I don't fly very often. In fact, in the summer of 2008, after two particularly horrendous flight experiences in a row, I swore never to fly again — and kept that promise for two and a half years. But on Monday I embarked on my fourth airplane trip of this calendar year — and the second to the opposite coast.
I started reading the New Yorker about eight or ten years ago, when I first started taking exercise seriously — a guilty pleasure, a respite from my usual regimen of austere left-wing theory, which I allowed myself as a reward while spending 30 minutes on an exercise bike a couple of times a week. The sense of virtue of working off some of that beer, along with a healthy dose of endorphins, allowed me to take pleasure in the craft of good writing without taking too much offense at the underlying assumptions of most New Yorker articles: a casual condescension toward both the working class and the serious intellectual left.
As the benefit of exercising became its own reward, and as I took up weights and running (at least in the 6 non-winter months we have in Vermont), I've developed a backlog of New Yorkers recently. As this flight was a long one, and I was travelling solo, and as this trip was for work, and as I've been working a lot recently ... I decided to bring nothing but pleasure reading on the plane with me — namely, all those New Yorkers.
* * *
The one issue I read cover to cover on Monday was the April 18th issue, a kind of travel issue, I suppose. There was a long piece by the novelist Jonathan Franzen, recounting a typically New Yorker type quest — the author, seeking to escape a sense of malaise, determines to travel to a remote island and re-read Robinson Crusoe while himself stranded in solitude on an otherwise uninhabited isle. The piece becomes a meditation on the life and suicide of his friend the novelist David Foster Wallace, and on the origins, function and destiny of the novel as an art form.
I've never read anything by either author, and in fact don't read very many novels at all, or fiction of any sort (even the fiction in the New Yorker). I read left theory. I read about what social movements are doing and thinking. And, like so many other people, I read what my friends, family, neighbors and distant acquaintances are doing, thinking, and finding amusing or appalling — on Facebook.
Franzen is his piece admits to having developed the habit of narrating his own life as if it were a novel; I, like so many other people — far more than will ever admit to it to others — often find myself narrating my own life to myself in Facebook status updates, or tweets. But sometimes, especially when I've been reading the New Yorker, I start narrating my inner intellectual life in a more expansive, rich and speculative voice — and, a few times a year, the result makes it onto this blog.
* * *
I started this blog almost seven years ago, prompted by a friend who was at the time, like me, mostly a housewife. She got up early every morning to write — a discipline I always admired but could never emulate. I maintained it in proper blog-like fashion for less than a year, then stopped regular posting, especially after I lost touch with my one regular reader as she went through a divorce and some other life changes. Then for awhile it became a place where I would regularly post recipes, but I've become too busy to even do that anymore.
In recent years, the only serious blogging I have done has been when I travel — which is something I don't do much of. Between the comforts of home — especially the comforts of good food and abundant wine in the evening — the demands of work (paid, house and movement), and the regular exercise that is necessary to maintain my health, I find it hard to find the time to actually write down my thoughts, and difficult to justify writing about whatever catches my intellectual fancy instead of serious writing for the movement. Travel offers not only subjects to write about but the time to do it, and, perhaps more importantly, permission to step outside the boundaries of day-to-day life.
* * *
Travel is, of course, a luxury — and luxury is intimately connected to creative writing. Visual art, music, dance and poetry are all deeply utilitarian — constituting and re-constituting the social rituals that make human society, and thus agriculture, factories, tractors and iPads, possible. They all stretch back beyond written history; they are at the core of what it means to be human.
The novel, however, as Franzen notes, developed with the world-historical emergence of capitalism. The tremendous development of productive forces established for the first time a class — the bourgeoisie — with the leisure time to not only read for pleasure on a grand scale, but also the leisure time to take pen to paper and write — formerly the province of the skilled castes of poets, dramatists and theologians. Novels were the first blogs, the first writing that took the commonplace as a worthy subject for art, and the first art that aimed to become a commonplace — to be read alone, at home, at the end of the day, for pleasure.
Blogging and social media are at the same time a fascinating democratization of intellectual production — we express our leisure now not simply by reading but by creating — and part of modern capitalism's conquest of leisure as a site of accumulation. Every night, after work, millions of us spend our leisure time working for free, creating the content that provides revenue for Adsense and Facebook.
* * *
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts," maintained Mark Twain. Of course, the modern American travel infrastructure has been designed to purge the activity of any such subversive function.
Years ago, as part of a discussion of "socio-economic integration" in the Burlington school district, a well-meaning middle-class liberal expressed pity for the white working-class kids in my neighborhood, who would (according to this person) never leave their community. Yet in Burlington's Old North End, those kids were going to be exposed to, brought into daily intimate contact with, forced by physical proximity and their own powerlessness to reckon with, cultures that were not their own. While that middle-class liberal could easily travel the whole world and never have to leave the worldwide cocoon of privilege and liberal condescension that makes the world safe for white middle-class Americans and their views.
