Nolan’s trauma boys
In the wake of some insightful comments by two smart young women regarding INCEPTION I have started thinking about the entire corpus of Nolan films.
And what an odd group it is.
I deeply disliked MEMENTO, which seemed both unpleasant and pretentious, as well as being needlessly difficult to follow. The tattooing of the male body was a strange, unsexual, un-beautiful visual experience whose meaning, I did not – at the time—understand.
But I loved BATMAN BEGINS. BB does perhaps one of the best jobs ever in contemporary cinema in framing and expressing the experience, performance, and working through of trauma. We get the whole trauma megillah, as it were: the imagery of falling into a dark pit to be attacked by the small dark, biting things that scare us most, the primal scene-esque murder of the parents, and the evil psychiatrist who brings a drug-induced version of the trauma back on just when you least expect it. The film is filled with scary father figures, who bedevil the hero, as though he lived in a hall of mirrors; everywhere he looks, he sees the traumatic loss of the parents, and his fall into the pit somehow re-enacted. And he is continually having to confront and fight in the middle of the traumatic experience. He never has the time and space to recover.
As a PTSD survivor, I can tell you that trauma really does work like this. Trauma triggers are everywhere, and for the trauma survivor, the world is filled with archetypes who reenact over and over again the primal terrors and humiliations which you are desperately trying to overcome. In a way, the trauma survivor is always taking the awful practical test in that scary ninja school in Bhutan, or wherever it is supposed to be from BB. BATMAN BEGINS also presents a compelling version of the difficulties of working-through to traumatic recovery, and the temptation to just reenact, not deal with. Consequently, I appreciated the highlighting of the acting-out portion of traumatic recovery. “I become what I fear,” says Batman at one point. Most trauma survivors do. Because, in a terrible way, trauma is always with us. We must always ask the eternal Batman’s Father question “why do we fall?” And we must always find in ourselves the inner doctor-parent who heals us, and gets us back up on our feet to try again.
DARK KNIGHT fascinated me, primarily because of the performance of the late Heath Ledger. But my goodness, what an odd, almost—but-not-quite drag, performance of masculinity THAT is. But what is being said in that film actually? David Denby may be right when he talks about the film as a disturbing celebration of terror for the purposes of commodification.
He notes “The Dark Knight” has been made in a time of terror, but it’s not fighting terror; it’s embracing and unleashing it—while making sure, with proper calculation, to set up the next installment of the corporate franchise."
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/07/21/080721crci_cinema_denby#ixzz0v1neAgde
So where does all this trauma talk leave us? Taken together, the films display traumatized heroes whose woundedness is marked by the erasure of sexuality, replacing sexual longing/activity with bats, gizmos, whirling tops, machines, and capers. This fact does not make the films less interesting, but it does – and here I think I agree with my female cohorts -- point to their limitation – the ways in which they don’t seem to “know “what it is they are saying. Perhaps this is why BATMAN BEGINS remains my favorite. A story about trauma and masculinity, it knows what the story is about, and it recognizes – in a way the other films don’t – the price of being a person who would heal a wounded world, all the while teetering on the brink of the traumatic abyss.
On Plates
Texasware
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
dreaming
Christopher Nolan’s Life is a Dream
It continues to amaze me how the literature of the past enhances our appreciation of the cultural work of the present, and how the conversation between the contemporary and the historical can shed light on the ways in which we still struggle to understand ourselves, our nature, and our possibility.
Here is a case in point:
In Calderón’s immensely strange Renaissance play, an abused and abusive Prince gains and loses everything he had dreamed of: wealth, power, and revenge. Returned to the terrible dungeon in which he has – unfairly – been forced to spend the majority of his life, Segismundo delivers one of the most haunting monologues of the world theater:
I dream that I am in here
with these chains and prisons burdened
yet I dreamt that I in other,
more fulsome state saw myself.
What is life? A frantic moment,
What is life? But an illusion,
but a shadow, but a fiction,
and the greatest good is small:
for life is all but a dream
and dreams are just that, they're dreams.
