While I write this essay people in Gaza are dying. People aren’t just dying in Gaza; people are being massacred. And people are not just people but individuals. With names. Families. Goals. Problems. Likes. Dislikes. How do we humanize the dead? </p><p>In a field, alkaline dusted tombstones are the only markers of Clarion, Utah: a Jewish settlement established in 1911. It “folded” four years later. Rabbi Krauskopf thought the local Mormon settlement of Gunnison, Utah ,would be their allies in returning to a lifestyle of farming. The Mormons, after all, were also historically a persecuted people. But no hope would come. The communities remained separated by their faith, by their differences. Records show that the Jews of Clarion didn’t know how to farm such an inhospitable land. The Mormons never really spent the time to help.</p><p>My eye color is between eyes six and seven: hazel brown with flecks of other colors. My son’s eyes would be a sixteen, as blue as a pale summer sky. </p><p>With a light knock, the doctor walked into the examination room. With only slight hesitation she told my wife, Elise, that my daughter was obese. My daughter was there in the room too. Talked over, but not unaware. Later she would ask what “obese” meant. This all happened despite the earlier conversation Elise had with the doctor about our family history, despite the fact Elise had asked the doctor to be considerate of our daughter’s body image and her self-confidence; we didn’t feel like we needed to make our daughter feel othered because of her size. Particularly because both our families have a history of huskiness at a young age. The doctor went on to explain that exercise and dieting can help with weight. She didn’t listen when we told her that our daughter was very “active,” that she played tennis and basketball, that our daughter liked to hike and be outside more than anything else. The doctor didn’t listen when we told her that our daughter ate a healthy well-rounded diet. Instead, she handed our daughter a list of things she should eat and things she should avoid; for the doctor, our daughter was just an outlier in the statistics of normality. </p><p>The Noel Phrenology collection at The University College of London has history that isn’t so dissimilar to other death mask collections. It was donated to the college by Noel’s descendants. It ended up in the eugenics lab for a while. It was decided that the masks weren’t necessary, so they were then donated to the art school at the college. For years the masks were used as props in still lifes. They were handled and turned and touched and drawn. You can see the years of grime from all the handling on each mask—a coat of hands grasping. Then when the art school tired of the masks, they were thrown away. Someone discovered them in some discard bins, recognized them as <i>not trash</i>, pulled them out and put them in the Object Based Learning Lab at UCL. </p><p>It is in the Object Based Learning Lab that I first see the collection. I traveled across the ocean to see these masks, to think about the processes of phrenology. It is in the lab that the director points out that there is an exhibit about eugenics only a short distance away that contains some of the masks from the Noel collection. It is in this same exhibit that I see the glass eyes. </p><p>The dark side of phrenology is the way the practice lent itself to bias confirmation; classism and racism are rampant in the evaluation of the head. In the Noel collection, Noel separated each mask into one of two categories: the intellectuals (usually life masks made of people already acknowledged for their brilliance) and the criminals (usually death masks made after the subject had been decapitated for their crimes). The curator of the Object Based learning lab tells me there were only two masks that didn’t fit snuggly in one of the two categories: a woman considered an intellectual—Noel didn’t know where to place her because she was “smart for a woman” but he didn’t consider her on the same level as his other intellectuals; the other mask was a life mask of a known criminal who had spent time in jail, but then, upon release was reformed. He became a monk and served others for the remainder of his life. Neither of these individuals fit with his other conclusions about shapes and bumps and predictions of predilection. </p><p>I am drawn to Clarion because of my ancestry. I am related to many people that immigrated across the great plains, often at great sacrifice, for their freedom of religion. And my grandfather is Jewish; his lineage stemmed from Russian Jewish immigrants that arrived in Baltimore near the turn of the 19th century. Because of my grandfather and my faith in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I have always felt connected to Judaism. So, in many ways, I view Clarion as what could’ve been a mecca, a blending of my ancestry. Yet, for whatever reason—whether it was that the Mormon’s wouldn’t accept or befriend the Jews, or if the Jews kept themselves apart because their ideologies—the settlement failed. </p><p>It can be easy to forget the anger that accompanies discrimination, the anger at being othered, and the anger that leads to the othering. It is easy to forget the history that leads to the action. When you are othered, it can be easy to feel like violence is your only defense, especially when your people have faced holocaust after holocaust; I can only trace my Jewish lineage so far before the records disappear from existence, wiped out by discrimination and violent measure. It is also easy to be blinded by anger. Blinded so much that you can’t see that your actions are just repeating the atrocities enacted earlier upon yourself. </p><p>The abused can become the abuser. </p><p>In September of 1857, a wagon train from Missouri traveled through Utah. It is said that some of those Missourians were part of the violent mobs that drove the Mormons from Missouri. Anger spilled over into violence. Mormon settlers from Cedar City masqueraded as Native Americans and massacred the men and women from Missouri. </p><p>How do we break the cycle? How do we acknowledge the past without repeating it in the present. How do the abused heal? </p><p>Thousands of miles away from Gaza I find myself conflicted. There is a history behind the violence. Both sides are guilty. But too many of the victims are innocent. Too many of the people being affected by the anger are just trying to live their lives. My distance is part of the problem. My lineage is Jewish, but I am not a Zionist. My people have been erased, but that does not mean we should erase others. But how do we protect ourselves, our beliefs when we are feeling attacked? </p><p>All these miles away, I have the luxury of thinking that too often language is used to create emotional distance. Conflict is just a softened way of saying violence and anger are rampant. Even the word <i>violence</i> is a softened way of saying that someone is intentionally causing hurt, injury, and/or death to others. We are so practiced at using language to blur the blows that even now, as I turn toward the problem, I am part of the problem. </p><p>Looking at a photograph of the glass eyes, it is easy to see only the color of the glass. The glass is just glass. But what does it mean when we attribute the color of an eye or the shape of a head to inherent qualities. What does it mean when we judge others by numbers and statistics instead of seeing them as a living person? </p><p>“Let my people go!”</p><p>Moses says this. In <i>The Ten Commandments</i>, in the Bible, in <i>The Prince of Egypt</i>. <i>Let my people go.</i> Now, thousands of miles away from Israel, from Gaza, people are saying something similar to the Israelites about the Palestinians. But the issue isn’t about letting anyone go, or finding a home, really; it is about finding a way to come together, to listen and acknowledge the atrocities of the past, and finding peace for the future. But how do we do that with so much anger? How do we do that when all we see is the other; the colors of the glass eyes reflect only what we want to see and not what needs to be seen. </p><p style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; text-size-adjust: auto;"> </p><p style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; text-align: center; text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">*</span></p><p style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; text-align: center; text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"> </span></p><blockquote style="background-color: white; border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-size-adjust: auto;"><span face="Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif" style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"><b>Zachary Ostraff</b> received his MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University (2016). He has work in <i>Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies</i>, <i>High Desert Journal</i>, <i>Longridge Review</i>, <i>Hippocampus Magazine </i>and more. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Texas Tech University. This essay is part of manuscript Zachary is developing that uses life and death masks to explore memory and connection. You can follow him on X (Twitter) @ostraffz or view his joint website with his artist partner, Elise, at <a href="http://ostraffworks.com" target="_blank">ostraffworks.com</a>.</span></span></blockquote><blockquote style="background-color: white; border: none; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-size-adjust: auto;"><p><i>This essay is part of the feature "<a href="http://www.essaydaily.org/2023/11/the-essay-in-time-of-genocide-invitation.html" style="color: #33aaff; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">The Essay in a Time of Genocide</a>"</i></p></blockquote><p></p>Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10884498346855741172noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-3597491785615700382023-12-25T04:55:00.000-08:002023-12-25T04:55:01.104-08:00Andrew Maynard on Other People’s Children<p>When my wife, Ally, began to feel contractions last month, she tried to convince herself they weren’t real. With baby #1, her water broke on the due date, but these arrived nine days early, and it can be difficult to recognize a reality outside of your lived experience. Ally researched Braxton Hicks on her phone while I slept in the nursery (I’d been kicked out of bed in favor of a full-body pillow). The contractions drew closer together, more painful, until she could no longer pretend they weren’t real. She woke me up to take her to the hospital. I was struck by her calm. </p><p><span style="white-space: normal;">The first time Ally was in labor, she pushed for four and a half hours, had an epidural that didn’t spread to half of her body, experienced the frustration of some unfortunately-timed shift changes, and ended with an episiotomy. In the aftermath, she experienced sustained waves of crippling anxiety. We took our son home but had to return to the NICU the next day. About a week later, my mom called while I was out walking the dog. When she asked how I was doing, I started crying on the crowded sidewalk. I didn’t have the language to explain what I was feeling, so I hung up the phone. </span></p><p>But this time the epidural distributed its magic with generosity, and we took a nap while we waited. When the doctor came in to check on the progress, Ally’s water broke and our second son was delivered fifteen minutes later. Ally looked at ease holding Sheppard. She’d done this before. Her body and mind had evolved to not only endure but to embrace building and delivering life. I cut the cord. The doctor stitched her up and then left. The nurses remained to do what they do: professionally care about other people’s children. We stared at our son, Sheppard, all day. I’d now witnessed two births up close and personal. I knew what it looked and sounded like. Yet I also knew I could witness a thousand more and never really understand the experience. I studied my son's tiny face and long toes and jet-black hair, and for the first time in weeks, I forgot to call my senators to advocate on behalf of the thousands of children who had been killed in Gaza. And the thousands more to come. </p><p><span style="white-space: normal; white-space: pre;"> </span></p><p>I recently revisited Audre Lorde’s essay “<a href="https://classics.fas.harvard.edu/files/classics/files/bowdoin_latin_silenceintoaction.pdf" target="_blank">The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action</a>” and find myself in the precarious position of agreeing with Lorde’s sentiment that “Your silence will not protect you,” while also being weary (verging on cynical) of the way speaking truth has manifested in the contemporary landscape of social media. When everyone speaks every one of their truths to everyone in their curated circle, the effect rendered is the same as the white noise machine in my toddler’s room: the voices converge into a single static that muffles the outside world. </p><p><span style="white-space: normal;">I arrived at Lorde’s essay in a state of frustration. I was irritated how the rhetoric surrounding the atrocities in Gaza had started to diminish the atrocities themselves. I was aware of the irony—centering my frustration over the way people center their outrage—and thought Lorde’s words might discourage my pettiness, maybe even combat my hypocrisy. Or at the very least force me to think outside of my experience. Usually the role of the essay in my life is simple: I take pleasure in reading them. But sometimes, particularly in moments of chaos, there’s more intention. </span></p><p> </p><p>We moved from San Francisco to Richmond, Virginia, this past summer to be closer to Ally’s family. Moving is a pain in the ass, but it’s also transformative if you allow it to be. You have to make choices about what you value, where to invest your resources, which stuff is worth the haul, who you must say goodbye to. As independent school teachers, Ally and I have to consider whether we want to take advantage of discounted tuition with our employer schools or start thinking about public school districts. Do we prioritize a yard or a walkable neighborhood? We have to clarify what we actually mean when we say we value diversity. Basically, we have to decide what air we want our children to breathe. Choice can feel daunting, but it’s always a privilege. Moving across the country, like writing an essay, asks you to hold both who and where you’ve been and who and where you want to be in tandem. </p><p><span style="white-space: normal;">Moving has also made me conscious of the provincial influences on how we tell stories about our own homes and the homes of others. When I tell people in Richmond I moved from San Francisco, I’ve been met with looks that say, <i>I know why you left.</i> They don’t. Yes, they know it’s expensive, and they’ve typically seen the videos of the car break-ins and tents on the sidewalk and people doing drugs on the street. Multiple people have specifically referenced how Walgreens now has to lock up the majority of their products and might have to shut down their city locations. And I find myself wondering if purchasing free-range deodorant from a Walgreens in San Francisco was really once the nostalgia-inducing experience they make it out to be, or if there’s something else going on. And if you’ve seen the headlines about San Francisco on major news outlets, it’s hard to blame anyone for believing the city is broken. But it’s also important to acknowledge that if you, like Ron Desantis, use maps that track human shit, you shouldn’t be surprised when that's what you step in. And I say this as someone who loves San Francisco and also hates the way San Franciscans so often talked about the South as if exempt from the bigotry. I say this as someone who is essentially still a tourist in Richmond but has realized that, depending on your slant and where you fall on the map, Richmond is either the former capital of the Confederacy that fetishizes its past, or the predominantly minority city that has demanded new monuments. And if the stories of San Francisco and Richmond can be told in ways that are unrecognizable to the people who live there, what might I be missing in the discourse about Gaza? And anyway, most people in Richmond with whom I discuss San Francisco simply respond, “Oh, I love San Francisco.” But those responses don’t help me say what I’m trying to say. Do you see what I’m saying? </span></p><p><br /></p><p>And this all rests under the umbrella of the question: What can the essay do in a time of genocide? I don’t think I have (nor am I particularly interested in) a prescriptive answer. It’s easier to answer what the essay can’t do in a time of genocide. Essays will not feed or clothe or shelter or shield the people whose roots have been tattered and ripped from Gaza. Essays will not pull the shrapnel from the flesh of children. Essays will not breathe life into the cold bodies of dead babies. </p><p>But essays do encourage digression in a time that feels more privy to debate and definition. Essays tend to avoid the delicate jostling of semantics that send the internet into a tizzy over the parameters and application of the word genocide. Essays reject the Jenga-styled, veneered arguments that pretend to be offended by the manufactured hypocrisy of both valuing land acknowledgements and believing Palestinians have the right to exist. </p><p>Within Lorde’s essay, there are entire worlds to explore, but I keep coming back to this passage: “In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.” It’s here in the essay where I suspect Lorde would urge me to call my reps and donate to aid funds and encourage my community to follow suit, but she would caution me against taking up space in an increasingly crowded discussion where it can already be a challenge to interpret the words let alone make meaning from them. I don’t believe it’s this white American guy’s function in the transformation to be heard, but rather to listen to those whose function and experience make them, as speakers, vital to the transformation. </p><p>And history and policy are important, and they are lanes that require drivers with credentials of knowledge and experience. And there are essays to be written that I can’t and will not write but will devour if you write them and encourage others to do the same. So I’m trying to stay in my lane here, to keep it simple. Because there is simplicity within this complexity. People are dying in droves. Civilians are dying in droves. Children are dying in droves. And Lorde says: </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth. </p></blockquote><p>And here is what I know beyond understanding. On our first night in the hospital, Sheppard, as is common for babies who undergo a quick labor, had a belly full of amniotic fluid that he kept spitting up while asleep on his back. The nurses assured us that babies can tilt their heads to the side and will not choke on their own bile. But we still couldn’t sleep. Maybe it was because we’d recently binged <i>Breaking Bad</i> and had too recently watched what happened to Jesse’s girlfriend, Jane. So every couple minutes when Sheppard would gag, we’d flock to his bassinet and wipe away the mess and hover, a hand on his chest and an ear by his mouth waiting to feel his breath. And we did that all night—out of instinct, not choice. A choice is whether you look at the <a href="https://www.essaydaily.org/2023/12/dave-griffith-on-thinking-about-looking.html" target="_blank">sensitive content</a>. Maybe you <a href="https://www.essaydaily.org/2023/12/nicole-walker-on-insistence-of-essay.html" target="_blank">insist</a> on spending three days sifting through investigative reports that warn you it’s going to hurt. And maybe you find a detail so brutal that you can barely <a href="https://www.essaydaily.org/2023/12/eric-lemay-on-unbearable-thoughts-and.html" target="_blank">bear</a> to consider it. There's much to be gleaned from reading other people’s essays, but I’ve also been thinking about the role of writing the essay and teasing out the banality of my own experience in the time when the World Health Organization has reported that a child is killed every 10 minutes in Gaza, which means that dozens of children have died in the time I’ve spent recounting the birth of my own. And when you measure anything in the lives of children, it’s fair to ask what’s the point? And it’s tempting to borrow a sentence from Lorde, perhaps, “The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us.” But that would feel contrived, like total bullshit coming from me. Because Lorde’s essay was written to be spoken and shared with an audience, and I’m writing this for myself. I’m writing this because I want to think exhaustively about something I feel in my body but don’t fully understand. To remember that after Ally gave birth to our first child it was the stories of women that made her realize she wasn’t alone. I want to question why it’s impossible to sleep when my child is gagging, but I can sleep while children die in Gaza. I once cried in the middle of the street because my body and mind were still acclimating to the weight of being explicitly responsible for another life. And while our bodies and minds might be built to evolve and protect ourselves, we must reject hardening to the deaths of other people’s children. And when Lorde says “teach by living,” I think of the nurses who showed me how to fold a diaper beneath the stump of an umbilical cord and how you have to swaddle a baby tighter than you might feel comfortable with to make them feel secure. And at the time I thought they were modeling how to keep your child alive, but maybe they were modeling what it looks like to care for someone else’s children as if they were your own. Maybe when they told me not to worry about Sheppard spitting up what to me looked like poison, it’s because they understood that amniotic fluid was what nourished him for months, and sometimes we have to reject the very thing that used to keep us safe, that once sustained us, in order to live and grow and transform in a new world. </p><div><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"> </p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; text-align: center;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 13.2px; text-size-adjust: auto;">*</span></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; text-align: center;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 13.2px; text-size-adjust: auto;"> </span></p><blockquote style="background-color: white; border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: red; font-family: Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"><b>Andrew Maynard</b></span></span><b style="color: red; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"> </b><span style="color: red; font-family: Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">is a teacher and writer based in Richmond, Virginia. His prose has appeared in <i>HAD</i>, <i>Rejection Letters</i>, <i>True Story</i>, <i>DIAGRAM</i>, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two sons, Clyde and Sheppard.</span></span></blockquote><blockquote style="background-color: white; border: none; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p><i>This essay is part of the feature "<a href="http://www.essaydaily.org/2023/11/the-essay-in-time-of-genocide-invitation.html" style="color: #33aaff; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">The Essay in a Time of Genocide</a>"</i></p></blockquote></div><p></p><p></p>Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10884498346855741172noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-17135183590550685082023-12-20T04:00:00.000-08:002023-12-20T11:48:44.117-08:00Patrick Madden on Exactitude in Translation (feat. Eduardo Galeano with a Christmas Eve pun)<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpNLg2TeH_pRypnE-6C6ieNcFvEnkdSCbcloHd0Vzh1bLOXyDAdHpzkt3OHWXK68cC1F2dlkXagk6FvUq5iSCgk1u8fN4ONi2TXF36IeG_UZLjWaySTJh528ADtO1e8AKVj6j0xHYBlZcVIKL6874PdpKCSCjtBvLrlrzKZqk-BWuBL760YeiC95DlxOQ/s499/Galeano-Hunter.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 0 1em 1em 1em; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="200" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="329" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpNLg2TeH_pRypnE-6C6ieNcFvEnkdSCbcloHd0Vzh1bLOXyDAdHpzkt3OHWXK68cC1F2dlkXagk6FvUq5iSCgk1u8fN4ONi2TXF36IeG_UZLjWaySTJh528ADtO1e8AKVj6j0xHYBlZcVIKL6874PdpKCSCjtBvLrlrzKZqk-BWuBL760YeiC95DlxOQ/s200/Galeano-Hunter.jpg"/></a></div>
<p>I have just finished reading Eduardo Galeano's last book, <i>Hunter of Stories</i>, in English translation, against Karina's advice, and I admit that she was utterly correct to question my judgment. I know Spanish well enough, and I do own the book in its original language, but that copy is miles away at my office, and I am sick, and I'd been waiting so long to say goodbye to Eduardo, who died many years ago, and I've been rereading my favorites of his books but avoiding this one, I suppose because the act felt too final, but this long weekend seemed like the right time to finally do it, "it" being to read, but also to bid farewell, which is not really farewell, as Eduardo himself learned as a young man in the old cafes of Montevideo:</p>
<blockquote style="color: darkblue;">I discovered that the past could become the present, and that memories could be recounted in such a way that they would stop being yesterday and become right now.</blockquote>
<p>So maybe I was just missing my old friend and I wanted him present again, and Karina was right that I should have listened to his voice unfiltered through a translator. This point came home to me most clearly near the end of the book, in a scene from years ago in Montevideo's Parque Rodó, which the translator renders (in part) thusly:</p>
<blockquote style="color: darkblue;">suddenly I found myself surrounded by an uproarious crowd of children, dressed in their school uniforms, the girls with big blue ribbons in their hair.</blockquote>
<p>As I've mentioned, <i>Cazador de Historias</i> is ensconced on a shelf in my university office. I will write the next bit before I get the book.</p>
<p>Reading that line, I knew it was mistranslated. I felt curious, a bit miffed, a bit betrayed, a bit territorial, a bit elitist. I wondered why Mark Fried, who'd translated eight of Galeano's books, who'd worked with him for twenty-five years, would have interpreted the idea this way into English, knowingly or unwittingly. My cavil was with the ribbons. While it's possible that some girls wore blue ribbons in their hair, I'm certain that Galeano was noting the big blue bows on the front of every Uruguayan schoolchild's uniform, boys and girls alike. I imagine the translator, encountering a strange detail that didn't map onto his experience, deciding that Galeano must have meant ribbons in the girls' hair, a logical place for such things. Who ever heard of a school uniform featuring giant blue bows, or, for that matter, flowing knee-length white smocks buttoned up in back? Who would design such a cruel outfit, not for private school students, whose risible getups are an expected part of their hazing, but for every child in the public schools of a country that led the Americas in establishing free, obligatory, laical education for all (1876)?</p>
<p>I guess I'm surprised that Fried seems either never to have visited Uruguay, or never to have noticed the ubiquitous schoolchildren in their silly uniforms, or maybe he visited only in the summer, or he didn't think to check on what must have seemed an odd phrasing in Galeano's Spanish (Galeano would have been dead by the time Fried got to this part of the book, I believe, so he couldn't have consulted). Or perhaps he decided not to "go there" in describing the reality Galeano had written, knowing that most of his English-speaking readers would be confused by an accurate depiction of the scene. But not this reader.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5reC-rUdoiRbsSD7Q4AgwxMy-uwZzzZeMHHpIGErz18Vr7mEmFm78kaz0JMXLEyOSFt_T8QGn3HxoAQtC-2MUQ-rlhmebhIm4sP2wSFT8CpIvSnuOLcUmsNzsROzAuRKoX-oudGVmwojZVz1AlOoyvYFrsnG0n1mK7BZORYgvMoFMm1fp2ELgBgdrRV4/s1000/Galeano-Cazador.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 0 1em 1em 1em; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="200" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="647" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5reC-rUdoiRbsSD7Q4AgwxMy-uwZzzZeMHHpIGErz18Vr7mEmFm78kaz0JMXLEyOSFt_T8QGn3HxoAQtC-2MUQ-rlhmebhIm4sP2wSFT8CpIvSnuOLcUmsNzsROzAuRKoX-oudGVmwojZVz1AlOoyvYFrsnG0n1mK7BZORYgvMoFMm1fp2ELgBgdrRV4/s200/Galeano-Cazador.jpeg"/></a></div>
<p>I have just found the Spanish edition of the book and checked the original phrasing. I was right (of course; I wouldn't complete this essay, or release it into the world, if I were wrong). Here it is:</p>
<blockquote style="color: darkblue;">me encontré súbitamente rodeado por una alborotada multitud de niños, vestidos con sus túnicas escolares y sus grandes moños azules.</blockquote>
<p>I like "uproarious" for "alborotada"; "crowd" is better than the cognate "multitude." Same for "uniform" instead of "tunic," though the latter term gets us much closer to an accurate visual. Syntactically, "suddenly I found myself" is the expected rendering of what reads as "myself [I] encountered suddenly" in word-for-word translation. Nearly everything feels pleasing, both accurate and artful, but maybe even the non-Spanish speaker can see that there are absolutely no "girls" and no "hair" here. Just "grandes moños azules" = "grand moños azures" = "big blue bows" ("moño" is supposed to have entered Latin from Etruscan, where "muhn" meant "knot").</p>
<p>I don't know why this bothers me so much, but I imagine it has something to do with the unavoidable imperfections of translation, or even the imprecisions of writing generally. For instance, I have been to Parque Rodó, numerous times, so I can locate Galeano's scene in a kind of general scenery/geography. In fact, I do locate it (unconsciously) just outside the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, where I once ran into the novelist Mario Delgado Aparaín. Obviously, the happenstantial similarities deepen the topographical. In this transposition of memories, I guess I am the rowdy schoolchildren and Delgado is Galeano (note the near anagram: 5 of 7 letters). But I am certain that my image is "wrong," not only because what are the chances, but also because Galeano used to always walk along the riverfront, which intersects the park several blocks from the museum, nearer to the amusement park, which seems like a more likely place for kids to (want to) be. Of course, a reader doesn't have to visualize the scene with any measure of specificity (and even my sharpest experiential memory of the park is only hazy and vague) to get the point of the vignette, which is that the children were excited to see an author they'd read in school; that they hailed him as "lord of the flames," misattributing to him a story he'd recounted from an unnamed man from Neguá, Colombia; and that, as Galeano points out to end his piece, this was "the only title of nobility [he'd] ever received." There's a lot here, but mostly the inversion of our expectations about value, about whom we ought to impress. Not only does the piece celebrate children; it undermines the whole system of back-patting honorifics. It's typical Galeano, in a good way.</p>
<p>So why should it matter if the translator transplanted the blue bows to the girls' hair?</p>
<p>I guess I could ask you how you would read "an uproarious crowd of children, dressed in their school uniforms and their big blue bows." Would you breeze by the description? Pause to consider it? Wonder what those bows were doing? Where they were located? Might you place them in girls' hair anyway? And does knowing that they’re on every child, dangling just below the neck, on a dresslike white smock, advance the plot? Does it help you understand anything about any message? Or does it give you another kind of pause? Are you heading to your search engine right now to see this sight?</p>
<p>Here. I'll save you the trouble:</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvmblVYFwQAnanVwOLNkVjtAvBI-XrSxnjZri9R2d7qUzv37U8jgcE0BZWdjx4ahS4iHCxvDx7_FLOenG1IDXP2jYP_rmoy1TmLW2ZCMj-1wjwdKzXmZ1gdnE3MszIx5emiP3h6GJ8eIe6n5nr6D-rofZ8duBivECQPFj2K01WJVXGfJZSsN1YDQs1BU8/s945/titumi-tunicas.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="945" data-original-width="945" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvmblVYFwQAnanVwOLNkVjtAvBI-XrSxnjZri9R2d7qUzv37U8jgcE0BZWdjx4ahS4iHCxvDx7_FLOenG1IDXP2jYP_rmoy1TmLW2ZCMj-1wjwdKzXmZ1gdnE3MszIx5emiP3h6GJ8eIe6n5nr6D-rofZ8duBivECQPFj2K01WJVXGfJZSsN1YDQs1BU8/s400/titumi-tunicas.jpg"/></a></div>
<p>For me, who didn't grow up in Uruguay and who's never worn the uniform, but whose children have (betimes, when we have lived in Montevideo long term), the sight of those comical dandy-painter costumes always elicits a smile, sometimes even a chuckle. Karina repeats the party line about how the uniforms equalize rich and poor, because nobody sees whether your clothes are ratty or fashionable, but I'm not so sure. For one thing, you can see pants legs and shoes; for another, maybe your smock is not in the best condition. A related justification she gives is that kids never have to worry about what clothes they'll wear to school because they're covered up with the uniform anyway. I mean, yes, those are possible interpretations of the tunic-and-bow, but couldn't we also be perpetuating a minor humiliation on our children, or, better said, a humbling, to good purpose? Enforcing a kind of uniformity as a means of, well, uniting them, us, not just spatially-socioeconomically but temporally-historically? Children wear the same uniform their parents wore, same as their grandparents and great-grandparents wore, same as those kids who thronged Eduardo Galeano that day. Dress (as redress) is yet another way past becomes present. Everybody does it. Has done it. See? We all survived. We're still here.</p>
<p>And while we're still here, extrapolating ad nauseam from such a trifling mistranslation, I should clarify that I'm resolutely against the idea that writing is purely secondary to what we commonly call "reality." Galeano first taught me this:</p>
<blockquote style="color: darkblue;">We begin with the moment an act happens in reality, outside an author's head, and then the author reproduces in himself what happened outside himself. Then this idea, this reproduction of the act inside the author's head, also becomes part of reality. The original act, which comes directly or indirectly from reality, is transfigured in the process of creation.</blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidRTUGtBIEo-Gwje0HgU4pJHg7FljzEzkwF271ooKSvZgsHpHGt0tLFb5G1g_bITd6rDz5XenrTVm3PHH8R2dqh0xibViZ5wgPoThtctq6rh1bfZCi8Nvm5lVq_e7JMd4shQSonY8lWKUpbx71qc8UuKJ3099fwRWlYPR4iWUcmLv02-csp7-JjrPQ13c/s499/Galeano-Brasilero.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 0 1em 1em 1em; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="399" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidRTUGtBIEo-Gwje0HgU4pJHg7FljzEzkwF271ooKSvZgsHpHGt0tLFb5G1g_bITd6rDz5XenrTVm3PHH8R2dqh0xibViZ5wgPoThtctq6rh1bfZCi8Nvm5lVq_e7JMd4shQSonY8lWKUpbx71qc8UuKJ3099fwRWlYPR4iWUcmLv02-csp7-JjrPQ13c/s320/Galeano-Brasilero.jpeg"/></a></div>
<p>You would be right, given all we've been through, to wonder what this statement sounded like when Galeano spoke it through the air to my ears two decades ago in Cafe Brasilero in Montevideo's Old City. For the benefit of Spanish speakers or Google translators, I'll share a transcription here, noting, with a humbled smile, how my own translation smoothed over quite a few extemporaneously rough edges:</p>
<blockquote style="color: darkblue;">...y de algún modo siempre a partir del momento en el que un hecho que proviene directa- o indirectamente de la realidad, o sea un hecho ocurrido en la realidad que está fuera del autor, o un hecho nacido en la cabeza del autor, que al fin y al cabo es un ser en sociedad, por lo tanto reproduce dentro de sí lo que acontece afuera, por lo tanto eso también es parte de la realidad. Ese hecho que viene directa- o indirectamente de la realidad se transfigura en el proceso de creación.</blockquote>
<p>When he said it, amidst hours of jovial conversation, it struck me as something utterly new and vitally important to understand. I comprehended, epiphanically, the power behind the motto Galeano printed on all his books: "la creación literaria": literary creation: the idea that the written word not only derived from but created reality. Reality expanded infinitely, immediately, it seemed.</p>
<p>Before we move on, allow me a brief additional consideration of transfigurations. All this reminds me of another Galeano piece, one of the "Walls Speak" segments in <i>Walking Words</i>, where an unknown graffitist has written</p>
<blockquote style="color: darkblue;">Las vírgenes tienen muchas navidades, pero ninguna noche buena</blockquote>
<p>which was translated as</p>
<blockquote style="color: darkblue;">Virgins have many Christmases but no christenings</blockquote>
<p>The grace of the Spanish joke is that Christmas Eve is called "Nochebuena," or "Good Night." So the sentiment of the graffiti is that virgins (recalling Mary, the Virgin mother of Jesus, of course) may celebrate many Christmases, but they don't have any good nights. Ever. Because...well, you get it. The problem with the translation is that, while it's technically true (or is it? a virgin could attend the christening of a friend's child), it's not funny. Yes, there's the alliterative wordplay, but there's no pun. So I tried my own translation:</p>
<blockquote style="color: darkblue;">For virgins Christmas comes but once a year, but every night's a silent night</blockquote>
<p>While the rhythm stutters at the outset (that pesky "for"), it settles into a pleasing, regular trochaic nonameter. And what's more, it finds a pun in the same last position, and with the same literal Christmas-Eve connection, and with a very similar double meaning, as the original. In order to pull off that feat, it has to revise the initial premise (from "many Christmases" to rare Christmases), but this feels like a more forgivable revision than ditching the joke altogether.</p>
<p>Which reminds me of yet another nitpick I've had with a Galeano translation, but I'll spare the backstory and simply let Eduardo remind us that</p>
<blockquote style="color: darkblue;">every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated, or forgiven.</blockquote>
<p><br /></p>
<p align="center">*</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p style="color: red;"><b>Patrick Madden</b>, author of <a href="https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496202444/">Disparates</a> (2020), <a href="https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803239845/">Sublime Physick</a> (2016), and <a href="https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska-paperback/9780803249240/">Quotidiana</a> (2010), teaches at <a href="http://home.byu.edu/home/">Brigham Young University</a> and curates the online anthology of classical essays <a href="http://essays.quotidiana.org/">www.quotidiana.org</a>.</p>Patrick Maddenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05358157802504449069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-38128335140667265452023-12-18T09:12:00.000-08:002023-12-18T09:12:33.477-08:00Dave Griffith on Thinking About Looking or The Essay as Ally<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJDnXPm85iF8bzwxXk5dk2EJJUn7Ja9OD8HF4Kq7Fsy7kCr1d7bAW7R51mc4WFTi4xjW4Wxxu2CV3GAeHTQgqGByT0EcQliOkKw3sH_GR833zc4FTTNCaC4Eiy5mNP5KIJYPGnEDcOFqzD1KAlpLaMkSXzoUQ0jHCesP-i6NsbPM8dLmTx5y5mUmI9ZOVj/s1125/4F9ECDA5-BD75-440B-AECC-E5FB64543EEE.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Screen shot from Instagram: Warning for Sensitive Content" border="0" data-original-height="905" data-original-width="1125" height="321" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJDnXPm85iF8bzwxXk5dk2EJJUn7Ja9OD8HF4Kq7Fsy7kCr1d7bAW7R51mc4WFTi4xjW4Wxxu2CV3GAeHTQgqGByT0EcQliOkKw3sH_GR833zc4FTTNCaC4Eiy5mNP5KIJYPGnEDcOFqzD1KAlpLaMkSXzoUQ0jHCesP-i6NsbPM8dLmTx5y5mUmI9ZOVj/w400-h321/4F9ECDA5-BD75-440B-AECC-E5FB64543EEE.png" width="400" /></a></div> <p></p><p><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">In the summer of 2017 I met Shaun King at the Chautauqua Institution–yes, </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">that</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> Chautauqua, where Salman Rusdhie was attacked and subsequently lost sight in his right eye. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-c69e5757-7fff-70d6-b647-953fa0c64a78"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I was onboarding that summer. I had just been hired to the executive team of the Institution and, though my start date was later in the fall, they wanted me to see what the lovely and venerable grounds were like in-season.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">King, an activist and organizer, was unknown to me. All I knew was that his visit was controversial. The audience at Chautauqua, while known for being deeply curious and full of well-educated folk committed to life-long education, are also known for being majority white and politically center-right. All I was hearing about King was that he was a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, an affiliation that led most of the Chautauquans I spoke with to cock an eyebrow.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">King’s lecture was in the newly rebuilt 4,400 seat amphitheater, or simply, “Amp,” as it is known on the grounds, and it was standing room only. I stood at the back of the Amp and listened, but mainly I was watching the crowd. I was curious to see how they would react to the news that this young man–still not quite forty-years-old–was there to share with them; that racism is systemic and structural; that it is endemic, baked in, so to speak, to most American institutions, especially law enforcement. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">While the crowd was gracious, clearly what King was saying was a direct challenge to the way most audience members, myself included, experienced everyday life. One audience member, an older gentleman wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the name of the military vessel he presumably served aboard during World War II, turned to me and said, “Love it or leave it.” </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">King got his start blogging and writing as a justice reporter for the </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">New York Daily News</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">, but these days he’s most known for raising funds for families victimized by police violence, and for the long, impassioned explanatory captions he writes in the space below his numerous Instagram posts, many of which are reposts of videos sent to him in order to help boost the visibility and awareness of events that would otherwise be lost in the daily glut of fitness and lifestyle influencers. If you follow reports of police brutality, then chances are good that you have seen some of his posts. His words illustrate and illuminate: “Let me tell you what you’re seeing,” he often begins, providing context for the often jumpy or grainy cell phone footage taken by bystanders.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Since the October terrorist attacks on Israel by Hamas militants, King’s Instagram feed has become focused almost exclusively on the IDF’s retaliatory counterattack, which has led to the death of thousands of civilians. Collaborating with journalists inside of Gaza, King has been reposting dozens of videos per day, many of them depicting the lifeless bodies of children. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Many of the posts are flagged by Instagram as “Sensitive Content,” indicated by a white eye icon with a warning slash through it, as well as a brief message: “This video may contain graphic or violent content” and beneath it a small box containing the words “See why.” Clicking on the box reveals a boilerplate statement explaining that though the post “doesn’t go against our Community Standards, [it] may contain images that some people might find upsetting.” And then: “We cover graphic content so people can choose whether to see it.” </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The unintentional poetry of this statement–</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">choosing </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">whether or not to see–is profound.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">King has many detractors for a variety of reasons–see Wikipedia–and I’m not here to defend him against those criticisms, but one thing that I think needs to be said is that what he is doing here and now goes beyond mere “outrage journalism.” He is forcing us to confront the choice itself. Do we opt for blissful ignorance and avoidance of what is being done in the name of justice and peace out of fear of being allied to, or complicit in, the cause, or do we engage in the difficult work of looking and thinking for ourselves.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">King’s Instagram posts are, in a way, reminiscent of the work of essayists and thinkers like James Baldwin, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, and Susan Sontag, writers who look(ed) at the world around them and, as Henry Giroux writes, told stories about what they saw in a way that has “the potential to unsettle common sense, challenge the commonplace, and move communities to invest in their own sense of civic and collective agency.” In this way, essays and essaying “make knowledge meaningful, in order to make it critical and transformative and provide a different sense of how the world is narrated.” </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I am thinking here of many essays at once, but top of mind is Thomas Merton’s “Letter to an Innocent Bystander,” </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a href="https://www.essaydaily.org/2012/12/thomas-merton-letter-to-innocent.html" target="_blank">which I wrote about 11 years ago</a></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a href="https://www.essaydaily.org/2012/12/thomas-merton-letter-to-innocent.html" target="_blank"> </a>this month for this very forum on the occasion of the school shooting in Newtown, CT.