Fear of Fiction

Once upon a time, a theoretically inclined graduate student at USC remarked that she had “gone beyond fiction.” Hardheaded gentlemen restrict their reading to biographies and history. Gio and Mike burn through fiction like a Los Angeles wildfire. In my desultory way I move through both fiction and nonfiction; yet with fiction I often find myself impatient with passages of description and realist trappings. My question for our little group is “What accounts for the renunciation of fiction by those who feel they’ve moved “beyond” stories and by those who find that they “learn” nothing from works without roots in facts?”  I have always been fascinated by this question but it became pressing after hearing a brief interview with DeLillo who said that he felt a writerly demand to do Falling Man , implying that fiction necessarily brings something to the event unobtainable elsewhere. what accounts for the antagonism….who wins?

writers under siege

anyone had to chance to read cynthia ozick’s literary rant on the april 2007 issue of harper’s? apparently she thought a good way to boost her literary legacy would be to piss on her readers and the hapless academics who, like us, read books that, like hers, have little commercial appeal.

nice.

i’ll write more on this when i’ve dug my way out of this mountain of student writing.

family guy on bin laden

one of my students alerted me to this. maybe you’ve all seen it (what do i know what people with television see?), but it blew me away. anyone knows when this aired? anything else i’ve missed?

two more 9/11 poems

after last thursday class, my students asked me if we could end the week (the last 10 minutes of the week) with something positive (lots of crying and gnawing of teeth in this class!). i found these two lovely poems — the sharon olds’ by browsing the atlantic monthly for an article i was looking for; the myra schneider from the online collection babylon burning.

before the poems, i’d also like to link to this great article from harper’s about firing rates and the training of our soldiers.

Week later.

Olds, Sharon. “Week later.” The Atlantic Monthly 290.1 (July-August 2002): 146
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 The Atlantic Monthly Magazine

 

A week later, I said to a friend: I don’t
think I could ever write about it.
Maybe in a year I could write something.
There is something in me maybe someday
to be written; now it is folded, and folded,
and folded, like a note in school. And in my dream
someone was playing jacks, and in the air there was a
huge, thrown, tilted jack
on fire. And when I woke up, I found myself
counting the days since I had last seen
my husband–only two years, and some weeks,
and hours. We had signed the papers and come down to the
ground floor of the Chrysler Building,
the intact beauty of its lobby around us
like a king’s tomb, on the ceiling the little
painted plane, in the mural, flying. And it
entered my strictured heart, this morning,
slightly, shyly as if warily,
untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness
and plenty of his ongoing life,
unknown to me, unseen by me,
unheard, untouched–but known, seen,
heard, touched. And it came to me,
for moments at a time, moment after moment,
to be glad for him that he is with the one
he feels was meant for him. And I thought of my
mother, minutes from her death, eighty-five
years from her birth, the almost warbler
bones of her shoulder under my hand, the
eggshell skull, as she lay in some peace
in the clean sheets, and I could tell her the best
of my poor, partial love,
I could sing her
out with it, I saw the luck
and luxury of that hour.

Myra Schneider
Stillness

In darkness let your fan of fingers open,
imagine amethyst’s purple crystals
at a geode’s heart liquifying to honey
until your face muscles loosen, your shoulders,
which have borne so much, begin to unlock
and stillness is a quilt over your body,
a feather lining within. Now the tock
of pulse emerges and breath passes quietly
as a slippered friend. Beyond the house tyres
whirr on tarmac and geese call as they rush
the sky. The grief of the bereaved will push
into your room and nameless losses sustained
by the displaced. Hold stillness and you may hear
rain on fruitless fields, grasses rising again .

essays written just after 9/11

i just found this list of essays written by progressive thinkers and writers in the couple of months that followed nine/eleven. i haven’t read any of them yet, but thought i’d post them here anyway. this is an essay by arundhati roy written on the first anniversary of nine/eleven that i also have not yet read.

2 great nine/eleven poems

check out suheir hammad’s “first writing since.” this was written only a few days after 9/11. a friend emailed it to me at the time. it’s reprinted in Trauma at Home: After 9/11, edited by judith greenberg and published by university of nebraska in 2003. also in this book is toni morrison’s “The Dead of September 11″:

“The Dead of September 11″
By Toni Morrison
Written September 13, 2001

Some have God’s words; others have songs of comfort for the bereaved. If I can pluck courage here, I would like to speak directly to the dead-the September dead.