(translation: http://copinapitli.blogspot.com/2006/08/segismundos-monologue.html)
At this moment Segismundo faces an impossible choice, worthy of the French Existentialists. Why do right, if it is impossible to know what reality is and if what you do even matters? Segismundo’s answer is do choose to do what he thinks is moral, regardless of whether his experience is real or imagined.
Christopher Nolan’s film INCEPTION takes up these Calderónian questions, and for me the film is at its most effective when it presses this issue of ethics, and shows us characters making increasingly complicated choices– from inside the dreamscape. Fans of Life is A Dream will recognize the traumatized billionaire son who remains determined to penetrate to the secret of the safe – which is in fact his own imagination – and to receive the blessing of an imagined father. These are the topics of Calderón’s play, which also features an indifferent abandoning patriarch, whom the son must somehow forgive in order to become his own person. The Machiavellian corporate mogul who would manipulate the minds of others receives the curse – or is it a gift? – of living the life he dreads. Dreams are instructive – in often terrifying ways. Finally, the problematic hero, a suspected killer (also like Segismundo) must choose whether to descend ever deeper realms of dreaming to rescue his future, himself, and the man who promises to save him.
Does Nolan’s hero win? The end of the film is as ambiguous as Calderón’s play, wherein Segismundo attains the throne and his inheritance, but remains a haunted figure – uncertain, still, whether he dreams or wakes.
Nolan’s contemporary action-packed fantasy in tandem with Calderón’s ethereal drama from Golden Age Spain remind us that fiction provides us with a powerful imaginary tool whereby we confront the fictive quality of our own lives, and the unexpected truths those existences may contain.
It continues to amaze me how the literature of the past enhances our appreciation of the cultural work of the present, and how the conversation between the contemporary and the historical can shed light on the ways in which we still struggle to understand ourselves, our nature, and our possibility.
Here is a case in point:
In Calderón’s immensely strange Renaissance play, an abused and abusive Prince gains and loses everything he had dreamed of: wealth, power, and revenge. Returned to the terrible dungeon in which he has – unfairly – been forced to spend the majority of his life, Segismundo delivers one of the most haunting monologues of the world theater:
I dream that I am in here
with these chains and prisons burdened
yet I dreamt that I in other,
more fulsome state saw myself.
What is life? A frantic moment,
What is life? But an illusion,
but a shadow, but a fiction,
and the greatest good is small:
for life is all but a dream
and dreams are just that, they're dreams.
(translation: http://copinapitli.blogspot.com/2006/08/segismundos-monologue.html)
At this moment Segismundo faces an impossible choice, worthy of the French Existentialists. Why do right, if it is impossible to know what reality is and if what you do even matters? Segismundo’s answer is do choose to do what he thinks is moral, regardless of whether his experience is real or imagined.
Christopher Nolan’s film INCEPTION takes up these Calderónian questions, and for me the film is at its most effective when it presses this issue of ethics, and shows us characters making increasingly complicated choices– from inside the dreamscape. Fans of Life is A Dream will recognize the traumatized billionaire son who remains determined to penetrate to the secret of the safe – which is in fact his own imagination – and to receive the blessing of an imagined father. These are the topics of Calderón’s play, which also features an indifferent abandoning patriarch, whom the son must somehow forgive in order to become his own person. The Machiavellian corporate mogul who would manipulate the minds of others receives the curse – or is it a gift? – of living the life he dreads. Dreams are instructive – in often terrifying ways. Finally, the problematic hero, a suspected killer (also like Segismundo) must choose whether to descend ever deeper realms of dreaming to rescue his future, himself, and the man who promises to save him.
Does Nolan’s hero win? The end of the film is as ambiguous as Calderón’s play, wherein Segismundo attains the throne and his inheritance, but remains a haunted figure – uncertain, still, whether he dreams or wakes.
Nolan’s contemporary action-packed fantasy in tandem with Calderón’s ethereal drama from Golden Age Spain remind us that fiction provides us with a powerful imaginary tool whereby we confront the fictive quality of our own lives, and the unexpected truths those existences may contain.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
REVEVOLUTION
Rev the Evolution
Watching the John Adams HBO special for the second time, I am reminded of reading the book on which the special is based. I am not a lover of biography, and I often find American history boring. But John Adams and Abigail Adams are fascinating figures to me, and I resonate with their passions and ideas.