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">As odd as it feels, I will quote myself: </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Reading Merton's essay now in the full, glaring light of the the school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut--27 dead, 20 of them children between the ages of five and ten--I am reminded how an essay, a preoccupation relentlessly chased, an attempt to articulate--to assail--the unspeakable, written decades ago with no thought of Newtown, Connecticut or gun control laws, can implicate us and charge us--and here I mean "everyone"--with a mission: "Our duty," Merton writes, "is to refuse to believe that their way is inevitable."</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I know that I (and we) must be careful how we choose our words and our analogies. And so let me say that I do not mean to equate the murdering of American school children with assault-style rifles with the IDF’s current bombardment (much of it with munitions whose flight cannot be controlled) of innocent Palestinians. Nor would I call the unrelenting spate of school shootings the </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">genocide </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">of American school-age children. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">This is not what the essay, as I am currently imagining it, intends. Merton might say it best. Writing in the prologue to his collection of essays </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Raids on the Unspeakable</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> he directly addresses his essays:</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 9.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">You are not so much concerned with ethical principles and traditional answers, for many men have decided no longer to ask themselves those questions. Your main interest is not in formal answers or accurate definitions, but in difficult insights at a moment of human crisis.</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">In other words, the essay, in the face of a crisis like the murder of revelers at a party in the name of freedom or the indiscriminate bombing–”total war,” as it called–of a civilian population, moves away from the safe pedantry of articulating ethical principles, and detours into the history of warfare to underscore the fact that we have been here before, and, don’t you know, that we have treaties and conventions abolishing such conduct, to focus on what we can say of ourselves at this precise moment in time. And, in so doing, enter the timeless and the prophetic.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I am thinking now of Wendell Berry who begins his essay collection </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">What Are People For?</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> with “Damage,” a poem about the building of a pond on his property to water his livestock.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge. The fault was mine.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I am thinking of the closing paragraph of Susan Sontag’s book-length essay </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Regarding the Pain of Others</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">. Writing about a photo depicting dead soldiers from the Russian/Afghan war, she takes on the perspective of the dead:</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">What would they have to say to us? “We”--this “we” is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through–don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">What we can say of ourselves–we, us–at this moment? I look to a post on Shaun King’s Instagram for assistance. The post is dated 12/5. It has received 317,890 likes, if that matters. It bears the “Sensitive Content” warning, so the screen is blurry in that 2 am scrambled cable channel pornography way. The caption reads “Forgive me for what you will see and what I have to say.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The caption continues:</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> What you are witnessing is the Massacre of Deir Al-Balah in Gaza–RIGHT NOW.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">This is being filmed by our dear brother @motaz_azaiza [a photographer living in Gaza whose own Instagram feed has 17.1 million followers] - this is HIS NEIGHBORHOOD. He soon realizes that he has lost many family members, friends, and neighbors.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The entire videos are some of the worst I’ve ever seen. It looks like 6 ENTIRE BLOCKS of LARGE APARTMENT BUILDINGS were just completely destroyed. Kids, elders, women, men. Everybody - either blown to literal bits or so badly mangled that survival is unlikely.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I saw torsos without heads of limbs.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Hands with no arms.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Heads with no bodies.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Skin with no bone.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">It’s been a lie since 1948. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">When I saw this post on the 5th of December, I chose to click on the “See Reel” link at the bottom of the blurred window. I did not bother with clicking the “See Why” button. I knew that what I was likely to see would be graphic. I told myself that I needed to see it. I had been avoiding such accounts. I had been taking other people’s word for it–thousands of innocent dead; whole neighborhoods bombed to rubble–so now I needed to see it with my own eyes.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">What I see is this:</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Cell phone footage from Motaz Azaiza. His camera is facing the street–not at him. He is running so the camera lurches up and down, up and down, with his footfalls. I am reminded of standing over my youngest brothers’ shoulder, watching him play the first-person shooter game DOOM. It is the 90s. He is maybe 10. All I see are the player’s hands as he runs through the maze of rooms. If I listen closely, I can hear the panting of this digital person as he runs. This is not Gaza, but some subterranean hellscape, but the movement and the sounds are eerily the same. The bobbing, lurching action simulates desperate, life or death running. I am concerned about my brother because I have heard the warnings about these first-person shooter games; worries that they can desensitize you, make you into a violent person.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Azaiza’s camera does not pause until he encounters bodies, and even then he runs past the first body he sees, fixing his camera instead on the large apartment building–or what had been an apartment building–shrouded in dust, a dark plume of smoke rising above it. Then, he doubles back a few yards to capture the body in the street–a man, covered in dust, above his head is a halo of blood, spreading itself on the asphalt of the street.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The camera turns and he is running again towards the wrecked building. People are running into the rubble and returning with small, limp, dust-covered bodies in their arms. All the bodies that he passes are covered in this dust. </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">We must not come from the same dust,</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> I think to myself. It is the only answer to how such destruction and death could be tolerated, could be countenanced.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I keep coming back to the formal apology of King’s caption: “Forgive me for what you will see and what I have to say.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I am thinking now of John Hersey’s </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Hiroshima</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">. I am thinking of the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist minister who survived the initial blast on August 6, 1945. I am thinking of him running through the streets in the aftermath and saying to the wounded who walk burned, bloodied, dazed, and covered in dust past him: “Forgive me for having no burden like yours.” </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I am thinking of what we are told is a quintessentially Japanese attitude, the guilt of having survived while so many others perished. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I am thinking now of James Baldwin who begins his essay “The Discovery of What it Means to Be an American” with a Henry James quote:</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“It is a complex fate to be an American.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I am thinking of my students from this past semester. We had just begun reading Sontag’s </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Regarding the Pain of Others</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> when Hamas militants attacked and massacred young people their age at an outdoor rave. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I am thinking of the looks on their faces when what we were reading became practical, if that is even the word for it. I am thinking of Sontag, quoting Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, of the Poem of Force” (another book-length essay) how “violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing.” I remember looking out at my classroom, this ring of students in their desks and allowing for just a moment to think of them as things. I am thinking of the horror, the shudder that went through me at the thought; that I had even allowed myself to have it in the first place.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">After Shaun King’s appearance on the amphitheater stage, he was to lead a workshop for a much smaller group of people who had paid extra, I believe, for this more intimate experience. I asked if I could sit in on the workshop. This, too, was standing room only. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Held in a high ceilinged ballroom on the third floor of Alumni Hall, a beautiful old manse with a wrap around porch, I stood at the back of the room and, again, as in the amphitheater, listened and watched the audience. The focus of King’s remarks to this small group of maybe fifty people–mostly white–was allyship: </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">How can we be allies to the oppressed? </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">His message, and I quote (as best as my memory serves): To be an ally don’t show up expecting to provide the answer. Being an ally means asking what you can do. It means bringing food, setting up chairs. It means standing back and listening, waiting, watching, and being ready to help. But don’t expect that anything you have to say will help solve the problem. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">From the looks on the faces of those present, this was a hard, deflating message to hear–it was definitely not what I expected to hear–as it burst the growing bubble of hubris; that fantasy that we alone can make a difference. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I am thinking about looking. I am thinking about thinking about looking, and about how looking causes us to think. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">But, I am thinking: Is looking required, or is requiring photographic proof of atrocity a concession to the cynics among us? No, I am thinking, I suppose not–the freedom to choose to look or not must be protected. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">But I will say this: an essay is a different sort of looking, a different sort of proof, a different kind of choice. It is an allying. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The essay asks, </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">If this is true, then what? </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-3641873556720866469" itemprop="description articleBody" style="font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 706px;"><div><p style="text-align: center;"> <br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />*</p><p><br style="background-color: white; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;" /></p></div><div><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="color: red;"><b>DAVE GRIFFITH</b> is the author of <i>A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America</i> (Soft Skull Press). His essays have appeared in print and online at the <i>Paris Review</i>, <i>New England Review</i>, <i>Belt Magazine</i>, <i>Image</i>, and <i>Another Chicago Magazine</i>, among others. </span></p><p></p></blockquote><p><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"> </i></p></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">This essay is part of the feature "<a href="http://www.essaydaily.org/2023/11/the-essay-in-time-of-genocide-invitation.html" style="color: #2288bb; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">The Essay in a Time of Genocide</a>"</i></p></blockquote><p> </p><div style="clear: both;"></div></div><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><div class="post-footer" style="background-color: #eeeeee; border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); color: #666666; font-size: 10.8px; line-height: 1.6; margin: 20px -2px 0px; padding: 5px 10px;"></div><div><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></span>Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10884498346855741172noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-36418735567208664692023-12-11T07:50:00.000-08:002023-12-11T07:50:26.790-08:00Nicole Walker on the Insistence of the Essay <p>I subscribe to <i>The New York Times</i>, <i>The Washington Post</i>, and my local paper, <i>The Arizona Daily Sun</i>. Unless you’re talking about how families receive $7,000 vouchers to remove their children from the public school system with no regulation for where and how they use that $7,000, the <i>Daily Sun</i> is a relatively safe space with stories about rim to rim to rim Grand Canyon hikes and when the new In and Out burger joint will open. But <i>The Times</i> and <i>The Post</i> offer less safety. Last week, I spent three rough days delving into investigative reports that warned each time that these stories were not for the faint of heart. That I had to prepare myself. That, for the first time, they were going to show images that papers usually don’t show. <br /> <br />The first article I read was a no-holds-barred article in <i>The Washington Post</i>, “Terror on Repeat: A Rare Look at the Devastation Caused by AR-15 Shooting.” A police officer, entering the elementary school after the massacre said, “I thought at first it was an art room because I saw a lot of red paint all over the walls and in the far left corner I thought I observed a pile of dirty laundry.” And then he realized those were not clothes. Or not only clothes. The clothes held the bodies of dead children who had huddled together to try to protect themselves from the shooter. Other images of blood streaking down the school hallway. And there were other photos from the Las Vegas massacre with another pile, this time of spent bullets, pyramiding in an empty room. <br /> <br />Next, I read in <i>The Times</i> the article, “They Started Playing Football When They Were Six,” about children who had played football as young kids and had killed themselves in their teens and early twenties. One element to this multimedia article showed a video of a young boy, as clean cut and together-looking as a kid could be, as he recorded himself saying that his brain had become increasingly uncontrollable. He could not stop his depression, his anxiety. He said, “Dad, I know you’re capable of doing this,” then he asked his dad to, after his open-casket funeral, donate his brain to science. He wanted them to see proof of what he believed: the many concussions he received while playing football caused his mental illness. Then, he turned the camera off and shot himself. <br /> <br />The third article was about children dying in Gaza. Another warning reminded me that these images might be too difficult to bear. In the article itself, an image of a mother holding her shrouded child in her arms was deemed the safe one. But if I clicked below, I could see the unbearable image. I clicked. Seven children lie under a blanket, their bodies covered to their necks, their faces exposed. Five of the faces looked dead, their heads bent in unlikely positions. But two of the youngest kids, maybe four and five, looked like they were sleeping. I could look at those faces a second longer than the others. One second. <br /><br />What can the essay do in the face of these tragedies? The articles have been written. The photos finally revealed to make the horror plain. Can my words provide more horror? Can I say better what <i>The Times</i> and <i>The Post</i> have said? They say, usually, we don’t show photos or videos like these, but now is the time. <br /> <br />I usually write braided essays, pairing a personal story with something research-based and informative. My hope is that by toggling back and forth between two kinds of stories, elements of likeness appear between the two, articulating that the personal story streaks through the bigger world and that the larger world reveals its nuances in the personal story. <br /> <br />But the Israel-Gaza war does not call for a braid. The war doesn’t need our opinion. It doesn’t need a political history lesson. What the essay can do is insist. Essays require a different kind of time and space. In fact, they make time and they make space. To read an essay is to give yourself over to the possibilities. They recount survivor’s stories. They describe the photos of bodies. They imagine the author signing up to work for the Red Cross. They image the four-year-old hostage whose parents were killed in the October 7th attack and wonder to what home that child might return. They think of the seven bodies and wonder what if those children had just been allowed to sleep. They imagine what peace might look like. They imagine water running freely from the taps of faucets like it never had before with Israeli-restricted water rations. They imagine that good story of a mother from Israel and a mother from Gaza bringing hummus and lentils and baba ghanoush and pita to each other at the border and sitting resolutely as the bullets fly overhead and feeding each other with their hands until suddenly, hummus looked better than bullets to the soldiers. <br /> <br />The essay, as has become cliché to say, means to try. It tries to see something others can’t see. It tries to believe something others don’t yet believe. The essay says, Look at what’s happening. It says, Do not look away until you see the things you didn’t want to see. Then the essay says, Look until you figure out how to make it better. </p><div><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"> <br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />*</p><p><br style="background-color: white; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;" /></p></div><div><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="color: red;"><b>NICOLE WALKER</b> is the author of <i>Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster; </i><i>The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet;</i> <i>Sustainability: A Love Story;</i> <i>Where the Tiny Things Are; Egg;</i> <i>Micrograms, </i>and <i>Quench Your Thirst with Salt. </i>You can find her at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/nicole.walker.18041" style="color: #33aaff; text-decoration-line: none;">https://www.facebook.com/nicole.walker.18041</a> Twitter: @nikwalkotter and website: <a href="http://nikwalk.com/" style="color: #33aaff; text-decoration-line: none;">nikwalk.com</a> and TikTok <a class="gmail_plusreply" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@nicolewalker263" id="plusReplyChip-0" target="_blank">@nicolewalker263</a></span></p><p></p></blockquote><p><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; text-size-adjust: auto;"> </i></p></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><p style="text-align: left;"><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; text-size-adjust: auto;">This essay is part of the feature "<a href="http://www.essaydaily.org/2023/11/the-essay-in-time-of-genocide-invitation.html" style="color: #2288bb; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">The Essay in a Time of Genocide</a>"</i></p></div></blockquote><p> </p>Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10884498346855741172noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-68886643930150006972023-12-04T08:35:00.000-08:002023-12-04T08:35:26.684-08:00Eric LeMay on Unbearable Thoughts and the Bombing of Children<p align="center"><a class="gie-single" href="http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/1715074100" id="h3Du5GgORXxaVTsoRkeStQ" style="border: none; color: #a7a7a7; display: inline-block; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Embed from Getty Images</a><script>window.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'h3Du5GgORXxaVTsoRkeStQ',sig:'d4WNES5qXFzZ1HI2Tsl9tryM4pHVS6QdoF__JSaOvNc=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'1715074100',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});</script><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embed-cdn.gettyimages.com/widgets.js"></script></p><p align="center">Palestinians evacuate the area following an Israeli airstrike<br />on the Sousi mosque in Gaza City on October 9, 2023</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: right;">“Writing my children’s names on their bodies is the solution, so that the world will know them.” </p><p style="text-align: right;">- Mohammed Abu Odeh</p><p><br /></p><p>On October 22, over two weeks into the bombardment of Gaza, I learned that parents are writing the names of their children on their children’s arms and legs. The parents hope their names will identify them if their bodies or parts of their bodies are found at bomb sites. <br /> Before I learned this, I’d read the reports of children being dismembered by Israeli missiles and found in the wreckage. I’d also read the reports of the thousands of children who’d had to flee their homes, who’d been orphaned, who’d been killed. At least 6,600 dead as of today, December 4, fifty-nine days into the fighting. <br /> Yet when I read about these parents inscribing their children’s names on their children’s limbs—names they gave them at their births, names they say every day of their lives—I broke. <br /> I am a parent and a writer. I can’t imagine writing any words more devastating than my child’s name on my child flesh, meant to be read when he is dead, when pieces of him are found.<br /><br /></p><p>“When my children ask me why I’m doing this,” says Mohammed Abu Odeh. “I tell them that it is for their safety and protection.” <br /> Abu Odeh is from the Al-Shati refugee camp in Northern Gaza. He has two children. He is explaining to reporters from <i>Al Jazeera</i> that no child should have to live hearing bombs explode above them, needing to worry about whether they’ll be buried under rubble.<br /> “Can anyone in the world bear the thought of what our children are going through?”<br /><br /></p><p>As the days continue and the bombings continue and the deaths continue, I see ever more clearly that the answer to Abu Odeh’s question is yes. <br /> There are many people in the world, many in my own country, who are not only bearing the horrors that Palestinian children are going through, but who are also supporting this attack on the civilians of Gaza.<br /> I see ever more clearly how they—how we—have hardened our hearts even to the mass killing of children. We who are parents. We who cannot bear the thought of such horrors happening to our own children. <br /> When I learn about these parents writing their children’s names on their children’s limbs, I try to share this news with my spouse. It’s morning, before school, and our own child is in the next room, playing with his electric toothbrush. <br /> As I tell her, she begins to cry and says, “Stop it.”<br /> I stop and, later, I think to myself that this is exactly what has to happen: it has to stop. <br /> It hasn’t stopped. <br /><br /></p><p>“At that moment, I thought that if the house was hit by a severe bombing, my children would die, and no one would be able to identify them.”<br /> The moment Sara al-Khalidi is describing happened in her living room in Gaza City, where she huddled with her four children during an Israeli bombardment that lasted the entire night. She goes on to describe fleeing south to Khan Younis, where she hoped she and her family would be safer. <br /> Once there, al-Khalidi saw her relatives writing the names of their children on their bodies and, later, saw a doctor at al-Shifa Hospital doing the same to the children there. Until then, al-Khalidi had resisted doing this with her own daughters. The thought of it, she said, made her cry. She worried it would bring bad luck. <br /> “The world should know about these children who were murdered by Israel,” al-Khalid says, “because they are not numbers, but names, stories and dreams killed by the Israeli occupation in Gaza.”<br /><br /></p><p>Yes. They are not numbers. They are children, as full of stories and dreams, as fully named, as our own children. As my own child. <br /> It’s knowing this, it’s knowing and loving my own child, that makes the thought of what these children are going through unbearable. <br /> My child’s name is Roland Sean LeMay. <br /> I write these words here, as a parent and a witness to the parents in Gaza, to the love they bear for their children in the midst of what’s unbearable. </p><p><br /></p><p>Note: One of my aims in this essay is to amplify the voices of Palestinian parents. I’m grateful to Linah Alsaafin and Ruwaida Amer, journalists at <i>Al Jeezera</i>, for their reporting on the people of Gaza and for this <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/28/so-world-knows-gaza-parents-mark-childrens-names-on-bodies-amid-bombing" target="_blank">report</a> from which I’ve drawn the accounts about and quotations from Mohammed Abu Odeh and Sara al-Khalidi.</p><p> </p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; text-size-adjust: auto;">*</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; text-size-adjust: auto;"> </span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: red;"><b>Eric LeMay </b>is an essayist and a parent. He lives in Athens, Ohio. One of his most recent essays, "<a href="https://www.riverteethjournal.com/blog/beautiful-things/2023/08/21/hole" target="_blank">Hole</a>," appears in <i>RiverTeeth</i>.</span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>This essay is part of the feature "<a href="http://www.essaydaily.org/2023/11/the-essay-in-time-of-genocide-invitation.html" target="_blank">The Essay in a Time of Genocide</a>"</i></p></blockquote><div><br /></div><p><br /></p>Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10884498346855741172noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-8712567744874367912023-11-27T10:27:00.000-08:002023-11-27T10:27:15.909-08:00The Essay in a Time of Genocide: An Invitation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH6BfudfNvleIZNgrXHZWuPsS_8j-R3MNMOnXL6WTMzMjfyRfvihE_D4JnKUPeT2O2IDxT1T8viQ9sVFECap63j5bOP5S5tSgObxWUHK4SaQ0KYCKwUaSavOkyN-p1W8cn0HF1F9wL8i_lWIOJZxYKz0jmMZR1hDYHK8WnoWDwtwLf1QiU8IZOdT9hbAPZ/s766/Reporting-Al-Jazeera.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Statistics on individuals killed and injured in Palestine and Israel" border="0" data-original-height="744" data-original-width="766" height="389" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH6BfudfNvleIZNgrXHZWuPsS_8j-R3MNMOnXL6WTMzMjfyRfvihE_D4JnKUPeT2O2IDxT1T8viQ9sVFECap63j5bOP5S5tSgObxWUHK4SaQ0KYCKwUaSavOkyN-p1W8cn0HF1F9wL8i_lWIOJZxYKz0jmMZR1hDYHK8WnoWDwtwLf1QiU8IZOdT9hbAPZ/w400-h389/Reporting-Al-Jazeera.png" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">(Source <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker" target="_blank">Al Jazeera</a>)</div><p style="text-align: left;"></p>Around the globe, in real time, we are witnessing atrocities happening to the people of Gaza. Through our phones, our tablets, our televisions, we’re seeing the images that Palestinians are posting on social media. We’re hearing about their experiences directly from them. Never before have we, as a collective, witnessed such violence happening to a people as it is happening. <p>And this violence has extended our collective awareness to other atrocities. Genocides in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Myanmar, and China, as well as the genocides of the indigenous people in what colonial settlers named the Americas and their connections to the history and ongoing legacies of chattel slavery. </p><p>In such a moment, what is the purpose of the essay? What is the role of the essayist? </p><p>Essay Daily invites essayists to respond to these questions for a feature that, given the exigencies of this moment, will begin as soon as possible. </p><p>In a time of genocide, what insights might the essay afford us about language, about violence, about empire, empathy, and justice? What alternatives does the essay offer to the current op-eds and talking heads? What beneficial change, if any, can an essay make in a humanitarian crisis or a human heart? </p><p>Contributors might look to essayists from the past, such as Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa. They might also look to practitioners in the present, such as Gayatri Spivak, Jamaica Kincaid, Angela Davis, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Noor Hindi, whose “<a href="https://lithub.com/against-erasure/" target="_blank">Against Erasure</a>” and “<a href="https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-thirty/noor-hindi-prose/" target="_blank">American Beings</a>” offer powerful examples of what the essay can accomplish. </p><p>This is an open invitation, a call to witness, a collective attempt to support—in whatever ways essays and essayists can—our fellow human beings. </p><p>If you’re interested in contributing, contact Eric LeMay (eric@ericlemay.org).</p><p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10884498346855741172noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-82507629027470833712023-08-22T09:52:00.002-07:002023-08-23T10:22:21.304-07:00Andrea Flint, The Wisdom of Spear Grass<p style="text-align: center;">THE WISDOM OF SPEAR GRASS</p><p style="text-align: center;">Andrea Flint</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">a cover of <a href="https://thediagram.com/18_2/minor.html">Sarah Minor's essay "A Log Cabin Square"</a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"> *</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbmDIaOaccFs9zkcX08UbeKtZ_q36un7qpxIIFhnZzCyT7lXJ1j5yodVLSoZovZqih6OWNXbdz0ih_UHqBQOiS36lPNAjZAu5XL0uTv3kKtoneFttWk239eA2w0KFsttp0cBqWoBqErle40JfBl8ao6OJ5V4CIUQoAlOVMEhKIG3QTLZ9PG1RMWJpQlv8/s1877/flint_hi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1858" data-original-width="1877" height="634" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbmDIaOaccFs9zkcX08UbeKtZ_q36un7qpxIIFhnZzCyT7lXJ1j5yodVLSoZovZqih6OWNXbdz0ih_UHqBQOiS36lPNAjZAu5XL0uTv3kKtoneFttWk239eA2w0KFsttp0cBqWoBqErle40JfBl8ao6OJ5V4CIUQoAlOVMEhKIG3QTLZ9PG1RMWJpQlv8/w640-h634/flint_hi.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;">(click to expand, or <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/0tl9cduwblo9c6pxjf36t/flint.pdf?rlkey=uzy6r1b9z6wl4jmfemi1js8ht&dl=0">click here</a> to download a pdf)</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>I don’t have many vivid memories of my childhood. Mostly, I remember a sensation that used to follow me around like a needy puppy—that things were not what they seemed, that there was a disconnect between my perception of reality and reality itself. </p><p>I also remember the relief I felt when, on hitting school-age, it began to dawn on me just how powerful the mind was. Soon I learnt to override my feelings. Unlike emotions, elusive and fickle like swallows flitting across the sky at springtime and gone by winter, the brain could always be relied upon to make and preserve meaning. </p><p>But no matter how hard I tried to hold on, I felt as if something was terribly off—as if my perception of the world was, somehow, defective.</p><p>I have learnt that unacknowledged traumatic experiences can do that to a person. Dissociation is a powerful survival tool, one where flights of fancy can lord unchallenged over a cruel reality to protect ourselves. Only when the veil lifts, does the impact of this alienation become apparent. Suddenly we are hit with the realisation that our ability to listen to our body’s wishes has been impaired to an extent that is commensurate to the strength of our denial. It’s as if the superhighway that connects body and mind has been lost to an enemy that has been residing undetected inside us. </p><p>There is no way to describe that time in my life other than I fell spectacularly apart. Though outwardly I was functioning by dint of a peculiar mix of willpower and habit, inside I was scrambling to gather the pieces of me that a nascent, frightening consciousness had ripped apart. </p><p>"The Wisdom of Spear Grass" was born out of this grown child’s irrepressible desire to make meaning—to join the dots out of the muddle of memories that were emerging from deep freeze during the hazardous process of therapeutic recovery. </p><p>It was around this time that I first came across <a href="https://thediagram.com/18_2/minor.html">Sarah Minor’s "Log Cabin Square"</a>. For the first time, home didn’t have to be something neat, monolithic to be called home. Home could be a collage, an amalgam of fragments whose meaning is revealed only when juxtaposed to other seemingly randomised tassels and enjoyed from the safety of distance. </p><p>As I tried to process the tangle of feelings the image of “horses on fire circling back to their bright home” stirred inside me, it struck me that the power of Minor’s Log Cabin Square rested on its ability to summon complex feelings that couldn’t be expressed in any other way. It’s this connubium of form and text that creates meaning. The latter—her essay reminds us, doesn’t exist in isolation, but as part of a whole that stirs our senses and tugs at our soul—our personal and collective mythologies. It cannot but be fragmentary. And that’s all right. And plentiful. And beautiful. </p><p>Though quilt-making has not infused the Italian psyche in the same way it has across the pond, from the outset this art & craft struck me as so intuitively right I didn’t hesitate to borrow its form. If cultural appropriation is a sin, then I hope to be forgiven. </p><p>Soon I discovered there were myriads of patterns and combinations—one for each life event, special occasion, celebration, even political causes. But I kept returning to the log cabin. </p><p>The idea of the hearth—of home inherent in its squares—spoke to me in ways other patterns couldn’t. Even though its nucleus—the central square around which all the others corral, kept eluding me, I knew I had found my container, one that was both physical and metaphysical. </p><p>The idea that <a href="https://www.feedipedia.org/node/433">a lowly weed</a>—one that is regarded as a pesky nuisance in my ancestral land, could function as its organising principle felt as fitting as it had felt serendipitous. Gramigna has threaded its way across three generations of women on the maternal side of my family. It carries within it the wisdom of sharecroppers of whom my grandmother had been one—a lithe six years old, who had to learn fast not to take love for granted. </p><p>Suddenly a pixilated picture of me within my extended family—atomised but undeniably truthful, bobbed to the surface. For the first time, perhaps ever, I felt moored. I had found my quilted hearth, its faintly smouldering embers beneath the seams radiating just enough heat to keep me going. </p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p>Born in Italy, Andrea Flint is an emerging writer based in London UK, working in Creative Non-Fiction as well as poetry and short stories. She is currently working on a hybrid memoir around the themes of identity, trauma, and heritage. <div><br /></div><div>"The Wisdom of Spear Grass" was written during her time on this year’s Spark Your Story Intensive programme. Andrea is especially grateful to Nicole Breit and Rowan McCandless for their wisdom and mentorship—and for showing her the way to creative non-fiction heaven. <br /><p style="text-align: left;">The Wisdom of Spear Grass is her first publication—something that makes it all the more special.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">Essay Daily runs <a href="https://www.essaydaily.org/p/cover-essays.html">a series of cover essays</a> (essays that "cover" another published essay, in the way of a cover song). Pitch us yours!</p><div><br /></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-10922134368338740982023-02-20T04:30:00.001-08:002023-02-20T04:30:00.185-08:00February 20, We Know Our Own Lives Expertly: a conversation with Hilary Plum<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_DzoUH4l8g9RY94XLe7uf4qQn0_yjkaQRkYqfqvura_e9dKDcadVr716PmKywUVMV86VszR-TELfW8saubZW6TtXUQBB42LMHxcFYPOmxxnyBz7Y53WgBJoiZo1yRyRx1MowYwEAV7hZjjLQ8aDPs7QR9pdNwy-P3EA64HNuQxjL-gNrIPFOBojC-/s800/hole-studies-cover-2-4-12-1_orig.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="500" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_DzoUH4l8g9RY94XLe7uf4qQn0_yjkaQRkYqfqvura_e9dKDcadVr716PmKywUVMV86VszR-TELfW8saubZW6TtXUQBB42LMHxcFYPOmxxnyBz7Y53WgBJoiZo1yRyRx1MowYwEAV7hZjjLQ8aDPs7QR9pdNwy-P3EA64HNuQxjL-gNrIPFOBojC-/w250-h400/hole-studies-cover-2-4-12-1_orig.jpg" width="250" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>An account of care, labor, illness, friendship, professionalization, and political struggle, <i>Hole Studies</i> (Fonograf, 2022) explores radical possibilities. Over four essays, Hilary Plum describes resistance and reinvention in our social lives and our aesthetic practice. The work touches on, among many other subjects, Sinéad O’Connor’s 1992 destruction of the Pope’s image on SNL; the corrosive psychology of whiteness; precarity in academic and service work; the rejection of “necropolitics” in struggles for freedom and humanity; the work of teaching; and the author’s own experience of chronic neurological illness. <i>Hole Studies</i> is a gorgeous look at the possibilities of authentic encounter—in art, in protest, and relationships—and it’s one of the richest, most humane books you’ll read this year. Plum is a friend; we recorded this conversation via Zoom between meetings in October 2022, a few days before <i>Hole Studies</i> was published by Fonograf Editions.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_JMH6-3XbBiSYJMpJBK6kalmXKUryYUfpv3GqVQguYOYXuQ1_YiFTcDp7C9MvM2Lz9vcc3p50ifSl2NoKRVPQ7zTd0hhH5dqcKbGwdPtVB3RsS_z2oTcJHltKBj8tyKSVegQzSvwlUoDOPq2szEchql34KIb2vZx5UOwXidmtIVGiPxxN-fIECIgt/s1006/HP%20author%203%20cropped.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="945" data-original-width="1006" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_JMH6-3XbBiSYJMpJBK6kalmXKUryYUfpv3GqVQguYOYXuQ1_YiFTcDp7C9MvM2Lz9vcc3p50ifSl2NoKRVPQ7zTd0hhH5dqcKbGwdPtVB3RsS_z2oTcJHltKBj8tyKSVegQzSvwlUoDOPq2szEchql34KIb2vZx5UOwXidmtIVGiPxxN-fIECIgt/s320/HP%20author%203%20cropped.jpg" width="320" /></a></div></div><br /><b>Hilary Plum</b> is the author of several books, including the essay collection <i>Hole Studies</i> (Fonograf Editions, 2022), the novel <i>Strawberry Fields</i> (Fence, 2018), and the work of nonfiction <i>Watchfires </i>(Rescue Press, 2016), which won the GLCA New Writers Award. A collection of poetry, <i>Excisions</i>, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2023. She teaches at Cleveland State University and is associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. With Zach Savich she edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press. Recent work has appeared in <i>Astra</i>, <i>Granta</i>, <i>American Poetry Review</i>, <i>Fence</i>, <i>Cleveland Review of Books</i>, and elsewhere.<br /><br /><div><b>Jay Aquinas Thompson </b>(he/they) is a poet, essayist, and teacher; they're the author of <i>The Resurrection Appearances: a Daybook</i>, forthcoming from Gold Line, and they have recent or forthcoming work in <i>Neon Door</i>, <i>Adroit</i>, <i>Guesthouse</i>, and<i> Poetry Northwest</i>, where they're a contributing editor. A ’21-’22 <i>Best of the Net</i> nominee, they’ve also been awarded grants and fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, the Community of Writers, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. They live with their child in Washington state, where they teach creative writing to public school students and incarcerated women.</div><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;">*</div><br /><b>JT:</b> I’ve been reading Fred Moten lately and I wrote down the sentence, “unrestricted sociality as an alternative to academic space.” I’m thinking about how <i>Hole Studies</i> attends to problems of work—the demoralizing, constant precarity; the ruthless, secretive, smiley competition in the academic world; and the sort of devaluation and adjunctification of all different kinds of labor. But the thing in the book that I wanted to begin from, that represents one alternative to that, is friendship. What role do certain conversations, or the kind of ongoing relational tug back and forth of care and ongoingness or abiding trust, play in your process as you write? Do you imagine a particular friend as a reader? Does a particular conversation or relationship persist as a goad when you’re working? Or is your writing something much more solitary than that?<br /><br /><br /><b>HP:</b> I definitely am always picturing friends when I’m writing. That’s who I’m writing for. I want you to read it, I want Caryl Pagel to read it; there’s always a small number of people who I am thinking about and writing toward, thinking about things that they’ve said and ideas they’ve had. And sometimes I give the piece to those people and respond to their critiques and comments and their further ideas. It’s just a handful of people, and who they are might change a little project by project depending. <br /><br />And then there are future friends! It doesn’t have to be about whether you would have a personal connection with this thinker. It’s like, your work would be friends. <br /><br />I love that thought from Moten. But also, sometimes when you’re looking at, I mean, the problems of academia—its restriction of sociality and friendship and its horrible competition and commitment to a really lethal idea of meritocracy, while meanwhile, it’s just being economically hollowed out—it’s funny, because when you step outside of it, you’re like, oh, this happens in other spaces too, small press spaces or poetry community spaces or among activists. All sorts of spaces have similar hierarchical problems. They aren’t formalized in the way that a workplace’s hierarchies are formalized or disciplined, but even in spaces that are more purely social, you can see those same dynamics, where people are competing with each other instead of feeling free or welcome to collaborate or feeling called into the generosity of collaboration. It’s an academia problem that is also a beyond-academia problem.<br /><br /><br /><b>JT:</b> Given the persistence of that sort of atomized, competitive, economically hollow, lethal asociality pervading so many kinds of communities and so many different forms of experience, can you say a little more about this future friend or a future reader you imagine? Is there something of the aspirational projection which you write about elsewhere in the book, around the experience of participating in a protest? Or is the aspiration more like, <i>May, in the better world, this book find exactly the person it needs? <br /></i><br /><br /><b>HP: </b>Yeah. I mean, the best version of it is someone that you admire, whose work you admire, also might find your work useful or want to read it. So maybe that’s the future friend. <br /><br />But also, even as all of this shit is happening in academia, the work of teaching remains very, very hopeful. Our students are looking for those future readers, and they’re being those readers for each other, and you can be that kind of reader for them, when you try to really be with them in whatever they’re working on, sometimes to a very deep degree. The belief in the future friend is also about feeling hopeful enough to believe in <i>something</i>, in some kind of relationship or possibility that you don’t know about yet. And when you’re teaching something like writing, you’re witnessing that hope in people who want to write. And you’re trying to sustain that hope, which is that their writing is going to be able to do something that they don’t know about yet, or to connect with people who might then become themselves in a new way. <br /><br />So I think part of it—the part that’s maybe most like attending a protest—is that, like, writing something for your friends or writing something for the people who are immediately around you that you’re in some kind of community with, when it’s in the best sense, is also writing for that possibility, that future whatever, that unknown something. Our friends are the people who make you believe in that, or who make that seem possible. Right? So you’re never just writing for your friends. It’s more that writing for them allows you to together imagine something that’s beyond that, too—that’s larger than that.<br /><br /><br /><b>JT: </b>This makes me think of a subtle harmony I was aware of in the book: the comparison between the beloved community, unknowable but apprehended in the rebellious sociality of a protest, and the book’s description of a poem as “a past and future land.” You say that, as readers, “we’re not there, but we’re practicing being there.” The spiritual exercises that works of literature demand of us—Fady Joudah telling American readers to repeat the sentence, “the Arab is beautiful”; Peter Dimock urging his readers to “live in the present moment within a frame of redemptive, universal history”—are things that we rarely literally live out. But we still allow ourselves to be <i>recognized </i>by those demands, and perhaps altered in some way. Likewise at the protest, you write that “everyone’s trying to say what they could mean together,” even if it’s imperfect, even if it’s fragile, even if it’s constantly under threat and surveillance.