I just finished reading the YA novel FEED and it is totally freaking me out. What a nasty horrible little book that is. And how beautifully it sneaks up on you.
I remember going to see A Clockwork Orange with my filmmaker boyfriend when I was 17 years old. He admired the cinematography but allowed that this was one sick film. I felt overjoyed by it, and have seen it probably 20 times. I have taught it at least 10.
Huh?
I’m a feminist. I am a pacifist. That film is – shall we say – ultraviolent. And the book is worse.
A year before that, I was reading an abridged version of Voltaire’s novel CANDIDE, in French for AP French.
“Psst,” said a very wealthy, high-toned classmate to me during study hall at our ritzy all girls private school in NYC. “I found an English translation of it and there’s all this SEX in it. And—“she added. “Some lady got her ass chopped off. It’s really weird. “
I have read and taught that weird little book probably 30 times. Each time it’s a roller coaster. And when I get to the end, and I say what I said when I read it all the other 29 times.
“What does the hell does it mean?” And then --
“Shit – what are we supposed to do?”
And then
“Well, we’d better do something to fix things.”
That’s how satire works. I’ve written about satire as an academic, but not as a reader and admirer of a genre that takes you by the scruff of your neck, throws you on a roller coaster ride, and then – right when you’re getting off and getting ready to puke -- kicks you in the teeth. Several times. All that vomit sliding back down your throat. Disgust, Horror. Why did I go on that ride? you ask yourself. Because you’ve been tempted by the thrill of it. Sex, violence, drugs, Gulliver pissing all over Lilliput. YAY!
Yay?
A Clockwork Orange -- both the novel and the film -- thrills you with language. So does CANDIDE. So does Zamyatin’s under-read novel WE (which heavily influenced Orwell’s 1984 [and influenced is a polite way of putting it]). So does Catch 22. And so does FEED. As a student of mine said once many years ago – the satiric hero is the person we don’t want to admit we’re like, but we crave all the things that person craves. And satire shows us ourselves.
Yuck.
It’s what great writing can do. Trick you into getting ethical. Trick you into kind a sorta getting something like a conscience.
A Modest Proposal, the Handmaid’s Tale, Volpone, American Psycho.
Damn you, Satirists!
Don’t stop writing.
On Plates
Texasware
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
On Jewishness
What to do about being a Jew (by choice)
It’s almost repentance/new year time for Jewish people, and I think I have never felt as uncomfortable with my Jewishness as now. I converted 14 years ago (I think), and in the 90’s it was very cool and fun to be Jewish. Then 09/11 happened, and Bush happened, and then all the terrible anti-Islamic, anti-Arab sentiment happened, and then Israel got so mean, and suddenly being Jewish felt terrible. And then going to synagogue felt terrible, because it was Israel my country right or wrong, and people got mad, if you said anything different. Our congregants were not terribly nice to the wonderful woman who came to teach about Islam, and I feel very often lately that being Jewish is not such a good idea.
But of course what I’ve just written is completely idiotic. It didn’t suddenly get problematic to be Jewish, and anti-Arab, anti-Muslim prejudice didn’t just pop into peoples minds in 2001. I think it is I who have been very stupid and very naïve about this whole Jewish thing.
I find that I cannot write intelligently about my Jewish identity. Not really. I approximate it, fly around it, circumnavigate it, but to say that I am a Jew is somehow not accurate; it does not elucidate what my relationship to Judaism is.
I am realizing this year that to say that I AM Jewish is wrong. To say that I live and breathe and think inside of Jewishness would be closer. For many years I peered out into the world from within Christianity. It was an uncomfortable location for me, filled with coffee cake socials and uneasy whispering about people who were “different”. Jewishness is a more spacious but also very troubled locale to speak/think from. I laboriously walk around this perimeter, looking out at Islam, and Evangelical Christianity, and lately at Buddhism. I am not always sure what I am doing here. But then I remember that my favorite thinkers – the agonizers, the pioneers – were in this circle too: Marx, Freud, and the incomparable Helene Cixous.
Derrida once wrote, “I would like to live with ghosts.” I know what he means. I live with the phantoms of who I was – choir practice in the Presbyterian church – and the projections of what my orthodox acquaintances see -- an unwelcome hybrid: a secular woman who claims but has no legitimate Jewish heritage. And I live with the ghostly memory of Israel, as a place where one of my babysitters, an impoverished Christian Southern “lady” told me was the Promised Land, where everyone could go and be welcome. And live in peace. That particular ghost stays with me and seems – more and more – to clank its chains, insisting, crying out for veracity.
So as I – a non-Hebrew speaking, unbatmitzvahed straight white woman located in Jewishness – contemplate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I ask myself how and in what ways I can enlarge this circle that I have entered but have not entirely joined. As a person inside but not OF Jewishness, how can I make the circle larger, more permeable, more spacious, more open, more gracious, more kind, more understanding, more politically nimble, more ethically aware.
I don’t know. But still, I need to ask the question.
That need to ask is perhaps part of why I was attracted to Jewishness in the first place. And why I remain in this perplexing place.
It’s almost repentance/new year time for Jewish people, and I think I have never felt as uncomfortable with my Jewishness as now. I converted 14 years ago (I think), and in the 90’s it was very cool and fun to be Jewish. Then 09/11 happened, and Bush happened, and then all the terrible anti-Islamic, anti-Arab sentiment happened, and then Israel got so mean, and suddenly being Jewish felt terrible. And then going to synagogue felt terrible, because it was Israel my country right or wrong, and people got mad, if you said anything different. Our congregants were not terribly nice to the wonderful woman who came to teach about Islam, and I feel very often lately that being Jewish is not such a good idea.