Adams was passionate on the subject of education, and he envisioned exceptional schools and universities to educate an enlightened populace of free people. Abigail Adams was a feminist, and absolutely abhorred the practice of slavery. Together, as intellectuals, parents, political activists, and – not least – farmers, they provide a stirring example of what women and men should hope for in the United States. They respected the earth because they worked it; they believed in sexual equality and prosperity and safety for all people living in the US.
Earlier today I read a summary of Tea Party politics, and I just shook my head in disbelief at its misguided ideas. Not that I do not understand a politically conservative point of view. My parents were both dedicated Republicans, and my father was extremely politically conservative. A passionate hater of the New Deal and of any form of liberalism, he voted (and so did my mom) for Reagan, Nixon, and Bush Senior. At the same time, my parents were fervently pro-abortion, pro-affirmative action, and pro legalizing drugs as well as prostitution.
At the end of his life, my Republican father got to know the head of Earth Watch, and concluded that we had to reduce our reliance on foreign oil, and adhere to a strict plan of ecology. “Let’s face it,” he said. “The weather is changing. We can’t go on like we are going. We just CAN’T.” And he was appalled by the cost of heath care, and the ways in which the elderly and differently-abled were cast aside by a society, which he said, was governed increasingly “by plain old greed.”
As BP workers come in to work side by side with volunteers still rebuilding from Katrina, it seems very obvious that my Republican parents (one of whom was a devout Christian, the other of whom was a devout Atheist) got what was important in our turn of the century political situation. They were not heroes, like the Adams's, but they shared with the Adams's a certain common sense that I admire and that we could certainly use as we consider our lives as Americans in 2010.
Here’s to revving our evolution, as we turn to the practicalities of helping our people get educated, get healthy, get jobs, get equal treatment and equal opportunity, and get to cultivate, protect, and enjoy the sublime ecosystem of our planet.
Happy 4th of July everyone!
Watching the John Adams HBO special for the second time, I am reminded of reading the book on which the special is based. I am not a lover of biography, and I often find American history boring. But John Adams and Abigail Adams are fascinating figures to me, and I resonate with their passions and ideas.
Adams was passionate on the subject of education, and he envisioned exceptional schools and universities to educate an enlightened populace of free people. Abigail Adams was a feminist, and absolutely abhorred the practice of slavery. Together, as intellectuals, parents, political activists, and – not least – farmers, they provide a stirring example of what women and men should hope for in the United States. They respected the earth because they worked it; they believed in sexual equality and prosperity and safety for all people living in the US.
Earlier today I read a summary of Tea Party politics, and I just shook my head in disbelief at its misguided ideas. Not that I do not understand a politically conservative point of view. My parents were both dedicated Republicans, and my father was extremely politically conservative. A passionate hater of the New Deal and of any form of liberalism, he voted (and so did my mom) for Reagan, Nixon, and Bush Senior. At the same time, my parents were fervently pro-abortion, pro-affirmative action, and pro legalizing drugs as well as prostitution.
At the end of his life, my Republican father got to know the head of Earth Watch, and concluded that we had to reduce our reliance on foreign oil, and adhere to a strict plan of ecology. “Let’s face it,” he said. “The weather is changing. We can’t go on like we are going. We just CAN’T.” And he was appalled by the cost of heath care, and the ways in which the elderly and differently-abled were cast aside by a society, which he said, was governed increasingly “by plain old greed.”
As BP workers come in to work side by side with volunteers still rebuilding from Katrina, it seems very obvious that my Republican parents (one of whom was a devout Christian, the other of whom was a devout Atheist) got what was important in our turn of the century political situation. They were not heroes, like the Adams's, but they shared with the Adams's a certain common sense that I admire and that we could certainly use as we consider our lives as Americans in 2010.
Here’s to revving our evolution, as we turn to the practicalities of helping our people get educated, get healthy, get jobs, get equal treatment and equal opportunity, and get to cultivate, protect, and enjoy the sublime ecosystem of our planet.
Happy 4th of July everyone!