<br /><br /><br /><b>HP:</b> The thing about protests is that they feel so powerful and important to be at, but they also feel so futile. And, like, you’ve gone to a million of them. The line you quote from the book—“everyone’s trying to say what they could mean together”—is trying to get at the hope that, in another context, or given a little more space, or having seized a little more space or freedom or possibility, we could figure out what the next thing to say was. Right now, everything the protest is saying is reactionary, right? It’s in response to whatever’s happening, to which our reply is a huge <i>no</i>, a sort of gut refusal. <br /><br />So that means we can’t yet say how everyone would get to talk to each other and be together in this other possible future space. But, at the protest, you’re also practicing toward that right now, right? Like, you are together right now doing something, and listening to each other. <br /><br />In the book I’m discussing a protest on behalf of Palestinian liberation and against the Israeli assault on Gaza in May 2021. I quote a line by Mahmoud Darwish, in translation, “the land of my poem is green and high.” Darwish’s work and its relationship to the Palestinian liberation struggle gives its own context, obviously, of the poem standing in for the land, but also <i>not </i>being the land: marking the land that’s not there, but also serving as a place for people to be together and for a memory that’s looking toward the future. And that’s something a lot of people have written about, who are not me and are better writers, readers, and scholars of Palestinian literature than I am. In terms of scholarship in English, there’s Jeffrey Sachs’s book called <i>Iterations of Loss</i>, about Darwish particularly and about poetry as the naming of loss. The poem is the land and the land is beautiful and it’s there, and he’s saying, this is where my poem came from and it’s where my poem is when you read it. <br /><br /><br /><b>JT:</b> The way that you’re threading together questions of glimpsed social possibilities and the aspirations of literature makes me want to come back to the way that you write about form, literary form, in the book. You talk about the dread of being taken as an expert in any content you include; you say something like, <i>Everything I know about this is already in the book. Please don’t treat me as an expert in this topic</i>. And instead, what you assert is that “form is a means to get at the possibilities of form.” So my question is, what possibilities of form, and hence content, did these essays open up for you, either in their own composition, or in the writing you’re doing now that <i>Hole Studies</i> is done?<br /><br /><br /><b>HP:</b> In US literature, we’re not in a moment that is paying a ton of attention to form. There’s not a lot of discussion or big fights about aesthetics, the kind of fights that have characterized other moments, nor the sense that aesthetics are ideology, nor that people are doing their politics in their aesthetics; it’s more like they’re doing their politics in their content. And in the book I talk about some of my concerns with this disregard for form, and these concerns are familiar critiques of social media, maybe the main place where form is made invisible and content is king: that fighting online is a distraction, and that there’s a kind of hypocrisy that’s easy to perform there, where people can say anything but it’s divorced from their own life. That mode is very performative, and there’s only certain kinds of thinking that you can do in its form, and a lot of kinds of thinking are left out of it, which you might fear are being degraded or excluded by the dominance of these types of media and interaction.<br /><br />For a lot of literary writers, maybe especially in the essay form, that question of what we’re “expert” in feels really present all the time: you think, OK, I guess I’m an expert in my life, but is that interesting? Actually, I feel largely like I don’t know a lot about my life! What context do I put it in? What are the important features of it to include? Every time you make a choice in relation to that, you are having politics about it. And those are all basically formal questions. <br /><br />What I got really interested in was—and this is in the book in different places—how people live or experience their jobs, and what they’re able to say about what their job is to them, or what they think it is in the world, or why and how they do it. Which is the thing that you want to know about everyone’s job, but not the thing you can ever make them tell you. It’s a hard thing to find language for. In the book it appears as a fight I was having with law students who didn’t want to connect the legal work that they were learning to do with thoughts people might have about society and the world, which is understandable, but also, you know, seemed very alienating and as though professionalization was a training in alienation or training in not seeing what role your work is playing in society. <br /><br />This is also something one thinks about as a teacher and editor and publisher: to ask, <i>What am I reproducing?</i> That question shows up in the book’s first essay, “Work, or the Swet Shop Boys,” thinking about the politics of English: what English am I reproducing? What am I enforcing when I become a professional in the language of English, a hegemonic language? <br /><br /><br /><b>JT: </b>How does this tie back to questions of expertise?<br /><br /><br /><b>HP:</b> What I was trying to think about in the book was, okay, what thoughts can I have about literature and experiences of literature and music and pop culture detritus that are not going to be expert thoughts, but will still be worth having? Even the book’s thoughts on literature—there’s an essay on the range of literature about the Iraq war, it’s mostly on work written in English, but the essay is not a scholarly project, you couldn’t publish it as scholarship, et cetera. It’s a different thing. <br /><br />I also write about music that I was listening to, without being someone who really knows anything about music or is very good at listening to it. And there’s YouTube shit: watching without actually knowing a full context—you could take any YouTube clip and build out a context that you could study, so that you would understand better where it was coming from and you could read it better. But in fact, in our life, we’re not doing that. So that’s the kind of reception and thinking that I was interested in. Even for people who have a lot of expertise, and spend a lot of time really trying to think, a lot of your day is not that. You’re receiving all sorts of things and you’re synthesizing them and you’re having a thought about them and you’re living your life and you’re feeling feelings and you’re making connections between the things that you know a lot about and these other things that exist, or that people say to you, or that interrupted you, or surprised you, or whatever.<br /><br />And so the book was trying to get at that realm of thinking, which I think literature is a good discipline for getting at. It’s the everyday being in the world, a feeling, thinking, responding, relating kind of existence. It can be theorized in a bunch of ways, but we’re not usually theorizing as we do it. You know what I mean? So that was what I was interested in. And the essay form, I think, is a good way of doing that, because you can braid, you can move among subjects, you can do more critical work and more emotional work and more storytelling work, all next to each other. Nothing can reproduce the stream of everyday thought, if that’s what anyone was trying to do, but this kind of essay is closer to that. It’s bringing your different modes of thinking and responding and observing in together rather than having a single, more established form that you’re doing it all in. So I like the essay as a form for that. I like how it can move between something personal and a claim that you’re making about something else, some kind of research you’re doing and also your reaction to it.<br /><br />My arguments about form, I think, are in particular about the radical possibilities of form. If you can find a form that lets you think in a new way or make new connections, lets you synthesize things that had seemed disparate or at odds, or that can help people understand each other, then that isn’t just an illumination about whatever your subject was, right? It’s an illumination about how it’s possible to do that: to get somewhere new, understand something newly. And so you might be able to continue doing that, continue making discoveries. I think I say in the book, new possibilities of form are a way to get at new content. That is what I was arguing or feeling. <br /><br />And also there’s something very dignifying and sustaining about thinking that a dumb obsession you had might become a real thought, and actually could connect to something larger—like, the first essay in that book is really just about a hip-hop group that I started listening to at a boring job. And so you think: <i>okay, but could this stray interest in this thing mean something? Can you get it to say something to you? And can you then say something back to it and to the world</i>? And that’s very life-affirming! Or to be like, God, I’ve really watched this one Sinéad O’Connor YouTube five times for no reason, and it’s long, 30 minutes long, why? And then you say, okay, why don’t you just try to say why? And then you’ll find out why, and you’ll also find out something else. If you give it more, it’ll give you more and you can make something together. So I think that a form that takes things seriously, but also tries to open a door with its subjects, is what I was looking for in that book. <br /><br />Also, I was wanting to write about work, all the jobs that we have—which I think everyone should write about, but they’re probably too tired.<br /><br /><br /><b>JT:</b> What struck me when I was hearing your response is the way that you use words like <i>dignity </i>and <i>sustenance</i>, because one of the things I found so moving about <i>Hole Studies</i> is the way that it pursues, not authority in any of its subjects that it describes—not that that was anything but an illusion in the world of any essay—but rather a form where unexpected moral truths can break through, fellow feeling can break through, and then maybe we can refuse despair. <br /><br />And I’m struck too by the way you talk also about certain ugly or racist thoughts. You said, It feels like when I think these thoughts, I’m reproducing something. I could see how I just thought a stereotype, a cultural or social virus, that exists in endless forms outside us and is constantly reproducing itself through us. And I see <i>Hole Studies</i>, perhaps in response to that, scrupulously weighing its conclusions or assertions, testing assumptions, rigorously examining them. So I wonder if you see a connection between the deliberateness and the sensitivity with which the book pursues its conclusions and the horrible infectiousness of certain kind of social contagions.<br /><br /><br /><b>HP:</b> Yes, the evil of memes! The memeing of evil! One project in my writing is to recognize that things can feel intimate without being in fact individual—to relieve us of the pressures of being an individual. And that means, in terms of thinking a horrible thought, it’s not your thought. You’re a vessel that’s vulnerable to thinking. And that, I think, helps you deal with those thoughts, because instead of shame and hiding, you can witness the thought more accurately and be responsible for it without being caught up. And, like, this isn’t a story about you. It’s a story about that thought and the harm it can do. That recognition seems useful to me and also more accurate. <br /><br />And I come to this having benefited from the sort of gift that no one wants—having had both a mental illness and a neurological illness. Through those experiences you find that you really can’t actually trust your thoughts. Your thoughts aren’t really reliable. Even having something as common as anorexia, which I had when I was young, 13 to 15 or 16, you know, the thinking of that disorder is yours. Like, you are really, really thinking it; in fact, it’s all that you think about. But it’s also quite common. You’re really shockingly unoriginal; it’s a deeply derivative art. So that in itself was kind of humbling. And I think this is also common: I would never have labeled or understood what I was doing as anorexia; at the point at which I could understand it as anorexia, I was already well into recovering from it, because I hadn’t had that ability to identify it and give it language before that point. And then I was really shocked that something that felt so personal to me—like, it arose directly out of my life, and it was thoughts that I had, that I was thinking about myself and people around me, it was something I was doing day in and day out—was actually common. I was an adolescent. We have a lot of thoughts like that when we’re adolescent, where we’re like, <i>What? Other people are people?</i> But the insight remains with you. And it’s sort of a relief. <br /><br />I also have a chronic neurological illness, and there’s whole sets of thoughts that come as part of that, as symptoms, and they’re not reliable; you can’t trust them. They’re bad. They’re just bad thoughts. I mean, they both feel bad, and they’re just shitty. You can’t, like, do anything with them. So I think that that’s helpful, because it means that you have a little skepticism toward yourself, and also you have a little mercy, you know what I mean? Someone thinking something isn’t really about them. It’s happening to them, but it’s not about them. It depends what you do with it. I think some of the skepticism and scrupulousness you see in my writing probably arises out of that experience of unreliability or feeling like, <i>OK, if I have a thought, I’ve got to test it, take it for a ride</i>. And also I would say that it feels like an ethical approach, because if you keep giving an account of your thought, and why you’re having it, and why you’re committing to it, and why you’re staying committed to it, that feels more truthful, and like a better basis for relationship with other people, rather than just asserting it. <br /><br />I can also get into problems of ambivalence—sometimes I have felt like I didn’t say something as fully and crisply as I wish I had, because I was doing that more scrupulating work, you know, or making a lot of space for people who might be coming in a different place. And later I thought, Hilary, you should have just given your opinion, and maybe what you did was a little chickenshit even though you thought it was a good practice. So there are problems like that, too. <br /><br />But some of those stylistic choices are trying to practice giving an account of who you are, and as much as you can see about why, and how the world shapes your thinking. If you can try to witness your thinking as much as you can, you can at least give an account of it and say, I am thinking this, and I think it’s for reasons like this, I’m going to try to do this with it, for these reasons. The more you can give that meta-account as you’re doing something, maybe the more you can resist certain kinds of pressure and reproduction of rote connections or stereotypes or erasures that exist in the thinking around us. It’s not perfect, but to me, those are practices that would help you offer something.<br /><br /><br /><b>JT:</b> Yes. It would give you a ground from which a praxis could start, a way of self-understanding that could lead one to a certain kind of action in the world, or to ways of being together.<br /><br /><br /><b>HP: </b>Yeah. Well said. [laughs]<br /><br /><br /><b>JT: </b>There’s a Peter Dimock quote, in his novel <i>George Anderson</i>—I thought of this, too, when I was reading your book. He writes, <i>Within structures of complicity, reciprocity must be improvised moment to moment each day. This is made difficult by the pleasures and rewards of benefiting from atrocity.</i><br /><br /><br /><b>HP:</b> Yeah! Exactly!<br /><br /><br /><b>JT:</b> In Dimock’s quote I saw a similar kind of intention to what I see in <i>Hole Studies</i>, to be both morally penetrating and scrupulously self-aware. I think of that refusal to gaslight ourselves that you talk about when you write about the sociology of people seeking abortions. You write, “We know our own lives expertly. We know the forces acting on us.” There is this desire in the book to scrupulously examine one’s own thoughts, but not undermine one’s own sense of authority about one’s own life or one’s own moral commitments, that I find really ennobling.<br /><br /><br /><b>HP:</b> That’s nice! You should be ennobled! I want people to feel that.<br /><br /><br /><b>JT:</b> Do you think you changed over the course of thinking through this book, over the course of drafting it, over the course of editing it? Who are you now that <i>Hole Studies</i> is done?<br /><br /><b><br />HP: </b>Yeah, I do think I changed. I feel more confident and more middle-aged. And I spent a lot of time walking around—this was last year when I was turning forty—saying, <i>You’re a forty-year-old English teacher in Cleveland</i>, and feeling OK about whatever romcom that was part of. And one thing that gave me confidence, of course, as I talk about in the book, is that I got a job that supported my work better, and that helps. But I also stopped feeling so insecure about, like, never knowing anything and not having gotten a Ph.D. You know, all of these types of expertise—we all have the thing where we say, well, I didn’t do that, and other people did that, and so other people know more about this than me, because of X or Y. And I did find myself letting go of some of that, and allowing for myself that sort of dignity. You just very nicely described that feeling as ennobling, of having one’s everyday thinking be acknowledged and respected. And then, as with a lot of things, you realize, <i>Oh, that has to include me</i>, because otherwise self-deprecation becomes a kind of self-aggrandizement in that way—if I’m hung up on my own shit, it means I’m treating myself differently. <br /><br />So I had to just say OK, I need to see what my thinking is and try to do things with it and be responsible for what it is, and not be so caught up about what it isn’t, or what’s not happening, or who I’m not, because otherwise I think you can end up in a more entangled egoistical space.<br /><br /><br /><b>JT:</b> Throughout the book, the moments of angry and precise assertion are chosen with incredible care, and one that most stuck with me is in “Work,” when you just say, “Our labor isn’t ours. It bears within it others’ work, others’ time, their years of frustration, boredom, achievement, and our own work radiates through the living hours of those we in no other way know.” What I hear in what you just said is a refusal to minimize or eat away at our own intellectuality, or our own expertise in our lives, or our own ability to make connections between the seemingly disparate parts of our lives, as a way to then have something to give to others. If we don’t eat away our own foundations, then we have something to pass on. And if we don’t eat away our foundations, we’re honoring the gifts that we’ve gotten from others’ care, others’ labor, others’ frustration, others’ boredom.<br /><br /><br /><b>HP:</b> Yeah. In that case I was thinking about medical work particularly, but it’s true of everything, and the pandemic emphasized this, obviously, because we witnessed our connections to and our reliance on each other so starkly. <br /><br /><br /><b>JT:</b> What books are you reading right now? What’s feeding your brain?<br /><br /><br /><b>HP:</b> I always feel like I’m not reading anything, which is not accurate. Whenever anyone asks me, I’m like, I can’t read! But I just started rereading a Tana French novel. I’ve been in a real detective fiction hole; in a good way—well, in a bad way and a good way, in part because I read them when I’m not feeling well, and I’ve been not feeling well a lot. So I think I’ve read about thirty detective novels in the past year; I wrote them all down this year, and I thought, <i>That’s pretty solid</i>. But I just restarted a Tana French one that I love, called <i>Broken Harbor</i>. And I’ve been listening to this history of the crime novel. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that genre, and what’s so appealing about it, and what’s so appealing about it to me, and what I want to do with it. <br /><br />I also just reread Andrea Lawlor’s <i>Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl</i>, which I helped to publish, and I’ve read it I don’t know how many times, but then I reread it and I thought, This is a real banger. Such a fucking good novel. Which I knew the whole time, but it was great to come back and think, It’s even better than I thought. I was an idiot, I thought it was really, really good, but it was really, really, really good. <br /><br />And I just re-read Adania Shibli’s <i>Minor Detail</i>, which I feel very similarly about: it’s really a perfect novel. <br /><br />Crime novels, detective novels, are a pretty heavy genre. When you’re reading one, it has a set of expectations, it has tones, it has a lot of history and traditions. It’s like a sonnet, as someone said to me recently; it brings a lot with it, but I love also thinking about what authors do in that space, and what makes them want to be in such a constrained space, where they get to express their artistic offerings through what frictions they have with the form and what they decide to do with those. And it’s a form about the criminal justice system, yet at its best it’s about the failures and the insufficiency of that system. Crime novels are often so much about a place and a time, and they’re about the political and systemic pressures of that place and time—the crime is chosen to express those, right? <br /><br />I’ve also been reading a lot of students’ writing, and it’s interesting, there’s a trend or tendency at the moment toward a lot of speculative work in their fiction. And that’s not something I’ve done—I’ve done little smidges of speculative fiction, but never a whole book. And I’m realizing, in contrast, <i>wow</i>,<i> I feel so committed to reality right now</i>. So I’ve been trying to think about why that is, and what are the ways that fiction comments on history, or does the work of history and journalism for us, that are so meaningful to me. <br /><br />You mentioned Peter Dimock, whose work I love and which is part of a vein of more documentary fiction that’s been happening steadily, although not quite exploded into the mainstream. That kind of work is very engaged with reality; it’s doing its fiction very much around archival material or things drawn directly from reportage or history, and it’s often interacting very directly with journalism, which is more like the fiction that I’ve written. <br /><br />So I’ve been kind of coming back to that same set of ideas, thinking, <i>Given others’ love of the speculative, what is my love of reality?</i> And then enjoying thinking of crime fiction as an in-between. Its genre form means that it feels like a performance: it’s doing a genre. You couldn’t say that it’s exactly realistic, but of course it’s realism. It has to be believable, and it’s supposed to feel like a real time and place, and its violence has a real weight to it.<br /><br /><br /><b>JT:</b> What do you hope unifies <i>Hole Studies</i>?<br /><br /><br /><b>HP:</b> Some of the things we talked about: feeling dignified and empowered in the ways that we think, and decentering authority from some of its usual shit-hole fortresses, recognizing authority in the spaces where it’s happening, and cultivating receptivity instead, other modes of response. I think that is the theme throughout the book. The first essay ends in watching Riz Ahmed appear in different settings across mainstream media, and the kind of opportunities that he seems to generously create for people there, which they mostly don’t take him up on. But there’s still the invitation: if you can recognize when someone’s doing that, you can try to respond; there’s a lot of potentiality and potency in moments like that. And art is a space like that—I mean, when it’s good, someone is generously making a potential space for future togetherness. But you in the audience have to do the next thing, right? <br /><br />So I think the theme of the book is about that: recognizing those moments of possibility or potential and then feeling empowered to receive them and respond to them, even though you might just be a person. <br /><br />It’s a book that also helped me think more about teaching, and so maybe it can do that for other people, but I don’t know. <br /><br /><br /><b>JT: </b>The way you describe the hope of the writing workshop as a “nice space” is another sounding of the moral theme of the book. You write, “I, too, am someone. This is how I tried it. This is how it worked out, in case that is useful to know,” and then, “Please use what I’m trying to say to say something you want to say.” I think that’s another sounding of that theme of shared labor and the dignity of our knowledge, or the dignity that we can give to our experience by taking it seriously.<br /><br /><br /><b>HP:</b> I hope so! I do like to use that phrase (and I write about this in the book), when teaching a workshop for example, to say that I am just trying to make a nice space—that’s the sentence that bubbles up in me and I’ve decided to stick with it. That phrase, “make a nice space,” seems kind of humble, pathetic, maybe misguided, next to academic course objectives and, like, aesthetic aims. But I like that about it, I like using a phrase that’s a little embarrassing and declines some forms of expert status, as we’ve talked about. I like that it doesn’t make an argument about what good writing is and who might be doing it and who will be the judge—it makes an argument instead about good experiences and good processes. So it’s not about what I, the teacher, will deliver as an authority, it’s about what we all will need to offer each other. It is very hard to make a space that feels nice to everyone in it, since people are very different and they are often in that same space for different reasons, looking for different outcomes. Ideally, niceness doesn’t deny or suppress difference, it makes space for it, while refusing hierarchies. So you have to keep observing, asking, checking in, calibrating, turning agency over to others but also guiding when it is useful, always attending. <br /><br />I’m not saying other people need to use this phrase—to make a nice space—especially since it is kind of banal, but I think teachers can find tools or guidelines that work for them and help them counter the tendencies toward hierarchy that swell up inside us or that roam any room, making these insidious dynamics that are exclusionary and unjust, not open. So that phrase (whatever anyone’s phrase is and feel free to use mine if you like it) is meant to be a kind of touchstone to help you recognize when hierarchy is getting going and think, that’s not so nice. So you’ll get in there and tend that space.<br /><br />Part of that approach, and this is what the quotes you mention are getting that, is that I as the teacher can try to offer my own experience to the room, and maybe it’s useful to think of that as experience not expertise. You can say, <i>I did it like this, it went like that, in case that’s useful to know</i>. But that mode of teaching or talking is more participatory—it means you’re doing less of the teaching thing where you impart knowledge and perform authority, and more of the teaching thing where you help students identify their questions, build a methodology and mode of approach—this is true of creative writing, too—and then reflect on their own processes and the work that resulted and the feedback they got. This is harder for everyone, especially because students often want clear definitive answers to their questions, not more questions, or an invitation to answer their question themselves—we all want to just receive sometimes and not be made responsible, especially if we’re not sure yet if we have the skills we need. And teachers also like to answer questions because it feels good and we want structure so that we’re not wandering too vaguely or idiosyncratically, or falling into the trap Dimock outlines, where an improvisatory practice that’s meant to build reciprocity—like conversation, like workshop—slides into complicity instead. But I think this is still the right <i>less/more</i> balance to try for. And after some years in teaching, I feel I still have a lot to learn and want to keep learning—and it’s hard even to want to keep learning! This is what is so admirable about the work of people being students—but I can say that the feeling of a nice space and good process is something I know students value, I’ve seen them value it and use it and try to offer it to each other. </div><br />Will Slatteryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15089022056676288637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-50809466220079623072023-01-16T04:30:00.003-08:002023-01-17T06:36:49.279-08:00Mordecai Martin, The Writer Goes To School: A Translation and Overidentification Between Translator and Translated in 54 FootnotesOriginal Yiddish by Lamed Shapiro<a href="#1" name="top1"><sup>1</sup></a>
, Translation and notes by Mordecai Martin<a href="#2" name="top2"><sup>2</sup></a><br /><br /><br /><br />Toward the end of 1896, when I was almost still a child, I came to Warsaw<a href="#3" name="top3"><sup>3</sup></a> with the explicit intention of conquering the city.<div><br /></div><div>What were my qualifications for this aggressive move? Nothing; except, maybe, for the fact that I had started to write at all—and with such fervor—from the age of 8 years old.<a href="#4" name="top4"><sup>4</sup></a></div><div><br /></div><div>In my childhood and early adolescence, I was exceedingly pious. My ideal was the Tzaddik, “The Rebbe.” How did I pair this with my taste for writing? I don’t know. An uncle of mine, seeing my piety, was sufficiently farsighted to say, “When the boy grows up, he’ll be a heretic.”<a href="#5" name="top5"><sup>5</sup></a> Around Bar Mitzvah age, I began to struggle with my God, and for a few years, a devastating waste grew in my heart. I was in despair and went so far as to author my own prayer, in the nusach of: Please, Lord, give me a sign! But God continued sitting on Mt. Sinai, veiled in His clouds, and I did not even merit seeing His back. This was my first heartbreak, and perhaps, considering my age, the hardest.<a href="#6" name="top6"><sup>6</sup></a></div><div><br /></div><div>At that time, I was already writing poems and stories in Hebrew. Later, in Russian, but the entire time, I was also writing in Yiddish, in a natural style, without a theoretical “stamp of rabbinic approval”<a href="#7" name="top7"><sup>7</sup></a>, for the simple reason that I did not think of Yiddish as a language.<a href="#8" name="top8"><sup>8</sup></a> The “rabbinic approval” I received much later, in a crooked way, if you can believe it, from Pisarev.<a href="#9" name="top9"><sup>9</sup></a> He changed my focus from “The Morningstars Sing in the Choir”* (Job 38:7) to the world around me, the surrounding reality. From there, my journey to Yiddish literature is clear; most likely the road was such, or similar, for many other Jewish writers of my generation.<a href="#10" name="top10"><sup>10</sup></a></div><div><br /></div><div>Arriving in Warsaw, in my hotel room I put on a morning coat—a garment that probably came about from the marriage of an overcoat and a dress coat- and a hat with a shiny visor, like the ones students from the Yiddish secular high schools wore.<a href="#11" name="top11"><sup>11</sup></a> In this very garb, I called on Number One Tsegliane Street<a href="#12" name="top12"><sup>12</sup></a>, at the door where a brass plate read in Hebrew, “Y. L. Peretz receives at 4 PM”. Peretz himself opened the door. As large as Peretz’s eyes were, they grew even larger when he saw my attire.</div><div><br /></div><div>I can only imagine those eyes, if he knew what was in front of him: a Genghis Khan.<a href="#13" name="top13"><sup>13</sup></a></div><div><br /></div><div>Peretz took me into his study and we chatted about Yiddish literature, which at that time, might as well have not existed. It was after Sholem-Aleichem’s “Folks-Bibliothek”<a href="#14" name="top14"><sup>14</sup></a>, after Spektor’s “Hoyz-fraynd”<a href="#15" name="top15"><sup>15</sup></a>. The first era of Peretz’s “Yiddishe Bibliothek” and his “Yontef-Blaatlech” were in the past. No books were being published. There weren’t even the three-kopek little folded books from Munk’s publishing house<a href="#16" name="top16"><sup>16</sup></a> anymore. From this talk, the only thing that lingers in my memory was my question, “How can that be? It was so vibrant a few years ago!” And his clipped response, “Among the writers. Not among the readers.”<a href="#17" name="top17"><sup>17</sup></a></div><div><br /></div><div>They were twilight years, and for me, they were years of near-despair at the possibility of a literature in Yiddish. Mendele was in Odessa, managing the local Talmud-Torah; Sholem-Aleichem was in Kiev, Menachem-Mendling<a href="#18" name="top18"><sup>18</sup></a>, and in Warsaw, both were practically unknown, outside of those few writers. In Warsaw itself, there was Peretz and Spektor, but I doubt that the Warsaw public knew they were writers. Dovid Pinski<a href="#19" name="top19"><sup>19</sup></a> was studying in Berlin—or so Avraham Kotik<a href="#20" name="top20"><sup>20</sup></a> tells me. There was some young man or other “who had a spark within him”, Avrom Reyzen<a href="#21" name="top21"><sup>21</sup></a>, who was off somewhere, serving in the Tsar’s army; he was in the musician’s battalion, and probably had the intention of being “the third bar.”<a href="#22" name="top22"><sup>22</sup></a> And—That’s it! That was the entirety of Yiddish literature.<a href="#23" name="top23"><sup>23</sup></a> No journalism in Yiddish was allowed. The Hebrew paper in Warsaw, “HaTsefira”, took money to print articles by certain writers, and in Petersburg, “HaMelits”<a href="#24" name="top24"><sup>24</sup></a> printed reports from the provinces about a burnt down bathhouse or about arguments over a ritual slaughterer or a rabbi.<a href="#25" name="top25"><sup>25</sup></a></div><div><br /></div><div>As an aside, a detail about Peretz around that time. We, a group of young people, had a plan of publishing a journal, and had wanted Peretz as our editor. We had a meeting with him, and when his turn came to speak, he begged our pardon: About “such matters” it was difficult for him to express himself in Yiddish, and since we “Litvaks”<a href="#26" name="top26"><sup>26</sup></a> didn’t understand Polish, he would speak Russian!<a href="#27" name="top27"><sup>27</sup></a></div><div><br /></div><div>After two years in Warsaw, I returned to my home town, in Ukraine, for some personal concerns. I had not “conquered the city”; the citadel of Warsaw remained untouched.<a href="#28" name="top28"><sup>28</sup></a> I traveled with the intention of returning soon—and ended up staying in my home for 5 years. Before this time, I was primarily interested in Russian literature, and the approaching first Revolution.<a href="#29" name="top29"><sup>29</sup></a> Only at home I wrote Yiddish.</div><div><br /></div><div>When I returned, in 1903, Warsaw was unrecognizable. The whole Jewish world was unrecognizable. In the borderlands between the two centuries, the two great Jewish political movements were born and grew to maturity: modern Zionism and the Bund.<a href="#30" name="top30"><sup>30</sup></a> In Petersburg, Der Fraynd, the first Yiddish daily newspaper, exploded onto the scene. Those who remember that time and know the role that “Der Fraynd'' played in our political and cultural life will understand why I used the expression “explode”. In Warsaw itself, the weekly “Folks-tzeitung” was published, first under the direction of Dr. Joseph Lurie<a href="#31" name="top31"><sup>31</sup></a>, later under Spektor. Peretz became maybe the most brilliant orator in Yiddish that I had ever heard, a powerful fount of dazzling thoughts and colorful speech; Sholem-Aleichem was the most popular, most read writer, even in Poland. Bialik<a href="#32" name="top32"><sup>32</sup></a>, Berdyczewski<a href="#33" name="top33"><sup>33</sup></a> and Judah Steinberg<a href="#34" name="top34"><sup>34</sup></a> wrote both in Hebrew and in Yiddish, and even Shimen Frug<a href="#35" name="top35"><sup>35</sup></a>, recalled his youthful sins, and with an uncertain tread, approached the language “of Vilna’s market and Dvinsk’s butcher shops.”</div><div><br /></div><div>One started to hear from America—Morris Rosenfeld<a href="#36" name="top36"><sup>36</sup></a>, Kobrin<a href="#37" name="top37"><sup>37</sup></a>, Libin<a href="#38" name="top38"><sup>38</sup></a>, Jacob Gordin<a href="#39" name="top39"><sup>39</sup></a>, Avrom Liessen<a href="#40" name="top40"><sup>40</sup></a>. From there, indeed, we were also saddled with translated cheap novels and “adaptations” from foreign literatures. These good people even so patched up Shakespeare that he came out as good as new.<a href="#41" name="top41"><sup>41</sup></a> And in Warsaw! Warsaw Alone! Frischmann<a href="#42" name="top42"><sup>42</sup></a>, Dinezon<a href="#43" name="top43"><sup>43</sup></a>, Setzer<a href="#44" name="top44"><sup>44</sup></a>, Bal-Makhshoves<a href="#45" name="top45"><sup>45</sup></a>, Reizen, Nomberg<a href="#46" name="top46"><sup>46</sup></a>, Asch<a href="#47" name="top47"><sup>47</sup></a>, Weissenberg<a href="#48" name="top48"><sup>48</sup></a>, Z. Shneour<a href="#49" name="top49"><sup>49</sup></a>, Jacob Steinberg<a href="#50" name="top50"><sup>50</sup></a>, I. D. Berkowitz<a href="#51" name="top51"><sup>51</sup></a> . . . Aha! Out with the dream of conquering worlds! You will be content, friend, to be capable of managing your own affairs.<a href="#52" name="top52"><sup>52</sup></a> From far-flung hick towns, from small-town mud, the boys and girls came running to Warsaw,—What possessed them? What sort of force expelled them from the deepest recesses of the People and sent them on a mission? GO AND CREATE LITERATURE IN YIDDISH!<a href="#53" name="top53"><sup>53</sup></a> And this at a time, when an individual who held any personal ambition was able to go to Russian, to Polish, to German. And they did indeed go! However, the ones who left for the other languages—with the exception of those who left for German—were our weakest. Bless their heads, let them live and be well.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ah, truly, the song of Yiddish literature in the beginning of the 20th century has not yet been sung! The person who saw the new Yiddish literature as a trickling stream, now was standing on the banks of a river, which was destined to overflow all countries where Jews lived.<a href="#54" name="top54"><sup>54</sup></a>
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<a name="1"><b>1 </b></a>Levi Yehoshua Shapiro, (1878-1948) born in Rzhyshchiv, Ukraine, died in Los Angeles, California. One of my favorite writers on violence and antisemitism, author of the tense psychological thriller short stories “The Cross” and “White Challah.” What is presented here is the autobiographical sketch that begins his long essay, “Der Shrayber Geyt In Heyder” “The Writer Goes To School,” published in 1945 in a slim collection of literary criticism. The rest of the essay is a meandering exploration of Shapiro’s opinions on writing craft and art. I discovered it by asking a facebook group of Yiddish writers and scholars for Yiddish Writing on Writing. I have been translating it since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when I filled the holes in my Yiddish grammatical education and the long days of lockdown with an obsession with Yiddish Duolingo. I still have much to learn, but can translate with a dictionary and some patience.
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<a name="2"><b>2 </b></a> I came to Yiddish for the ghosts. I have been convinced from a young age that I will one day encounter my great grandparents, dead decades before my birth. What will I say to them? What language to greet them in, to show I have spent my time honoring them and their memories? The problem with ghosts is that they’re people. The more I learn about my great grandparents, both specifically from family lore and in general conclusions about their generation, I wonder if they WOULD be proud if I spoke to them in Yiddish. Possibly more bemused than proud. Why did I waste time not being a nice American boy, like they had hoped for, like they had been so proud to see my father and his brothers becoming? Then again, my father and mother have so little insight into their own grandparents’ interiority. It was not a time for showing children what made your heart bleed. Bubbe sold sweaters in a little shopping cart around Brownsville. Zayde was a waiter in Crown Heights, though all he ever cooked was cucumber salad. Wispy little ghosts, remembered for wispy little gestures. Better, now that my Yiddish is coming along, to study literature.
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<a name="3"><b>3 </b></a> Here the city makes an appearance as the center of the Yiddish literary world, a position it held in no small part due to its prominent Yiddish literary citizen, Yitzhok Leybush Peretz, (1852-1915), who was a tireless mentor to younger generations of Yiddish writers, including Lamed Shapiro. And so we see “that a man in himself is a city” Is the author seeking to conquer the city, the literary scene, or his mentor’s mind?
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<a name="4"><b>4 </b></a> When I was eight I authored and illustrated my first book, whose title escapes me, but whose subject was a species of aliens that could mimic toilets, attacking a human population hopelessly enslaved to their bowel movements. The attack is fought off by a brave little Jewish authorial stand-in character, who saves the world on Hanukkah. Already my work’s preoccupation with explicit Jewish content, the body, and the alien are present. Some of these preoccupations are shared with Shapiro and other Yiddish writers. <a href="#top4"><sup>↩</sup></a>
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<a name="5"><b>5 </b></a> The nature of Shapiro’s heresy is vague. Perhaps he denied the very existence of the God of Israel. Or perhaps having witnessed pogrom after pogrom and keenly observed their devastating psychological effects, he denied that there is a Judge and Justice. My own heretical leanings are even more difficult for me to understand. I no longer trust God, and I believe God must answer for all suffering, including my own. I would like to know why, if God demanded that I learn Torah and obey the Law, why God has made it so difficult for me to do so without resulting in a deep melancholy and anxiety that does not allow me to function at all, let alone as an observant Jew. I am perhaps more of a believer than Shapiro. It is unclear.
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<a name="6"><b>6 </b></a> When leaving God behind, all that is left are Jews. When you stop speaking Hebrew, the language that “crossed over”, all that is left is Yiddish, the language that is Jew-ish.
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<a name="7"><b>7 </b></a> The word in Yiddish is the Hebrew word “הכשר,” meaning both generally a Rabbi’s declaration that a food stuff or religious article is “kosher” and the symbols used by a variety of Rabbinic organizations to show that they have supervised and approved the production of a food stuff or article for use by observant Jews. Shapiro uses it colloquially here, but there was a time I sought rabbinic approval for my whole life, desperate to please a cadre of musty historical figures whose writings and decisions in the framework of Jewish law I considered sacrosanct. I still love and value the writings of these rabbis, I still long for their embrace. But my madness, my pain, prevents me from keeping the law. What can I do? The rabbis in their wisdom might declare me a “שוטה”, a man too mentally unfit to keep the law. That is the best case scenario. They might condemn me as a simple sinner, too obstinate and boorish to know how to be Jewish correctly.<a href="#top7"><sup>↩</sup></a>
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<a name="8"><b>8 </b></a> This contempt for Yiddish as a “jargon” is deeply felt to this day. My ancestors had almost no interest in passing the language to my parents’ generation of Americans, who they would whisper over, holding their secret parental and grandparental conversations in the old language. My father often chuckles indulgently when I tell him what I learn in my Yiddish classes, cracks old borscht belt jokes, wonders what I am doing on my phone all the time. I am telling a cartoon owl how many eggs he has in Yiddish. I am telling a cartoon bear that he forgot to close the store. I am playing my heritage as a game.
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<a name="9"><b>9 </b></a>Dmitry Ivanovich Pisarev (1840-1868), a literary critic and one of the foremost thinkers of Russian Nihilism. An influence on Lenin, his effect on Shapiro is humbler: the adoption of the language of himself and his neighbors for literature.
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<a name="10"><b>10 </b></a> This humility, this flippancy, this certainty that a detailed autobiography of his reading and writing life could shed no light that has not already been shed, where does it come from? Is there a vast literature of Yiddish writers on writing? Do we know this story already? Why don’t I know how to read as a Jew? What literature makes a Jewish writer? What makes me a Jewish writer?
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<a name="11"><b>11 </b></a> Shapiro describes a bizarre outfit, half formal wear, half costume of youth and immaturity, in which he goes to meet Peretz. In my bar mitzvah suit, with its crazy patterned tie to satisfy my still childish tastes, I receive check after check, and every now and then a book. Was it here that I first held a copy of Peretz’ stories in translation in my hand?
