There isn't very much happening right now. There is this silence, that isn't deafening -- a kind of pause, before life starts up again. I am not writing today, and I am not working much either. This afternoon I talked online with a small group of students about Haruki Murakami. Nothing earth-shattering happened, but it was a pleasing exchange. Today someone recommended a book. I went through the mail, and brought my husband a bagel. My daughter is sitting and drawing and writing. We are not talking. My husband wanted to eat by himself in his office. That felt fine.
Sometimes less is more, and sometimes, nothingness feels full. Last night it rained, and my husband said "can you hear it raining?" I couldn't so I stepped out of our bedroom door; we have a door now that opens on to the backyard. Our backyard isn't anything special, but I stood in the doorway and heard the rain. I'd heard it before. I will hopefully hear it again. But this time, I heard the silence between the raindrops, and in the space between the water, there was a sense of arrival on the edge of something that is beyond nothing -- where all opposites meet, coalesce and transform.
On Plates
Texasware
Monday, October 25, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
On Dangerous Teaching
Give me danger little stranger
And I’ll feel your disease
I feel every quarter that the classroom is becoming an increasingly dangerous place for me. Dangerous, existentially, politically and psychologically, although I realize that there are other more immediate dangers.
But this danger feels insidious.
Why? Because I no longer have confidence in the Socratic method. Dangerous because I no longer feel that (my) enthusiasm is enough to carry the weight of my students’ needs – needs that are amorphous and complicated. Their need to know grammar, their need to learn how to retain information. Their need to learn – in a very real way – how to think, how to argue, how to analyze. And most importantly, (or not) – my need for them to care about such things.
When I was a young teacher, teaching was about a solo performance: look at me! like me! think I’m smart! think I’m talented: love German, or French or Don Quixote. Now I know it is dangerous at worst and unproductive at best for teachers to seek “love” from their students. Adulation from a chair desk is the cheapest form of admiration. You are grading the person in that chair desk. Are you really going to grade them on how much they appear to love you? No. And what kind of love is that anyway? They don’t know you and you don’t really know them either. You know each other’s behaviors – your social performances in that panoptical space that is the classroom.
But I think my most recent fall from the grace of teaching was when a student informed me that I made it impossible to learn. I was and continue to be haunted by that assertion. Of course it was a terrifically “mean” thing to say to a teacher. But, the problem is: it may be true. It may be all my attempts to engage students through increasingly avant-garde, and unsocratic sets of interventions, are not engaging at all but just alienating (without the pedagogical effect that Brecht hoped for). Friends and family have urged me to forget this student’s statement – despite the fact that it was fairly recent. But I cannot and will not. Because isn’t it even more dangerous – for me and for the people I teach – that I deny all negative assessments, and insist uncategorically, as one colleague does repeatedly, that “I’m a good teacher”?
And so I return to the uncertain, treacherous place that is the classroom. This is not to say that this place is not interesting, compelling, and at times rewarding. But it sure feels scary. A tightrope, where the audience doesn’t know enough yet to decide whether they are with you, or not.
But
An audience that is also on tightropes, walking carefully, hoping to get through college, and not flunk, hoping to get a non-existent job that will pay non-existent benefits. Hoping that the acrobatics of college courses will open up opportunities. And with every step sensing that that reality is no longer viable. Yes, students walk the tightropes too, and the fall is longer. Deeper.
But cancel that. Today, right after I posted, I met a woman at the yarn store. Wearing cat eye glasses a hundred necklaces and a huge plastic cocktail ring, she teaches Communications at UCLA. Untenured.
I TELL THEM THEY DON"T KNOW HOW TO TALK, she cackles at me over enormous knitting needles.
"You terrify and confuse me," one student told her.
"Good," she said.
And I’ll feel your disease
I feel every quarter that the classroom is becoming an increasingly dangerous place for me. Dangerous, existentially, politically and psychologically, although I realize that there are other more immediate dangers.
But this danger feels insidious.
Why? Because I no longer have confidence in the Socratic method. Dangerous because I no longer feel that (my) enthusiasm is enough to carry the weight of my students’ needs – needs that are amorphous and complicated. Their need to know grammar, their need to learn how to retain information. Their need to learn – in a very real way – how to think, how to argue, how to analyze. And most importantly, (or not) – my need for them to care about such things.