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Silver
When the silver can’t be saved
I’ve lost my mother’s silverware. We just moved into a new house. We have an awful lot of stuff, even though we have pared down and pared down for almost a year. I gave away 25 boxes of books last summer, and I can still barely fit what I’ve got into my new garage-turned story shed. My daughter is a fiendish collector and I am too: snow globes -- action figures (particularly Star Trek). And cards. Cards from my friends and lovers, cards from my daughter and husband. Cards from my mother.
My mother was a collector too. Handbags, perfume, theater books, gloves, costume jewelry. She was something of a low-level hoarder. She held on to things hard, because she was often very afraid.
Troubled by constant and paralyzing anxiety that manifested itself most visibly as a fear of both people and machines, my mother was a genius in hiding: a woman afraid to talk to anyone but me and my father about her amazing ideas and insights. She hid in the hotel bathroom when I was 13, because she was terrified at the thought of speaking French to the maid (we were in Montreal for Expo 67). Yet her French was impeccable. She feared the telephone, and hated going to the doctor. Other than her family, she had no friends.
Yet, for all her fear my mother was no political conservative; she was fervently pro-choice, a card-carrying atheist, and a lover of rock and roll. When the Bill Clinton sex scandal erupted, she asked what remains my most favorite of her no-nonsense questions; “If oral sex isn’t sex, then what the heck is it?” A remote person who came off as snobbish when she was really just plain old frightened, she braved the subway to she take me to see the Beatles, and a few years later, went with me to Carnegie Hall where we heard Tim Buckley sing in a marijuana filled room.
My best adult memory of my mother is that whenever she boarded the bus after an afternoon tea or a cup of coffee, she would take a seat and wave continually til she disappeared over the hump that occurs from time to time on Manhattan’s 3rd Avenue.
I really knew that my mother loved me at those times. She felt most at ease, I think, saying goodbye. In the distance she could safely express what close proximity made her too scared to say.
So I wept when I realized that my mother’s silverware had gotten lost in the move. I don’t know this catastrophe happened. We’d had our stuff packed up in boxes for so long, it’s possible the box got given away by accident, got transported to the wrong storage facility or who knows what.
My mother clung to objects with a palpable terror. So I felt terror too, when I realized her silverware was gone. I had lost another piece of her. My scared brilliant mother, who died a little over 10 years ago. I think about her every day. I have never stopped missing her.
I went on line, and after looking at forks and knives til I went cross-eyed, I finally found the pattern. It’s buyable, if expensive. We can gradually replace the set, I think. And how lucky that my husband is willing to do that. How lucky that we are in decent health in a new house. How lucky that we have jobs. How lucky that I get to be a writer. Although I am no genius, my ideas are rarely secret. I tell them, and write them, and have often gotten to publish them. I am surrounded by wonderful friends.
Maybe you can’t save the silver. But if you have everything else, that’s ok. I love you Mom. Don’t ever stop waving.
I’ve lost my mother’s silverware. We just moved into a new house. We have an awful lot of stuff, even though we have pared down and pared down for almost a year. I gave away 25 boxes of books last summer, and I can still barely fit what I’ve got into my new garage-turned story shed. My daughter is a fiendish collector and I am too: snow globes -- action figures (particularly Star Trek). And cards. Cards from my friends and lovers, cards from my daughter and husband. Cards from my mother.
My mother was a collector too. Handbags, perfume, theater books, gloves, costume jewelry. She was something of a low-level hoarder. She held on to things hard, because she was often very afraid.
Troubled by constant and paralyzing anxiety that manifested itself most visibly as a fear of both people and machines, my mother was a genius in hiding: a woman afraid to talk to anyone but me and my father about her amazing ideas and insights. She hid in the hotel bathroom when I was 13, because she was terrified at the thought of speaking French to the maid (we were in Montreal for Expo 67). Yet her French was impeccable. She feared the telephone, and hated going to the doctor. Other than her family, she had no friends.
Yet, for all her fear my mother was no political conservative; she was fervently pro-choice, a card-carrying atheist, and a lover of rock and roll. When the Bill Clinton sex scandal erupted, she asked what remains my most favorite of her no-nonsense questions; “If oral sex isn’t sex, then what the heck is it?” A remote person who came off as snobbish when she was really just plain old frightened, she braved the subway to she take me to see the Beatles, and a few years later, went with me to Carnegie Hall where we heard Tim Buckley sing in a marijuana filled room.
