On trying

2010 has been a trying year.  And we live in trying times.  The bureaucracy of the university tries our patience (surprise!), and trying to pay bills in this new economy is – to say the least – an interesting experience in trial and error.

Writing is all about trial and error too.

Nope, nope nope,  you say:  this doesn’t work,  But THIS – image, moment, surprising plot development, or unseen until now character flaw in a flawless hero – this does work. 

Perhaps the motto for 2011 shouldn’t be, as the old AVIS blurb states, “WE TRY HARDER.”  Maybe the motto is: try more and try different. 

If you’re a writer, try some acting. If you’re an actor, try some writing.  If you’re a jewelry maker, try setting down your memoirs (yes, Hilary, that means YOU!).  If you’re a musician try writing about music instead (Hi Jasper!).  If you hate literary forms, try some strict ones (the sonnet, the ghazal, the fairy tale).  If you’re a form nut, read one of the Dada Manifestoes.  Then write your own.   

Actor-Professor Eric Barr suggests a plan of action for 2011.
Think you can’t accomplish one?

Maybe not. 

But it’s definitely worth a try.

On inconveniently alive writers

Today I started reading W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, after glaring at it on my bookshelf for the past 3 weeks. I had begun the Rings of Saturn (on the recommendation of Aimee Bender) a few years ago, but had put it down. Too dense. I just didn’t like it.

“How can you not like Sebald?” several writers have asked me with complete incredulity.  “You love German, speak German, admire German art, and love German literature!”   

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? – was the unspoken question.

“He’s so brilliant.”

“And how sad that he’s dead.”

Interestingly, I had a similar set of conversations about Bolaño’s SAVAGE DETECTIVES two years ago.

“I just can’t get through it,” I told someone. “There are all those prostitutes talking about philosophy and politics, and I don’t mind prostitutes talking philosophy, but I want them to sound at least a little like real people or else sound like the characters in Sade.”

Heads shook at this.

“How can you not like Bolaño…. he’s all about metafiction, the postmodern, magical realism.”  Etc etc.

“Well, I read Nazi Literature of the Americas and I love that, and I love a Distant Star.”

“But 2066!  His death was such a tragedy.”

Etc etc.

Dead authors are great. Their corpus is complete, and they can’t change on you or quick write something unexpected. They are under your control, and you can safely idolize them even if you aren’t sure (as in the case of Bolaño) what their actual life story was.

But anyway, back to Sebald.

So there I was reading the first of the 4 “biographies’ in The Emigrants.  And as I was reading I kept on repeating one word over and over and over again.

“handke handke handke handke”

“He sounds like a poor man’s Peter Handke,” I shouted – to the dismay of my husband and daughter, who were both trying to update their own blogs.

Peter Handke is a bothersome – if not downright pain in the ass -- authorial hombre.

1. He is alive and kicking while these other authors are dead.
2. He’s a problem because his aesthetic has changed remarkably at least twice
3.  He went To Slobodan Milosevic’s funeral and said something nice about him.
4. He has made pro Serbian remarks and comments.

I admit -- I groaned audibly when I read about 3 and 4. 

(Although it’s typical: he’s the one who had the audience locked into the theater during the first performance of “Insulting the Audience.”  I wouldn’t put it past him to go to Milosevic’s funeral BECAUSE people begged him not to.)

Because of these 4 items, no one reads Handke in this country. No academic critics write about him, and I have to admit, I don’t like his new books so much, and haven’t read the most recent one.

BUT.

The fact remains that Peter Handke is a genius.  He singlehandedly (with a bit of help from the more respected Thomas Bernhard [dead!!!!] and Patrick Susskind) has just about reinvented how German narrative can work, and how spare the German language can be, when you compress it enough.  He has written breathtakingly weird, funny, heartbreaking novels and a hybrid memoir/biography about him and his mother that still is one of the most earth shattering reads you can have. 

He wrote the play Kaspar – still performed and valued. 

And in the 80’s he correctly identified the challenge of the writer to outstrip the acts of commodification – having to wake up every morning and think of a way to beat out the flattening of art by commercial television and publicity tactics.