Those children of ancestors born in every continent on the planet: Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas… born of ancestors who wore kilts, obis, saris, geles, wide straw hats, yarmulkes, goatskin, wooden shoes, feathers, and cloths to cover their hair. But I would not say a word until I could set aside all I know or believe about nations, war, leaders, the governed and ungovernable; all I suspect about armor and entrails. First I would freshen my tongue, abandon sentences crafted to know evil-wanton or studied; explosive or quietly sinister, whether born of a sated appetite or hunger; of vengeance or the simple compulsion to stand up before falling down. I would purge my language of hyperbole; of its eagerness to analyze the levels of wickedness; ranking them, calculating their higher or lower status among others of its kind.

Speaking to the broken and the dead is too difficult for a mouth full of blood. Too holy an act for impure thoughts. Because the dead are free, absolute; they cannot be seduced by blitz.

To speak to you, the dead of September, I must not claim false intimacy or summon an overheated heart glazed just in time for a camera. I must be steady and I must be clear, knowing all the time that I have nothing to say-no words stronger than the steel that pressed you into itself; no scripture older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you have become.

And I have nothing to give either-except this gesture, this thread thrown between your humanity and mine: I want to hold you in my arms and as your soul got shot of its box of flesh to understand, as you have done, the wit of eternity: its gift of unhinged release tearing through the darkness of its knell.

david grossman’s eulogy for his son uri

there are only three israeli writers i’ve read, david grossman, amoz oz, and a. b. yehoshua. on august 11 they appeared at a joint press conference to call for peace with lebanon. two days later, grossman’s son, 20, was killed in lebanon while serving in the army. it was 48 hours to the official cease fire. the death of this boy has struck me deeply. our writers, the writers we love, are the voices of our imaginary and often our souls. those we really love, we are capable of loving more than we love our friends. they become soulmates in a way that is magically free of the constraints of time and space and the demands of everyday life (this is why, if you love a writer very much, you don’t want to meet her). the quality of this love is platonic to the highest degree, in the best possible sense. i love these three men. i love their novels. i am moved by their lifelong fight for justice in israel and palestine. here’s grossman’s eulogy for his son as translated by the guardian.

don’t come knocking

we just saw this wim wenders movie, and although wim wenders can be slow, this movie captured my imagination in a way that only wim wenders does. when i came to the US (america!) i had recently seen and loved paris, texas, and that infatuation with the west never left me. whenever i drive in the west (it’s been years now, unfortunately), i feel in the middle of a western movie, and i don’t mean john wayne. i mean wim wenders. maybe wenders approaches the mythology of the west with the same spirit with which i approach it — as a european brought up by western, spaghetti and otherwise. to many of us europeans, america is not the teeming streets and urban canyon of new york, but the sandy, scorched desolation of the west, with a lovely soundtrack of horse hooves, the heels of cowboy boots, and a languorous slide guitar.

because of all the discussions on WLTW, i have been tuned in to which representations of masculinity turn me off (or even make me angry) and which, instead, feel interesting to me. in don’t come knocking, the protagonist, played by sam shepard, is a used up actor who’s done too much drinking, drugging, and whoring and is now worried that life has slipped away. his attempts at reconciliation with the children he has disseminated, the woman he loved, and his mother, are clumsy, childish, and maybe selfish, but i felt touched by the desire for closeness the old man feels (in real life, sam shepard looks a lot more youthful). closeness is hard business, and you’re lucky to remember to look for it while the people who might want you are still around.

ultimately, i’m turned off, really turned off, by violent and brutish masculinity, which may serve a cinematic and textual purpose, but frightens and repels me in the way in which, i suppose, it does most women, in different ways.

but i’m grossly generalizing.

maybe.

real-life other texts: do the right thing

independently and together, the bush administration and the israeli government are making sure the world hates jews and white americans as much as possible for the longest possible time.

last night i saw do the right thing, which tapped into the reservoir of anger that is filling up inside me, and therefore resonated more deeply than it would have at another, calmer time. there are four constituencies in the film: the blacks who own the neighborhood, the whites who have done business in it for the longest time, the newly-arrived, ever-enterprising asians, and the cops. towards the end a black kid says, off screen if i remember correctly, that one of the cops was black. i don’t remember any of the cops being black, but that’s besides the point: authority and power (guns, batons, and pepper spray) tend to bleach out personal and political identity. we see this all the time.