When I was a young teacher, teaching was about a solo performance: look at me! like me! think I’m smart! think I’m talented: love German, or French or Don Quixote. Now I know it is dangerous at worst and unproductive at best for teachers to seek “love” from their students. Adulation from a chair desk is the cheapest form of admiration. You are grading the person in that chair desk. Are you really going to grade them on how much they appear to love you? No. And what kind of love is that anyway? They don’t know you and you don’t really know them either. You know each other’s behaviors – your social performances in that panoptical space that is the classroom.
But I think my most recent fall from the grace of teaching was when a student informed me that I made it impossible to learn. I was and continue to be haunted by that assertion. Of course it was a terrifically “mean” thing to say to a teacher. But, the problem is: it may be true. It may be all my attempts to engage students through increasingly avant-garde, and unsocratic sets of interventions, are not engaging at all but just alienating (without the pedagogical effect that Brecht hoped for). Friends and family have urged me to forget this student’s statement – despite the fact that it was fairly recent. But I cannot and will not. Because isn’t it even more dangerous – for me and for the people I teach – that I deny all negative assessments, and insist uncategorically, as one colleague does repeatedly, that “I’m a good teacher”?
And so I return to the uncertain, treacherous place that is the classroom. This is not to say that this place is not interesting, compelling, and at times rewarding. But it sure feels scary. A tightrope, where the audience doesn’t know enough yet to decide whether they are with you, or not.
But
An audience that is also on tightropes, walking carefully, hoping to get through college, and not flunk, hoping to get a non-existent job that will pay non-existent benefits. Hoping that the acrobatics of college courses will open up opportunities. And with every step sensing that that reality is no longer viable. Yes, students walk the tightropes too, and the fall is longer. Deeper.
But cancel that. Today, right after I posted, I met a woman at the yarn store. Wearing cat eye glasses a hundred necklaces and a huge plastic cocktail ring, she teaches Communications at UCLA. Untenured.
I TELL THEM THEY DON"T KNOW HOW TO TALK, she cackles at me over enormous knitting needles.
"You terrify and confuse me," one student told her.
"Good," she said.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
On Plates
In her first novel about amnesiac detective William Monk, Anne Perry describes scene after scene of complex formal dining among landed gentry, wherein everyone changes for dinner, and the women must be escorted into the dining room by a man. Shamefully, if not enough men were present, the women would have to walk in by themselves. In one particular scene, a gentrified but poor female visitor gazes at the linen, the silver cutlery, the side of mutton, and the empty conversation, as the invisible maids and footmen pass the food around. The protagonist looks down at her ornate china plate. Not knowing what safe subject to raise with her aristocratic hosts.
These descriptions make me think immediately – in a kind of BLINK reaction -- of my grandmother Stephanya Romanov standing triumphantly in her Southampton beach house and announcing “Soup’s on!” to me, my parents, and my grandfather.
You need to see the scene: my grandmother was about 4’’ 10” and she would be wearing a hand-me-up Snoopy sweatshirt that said TO DANCE IS TO LIVE (appropriate for an ex Ballet Russe dancer), and corduroy pants, that I think also may have been mine. She would be smiling her enormous smile --
After this announcement we would sit down to macaroni and cheese or hot dogs or hamburgers, or a truly weird chili-like concoction served on aqua colored Texasware plastic plates. It must be noted that my grandfather – who was the real Romanov (my grandmother being the descendent of some minor Russian aristocrat) – resisted this laissz-faire attitude somewhat. He typically wore a smoking jacket and a scarf stuck with a pearl pin to such meals. That was his idea of country-wear. And his George Harrison style Beatle wig. He was an artist, though, and could be eccentric.
I never entirely understood my grandmother’s fascination with the casual. My grandfather was a gifted dress designer and made all of my grandmother’s clothes. They lived in a Manhattan townhouse packed with chinoiserie, musical instruments, and books. They went to the opera and had sophisticated, artistic, bohemian (read, Gay and Lesbian) friends. They stayed out till all hours.