And by the way, Sebald LOVED Peter Handke (aha!  I knew it!), and wrote on him extensively. 

So, clearly, this famous dead author was deeply influenced by this weird, unpleasant, and inconveniently still very much alive writer.

Keep em coming, Mr. Handke, and I promise I’ll try to read your latest book now.

P.S. -- This Christmas as you order the unreadable Rings of Saturn, consider putting some of the following into your shopping cart:

Short Letter, Long Farewell

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

Across

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Kaspar and other plays

The Afternoon of the Writer

A Moment of True Feeling

Children’s Story

The Weight of the World

The Jukebox

pps -- to read a high-culture take on PH as I rock the postmodern vocab of the feminist literary critic, check out my dense "essay" on Handke's essays in Postmodern Culture: On the Bull's Horn with Peter Handke

On blame

"They are no goddamn good!"

My father, Leonard Hammer was a big declaimer of this sentence. He said it a lot. And he said it loudly. 

Here are some of the people my dad designated, when he said “they are no goddamn good:”

African Americans and Black Africans

Asians, in particular the Japanese

Gay and queer persons, in particular gay men

Hispanics, in particular Puerto Ricans

Indians – both Native American and South Asian

Israelis

Irish-Americans

Italian-Americans

Jews

The Pope

I am making my father sound like a horrible person.  And in some ways he was.  He was certainly a racist, and was deeply prejudiced against people who held religious and sexual practice values different than his own.  He was, like many White Male straight Protestant Americans, unaware of how White privilege informed his experience and politics.  Like many working class people, my dad was unwilling and or unable to deal with how class shapes working life and opportunities in the US. 

But he was not – to use his own words -- “no goddamn good.”

My father was also generous to a fault, and when he actually met and talked to a person, who belonged to a member of the above list, came away and said “Wow!  That person is nothing like what I imagined they would be!”  (this doesn’t redeem him, by the way – but it does suggest that he wasn’t completely awful). 

My dad gave to charities.  And he also apologized when he was wrong. He apologized to me the day before he died, for all the crappy things he did.

The suggestion I am trying to make is that no one is “no goddamn good.”   It’s just never that simple. 

We are all a complex alloy.  Sarah Palin is (argh) an alloy and every Israeli and every Palestinian is one too.  Even Osama Bin Laden is not completely "no goddamn good" (although, I admit, that's a stretch).  Barack Obama is not perfect, and neither is your favorite political leader/religious authority (including the Dalai Lama).

Being Leonard Hammer’s daughter, I do my share of beserker-style yelling and screaming.  I am enraged as anybody about the following situations:

1.     Unemployment

2.     The Tax cuts for the rich

3.     The cuts to education in California and in the US

4.     The failure of the Dream Act

5.     The greenhouse gas emissions from the US

6.     The war in Afghanistan

7.     The failure of peace talks between Israel and Palestine

However, I think too much blame of the “they are no goddamn good” kind is being passed around.  And as a result we are losing opportunities to get things done.  We are thinking way way inside the box when we do this Leonard Hammer type of responding. 

So this week, I am going to try not to say “they are no goddamn good.”  No matter how much I want to.  And no matter how mad I am about whatever it might be.

And I am going to try to be aware of how my own access to White privilege determines my responses and my words.

Wishing you all a wonderful Christmas week if you celebrate and if you don’t, a beautiful and wonderful winter week.

on smallness

"come closer"

This past fall a student sent me a youtube link.  The link took me to Anis Modjani --  poetry slam artist, and his spoken word piece “come closer.” 

If you haven’t seen it, you should watch it, at the end of this post.

Trained intellectuals are taught to look for bigness:  to talk about tautologies, theories, cultural trends, and otherwise big ideas.  As a trained intellectual I have spied out and analyzed these things.  I wrote many articles and several books on ideas and histories of ideas.

But as an artist, I have always loved and been interested in the small. 

When I was 4 I touched a slug by accident in a forest in Washington State.  Its skin was surprisingly cool. 

When I was 7 I walked to Central Park by myself with my friend Hilary. She says I stood up to a policeman who told us not to play with the water fountain or something (a typical early 1960’s situation—authorities forbidding all manner of things to children—it explains a lot about babyboomers). 