But still, despite all the attempts to sanitize it, travel can still radicalize people. No matter how well-crafted and swaddled in liberalism a study-abroad program is, it always runs the risk of returning a student dedicated to overthrowing imperialism.
Writing, on the other hand, is not fatal to prejudice — in fact, it is fundamental to prejudice, for what is prejudice if not the stories we tell about others whom we do not know. It can seek to disrupt prejudice, but without the disruption caused by contact — physical contact — with others, writing inevitably ends up reinforcing some sort of prejudice, however "inclusive" that prejudice pretends to be.
Which I suppose is why travel writing is, despite my reluctance to do it, important.
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Monday, May 03, 2010
Short Article About May Day in VT
Although I'm credited as the main author of "May Day Protests Gain Urgency as Immigration, Health Care Fights Explode" over at Labor Notes, I really only wrote the last bit about Vermont's May Day Healthcare Is a Human Right rally. Still, I guess it's a publication.
I posted the best of the pictures H and I took on May Day here.
I posted the best of the pictures H and I took on May Day here.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Report from 2006 World Social Forum (re-post)
This was original published (in print only) in the February, 2006 issue of the UE News. I am posting it now because Armando Robles, one of the UE delegation from that WSF trip three years ago, was one of the leaders of the plant occupation at Republic Windows and Doors last December, and just recently visited Vermont as part of the Resistance and Recovery Tour.
In January, three rank and file UE members — myself, Angaza Laughinghouse (Local 150), and Armando Robles (Local 1110) — travelled to Caracas, Venezuela to attend the sixth World Social Forum (WSF). The WSF is an annual gathering of trade unionists, community organizations and other social movements who oppose corporate globalization. The goal of the WSF is to promote a globalization based on solidarity, justice and peace, one that creates jobs rather than destroys them and improves the lives of working people. The UE has been repesented at every WSF since the second one, in 2002. As in previous years, we were part of a broader delegation of U.S. grassroots organizations organized by Grassroots Global Justice.
VENEZUELA
This year, the WSF was hosted by the pro-worker government in Venezuela. While much of the media coverage of Venezuela has focused on President Hugo Chavez, there is in fact a much broader process of social change going on in Venezuela, known variously as "the Bolivarian Revolution," "the Revolution," or simply "the process." Virtually all of the working-class people we met were supporters of the revolution, though a few were critical of Chavez personally.
There is no doubt that this process is benefiting the working people of Venezuela. While many speak of the process as being a "revolution," it is peaceful and democratic. There is no political repression — indeed, the opposition flourishes in wealthier areas, owns all of the private press and media, and in fact organized a large (and extremely well-dressed) anti-WSF march at the beginning of our time there. The "process" seems to primarily consist of using government resources to assist communities and workplaces with self-organization, whether it is around jobs, health care, education, public safety or other concerns. As a result, the access to health care, quality of education, level of public safety and so forth seem to be improving throughout Venezuela, in marked contrast to the U.S. where we are constantly fighting defensive battles. Furthermore, what we in the UE would call "rank and file control" is a central principle of this process; a common slogan was "the revolution is giving power to the people." The new provision of services in neighborhoods is directed by neighborhood committees, and, most inspiringly, factories and other workplaces closed by their owners are being re-opened by the workers (see below).
VENEZUELAN LABOR
For many decades, workers in Venezuela have been represented almost exclusively by a labor federation known as CTV (Venezuelan Confederation of Labor), which was and is corrupt, undemocratic and tightly connected to both employers and the old political parties (before Chavez was elected, politics in Venezuela were controlled by a two-party system very much like our own, with both parties representing bosses' interests). The CTV is extremely hostile to Chavez, and was involved in both the Bush-instigated coup against Chavez in April of 2002 and the "general strike" (really a general lockout called by employers) which attempted to force Chavez from power later that year. It is one of the few labor federations in the world enthusiastically supported by the Bush Administration.
In the last five years or so, rank and file workers have created a new labor federation, the UNT (National Union of Workers), which has become the dominant federation in the private sector and has also recently gained the affiliation of the key construction unions. In contract to the CTV, debate and discussion flourish inside the UNT; while the UNT membership is overwhelming in favor of "the process," there is a vigorous debate over whether the labor movement should be close to Chavez or strive for political independence.
Another issue of great discussion and debate in the UNT is "co-management," the process by which many closed factories and other workplaces in Venezuela are being re-opened under worker control. We met an electrical utility worker from the UNT who could barely contain his pride that he and his co-workers were now running the shop without bosses. "We run it now," he said.
EXPOSING U.S. GOVERNMENT HYPOCRISY
At a workshop co-organized by UE and the Southwest Workers' Union (SWU), which represents school support staff workers in southern Texas, WSF delegates from Venezuela, Colombia, Europe and the U.S. heard Local 150 Executive Board member Angaza Laughinghouse describe the struggle of public sector workers in the U.S. South for collective bargaining rights through the International Worker Justice Campaign. At another workshop organized by SWU on the general issue of workers' rights in the U.S., Armando Robles (Local 1110) also described the struggle of workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago for a democratic union.