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<a name="12"><b>12 </b></a> So the great man enters our story. My own reading of Peretz started around the age that Shapiro met him in person. I gobbled up translations of his work, finding his slightly austere style more to my liking than the schmaltzy folkiness of Sholem-Aleichem (1859-1916) or Mendele Moykher Sforim (1835-1917) the other great pillars of Yiddish Literature. He was for a while, most of what I knew of Yiddish literature, besides the Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991) children’s stories that I had grown up with, and the little Aleichem and Mendele I had read. I saw parallels between him and my adolescent favorite, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). They both mixed magic and philosophy freely. Peretz tells stories of miracles and mud with a detached wondrousness. I was enchanted by his words as a young adult. I haven’t read him for ten years. Life gets in the way. To encounter him here, as a human being, a hero to Shapiro but still fallible, is to rediscover and reinvent my image of him, no longer a wizard behind an untouchable great book, but a writer. A great writer, but still, a writer, as Shapiro is a writer, as I am a writer. What separates me from YL Peretz? A language, a continent, an ocean, some words.
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<a name="13"><b>13 </b></a> Remember, Shapiro still intends to take the world by storm, by way of Yiddish literary greatness. Can a Jewish writer in a Jewish language conquer the world? If a Jewish writer in a non-Jewish language conquers the world, has he done anything for the Jewish people? What does all my writing in English amount to?
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<a name="14"><b>14 </b></a> One of the first literary periodicals in Yiddish, started by Sholem-Aleichem in 1888, but forced to close by Aleichem’s bankruptcy in 1890.
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<a name="15"><b>15 </b></a> A Warsaw-based publication run by the author Mordkhe Spektor (1858-1925), but whose last edition appeared sometime before 1896, the year of Shapiro’s arrival in Warsaw.
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<a name="16"><b>16 </b></a> Y. G. Munk, Warsaw based bookseller and publisher. I am still endeavoring to find precise dates for Munk’s birth and death and the operation of the press and shop, but there are extant Munk editions of Hebrew works dating from at least the 1870s.
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<a name="17"><b>17 </b></a> The earliest question my writing had to answer, literally written in the margins by friends and teachers serving as editors, was “Who is this for?” Spending my entire 20s without a bachelor’s degree, my tone was too academic. Trying to hand my work in at the schools I kept dropping in and out of, I was told I was too lyrical, too glancing in my analysis. As I turned to fiction and creative writing, the question persisted. Who is this for? Who is your audience? Where are the readers?
<br /><br />Isaac Bashevis Singer, when he received the Nobel prize for Literature, said that he continued to write in Yiddish after the Holocaust, because he is a believer in מחיה המתים, the Resurrection of the Dead. “I am sure that millions of Yiddish speaking corpses will rise from their graves one day and their first question will be: ‘Is there any new Yiddish book to read?’” In much the same way, I hope to write Jewish stories to continue conversations with the long dead rabbis who torment me, with the Jewish writers who delight me. When I read Grace Paley and Isaac Babel for the first time in 2019, I realized, this is my audience, this is who I write for. I do not write for readers. I write to be in conversation with other writers, many of them dead and gone.
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<a name="18"><b>18 </b></a> An allusion to Aleichem’s character, Menachem Mendl, notorious for his unending faith in his disastrous financial speculations, and Aleichem’s own attempts to remake the fortune he had lost in 1890 on the stock market.
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<a name="19"><b>19 </b></a> Yiddish writer Dovid Pinski (1872-1959), another mentee and collaborator of Peretz’. His move to Berlin in 1896 was the beginning of the end of his time in Europe. He moved to America in 1899, and then moved to the state of Israel in 1949.
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<a name="20"><b>20 </b></a> Avraham Hirsch Kotik (1867 -1933) son of the Yiddish memoirist Yekhezkl Kotick (1847 -1921), and a socialist activist and translator into Yiddish in his own right.
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<a name="21"><b>21 </b></a> Avrom Reyzen (1876-1953), another protegé of Peretz, and a prodigy, published his first poem in Peretz’s Yiddishe Bibliotek in 1891, at the age of 15.
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<a name="22"><b>22 </b></a> What is meant by Shapiro’s comment about the Third Bar is unclear to me. The original term is די דרײ טאַקטן, and is definitely a reference to musical notation.
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<a name="23"><b>23 </b></a> The terrain is surveyed and found wanting. I am less despairing than Shapiro; perhaps we might say, less arrogant. I do not believe myself to be a lone voice crying in a wilderness. There are others here too, some of whom tower above me, their names regularly appearing in both the Jewish and the wider press: Chabon, Krauss, Englander, Safran Foer. I have dozens of contemporaries I can turn to, talk with. But I read them all in English. Even those who write in Hebrew, which I speak, I read in English. Is there an intimacy we are denied? Has a Jewish writer ever reached out to me to speak, Jew to Jew, just us, no one watching. Then again, who would watch us? Who cares what a Jew has to say to a Jew but another Jew?
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<a name="24"><b>24 </b></a> A depressing decline from the golden days of the paper’s Yiddish supplement Kol Mevaser, the first Yiddish paper in Russia, published between 1862 and 1872. Under editor-in-chief and publisher Aleksander Zederbaum (1816-1893) the paper saw the publication of Mendele Moykher Sforim and Avrom Goldfadn, among other Yiddish luminaries. My own sense of the Jewish press is of decline. The Forward is consumed by listicles, Tablet by neo-conservatives. Jewish Currents and Haaretz have little to no interest in fiction or creative non-fiction. The Jewish Book Review champions Jewish writers . . . once they have books. Where can my stories go to find their cousins? In what anthology could I be beside other Jewish writers of my generation? Can I only talk to ghosts, or do I have a message for the living?
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<a name="25"><b>25 </b></a> These arguments persist, and I don’t see why Shapiro should complain about them. They are the foundation of all Jewish fiction, these clashes between Jews, these petty, quiet events in the midst of history.
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<a name="26"><b>26 </b></a> Shapiro was Ukrainian, not Lithuanian, but the term had expanded to all non-Polish Jews who were rushing into Warsaw in the 1890s.
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<a name="27"><b>27 </b></a> Peretz fell in esteem in the eyes of his student, for the simple crime of speaking the wrong language at a crucial moment. One can picture a young Shapiro tearing his hair out. How can there be hope for Yiddish Literature when one of its greatest practitioners can’t even conduct business in the language! This youthful purism was, in me, turned inwards. In my 20s, I berated myself for failing to keep kosher, failing to keep Shabbos, failing to keep up with my talmudic studies. Entering Jewish literature as a writer in my 30s, is there an equivalent? Who am I disappointed in? <br /><br />So much of the Jewish world is swinging right, to keep in lock step with the state of Israel. I arrived in Israel in 2005, the year the state removed settlements from Gaza. How proud I was of the morality of that decision, the liberalism of it! Surely this was the beginning of a Jewish-led peace. But as I watched the slow imprisonment and pulverizing of Gaza over the next decades, and as my own mental health crisis inclined my sympathies to all who were trapped, hurt, wounded, I became disenchanted with Zionism and Israel. I left in 2008, a nervous wreck, heart broken by the “only Jewish country in the world.” Now I no longer believe in states and their promises, much as I no longer believe in sanity. The world is too thin for that, the mind too unpredictable. We must let go of purism, and embrace what emerges next.
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<a name="28"><b>28 </b></a> Jewish literary greatness eluded Shapiro in his first sally. No meteoric rise, no weeping at the edge of the sea for having nothing left to conquer. Like Don Quixote he comes home beaten, finding the world both larger and smaller than he had hoped. And me? I am dipping my toe in. I am satisfied with my early publications, and am exploring a writers life. Readings, submissions, queries, working on sustained pieces. Is this failure? Is it success? It’s mostly just words, some printed, most online. A bigger and smaller world than I had hoped<a href="#top28"><sup>↩</sup></a>
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<a name="29"><b>29 </b></a> Behind all this Jewish writing, political upheaval. Empires rise and fall, tsars are conspired against, assassinated, appointed, Presidents are elected, Jewish states come into being, Holocausts happen. What is a Jewish writer’s responsibility to all this? What language should he write his political screeds in? What role should she take in history?
<br /><br />When there was a brief rhetorical struggle over whether it was appropriate to label the conditions of US detention facilities for immigrants “concentration camps” I felt it my responsibility to get arrested protesting a July 4th parade with a group of Jewish activists. We were of the opinion that the detention facilities were indeed concentration camps, and that we as Jews must shout never again. These activists, who I perhaps over excitedly labeled “my comrades,” have become a Jewish community for me. I write about their Messianic pretensions, their artistic sensitivities, their cries for mutual aid (which I try to answer when possible). I conspire with them to make art. Some of them are Jewish writers too.
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<a name="30"><b>30 </b></a>Like Shapiro, I have been alive for the turn of the century. I wonder if I’ve also lived to see a revival of a uniquely Jewish political consciousness. Conversations long thought dead and dying suddenly have new life. Twitter profiles of US 20 somethings earnestly declaring themselves Neo-Bundists spring up like mushrooms after the rain, and Zionism chugs along, a state ideology, with its free vacations for Americans and its mandatory army service for Israelis. Yiddish has taken on a new significance in this struggle, there are respectable amounts of revivalists in the summer programs and classes and even an app that teaches you the language, taught me the language. But has Jewish literature taken a role yet in the century to come?
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<a name="31"><b>31 </b></a>Dr. Joseph Lurie, (1871-1937) a delegate to the First Zionist Congress, founder of the weekly Der Yud, and the literary editor of Der Fraynd until 1906. <a href="#top31"><sup>↩</sup></a>
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<a name="32"><b>32 </b></a> Hayyim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934), perhaps the first great modern Hebrew poet
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<a name="33"><b>33 </b></a> Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski (1865-1921), an ardent defender of Hebrew belles lettres.
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<a name="34"><b>34 </b></a> Judah Steinberg (1863-1908), a romantic writer of Hasidic stories.
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<a name="35"><b>35 </b></a> Shimen Shmuel Frug (1860-1916) polyglot, misanthrope, Russian literary darling and author of a screed, in 1899, dismissing the possibility of a great Yiddish literature.
<a href="#top35"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="36"><b>36 </b></a> Morris Rosenfeld (born Moshe Jacob Alter 1862, died 1923), prolific poet of the lives of immigrant tailors.
<a href="#top36"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="37"><b>37 </b></a> Leon Kobrin (1873-1946) playwright, poet, translator, whose passion for Yiddish only began upon his immigration to Philadelphia in 1892. Beginning as a disciple of Jacob Gordin (See note 35), his career spanned two golden ages of the Yiddish stage.
<a href="#top37"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="38"><b>38 </b></a> Z. Libin, born Yisroel Zalmen Hurvits, (1872-1955), a socialist playwright and author, and brother to Khayim Dov Hurvits (1865-1927), a contributor to Der Fraynd.
<a href="#top38"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="39"><b>39 </b></a> Jacob Mikhailovitch Gordin, (1853-1909), playwright and the father of Naturalism and Realism in Yiddish theater.
<a href="#top39"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="40"><b>40 </b></a> Abraham Liessen (1872-1938) Socialist revolutionary, poet and playwright. He came to New York in 1897, fleeing the secret police.
<a href="#top40"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="41"><b>41 </b></a> What is my responsibility as a Jewish writer in English? Shapiro complains of cheap translations and interpretations as shoddy patchwork on the dignity of Shakespeare. When I use my duolingo Yiddish to translate the greats of Yiddish literature into my mooncalfish English, whose dignity am I imperiling? On the other hand, reading Cynthia Ozick’s novella “Envy, or Yiddish in America”, I come across her creation the poet Edelshtein, wandering the wintry New York streets, feverishly hoping to find a translator for his poems. Is Yiddish a language of beggars who cannot be choosers? Is it so insulting to patch up the coat of a language dressed in rags? Or is it an insult to point out the rags in the first place?<a href="#top41"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="42"><b>42 </b></a> David Frischmann (1859-1922) Modernist in Hebrew and Yiddish, translator of, among other authors, Tagore, Goethe, and the Brothers Grimm. <a href="#top42"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="43"><b>43 </b></a> Jacob “Yankev” Dinezon, (1851-1919), an author and early champion of Peretz, whose novel Yosele exposed abuses in the Jewish religious education system and led to major educational reforms.
<a href="#top43"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="44"><b>44 </b></a> Samuel H. Setzer, (1876-1962), energetic translator and writer in Hebrew and Yiddish.
<a href="#top44"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="45"><b>45 </b></a>Pen name of Dr. Isidor Eliashev (1873-1924), the “Master of Thoughts” didn’t enter into the world of serious Yiddish literary criticism until Dr. Joseph Lurie (see note 27) urged him to in 1899. His enthusiasm for Yiddish literature took a distinct pessimistic turn in 1910, with the collapse of his marriage. Things seemed to look up after WWI, but then his depression and physical ailments took a turn for the worst, and he died in his native Kovno.
<a href="#top45"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="46"><b>46 </b></a> Hersh Dovid Nomberg, (1876-1927), a Yiddish bohemian whose stories of love, lust and loss I have encountered in translation in the delightful “A Cheerful Soul and other stories” (2021, Snuggly Books) trans. Daniel Kennedy
<a href="#top46"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="47"><b>47 </b></a> Sholem Asch (1880-1957), whose copious translated novels surrounded me in my youth, though I never picked them up.
<a href="#top47"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="48"><b>48 </b></a> Isaac Meir Weissenberg (1878-1938), tireless and occasionally cantankerous champion of Polish Yiddish, as opposed to the Lithuanian dialect or the Ukrainian.
<a href="#top48"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="49"><b>49 </b></a> Zalman Shneour, born Shneur Zalkind (1887-1959) writer in Hebrew and Yiddish, nominated in 1951 by the Hebrew PEN club for the Nobel prize.
<a href="#top49"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="50"><b>50 </b></a> Jacob Steinberg, (1887-1947), who wrote Yiddish in Peretz’ circles, but swore off it and on to Hebrew when moving to Mandate Palestine in 1914. Still, he never adjusted his Hebrew accent, writing in an Ashkenazi Hebrew until his death. <a href="#top50"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="51"><b>51 </b></a> Isaac Dov Berkowitz (1885-1967) a translator of Sholem Aleichem, his father-in-law, into Hebrew, and a writer in his own right.
<a href="#top51"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="52"><b>52 </b></a> Eventually ambition leaves us, and we can get down to writing. Shapiro is no longer a Genghis Khan, and I can no longer continue to over identify with Shapiro, whose greatness and essentialness to the world of Jewish letters surpasses my own abilities. I must now admit the gulf between us, me, unproven and trying in English, and him, a master of Yiddish. I’ll visit him at his grave in Los Angeles one of these days, and thank him for the advice.
<a href="#top52"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="53"><b>53 </b></a> Every Jewish writer post the Shoah has heard this call, and has had to answer in their own language, in their own way. Hebrew is the future, some of us say. I do not speak Yiddish, we say. I am not even Ashkenazi, others reply. Still, the voice is sharp and clear. Why does it keep calling? Why can’t it be satisfied with the short spurt of the river that Shapiro describes?
<br /><br />I am not a Yiddish writer, but I am creating a Jewish literature for here, for now. And part of that literature by necessity is about and for and in Yiddish. Yiddish is the present and the future. Yiddish is as alive as the pulse in my thumb, as it presses the iPhone screen and answers the cartoon owl’s questions in Yiddish.
<a href="#top53"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span>
</p><hr width="80%" />
<p>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">
<a name="54"><b>54 </b></a> I end here, on Shapiro’s bitter optimism. Writing in 1945, it is unclear to me how much he knows about the devastation of his world and audience. But surely he knows something has shifted, that there is a dying at hand. He transitions from here to several sections of craft thoughts and writing advice. He covers what there is to learn from other arts, how to learn what not to do from others failures, whether Yiddish will ever be free from comparisons to German. In the following pages he declares “The Yiddish language has worked a spell on me. She is, after all is said and done, my most beautiful love, and I hope to die at her feet.”
<br /><br />That spell is being worked on me by Jewish literature more broadly. I have my answer now of what to read. Shapiro’s listing above is curriculum enough, and more gets written every day. I am a Jew awash in books, as Jews always have been. One day Jews will swim in my words too.
<a href="#top54"><sup>↩</sup></a>
</span> </p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p></div><div><p style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote><span style="color: red;"><b>Mordecai Martin</b> is an Ashkenazi Jewish writer from New York with ties to Mexico City and Philadelphia. His creative non-fiction has appeared in <i>Catapult Magazine, Longleaf Review, Peach Magazine, Autofocus Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine,</i> and <i>The Hypocrite Reader.</i> His fiction has been featured in <i>Identity Theory, Timber Journal, X-Ray Lit, Gone Lawn, Knight’s Library Magazine, Funicular,</i> and<i> Sortes.</i> He is obtaining an MFA in creative writing at Randolph College in Virginia. He tweets and instagrams @mordecaipmartin and blogs at <a href="http://www.mordecaimartin.net">http://www.mordecaimartin.net</a>.</span></blockquote><p></p></div><div><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p></div>Mordecai Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17922053172689354257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-58378107466566440662022-12-25T04:30:00.009-08:002022-12-25T04:30:00.157-08:00Dec 25: Merry Christmas & an Invitation to Send Us Your Reading Recs<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJaih-B99ZzWFwit4SOwBYCZaItgQOCsq94CUpH-0Q4crGmRYEYa5yxd2xkGA78S_KMtSO6qZo4RMzCjDc5ZtJBmpOshEVOxX224WeczEWZ_LLgXdy7AJC4KjHdTyKJXL2IxFeY1H_VzNRJ0MHsM_og3EBKnhUV7IkThjbFvQwDHTFoENVwIK8FrS6/s1080/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec25.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1080" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJaih-B99ZzWFwit4SOwBYCZaItgQOCsq94CUpH-0Q4crGmRYEYa5yxd2xkGA78S_KMtSO6qZo4RMzCjDc5ZtJBmpOshEVOxX224WeczEWZ_LLgXdy7AJC4KjHdTyKJXL2IxFeY1H_VzNRJ0MHsM_og3EBKnhUV7IkThjbFvQwDHTFoENVwIK8FrS6/w640-h372/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec25.gif" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Merry Christmas!</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>*</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you and yours. Thanks for reading <a href="https://www.essaydaily.org/p/the-essay-daily-advent-calendar.html">this year's Advent Calendar, all of which you can now find collected here</a>. We'll take a break now for a bit, but invite you to tell us what you loved reading this year, essay-wise. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Either fill out the <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeLI7uBNJUSqUnOrw9i7F6CRdnY8PA8YXbQcmWDkzTkH2jkxw/viewform?usp=sf_link">Recommended Reading google form here</a> or send us an email with your recommendations. Anything essay or essayistic that you got into this year is fair game. Doesn't have to have been published this year, but bonus points if it was. We'll run a digest post with all of our riffs and recommendations in early 2023, so get us yours by the end of the year.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">—Ander & Will</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">*</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN8EwaKEif7ol84TCih8YXPcHYfogl_CdRQ4m4qhD4yF1pLmm9azVPyoFlDYyv4lbjFqB7K7F9R5lpJaFUf8_PcDS4EJZOMlNOL8nV4lXcue2bWeWZNCZQuc1sGyOxgAQhPRX3Khd3xNq5du3B_ckls8aXv09pxL00X_6JI_sxpdNSWjVkmtPmph1W/s4032/rudolph%20and%20skeleton%20IMG_0757.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN8EwaKEif7ol84TCih8YXPcHYfogl_CdRQ4m4qhD4yF1pLmm9azVPyoFlDYyv4lbjFqB7K7F9R5lpJaFUf8_PcDS4EJZOMlNOL8nV4lXcue2bWeWZNCZQuc1sGyOxgAQhPRX3Khd3xNq5du3B_ckls8aXv09pxL00X_6JI_sxpdNSWjVkmtPmph1W/w640-h480/rudolph%20and%20skeleton%20IMG_0757.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /> <p></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-68823470831036448272022-12-24T04:30:00.002-08:002022-12-24T04:30:00.198-08:00Advent 2022, Dec 24, Dave Griffith, Station X: Christmas Eve, Strawtowne Pike, Bunker Hill, IN<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyqdG1FgmKVMVBxuqNprD2kjPdh2HA7S3X3l7ocmPavZVfAMcOe0vVLa0vJovxK8-NrWAfYFBSuoO5YXpOKa2LBYT5xyG-QLW3kUbHvFNmydQyu5VaIqs3u3f_GeeMoALkYMP-6mBXaDsH6oHW2GHCJxLqFkN2Xxuk_MpxK0kbjyJgZ8XxyXdWNo9r/s1080/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec24.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1080" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyqdG1FgmKVMVBxuqNprD2kjPdh2HA7S3X3l7ocmPavZVfAMcOe0vVLa0vJovxK8-NrWAfYFBSuoO5YXpOKa2LBYT5xyG-QLW3kUbHvFNmydQyu5VaIqs3u3f_GeeMoALkYMP-6mBXaDsH6oHW2GHCJxLqFkN2Xxuk_MpxK0kbjyJgZ8XxyXdWNo9r/w640-h372/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec24.gif" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Station X: Christmas Eve, Strawtowne Pike</i></div><div style="text-align: center;">Dave Griffith</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #0b5394;">*</span></div><div><br /><b>Author’s note:</b> “Station X” is part of a 14-part <a href="https://soundcloud.com/poorerthandead/sets/days-between-stations-1?si=97e2ab5f052f45d1a922d7ac8bbe6134&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing">collaborative text and audio project</a> between myself and printmaker and musician, Kyle Peets, that reflects upon daily life during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the project is not explicitly religious, it does borrow the narrative structure from the popular Lenten ritual the Stations of the Cross or Way of the Cross, in which pilgrims reenact the Passion of Jesus Christ by processing and praying before tableaux depicting different moments from that story.<br /><br />The text and accompanying ambient music were composed independently of one another during the pandemic at a distance of over 2,000 miles—me in Indiana and Kyle in Oregon. Kyle did not have access to the text I was writing while he composed, and I did not have access to the music he was composing while writing. This was to ensure that any synchronicities would be accidental. <br /><br />We suggest reading the piece, then <a href="https://soundcloud.com/poorerthandead/station-10_master-mp3?in=poorerthandead/sets/days-between-stations-1&si=be21c1b4c14148b98cea6279d89da8db&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing">listening to the recording</a>.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #0b5394;">*</span></div> <br />That was at the new house. <br /><br />At the old house on Stratowne Pike, the house my grandparents and my two aunts moved into when my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer, we would walk out past the barn, across the barren field toward a dark windbreak. It was farther than it looked, and colder out there in the middle of the field than it was close to the house, and so we always bundled ourselves in hats and scarves before beginning the walk out to the wood. <br /><br />My dad would carry my brother on his shoulders at least part of the way. My uncles would be carrying cans of beer, which they plucked from the case cooling on the back porch. Out there in the woods there wasn’t much to see, really, except some rusted farm equipment, old beer cans, maybe a whiskey bottle. On the walk, my dad had a knack for finding arrowheads just sitting on top of a furrow, turned up when the field was plowed under.<br /><br />This is the house where we gathered for many Christmases and Thanksgivings, where we would play heated games of Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary, and then stay up late giving dramatic readings from the Collected Poems of James Whitcomb Riley, the so-called Hoosier Poet, whose 1885 poem “Little Orphant Annie” inspired the creation, years later, of the comic strip.<br /><blockquote>Little Orphant Annie's come to our house to stay,<br />An' wash the cups an' saucers up, an' brush the crumbs away,<br />An' shoo the chickens off the porch, an' dust the hearth, an' sweep,<br />An' make the fire, an' bake the bread, an' earn her board-an'-keep;<br />An' all us other childern, when the supper things is done,<br />We set around the kitchen fire an' has the mostest fun<br />A-list'nin' to the witch-tales 'at Annie tells about,<br />An' the Gobble-uns 'at gits you<br /> Ef you<br /> Don't<br /> Watch<br /> Out!</blockquote>In my memory, the poem took the place of “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” in our Christmas Eve ritual.<br /><br />But that house is gone now. Four years ago, a tornado blew through the county and came near enough to nudge the house off its foundation. House inspectors came and judged that it was no longer a safe place to live, so it was condemned and razed. All that is left is the gravel drive with its strip of grass and weeds down the middle, and a faint outline of where the foundation had been. <br /><br />Sometimes when I am driving back from Indianapolis, after a weekend with my kids, I make a quick detour off route 31 and visit the empty lot, remembering the feeling of anticipation I felt as the house came into sight; how the dogs would begin to bark and rush out to our van to greet us, followed by my uncles who would come out to ask if they could help carry luggage; how I would hug them, or, as I got older, shake hands; how as we all walked into the house my uncles would grab beers from cases chilling on the porch, and, later, as I got older, I would grab one, too.<br /><br />In the Google satellite images, images taken from the USDA’s Farm Service Agency map data, the shape of the gravel drive is still clearly visible; the way that it ran parallel to the north side of the house and then made a loop around the garage and then met back up with the drive again. When you zoom in to several hundred feet from the ground it looks like the looped rope of a snare. <br /><br />But when you drag the small icon of a person over the old gray asphalt, it glows blue, meaning that a Google car has driven past. I drag the little orange person over the green fields, my cursor holding them by one arm, their legs dangling and swinging with the sudden motion, like someone being carried away by a clutch of balloons, and drop them on the blue road in front of the driveway. It is then that the house appears. There it is: the white gable of the roof is peeking from behind a line of trees in full leaf. Orange daylilies flank the entrance to the drive. <br /><br />According to the timestamp at the bottom of the screen, it is June of 2009. It is a glorious day. The sky is a wash of light blue at the horizon that grows more and more intense and saturated with elevation. Among the white puffs of clouds it is deep robin’s egg, and with a dragging of the mouse upward I can see that the sun is white and blurry at its nadir and beyond the sun it is Marian. <br /><br />It must be early June because the corn in the adjacent fields has just emerged, several inches high.<br /><br />If I close my eyes, I can feel the heat of that sun and smell the odor of those lilies. <br /><br />A few seconds of meditation and I am there walking that drive way; the noise of my shoes on the gravel like a needle traveling the groove of a record.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #0b5394;">*</span></div><span style="color: red;"><blockquote><b>Dave Griffith</b> is the author of <i>A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America</i> (Soft Skull Press). His essays and reviews have appeared in print and online at the <i>Paris Review</i>, <i>The Normal School</i>, <i>Another Chicago Magazine</i>, <i>The Los Angeles Review of Books</i>, the <i>Utne Reader</i>, <i>Killing the Buddha</i>, and <i>Image</i>, among others.<br /><br /><b>Kyle Peets</b> is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator who has exhibited his work nationally and abroad. He has had solo exhibitions at Platte Forum gallery (Denver, CO) as well as various group exhibitions: <i>Character Profile</i> at Root Division gallery (San Francisco, CA), <i>Art Is Our Last Hope</i> at The Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ), and <i>Art Shanty</i> on the frozen White Bear Lake (Minneapolis, MN). His work has been published in the periodical SPRTS by Endless Editions (New York, NY), and is archived in the Watson Library Special Collections, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and MoMA Manhattan. He received his MFA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa and a graduate certificate in Book Arts from the Iowa Center For The Book.</blockquote></span><br /></div>Will Slatteryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15089022056676288637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-10003694857569611642022-12-23T04:30:00.001-08:002022-12-23T04:30:00.201-08:00Advent 2022, Dec 23, Jenny Spinner, Um Aidan<div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi31b-2kQAP854vowsv1F66otE2v3eaVpsFSTFtPc7kKvflrj9-i39GHzh-JJTrXW_nLxrPF_fYL-RGAMty_AJEJWGPndjDdbv0eI5Q4KWTzuj_WDGeKp7q0X0E0UsthBpIyCUC05UbPFWeQJn-M47IMIp2TyXUqQyaN7KVhT8utb-w3576wv44wIbK/s1080/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec23.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1080" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi31b-2kQAP854vowsv1F66otE2v3eaVpsFSTFtPc7kKvflrj9-i39GHzh-JJTrXW_nLxrPF_fYL-RGAMty_AJEJWGPndjDdbv0eI5Q4KWTzuj_WDGeKp7q0X0E0UsthBpIyCUC05UbPFWeQJn-M47IMIp2TyXUqQyaN7KVhT8utb-w3576wv44wIbK/w640-h372/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec23.gif" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Um Aidan</i></div><div style="text-align: center;">Jenny Spinner</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #0b5394;">*</span></div><i>—Amman, Jordan, December 2022</i><br /><br />I remember that iris, a dome of florets now more gray than blue, not solid but patterned, with bits of white breaking through the way light spills from the bottom slit of a closed door. Back then, we spent hours holding each other’s gaze, locked in study and reassurance: <i>I’m here. You’re here</i>. Once, while changing him in an airport bathroom—he was about six months old—a woman leaned in, interrupting us. She put a wrinkled hand on my arm, and said, “I remember that, too. Don’t blink.” <br /><br />But I did blink, inevitably, and now he’s more man than boy, elbows propped on an aluminum-topped table, sweatshirt sleeves pushed back, popping small balls of falafel into his mouth. He brought me here because he knew I’d love it—<i>your kind of food, Mom</i>—and I realize he finally knows me the way I know my own mother. Which means he knows only what he can bear to know. We’re at a hole-in-the-wall falafel joint tucked into a covered alley off a busy street in Wasat al-Balad. He orders foul and hummus and mouttabal. Someone slaps two round discs of bread on the table. There’s no menu, but my firstborn knows what he’s doing. <br /><br />In the last few days, we’ve shared more words than we have since he was a child. He tells me about his visit to Palestine, the differences between Moroccan and Iraqi dialects, the Circassians who guard the royal family, and that time he inadvertently walked into the quiet room in the library and forty pairs of eyes lifted to stare at him, not hostile, just looking. When the man at the market across from the university gate asks why he is studying Arabic, he says “because I love the culture” not “politics.” He leads me inside: <i>When the fruit comes out, it’s time to leave. Women sit in the back of the cab, not the front.</i> We talk about the crazy traffic in Amman and the constant honking, and then he remembers that time he drove home to Philadelphia from the shore and a violent thunderstorm flooded the roads and he couldn’t see at all and he was terrified. He’d only had his license for six weeks, and he didn’t want to be in charge anymore. He wanted to give it all back, but he couldn’t, so he pulled into a mall parking lot to wait it out, only to have an unsympathetic guard insist he keep moving. It’s happened to him twice, he tells me, when he’s been on the road and it’s so dangerous that he can’t see and the only thing he can do is white-knuckle the wheel and makes all sorts of promises to himself and to God if only he survives. You know that feeling? he asks me. <br /><br />Just that morning, after the latest test results arrived in my inbox—the doctor can’t reach me here but the tests can—I’d sunk into a heap on the chair in the corner of my hotel room. The doom in my stomach rose to my throat, and I swallowed hard, trying to breathe. By the time we met up later in the day, I had decided I wasn’t going to tell him, but then I did, a little, enough. His eyes met mine for about five seconds too long. Those eyes. <i>I’m here. You’re here. I’m still here</i>. <br /><br />Sometimes it’s hard to reconcile this man of mine with the boy who was so shy as a child that he couldn’t look anyone in the eye. At his first soccer game, when he was five, he sat on the sidelines and cried because he was too afraid. For so long, he clung to me like a shadow. But now, here he is, leading me all over this city, ordering my tea, hailing cabs, rifling through my wallet for the right bills, shooing off hagglers, translating for his host family. When we cross the street, I tuck into his side, watching not the traffic but his feet. When he moves, I move. <br /><br />But I’m always a step behind these days, anxiety saddled to my waist, weighing me down as I try to keep up. At home, in the old life, I am the professor. Here I am the student. More than that, here I am Um Aidan. We’re climbing the steep road near his house as the sun sets in a pink splendor over the sandstone buildings dotting the hill. He’s telling me about Naji al-Ali’s Handala and the men who run coffee out to your car on silver trays and the dried miramia leaves his host mother will crumble into my tea, promising to cure me of any ails. Keep going, I want to say, my voice cracking with love and pride as he strides ahead with a confidence I’ve never had. My boy. <i>Keep going and do not look back</i>.<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdOLjsLEiG8XYNzgSj2BUKrsrwIe0NR3JhA1l1prLWwWidKQkdf-vKE2aQd1jqhgf9_OSNGX-uJ40E_2gsr-CBNDeDFf8H0c19RLg-S0C5pzZHzzCiV1uxmsxGmfkriDeq1feznTt7pzvyWIBSCZbDcXVsjwxvNEzHoH8WAuqf05cjuprwhxVUlJG4/s1440/js%20image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1440" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdOLjsLEiG8XYNzgSj2BUKrsrwIe0NR3JhA1l1prLWwWidKQkdf-vKE2aQd1jqhgf9_OSNGX-uJ40E_2gsr-CBNDeDFf8H0c19RLg-S0C5pzZHzzCiV1uxmsxGmfkriDeq1feznTt7pzvyWIBSCZbDcXVsjwxvNEzHoH8WAuqf05cjuprwhxVUlJG4/w640-h480/js%20image.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><div><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #0b5394;">*</span></div><div><span style="color: red;"><blockquote><b>Jenny Spinner</b> is a professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia where she teaches creative nonfiction and journalism. She received her MA and PhD in English from the University of Connecticut and her MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Penn State University. She is the author of <i>Of Women and the Essay: An Anthology from 1600 to 2000</i> (U of Georgia P, 2018).</blockquote></span></div></div></div><div><br /></div>Will Slatteryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15089022056676288637noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-81042315707410910982022-12-22T04:30:00.002-08:002022-12-22T04:30:00.168-08:00Advent 2022, Dec 22, Ander Monson on the Pleasures of a Book all about Road House<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSP7o29FtHS0Ft3IT_nmzdjY8uDnzAnIDJUEEKfIflZpZKFoNTfiExlGtIwqSzBT_gRQeWyeYYicnekFFIIt35r1zQf3yBz6IwL4NBHb2Pnn3dK80o2-22RbBjrfoV5TZ8dPhmNBuPftw8yve-H8AYUBhKtNxPn-pJeYiaqCQOwpXokJ7dtXUIR0F3/s1080/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec22.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1080" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSP7o29FtHS0Ft3IT_nmzdjY8uDnzAnIDJUEEKfIflZpZKFoNTfiExlGtIwqSzBT_gRQeWyeYYicnekFFIIt35r1zQf3yBz6IwL4NBHb2Pnn3dK80o2-22RbBjrfoV5TZ8dPhmNBuPftw8yve-H8AYUBhKtNxPn-pJeYiaqCQOwpXokJ7dtXUIR0F3/w640-h372/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec22.gif" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">Pain Might Actually Hurt?:<br /><span style="text-align: left;">on Sean T. Collins's <i>Pain Don't Hurt</i></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><i>Ander Monson</i></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><i>*</i></span></p><p>1. On the spectrum of bad ideas for books, watching the Patrick Swayze movie <i>Road House</i> repeatedly and writing an essay a day about it for a whole year, 365 days straight, has to rank pretty high. My friend Sean (not T. Collins) once went to his parents’ cabin when they weren’t there, he told me, and took one of every pill he found just to see what would happen. That was not a <i>good</i> idea, but it's one with a relatively limited half-life, unless they were into some really weird shit. I remember he said he just got bad diarrhea, which is about as positive as an outcome as one could imagine. But an essay a day—for a year—about <i>Road House</i> is a lot.</p><p style="text-align: left;">2. To be fair I recently <a href="https://otherelectricities.com/predator/">watched another movie 146 times and wrote a book about it</a>, so I know what I’m talking about when I tell you this isn’t a great idea. I did write about <i>Predator</i> every day for a year, but I didn’t write an essay a day. I suppose, in retrospect, I could have.</p><p>3. I also haven’t, to tell the truth, yet finished the <i>Road House</i> book, which is <i>Pain Don’t Hurt</i> by Sean T. Collins: As of this writing I’m only on essay 121. It’s not a book you can just blow through, unlike <i>Road House</i> the movie which is very easy to blow through, though I have watched it, as of right now, in the middle of this sentence where I am meeting you, exactly once. I’m not quite sure how I missed it, having watched pretty much every other action movie of the 80s a lot, often on repeat. But I realized while writing <i>Predator</i> that of all the 80s action movies I’d never actually seen <i>Road House,</i> and neither had my wife. So we watched it last year.</p><p>4. It's a lot! It makes so many kinds of sense that it makes none. <i>Road House </i>is not a consistent piece of art except in its inconsistency. It’s a light, weird action movie that coasts along on a truly bizarre premise and the irresistible hotness of Patrick Swayze but by the end turns for no real reason into a brutal murderfest. The tone of the movie veers wildly and unexpectedly from wacky sexy zen to dark af for no reason I could discern. Little of the plot makes any sense, starting with its initial premise in which there is a world where you might hope to attract and pay nationally-known celebrity bouncers six figures (in 1980s money!) to clean up your shitty local bar. Things devolve from there. Few of the movie’s lines of dialogue hold together when you look at them for more than a few seconds (which Collins directs our attention to many times, for instance the classic line "Does a hobbyhorse have a wooden dick?," uttered in the mode of a question like "Is the Pope Catholic," yet the answer, very obviously, is no; stuff like this happens a lot in the movie). If you would like a smart writer riffing on—not just bagging on—a kind of dumb movie, then you'll like this book a lot.</p><p>5. What drives any of us to our subjects? I watched it, thought it fun and forgettable, and filed it away. For Sean T. Collins, however, it became an animating force. A whetstone for the mind. An idea that was so crazy it just might work.</p><p>6. It does work. It works great. </p><p>7. So you actually don’t have to buy <i>Pain Don’t Hurt</i> to read the essays, but you should if you can find a copy. It goes in and out of print, I guess, maybe because all 365 essays are available <a href="https://seantcollins.com/category/roadhouse/">on his website under the tag ROADHOUSE</a>. The blog versions have one major advantage, which is that they include screenshots from the movie to illustrate his points. This is useful if you haven’t seen the movie at all, or, like me only once, or can’t call to mind all the minor and often throwaway characters in the film, nearly every one of whom gets a deep treatment, or just don’t want to rewatch the movie to refresh yourself of all of its nuances.</p><p>8. The primary disadvantage of reading them onscreen is that the project really <i>is</i> a book; it reads better that way, as something you can hold in your lap and that has all the authority of bookness to it and all of the weird uneven sexiness of <i>Road House</i>. This is a source of great friction between the authority of the artifact and the dumb idea and subject matter of the book.</p><p>9.There are a lot of good introductions to <i>Road House </i>and why anyone might care about <i>Road House</i> in this book, but my favorite so far is in <a href="https://seantcollins.com/2019/04/107-daltons-back/">107, “Dalton’s Back,”</a> a tight little essay about just that, the spectacle of Dalton’s sexy back:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>Road House, </i>when appreciated properly, is less a film than an ecosystem: hyper-efficient, factory made late-‘80s star vehicle; barely competent, incoherent MST3K fodder; rock-solid action flick; obvious, excessive homoerotica; smarter than it looks; dumber than it realizes; a Ben Gazzara film; a Terry Funk film. When you watch Dalton’s flawless, godlike arms, traps and shoulder blades flex and contract in harmony, you’re watching the character and the movie in metonymy. You’re watching a real physical thing—Patrick Swayze’s beautiful, beautiful body—do what Patrick Swayze’s character and Patrick Swayze’s movie are also doing. As below, so above.