in spite of the fact that the whites (sal and sons) have been in the ‘hood longer than some of the movie’s black characters, they are colonizers. kind colonizers are still colonizers. long-time colonizers (the white land owners in zimbabwe, the boer majority ex-government in south africa, etc.) are still colonizers. the children of colonizers are colonizers. sal acknowledges this at the end when he pays up mookie in spite of the fact that he started the riot that burned down sal’s pizzeria.

the asian shop owners are not colonizers in the same way. as they cry out during the riot, they are not white. they are not black, either, but their claim to be black tickles the rioters and dissipates their rage. maybe spike lee was loath to see these new immigrants’ shop go up in flames in his film. the so-called LA riots took care of that scruple a couple of years later.

the truly, irredeemably bad guys are the cops. i don’t think cops are bad (in the movie and in real life) because of the power their represent, but because of the power they have and abundantly use. this is what makes the united states so loathsome these days: it doesn’t even pretend to obey laws and treaties it itself signed into being. it bullies, kills, and maims because it can.

i saw this film as a timeless vignette of ethnic conflict everywhere. the blacks are the palestinians, the whites are the jews, the asians are the lebanese, the cops are the united states.

i am not a supporter of violence. i think armies should be dismantled and weapons taken apart. i think people should take abuse without returning it and be all the stronger for it. i think we should promote other people’s happiness to the same extent that we promote ours. but i do understand rage and the desire to kill. i feel it inside myself and i fight it. i’ve gotten good at fighting it. these days, i get angry temporarily and privately, and find ways that feel constructive to me to utilize my anger. i write thoughtful and well-worded letters to the papers. i sign petitions and join movements and mass actions. when i have it, i put my energy into organizing people for peace, justice, and a functioning democracy in the place where i live.

in lee’s words, i try to do the right thing.

this doesn’t mean i don’t understand, and feel, the overpowering anger.

Real-Life Other Texts

 

 

I spend a lot of time in the basement—out of necessity for online work and out of a desire for cool solitude where I indulge my various cultural obsessions in my half-assed way. Because I am an obsessive completist/listmaker, I often stand paralyzed before immersion into the texts that compel me. Nevertheless I find the time flying by as I contemplate things which seem rooted in my basement life and difficult to “share” as public objects. But here is the start of explaining things that have recently caught my attention, bringing me to spare many hours on fleeting sounds and images:

 

Emusic:  I cannot get over the fact that I can make CD’s and DVD’s on my computer. This seems like a miracle, having grown up with the hard reality of vinyl and still pissed off on the way CD’s skimp on liner notes and images. Then I discover…get this…that I can download fucking music off the internet….so I subscribe to emusic.com, a site devoted to independent music, and suddenly I become obsessed with playlists, sequences, and music networks (one song leading to another artist and then to another song). I have downloaded the Tindersticks, Howlin’ Wolf,a collection called American Primitives: Raw Pre-War Gospel, and the Mekons (the band closest to my heart probably—I identify easily with their romantically tinged cynicism and hybrid status between the anger of punk rock and the detached resignation of old country) So the Mekons leads me to Jon Langford’s “alt-country” band the great Waco Brothers and to Sally Timms solo records and to the compilations put out by Bloodshot Records and to the Handsome Family, a husband and wife duo who love country darkness and the irony of not taking serious themes ironically.  So I sit at the computer night after goddamn night, waiting for songs to download on my slow connection, then I compile them on itunes into playlists packed with personal secret meaning, then I burn them onto CD’s which I lovingly label and put into piles volatile with stored sound, demanding to be heard.  Soon all this music may overwhelm me, especially as I connect it with my own little private basement world. I saw a live performance of George Jones recently and I could not believe I was out in public seeing a real live human being performing music. How do I negotiate between old legendary George out there on the stage and my secret friends on emusic who do not get me a job, do not put me on the road to a happy marriage, do not help me finance the mortgage on a house or, in fact, in any way clarify the future?  I ask you, what is more real, the lovesick country girl who hangs herself in the song “The Butcher Boy” or the job announcement that proclaims I must be comfortable with spreadsheets and databases? I have a fantasy where Howlin’ Wolf throws Dean So-and-So to the floor in the midst of the raucous fish fry/wang dang doodle in Abyssinia Ned’s juke joint.