michelle cliff’s free enterprise (1993)

i can’t wait to teach this in class! i read two others novels by cliff, abeng and no telephone to heaven, and at the time i found them both too challenging to be satisfying (i’ll try ‘em again, especially the latter). free enterprise is about the slave trade and abolitionism, and it focuses in particular on the life of mary ellen pleasant, a free born african american who lent lots of energy and money to the abolitionist cause. pleasant was a wealthy hotel owner in san francisco, and lived her life with a sense of entitlement that inspires. at least this is the way she’s portrayed in free enterprise. she is cool and tough and totally no nonsense. she’s also portrayed as butch, which is cool. (i already knew about MEP because my friend lynn hudson wrote a very good book on her).

when john brown was captured there was a note from MEP in his pocket.

one strong theme of this book is the amnesiac quality of history, in particular the fact that while john brown the-white-man ended up mythologized, mary ellen pleasant the-black-woman was all but forgotten. in enterprise, pleasant doesn’t hide her bitterness about this erasure, and neither does cliff, who peoples her book with other “forgotten” women, annie christmas, a jamaican gens inconnue, and alice and clover cooper, two white americans. there is much wordplay in enterprise, and i cannot begin to unfold the historical and popular resonances of these fictional characters without some research. but clover and annie are beautiful characters, very much alive and, also, very much hurt by the marginalization that is forced upon them.

this is not an easy novel. it is written in fragments and skips from one character to the next and back and forth in time. cliff writes in a lyrical and condensed way, and some of these chapters read like terse, somewhat experimental prose poems. but the storylines are ultimately not difficult to follow, and the fate of mary ellen, annie, alice, and clover is brought to the page with great poignancy and emotional impact.

i loved reading this. it’s a short book, but it stays with you. you want to read it slowly, sink into cliff’s expert, tightly controlled, effortless-looking writing, enjoy the beauty of her language and the passion of her feelings. it is a book with a number of intellectual challenges, too: what does capitalism hold in store for the free african american? what is the significance of history? what is the meaning of a life dedicated to a lost cause? what makes the ex-slave truly free? how can the wounds of the past be healed? are there injuries that are simply too deep ever to scar over? can women and men validate each other or are they put at irreconcilable odds by history and birth?

i highly recommend this neglected jewel.

willa cather’s the professor’s house

i had heard this book mentioned with great admiration a number of times, and then simon read it and was blown away (couldn’t stop lamenting the fact that the book was finite and he would one day be done reading it), and then i finally read it. we all know that willa cather is amazing, but this book is special in a number of ways. the time when i read her pioneer stories is shrouded in mnemonic fog, but if i remember correctly those books were testimonies to endurance in hardship and, to some extent, a pioneering joyfulness (don’t quote me on this). this book is not dissimilar to death comes to the archbishop in its melancholy, though here the melancholy assumes existential and psychological dimensions that are as magnificent as the mesas of the southwestern landscape where (part of) professor takes place (the other part takes place in a college town on the shores of lake michigan).

the question of the setting is half the story and half the intrigue of the book. without giving anything away in case you haven’t yet read it, i’ll say that one of the most impressive features of this novel is its structure, which is a totally baffling one, a daresay experimental. the book is divided in three parts: a longish narrative of hypercivilized familial intercourse set in the north, another longish narrative of cowboy life set in the lovely american southwest, and a very short and astonishing psychological denouement. the settings, the subject matters, and the narrative approaches (the first and third parts are in the third person, the second is in the first) give these sections strongly different flavors. technically, the structure is unbalanced. in reality, it’s perfect. one has to admire cather’s confidence in putting out such a strange book.

at the end, when you look back at the book you’ve just read, your first reaction is something along the lines of “what the hell”!?!

cather seems to contend here with the problem of being-in-the-world. her characters (at least a couple of them) are people shattered by a landscape whose nourishment is so rich their bodies/souls cannot take it. or maybe it’s life — if you live it too much, too fully, too intensely and seriously, it will burst you at the seams.