</blockquote><p></p><p>10. The movement here is obviously the real show. And like many iterative projects over a sustained period of time, the life of the writer often sweeps into the project in big and obvious ways, as it does in <a href="https://seantcollins.com/2019/02/053-why-we-fight/">53, “Why We Fight,”</a> which is also another great introduction to ways of experiencing <i>Road House:</i></p><blockquote><p>'This has been, without question, one of the worst weeks of my life, but one man offers succor.’” / I tweeted this as I sat down to write today’s <i>Road House</i> essay. I knew exactly what I was going to write about: I knew the scene, knew the moment, knew the angle, knew how to flesh it out. It’s one of the ideas that made me want to start this whole project in the first place. It wasn’t until I began writing that I realized the thing I posted on Twitter before writing today’s <i>Road House </i>essay is today’s <i>Road House</i> essay. / I’m not going to talk about the week I’ve had, or why it’s been so bad, bad enough that as I type this I am home along with my stepson instead of out with my partner and our friends because we were supposed to go to an all-sad-songs karaoke party together and I am too sad for Sad Song Karaoke. It’s not really my story to tell anyway. I’ll tell you what is, though: <i>Road House.</i></p></blockquote><p>11. This is the value of writing about <i>Road House </i>in this way. It becomes your subject. It becomes your only subject, and the subject you will always have, whatever else happens. You will always have your bad idea, your self, and your <i>Road House.</i></p><p>12. Have I ever been to an actual road house? I’m not sure. None come to mind. I’ve been to plenty of dive bars, and a lot of non-dive-bars and some not-quite-dive bars, many of which are in houses that have been located on roads, and I’ve been to some chain restaurants with music where you’re supposed to throw the peanut shells on the floor in a performance of, maybe, road housery, but I don’t think I’ve ever been to anything you could actually call an outright <i>road house</i>. I mean, I understand a road house is a tavern, inn, or club on a country road in its initial incarnation, like the Inn of the Last Home (shout out to Otik’s Spiced Potatoes), and I feel certain that at least one of Collins’ essays needs to address what makes a road house a road house, but I haven’t read it yet. I would be surprised if I have thought of a question about the movie that he has not (yet).</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">a. Is it the possibility of witnessing a bar brawl that makes a road house a road house?</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">b. Does a road house require live music, ideally the Jeff Healey Band?</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">c. I feel like a road house must at least have beer and a pool table and definitely not call it a billiards table.</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">d. I’m not even sure if it has to be on a road. A snowmobile trail seems like it’d be fine. Preferable, even.</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">e. Is the primary feature of a road house that it’s for travelers, not regulars? In this sense is Applebee’s a road house? Can Applebee’s be a road house? I’ve definitely been closer to witnessing or possibly instigating an actual bar brawl at Applebee’s than anywhere else.</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">f. the only actual Road House in Tucson is a brew-and-view movie theater. I wonder if they ever show <i>Road House? </i>Perhaps they will when the remake (!!) comes out in 2023, and if they do I will endeavor to see it there.</p></blockquote><p>13. The reason I love bad idea essays is not because they seem dumb or bad but that they’re hard. Anyone can write a <i>good</i> idea essay. But only a real pro—or a real fool, and it’s hard to tell which you are when you start one, which is the entirety of the stakes of the bad idea essay—can write a bad idea to its exhaustion/completion. Only after exhausting yourself will you see if it was worth it.</p><p>14. Let me say <i>it is always worth it,</i> even if the results don't please you or aren't easy to publish. It's the process that matters.</p><p>15. 365 essays about <i>Road House</i> is an idiotic thing, and its idiocy is part of its appeal. I am often moved by iterative projects (like the kind <a href="https://www.essaydaily.org/2022/12/advent-2022-dec-20-lawrence-lenhart.html">Lawrence Lenhart made a promise to embark on in his Dec 20th advent essay</a>), because in repeating an action every day or every week or every year you make time a subject.</p><p>16. Time is always a subject, as well as a tool, but in an iterative essay, time becomes unavoidably a primary subject. How long can Christa Wolf sustain her <i><a href="https://www.seagullbooks.org/one-day-a-year/#:~:text=One%20Day%20a%20Year%20is,or%20imagining%20yourself%20being%20watched.">One Day a Year</a></i> project (until she died!)? How many comment cards can Joe Wenderoth write and send to Wendy’s? How many <a href="https://www.instagram.com/nachos.indiana/">nachos of Indiana can Sean Lovelace eat and write about</a>? How many phone calls can Lenhart make and document by the end of the year, and will he survive it? How many letters can <a href="https://azdailysun.com/flaglive/full_frontal/letters_to_ducey/nicoles-impossibly-possible-ideas-the-last-letter-to-ducey/article_32813248-6695-11ed-8b7f-d7fe9f8fac33.html">Nicole Walker write to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey?</a> (The linked one, Dec 2, 2022, was the last one, if just because Ducey is finally leaving office. Respect to her!) </p><p>17. An aside: Have you thought about just how good a<i> deal</i> books of essays and short stories are? I just bought the new Jack Driscoll collection <i>20 Stories</i> for less than twenty bucks. That’s me getting 20 stories for a dollar each! I get to keep them forever, too.</p><p>18. Twenty dollars seems to me like a lot for a novel, however. You only get one novel for that money. You could have got 20 essays. Or, shit, 50 poems!</p><p>19. I mean that a good poem or story or essay stays with me more than a good novel does. I know I'm in the minority but that's how I'm built. Maybe I’m just a shitty reader. I’ve been told that before.</p><p>20. I am reminded of the time when we were kids that my brother and I each got $50 for Christmas to spend as we liked. Ben took his $50 as one bill. I wanted 50 ones, which I got. 50 felt more substantial than one, even if it was worth the same amount of money. Then we went to Marquette to spend them at American, seemingly the only good store in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I still think 50 one dollar bills feels better than one 50 dollar bill, especially if you're a kid. But then my brother's an investment banker who lives in a giant house and I write advent essays for free on this website. Maybe there's a lesson in that.</p><p>21. The reason I love iterative projects is that the plot is inevitably the movement of the mind (or the life or the body) through time. Every piece is a technical problem: oh shit, what am I going to do today? And the technical problem just gets harder as it goes deeper: How can I not bore myself on essay 241? (I'll have to let you know when I get there, but I feel like Collins is going to be able to solve this problem just fine.)</p><p>22. So when I read, say, <a href="https://seantcollins.com/2019/02/046-tableau-ii/">essay 46, “The Agreement, Part Five: Tableau II”</a> (he returns to many of the core ideas and scenes multiple times from multiple angles), I’m entertained and not a little amazed that we’re talking about the weird, short scene where a bar patron (Sharing Husband) offers to let another bar patron (Gawker/Groper) fondle his wife’s (Well-Endowed Wife's) breasts for $20. And then the guy doesn't even have the money! Even more entertainingly, this is the fifth (of seven I’ve so far encountered) essay on this weird throwaway moment in this weird, possibly throwaway film, and each manages to improbably get at some new aspect of the scene.</p><p>23. Possibly if this scene made any real narrative sense in the context of the film or sense at all really it might be less permeable to the mind of the essayist, and because <i>Road House</i> has so many inexplicable scenes like this <i>Road House</i> becomes an ideal cipher.</p><p>24. What I really like about essay 46 in particular is how it dead-ends into a set of references that I’ve never really seen anyone make before, and certainly not in this configuration and all at once. I’ll quote the end of the piece to show you:</p><blockquote><p>But for now let’s look at this miserable bastard, transformed by the spectacle of the tripartite Agreement between Sharing Husband, Well-Endowed Wife, and Gawker/Groper from a belligerent cut-up to fucking Saul on the road to Damascus, transfixed by the sight, blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night, just completely poleaxed by watching one idiot feel up another idiot’s wife. / You don’t see that. You might still see it [I did initially mistype it as tit, amusingly, and felt that was meaningful enough to note —Ander] in the desert—shout out to the Orb—but you don’t see it at Duggan’s, and you don’t see it where Dalton works. Beautiful in its idiocy, the world Tilghman is building has no room for it. The Elves sail West and the Gawker and Heckler and Sharing Husband and Well-Endowed Wife disappear and so help me God the bar as I sit here writing this the bar is playing “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” by Dropkick Murphys and where is Dalton and Thomas Nast when you need them.”</p></blockquote><p>See what I mean? I laughed hard at the Orb reference, cued as I was already by the Blinded by the Light ref, and that they’re exactly 25 years apart adds to the trick, and then when the (Tolkien) Elves show up I’m really here for it, and I just heard that Dropkick Murphys song for the first time only last year, and it’s a hell of a song with its own full commitment to its own bit. I mean that I see the stars in the sky and I can see him connecting them as he goes, and I’m here for the resulting constellation. </p><p>25. Any iterative project—any restrictive form like this one is—breaks down at some point in its exercise over time. The pressure of the external form on the huge ever growing pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the ultraworld and the pressure of that brain’s growing internal energy out against the artificial walls of the form: this is a thrilling plot and one I am always here for. I'm really really looking forward to the next couple hundred essays on <i>Road House</i> and to its inevitable breakdown: I hope it's a good one. And I hope I've also got you interested enough by the end of this essay to give these weirdo <i>Road House</i> essays some time. (I'm still not 100% sure if the movie is worth your time or not, but Collins is starting to sway me to yes.)</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p><br /></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="color: red;"><b>Ander Monson </b>is one of the editors of <i>Essay Daily </i>and the author of <i>Predator: a Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession</i> (Graywolf, 2022), a book not (so far) on any of the year's Best Of lists which he is pretty sure is either an oversight or a category error.</span></blockquote><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-11400397842192939672022-12-21T04:30:00.001-08:002022-12-21T04:30:00.159-08:00Advent 2022, Dec 21, Susan Briante, Our Midwinter Days<p style="text-align: center;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS0d4bgVL_yW7YeV7IOFmuRUq9OJ3987EShdaJAq_fVELohLIjc9-icD8BcAHvYFGY0UWV2sj4nBrbTJdc9TbE6wHUZ7N7Min_LM_15RF_ID4FKbAj3nk3nViKR63KJadKSs4ZoNkAUFkGp9qQJAeTLZx_kVeKQLbmUbenEw90SM_CS8yZ_7pSenxx/s1080/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec21.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1080" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS0d4bgVL_yW7YeV7IOFmuRUq9OJ3987EShdaJAq_fVELohLIjc9-icD8BcAHvYFGY0UWV2sj4nBrbTJdc9TbE6wHUZ7N7Min_LM_15RF_ID4FKbAj3nk3nViKR63KJadKSs4ZoNkAUFkGp9qQJAeTLZx_kVeKQLbmUbenEw90SM_CS8yZ_7pSenxx/w640-h372/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec21.gif" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Our Midwinter Days</i></p><p style="text-align: center;">Susan Briante</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">*</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZNfo5ECyegQDwnerQC7ccMD4cQW8nN1j5CwkciaIYioePuhUyrVrTuALzvcu5L4UZyvixKGWJezvKh0VDxWAE2Bohy1kyoKA84VjCRwo7qZNL8FetXsMH8XQNvOy8eGdWCw-p8ESDZu-yUFhjHNKJh-drO3QBJgWdzmanQjRzLZwsZz3Pa72Q6rvt/s4032/IMG_3414.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZNfo5ECyegQDwnerQC7ccMD4cQW8nN1j5CwkciaIYioePuhUyrVrTuALzvcu5L4UZyvixKGWJezvKh0VDxWAE2Bohy1kyoKA84VjCRwo7qZNL8FetXsMH8XQNvOy8eGdWCw-p8ESDZu-yUFhjHNKJh-drO3QBJgWdzmanQjRzLZwsZz3Pa72Q6rvt/w640-h480/IMG_3414.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>As I write this, the Christmas lights hung from our eaves strum a flickering tune against a sky the gray of water at the bottom of an old pan. The sun rose into clouds today and blued the Tucson afternoon for a little while, but now the color drains. If you asked me what I did during this sliver of a day, the list feels paltry: I ran on a trail beside the dried riverbed, came home, made a holiday card with my daughter, cooked some chicken with garlic and cannellini beans, threw a load of laundry in the wash, read, made some notes toward this essay. What more could there be to say?</p><p>As you read this, we (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) share our first midwinter day without the poet Bernadette Mayer. On December 22, 1978, Mayer made this day hers by writing a 119-page dream-to-morning-to-afternoon-to-evening account of her life as a writer, thinker, mother to two small children, and partner to poet Lewis Warsh. But “account” doesn’t capture the scope of her project. Mayer’s book-length poem <i><a href="https://www.ndbooks.com/book/midwinter-day/">Midwinter Day</a></i> presents a brilliant mind narrating thoughts, memories and observations as she dreams, wakes, feeds children, goes with them (and Warsh) into the cold of Lennox, MA, to return library books and pick up groceries, goes home, reads to children, cooks, and writes. Her words careen and croon in a masterful musicality. Poet Alice Notley has called the work “an epic poem about an ordinary day.” </p><p>I was first introduced to Mayer watching her read her poem <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XFVx-fpYfA">“Eve of Easter” on the Poetry Project’s Public Access Poetry Channel on You Tube.</a> “Milton,” Mayer begins by addressing the author of <i>Paradise Lost.</i> “I have three babies tonight.” And from there she turns an evening of childcare into a rumination on literary legacy and mothering. (“I stole images from Milton to cure opacous gloom/To render the room an orb beneath this raucous/Moon of March, eclipsed only in daylight/Heavy breathing baby bodies…”) It is extraordinary and tender, and if you haven’t already read or seen it you might want to do so right now for a taste of Mayer’s heart and humor, ear and intellect. Recorded months before Mayer would write <i>Midwinter Day, </i>the black and white video spans 3:07 minutes but seems much longer.</p><p><i>Midwinter Day</i> builds off that same impulse to do more than make do with whatever life gives us, to take a situation like baby sitting and make art from it. Just as Melville, Hawthorne and Milton become Mayer’s companions in childcare in “Eve of Easter,” Catullus, Freud, Hawthorne and Joyce all make appearances in <i>Midwinter Day, </i>where they are joined by movie stars (Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck, and Jane Fonda) as well as friends (poets Clark Coolidge, Ted Berrigan, Notley, among many others); even the Shah of Iran makes several cameos throughout the poem. People come and go in Mayer’s dreams (which open the book) as well as in her memories which wind their way throughout her narration along with observation, literary and local history, psychoanalysis and inventory.</p><p>In my memory of first reading <i>Midwinter Day,</i> I sit on a red leather couch bought from a Dallas coffee shop for $100. (It smelled of espresso for months.) I hold Gianna on my lap cradled in one arm, the book in the other. I look up from book or daughter across the six lanes of traffic in front of our house to a splinter of park, dead leaves and black walnut trees. I’m waiting for Farid to come home from his teaching gig at a private high school across town, so I can hand him our child and start working on writing or dinner. That first winter with my daughter, the days felt long (even though the daylight was short), and I felt isolated and overwhelmed by motherhood. But the specificity of that particular moment on the couch feels a little off. Gianna almost never took naps. If she was still, I was probably nursing her, which would have made the book hard to hold. My memory reshapes its banks like a river bound to currents and geographies I barely perceive. Mayer was fascinated with the technologies of recall. In her 1971 project/ installation <a href="https://www.bernadettemayer.com/memory-1"><i>Memory</i></a>, she shot a roll of 35 mm film every day for a month and kept a journal. But her proposal for <i>Midwinter Day</i> extended beyond remembrance. She tells us “I had an idea to write a book that would translate the detail of thought from a day to language like a dream transformed to read as it does, everything, a book that would end before it started in time to prove that the day like the dream has everything in it, to do this without remembering….” </p><p>As in James Agee’s unwieldy masterpiece <i>Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Midwinter Day </i>teams with unflinching descriptions: of the items crowding a table or closet or hallway, the books that line the shelves of the local bookstore, the businesses, churches and municipal buildings that make up their town. “What an associative way to live this is,” she writes. Mayer doesn’t shy away from registering the struggle of parenting and art making at the fringes of an economy (“sickening holidays, cold rooms running out of money again/ nothing to do but poetry, love letters and babies.”) But rather than register complaint or critique, Mayer seems most intent in keeping herself interested. The action of making sauce for spaghetti stretches across a page but becomes another way to think of writing as she describes “the commas” of the “cheapest small onions” and the “letters of straight pasta.” Summaries of the books she reads to her daughter <i>(Big Dog, Little Dog; The Three Little Pigs; Popped-out-of-the-Fire)</i> give way to ruminations on Sekhmet, the wife of Ptah, or Septimius Felton, a character of Hawthorne’s. Even when her topics remain in the mundane there’s something enlivening (if not enlightening) about witnessing her get it all down and make it worthy of a place on the page (next to Hawthorne, Milton and Melville). There’s something both familiar and refreshing about Mayer’s feat today when we filter our faces and soundtrack our moments to share in a marketplace of attention. More than posing or posting, Mayer recognizes and honors. She acknowledges that her work is a privilege as she imagines “a Latin Sabine or Etruscan mother/ Who didn’t have the time, chance, education or notion/ To write some poetry so I could know/ What she thought about things.”</p><p>I try to imagine my mother in 1978 in our split-level house in the New Jersey suburbs, where she could not walk to a store or find accessible public transportation to get anywhere. What would she have written about? A view to the cul-de-sac, the ragged oak tree, crumbling driveway, the Japanese maple, manhole cover, fire hydrant, the long-legged girl who lived in the house on the corner until her parents divorced. For years, it sounded to me like every sentence spoken by the women in my family had a baseline of complaint, a backbeat of worry. Could my mother have written herself into a legacy or history or out of isolation? </p><p>In<i> Midwinter Day</i>, Mayer lists all the women who penned what she calls “a secret history:”</p><blockquote><p>Anne Bradstreet and Tsai Wen Gi, <br />Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alice Notley and me,<br />Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton,<br />Elinor Wylie, Louise Bogan, Denise Levertov….</p></blockquote><p>The list continues encompassing H.D. and Nikki Giovanni, Murasaki Shikibu and Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks and Marina Tsvetayeva, among others (including “the saints.”) In its compilation Mayer creates both a genealogy and a community. </p><p>On December 22, 2018, in honor of the 40th anniversary of <i>Midwinter Day</i>, I joined a group of 32 other poets who wrote our day into sections (Dreams, Morning, Noontime, Afternoon, Evening, and Night) on a shared Google doc. I wrote while I hosted family from France, drove 7 hours to California and mourned the first Christmas I would spend without my father. The book <i><a href="https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/midwinter-constellation/">Midwinter Constellations</a></i> collects all our entries and publishes them without individual attribution. When I read back through it, I feel the beauty of forgetting for minute which voice is mine in a chorus of the quotidian.</p><p>On November 22, the day that Bernadette Mayer died, I dreamt the moon had fallen from the sky. When I woke the moon was still there. Today, less than a month later, we sit on the dark side of the year, maybe late in the day and perhaps late in our lives. My mother has been gone since 2014. </p><p>When I wake today at 6:30 in the midwinter darkness, the Christmas lights continue their flickering, little flashing beads, a rosary for our eyes: light and dark, day and night, paper and ink. The sun’s a little mother who warms and feeds and allows us to see what is right in front of us.</p><p>In these December days we feel our scarcity. But that’s just what the myth of American individualism and the treadmill of capitalism wants us to feel. (For more on this, <a href="https://www.findingourwaypodcast.com/individual-episodes/s1e7">listen to Alexis Pauline Gumbs</a>). It keeps us working. It keeps us scared. A poet like Mayer shows otherwise. Much remains even at the end of the season, at the end of a year, even at the end of a life. Today in places like New York and Los Angeles, online and in Amsterdam, poets will gather to read <i>Midwinter Day </i>in honor of Mayer. On this darkest day, we need to believe that the sun will return, that the children will eventually fall asleep, there will be another hour to write and so much more to be said, that there’s a reader who will follow us to the next page.</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaxIXYFB9ccZmWnG873e3-MdEub1PBr7aK9msS6ncFxVeRF2CZC57K042T1xB7PFfRpCtJ2rVqiM5OghtmiM7Xe2fAPMhIAPSy9ljKX57DdNgpYatNt1aL4qAFRFc2crNO3BDasg4223gYoosi69yS-rJMOB9PkIMEoZn9vWte28_9_Yms4bfnErCw/s636/Screen%20Shot%202022-12-20%20at%202.49.10%20PM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="636" height="428" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaxIXYFB9ccZmWnG873e3-MdEub1PBr7aK9msS6ncFxVeRF2CZC57K042T1xB7PFfRpCtJ2rVqiM5OghtmiM7Xe2fAPMhIAPSy9ljKX57DdNgpYatNt1aL4qAFRFc2crNO3BDasg4223gYoosi69yS-rJMOB9PkIMEoZn9vWte28_9_Yms4bfnErCw/w640-h428/Screen%20Shot%202022-12-20%20at%202.49.10%20PM.jpg" width="640" /></a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p><br /></p><blockquote><p><span style="color: red;"><b>Susan Briante</b> is the author of <a href="https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781934819906/defacing-the-monument.aspx"><i>Defacing the Monument</i> </a>(Noemi Press 2020), essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, winner of the <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/video/156674/the-2021-pegasus-awards-ceremony">Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism</a> in 2021. She is a professor of English in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona. Briante is also the author of three books of poetry: <i>Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, </i>and<i> The Market Wonders.</i></span></p><div><br /></div></blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-90554018099148641582022-12-20T04:30:00.001-08:002022-12-20T04:30:00.157-08:00Advent 2022, Dec 20, Lawrence Lenhart, Toward an Unregulated Confessionalism: Prolegomenon to The Calling Party<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgox_1Onwyax3B-7piIcmygbsbvFwVsNkN99jfPmjkmeybb76FkKKyZf4HVsXhsBzk0sGar3yjn89j2YtYcr-SLMXC_BgoCb0sLT73pZ6S9iI0WKAbRdDSrssc_HjYwmpU_NeVAEPIAEWmlvjmVzCYbU5gx4mpuJBnCKQmkVPk3wiJHp0yQCrzWIAYc/s1080/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec20.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1080" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgox_1Onwyax3B-7piIcmygbsbvFwVsNkN99jfPmjkmeybb76FkKKyZf4HVsXhsBzk0sGar3yjn89j2YtYcr-SLMXC_BgoCb0sLT73pZ6S9iI0WKAbRdDSrssc_HjYwmpU_NeVAEPIAEWmlvjmVzCYbU5gx4mpuJBnCKQmkVPk3wiJHp0yQCrzWIAYc/w640-h372/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec20.gif" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Toward an Unregulated Confessionalism: </i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Prolegomenon to </i>The Calling Party</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Lawrence Lenhart</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #0b5394;">*</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="5">
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<td width="45%">With this sentence, I start a new essay.</td>
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<td width="45%">Its concept is twelve years in the making.<br /></td>
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<td><p>Starting January 1, 2023, I will begin calling everyone in my phonebook. That's 431 calls total, or 1.18 per day for a year. </p></td>
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<td><p>I am wary of this text [already] because it isn't mine. (Replace "text" with "life.")</p></td>
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<td><p>How to begin writing a text for which I won't be the author? I stall by calling forth this prolegomenon.</p><p><br /></p></td>
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<td><p>My first false start was at a bonfire in 2015. I swiped through the digital rolodex as if it was a roulette wheel, and it landed on RM. I sputtered a bit before he hung up. Where I meant to break the seal, instead I soldered it shut.</p></td>
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<td><p>"Each act of reading the 'text' is a preface to the next. The reading of a self-professed preface is no exception to this rule" (Spivak xii). Might someone, somewhere already be rereading the book I have not even begun writing?</p></td>
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<td><p>The database is especially full of area codes in PA, OH, DE, AZ, and CA. My main milieus, strange avenues. </p></td>
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<td><p>This essay is no one's. Instead, "the text belongs to language, not to the sovereign and generating author" (Spivak, lxxiv). </p></td>
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<td><p>I will call everyone, no exceptions: my best friend from the old neighborhood in Southwestern Pennsylvania; my old boss/lifeguard captain in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware; whoever picks up at the Buffalo Wild Wings in Akron, Ohio; my ex-fiancée's mom in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; my estranged and incarcerated cousin in Huntsville, Alabama; my son's best friend's mom's best friend in Flagstaff, Arizona.</p></td></tr>
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<td>I will likely call <i>you</i> too.</td>
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</tbody></table></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">*</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In communication theory, the Johari window is a “self-awareness tool that helps us understand the differences between how people see us and how we see ourselves” (Kesgin).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Fig. 1. The Johari Window</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-style: italic; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgBtc4iXfNrsoLUljRexb4ltHjLjEd7BvkkE-SpFhieXz66g5CCny6loaMjtpJ1CMHeeWtNkj1rN8t5j95CMeOrlLdVS1TZ1FMpG5XIwT2NgDZ7-UYcm3AR0FgfTO78kkKWGF9ZLZYXooyoPzx1-OyxLUH0rks7bw_Tnmi5Q5EALz7EkkLBhdOOP74_" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="588" data-original-width="936" height="402" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgBtc4iXfNrsoLUljRexb4ltHjLjEd7BvkkE-SpFhieXz66g5CCny6loaMjtpJ1CMHeeWtNkj1rN8t5j95CMeOrlLdVS1TZ1FMpG5XIwT2NgDZ7-UYcm3AR0FgfTO78kkKWGF9ZLZYXooyoPzx1-OyxLUH0rks7bw_Tnmi5Q5EALz7EkkLBhdOOP74_=w640-h402" width="640" /></a></div><br />Epistemologically, the blind spot is where I wonder what you know about the frequency of my voice or the swirl of hair on the back of my head. It is what you whisper about me when I leave the room, the state, this relationship.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">*</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="5">
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<td width="45%">How about a new slur for millennials? Now they call us Generation Mute. An article by Alex Jeffries begins, “Ring, ring! Who’s there? If you’re a millennial, you have no idea.” Studies report that seventy-five percent of millennials screen their calls due to apprehension anxiety. </td>
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<td width="45%">Most contacts in my phonebook are millennials, meaning perhaps I’ll only reach 153 of you <br /><br /><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">—at least initially. I will call back. I will get through.</blockquote><p><br /></p></td></tr><tr><td> </td>
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<td><p>Starting January 1, 2023, I will begin calling everyone in my phonebook. That's 431 calls total, or 1.18 per day for a year. </p></td>
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<td><p>I probably have “telephonophobia” too but have irreversibly committed myself to this dare</p></td>
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<td><br />, a self-administered immersion therapy. <br /><br /><br /></td>
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<td><p>“I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself” (Montaigne). But what if we are made <i>through</i> others?<br /><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /><br /></p></td>
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<td><p>I am calling…</p><p></p><ul><li>because I miss you and thus, I miss myself.</li><li>because I’ve forgotten you and thus, I have forgotten myself.</li><li>because I fear you and thus, I fear myself.</li><li>because I’ve neglected you and thus, I have neglected myself.</li><li>because I love to hate you.</li></ul><p></p><div><br /></div></td>
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<td><p>In “Son,” Forrest Gander writes, “I gave my life to strangers; I kept it from the ones I love.” </p></td>
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</tbody></table></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">*</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">The Johari window idealizes the open arena as a site of public self-awareness. Think autobiography or personal essay. To get to the arena, one should strive to eliminate the hidden self through disclosure; reduce their blind spots by soliciting feedback from others; and mitigate against the unknown through self-discovery. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Fig. 2. Essay Genres in the Johari Window</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgf3yPqmoNwhCcgvn1eLepPuy1KDlHx2hi7oYHwHSDBAImseL34Z0E2WWpD90e-3yMG3HGM14J7-iHecpN0H1MPC0hzYj2jGaJspk0L5ViZW5r-WihTY2PN5SaLi9d-rq6i7Qv42GicDbcT4FPq__Iji6TPYNSHW0c-f_udHbiGxJiUbAF8wgS4i1Sm" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="328" data-original-width="936" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgf3yPqmoNwhCcgvn1eLepPuy1KDlHx2hi7oYHwHSDBAImseL34Z0E2WWpD90e-3yMG3HGM14J7-iHecpN0H1MPC0hzYj2jGaJspk0L5ViZW5r-WihTY2PN5SaLi9d-rq6i7Qv42GicDbcT4FPq__Iji6TPYNSHW0c-f_udHbiGxJiUbAF8wgS4i1Sm=w640-h224" width="640" /></a></div></i></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">I believe each panel of the Johari window corresponds to its own unique epistemic domain of life writing. Self-awareness can be likened to autobiography or the personal essay; disclosure to regulated confessionalism; and self-discovery to meditation/revelation á la speculative nonfiction. But what kind of essay can be written from within the so-called blind spot? </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">To clarify, most confessionalism is regulated. An author carefully selects sensitive information from their personal history and discloses it in the essay. However, this process of selection belies the artifice of the confessional genre. Selective disclosure has as much to do with the disclosive tendency as it does the concealing one. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">The personal essay says, “Our engagement ended because we were much too young.” The confessional essay says, “I called off the engagement because I was a shithead.” The speculative essay says, “In another possible world, are we still together in a loving relationship?”</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Within the blind spot, though, I must admit the ways in which I cannot see me. Instead, I solicit feedback, ask others for their testimonials. The essential difference between biography and heterobiography is the emphasis on alterity. Crowdsourced heterobiography represents a kind of unregulated confessionalism. It is conveyed through a valve from which I cannot stop the flow. Here in the blind spot, my secrets are unsafe with you.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">The heterobiography says whatever it wants about me, directly to me. </div><div><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">*</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Other Crowdsourced Heterobiographies</b><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">1. Marina Abramović’s <i>The Artist is Present </i>(MoMA; 2010) was a three-month performance in which the seated artist engaged in a mutual gaze with an audience of one thousand, most of whom were strangers, but also included friends, colleagues, and even a former lover (MoMa par. 3). </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">My method—of reaching out to an audience of 431 people—addresses my writerly desire to be recognized as a writer by those who primarily exist outside of my artistic network. By inciting this encounter, I will momentarily, bureaucratically exist as an artist to each respondent. The consenting statement at the beginning of each call will include the following words: “this is for a new book project I’m working on.” This phrase will serve as a loose reminder that I am a writer. However, I will immediately cede that role as I coax my audience into the text-making. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Q: Is it the public backdrop of MoMa that renders the seated artist <i>as</i> art? Is Abramović, later seated in her private apartment, inherently artless? A: Heterobiography begins at the turnstile, with the breach, in the gaze returned to sender. Only when the <i>audience</i> is present is her alterity ensured.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">2. Bhanu Kapil’s <i>The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers</i> employs structured interview to elicit responses to a set of twelve questions. The questions are posed to woman of Indian descent living in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She then re-arranges the responses in docu-poetic collage. In her own prolegomenon, she writes:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"></div><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">—The project as I thought it would be:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">an anthology of the voices of Indian women.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"> . . .</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">—The project as I wrote it: a tilted plane.</div></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">I have routinely referred to this as my favorite book.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">3. Joseph Bradshaw calls Noah Eli Gordon’s <i>Inbox</i> a “reverse memoir, an autobiography composed using only others’ words.” <i>Inbox</i> is avowedly “uncreative writing” (Goldsmith), a copy-paste job that literally re-presents every email in the “author’s” inbox on September 11, 2004, arranged in reverse-chronological order. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Gordon is nowhere and everywhere to be found in the manuscript. “Nowhere” as in this book was “written” with a mouse and not a keyboard. “Everywhere” as in Gordon is the book’s sole addressee. It is, above all, a heterobiography of the writer in thrall to “dinky pobiz stuff.” </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">4. For <i>The Last Interview,</i> David Shields transcribed the 2,700 interview questions asked of him over the past forty years. Through a regimen of rewriting, editing, and remixing the questions, he arrives at an anti-memoir of sorts. According to the jacket copy, “the result is a lacerating self-demolition in which the author—in this case, a late-middle-aged white man—is strangely, thrillingly absent.” This is at least a conceptual solution to the existential question posed in the advice column, “Should White Men Stop Writing?” (<i>The Blunt Instrument</i>). </div><div><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">*</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">I have made myself a slim deck of cards…</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgNqDzO-3Mp9zAcRU58jHsbeqlJ_SAKFvxRTjeo4GW8SxK672UeWzQ9G6dKi8kT27TFZMerw6w8X2driuM84sOHNIpp8489CkkpxqW4qFjdv9Kb-zs_O76i5Hx54tRb3rKmoNNNhM-wze3BgLQ156P0omOrn8pKy4QegnRuxxkI_dskBIgUTVP1EZQr" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="486" data-original-width="936" height="333" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgNqDzO-3Mp9zAcRU58jHsbeqlJ_SAKFvxRTjeo4GW8SxK672UeWzQ9G6dKi8kT27TFZMerw6w8X2driuM84sOHNIpp8489CkkpxqW4qFjdv9Kb-zs_O76i5Hx54tRb3rKmoNNNhM-wze3BgLQ156P0omOrn8pKy4QegnRuxxkI_dskBIgUTVP1EZQr=w640-h333" width="640" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">… to shuffle as the phone rings.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">*</div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="5">
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<td width="45%">You think; therefore, I am.</td>
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<td width="45%">I am building a new kind of answering machine. (This is not about posterity.) </td>
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<td><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>What then to do with the data of 431 phone calls? </p><p>I will use a call recorder (Rev), transcription service (otter.ai), data analytics software (Dedoose), word processor (MS Word), and digital sound workstation (GarageBand) to create an audio-biography, a composite anti-memoir in the second-person comprised of my concatenated acquaintances. </p><div><br /></div></td>
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<td><p>Derrida’s différance indicates both difference <i>in</i> and deferral <i>of</i> meaning.</p></td>
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<td><p>Through différance, “meaning is disseminated across the text and can be found only in traces, in the unending chain of signification” (Mambrol).</p></td>
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<td><p><i>The Calling Party</i> is a collective heterobiography that signals the death of compartmentalization. A fuzzy feedback arena. </p></td>
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<td><p>One may choose to listen by area code/milieu. Or filter by theme. To hear all responses to, “What would be a fitting way for me to die?” in succession, by toggling to Q13. There’s a randomizer too that produces a new text each time it is refreshed, resulting in a collage of sound bites. When I press that button on January 1, 2024, the resulting text will be the basis for the official codex for <i>The Calling Party.</i> </p></td>