My best adult memory of my mother is that whenever she boarded the bus after an afternoon tea or a cup of coffee, she would take a seat and wave continually til she disappeared over the hump that occurs from time to time on Manhattan’s 3rd Avenue.
I really knew that my mother loved me at those times. She felt most at ease, I think, saying goodbye. In the distance she could safely express what close proximity made her too scared to say.
So I wept when I realized that my mother’s silverware had gotten lost in the move. I don’t know this catastrophe happened. We’d had our stuff packed up in boxes for so long, it’s possible the box got given away by accident, got transported to the wrong storage facility or who knows what.
My mother clung to objects with a palpable terror. So I felt terror too, when I realized her silverware was gone. I had lost another piece of her. My scared brilliant mother, who died a little over 10 years ago. I think about her every day. I have never stopped missing her.
I went on line, and after looking at forks and knives til I went cross-eyed, I finally found the pattern. It’s buyable, if expensive. We can gradually replace the set, I think. And how lucky that my husband is willing to do that. How lucky that we are in decent health in a new house. How lucky that we have jobs. How lucky that I get to be a writer. Although I am no genius, my ideas are rarely secret. I tell them, and write them, and have often gotten to publish them. I am surrounded by wonderful friends.
Maybe you can’t save the silver. But if you have everything else, that’s ok. I love you Mom. Don’t ever stop waving.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
LEH
Listening (and gifting) like Leonard
My father Leonard Hammer was an impossible person a lot of the time. Insanely conservative (by this I mean a Reaganite, and before that a Nixonite), my dad glared at men who didn’t wear ties (which was most of them), considered the Israelis an overwrought lot, and detested political radicalism (of the left). He and I did not get on a lot of the time.
But.
The man knew how to treat people to lunch, dinner and drinks. He loved much younger people, frequently spoke to his fraternity brothers at universities and conventions, and once helped a young NYC taxi driver, who seemed like a nice person, get a job in television. He helped, listened, encouraged, and always picked up the check with a bevy of much younger friends – who included, by the way female former secretaries, bank tellers, and salespersons, whom he had gotten to know during his travels up and down the East Side avenues.
“You work in a world I do not understand,” he told me repeatedly over lunch at the various clubs he belonged to. “But you are successful at it and I’m proud of you. I hope you’re proud of yourself. “ He always kind of yelled when he said that last part – which would explain why I found these lunches fairly embarrassing.
Now I am 56 and have many friends who are much younger than I am. Younger friends are amazing, because they have so much energy and ambition and their dreams are fresh and strong.
3 nights ago I had a friend tell me he was up for a possible new wonderful job.
“You work in a world I do not understand,” I said. “But gosh, I’m proud of you.” I spoke or rather, yelled, sagely, lifted my glass, and paid the check.
Oops! Am I really an old geezer like my dad? More like a geezer in training I figure, and a left leaning, Green Party sympathizing one at that. Still I had the opportunity to feel grateful to him for his skills at table. The way he made you feel you could order anything you wanted off the menu, the way he got the check and dealt with the wait staff. He always treated them nicely too.
I used those moves this week with my friend with the possibly new great job, and with two newly turned girl professors, and with two wonderful graduating students. I tell them all I’m proud of them, and I hope they are proud of themselves.
My dad really had a way with being generous and supportive.
Here’s to paying that gift forward.
But please, don’t vote Republican.
My father Leonard Hammer was an impossible person a lot of the time. Insanely conservative (by this I mean a Reaganite, and before that a Nixonite), my dad glared at men who didn’t wear ties (which was most of them), considered the Israelis an overwrought lot, and detested political radicalism (of the left). He and I did not get on a lot of the time.
But.
The man knew how to treat people to lunch, dinner and drinks. He loved much younger people, frequently spoke to his fraternity brothers at universities and conventions, and once helped a young NYC taxi driver, who seemed like a nice person, get a job in television. He helped, listened, encouraged, and always picked up the check with a bevy of much younger friends – who included, by the way female former secretaries, bank tellers, and salespersons, whom he had gotten to know during his travels up and down the East Side avenues.