Yet, my grandmother lived for her Snoopy sweatshirt and pants, and walking her 3 dogs in the country. She loved her plastic plates. And she loved eating in the kitchen, where you could see wild swans in the distance honking in a pond across the road.
Reading Anne Perry, I think I get it. My grandmother was born in 1900. She must have known and attended the aristocratic dinners that Anne Perry describes. Her own mother was a feminist, a writer and a graduate of Wellesley. All that propriety. Formality. Not to mention corsetry. And of course, my grandmother’s mother couldn’t vote, and my grandmother watched her own mother opine at the table without a legal voice. It’s hard to remember that these freedoms for women are very recent.
So it makes sense that pea soup and mac and cheese would be glorious, and that a sweatshirt and a pair of pants would be pieces of clothing that would be fabulously, subversively comfortable, washable, easy to move in. Fun.
And plastic plates? Plates that were unbreakable, dishwasher safe, and equally important – something anyone could buy or afford. Not china. Not precious, and because of that, even more valued. Loved.
What are my favorite plates at home? And my husband’s? You know the answer. Those aqua colored Texasware plates that I inherited from my grandmother and brought out here to California.
Soup’s on, everyone!
These descriptions make me think immediately – in a kind of BLINK reaction -- of my grandmother Stephanya Romanov standing triumphantly in her Southampton beach house and announcing “Soup’s on!” to me, my parents, and my grandfather.
You need to see the scene: my grandmother was about 4’’ 10” and she would be wearing a hand-me-up Snoopy sweatshirt that said TO DANCE IS TO LIVE (appropriate for an ex Ballet Russe dancer), and corduroy pants, that I think also may have been mine. She would be smiling her enormous smile --
After this announcement we would sit down to macaroni and cheese or hot dogs or hamburgers, or a truly weird chili-like concoction served on aqua colored Texasware plastic plates. It must be noted that my grandfather – who was the real Romanov (my grandmother being the descendent of some minor Russian aristocrat) – resisted this laissz-faire attitude somewhat. He typically wore a smoking jacket and a scarf stuck with a pearl pin to such meals. That was his idea of country-wear. And his George Harrison style Beatle wig. He was an artist, though, and could be eccentric.
I never entirely understood my grandmother’s fascination with the casual. My grandfather was a gifted dress designer and made all of my grandmother’s clothes. They lived in a Manhattan townhouse packed with chinoiserie, musical instruments, and books. They went to the opera and had sophisticated, artistic, bohemian (read, Gay and Lesbian) friends. They stayed out till all hours.
Yet, my grandmother lived for her Snoopy sweatshirt and pants, and walking her 3 dogs in the country. She loved her plastic plates. And she loved eating in the kitchen, where you could see wild swans in the distance honking in a pond across the road.
Reading Anne Perry, I think I get it. My grandmother was born in 1900. She must have known and attended the aristocratic dinners that Anne Perry describes. Her own mother was a feminist, a writer and a graduate of Wellesley. All that propriety. Formality. Not to mention corsetry. And of course, my grandmother’s mother couldn’t vote, and my grandmother watched her own mother opine at the table without a legal voice. It’s hard to remember that these freedoms for women are very recent.
So it makes sense that pea soup and mac and cheese would be glorious, and that a sweatshirt and a pair of pants would be pieces of clothing that would be fabulously, subversively comfortable, washable, easy to move in. Fun.
And plastic plates? Plates that were unbreakable, dishwasher safe, and equally important – something anyone could buy or afford. Not china. Not precious, and because of that, even more valued. Loved.
What are my favorite plates at home? And my husband’s? You know the answer. Those aqua colored Texasware plates that I inherited from my grandmother and brought out here to California.
Soup’s on, everyone!
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Sock Legends
In the interest of world peace and harmony, I am sharing a story that was published in the Mochila Review in Spring 2009. Feel free to disseminate, but please credit me and the Mochila Review. Happy Rosh Hashanah and happy fall!
Once upon a time there was a little sock that lived in a sock drawer along with T-shirts and underpants in a blue dresser in somebody’s room. The sock had lost its twin long ago and, having no sibling to talk to, spent most of his time in the darkness of the drawer, listening to the other socks discuss the matters of the day.