I don’t remember the incident.

But I do remember gathering these weird looking brown pods filled with seeds that were lying all over the ground in the park.  They were so shiny, and as the leaves seemed to die, they were filled with secret aliveness.  I remember our feet literally pounding the cold pavement of Park Avenue.  The light was very bright.

My first lover had the incredibly pale skin of certain Russians.  He had black hair and a gloriously hooked nose.  I liked to run my finger up and down the bridge of it.

Even my academic studies reveal a secret love of the small.  German for example, is secretly petite or should I say klein.

Impossible! you say.  What about the systems of Kant, Hegel and Marx?

Yes, but German is a crazy language that only looks big. It’s really made up of necklaces of word-beads. The really big is made of the really tiny.

No wonder, I write short.  I prefer the tale to the novel, the ghazal to the epic.

And the specific to the general.

I wrote my first poem when I was 6. It was about clouds.

I wrote my first story about the pink carnations that my father liked.  In the story my dead dad and I walk around Los Angeles.  But it starts and ends with those pink buds.

I like to share these small things. 

Writing gets up close and shares these reactions in words.

Teaching can sometimes share the small things.  But often it can’t, and I think now that I’m a writer, teaching pleases me less because I have found new and more immediately small ways to share myself and the things that matter – that connect me to myself and to you.  By sharing my words – not about tautologies and theories and postmodernisms (although I love these still) -- but about my sensations and memories.  I can even sometimes speak these directly and share with you the heat-of-the-real-moment of fragmentary enunciation.

When I do that, I approach, in a small way, what Anis is able to do. 

The diminutive is always present to us – literally and figurative graspable.  A pod of words you can hold in your fist.

So, come closer.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATC5OGh3adg

On classrooms, women, and rage (with thanks to Jo Scott Coe)

Now that most teaching in the Humanities and in K-12 is done by women, does this mean that feminist issues are bypassed in the classroom? Women have power, after all. We stand at the front of the room. We wield the chalk or the marker, and we wield grades, and signatory sheets on Ph.D. examinations.  We are, some argue, clearly in the post-feminist phase of education. 

Gender problems solved!  Hooray! 

But I’m seeing something different.  There is still – at least in education (and I suspect elsewhere) -- a persistent questioning of women in authority:  with the authorizing of women as agents of expertise, mastery, and judgment.  And those problems come – more often than not – from other women.   

I am seeing it come from younger women.  Whether these students see me as their evil mother, grandmother, or babysitter is unclear. But what is clear is the rage that I see many young women bringing into the classroom.  And it is sometimes directed against me personally.  Such a thing happened to me recently.  Twice.

Other versions of this story circulate. It isn’t always inter-generational.

A young female colleague has confessed to me that she has the same problem.  She has a female graduate student who persistently seeks to undercut her, subvert what she is doing in class.  She feels disrespected. She is disrespected.  She tried talking to the student.  The student had a fit and said she was being disrespected.  The result? Silence. The long-standing hate-filled, pursed-lipped silence between women. The power struggle that dare not speak its name.  Another instance of feminist solidarity broken apart, ruined, spoiled.  Tainted.

Who do we talk to about this?  Students have the ombudsperson.  To whom do female professors and teachers go?  We have no one. Are we being “harassed”?  Not exactly.  Are we being physically threatened?  No.  But my colleague and I are being undermined. What office do you go to for that? 

I don’t know how to begin, even, to talk about this semi-spoken rage, this Schopenhauerian ressentiment that circulates between women teachers, graduate students, and undergraduate students and that radiates outward to staff (an increasingly female cohort) – making education a practice in bitchery, incompetence, and denial.

But I want to name it. 

There are exceptions to this trend of course. Wonderful relationships that develop between women teachers, and women grad students, and undergraduates.  I work with an undergraduate staff person, whom I admire deeply.  I believe that we are good colleagues. 

But there are these other power-relations. 

And these ones are not good. 

I scan my student roster nervously.  I fear to see certain female names on it. 

And fear in education is never a positive thing.