“You work in a world I do not understand,” he told me repeatedly over lunch at the various clubs he belonged to. “But you are successful at it and I’m proud of you. I hope you’re proud of yourself. “ He always kind of yelled when he said that last part – which would explain why I found these lunches fairly embarrassing.
Now I am 56 and have many friends who are much younger than I am. Younger friends are amazing, because they have so much energy and ambition and their dreams are fresh and strong.
3 nights ago I had a friend tell me he was up for a possible new wonderful job.
“You work in a world I do not understand,” I said. “But gosh, I’m proud of you.” I spoke or rather, yelled, sagely, lifted my glass, and paid the check.
Oops! Am I really an old geezer like my dad? More like a geezer in training I figure, and a left leaning, Green Party sympathizing one at that. Still I had the opportunity to feel grateful to him for his skills at table. The way he made you feel you could order anything you wanted off the menu, the way he got the check and dealt with the wait staff. He always treated them nicely too.
I used those moves this week with my friend with the possibly new great job, and with two newly turned girl professors, and with two wonderful graduating students. I tell them all I’m proud of them, and I hope they are proud of themselves.
My dad really had a way with being generous and supportive.
Here’s to paying that gift forward.
But please, don’t vote Republican.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
On Bob Fossil’s Belly
I have a giant crush on Bob Fossil. I LOVE him. If I could still bear children, I would want to make a big chubby Bob Fossil baby. Bob Fossil makes me want to get up and do my dirtiest silliest dance.
Who is this Svengali who makes a middle aged professor want to take all her clothes off, find a pole, and do a pole dance – assuming she doesn’t throw her back out in the attempt? Bob Fossil is a pretend fictional character from the BBC TV series The Mighty Boosh. He is an out of control, power-mad, probably homosexual nincompoop who runs a zoo and who doesn’t know the names for any of the animals.
He loves to dance, and make people watch him. He dances sexy, dirty, and ridiculously -- like he was a bad stripper, an aging disco queen, or a cage dancer from the 60’s.
Most importantly Bob Fossil has a huge, white, round belly that continually protrudes in obscene little sections through the gaps of a tiny, barely buttoned, pale blue safari shirt. The shirt has epaulettes. It wants to be a uniform, but that belly shines forth like a beacon between and below the shirt, reminding us that nothing having to do with the body can ever be “official.” The body is its own wild animal, and it cannot – literally—be contained.
Personally, I have always had a problem with my belly. When I became a fat child, the belly was the fattest part of me.
Now that I am a menopausal 56 year old, my belly has returned with a vengeance; the once and future fattest part of me once again reigns supreme. Lords it over blue jeans. Humps and jumps out of dresses, curls its lip and swells disdainfully over underwear.
Until Bob Fossil came into my life I could not make peace with the belly. Granted, I had refused surgery and the insane dieting of yesteryear, but I had retreated – as many women do -- away from myself as body, away from myself as sexual being into a low-level sense of what Muriel Rukeyser once called despisal. Despisal is insidious. You don’t entirely hate the way you look. You just feel a mild sense of nausea when you think about yourself. You avoid looking at your body whenever possible, and you regard all compliments as lies – albeit kind ones. It’s not a big deal; it’s just a little despair, a tiny daily dose of deep desperation. All because of the belly.
And then along comes Bob Fossil and his too tiny shirt and his terrible dancing. When Bob Fossil struts on camera with that bulbous belly birthday cake of flesh, I reach for something spacious in myself and find it. I want an invite to the tummy party he’s incarnating. Watching Bob Fossil’s belly makes me want to wear hip huggers, a very tight shirt, and a pushup bra, and a lot of eye makeup and super high heels. Because why the hell not?
Writers like Rabelais celebrate what has been called the “carnivalesque” body. Bob Fossil shows us what fun that carnivalesque body is to own because of the fun you can have with it. The way you can feed it, fuck with it, and flaunt it.
Excuse me. I feel a pole dance coming on.