A pressing issue among the sock population had become how the world was made and organized. The socks talked endlessly and sometimes so vehemently about this question that the drawer handles rattled and the T-shirts and underpants had to knock on the bottom and top of the drawer to ensure a little peace and quiet.
“Those socks need to learn how to get along,“ said the T-shirts to each other.
“Those socks certainly entertain high-falutin’ ideas,” observed the underpants.
“That’s because there are so many of them,” said the long johns, who had gotten thrown in the underpants drawer by mistake.
But it was certainly true that the socks argued a great deal about credos and creeds.
One corner of the drawer favored the theory of a One Sock Above All Others, who created sockdom, underpantsdom, and T-shirtdom. The OSAAO had decided that the socks were the chosen garments, perhaps because of their duality, and gave them special laws of conduct. Thus it was believed, according to this segment of the sock population, that the original socks had been created in a sort of divine factory by the OSAAO. The first socks were then forced to leave and travel—just how, no one knew—to the sock drawer itself.
The little sock listened to the stories of wandering and exile, of the attempt to create order out of the chaos of a drawer, and of the need for laws: All knee-highs together at the front; all crew socks at the back and pastels in the middle.
Orphaned socks, like our little sock here, were to be placed near the front but not quite, so they could wait and hope for the coming of their long-lost twin. Only then could they go out into the world like the other socks, who did (it must be admitted) exit the drawer from time to time.
Another group of socks fervently disagreed. These were the socks that lived at the opposite corner of the drawer. They maintained that yes, of course there was an Original Sock Creator, but there had been, and would be again, a Son of Sock, who taught that love was more important than rules and that believing was more important than doing. These socks got tangled up with each other and often ended up in a giggly pile that kept on saying how much they loved each other. Sometimes they even rearranged themselves into nonmatching pairs, and out they went in the world and sometimes did not, sad to say, come back at all.
These two groups argued a lot about the law versus emotion, about duty versus inspiration, and, often, the little sock did not understand what in the world they were talking about. Why did one side get so angry? (The chosen sock group.) And why did the other group go from sudden laughter to rage and then to abject tears when anyone disagreed? (The Son of Sock contingent.)
That’s when the third group showed up. The third sock consortium consisted primarily of tightly woven business socks. Adult-looking, they could be beige, argyle, black, brown, or blue, but rarely white, and almost never pastel. They congregated at the very front of the drawer, pushing hard against those who had come before, and they insisted—loudly—that they needed to be stationed there so as to be ready to make the Great Sock Journey. All socks must travel, the new arrivals said, to the place where the famous Sock Soothsayer received his written instructions, dictated directly from the Sock Maker Himself.
A lot of socks didn’t like these newcomers. The new business socks were quite aggressive, and they told the other socks they were stupid if they didn’t agree with them and that they were going to end up in the trash if they didn’t behave. On the other hand, they told wonderful jokes and were big huggers. If they liked you, they would say “SOCK!” and embrace you. After that they were always your friends.
The little sock didn’t know what to think. He had a feeling that believing was important, and he missed his long-lost twin, whom, at this point, he could barely remember. He decided, despite his doubts, to go on the Great Sock Journey, and when the Newcomers jumped into the laundry basket, he hid himself underneath a big argyle sock and jumped too.
Oh, dear! What a mistake, thought the little sock as he found himself immersed in freezing cold water and not in the usual hot of distant memory.
“That’s to protect our colors, foolish little one,” said Argyle haughtily. The little sock got thrown around in the agitating cold water. But along the way he met a kind T-shirt who swept him up in his shoulder.
“Just hang on there, young fella,” said the T-shirt. “I’ll protect you from the worst of the buffeting. Then we go into the driving desert, and we can talk as we spin around.”
And hardly had he spoken when they whirled madly in violent circles and then got tossed into a dry and hot enclosure.
This is like the original Sock Journey some of my people talked about, thought the little sock, and so he spoke to the T-shirt as they settled into a comfortable, warm spin.
“Oh ho,” chortled the T-shirt when he heard about the various sock disputes. “So this is what you all are caterwauling about in that overcrowded drawer of yours.” The T-shirt unfolded its neck so as to better enjoy the warm drying air.