I speak this fear because I do not believe it is necessary or inevitable; I address the problem of rage, in hopes that we can change the way we interact with each other now that we have – finally – managed to enter the corridors of power. 

I speak it because I think we can’t get to the next place – the next stage of freedom  (be it 4^th wave or 5^th wave feminism)– until we fix this unspoken, repressed and unaddressed problem in the ways that we interact with each other in the increasingly "feminized" but not yet truly feminist educational arena.

Barbé Maria Tirtov-Romanov Hammer, 1920-1999

Sonnet for the one

We did not hug or kiss much. We loved most when we shopped.
When I was fat, she bore witness in the dressing rooms at Saks;
I sobbed and screamed at shorts that would not squeeze on. I mopped
Up the tears. She sat and smiled like the Buddha, accepting. Back
At Schraffts I vowed to diet after a hot fudge sundae. “My last
One,” I declared. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not.” Then I got thin at camp.
She nodded, agreed it was probably smart, but she herself resisted
social svelteness, lounged luxuriant in folds of flesh at Bonwits, as I vamped
formal wear and blue jeans, coats, shoes, at Bloomies and I forget where else.
Oh yes, the GAP -- when my father died. She sent me there for a purple dress.
“Black is boring,” she said. “So expected.” Until her last year she pressed
Me to buy “a decent outfit” with her hard earned cash. The final gift felt
Extravagant: A pair of moss green shoes from France. She was generous –
I had forgotten that. Remember now the sizing of the love we shared. Enormous.

On professorial privilege

I feel so overworked and so under-appreciated (not to mention underpaid) at the university these days, that I tend to see the humanities professor – particularly a non-researching one, such as myself – as a low-level bureaucrat. We go to endless meetings, and as an occasional treat, we get to “entertain the kids” a bit like a clown at a birthday party. I don’t feel respected very much either. My students think I’m a weird older person (which is certainly true), and my colleagues think I’m a loser scholar who is now messing around with poetry and fiction, instead of doing what she’ is supposed to do (research) and really ACHIEVING something in THE WORLD OF IDEAS (sometimes, I think they are right).

Because life is hard in the academy, and it is really hard in the University of California system, and it is REALLY REALLY hard at the poor campuses (Riverside and Merced), it’s easy to forget that professors possess considerable privilege, and if they are white, upper class, heterosexual, able, and CIS (I just learned that term from my daughter [thanks to a wonderful former student for the spelling correction]), then they -- which means we -- have all of that privilege on top of the professor thing.

When you are a professor you convey mastery, genius, knowledge, expertise, and a certain scary something that means you are the authority (pronounced a la Eric Cartman) in the room. No one (other than a tycoon or another professor [especially in the sciences]) is going to fuck with you. It’s a little bit like male privilege, frankly, in so far as you get to swing your Lacanian knowledge phallus around the joint, or threaten to. And the threat is enough, generally, to create a certain awed hush, a reverent expectation, whenever you open your mouth to make a cultural pronouncement.

Folks, that’s power.

The fact of my own privilege was brought home to me last night, when I joined a table of high-school teachers and community college teachers all gathered to celebrate a mutual friend’s book publication. These teachers were all bright, attractive, younger, middle class and white.

And you know what? I scared them.

I scared them because they had learned already that I was OF THE UNIVERSITY. They were quiet. Until, I used the word ”bitch” and promised someone to guard his or her drink. Then the situation shifted.

Professors are rightfully busy and proactive in protecting their rights, fighting against tuition fee raises, and trying to battle for thinking in the increasingly commodified university. BUT, we usually forget and dismiss our sibs, our partners in arms, our -- in a very real sense – comrades in k-12, and in community colleges. Teachers regard academics as the enemy, because we often are the enemy. Or at best, we are semi-interested liege lords presiding over the lands supervised and tilled by our vassals and our vassals’ vassals.

I think we need to name the ways in which we are privileged, and begin the uncomfortable and necessary process of stepping away from that privilege, rolling it up into a box marked “HISTORY”, and moving on from it. So that we in education can all help each other, as well as model some actually progressive behavior for our students. So we can get some real intellectual work done.