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</table></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">*</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">If I’m being honest, parts therapy proved I was ready to write this book. Of course, it was never about the fear of confronting 431 others, but instead the fear of confronting 431 selves. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Here I am, trying to reintegrate.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">To survive the daily force field of complex PTSD, generalized anxiety, panic disorder, alcoholism, dyshidrotic eczema, insomnia, sleep paralysis, and auditory processing disorder. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Internal Family Systems (IFS) says there is a family of sub-personalities within me, that I am my own psychic ecology. I am an only child; and yet I know how to brother and sister as I parent my kids. I mother even as I father. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">I am Lawrence and Larebear, professor and “dude,” normie and edgelord, Hilfiger and Hot Topic, devoted family guy and chronic bachelor, homebody and wanderer, etc.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">The premise of IFS is that the sub-personalities are internally conflicted with the “core Self,” a phrase that makes me blush. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">The core Self smacks of personal essaying. If I am skeptical of the personal essay, it’s because I am equally skeptical (read: jealous) of the spectacle of the “core Self” supposedly anchoring it</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">For now, all I have are my sub-personalities. Subterranean, they must be called forth from the blind spot—by a therapist, exorcist, or you through this crowdsourced heterobiography. Please pick up.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #0b5394;">*</span></div><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="color: red;"><b>Lawrence Lenhart</b> is the author of<i> The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage</i> (Outpost19), <i>Backvalley Ferrets: A Rewilding of the Colorado Plateau</i> (UGA: Crux), and <i>Of No Ground: Small Island/Big Ocean Contingencies</i> (WVU: In Place). With William Cordeiro, he wrote <i>Experimental Writing: A Writer's Guide and Anthology</i> (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). His prose appears in journals like <i>Creative Nonfiction</i>, <i>Fourth Genre</i>, <i>Gulf Coast</i>, <i>Passages North</i>, and <i>Prairie Schooner</i>. He is Associate Chair of English at Northern Arizona University and Executive Director of the Northern Arizona Book Festival.</span></div><div><br /></div></div></blockquote><div><br /></div></div><br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /> <p></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-10100496878582969692022-12-19T04:30:00.001-08:002022-12-19T04:30:00.174-08:00Advent 2022, Dec 19, Nicole Walker, TikTok Manifestations by Non-Boomer, Non-Gen Z specimens: A Gen-X approach.<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix7qG6bt24nBQJ8f9Y0Eu6vqbXkAY3EjTqkQ80G7JROSMyLf8VCVyzxE-w9eh5ND_uXrm_R-ID1rTAszlwVQR7MeQoY6-7FLfwDIM9IS-N-q0eeoQazkuB6V6lwL6U_npzhVVPqs1xDoOEnljFesvdKvzUrPwoH5DHsfgfex8AWRA5nE6RkTaTL55b/s1080/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec19.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1080" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix7qG6bt24nBQJ8f9Y0Eu6vqbXkAY3EjTqkQ80G7JROSMyLf8VCVyzxE-w9eh5ND_uXrm_R-ID1rTAszlwVQR7MeQoY6-7FLfwDIM9IS-N-q0eeoQazkuB6V6lwL6U_npzhVVPqs1xDoOEnljFesvdKvzUrPwoH5DHsfgfex8AWRA5nE6RkTaTL55b/w640-h372/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec19.gif" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i style="text-align: left;"><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i style="text-align: left;"> TikTok Manifestations by Non-Boomer, Non-Gen Z specimens: A Gen-X approach.</i></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Maxwell Sather (Gen Z), Zoe Sather (Gen Z), Nicole Walker (Gen X)</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">*</span></p><p><br /></p><p>Abstract: TikTok is a media platform devoted primarily to social media users age 10 to 20. These users appreciate and are able to digest short-form films delivered to these adopters in 15, 30, and 60 second intervals. TikTok uses algorithms similar to older models of social media such as Twitter and Facebook. As the user ‘likes’ (by pressing an electronic button shaped as a heart) a video, follows a particular TikTokker, or searches for content by category, the algorithm then ‘pushes’ content that the user will fine diverting, amusing, or distracting. There is some evidence that how long one lingers on a TikTok video contributes to the algorithmic calculations but to an independent observer, this is difficult to verifier. Because a considerable number of TikTokkers are comprised of the Generation “Z”, our work here is to determine whether it is possible for a person of the Generation “X” to develop a TikTok strategy, or, algorithms willing, a following, without be called a “Boomer” by other participants. </p><p>Keywords: Tik. Tok. Upload. Seconds. Chicken. </p><p><br /></p><p>Introduction</p><p>In an effort to promote Walker et al’s essay collection<i> Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster,</i> which was released in March 2021 in the middle of a pandemic, Walker undertook an unconventional approach. While promotional plans had including serving charcuterie at various book-selling events, Covid 19 et al., prohibited the leaving of house, the sharing of food, and the selling of books. In 2022, Walker endeavored to produce several short videos and upload them to a new social media platform with the help of Sather et al. whose experience, attention span, and training prepared them especially for this work. </p><p><br /></p><p>Methods</p><p>Study Design: TikTok was selected as the platform for a dyad of reasons. 1. Subscribers to older model social media conglomerates like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram had been previously inundated with attempts by Walker et al to entice them to read her collection, contaminating those platforms. 2. TikTok affords its users a companionable hashtag system, where different “tiks” can be sorted by “toks.” Thus, #Booktok proved the fecund yet unsullied ground by which we could conduct our experiment. </p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@nicolewalker263/video/7177843857579724075?is_from_webapp=v1&item_id=7177843857579724075&web_id=7160485742938408491">Experiment One</a></p><p>Sather et al’s paternal parent is a filmmaker which is distinctly not the kind of video Walker intended to produce. Sather et al had both made TikToks with varying degrees of “likes” or “followers,” making them the ideal cinematographers for this study. Materials used included an iPhone 11, a frying pan, a refrigerator, boneless, skinless, chicken thighs, bacon, square-shaped Tupperware, and a copy of <i>Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster. </i>While each videos strategies differed slightly, we adopted the ‘common’ form of video collecting, pointing the camera at the subject and engaging the ‘record’ electronic button. </p><p>In preparation for the procedure, Walker first decided what would cook for dinner. Second, she found a passage in <i>Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster</i> (the title of send book she has currently converted to Macro FN 32) that paralleled that particular meal. </p><p>Limited resources, in both imagination and product, constrained the choice of specimen primarily to chicken. Cinematographer Sather positioned the camera implement of his handheld device toward Walker as she unwrapped boneless, skinless chicken thighs from the Foster Farms cage-free brand of chicken. In an attempt to preserve the integrity of the process, chickens raised in crowded but uncaged growth vessels determined our purchasing options. Once the chicken has been removed from the packaging and placed between layers of parchment paper, concern for the welfare of the chicken no longer limited the parameters of the experiment. In order for the chicken thighs to ‘cook’ evenly, thighs must be pounded flat. Sather et al recorded the flattening by aiming the camera implement from the handheld device toward Walker’s cutting board and rolling pin, thereby recording the process of pounding the meat into squares. Walker then laid the chicken thighs in an admixture of flour, paprika, celery salt, and garlic powder, covering both sides evenly, then lying flat in a beaten egg preparation, then again laid into bread crumb coating, designated “Panko.”</p><p>Here, the visual recording was halted and the audio recording commenced. Sather et al attempted to instruct Walker on the technological steps to implement an audio recording but gave up and recorded Walker as Walker read <i>Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster:</i> </p><p></p><blockquote><p>I laid the chicken between wax paper and got out the rolling pin.</p><p>“Where’s the pizza?” she asked. She was used to rolling out pizza dough with me.</p><p>I showed her the chicken thighs and pointed out how fat and uneven they were.</p><p>“We’ve got to pound them thin,” I told her. “For chicken tenders, they need to be half an inch thick. Do you want to try?” She said yes but she hit the thighs with no force at all. “You have to hit them hard.” I took the rolling pin from her and gave them a whack. They submitted, flattening out, becoming more dough than flesh. </p><p>In the middle of the next swing, Zoë yelled for me to stop. “That hurts the chicken.”</p><p>I understood her point. It was an odd thing to do: take these round thighs and make them flat. Chickens, factory-farmed grow so fat and thick, the chickens can’t walk. It’s ridiculous, I thought, as I continued to pound the yellow flesh into smooth medallions, that the chicken-growers spent so much time, energy, and DNA manipulation making their chickens grow unnaturally fat and here I am, just thinning them out again. But that’s the only way I knew how to make chicken tenders.</p></blockquote><p></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@nicolewalker263/video/7169649636163063083?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1&item_id=7169649636163063083">Experiment two</a></p><p>This procedure began as with Experiment one, with the packaging of the specimen: Walker unwrapping butter as she prepared potatoes for Thanksgiving. Given time limitations, Sather et al. cooked, read, promoted <i>Macro FN 32</i> and conducted recordings simultaneously. It should be noted the Joel Robuchon suggests one pound of butter for two pounds of potatoes but not even Walker has been able to repeat this experiment without severe damage to both the lab, the specimen, and the personnel. However, these potatoes, peeled, quarter pound buttered, quarter cup milked, and whipped in the culinary centrifuge, turned out as expected: buttery but not disastrously so. The results of the promotional aspect of the experiment are less certain. </p><p><br /></p><p>Results: </p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEirEwjf5Cg__qM-y4SSjKrEOMP7wKPhs-o0HBbqARX5oOdYm4UaNzd_0p5SWwBcAnJrJjrzlT8ww26cZ0THVyG6ZggFeRVCrkx_QTXNszGAWJRPb0tlf13XaZ6rgGbDBbZiCk5LKcc5sE41uEE15qs7HE3CqZX7eddVHE51swwW81oAfCe-HrT_Cqu5" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="86" data-original-width="936" height="29" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEirEwjf5Cg__qM-y4SSjKrEOMP7wKPhs-o0HBbqARX5oOdYm4UaNzd_0p5SWwBcAnJrJjrzlT8ww26cZ0THVyG6ZggFeRVCrkx_QTXNszGAWJRPb0tlf13XaZ6rgGbDBbZiCk5LKcc5sE41uEE15qs7HE3CqZX7eddVHE51swwW81oAfCe-HrT_Cqu5" width="320" /></a></p><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEglVEO6k9nQj-6zG5FnfiyMkKTFuwBAahzNpQ-XqqCZALznD8T4iHvJMVfNRjhB7YT3hY68aQUen-KD9xU3HTS4VX8jnSUU3uS1YONQ-N5Swsx2CLe3IMj6J9_VTagDZbQ-sGs_hsD9cPdRqFVO8C--cr4qmB2NPeciMv9J-8FvtK8l_K3pDUgKFORD" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="436" data-original-width="724" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEglVEO6k9nQj-6zG5FnfiyMkKTFuwBAahzNpQ-XqqCZALznD8T4iHvJMVfNRjhB7YT3hY68aQUen-KD9xU3HTS4VX8jnSUU3uS1YONQ-N5Swsx2CLe3IMj6J9_VTagDZbQ-sGs_hsD9cPdRqFVO8C--cr4qmB2NPeciMv9J-8FvtK8l_K3pDUgKFORD" width="320" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@nicolewalker263/video/7170412419552939306?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1&item_id=7170412419552939306">Experiment three</a></p><p>For the third experiment, due again to time limitations and the labile conditions of the specimen, Sather et al recorded cleaning the refrigerator instead of focusing on a singular aspect of a specimen such as chicken or butter as in experiment one and two. The cinematographer recorded Walker removing squares of Tupperware, petri dishes of microorganisms, and hazardous biologic material from the specimen for a 30 second interval and then recorded restocking the specimen with material inoculated with spores and microbes in conditions not yet catalyzed for spontaneous growth. </p><p>Walker, still restricted in audio capacity, required Sather et all to adjust the technology for Walker to read from <i>Macro FN 32: </i></p><blockquote><p>I spill applesauce down my shirt while trying to shape it into something palatable for Zoë. This little baby will not eat. Or, she won’t eat anything as perimeter-defying as applesauce. She will not eat anything that isn’t square, so I’m always sticking macaroni and cheese into the refrigerator in a Rubbermaid container. When it’s cold and hardened, I pop it out of the plastic and cut the newly formed mass into squares. Everything must be made square—because she likes the pointy edges or because I am limited to squares by my sculpting skills, I’m not sure. Mashed potatoes I take between my hands, pat into a square, and fry. Cucumbers, cut down the middle, edged, and quartered, she’ll eat. It looks strangest on the meats—chicken squares, steak squares. I try to resist taking her to Wendy’s daily for the pre-squared hamburgers. If you take the tops and bottoms off Wendy’s fries, they are practically Pythagorean.</p></blockquote><p>Because the specimen chicken has been well-studied herein and bone-in chicken may disturb our reader, the editors request <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@nicolewalker263/video/7171900918269496619?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1&item_id=7171900918269496619">Experiment four</a> only be charted and cited. However, please note, Sather et al. coats the chicken in paprika, celery salt, and garlic powder in the data-collection. </p><blockquote><p>There is chicken on the bone. There is chicken off the bone. Chicken on the bone is the chicken I’d want in all its decadent renderings—by all I mean one. Fried chicken. There are many bone-in chicken recipes like chicken hindquarters in port and cream, barbecued chicken, buffalo wings, though they may be a kind of fried. But fried chicken is a testament to the beauty of the disarticulated chicken. Every piece a handhold. Every piece its own integrity. The coating wraps a thigh like snow, a breast like a scarf, a leg like a stocking to protect it from the cruel world of hot oil. Frying chicken is the nicest thing you can do to a dead chicken. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>But there are some who cannot eat the chicken on the bone. Breast of chicken, boneless thighs, cubed in korma, rolled cordon bleu, that’s doable. At the bar, spicy drummette in my right hand, hot sauce on my cheek, a pile of bones in front of me, I turn to my friend Ander, who will not eat the boney chicken but is currently eating chicken tenders. I do not comprehend his reluctance.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>“It’s the same thing,” I argue.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>“It’s not.” He pushes my plate of sticky bones further away.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>“But you eat meat. Chicken. Steak,” I say. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>“I prefer hamburger,” he says.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Perhaps he does not like the resistance of muscle.</p></blockquote><p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEja04JR4wrEA-8oD6ckFTCtuGK5chTVX_lS-o8FRlkX56T5-HivxjWQGuy_4XsR7dH_pFiAHbMD9GciURndk28zvmdZXkq1sB2nkP9ebxMpg13CTyU4BVhqSAyFrjrRjdro5dvYzEr0mFqlAAtWdnKAUFFaTMUCTXQVt2g9sgobv9AvnskqKFMVyv6f" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="436" data-original-width="724" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEja04JR4wrEA-8oD6ckFTCtuGK5chTVX_lS-o8FRlkX56T5-HivxjWQGuy_4XsR7dH_pFiAHbMD9GciURndk28zvmdZXkq1sB2nkP9ebxMpg13CTyU4BVhqSAyFrjrRjdro5dvYzEr0mFqlAAtWdnKAUFFaTMUCTXQVt2g9sgobv9AvnskqKFMVyv6f" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>A final experiment, henceforth referred to as <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@nicolewalker263/video/7173445681514876206?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1">Experiment five</a>, produced outlying results. While the primary visual record is of the specimen frying in a pan, inferences may be made that specimen bacon, while equally subjected to unseemly living and death situations, is easier to render digestible because of its exuberant effect on the tastebuds, even as perceived through a visual medium. The data here thus outlie our previous experiments but are noted for significance. Please note that while the inputs trend higher, the ratio remains the same. Sather et al include these data for reference only. </p><blockquote><p>During the H1N1 pandemic scare, I start stockpiling groceries. I buy twelve cans of Cento tomatoes, twenty boxes of spaghetti. It’s not as if I think the grocery stores are going to close tomorrow. But I should start preparing—part as pure logic and part as an offering to the gods of swine flu. I buy two pork tenderloins, two pounds of bacon, and a saver-pak of pork chops. A little protein in the form of cheese won’t save me but a lot of pig might. I’ll fight fire with fire. I’ll develop my own antibodies to the H1N1 out of bacon. I realize that it’s not the pig that will kill me, but, lacking any other sort of game plan, I reason that pig is a prophylactic. I will eat him homeopathically.</p></blockquote><p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjy7rlYQGS9lOAn8I8BPnxgBxQz_6SBRafTcjfDECsLdFqV0X5CHsbDntENR8JVlR26MousiFSVgwAhsGLk1BAV6f_FH9reZolUmjBeAZvW4UqhvIXgQqTO4YxmxHk8fWDKZN8bWdTo5XcsrOLya3eHiRYlu1ji6I8X4LLUGUrUubrNcaHn13fQSe6t" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="436" data-original-width="724" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjy7rlYQGS9lOAn8I8BPnxgBxQz_6SBRafTcjfDECsLdFqV0X5CHsbDntENR8JVlR26MousiFSVgwAhsGLk1BAV6f_FH9reZolUmjBeAZvW4UqhvIXgQqTO4YxmxHk8fWDKZN8bWdTo5XcsrOLya3eHiRYlu1ji6I8X4LLUGUrUubrNcaHn13fQSe6t" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>In conclusion, it shall be inferred that TikTok, while a forum designed for a generation well-practiced in giving short-term attention and incessant dopamine infusions, other generations may learn to adapt and avoid being called “Boomers” if collaboration with the generation Z may be forced. However, we must conclude that becoming a TikTok sensation is not likely. These experiments must be repeated for results to prove valid. Future study is indicated in the specimens of pomegranate, beef tongue, and beef Jell-o. The larger conclusions may be even less promising. Self-promotion is an embarrassing sport and the promise of finding book readers in a TikTok world is ever shrinking. And yet, the show must go on. </p><p>Notes: Walker neglected to push “post” on Experiment one so Experiment one should now be imagined as Experiment five. Walker also included two additional hashtags: #food and #chickentenders which garnered, we believe, more views. It also drew three comments: “Is this a book? It seems like a book.” And “Thanks for the dating advice, coach” and “This seems like an audiobook.” And “You should write a book.” These comments seem linked to the fact that Walker neglected to record an image of<i> Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster.</i> Walker’s Macro usage has been suspended until further investigations can be conducted. </p><p>Chart for Experiment One updated as of 12/17/2022, 11:05 a.m.: </p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjBS4bFx5V_t5mVrfCC221AV10EZe3Xt7M638TOLv8UnICGJm98rHrMxxIC-PuENAY5f_O9LEqXuG80haIjmN6dJmWJIvEgY5jTb6aWY0wiltzMWbbRmGQ1q8G7VEcAbbsFh27cNee46Meb3ipGBKQT7be3ALLWFacdmjwb8ofnaGFR2lcHsGpiRQaU" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="436" data-original-width="724" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjBS4bFx5V_t5mVrfCC221AV10EZe3Xt7M638TOLv8UnICGJm98rHrMxxIC-PuENAY5f_O9LEqXuG80haIjmN6dJmWJIvEgY5jTb6aWY0wiltzMWbbRmGQ1q8G7VEcAbbsFh27cNee46Meb3ipGBKQT7be3ALLWFacdmjwb8ofnaGFR2lcHsGpiRQaU" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Garamond,serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Garamond,serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="color: red;"><b>NICOLE WALKER</b> is the author of <i>Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster, </i>(AKA Macro 32) <i>The
After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet</i>, <i>Sustainability: A Love Story</i>, <i>Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg</i>, <i>Micrograms, </i>and <i>Quench Your Thirst with Salt. </i>You can find her at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/nicole.walker.18041">https://www.facebook.com/nicole.walker.18041</a>
Twitter: @nikwalkotter and website: <a href="http://nikwalk.com">nikwalk.com</a> and TikTok <a class="gmail_plusreply" id="plusReplyChip-0">@nicolewalker263</a></span></p><p></p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-55736100246077709992022-12-18T04:30:00.001-08:002022-12-18T04:30:00.160-08:00Advent 2022, Dec 18, Julie Lunde, 100 Essayistic<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSVZyoxuVzrRDjuU-nfTYTNxaeyYzFBQt06BQw-3t8pc4cS2y79eEmoG3Yxp2x7N8f42dX3jk4m4yGVjrINRhLleMfapJsCDnUVWoa7hhStekGgjxWpc9uxfdCrcD0S3RuF6NF7SHc9z_IxrtcbCTxzuLuCQ8OVazMEYqARQFe9eq8uMpKlcyIYE1I/s1080/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec18.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1080" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSVZyoxuVzrRDjuU-nfTYTNxaeyYzFBQt06BQw-3t8pc4cS2y79eEmoG3Yxp2x7N8f42dX3jk4m4yGVjrINRhLleMfapJsCDnUVWoa7hhStekGgjxWpc9uxfdCrcD0S3RuF6NF7SHc9z_IxrtcbCTxzuLuCQ8OVazMEYqARQFe9eq8uMpKlcyIYE1I/w640-h372/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec18.gif" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>100 Essayistic</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-style: italic;">a cover of Philip Ording’s 99 Variations on a Proof</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>which is a mathematical cover of Raymond Queneau’s </i>Exercises in Style</div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Julie Lunde</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">*</div><div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>If you give an essayist a math problem, for instance: </div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>x<sup>3</sup> – 6x<sup>2</sup> + 11x – 6 = 2x – 2</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>she’ll say, </div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>Fuck math, I’m an essayist.</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>Or else she might say, </div><div><i></i></div><blockquote><div><i>I love math, but I haven’t done it in years, I’m an essayist.</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>If she is a certain kind of essayist, she might respond to your equation with an abstract but ultimately unhelpful and likely pretentious allusion: </div><blockquote><div><i>“To know x = to know (everything – x).” </i>[i]</div></blockquote><div>Or else she might offer an equally ill-fitting, only vaguely math-adjacent, but more fun pop culture reference: </div><div><i></i></div><blockquote><div><i>“The limit does not exist!” </i>[ii]</div><div></div></blockquote><div>If neither one of these quotes feels sufficiently satisfying, she might begin again by retracing a tangential anecdote: </div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>There was a math teacher at my high school, I forget his name, who was married to the history teacher—I forget hers, too. They always held hands in the hallways. He was rumored to teach in hyper-speed so he’d have two whole weeks free at the end of the schoolyear to tell his students the story of how they’d met; apparently, it was The Greatest Love Story Of All Time. But his students were sworn to secrecy, and I never took his class…</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>If the essayist is sometimes a little uncomfortable with the personal nature of her chosen genre, she will choose to reply with an alter ego to help relieve the burden of the first-person, to speak with a stand-in sometimes called the speaker (where speaker ≠ writer), sometimes the essayist, or sometimes even just a single, simple letter, an ‘I’; which, in its vacancy, can become universal, a functional placeholder for multiple possible truths.</div><div><span style="white-space: pre;"></span></div><blockquote><div><i>Let ‘x’ be a real number. </i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>If she loves a good braid, which what essayist doesn’t, she may opt to weave in another thread, which will, of course, feel random at first:</div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>The first game of ‘ultimate,’ also called ultimate frisbee, took place in a parking lot at Columbia High School in New Jersey, in 1968. The sport was the casual after-school creation of a group of friends, but its appeal proved contagious; an alumnus of CHS got his hands on a copy of the rules and founded an ultimate team at Staples High School in Connecticut in 1970, and before long, there was a CT league, and from there the trend went national.</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>The essayist might consider numbering her paragraphs, to make her essay response into a fragmented work, as in this classic of the genre:</div><div><i></i></div><blockquote><div><i>“100. It often happens that we count our days as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse…” </i>[iii]</div><div></div></blockquote><div>If she chooses to do so, she will then consider the way a numbered fragment is formatted. She’ll look back at the page full of fragments and think:</div><blockquote><div><i>This looks just like math homework—like a sheet of word problems.</i></div></blockquote><div>If you try, then, to redirect this essayist to your chosen problem by restating it, this time more directly: </div><blockquote><div><i>100. Let ‘x’ be a real number. If </i><i>x<sup>3</sup> – 6x<sup>2</sup> + 11x – 6 = 2x – 2</i><i>, solve for x.</i></div></blockquote><div>The essayist is likely—at first—to once again skirt the question. This isn’t because the essayist doesn’t love a good math problem, but rather because she thinks a good essay, and a good essayist, always resists the finite or definitive answer. A good essay, she thinks, thrives in irresolution, indecision, uncertainty. As she’ll be all too happy to inform you:</div><div><i><span style="white-space: pre;"></span></i></div><blockquote><div><i>An essay, from the French </i>essai<i>, is an attempt. It isn’t an answering, but a mind at work.</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>If the essayist is a writing teacher of some kind, perhaps the instructor of a college composition course, she might include this etymology lesson in her class materials one day; and if one of her students is playing games on their phone during that class, the essayist will recall Mr. Wetzel—who, of course, taught the essayist’s high school precalculus class and wrote her college recommendation letter, who didn’t give the essayist too much flack when she got bored of math and began solving the NYT crossword in class; who, in fact, after she’d gotten into college, would regularly stop by her desk to say:</div><div><span style="white-space: pre;"></span></div><blockquote><div><i>You got 24-Down wrong. The first letter is ‘S’.</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>When some of the essayist’s students (the engineers) ask her then for some more concrete rules, what they should or shouldn’t use as a title, whether their essays should be five paragraphs or six or seven, and if there’s a good formula or template for an A+ conclusion, she’ll take solace again in writing’s lack of solutions: </div><div><i></i></div><blockquote><div><i>There’s no wrong answer when it comes to writing something new, something original, an essay that is yours.</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>She’ll even give them a second, more math-inspired response: </div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>There can be multiple correct answers (in writing). Multiple factors go into it (writing beautiful essays).</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>And if those students ever roll their eyes at the essayist’s exuberance for essay writing (which, let’s be honest, would not be unwarranted), she will find herself recalling her old AP Calc teacher, Mr. Wilkes, who bounced around the front of their classroom at Staples High with a puppy’s energy, puppy-eyed, exclaiming: </div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>I’m teaching you guys the highest level of math I know! Think about that—you’re only what, seventeen, and one day soon you’ll know more advanced maths than I do now! By the time you’re my age—and I’m not that old—think how much more advanced you’ll all be!</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>He was assuming they would continue studying math in college. His students, including the essayist, used to make fun of his overenthusiasm a little. Thinking of this now, the essayist will feel sorry and a little embarrassed that she never took another math class after that.</div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>Instead, she studied how to become an essayist.</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>Maybe she stopped taking math then, when she started writing, because she assumed she no longer had a use for that kind of thinking—that, as a <i>creative</i> writer, now, she was done forever with all that hard logic. Or maybe she’d just fallen into the bad trap of demanding real-world applications from her academic pursuits—that common failure of imagination, learning not for learning’s sake, which her high school teachers had always been so frustrated by, and accustomed to:</div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>“In my Pre-Calculus class last year, when Mr. Wetzel was asked, “When are we ever going to use logs (logarithms)?” He wisely replied, ‘In a fire.’” </i>[iv]</div><div></div></blockquote><div>By now, the essayist will be feeling the need to perform some essayistic research. She’ll start out by googling how to factor cubic equations but will get sidetracked clicking through links, chasing stray inquiries, seeking endless revelation ‘til she’s thick in the archives of her high school’s newspaper and then knees-deep in the axiomatic philosophies of David Hilbert, a mathematician who argued that geometry’s central concern was simply the relations of otherwise arbitrary terms:</div><blockquote><div><i>“One must be able to say at all times—instead of points, straight lines, and planes—tables, chairs, and beer mugs.” </i></div></blockquote><div>The essayist may then take a different tack completely, and decide to deliver an aside to the reader stating her essay’s intentions directly:</div><blockquote><div><i>I want to show you, show myself, how math is essayistic—how essays are math, or mathematical. I’m trying to examine how that overlap works.</i></div></blockquote><div>Shift again, to the indirect, back to research. Another math teacher at the essayist’s high school, Mr. Jolley, was niche-famous for being a ‘Johnny Appleseed’ of Ultimate Frisbee, meaning he’d been one of the first to help the sport spread. Legend had it he’d founded the second ever Ultimate team at her high school in the ‘70s, out of a group of some math students he’d had who loved frisbee. </div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>“Last Wednesday, Al Jolley, Staples math teacher and frisbee coach, was seriously injured when he attempted to make the famed “oral grab” (trying to catch a frisbee in his mouth). Suffering a broken jaw and loss of three teeth, Jolley commented, “shirpvgmn….’” </i>[v]</div><div></div></blockquote><div>If you are left wondering how you got here and try, one last time, to rephrase your original question in a different way:</div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>Suppose that among four consecutive numbers, the product of the first three equals twice the third. What’s the fourth number? </i>[vi]</div><div></div></blockquote><div>The essayist will hem and haw. She’ll change the subject again, not because she’s resisting, but because she’s just discovered she doesn’t actually know how to solve this one. She’s forgotten all her math moves, so, as essayists are wont to do when their chosen tools fall short, she’ll look elsewhere for a functional answer of sorts:</div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>“All players are responsible for administering and adhering to the rules. Ultimate relies upon a Spirit of the Game which places the responsibility for fair play on every player. Highly competitive play is encouraged, but should never sacrifice the mutual respect between players, adherence to the agreed-upon rules of the game, or the basic joy of play.” </i>[vii]</div><div></div></blockquote><div>An essay, too, has no referee. Thus the essayist may better be able to understand its basic relations if she is able to abstract some of the above terms, and say—instead of respect between players, agreed-upon rules of the game, and basic joy of play—the essayist’s fidelity to a reader, the expectations or qualities inherent in language, the basic joy of play (this one stays the same). </div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>Group like terms on one side: x<sup>3</sup> – 6x<sup>2</sup> + 9x – 4 = 0.</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>Math, as play which, too, operates under agreed-upon rules <i>(let ‘x’ be a real number)</i>, might reasonably make for a natural gateway to a sport like Ultimate; or, at the very least, Ultimate’s proliferation by a math teacher and his students makes some sense. Both are concerned with <i>the spirit of the game. </i>Math isn’t just about answers or practical use, but also about fire, pursuit:</div><div><span style="white-space: pre;"></span></div><blockquote><div><i>Rewrite to seek out commonality: x<sup>3</sup> – x<sup>2</sup> – 5x<sup>2</sup> + 5x + 4x – 4 = 0.</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>At this point, the essayist will pause solving to consider how her high school math teachers instilled in her the same stylistic values which she still strives for in writing today, how they had waxed rhapsodic not over correct answers, really, but rather over their explanations, mathematical proofs:</div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>Take a look at this solver’s organization, the elegance of expression, their creativity in seeking out the solution this way….</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>The essayist’s obsession with <i>tracking the mind at work</i> closely echoes math’s insistence on <i>showing one’s work.</i> The word proof originates from Latin <i>probare:</i></div><div><blockquote><i>To show; put to the test; inspect.</i></blockquote></div><div>In a weird way, these math dudes, whose classes she remembers much better than most of her English ones, were the very first essayists she ever knew. No wonder, now, when the essayist is locked into the central heat of writing an essay, she always feels herself becoming more analytical, calculating; not formulaic, but determined to inspect the problem from all sides, willing to experiment with a range of tools…</div><div><span style="white-space: pre;"></span></div><blockquote><div><i>Factor: x<sup>2</sup>(x – 1) –5x(x – 1) + 4(x – 1) = 0.</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>The essayist had not given up math at all, she’d just started solving with language rather than numbers. </div><div><i></i></div><blockquote><div><i>Factor: (x<sup>2</sup>–5x + 4) (x – 1) = 0.</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>If the essayist has gotten this far in her proof, she will be startled to make what, once made, is an obviously accurate realization, a turning point with proven veracity, shown out in her work: the essayist’s Ultimate game, her Greatest Love Story of All Time, is and has always been, since high school, math. </div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>Factor: (x – 4) (x – 1) (x – 1) = 0.</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>The correct answer, or a mathematician’s desire to seek it, isn’t irrelevant, exactly, but merely one of the necessary conditions for the game, a prerequisite for attempting to solve, much the way the essayist is guided to the page in pursuit of elucidating truth, or Truth. That truth is, in many ways, an arbitrary term; the meat or measure of any proof or essay is not the solution but how it is solved, how the game is played out, which makes any answer somewhat beside the point. But the win, admittedly, still feels rewarding:</div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>x = 1, or x = 4.</i></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: center;">*</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div>[i] <i>Pataphysical Essays</i> by René Daumal.</div><div>[ii] Cady Heron, in <i>Mean Girls.</i></div><div>[iii] <i>Bluets</i> by Maggie Nelson.</div><div>[iv] “Counting On Math in the Real World,” <i>Inklings</i> (Staples High School Newspaper). </div><div>[v] <i>Ultimate History, Staples Grads</i>; https://www.ultimatehistory.com/founders/Pg/staples.html/.</div><div>[vi] <i>5 Puzzle,</i> in Philip Ording’s <i>99 Variations on a Proof.</i></div><div>[vii] <i>Spirit of the Game,</i> World Flying Disc Federation.</div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;">*</div><div><br /></div><div><blockquote><div><span style="color: red;"><b>Julie Lunde </b>has an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Arizona. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in <i>Western Humanities Review, Pigeon Pages, </i>and the anthology <i>Letter to A Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us </i>(Algonquin, 2022) among other places. She serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at <i>DIAGRAM</i> and is the writer in residence at her dog's house. See more at <a href="http://julielunde.com">julielunde.com</a>.</span></div></blockquote><div><br /></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-37202651515586531472022-12-17T04:30:00.003-08:002022-12-17T08:52:49.927-08:00Advent 2022, Dec 17, Michael Martone, Ten and a Half Short Essays on the Short Essay<p style="text-align: center;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg652GTddatkVr3BojBWQTg6X7_FtALBAiXYx5AXymNLtCQZQq9HICgYnITAl8ZPmxx8crrU0J1gOIUVIyLoFznjnwi9cqydj8h0LPfvtQz7t8iOpm5UX079v_x7PKK-7l-KwtKzq57MwAlkI-iPbmTCZL-WTdIu-c_dq-_-vq30B3Jd4Q8XMuptz-q/s1080/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec17.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1080" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg652GTddatkVr3BojBWQTg6X7_FtALBAiXYx5AXymNLtCQZQq9HICgYnITAl8ZPmxx8crrU0J1gOIUVIyLoFznjnwi9cqydj8h0LPfvtQz7t8iOpm5UX079v_x7PKK-7l-KwtKzq57MwAlkI-iPbmTCZL-WTdIu-c_dq-_-vq30B3Jd4Q8XMuptz-q/w640-h372/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec17.gif" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Ten and a Half Short Essays on the Short Essay</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Michael Martone</div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">*</div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Train Car Graffiti</i></p><p>The tags have largely disappeared from the urban canvases of subway cars and commuter coaches. Metal alloys were employed to foil the paint’s adhesion, the cars and yards surveilled. No, now the art is affixed to the pristine sheets of steel herded along the desolate rusting right-of-ways, the corridors of ruins, owned by the few remaining national railroads stretching across the nation.<br /> Boxcars and reefers, grain hoppers (with primer coats of paints the color of after-dinner mints), gondolas hauling scrap metals to mini-mills, and well-cars stacked with containers (not painted as the containers never dwell long enough to be tagged), flat cars, tank cars, litanies of letters, hieroglyphics, camouflages, ideograms, and the punch of punctuation. Their connecting knuckle-couplers could be commas, I think. Look! See what is done to the perforated siding panels (white cliffs to coat!) that protect the sky-scraping covered auto-racks! The fossil records written there!<br /> The economies of rail and scale are such now that the trains are longer and slower though they are express, stopping only in major cities and ports and mines or along long sidings to wait for longer trains to pass by. These drags are handled now by only one or two humans (an engineer, a conductor) stationed on the headend of the train. No way they are taking any notice about what is going on on the train they pilot. Their bosses would have them gone as well. Robotic trains would maximize profits….<br /> It once was the paint, the varnish and the livery of the cars, that ID-ed the companies (there were hundreds), advertised their speed and service, made proprietary their trademarks, illustrated the flanks of their rolling stock with maps, plastered with place names their cars, polished and edited, connected. But that’s all gone…. <br /> Cars now are free-floating thought balloons, galleries on wheels, font books and follies, scrolling essays penned by some Pascal (in primaries and pastels) somewhere far away (the infinite spaces between the cars!) from where I am, here on this forgotten siding, reading these imaginary languages, in scripts that are at once organically expressed (in contrast to the framing machined edges beneath) and constructed in such a way (shading and chiaroscuro) the animated letters, trundling by, jump off their pages of steel like depression-era harlequin hobos.</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>*</i></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Junk Sequencing </i></p><p>There are regions of the human genome that contain strands of DNA that are not coding, that are noncoding. That is to say these long sequences of the genetic basic base nucleotidal bits of alphabet (A-T and C-G) seem to be just there…. There? Fallow? Scrapped? Forgotten? They express no protein that creates eye color, say, or the tenth cranial nerve, the vagus, that wanders through the gut, the heart, and the larynx…. <br /> Junk sequencing then is a kind of debased basic babble of inarticulate nitrogenous bases, neutered nucleotides. The proportion of coding to noncoding DNA swings significantly from species to species. The bacteria’s detritus makes up a mere 2% of its genome. In humans, the clutter we carry, the trash we horde makes up 98% of genomic static. No one knows. No one knows. Or maybe the bacteria know what all this material is there for. Leftovers from some long-forgotten shell of the former beings we were being? The drafts of essays that were written and never erased, shelved, stored? Juvenilia? Marginalia? Glosses that have grown dull? Scribbles that are part of our “papers” we will donate to the Lilly Library when we retire?<br /> I attended The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. My mother, back in Indiana, would tell her friends that her son attends The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore not saying what I was studying there, allowing the implication that I would become a medical doctor or biological researcher to float on the air, allowing that to go unspoken, a given. I was, of course, attending The Johns Hopkins University, where the human genome was then first being mapped, to “study” writing in its Writing Seminars, a long way from its laboratories and surgical theaters. I let it go…. <br /> Though I did, one time, assist a friend, a graduate student in microbiology, as he practiced the new technique of gene splicing, gene editing. I watched as he introduced a junk sequence from a frog’s gene into the waiting arms of a random E. coli.<br /> Gertrude Stein too attended The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore “reading” in medicine to become a medical doctor. I still have a clipping taken from the SUN newspaper that advertises a house for sale where she once lived. Have you read her books? Have you seen how thick they are? How many pages of text? Word after word after word? How much had she had to write, the noncoding coding, to produce this this: “A rose is a rose is a rose?” Or this this: “There is no there there?” <br /> “There is no there there” is, by the way, the epigraph attached to my unpublished thesis, written over forty years ago, that now resides in the Eisenhower Library at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore called <i>Cardinal Numbers, Ordinal Lives.</i></p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>*</i></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>“Catch!”</i></p><p>There are websites where you can buy a bomb or a missile, a shell, an artillery round. The transaction is with the Ukrainian military. They will then send the round downrange on its way toward the invading Russians to stem the tide, to cover a friendly advance, or even do retaliatory damage behind the enemy’s lines, a kind of potluck of targets. With the purchase (everyone likes to think of it as a “donation” to the cause), you have the chance to have a message of your choosing penned, chalked, or painted on the ballistic flanks. The messages need to be pithy, brief, graphic, specific of course. There are pictures of the bombs bedecked. Soldiers snap a shot before the shot is shot. There are rifled cheers and jeers, puns and wordplay, obscene wishes and concrete descriptions of the target, the explosion, the aftermath of the pain on its way. Special delivery is a theme. The idea of a gift is turned inside out like a kernel of popcorn, iconic, ironic. Around Easter, the season of resurrection, “Here is an Easter Egg that <i>finds</i> you.” They are, in their way, elegant projectiles of ragged raw spontaneous anger. And I am trying to end this paragraph with some way to explode the notion of the pen being more powerful than the sword or how lethal language can be especially when applied to the skin of a shell made up of a high energy propellant and a depleted uranium slug, a projectile that projects physical rage, fury swaddled in a barbwire net of text.<br /> This is not something new. The British Museum has in its collection a lead slingshot (# 1851,0507.11) from the Golden Age of ancient Greece, almond shaped with a winged thunder bolt on one side and the high relief inscription DEXAI “Catch!” on the other. There are spent missiles from a Roman siege that tell the recipient to “relax your ass” and another taunts “you can’t hide from me,” decorations of penetration from a distance. <br /> Sticks and stones can break bones but words? I ask my writing students if they know about shaped charges, how modern munitions are constructed to “pierce” armor, concentrating the explosive expanding energy all into one tiny narrowed focus, a jet of sun-scalding plasma. I warn them! I use a trigger warning before I start up with this metaphor, adapting it to the way one might think about one’s writing, writing that selects minute details and then hyper-amplifies them. We do talk about the <i>power</i> of the written word, its <i>energy</i>, the <i>focus</i>. Its ability to <i>pierce</i> through, to <i>devastate</i>, to <i>deliver</i>. I warn them. It is on the way. I warn them, a message on a bomb I am about to hurl: “Catch this!” </p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>*</i></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Visible Invisible Prisons</i></p><p>I have a lot to say about the postcard. I have thought a lot about the postcard. How it is an analog Tweet. How I think of it as a kind of prayer, not a vehicle of correspondence. One does not expect a return message. Tom Phillips, the creator of <i>The Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel,</i> died a few days ago so I am thinking of him (a postcard cliché!) and of his other big book, <i>The Postcard Century: 2000 Cards and Their Messages. </i>But the postcard, for me is always about edges and sides (the front and back), borders and frames. “Your message here.” “The address here.” “The stamp here.” There is even now a box along the bottom that is for post office use to print its barcode clearly to be scanned for sorting. The postcard by design is always about limits and fit. It is a puzzling box of boxes, quarantined, and partitioned off. As this essay about postcards is as well. I am always already running out of room….