But of course what I’ve just written is completely idiotic. It didn’t suddenly get problematic to be Jewish, and anti-Arab, anti-Muslim prejudice didn’t just pop into peoples minds in 2001. I think it is I who have been very stupid and very naïve about this whole Jewish thing.
I find that I cannot write intelligently about my Jewish identity. Not really. I approximate it, fly around it, circumnavigate it, but to say that I am a Jew is somehow not accurate; it does not elucidate what my relationship to Judaism is.
I am realizing this year that to say that I AM Jewish is wrong. To say that I live and breathe and think inside of Jewishness would be closer. For many years I peered out into the world from within Christianity. It was an uncomfortable location for me, filled with coffee cake socials and uneasy whispering about people who were “different”. Jewishness is a more spacious but also very troubled locale to speak/think from. I laboriously walk around this perimeter, looking out at Islam, and Evangelical Christianity, and lately at Buddhism. I am not always sure what I am doing here. But then I remember that my favorite thinkers – the agonizers, the pioneers – were in this circle too: Marx, Freud, and the incomparable Helene Cixous.
Derrida once wrote, “I would like to live with ghosts.” I know what he means. I live with the phantoms of who I was – choir practice in the Presbyterian church – and the projections of what my orthodox acquaintances see -- an unwelcome hybrid: a secular woman who claims but has no legitimate Jewish heritage. And I live with the ghostly memory of Israel, as a place where one of my babysitters, an impoverished Christian Southern “lady” told me was the Promised Land, where everyone could go and be welcome. And live in peace. That particular ghost stays with me and seems – more and more – to clank its chains, insisting, crying out for veracity.
So as I – a non-Hebrew speaking, unbatmitzvahed straight white woman located in Jewishness – contemplate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I ask myself how and in what ways I can enlarge this circle that I have entered but have not entirely joined. As a person inside but not OF Jewishness, how can I make the circle larger, more permeable, more spacious, more open, more gracious, more kind, more understanding, more politically nimble, more ethically aware.
I don’t know. But still, I need to ask the question.
That need to ask is perhaps part of why I was attracted to Jewishness in the first place. And why I remain in this perplexing place.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
On Islands
Greetings from Whidbey Island -- now, officially, the biggest island in the contiguous US. Does that make sense? Geography was never my strong subject. (Boomers – remember those ghastly plaster of paris topographical maps we had to make?)
[X-ers, never mind, Y-ers, never mind, and Millennials, don’t jeer at the old people].
Islands – I grew up on an island, and my husband grew up on an island as well. My mother's favorite song was Simon and Garfunkel’s “I am a rock/I am on island.” Islands disappear and reappear in my life. Islands mark separation, a wonderful clear boundary between the others and me. I am safe, surrounded by water. But I am also alone (“no man is a—“). Which is not good.
Here at the Whidbey Island Writers Residency, though, you can be an island, a peninsula, or just about any body of land or water you want to be. You can be alone when you want to write alone or jump into very cold water with a bunch of other writers. Or photograph the scene. You can be a creek timidly winding through the wastes of some non-fiction writer's presentation, or you can be an ocean of information at the discussion about blogs.
Your choice. And the choice can change. This week, I’ve been a set of tiny atolls with a poem raised like a flag on each one. I have always loved poetry, and through my encounters with my former students Ching-In Chen, Nicelle Hughes, and Noel Mariano among others have been trying to expand that tiny poetry territory in my psyche. That generous waterfall of poetic license and erudition – Carolyne Wright – has allowed some water to trickle through the atolls at an increased rate.
But there’s other territory to incarnate: Ana Maria Spagna’s spacious sense of non-fiction as braided narrative – at once personal, political, and subtly poetic. What kind of land mass is that? Mountains, and desert, and snow, and ice. The entire state of California maybe, with all its variations.
I bring back to LA a sack full of geographical identities. But the island remains important to me as the place where I both build sand castles and send out smoke signals.
For writers, the island is where we must perforce write alone, but we travel from there too -- sending our words out like beacons, like boats, from our conscious-ringed singularities towards the other islands, vessels, hoping to encounter strange and undiscovered forms of bursting life.
[X-ers, never mind, Y-ers, never mind, and Millennials, don’t jeer at the old people].
Islands – I grew up on an island, and my husband grew up on an island as well. My mother's favorite song was Simon and Garfunkel’s “I am a rock/I am on island.” Islands disappear and reappear in my life. Islands mark separation, a wonderful clear boundary between the others and me. I am safe, surrounded by water. But I am also alone (“no man is a—“). Which is not good.
Here at the Whidbey Island Writers Residency, though, you can be an island, a peninsula, or just about any body of land or water you want to be. You can be alone when you want to write alone or jump into very cold water with a bunch of other writers. Or photograph the scene. You can be a creek timidly winding through the wastes of some non-fiction writer's presentation, or you can be an ocean of information at the discussion about blogs.
Your choice. And the choice can change. This week, I’ve been a set of tiny atolls with a poem raised like a flag on each one. I have always loved poetry, and through my encounters with my former students Ching-In Chen, Nicelle Hughes, and Noel Mariano among others have been trying to expand that tiny poetry territory in my psyche. That generous waterfall of poetic license and erudition – Carolyne Wright – has allowed some water to trickle through the atolls at an increased rate.
But there’s other territory to incarnate: Ana Maria Spagna’s spacious sense of non-fiction as braided narrative – at once personal, political, and subtly poetic. What kind of land mass is that? Mountains, and desert, and snow, and ice. The entire state of California maybe, with all its variations.
I bring back to LA a sack full of geographical identities. But the island remains important to me as the place where I both build sand castles and send out smoke signals.
For writers, the island is where we must perforce write alone, but we travel from there too -- sending our words out like beacons, like boats, from our conscious-ringed singularities towards the other islands, vessels, hoping to encounter strange and undiscovered forms of bursting life.
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