the professor’s house is too small and rickety a shell to contain the enormity of the human soul and the human being-in-the-world.

i could go on, say more, but before it do: has anyone else read this?

stwah dogs

i'm posting this here because i feel my rabid feminist takes on things (rabid? who, me?!) are safer in this here blog thingie than in we like to watch. at least here i'm the friggin' administrator, goshdarnit.

ah, dustin hoffman. he and al pacino are some sort of twins in my mind, al pacino the essence of cool and high seriousness, dustin hoffman a well-intentioned buffoon, a genius of high comedy. in this film he is absolutely great. my only regret is that academics never fare well in popular culture. (li'l pony was frustrated at tom hanks' and ian mckellen's representations of "the academic" in the da vinci code, and drew my attention to the fact that popular culture is not kind to academics. a few days later i hung out with a good friend, herself an academic though at a different university, who thinks of academia as one of the roots of all evil. these two conversations made a difference to my appreciation of straw dogs. thanks to both my friends, who helped, in their own different ways).

maybe academics deserve to be relentlessly satirized and presented as pretentious idiots who are unable to handle the simplest hurdles of real life while being utterly full of themselves. god knows this is how i often see myself and my colleagues. god knows i often think we end up in academia because we are seriously unable to handle the real world. having never spent much time in any other work environment, real or not, though, i cannot say whether this is a feature of academics or of people in general. maybe we are all quite unable to come to terms with the real world.

i watched straw dogs in two installments, because i was too angry after the first half to finish it. i had just read jeff's thoughtful and well-intentioned but (to me) frustrating comment on black narcissus that focused on its (the movie's) investigation of masculinity (see under june 20th). jeff's comment, coming at the same time as the very masculine senate debate on the war in iraq and the world's attention on the equally masculine fifa world cup had the unpleasant effect of making me feel erased. here is a film that is very much about women, and what do you know, people find a way of turning it around and casting it in terms of masculinity. i felt depressed.

as you can imagine, straw dogs was not what i needed to see. because, you see, straw dogs isstraw dogs is hard to take for a variety of reasons, but what really incensed me is that, to some extent, or at points, amy enjoys it. what message does this enjoyment convey? why is it there?

the second part, which i watched the following day, somewhat mollified me. once he turns into the great male avenger, david become utterly ridiculous and despicable, more so even than when he was a self-absorbed and timid mathematician. peckinpah, clearly, is not out to celebrate violence but to investigate the deep, murky, perverted forces that draw us to it. thank goodness for david's lurid smirk at the end, for his sad self-satisfaction for having effected a bona fide massacre under her wife's traumatized eyes, having saved the dangerous village idiot, and being in his own damn car, driving the poor bastard to the doctor's! never mind that his wife is sitting at the house surrounded by corpses and, once again, exposed to a myriad dangers. 

as in all films of this kind (the recent discussion on history of violence, which has in my opinion no redeeming qualities, comes to mind), depicting extreme violence in order, i allege, to condemn it smacks however of bad faith and pornography. there must be ways to alert us to the hideousness and power of violence without making us cheer for blood and revenge, without turning us own, without titillating us.

i know people think of this as a dilemma, but i don't find it to be so. there is no merit whatsover in my opinion in arousing in the viewer the selfsame feelings the film is condemning. if i were reynolds i'd have at least a dozen films at my disposal now that exemplify a different use of violence — equally critical, equally powerful, less pornographic (maybe

simon pointed out to me that the fact that this discussion is taking place proves that the critical aims of the film are ultimately successful. i don't agree. we are the educated public (didn't i already say we are the smug academics?). and how hard, even for us, not to feel contempt for weak men who are unable to defend their female partners and are instead slavish to the dictamina of civility and meekness. producing truly subversive art cannot, ever, even for a minute, reinforce the damaging stereotypes that cause so much anguish. i hold filmmakers responsible for this.