I have a giant crush on Bob Fossil. I LOVE him. If I could still bear children, I would want to make a big chubby Bob Fossil baby. Bob Fossil makes me want to get up and do my dirtiest silliest dance.
Who is this Svengali who makes a middle aged professor want to take all her clothes off, find a pole, and do a pole dance – assuming she doesn’t throw her back out in the attempt? Bob Fossil is a pretend fictional character from the BBC TV series The Mighty Boosh. He is an out of control, power-mad, probably homosexual nincompoop who runs a zoo and who doesn’t know the names for any of the animals.
He loves to dance, and make people watch him. He dances sexy, dirty, and ridiculously -- like he was a bad stripper, an aging disco queen, or a cage dancer from the 60’s.
Most importantly Bob Fossil has a huge, white, round belly that continually protrudes in obscene little sections through the gaps of a tiny, barely buttoned, pale blue safari shirt. The shirt has epaulettes. It wants to be a uniform, but that belly shines forth like a beacon between and below the shirt, reminding us that nothing having to do with the body can ever be “official.” The body is its own wild animal, and it cannot – literally—be contained.
Personally, I have always had a problem with my belly. When I became a fat child, the belly was the fattest part of me.
Now that I am a menopausal 56 year old, my belly has returned with a vengeance; the once and future fattest part of me once again reigns supreme. Lords it over blue jeans. Humps and jumps out of dresses, curls its lip and swells disdainfully over underwear.
Until Bob Fossil came into my life I could not make peace with the belly. Granted, I had refused surgery and the insane dieting of yesteryear, but I had retreated – as many women do -- away from myself as body, away from myself as sexual being into a low-level sense of what Muriel Rukeyser once called despisal. Despisal is insidious. You don’t entirely hate the way you look. You just feel a mild sense of nausea when you think about yourself. You avoid looking at your body whenever possible, and you regard all compliments as lies – albeit kind ones. It’s not a big deal; it’s just a little despair, a tiny daily dose of deep desperation. All because of the belly.
And then along comes Bob Fossil and his too tiny shirt and his terrible dancing. When Bob Fossil struts on camera with that bulbous belly birthday cake of flesh, I reach for something spacious in myself and find it. I want an invite to the tummy party he’s incarnating. Watching Bob Fossil’s belly makes me want to wear hip huggers, a very tight shirt, and a pushup bra, and a lot of eye makeup and super high heels. Because why the hell not?
Writers like Rabelais celebrate what has been called the “carnivalesque” body. Bob Fossil shows us what fun that carnivalesque body is to own because of the fun you can have with it. The way you can feed it, fuck with it, and flaunt it.
Excuse me. I feel a pole dance coming on.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Don’t Shoot the Chairman
“Are you a professor,” the nice lady at Borders said to me yesterday. I was buying Valentines’ presents for my husband and daughter, the Book Thief for her (she’s never read it) and Jesus in Islam for him (he’s interested in all things having to do with scriptural representations of the big guy [no he’s not Christian {he’s not Muslim either}]).
“They shot someone because they didn’t get tenure,” the lady said. She looked meaningfully at her colleague.
“In Alabama.”
The cashiers were both African American. I was and am white. Something passed between them, that I felt but couldn’t read.
“University of Alabama?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Why’d they take it out on them?” She said.
I drove home in a hurry and went online. “Them” turned out to be the department chair and two professors, along with 3 others all sitting in a meeting where an assistant professor was informed she didn’t get tenure. I guess she pulled out a gun and shot them then and there. The assistant professor who was the shooter was a scientist. Her husband was waiting in the parking lot.
“Well!” I said to my husband, “she certainly knew how to handle a gun. She shot 6 people.”
“Crap,” said my husband also surfing online. “I think she’s Jewish.”
A lot of teachers in academics from lecturers to full professors to teaching assistants, say they hate the chairman and the administration. A lot of people say that the tenure process is completely unfair. This has been a line waiting to be crossed. Something is happening in the world of edu. We keep on saying it’s a refuge, safe space, but we know now that it isn’t. Something has to change. All of it has to. From preschool to med school.
The Montessori school knows it. Evergreen State knows it. And the Whidbey Island MFA program knows it. The school must change into something else.