“The difficulty with your view is that it places socks at the veritable center of the universe,” said the T-shirt, extending his arms and allowing the little sock to rest comfortably against the belly of the shirt.
“But it excludes everyone else. What of T-shirts? What of underpants?”
“Gosh,” said the little sock. “I never thought of that.”
The little sock was beginning to feel wonderfully dry, and as he nestled in the smooth cotton of the shirt, he asked his older acquaintance to share some other ways of believing.
The T-shirt—who had clearly spent much time in the great world outside—happily obliged.
“There are views of the universe that there were many makers, not just one, and many helpers, not just a son. Some say there was no maker at all and that the world as we know it—filled with drawers and textiles and water and heat—just happened. A kind of wonderful chance.”
That possibility frightened the little sock a bit. Could there really be no plan at all? He shared his fear with his new friend.
“So, what do I do now?” asked the little sock.
“I think,” said the T-shirt, “you just try to live well, behave kindly to others, and be happy.”
“And my twin?” asked the little sock.
“There, you have a real problem,” said the T-shirt, “and you may indeed decide that a quest beyond the limits of the laundry will be necessary. For that you will need to find a foot, and the foot will take you where you need to go.”
The air grew still. The little sock felt himself pulled out of the space. As he called good-bye the T-shirt called cheerily after him.
“Go forth, young sock.”
The little sock felt himself slipped around something large and fleshy, and he saw himself covering wriggling, wormlike monsters. The monsters waved to him, and he felt himself encasing a being larger than himself but still small.
Is this the Sock Maker? he thought, but no. And, yet, imagine the little sock’s delight when he heard a thunderous voice roar. “Mommy, here’s my missing sock!”
As the little sock looked sideways, he saw his long-lost twin covering a similar set of five monsters.
His twin smiled brightly as, above their heads, the old T-shirt stretched tight across a huge, flat expanse.
“Now, the adventure really begins,” the T-shirt shouted merrily.
And the three sallied forth, searching for their truths.
Once upon a time there was a little sock that lived in a sock drawer along with T-shirts and underpants in a blue dresser in somebody’s room. The sock had lost its twin long ago and, having no sibling to talk to, spent most of his time in the darkness of the drawer, listening to the other socks discuss the matters of the day.
A pressing issue among the sock population had become how the world was made and organized. The socks talked endlessly and sometimes so vehemently about this question that the drawer handles rattled and the T-shirts and underpants had to knock on the bottom and top of the drawer to ensure a little peace and quiet.
“Those socks need to learn how to get along,“ said the T-shirts to each other.
“Those socks certainly entertain high-falutin’ ideas,” observed the underpants.
“That’s because there are so many of them,” said the long johns, who had gotten thrown in the underpants drawer by mistake.
But it was certainly true that the socks argued a great deal about credos and creeds.
One corner of the drawer favored the theory of a One Sock Above All Others, who created sockdom, underpantsdom, and T-shirtdom. The OSAAO had decided that the socks were the chosen garments, perhaps because of their duality, and gave them special laws of conduct. Thus it was believed, according to this segment of the sock population, that the original socks had been created in a sort of divine factory by the OSAAO. The first socks were then forced to leave and travel—just how, no one knew—to the sock drawer itself.
The little sock listened to the stories of wandering and exile, of the attempt to create order out of the chaos of a drawer, and of the need for laws: All knee-highs together at the front; all crew socks at the back and pastels in the middle.
Orphaned socks, like our little sock here, were to be placed near the front but not quite, so they could wait and hope for the coming of their long-lost twin. Only then could they go out into the world like the other socks, who did (it must be admitted) exit the drawer from time to time.
Another group of socks fervently disagreed. These were the socks that lived at the opposite corner of the drawer. They maintained that yes, of course there was an Original Sock Creator, but there had been, and would be again, a Son of Sock, who taught that love was more important than rules and that believing was more important than doing. These socks got tangled up with each other and often ended up in a giggly pile that kept on saying how much they loved each other. Sometimes they even rearranged themselves into nonmatching pairs, and out they went in the world and sometimes did not, sad to say, come back at all.
These two groups argued a lot about the law versus emotion, about duty versus inspiration, and, often, the little sock did not understand what in the world they were talking about. Why did one side get so angry? (The chosen sock group.) And why did the other group go from sudden laughter to rage and then to abject tears when anyone disagreed? (The Son of Sock contingent.)