<br /> Now, when I do receive postcards, I have noticed how the writers (most of them new to the form) are novices to the particular problems of postcard composition. They send messages I must decipher not on purpose, mind you, but because for them to write a postcard is unlike any other writing they have ever done. They’re handwriting, for one, perhaps for the first time in a long time. They could type the card but what are the chances they have a typewriter? They assume if they sign just their first name, I will be able to suss out their identity. I know many Susans, Sarahs, Davids, Dans. They neglect adding a place where the card was written or sent, assuming, I assume (if they even know about the postmark and cancellation) that the PO will address the issue of routing. But the PO is all robots now and centralized distribution. No help helping me pin dowm the where of the person whose penmanship I am trying to detangle. No place for return address! Besides the PO’s mechanized intervention is overprinting much of the scribble (the barcode, the cancellation) if the mechanical teeth feeding the mail through scanners and sorters haven’t already eaten away at the card itself. <br /> In “Postcards from the Maginot Line,” W.S. Merwin recounts the strange liminal space created when he receives intimate messages from someone he does not know or remember. Who is sending these semiprivate semipublic billets-doux? It is perhaps this particular space, this special theater, the occasional occasion, this whispered public address that attracts me to this kind of essay, the postcard. Even more than “purloined” letters with their obscuring envelope, the postcard hides itself in plain sight. Every kind of writing may be a collaboration between the writer and the reader in the making of meaning. But the collaboration that takes place within the confines of the postcard creates this unique and concentrated emotional escape and, strangely, this sublime imprisonment.</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>*</i></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Slips</i></p><p>Ephemera</p><p>I enjoy meandering through the office buildings of the university where posting is usually prohibited on hallway walls, restricted to bulletin boards. But the office doors of professors provide a blank canvas to install ephemeral collages of all kinds. Texts and images create (in their recontextualization) found poems, juxtaposed jokes, startling defamiliarizations. To read the office doors is to do a kind of archaeology. You delaminate the layers and work the grid. It is also a mental documentation of the eccentric academic documentation of the absurd, the Kafkaesque giggles adhering to thresholds between high-functioning insanity and measly manufactories of meanings inside the offices. I always find when I read a well-encrusted, thoroughly scaled, and chain-mailed door, that I am often a tweedy Zeno enroute to paradoxical, Escheresque illusions. I riffle through the slips of foxing paper, paper consuming itself with the leftover acid it took to make the pulp into paper in the first place that now crumbles into crisp burned curling edges.</p><p><br /></p><p>Memoranda</p><p>The Marxist, in the office next to mine who would work while listening to public radio classical music played loudly, would not speak to me. I asked if he could turn the music down. He wouldn’t answer. He didn’t speak to anyone. He didn’t speak, he let us know in a written memo, because speech could not be critiqued. In my office next door, I’d compose elaborate theses about communal space, privacy, what is meant by the “ringing” in the ears and the “wasting” of time. I would type these critiques up on an old manual typewriter, hammering the keyboard as loud as I could, making a racket. When I finished, I’d slip the bruised and battered paper under his door. </p><p><br /></p><p>Fortunes</p><p>Attached to the doors of many offices were slips of fortune cookie fortunes. I think the size of the little strips often worked in the overall door design while indicating the popularity of SWEN’s (the nearest Chinese restaurant) lunch special. The slips were counter punctual, a contrast to the letter and legal-sized sheets elsewhere, to the four-panel comic strips, to the posters with the frill of phone numbers, to the printouts of spreadsheets and memes. For me it isn’t so much about the fortune per se (the parodic aphorisms and obvious predictions) but the fortune cookie fortune writer. As a writer, I think about the fortune cookie fortune writer. I picture the writer in some cramped minuscule office somewhere typing out the pithy pronouncements, a pantomime of “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The running out of words. The inevitable probability inherent in the endless act of creation, the dwindling ability to imagine another improbable probability. The writer, exhausted, staring at a screen, slipping down in the chairs, stacks of empty slips of paper spilled all around, the reeking smell of burnt sugar emitted by nearby assembly lines, always already baking cookies, seeping under the closed office door.</p><p><br /></p><p>Aphorisms</p><p>An aphorism is a short “saying” in need of interpretation according to Andrew Hui in <i>A Theory of the Aphorism.</i> Maybe. In all the years I have haunted the hallways of English Departments, Creative Writing Programs, Textual Studies, Rhetorics and Compositions, Communication Schools, and Media Colleges there have been plenty of theories of language and meaning bandied about, scalloped and overlapped like the pith of paper bark on a pithy door. Interpretation? No. One never quite reaches an end to the reading-into of the reading into. I have always liked better the slipperiness of words, the play in their meanings the muddy banks of a river I can’t step into the same twice. You know, the slip in the poetry’s transmission that makes the nothing in nothing happening happen.</p><p><br /></p><p>Props</p><p>Often after a famous writer gives a public reading and before the dismissal to the author signing books or the reception, there is a brief period set aside for questions and answers. The questions are pretty standard. How did you get your start? Where do you get your ideas? Do you write every day? What are you reading now? That last question (all of the questions, really), posed by an audience member who might also be an aspiring writer, is really hoping for a shortcut or some direction to “good writing,” good writing that might rub off on the writer who is reading that “good” book or story or essay. <br /> John Barth anticipated that question— “What are you reading now?”—at a Q&A I saw. He lifted to the podium an old over-large leather attaché case, pried it open, and, like pulling rabbits out of a hat, produced a whole series of things he was reading. He started with SUN newspapers, the mail (junk mail, bills, postcards, letters, flyers, offers, coupons), magazines in the mail, catalogues, advanced reading copies of books he wouldn’t blurb but still read, galleys, books he was reading for pleasure, the books that were texts for classes he was teaching, papers his students in composition classes produced, fiction typescripts his creative writing students had turned in, a thesis a graduate student was working on, a brochure on a sailboat he was thinking about buying, journals that his former students sent him of their published work, books by the same, one of his own published books, a book by a friend. He pulled out a cereal box saying he liked to read all the different things printed on the box while he ate the cereal. Then he said, of course, he reads every day his own writing, what he had written the day before, before he begins writing today. And then out of his pocket he pulled out a little slip of paper, a fortune cookie fortune, saying he got this after dinner before the reading. And read it to us. That was what he was reading now.<br /> In a way he was poking fun at the desperate unasked question of the question, “What are you reading now?” But at the same time, he was making a serious point. That one never knows what writing one reads will be useful, instructive, inspirational even. There is no “good” writing one can cozy up to to become a “good” writer. Notice all that you are reading all the time, and welcome, every day, everything you read as necessary and, yes, as “good.”</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>*</i></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Memory Foam Moon</i></p><p style="text-align: left;">On the nightstand (nightstand! I never noticed the word until now) a notepad and pen are no longer provided by this hotel. The pushbutton (pushbutton!) telephone and alarm clock remain, objet d’art, obsolescent curiosities now that the phone, the alarm are folded into the handheld (handheld, another word to notice!) device that also provides (without a pen, a pad) a place to write a note and even a nightlight (nightlight! compounding compounding words) that ignites when a message arrives, an illuminated notepad (notepad!) on the nightstand (nightstand!).</p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p>I am allergic to down. And I forget when I make a reservation for a hotel room to request a foam pillow or one stuffed with polyester fill. I forget, and the first thing I do is wrestle with the pillow’s sham and slipcover (slipcover!), extract another sleeve, a shell this time, its zipper stuffed into the cover opposite the opening, and open the pillowcase (pillowcase!), flipping the pillow, searching for the tag, the tag, that should never be removed, to inspect the contents enclosed. Often, by then, some feathers have found ways to surface, float in the air, a cartoon of struggle. I have knocked the stuffing out of the stuffing.</p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p>I use the ancient phone to call the desk and request a hypoallergenic pillow, and they oblige, a clerk knocking at the door, telling me to have a good night, it is memory foam (memory foam!), the pillow, and before my head hits it, I remember you in bed next to me, the moon in the window, its light landing on the nightstand (nightstand!) next to you sleeping, illuminating the notepad, a moon in the moonlight, the glint of the nib, the barrel, the pen’s button, the tangled sheets, your breath, all of it, it must be written down so I never forget what I just remembered, within the paradox of a sheet of paper, even within this bounded space it contains an infinite number of points, and will I even recognize what I have remembered to write, written, will I even remember that I have written this in the night the next morning, this lucid dream of lucid writing, and I reach over you for the pen, the paper, not wanting to wake you but then not wanting not to wake you.</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Floating Quotations</i></p><p>Four buildings, you are told, survived the burning of the University of Alabama’s campus at the end of the Civil War. You are told that one book was rescued before the burning of the library, a copy of the Quran, and that the president’s wife saved the president’s mansion by refusing to leave the house. The observatory is still there with a plaque that mentions the telescope either being scrapped for the war effort or tossed into Marr’s Spring to keep from falling into Federal hands. Oddly, the last building to avoid the torch was the only military structure, a guardhouse. The campus today is studded with plaques spelling out what happened here, the running battle, the strategic burn. The bronzed embossed letters cast shadows, foiling the stories and statistics. [<span style="color: red;">1</span>]<br /> Writers have come from all over the country to study writing here in the MFA program. They have their own received narratives about what has happened here, here where they now find themselves, what is happening here now. All the buildings, even the ones finished yesterday, camouflage themselves in fluted columns, in limestone metopes and triglyphs, decorative capstones and stuttering dentitions, disguising themselves, in whitewash and Alabama red-clay brick, as antebellum buildings. <br /> And plaques are everywhere addressing the biography of the names naming those building, the history of a tree, the footprints of football players, this well, that bell, the heralding of philanthropy. The lettering seems to levitate, jumps off the stern sheet metal page. One of my favorites is a modest tarnished tile saying simply that the new library was built by the WPA, another visit from the North. It doesn’t tell the story I heard when I got here that President Denny petitioned President Roosevelt for the library’s funds only to be told that there was no money left for such construction, only emergency money for acts of God and war. Denny made his case by reminding Roosevelt that the Yankees had burned the library, and Roosevelt, amused, released the funds. I don’t know. I am not sure. It is a good story. It’s something I heard. It isn’t, like so much else, set-in stone.<br /> A fact is a thing done. A fiction is a thing made. A fact having happened is finished. It leaves behind a residue, records of its happening, its occasion, evidence of the event. Even nonfiction, an essay, say, is a fiction in this sense. A made thing.<br /> I walk with the writers through a forest of plaques and carved stones, on paths of bricks inscribed with messages, the thick atmosphere of texts, a weather of words, reading the inscribed essays cast across campus.<br /> At the doorway of Foster Auditorium, a plaque that recounts the integration of the university. It is surrounded by others, newer plaques, revisions, edits. The writers read closely all that remains of that day, stamped in metal. I point out that the original plaque calls what happened here “The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door.” I think about, and I ask the writers gathered around me to think about, those floating quotation marks. Who “wrote” this? I wonder. Who wrote this and when? Who added the “quotation” that is buttressed by those marks? The writers deal every day in abstraction, using language to make those abstractions concrete. I tell them to go ahead and touch those raised letters, read by feel. Feel those slugs of punctuation, feel the prick of the periods worn smooth by the concentrated touch of others.</p><blockquote><p>[<span style="color: red;">1</span>] Of course, more than four buildings survived. The president’s mansion’s slave quarters survived. They are still there behind the big house. There are no plaques. There is a warning not to trespass. The last I looked, it was being used as a garden shed (hand-tools and hoes, rakes, a lawn mower, gloves, sunhats, clippers and pruners, a wheelbarrow) to tend the mansion’s property, its rose gardens and azalea hedges. </p></blockquote><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>One Hundred Frogs</i></p><p>Universities stage annual fairs to introduce their international students to the community, the community to these students from other countries who now find themselves in Iowa or Central New York or Alabama, Below the Bug Line. Each booth a new food or craft, a loop of music, a slide show of landmarks, accented by unique accents. Often at the Japanese table there is origami, and I am encouraged to fold a crane or two. Other paper is used to demonstrate calligraphic talent, the students offering to write your name in kanji. I always thank them, but then I request their take on Basho’s frog haiku:</p><p style="text-align: center;">Furuike ya/kawazu tobikomu/mizu no oto</p><p>“Old pond,” I say, I don’t dare the Japanese. “A frog.” “Splash,” I say, gesturing with my hands. They know instantly what I am asking for and are always willing, eager in fact, to take a break from the name-writing and paper-folding to attempt to capture again the most famous seventeen syllables on earth. Every student there takes up a brush, pauses, and jumps in. I do love the way the letters spill down the page, how the composing and the composition mimics the flight of the frog, the disturbance of states, the stirring of liquid stillness, the slight sigh as the writer breathes out at the conclusion. The physical performance of writing that is so often passive, private.<br /> We think of haiku as poems. It’s the syllable count, the line breaks, I guess. But I think of haiku as a kind of essay of course, an attempt, a meditation. Place is there. And motion contrasted with stillness from the microscopic to the cosmic. But also, season, time, a second and, then, a second second.<br /> In the anthology <i>One Hundred Frogs,</i> Hiroaki Sato collects over 100 attempts at translating Basho’s moment in time. I think as a writer of essays I worry time, worry it too much in that linear way, wishing in the next new essay for the next new thought, a next new insight. The existential nature of the art of writing is that it is linear. It wants to go someplace. Beginnings, middles, ends. It leaves a straight wake in the water and not the radiating ripples, circles after a frog jumps into….<br /> In what way does the essay, does this essay, think the same thought, nothing new, over and over again and again? Nothing new! This essay, a practice, a practice of practice.</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Parasitic Texts or Enabling Apparati</i></p><p>I started teaching a class called “Contemporary Rural and Agricultural Literature” in Iowa where most of the students were from Iowa farms. Later, when I taught the same class in Boston, Syracuse, and Tuscaloosa none of the students had any real connection to farms or farming. I asked them to draw a picture of a farm. And they all drew a gambrel roofed haymow barn with an attached silo, a water-lifting windmill, and board or barbed wire fencing corralling mixed livestock—cows, goats, pigs, chickens and, often, a horse. My students in Iowa who had lived on farms, who still lived on farms, would never have pictured their farms like that—the barn, the bungalow, the garden, the picket fence—the idealized landscape of the American farm. The tableau exists if you stumble into the Amish community of Kalona, but it is mainly gone. For my purposes of teaching a class on contemporary rural literature, it was interesting to ask the urban students why they think a farm looks like this and/or why they desired farms to look like that.<br /> I could go on about that class, but mostly here I want to talk about a bag of potato chips—the bag more that the chips—Miss Vickie’s, Sea Salt Original. Each meeting, I would bring in food to my Farm class. One of the lurking questions in the class was “What is food?” so I would bring in examples of things purporting to be food. I could go on with that. Or I could go on with just doing a close reading of the various banners and headlines of the potato chip package—Made with Love and Care (a handwritten font), No Artificial PRESERVATIVES OR FLAVORS (a rubber stamp font), guaranteed fresh (in a crisp Helvetica)—but what most interests me is the body copy on the back.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Every bag of chips began somewhere, but ours began with someone. Miss Vickie wanted better chips for her family so she made them using ingredients fresh from her family’s farm.</p><p>In her kitchen –where work was respected, family loved, and honesty was a must—she spent years getting just the right crunch and flavors to put big happy smiles on every face in her farmhouse….</p></blockquote><p>It goes on.<br /> I don’t remember when I began to consume words like this with my consumption of “food.” I don’t remember when they began printing essays on packaging, but I do know that the practice has grown, expanded, become ever more elaborate in my lifetime as the companies making the products became larger in scale, more anonymous, and well, less artisanal. They actually plagiarized the hand-made rhetoric to promote the handmade-ness of the product, borrowing from the competing actual artisanal artisans who were deploying the essay sincerely, not cynically, to reveal ingredients, craft, traditions, and histories they were attempting to revive.<br /> The “ours” above is the Frito-Lay PepsiCo Company. The package disguises the connection. The only tip-off being that someone or something in Purchase, New York, manufactures the chips for Miss Vickie. So, a snack company owns the copyright of the little personal essay and the trademark to “Miss Vickie.” Now, you might regard it as a fiction, but it is a fiction in the form of an essay, an essay of a particular kind.<br /> There are four times as many words in that parasitic essay as there are sea-salted chips in the bag. I counted. How many bags and boxes now come to us fortified or invested with the ingredient of language, a season of syntax?</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Lastly, Lists, Listicles, Litanies</i></p><p>It is that time of year again, the season of countdowns and the tallying of lists. This short essay is the short essay that is about lists and will be contributed to The Essayist’s annual Advent Calendar’s list of essays. Originally, I imagined the larger essay to be made up of 24 short essays (for the 24 days of Advent—though the days of Advent in the western church tradition can range from 22-28 days), but I ran out of time.<br /> When one is not, as I am not, a narrative writer and does not depend on the skeletal structure of beginning, middle, and end (a little list right there!), one often employs a numerical scaffolding, cartilage instead of bone, to give the writing shape, structure, a sense of an ending. The number of minutes in an hour, the hours in a day, the days in a week, the weeks in a year…. I could go on…. But I’ve run out of time.<br /> Here is my original list, taken from my notes, of the short essays I was going to write for this essay about short essays:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>The Subtitle: The Colon or Titles: The Subtitle</li><li>The Blurb (this Advent essay is due December 15th and that same day two blurbs are due too—the clock ticking)</li><li>Last Words</li><li>Nose Art/ The Writing on Bombs</li><li>Fine Print</li><li>Skywriting</li><li><i>L’esprit de l’escalier</i></li><li>Understatement: Sighted sub. Sank same.</li><li>The Memorandum. The Extinction Layer?</li><li>The Quip</li><li>Junk Sequencing</li><li>IKEA Directions</li><li>Dance Steps</li><li>Haiku</li><li>The Postcard</li><li>Labels</li><li>30-Second Ads</li><li>Epitaphs</li><li>E.B. White’s Rowboat</li><li>Kurt Vonnegut’s Typewriter</li><li>Those Church Billboards</li><li>Train Car Graffiti</li><li>Side Effects</li><li>Candy Sampler Box</li><li>Recipes</li><li>Tattoos and Body Copy</li><li>Fortune Cookie</li><li>The Advent Wreath</li><li>The Faculty Annual Report or FART</li></ol><p></p><p>It was only after I started writing these short essays and when I mentioned to Theresa that I was running out of time that she suggested I add “Lists” to the list of short essays after seeing all the year-end lists online, on the TV, in magazines, and in newspapers.<br /> If there was time, I would write a little essay about the invention of the listicle and its connection to <i>blogging</i> and <i>clickbait</i>. I made a note to find Borges’s “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” again and to read Umberto Eco’s <i>The Infinity of Lists.</i> I keep Italo Calvino’s <i>Invisible Cities</i> on my nightstand, used it as a backing when I woke up thinking of a list of short essays I could write. <i>Invisible Cities</i> was a model for <i>Michael Martone,</i> my memoir, a list, a list of “Contributor’s Notes.” But how to fit all that in?<br /> I took the time to re-read Henry Reed’s poem, “The Naming of Parts.” I was going to do something with that. “The Naming of Parts” is one of six poems in a cycle he called “Lessons of War,” a list inside of a list.<br /> The first edition of David Wallechinsky’s, Irving Wallace’s and Amy Wallace’s <i>Book of Lists</i> made the list of books that were banned in 1977 because it contains a list that described popular sexual positions and the pros and cons of their use. I thought, maybe, I could do something with that too.<br /> The nouns (the persons, places, or things) of the list are like little essays, just the names of names, written out after bullet points, behave like four-handed carbon, a bristle of bonding points, a schematic of out-of-the-box thinking, all juxtaposition and glancing associations.<br /> The writer of lists is not so much a composer of music but the music’s arranger. It is a kind of writing that dramatizes the collaboration between the writer and reader. The list presents as <i>some kind of direct</i> (my computer program is calling for concision here, but that’s the point of lists—you think they are channeled but they soon begin to meander) route going to a particular destination, yet it also gives you the unfolded and unfolding map as well on which the route is inscribed. The side trips and scenic byways, the periphery that draws the eye, the detours to the places you didn’t know to know.<br /> I know about the Great Lent, 40 days leading up to Easter, that practice of fasting. As a joke, I’ve posted on Facebook a list—40 days of Fish Sandwiches. Something to pass the time. You would not believe, or maybe you would, how many images exist of fish sandwiches and where my fishing took me on the internet to find them. And just now I discovered that Advent is the Little Lent, 4 weeks instead of 40 days of fasting in preparation for the Feast of Christmas. Instead of fish sandwiches I am posting short essays.<br /> Church Litanies were the bee’s knees in the Middle Ages. The prayer, made up of lists, a prayer of listing, became so popular (close to 100 different versions) that Pope Clement VIII forbade, in 1601, the publication of most of them.<br /> Here is a list of the litanies approved by the Roman Catholic Church for public recitation:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The Litany of the Holy Names of Jesus</li><li>The Litany of the Sacred Heart of Jesus</li><li>The Litany of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus</li><li>The Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary</li><li>The Litany of Saint Joseph</li><li>The Litany of the Saints</li></ul><p></p><p>A lot o’ litany.<br /> I don’t know what to make of these little scraps I have assembled here, lists of lists. I think it has something to do, for me, with time and our sense of how time moves. Time moves in a direction. We sense that direction is forward, toward something. The litany, the list, is a kind of prayer. It suggests a direction, a destination, but, as I said, it begins to spread, to resist the relentlessness, the relentlessness of time.<br /> We mark the time of Advent with a calendar, yes, but also by a wreath that is circular. It and the season will come back around. There will be another round of essays about essays.<br /> After Advent and the twelve days of Christmas, after Epiphany, we return, again and again, to Ordinary Time, another kind of time that is anything but ordinary.</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p><br /></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="color: red;">Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and educated in the public schools there. His newest books are <i>Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana</i> (Baobab Press) and <i>The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone </i>(BOA Editons, Ltd). <i>The Flatness and Other Landscapes</i> (University of Georgia Press) won the Nonfiction Book Award from the AWP. His memoir, <i>Michael Martone</i> (FC2), is a collection of contributor's notes like this one. After teaching for 40 years in four different universities, he retired to garden and to attempt his first novel, Fort Fort Wayne. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Below the Bug Line, with the poet, Theresa Pappas. </span></blockquote><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-29207636055936120312022-12-16T04:00:00.001-08:002022-12-16T04:00:00.159-08:00Advent 2022, Dec 16: Sol Kim Cowell, The Final Girl<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1HUm7YIFmpSOwlgDHtzMl-eE0_IrdUjz8z7rwJ22ZFdNlMVXU8G21uSPZBt_giIbJC7ZGRxWHRAdWtNDsE8AgZb_FavRSMywMpcXjiGLbUyyuKpwNph_k7hIQUxlNxBotdU06iGGEtzPc8JtHoL7-IUy8HQJV8ME3aPIs9IDZI39J8K3wkRQs2ZBZ/s1080/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec16.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1080" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1HUm7YIFmpSOwlgDHtzMl-eE0_IrdUjz8z7rwJ22ZFdNlMVXU8G21uSPZBt_giIbJC7ZGRxWHRAdWtNDsE8AgZb_FavRSMywMpcXjiGLbUyyuKpwNph_k7hIQUxlNxBotdU06iGGEtzPc8JtHoL7-IUy8HQJV8ME3aPIs9IDZI39J8K3wkRQs2ZBZ/w640-h372/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec16.gif" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><p style="text-align: center;"><i> The Final Girl: Groups, Series, Histories, and Transness</i></p><p style="text-align: center;">Sol Kim Cowell</p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p></div><p>All bodies are gendered—even if it’s through the absence of it altogether—but few people are as intimately aware of this nature as those who experience an incongruence between the physical form and the gendered form. By which I mean anyone who is policed by the perceived gender of their body, but just for today: those who identify as transgender. To anyone outside of these experiences, it can be hard to imagine the complexity that exists even at the most fundamental level of perception. Not just externally, but internally as well, down to an organic and cellular level.</p><p>I’m not a believer that you have to medically transition to be transgender, but I do think it’s important to examine the many different pathways and experiences that trans people take throughout life, and it is for that reason that I consider <a href="https://www.honeyliterary.com/issue4/hybrid-a-complete-family-hstry-by-sarah-cavar">Cavar’s “a complete family / hstry”</a> to be one of many essays detailing a gendered experience that is simultaneously individual and universal.</p><p>Cavar’s ode to their hysterectomy begins with a quote from <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230523173_8">Alison Stone’s “On the Genealogy of Women: A Defense of Anti-Essentialism.”</a> Parts of it are italicised for emphasis by Cavar’s own decision, and understanding the reasoning behind this is central to approaching the larger piece from the intended perspective.</p><blockquote><p>[Groups] are collections of individuals who mutually recognize significant areas of shared experience and orientation to common goals. In contrast, <i>membership in a series does not require sharing any attributes, goals, or experience with the other members. The members of a series are unified passively through their actions being constrained and organized</i> by particular structures and constellations of material objects.</p></blockquote><p>Now, I don’t intend to diagnose the intentions of any writer other than myself, but in the case of this specific decision, I can hazard a guess. We are connected not through identical pasts, presents, or futures, but instead through the collective shoehorning of us into neat little boxes. And who is we? Anyone who does not fit the patriarchal ideal. Women of all kinds, yes, but also those who transition away from womanhood, and therein lies the crux of this essay. I’m not a particular fan of the whole women-and-nonbinary-people rhetoric—I find it reduces the nonbinary experience to that of women-lite, in the way that saying “cats and kittens” implies that one is the derivative of another.</p><p>That being said, however, there is an important unity between people of any marginalised genders, and Cavar’s careful selection of this quotation serves to illustrate how their story sits in the intersection of all of these things without reducing it to any one of its singular parts. There is a way to shed light upon the tangents that interconnect this intricate web we weave without centering one experience above any other and Cavar’s story is just one part of infinite library of things.</p><blockquote><p>He’s cis, straight, white, male, at least fifty, probably six feet-something with a hanging belly. I am transgender, queer, and barely-twenty. He is my gynecologist.</p></blockquote><p>Immediately, there’s a dichotomy here, but also a connection between these two people. The picture of the gynecologist is painted first—we’re seeing this through Cavar’s eyes, and the comparison is not lost on them. I think back to the opening quote and wonder if underneath their differences, there is still some sense of togetherness shared in their humanity. And there is some camaraderie! A handshake, a congratulatory note, and Cavar’s tentative sense of wonderment (“And it’s—it’s out?”) punctuates the end of the beginning.</p><p>At this point, the narrative changes. It is no longer a quote from a far off philosopher or a post- surgery memory painted on the page, but now the inner musings and narration of Cavar themselves. They recount the long farewells of their uterus, saying “goodbye in crimson streams”, but then the focus shifts from the individual to the collective once more.</p><blockquote><p>Still, I was thankful, having heard my whole life that this procedure was unthinkable for a healthy young adult—unthinkable to not make my future child, impossible to embody today an already-empty future.</p></blockquote><p>It’s at this point that I realise the use of “hstry” in the essay’s title can be read as shorthand for both “history” and “hysterectomy”. The two are intrinsically tied in the way that the assumption of a “future child” is made by almost any doctor discussing the possibility of a hysterectomy with a younger patient. To them, this procedure is a defiant end to the creation of history and an unimaginable cruelty to the hypothetical children toddling around in what they assume must be a universal daydream. This isn’t something just faced by Cavar, but rather a collective experience that every young person pursuing anything seen as a permanent contraceptive goes through.</p><p>But Cavar draws us back to the multifaceted queerness of their existence, shedding light upon the way in which society views us. Queer, a synonym for odd.</p><blockquote><p>Yet in hindsight, I understand: after two years of biomedical regendering—breasts gone, gelled testosterone a daily application—of course I could forfeit my uterus with relative ease. After all who wants a mother who is actually a monster? Who wants the deviant to spawn?</p></blockquote><p>What’s important about this little segment is how naturally it addresses the medical changes that Cavar and many other trans people go through in pursuit of gender euphoria. Again, I want to draw attention to the use of “many”—<i>many</i>, but not all. More to the point, they continue past this to establish how these changes cause others to view them as a “monster” and a “deviant”.</p><p>There’s something of a bell curve in the transitioning process, at least medically. Before you undergo any procedures (should you wish to), you’re able to assimilate into the sea of cis people. Even with a binder or a packer, there’s always the option to remove those things. Transfems can boymode, should the situation call for it. But once you begin making changes to your body, you enter an uncomfortable in between state, where people take great pride in “clocking” your transness. Your voice may break and deepen. Going the other way, you might begin to develop breasts. Your fat distribution across your body will change, as well as your ability to build and retain muscle. Whilst you experience this second puberty, it’s extraordinarily difficult to feel like you’re simply part of a crowd — it’s not until after years pass that you can slip into the sea once more. That is, if it’s what you wish.</p><blockquote><p>I don’t attribute my hysterectomy entirely to trans identity. [...] “Gender dysphoria” is a medico-psychiatric racket, a means of transmuting acute suffering under conditions of biological essentialism into individual fault.</p></blockquote><p>To Cavar, it’s not all about transness, and indeed there are many reasons for pursuing a hysterectomy that are not exclusive to trans people at all. And the notion of gender dysphoria has long been used to exclude and gatekeep people from transness, implying that there must be a degree of inherent and vitriolic self hatred to warrant entry. But the reality is that this is not wholly separate from Cavar’s trans identity, either.</p><blockquote><p>Yet for years prior I had taken extreme measures to cease menstruation, and even before puberty, I feared and loathed pregnancy. I begged to get my tubes tied the moment I learned of the possibility, feeling existential terror at the sight of a rounded belly, a growth hijacking some innocent gut. This growth would then bear my name, doing with my legacy things I would be unable to control.</p></blockquote><p>Again, Cavar toes the line between the individual and the other. There is Cavar in the modern day, and then Cavar as an ancestor—something to be interpreted and reinterpreted by descendants long separated from their individual truth. This is Cavar as a footnote in a history book or a name on a family tree. It is not a child, but a “growth” that sprouts within their nightmares; something unwanted and unintended. Contrast this with their earlier reference to “[their] future child,” italicised in its irony and quotational nature. The idea of this growth does not belong to them, but has instead been ascribed to them by others.</p><blockquote><p><i>I say goodbye to future. Goodbye to period promise. An organ to waste.</i></p></blockquote><blockquote><p>The first time, I was at my grandmother’s house. I spent the bulk of my childhood there, walking the same hall as my father and late uncle, passing several generations of family photos mounted on the violet wall.</p></blockquote><p>As Cavar becomes “unwoman”, they reflect upon their first period. It’s back to history and future, the relatives of generations past witnessing the blooming of a new adult. Alison Stone’s quote comes to mind once more: is this a group or a series? They are connected by heritage, but unbeknownst to little Cavar, they will grow up to diverge from this path. To end the history of their family, even if only in a small way, and in a manner which staunchly resists the desires of their own grandmother (who vehemently declares that it’s “not the same” to adopt).</p><blockquote><p>Someday, I will be the last living Cavar. I was a final girl, left to tell the story. But then I, too, would die, and take my family with me.</p></blockquote><p>The concept of the final girl stems from horror films, primarily slashers, and describes the last living victim who lives to tell the tale. And just as Cavar is the final girl of their family, their last period remains the final girl of womanhood—a survivor of the hysterectomy, but one that would die out like any other.</p><blockquote><p><i>At the feel of another dam giving way to blood, I squeeze my eyes shut and try to laugh at the irony. Here was my heaviest period, unleashed in final protest against the uterus that isn’t.</i></p></blockquote><p>And what place does a final girl have in a group or a series? They are the mouthpieces that tell the stories of those who do no longer have the voices to speak. The “final protest”, in this case, is made by the remnant of that which came before. In this way, could Cavar and the metaphorical final girl of their uterus be mirror images of each other? Cavar shedding womanhood, and the last period clinging to it posthumously.</p><blockquote><p>I am not a girl but I am the final. I tell the story of a family history that will soon end. Without intending to do so, I have ended history: severing it and slowly, painfully, excreting what remains.</p></blockquote><p>And just like that, the essay borne from the ungirling concludes, just as Cavar’s family history shall someday come to an end. From trans identity to familial inheritance, Cavar has woven a story of gender and the rejection of it: the series that is marginalised gender; the group that is their family, though they find themselves diverging from the shared goal of continuation; and the final girl, the last living member of her group, doomed to tell and retell their story until it dies with her.</p><p>The interaction between groups, series, and histories is central to the narrative of Cavar’s essay, but at its core, this piece is about the individual. This is Cavar’s story, not anyone else’s, and it cannot be taken from them, no matter how much their “grandfather’s heart [cracks] with pity” or their “grandmother [grieves] for the child that would not come”. Referencing the opening quote once more, Cavar has lived and will continue to live a life <i>“constrained and organized” </i>by others, but this moment is just for them. Their choice is their freedom.</p><p>Some may say the final girl is trapped in her role, forced to relive her memories again and again. I beg to differ—the final girl is the only one who can make the choice to move on and continue living. She’s the only character in the story who can learn and change, and she’s the one who can take ownership of her existence once more.</p><p>I leave you with an excerpt from Cavar’s ending notes for this essay and the hope that regardless of your membership to our group, series, or history, you hold this story in your heart. One of many stories, each different in their own way, but each deserving of individual understanding.</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>Perhaps last is simply the resting of a burden, only to be</i></p><blockquote><p><i>drug up once more. Perhaps, then, final</i></p></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><p><i>just the broken promise of a last. Final—end of history, of a story</i></p></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><p><i>I did not know I was telling</i></p></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><p><i>(a story I today remake in text?)</i></p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><p></p><div><br /></div><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p><br /></p><blockquote><p><span style="color: red;"><b>Sol Kim Cowell</b> is a transmasc mixed British-Korean writer and local café regular. He writes about the convergence of mental illness, sexuality, and cultural heritage. At his doljanchi, he picked up the pencil, and he hasn't put it down since. Find him at <a href="https://solkimcowell.carrd.co/">https://solkimcowell.carrd.co/</a></span></p></blockquote><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-63285692852383048332022-12-15T04:30:00.001-08:002022-12-15T04:30:00.226-08:00Advent 2022, Dec 15, Megan Neary, An Hour of Splendor<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiEx2nlkSR8-WUV7nF0CVV1QAyZWEF5xBI1Tk1BOZtV40nHu5fVXrTpssZvWNDJ6Nhpzpa7epVS1MDg5zGr6vLGP4OuMCX1eJWrEWwC_PxMNQH8d3Asty91qy3XcF1iLyV-v2XCwDRjvDy5GBw8tdGMoX5n9YsMlCosG9Ttfd5y1KykiWPP7TdnpLe/s1080/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec15.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1080" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiEx2nlkSR8-WUV7nF0CVV1QAyZWEF5xBI1Tk1BOZtV40nHu5fVXrTpssZvWNDJ6Nhpzpa7epVS1MDg5zGr6vLGP4OuMCX1eJWrEWwC_PxMNQH8d3Asty91qy3XcF1iLyV-v2XCwDRjvDy5GBw8tdGMoX5n9YsMlCosG9Ttfd5y1KykiWPP7TdnpLe/w640-h372/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec15.gif" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i style="text-align: left;"><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i style="text-align: left;">An Hour of Splendor</i></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">Megan Neary </p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p>I have loved E.B. White since I was an elementary school child, eagerly listening to my teacher read the class Charlotte’s Web. We’d come in red and sweaty from running in the sun, soaring high on swings, shooting baskets, or jumping rope. We’d sit down and the teacher would say we could put our heads on our desks, could cool our flushed cheeks on their chilly surface. And then she would open the book and begin to read and I’d be swept away, pulled into the story and, what was more, pulled into the sound of the words, their rhythm and beauty. Even then, White stood out to me as I fell in love with his style before I knew what style was.<br /> Years later, in high school, I found a book of White’s essays and was delighted to learn that the <i>Charlotte’s Web</i> guy had written for adults. I sat outside that night beside a dying fire and I read until it was too dark to make out the words and still I remember the pleasure of that, of reading as the fire crackled, as the smoke perfumed the air, as the sun set in beauty beneath the barren fall trees, as I laughed and ached over the words I read, as I fell in love with this brilliant author all over again.<br /> Years passed and covid came and I found myself in a dreary apartment, alone much of the time, and I came across another collection of White’s work. I bought it and devoured it, reading in long, thirsty gulps, reading and becoming a part of the world again, a world where people and nature were connected, where the little things of life that are so often swept aside were examined, seen for their place at the center of life. <br /> This fall, I taught my own class of third graders<i> Charlotte’s Web.</i> They fell in love as I had. They were swept into the story, understanding what was important right away, understanding this tale of friendship and love, though they did require several lessons on inflation before they could understand the prices that are mentioned throughout the book. But, of course, it doesn’t matter how much money Fern’s father gives her at the fair, there’s no question what price Charlotte pays for her babies.<br /> So it was with gratitude toward White, for having given me some successful lessons, for having taught my class some important things, that I returned to my little blue book of his essays. I found myself focused on a short, unassuming one called <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/what-do-our-hearts-treasure.html">"What Do Our Hearts Treasure?"