When I was a graduate student a friend and I made up a hit list. We were filled with rage a lot of the time. Graduate school in the humanities was fiercely competitive and we all knew there weren’t enough jobs to go around.
It’s worse now.
“Do you tell prospective graduate students there are no jobs?” I asked a colleague a few years ago. “Oh,” she said. “I never even thought of that when I was in the PHD program.”
I did. I had to get a job. A lot of people in academics have to work. If they don’t make it in the academy, they have to start all over again. You are not an automatic hire in the k-12 system. It doesn’t work like that.
Should we abolish tenure?
Maybe.
But until we figure out how to make hiring and firing in education more honest and fair, until we figure out the whole nexus of what edu needs to be. We are going to have these horrible things happening. It’s going to columbine. It’s already happening.
Until our country supports education, it’s going to columbine. Until we take education seriously, it’s going to columbine. First it was students in high school, then it was a student on a college campus, and now it’s an assistant professor in the sciences for Pete’s sake.
It all needs to change. Now.
My colleagues at the Borders cash registers know something about being underpayed and undervalued. They condemned the violent act that emerged within what they and most people consider a space of privilege. But they also seemed to know that crazy stuff happens when you least expect it. In seemingly pastoral spaces. The unthinkable happens on the margins of what we think is possible. It continues to call us into awareness. We need to heed the call.
“Are you a professor,” the nice lady at Borders said to me yesterday. I was buying Valentines’ presents for my husband and daughter, the Book Thief for her (she’s never read it) and Jesus in Islam for him (he’s interested in all things having to do with scriptural representations of the big guy [no he’s not Christian {he’s not Muslim either}]).
“They shot someone because they didn’t get tenure,” the lady said. She looked meaningfully at her colleague.
“In Alabama.”
The cashiers were both African American. I was and am white. Something passed between them, that I felt but couldn’t read.
“University of Alabama?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Why’d they take it out on them?” She said.
I drove home in a hurry and went online. “Them” turned out to be the department chair and two professors, along with 3 others all sitting in a meeting where an assistant professor was informed she didn’t get tenure. I guess she pulled out a gun and shot them then and there. The assistant professor who was the shooter was a scientist. Her husband was waiting in the parking lot.
“Well!” I said to my husband, “she certainly knew how to handle a gun. She shot 6 people.”
“Crap,” said my husband also surfing online. “I think she’s Jewish.”
A lot of teachers in academics from lecturers to full professors to teaching assistants, say they hate the chairman and the administration. A lot of people say that the tenure process is completely unfair. This has been a line waiting to be crossed. Something is happening in the world of edu. We keep on saying it’s a refuge, safe space, but we know now that it isn’t. Something has to change. All of it has to. From preschool to med school.
The Montessori school knows it. Evergreen State knows it. And the Whidbey Island MFA program knows it. The school must change into something else.
When I was a graduate student a friend and I made up a hit list. We were filled with rage a lot of the time. Graduate school in the humanities was fiercely competitive and we all knew there weren’t enough jobs to go around.
It’s worse now.
“Do you tell prospective graduate students there are no jobs?” I asked a colleague a few years ago. “Oh,” she said. “I never even thought of that when I was in the PHD program.”
I did. I had to get a job. A lot of people in academics have to work. If they don’t make it in the academy, they have to start all over again. You are not an automatic hire in the k-12 system. It doesn’t work like that.
Should we abolish tenure?
Maybe.
But until we figure out how to make hiring and firing in education more honest and fair, until we figure out the whole nexus of what edu needs to be. We are going to have these horrible things happening. It’s going to columbine. It’s already happening.
Until our country supports education, it’s going to columbine. Until we take education seriously, it’s going to columbine. First it was students in high school, then it was a student on a college campus, and now it’s an assistant professor in the sciences for Pete’s sake.
It all needs to change. Now.
My colleagues at the Borders cash registers know something about being underpayed and undervalued. They condemned the violent act that emerged within what they and most people consider a space of privilege. But they also seemed to know that crazy stuff happens when you least expect it. In seemingly pastoral spaces. The unthinkable happens on the margins of what we think is possible. It continues to call us into awareness. We need to heed the call.
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