That’s when the third group showed up. The third sock consortium consisted primarily of tightly woven business socks. Adult-looking, they could be beige, argyle, black, brown, or blue, but rarely white, and almost never pastel. They congregated at the very front of the drawer, pushing hard against those who had come before, and they insisted—loudly—that they needed to be stationed there so as to be ready to make the Great Sock Journey. All socks must travel, the new arrivals said, to the place where the famous Sock Soothsayer received his written instructions, dictated directly from the Sock Maker Himself.
A lot of socks didn’t like these newcomers. The new business socks were quite aggressive, and they told the other socks they were stupid if they didn’t agree with them and that they were going to end up in the trash if they didn’t behave. On the other hand, they told wonderful jokes and were big huggers. If they liked you, they would say “SOCK!” and embrace you. After that they were always your friends.
The little sock didn’t know what to think. He had a feeling that believing was important, and he missed his long-lost twin, whom, at this point, he could barely remember. He decided, despite his doubts, to go on the Great Sock Journey, and when the Newcomers jumped into the laundry basket, he hid himself underneath a big argyle sock and jumped too.
Oh, dear! What a mistake, thought the little sock as he found himself immersed in freezing cold water and not in the usual hot of distant memory.
“That’s to protect our colors, foolish little one,” said Argyle haughtily. The little sock got thrown around in the agitating cold water. But along the way he met a kind T-shirt who swept him up in his shoulder.
“Just hang on there, young fella,” said the T-shirt. “I’ll protect you from the worst of the buffeting. Then we go into the driving desert, and we can talk as we spin around.”
And hardly had he spoken when they whirled madly in violent circles and then got tossed into a dry and hot enclosure.
This is like the original Sock Journey some of my people talked about, thought the little sock, and so he spoke to the T-shirt as they settled into a comfortable, warm spin.
“Oh ho,” chortled the T-shirt when he heard about the various sock disputes. “So this is what you all are caterwauling about in that overcrowded drawer of yours.” The T-shirt unfolded its neck so as to better enjoy the warm drying air.
“The difficulty with your view is that it places socks at the veritable center of the universe,” said the T-shirt, extending his arms and allowing the little sock to rest comfortably against the belly of the shirt.
“But it excludes everyone else. What of T-shirts? What of underpants?”
“Gosh,” said the little sock. “I never thought of that.”
The little sock was beginning to feel wonderfully dry, and as he nestled in the smooth cotton of the shirt, he asked his older acquaintance to share some other ways of believing.
The T-shirt—who had clearly spent much time in the great world outside—happily obliged.
“There are views of the universe that there were many makers, not just one, and many helpers, not just a son. Some say there was no maker at all and that the world as we know it—filled with drawers and textiles and water and heat—just happened. A kind of wonderful chance.”
That possibility frightened the little sock a bit. Could there really be no plan at all? He shared his fear with his new friend.
“So, what do I do now?” asked the little sock.
“I think,” said the T-shirt, “you just try to live well, behave kindly to others, and be happy.”
“And my twin?” asked the little sock.
“There, you have a real problem,” said the T-shirt, “and you may indeed decide that a quest beyond the limits of the laundry will be necessary. For that you will need to find a foot, and the foot will take you where you need to go.”
The air grew still. The little sock felt himself pulled out of the space. As he called good-bye the T-shirt called cheerily after him.
“Go forth, young sock.”
The little sock felt himself slipped around something large and fleshy, and he saw himself covering wriggling, wormlike monsters. The monsters waved to him, and he felt himself encasing a being larger than himself but still small.
Is this the Sock Maker? he thought, but no. And, yet, imagine the little sock’s delight when he heard a thunderous voice roar. “Mommy, here’s my missing sock!”
As the little sock looked sideways, he saw his long-lost twin covering a similar set of five monsters.
His twin smiled brightly as, above their heads, the old T-shirt stretched tight across a huge, flat expanse.
“Now, the adventure really begins,” the T-shirt shouted merrily.
And the three sallied forth, searching for their truths.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Why I love Satire
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.
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.
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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