</a> <br /> In this essay, White relates his experience of spending Christmas in sunny Florida rather than snowy New England where he and his wife have always known Christmas in the past. The essay is simple, nothing much happens, and yet I return to it again and again. He tells of the shocking pink house he has rented sight unseen, of his wife’s crying spells, which she claims are on account of the situation in Vietnam—an explanation he doesn’t believe, and of a man who comes to fix the heating system and spends hours a day, “in a kneeling position, as though he were a figure in a creche, gazing at the table of tubes and wires left by the removal of the burned-out compressor. He, too, seemed melancholy, but did not weep. He kept his own counsel and did what he could, hour after hour, to remedy an almost impossible situation.” He’s described a repair man at work and somehow it makes me want to cry. We learn that White’s grandchildren have performed in a pageant, his granddaughter reciting something called What Do Our Hearts Treasure? It is a lovely title to an unknown work, a title that makes one think, stop and consider, what do our hearts treasure? It is a question I have been asking myself, in one form or another, as Christmas grows near and another year draws to a close. <br /> I find myself wondering what is truly important to me, what I ought to focus my energy and attention on. It’s not a novel or even particularly interesting question. There are clear answers, too. Just as everyone is supposed to say, “well the important thing is you weren’t hurt,” when someone totals their car without winding up in the hospital, just as they aren’t ever to let on that it would’ve been better if the driver could’ve not been hurt and not totaled the car, too, the things our hearts treasure are meant to be family and friends, maybe pets or good health or nature. And this is true, I think, for most people, at least some combination or variation of those things are important to nearly everyone. But what of the other things? The little things that aren’t really little in the view of a lifetime. The beauty of fresh fallen snow, the feel of warm arms embracing you, the smell of coffee in the morning. How can we begin to recognize these moments each day? <br /> White buys a poinsettia, but feels silly, its red flowers hardly special among the natural blooms of Florida. Instead of a Christmas tree, they buy something tropical called <i>Dracaena marginata, </i>the man selling it had called it <i>Imaginata</i> and White remarks that he preferred that. So do I. <br /> White treasures words, as do I. Am I comparing myself to White? He’s brilliant, a genius. I’ve written some pretty good copy for a deodorant company. And yet, I think he wouldn’t mind. I feel I know him and perhaps I do. I know his writing, I know how he saw the world and I know that I have been moved to awe by the everyday scenes around me as he so often was. In high school, I was desperate to discover my place in the world and I know that White’s words brought me closer to my destination. And so my heart treasures his work, as it treasures the work of many writers, writers who showed me that I was not alone.<br /> I imagine White driving his little potted plant to his rented home, perhaps it is buckled into the passenger seat, perhaps his right arm reaches out automatically when he takes a rough curve, protects the flower from harm. I imagine his confused sorrow as he drives past fields of blooming flowers, sorry his little plant no longer seems so special, aware even in his sorrow that if he loves flowers he ought to love the ones he sees outside his window. <br /> Then a package arrives, gifts from home, and with it comes an answer to the question of what our hearts treasure, or, at least, what White’s treasured. Inside is a branch from a balsam fir. White’s wife buries her nose in it, delighted. The package also contains photos of grandchildren and a little paper drum one had made. White places the drum at the foot of the little tropical tree and creates a paper star and cornucopia to decorate it. He looks out the window and for a moment is sure the Australian pines have “hardened up momentarily for this hour of splendor. They were spruce! They were birch! They were fir!” In that simple package, White and his wife received the treasures of their hearts—family in the form of photos, home in the form of a tree branch trimmed from the backyard woods, love in the form of a tiny drum carefully made, carefully packaged, carefully mailed thousands of miles, and carefully placed beneath a tree, a tree that had no history as a Christmas tree, but became one as soon as the heartfelt gift was placed beneath it. <br /> I don’t know what your heart may treasure, but I wish you plenty of it this year. And I think it holds true that, so long as we have love in our hearts, the world around us will be transformed, our dreams will come true, the Australian pines all around us will harden momentarily for an hour of splendor.</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p><br /></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="color: red;"><b>Megan Neary</b> is a writer and teacher living in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has appeared in <i>After Dinner Conversation, The Cleveland Review of Books, The Amethyst Review,</i> and various other publications. She also co-edits <i>Flyover Country Literary Magazine. </i></span></blockquote><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-46394065969425795172022-12-14T04:30:00.000-08:002022-12-14T04:30:00.184-08:00Advent 2022, Dec 14, Brooke Champagne on Vivian Gornick<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJjv9V9r360MDzui3nGnvAY0_7fpRXhxJ-Kfr2fH9enruK_KiL9qwP1Y5rHQM-C9Z54H_80r5TbJfiTELRPjKHjLu3fY_fsLmIGFI2bOrxb6KfVlvgyNtHWHbmT1apKIvUsMZrQFnBOtqVWsqXx8DO0q29CYk8CghGnAd0wh32h-o78mZgDaNsjKMG/s1080/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec14.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1080" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJjv9V9r360MDzui3nGnvAY0_7fpRXhxJ-Kfr2fH9enruK_KiL9qwP1Y5rHQM-C9Z54H_80r5TbJfiTELRPjKHjLu3fY_fsLmIGFI2bOrxb6KfVlvgyNtHWHbmT1apKIvUsMZrQFnBOtqVWsqXx8DO0q29CYk8CghGnAd0wh32h-o78mZgDaNsjKMG/w640-h372/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec14.gif" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Style Over Substance (At Least for Today):</div><div style="text-align: center;">Revisiting <i>The Situation in the Story</i> in the CNF Classroom</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>Here’s the situation: I’m sitting at my computer, reflecting on two decades’ worth of teaching failures. This fall semester marked my twentieth year in the classroom, a temporal milestone fitting for the teacher/essayist’s most essential criterion of reflection. Eventually, reflecting becomes something we learn to do without even trying.</div><div><br /></div><div>What I’m reflecting on now is that I recently taught Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story for maybe the twentieth time in my career as the opening salvo for my Intro to Creative Nonfiction class. And for the twentieth time, it didn’t quite work. My instinct is to say it’s all my fault; it’s not the ideas, I’m just conveying them poorly. Gornick is one of my writing heroes, near the top of my personal pantheon of the Nine Muses of Memoir. I say this to my students. But still, year after year, they read her primer on personal narrative and just don’t get it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Before I explore why my teaching of this text is a perennial failure, let me first say why I keep trying anyway. I love it for many reasons, including the memorable opening anecdote about a series of eulogies recited at the funeral of a famous, intransigent doctor, and how only one eulogist’s words had, for Gornick, “deepened the atmosphere and penetrated my heart.” (Aside: many students hate this opening anecdote, and they’ve cited the reason is that when they die, they don’t want any eulogies examining all of their complicated humanity and occasional pain-in-the-assed-ness, but instead for eulogies to shine singularly on their virtues. Problem for me is, I teach this text too early in the semester to say: “yes, but those hopeful eulogies about you would be lying, and the beauty, as Keats’ urn said, lies in the truth, and, further, that truth-beauty combo is what this class is all about.” Perhaps my whole dilemma could be solved if I waited to teach Gornick in Week 8. I’ve always begun the semester with it, though, with the belief that Gornick held a catchall theory for the essay, and given that the story part is hard, they needed to begin working on understanding it right away.)</div><div><br /></div><div>But the reason I most love The Situation and the Story is that when I first read it twenty years ago, it taught me something essential about writing the memoir and the essay. For those uninitiated, this opening section sets up clearly and succinctly the two essential components of a successful personal narrative: the situation, and the story. The situation is the surface-level subject of the writing, “the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot.” But the story, well, that’s what we all came here for. For Gornick, “the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.” This elucidation taught me that my goal as a budding essayist was both simple and impossible: I had to not only tell my stories well, but understand why I was telling them, what it all meant (without artlessly saying, of course, “this is what it all meant.”) According to my decade-old yellow sticky note on page 13 of the book, I’ve paraphrased her definitions by telling my students that “situation is the shallow end, summary, the ‘what,’ and story is the deep end, analysis, the ‘why.’” I’ve tried lots of other metaphors, as well. Situation is fun, story is work. Situation is the fabled hare to the story’s tortoise. In one example for my CNF students this semester, I proposed situation is foreplay and the story is orgasm.</div><div><br /></div><div>Still, they did not get it. I mean, they’re smart people. They understood the gist, they got it intellectually, but there was not now—nor has there ever been for my students—a eureka! moment like there was for me.</div><div><br /></div><div>I have theories as to why. Let’s start with the aforementioned My Fault. Any teacher knows it’s folly to teach what you dearly love, something that’s so fundamentally influenced your style or soul that its ideas become inextricable from your own. (Once, after assigning the first fifty pages of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, I harpy-shrieked ISN’T THIS AMAZING to which I heard crickets, and proceeded to read aloud highlighted sections. Couldn’t they hear it, how everything about childhood and fear and regret and wonder and the whole of humanity culminated perfectly into this enormous block of writing? C’mon, y’all! More crickets.). In other words, Gornick’s eminence is so self-explanatory to me that when I assign it, I’m kind of like, “See? Great! Let this be your guide now!” And when their faces glaze over, I transition our discussion to Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” which I much-too-ambitiously assigned for the same class period.</div><div><br /></div><div>It could be my students’ fault. Seriously, all nearly-twenty years’ worth of them. Because most of my students’ ages range from eighteen to twenty-two years old (many now younger than my actual teaching). It’s long been known in the brain scientist/researcher world that young adult brains continue developing and changing through their mid-20s; I even learned this in college, way back in the Stone Age of 1998. What’s less known is how the app-browse-click-swipe-right-social-media addled brain develops under the influence of incessant toxic stimuli. According to an article discussing the slowly growing Gen Z-brains-research on today.com (technically a news site…?), one neurologist suggests “technology has changed the demands on brain development for kids born after the year 2000, leaving a disconnect between the brain they need and the brain they have.” And the brains they have: unfocused, averse to goal-orientation, prone to taking risks. Even more so than the pre-internet young adult brain. These brains, developmentally, have more the metaphorical chemical makeup of sugar (the situation) than protein (the story).</div><div><br /></div><div>Am I implying my students’ phones have made them dumb, and I of the superior Gen X Brain have escaped my own phone’s nefarious effects? Certainly not. I’m just saying, what Gornick and essaying in general asks of us, to making meaning both for ourselves and others about a segment of our lives…well, this calls for more intellectual risk-taking rather than physical, and the brain research makes clear that this age cohort is much more inclined to the latter. Essaying is already so much to ask of a fully-developed adult brain, and nearly Herculean to ask of a still semi-in-utero one.</div><div><br /></div><div>All of this leads me to suggest now, upon reflection, something that Gornick and other writers I admire might constitute as essayistic sacrilege: what if, in terms of what I’m asking of students from their own writing, just their experiences (the situation) were enough? What if I asked them to foreground situation over story? What if I asked them to temporarily just forget about the story part altogether?</div><div><br /></div><div>But, you may be thinking, who wants to read only a description of an event? Like, what’s even the point of that? Gornick says this herself later in the opening of S&S, admitting her earlier book on Egypt had been a failure because she simply tried to replicate her experience there rather than understanding the meaning of those events to her narrating self. (Students, who I suspect don’t completely understand time ticks by more quickly than they realize, also do not appreciate Gornick’s example that shortly follows the Egypt anecdote: J. R. Ackerley took thirty years to write his masterpiece My Father and Myself, because that’s how long it took him to find the story. Though to be fair, no writer wants any book of theirs to take this long to complete, which is another reason to say buh-bye to story for now.).</div><div><br /></div><div>Speaking of anecdotes, the only evidence I have for my proposal to create this situation-over-story classroom is anecdotal, so here it goes. Weeks after I’d taught Gornick’s text this semester, I brought her up again: I asked students whether they’d consider rejecting the foregoing notion of story. Like, just create a series of scenes in your essays from here on out, what about that? One type-A, rule-following young woman balked at that. S&S had confirmed for her the need to know and show her purpose in any personal writing situation; she needs to make meaning for herself in order to make it for her reader.</div><div><br /></div><div>Fair enough. Hell, I’d just taught them that this was their essayistic objective. And for her next essay, yes, my type-A lovely succeeded in her storying attempt. She wrote a Gornick-approved piece about her relationship with her father, how he pushed her to become an athlete rather than artist, how she struggled to become the person he wanted and repressed her desires to please him…until she recognized she’d always be treading water to keep up with this false version of herself, and so wrote a short story for her father about this struggle. Her piece of fiction, emblematic of her passions, was what finally led him to understand. The essay was quiet, and beautiful—she was one of the few who listened to and understood Gornick. Another student, less-fully Gornicked, wrote a less-baked essay about his time working the nursing home late shift and an unlikely friendship he made there with a resident octogenarian. Every night the elder man visited my student at the front desk, carrying with him two gallon-milk jugs, and settled into one of the musty couches to tell my student about bygone days while he ruminatively sipped his milk like wine. There was little in the way of Gornick’s approach to story: I never learned why this friendship stuck with my student, what happened to the octogenarian, what all of this has to say about how we treat the elderly in America, how when we’re older and weakened, we become disposable, someone else’s midnight problem. Because I’d already taught S&S, which implies Story is God, I asked these questions of my student for future consideration.</div><div><br /></div><div>And while only one student expressed what her experience meant to her, it’s still those damn two gallon jugs of milk I can’t get out of my head. How stranger than fiction that image was, how totally it painted the situation for me…and how that became, metaphorically at least, suggestive of story. I wanted to say, but didn’t, that every essay should contain some version of the two gallon-milk jugs to tell its reader: I was there, and because I’ve shown you some of what was there, now you’re there, too. And maybe just being there, for my student-essayists and their readers, can for now, at least, be enough.</div><div><br /></div><div>Part of Gornick’s situation-and-story theory, I think, is that the two are inextricable from each other. So if you’re the kind of writer who can conjure a wonderfully-wrought situation, you’ll find a way for the story to reside in those details. After so many years of teaching this text, just as I’m finally getting that concept, I’m rejecting it. Because this is part of my point. As writers, my students (and I) get so caught up in making meaning—“story” becomes the pinnacle of any writing event—that sometimes the smaller elements of experience get glossed over. We forget the surprising transcendence of presenting two gallon jugs of milk.</div><div><br /></div><div>This isn’t an essay arguing we esteem imagism over reflection as the essayist’s greatest tool. It’s just that if we understand Story as God, it’s likely that whether we’re setting out to write our first essay or our hundredth, we feel like unworthy disciples. There’s certainly not time enough to reach essay heaven in the fifteen weeks of a semester. But we can create little saints-in-training from our situations in hopes that one day, some pearly, perfectly-composed gates will open wide for us.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here’s the real story, though: despite everything I’ve said about foregrounding “situation,” I’m compelled to make “story” out of all this, to artlessly make meaning: This Essay Concerns the Noble Struggle to Keep Heart After Decades in the Classroom. I want you to know you came here for something, even if it’s ultimately wrong. And hell, maybe this is all Gornick’s fault. After all, she fails to mention in The Situation and the Story that one of the greatest parts about being an essayist is that no one can hold you to anything: this was all just an attempt, a rhetorical shrug, a sexy maybe. So if you shook your head nope to any of the above, it’s fine, because by this time, perhaps, I’ve already gone and changed my mind.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">*</div><span style="color: red;"><b></b><blockquote><b>Brooke Champagne</b> was born and raised in New Orleans, LA and now writes and teaches in Tuscaloosa at the University of Alabama. She was awarded the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay for her piece 'Exercises,' which was published in The Normal School. Three of her essays have been chosen as Notables in the Best American Essays series, and earlier this year she won the 2022 March Faxness Essay National Championship Tournament with her essay on Aimee Mann’s cover of the song “One.” Her debut essay collection, Nola Face, will be published with the Crux Series in Literary Nonfiction at the University of Georgia Press in 2024.</blockquote></span>Will Slatteryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15089022056676288637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-75027676967644391272022-12-13T04:30:00.000-08:002022-12-13T04:30:00.184-08:00Advent 2022, Dec 13, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Museums of Natural History: Essay Collections as Curation<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxv7GDFGFwytTwC0aZ0WL4MmKpXPT-zFZQaE_QBugBPV9PIaNVW2M9xSKlkkRP1q4EzKvthPB_w3kCYf-FbpqOUXVKnQOJKFkPdJxlbSaESswJu-C6pwh4YdjJnjMgAjvdOmBjPMhpdAxwuH0FFxnENqrUe30kg8Qh_YsFaYGaKRIj43AG3cM_5cpq/s1080/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec13.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1080" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxv7GDFGFwytTwC0aZ0WL4MmKpXPT-zFZQaE_QBugBPV9PIaNVW2M9xSKlkkRP1q4EzKvthPB_w3kCYf-FbpqOUXVKnQOJKFkPdJxlbSaESswJu-C6pwh4YdjJnjMgAjvdOmBjPMhpdAxwuH0FFxnENqrUe30kg8Qh_YsFaYGaKRIj43AG3cM_5cpq/w640-h372/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec13.gif" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><i><div><i><br /></i></div>Exhibit One</i><br /><br />I’ve long collected what’s been buried. <br /><br />As a child, I spent afternoons digging with my tiny pail, later with an industrial shovel because plastic was no match for my obsession. I dug everywhere—my brittle California yard, the salty beach shore, the elementary school sandbox. I was desperate to get beneath the surface.<br /><br />It was exhausting, dirty work. Digging marked my hands and clothes, left dark halfmoons under my nails. Sometimes I found treasures—pebbles, pennies, minerals, bones. I found old dog teeth and bullet casings, mucked feathers and sand dollars. I made up a story for each discovery. At the end of each day, I carried my collection home and displayed my findings in the windowsill like a natural history museum.<br /><br />Nothing much has changed. I’m still digging, still collecting artifacts. I’m still telling stories by uncovering what has been buried.<br /><br />My latest essay collection, <i>Halfway from Home</i>, is a curation of the self. Uncovering the stories from my past that led me to leave a chaotic home at 18 in order to chase restlessness, claiming places on the West Coast, Midwest, and East Coast, I examine how difficult it is to move forward when you long for the past. With my family ravaged by addiction, illness, and poverty; the nation increasingly divided; and the natural worlds where I once sought solace under siege by wildfire, tornados, and unrelenting storms, I turn to nostalgia as a way to grieve a rapidly-changing world. Excavating the stories and scars we bury, the essays in this collection examine contemporary sorrow, searching for how to build a home when human connection is disappearing.<br /><br />I wrote this book at the start of the end of the world. Like many, I could not leave my home or see my family, and I watched as the social, political, and environmental landscapes I knew disappeared seemingly overnight. I was buried by grief and so I wrote to dig myself out.<br /><br /><br /><i>Exhibit Two</i><br /><br />It is not possible to essay without the act of digging. The genre asks us to uncover the self by mining through the strata of memory, to uncover the story by going deeper.<br /><br />Essaying requires the same techniques as excavation. You must work slowly and proceed with caution. You first map out the area you hope to uncover, while acknowledging that what is beneath the surface is likely to sprawl in all sorts of unexpected directions, tree roots and mineral veins running jagged through the tidy plot at the surface.<br /><br />Begin by removing debris you will not need, distractions that threaten what you hope to uncover. Apply just enough pressure to break beneath the surface but not enough to damage what you uncover. When you do strike something—a memory, an image, an idea, a version of the self you thought long buried—brush away the soil carefully. Do not try to remove the artifact yet. Instead, survey the site to see where it has rested all this time. Consider the surroundings. <br /><br />When you finally begin the work of moving earth, remember to sift through what you plan to discard. Do not ignore what you were not looking for. Most minerals only shine when they are polished. Geodes must be split in order to discover what they hold, just like trees when searching for amber. Do not leave these riches behind.<br /><br />Like excavation, essaying is not without its dangers. The walls might collapse. You might be struck by falling debris. You might begin the important work of uncovering only to find that what you are searching for is already damaged, or worse, that you damage it in your quest. You might find that the artifact you are searching for has already been taken by someone else, or is lost altogether. <br /><br />If you find yourself buried beneath the rubble, remember your tools and training. Veer off the path to discover a new way. Tunnel yourself free.<br /><br /><br /><i>Exhibit Three</i><br /><br />Nonfiction writers are often accused of navel-gazing, of curling in on themselves like a fetus until their story is as small and insignificant as a bellybutton. But this ignores the fact that the navel once tied us to another body, and then another, an endless tethering back in time that leads to ancestors buried underground which thus ties us to fossils, to precious ore, to the microscopic organisms that lead to both deterioration and preservation.<br /><br />In order to tell our stories, we have no choice but to consider how they are part of a richer landscape. We cannot consider our personal histories without also telling the stories of our family trees, the ways they fork and split, the tangle of roots beneath the surface, which spread unseen up to five times as wide as the radius of the canopy. And because these roots work with the soil’s fungal networks to share messages and nutrients between trees of many species, we must consider how our stories are linked to many communities. Positioning the story of the self this way—one of humility rather than hubris—counters the claim that ego drives the essay. <br /><br />To broaden the story beyond the self, we must essay to uncover the artifacts of our lives but also those of others. We unearth family secrets, painful experiences, our own shames. We dig up the histories and selves that once were but that have been buried with time or violence perhaps our own willingness to forget or change. We dig up what was once buried in order to examine the ways the story has decayed while out of site, in order to understand what remains. We gather the artifacts; we make sense of the relics. <br /><br />In this way the essay is an exhumation. You participate in your own unburial. You uncover what you have concealed—sometimes for your own survival—and through that act, you have the opportunity to offer yourself understanding and forgiveness. Perhaps navel-gazing is not such a terrible comparison for the work of essayists after all, for the belly button is the first human scar and we write the world through our wounds. To display the scars of the self in an essay, as in a museum, is to claim a place above ground, in the light. <br /><br />Some of the earliest fossils of animal life are ammonite. Extinct shelled cephalopods, they bore the distinct intelligence of contemporary creatures like squid and octopi, the kind of intellect that rivals our own. Like humans today, ammonite have been found across the earth, of interest precisely because of their diversity and rapid evolution. Much like humanoid remains, they are important, too, for scientific dating of the geologic record and for what they teach us about how animals responded to climate change. In natural history museum displays of bright gemstones and stuffed exotic animals, however, it is easy to miss these small brown fossils. <br /><br />But look closely and you will see these fossilized shells are tightly curled in on themselves, a spiral reminiscent of our own in the womb before we first unfurled. <br /><br /><br /><i>Exhibit Four</i><br /><br />It is not possible to essay without the act of display. We catalogue the artifacts we have uncovered—those we were searching for, those that revealed themselves along the way—and curate a narrative. We write these stories because we believe they will be of beauty and utility to observers from other places, times, and lives.<br /><br />Like excavation, curation requires careful craft. The display you create changes with time and context—personal and political, national and environmental. It changes as you view it from many angles, enter from different directions, move through the museum clockwise or counter, in the early morning when the artifacts are bright beneath the lights or late evening when the setting sun illuminates even fingerprints on the glass. Remember that while you can construct the display and the story you hope to tell, you will have little control once the patrons arrive.<br /><br />As the curator of your natural history museum, consider the following: Who are you inviting into your display? What do you hope viewers will do with this story? What might they do once you relinquish control? What hope or hurt could happen? <br /><br />More important: Who have you forgotten—or refused—to welcome? Who is erased from your display? Who have you silenced? Is this your story to tell at all? Much can be said of colonization and the conquest of curation. Artifacts are stolen. Artifacts are sold. Artifacts are displayed by those far removed from the lives of those they seek to honor. Like stories, artifacts can be used for personal and political gain. If weaponized, they can be used to wound.<br /><br />Both the essayist and the archivist bear tremendous responsibility. By selecting which artifacts to display and which to file away, and by writing the placards that accompany the objects you have the power to shape truth. Museums offer opportunities for witness, and while it is wise to consider the possibility of your work, it is also prudent to consider the peril.<br /><br /><br /><i>Exhibit Five</i><br /><br />While writing <i>Halfway from Home</i>, the act of digging through my past brought up all sorts of nostalgic memories to the surface. I wrote about my childhood treasure hole, my father hiding gemstones and small ceramic animals for me to discover. I wrote about going berry picking with my family when my parents could not keep the cupboards full, how they managed to make something from nothing and feed us from that fruit. <br /><br />But as I dug, I discovered darker truths. Addiction tangled the roots of our family tree. Abuse was carved into the bones of our women like scrimshaw. Early members of my family made their living by contributing to the violent legacy of environmental conquest in America. <br /><br />The story of an artifact does not exist free from the bedrock that surrounds it, so I wrote, too, about the natural world. I wrote about the childhood wonder of pulling starfish from the coastal California tidepools and the adult horror of watching as my home state burns each year. I wrote about fleeing my chaotic childhood home to seek solace in the grassland prairies of Nebraska, where roots stretch endlessly underground to survive the roughest conditions, but how this vital ecosystem weakens with climate change. I wrote about finding an unexpected home in Massachusetts where the forest fungal networks share resources between species to protect the community even as throughout the pandemic humans would not do the same. I wrote to discover what it meant to live before the world was dying, when the tides were gentle, when monarchs clustered together for warmth each winter, when history was a hope rather than a hurt. <br /><br />And I wrote to uncover how to live now. The grief I felt lifted as I unearthed the stories for my essay collection. The more I wrote, pulled stories up from where they were buried to be visible at the surface, the more the ache receded. You see, excavation and the essay are used for exploration, but they can also be used for restoration, perhaps even rescue.<br /><br />Writing this book was no different than the love and labor of my childhood. I dug, uncertain what I would uncover once I got past the surface of memory, surprised by what had been buried—by others, by myself. I pulled ideas and images from the darkness, dusted them off, and displayed them in the light.<div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #0b5394;">*</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">Sarah Fawn Montgomery will be joining Sonya Huber for our next digital salon event, "Essays and Embodied Voices," on December 16th. See <a href="https://forms.gle/hFikvgAH7DE1CRaF6">here</a> if you'd like to join us over Zoom for the salon.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwVLU9XJdRxcqQCsNxAFwcLntm9HvL-m6EhWVnoii60LjQlWipbokBBGLBv7ycX4GMkvzG-UtCBOn4O_mMtc6IC-spvsKqyXlnN2-VEBhX3jnYkihGYYfrgbWMkRadYKKA31MZg3TT8nZzrS9A-A8Dp6pvkzKWf7t6s8a4N4xbpUz7LYlJ_lvyXUSH/s1363/essaydailysalon_121622poster%20(1).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1363" data-original-width="1353" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwVLU9XJdRxcqQCsNxAFwcLntm9HvL-m6EhWVnoii60LjQlWipbokBBGLBv7ycX4GMkvzG-UtCBOn4O_mMtc6IC-spvsKqyXlnN2-VEBhX3jnYkihGYYfrgbWMkRadYKKA31MZg3TT8nZzrS9A-A8Dp6pvkzKWf7t6s8a4N4xbpUz7LYlJ_lvyXUSH/w398-h400/essaydailysalon_121622poster%20(1).jpg" width="398" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #0b5394;">*</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="color: red;"><b>Sarah Fawn Montgomery's</b> latest collection, <a href="https://www.splitlippress.com/halfway-from-home"><i>Halfway from Home</i></a> was published with Split/Lip Press this November. Essays from this lyric essay collection on nostalgia, climate change, and searching for home during emotional and environmental collapse have appeared in <i>Bellingham Review</i>, <i>Crab Orchard Review</i>, <i>Fourth Genre</i>, <i>New England Review</i>, <i>Southeast Review</i>, <i>Sycamore Review</i>, and <i>Zone 3</i>. Several have been listed as Notable in <i>Best American Essays</i>. Dinty Moore calls this collection “intensely intimate” and Kwame Dawes says it is “a work of urgency, sensibility, and immediacy.” Sarah Fawn is also the author of <a href="https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814254868.html"><i>Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir</i></a> (The Ohio State University Press), as well as three poetry collections. She is currently an Assistant Professor of creative writing at Bridgewater State University.</span><br />Will Slatteryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15089022056676288637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6004423696675838467.post-83010266241884718482022-12-12T04:00:00.002-08:002022-12-15T12:07:45.847-08:00Advent 2022, Dec 12: Dave Madden, On Ending and Unending<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlArf470C_WuKviw3_l9f5p961g5EYlmV9voa0NJkS990ERwJPRTSpfV-Dp4ewOqqis4PZCZcE6NPcWT9DOqT6NB-9dkj3wXe5qFuL3tTHEA76wpq-cDdGL5TvEy8ps4FVvSRcbQGsqMc6sJ9Nln20jNGZuC3x9bLQ_onH222VRHdvYjGhxanh_aTl/s1080/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec12.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1080" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlArf470C_WuKviw3_l9f5p961g5EYlmV9voa0NJkS990ERwJPRTSpfV-Dp4ewOqqis4PZCZcE6NPcWT9DOqT6NB-9dkj3wXe5qFuL3tTHEA76wpq-cDdGL5TvEy8ps4FVvSRcbQGsqMc6sJ9Nln20jNGZuC3x9bLQ_onH222VRHdvYjGhxanh_aTl/w640-h372/advent22_header_15in-eachday-dec12.gif" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>On Ending and Unending</i></span></div><div><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br style="text-align: left;" /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave Madden</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</p></div></div><div><br /></div><div><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">At <a href="https://www.essaydaily.org/2020/12/2020-advent-calendar-dec-1-mike-martone.html">the start of Essay Daily’s 2020 Advent</a>, Michael Martone wrote (per Aquinas) that "without death life has no meaning.... Death defines, shapes incident into a shaped charge of meaning. But if death (a real death) defines, it also renders the writer mute.... So the memoirist’s first move is to simulate that death ... create an artificial parenthesis, a cyst of sorts to sort it out."</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m afraid of death.</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not so much the dying as the part afterward.</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m also writing my first memoir.</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s sorting out, among other things, a history of shame and gay sex.</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">That old French chestnut: <span style="font-style: italic;">La petit mort.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Whatever happened to queer happiness, Kevin Brazil asks in <a href="https://granta.com/whatever-happened-to-queer-happiness/">his essay of the same name</a>. It’s the right question to ask in a time when queer bleakness wins awards. Queer tragedy gets all the New York folks in a lather. But, as Brazil writes, "Maybe it isn’t possible to write about happiness at all.... Happiness leaves no trace on a state of blankness, and it is happiness because it leaves no trace."</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s <span style="font-style: italic;">un</span>happiness that scars, leaves a mark. The coming of unhappiness is the death of joy that gives joy meaning. Advent marks the season of comings, of preparation, of pending arrival. <span style="font-style: italic;">Joy to the world.</span> What is the meaning of the messiah’s coming? Is it an end (of this life, this world) that will give our lives meaning, or does it suggest another end, another death: the <span style="font-style: italic;">going</span> of the messiah, and whatever mark they might leave behind?</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rapture can be the start of your story or its end. It’s all in which parenthesis you favor.</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gut trouble runs in my family. My mother’s told stories about sitting at home as a teen and waiting for boyfriends to come pick her up for their date. She was an only child, in rural Appalachia, waiting for a man to deliver her anywhere else. She’d stand in the kitchen, looking out the window at the long country road that led to her house, and her stomach would roil and churn the whole time. "It was terrible," she told me. "I’d just get so sick."<br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cue Tom Petty: the waiting is the hardest part. Contrast this with cruising, anon hookups, where the anticipation is often hotter than the sex it precedes. The hardest part? On my way to a bathhouse, truckstop, or video arcade I sometimes have to pee three times an hour. I wouldn’t call it terrible, except retroactively. When the event you’ve waited hours (or days, or adulthoods) for is bad, and not for the first time, you return to an age-old question: <span style="font-style: italic;">Why did I do that again?</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Waiting as self-mesmerizing. What comes of our fantasies, our fantasies of coming and second comings, when they become reality? Is there a word for that accomplished disappointment? That advent-ure?</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In "<a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/samuel-r-delany-ash-wednesday/"">Ash Wednesday</a>", Samuel R. Delany is ‘worried about [his] trip up to New York to attend a party.’ It’s a party for men over the age of 50 who like to have sex with men over the age of 50. Delany—who, as he writes, is ‘known as a “sex radical”’—is all the same a stranger to such parties, but what worries him isn’t the party itself, it’s the many tiny scuffles that departures and transit present for a person of a certain age with a recent ADD diagnosis:</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘Would I arrive with phone and luggage intact? Would I be able to get back with everything I started out with? Would I be able to negotiate my medications, food? Sleep? With ADD wreaking havoc on logic and focus, would I be able to document the trip as I hoped?’</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think of that hope, the hope of every reporter, chronicler, essayist. <span style="font-style: italic;">If I can capture what is happening around me in words, I can look back later and learn what What Happened means.</span> Or it’s, <span style="font-style: italic;">Forgetfulness may have a stronger appetite than memory, but by writing this down I can even the score.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">For much of "Ash Wednesday," Delany does his job chronicling: "The bus has skipped Mount Laurel and is going express to New York City. The trees on the far and near sides of the fields beside the roads are all bare, and remind me of underwater sponges. Despite the bursts of warm weather, there is just old grass—some dull green—amidst browns and tans." But when it comes to his task of meaning-making, the parts won’t come together:</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">"On Ash Wednesday, one of those warm days, I only saw two people with the traditional cross of ash on their foreheads in the Gayborhood streets of Philadelphia. It seemed fewer than in former years. Are activities of the sexual sort, the real subject of this meditation, replacing it? Is there any connection at all? Am I taking this trip for sex, for friendship, or just to be able to spread information to people who need it or might benefit? Or all three? Some of them all, I suspect."</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the sex party, Delany heads north to the home of an old fuck-buddy and his partner, ruminates on the differences between a hovel and a barracks, and gets on a bus back home. </p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">"I think of myself as somebody who is interested in the differences, the differences between straight society and gay, the differences between male and female, but all of those presuppose a set of similarities on which those differences have to be marked out. Beginnings and endings are the hardest parts for thinkers who utilize such structures. Perhaps that means the best way to end this essay is to say, as of yet, it is not finished." Goes the end of this finished essay. </p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ash Wednesday, the day, is about beginnings as endings. <span style="font-style: italic;">Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.</span> Another stay against forgetfulness, one that sits at a distance from its Science Is Real cousin, <span style="font-style: italic;">You are made of stardust</span>. The secular version wants to lift you up, expand you to the farthest reaches of the universe. The Catholics suggest a little more humility. </p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">To what end? Humility and pride are secret siblings, like the rabbi in the old joke who wails "I am nothing! I am nothing!" while praying in the synagogue, but once the janitor is inspired to do the same, nudges the cantor and whispers, "Look who thinks he’s nothing." One effect of making yourself small is that the world around you—your material—gets bigger, which feels both scarier and more honest. Life is a mess we’re forever inspired by, but only in the interests of cleaning it up. Making a pretty shape. The Greeks called it hubris.</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">By concluding with the statement that the essay is not finished, Delany suggests "Ash Wednesday" has no ending, or that its ending, like the messiah, is TK. But without our ending, as we await it, what meaning can be made of what we just read?</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">A cold evening, many years ago. I’m 26 years old, and I’ve been standing silently in the dark of my bedroom for the last forty-five minutes, staring out my window and across three yards at the blazing windows of my neighbor’s house. I am waiting to see if he’ll walk into the frame, and waiting to see if he’ll be naked when he does so. He is a man over 50, a man I’ve never met or even seen outside his home, but he’s a man I like the shape of enough that this waiting, standing alone and watching in silence out a window, feels like nothing.</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The waiting is everything. At the end of this essay, you’re wanting to know whether the man will appear in the window. So was I.</p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p><blockquote><p><span style="color: red;">Dave Madden is the author of two books. His essays have appeared in <i>Zyzzyva, The Guardian, Lithub, Harper's</i>, and elsewhere. He teaches nonfiction in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco, and writes a fortnightly newsletter named <i><a href="https://shennymag.substack.com/">Shenny.</a> You can read the Behind the Music of this essay in <a href="https://shennymag.substack.com/p/shenny-how-the-sausage-was-made?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email">a recent Shenny</a>.</i></span></p><div><br /></div></blockquote></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0