Participants from other countries, who often hear the U.S. government defend its military adventures or interventions against pro-worker governments like Venezuela's with rhetoric about "democracy" and "rights" were shocked and appalled to hear how the U.S. denies the basic democratic right of collective bargaining to millions of workers. All three of us were also interviewed by a radio journalist from Quebec, who broadcast a story about the U.S. denial of collective bargaining rights over the WSF's own radio station while we were there and also recorded a program to be played on Montreal radio when she returned.
IMPORTANCE OF SOLIDARITY
We all returned inspired by how workers in Venezuela, and throughout Latin America, are organizing and making improvements in their living and working standards. We were also impressed at how clearly they saw that American workers were not their enemies, but their brothers and sisters in a struggle to improve the lives of all workers, even though our government has been working to undermine their achievements. We returned committed to telling the truth about how Chavez's democratic revolution is benefitting the workers of Venezuela, and to prevent Bush from intervening in Venezuela.
In January, three rank and file UE members — myself, Angaza Laughinghouse (Local 150), and Armando Robles (Local 1110) — travelled to Caracas, Venezuela to attend the sixth World Social Forum (WSF). The WSF is an annual gathering of trade unionists, community organizations and other social movements who oppose corporate globalization. The goal of the WSF is to promote a globalization based on solidarity, justice and peace, one that creates jobs rather than destroys them and improves the lives of working people. The UE has been repesented at every WSF since the second one, in 2002. As in previous years, we were part of a broader delegation of U.S. grassroots organizations organized by Grassroots Global Justice.
VENEZUELA
This year, the WSF was hosted by the pro-worker government in Venezuela. While much of the media coverage of Venezuela has focused on President Hugo Chavez, there is in fact a much broader process of social change going on in Venezuela, known variously as "the Bolivarian Revolution," "the Revolution," or simply "the process." Virtually all of the working-class people we met were supporters of the revolution, though a few were critical of Chavez personally.
There is no doubt that this process is benefiting the working people of Venezuela. While many speak of the process as being a "revolution," it is peaceful and democratic. There is no political repression — indeed, the opposition flourishes in wealthier areas, owns all of the private press and media, and in fact organized a large (and extremely well-dressed) anti-WSF march at the beginning of our time there. The "process" seems to primarily consist of using government resources to assist communities and workplaces with self-organization, whether it is around jobs, health care, education, public safety or other concerns. As a result, the access to health care, quality of education, level of public safety and so forth seem to be improving throughout Venezuela, in marked contrast to the U.S. where we are constantly fighting defensive battles. Furthermore, what we in the UE would call "rank and file control" is a central principle of this process; a common slogan was "the revolution is giving power to the people." The new provision of services in neighborhoods is directed by neighborhood committees, and, most inspiringly, factories and other workplaces closed by their owners are being re-opened by the workers (see below).
VENEZUELAN LABOR
For many decades, workers in Venezuela have been represented almost exclusively by a labor federation known as CTV (Venezuelan Confederation of Labor), which was and is corrupt, undemocratic and tightly connected to both employers and the old political parties (before Chavez was elected, politics in Venezuela were controlled by a two-party system very much like our own, with both parties representing bosses' interests). The CTV is extremely hostile to Chavez, and was involved in both the Bush-instigated coup against Chavez in April of 2002 and the "general strike" (really a general lockout called by employers) which attempted to force Chavez from power later that year. It is one of the few labor federations in the world enthusiastically supported by the Bush Administration.
In the last five years or so, rank and file workers have created a new labor federation, the UNT (National Union of Workers), which has become the dominant federation in the private sector and has also recently gained the affiliation of the key construction unions. In contract to the CTV, debate and discussion flourish inside the UNT; while the UNT membership is overwhelming in favor of "the process," there is a vigorous debate over whether the labor movement should be close to Chavez or strive for political independence.
Another issue of great discussion and debate in the UNT is "co-management," the process by which many closed factories and other workplaces in Venezuela are being re-opened under worker control. We met an electrical utility worker from the UNT who could barely contain his pride that he and his co-workers were now running the shop without bosses. "We run it now," he said.
EXPOSING U.S. GOVERNMENT HYPOCRISY
At a workshop co-organized by UE and the Southwest Workers' Union (SWU), which represents school support staff workers in southern Texas, WSF delegates from Venezuela, Colombia, Europe and the U.S. heard Local 150 Executive Board member Angaza Laughinghouse describe the struggle of public sector workers in the U.S. South for collective bargaining rights through the International Worker Justice Campaign. At another workshop organized by SWU on the general issue of workers' rights in the U.S., Armando Robles (Local 1110) also described the struggle of workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago for a democratic union.
Participants from other countries, who often hear the U.S. government defend its military adventures or interventions against pro-worker governments like Venezuela's with rhetoric about "democracy" and "rights" were shocked and appalled to hear how the U.S. denies the basic democratic right of collective bargaining to millions of workers. All three of us were also interviewed by a radio journalist from Quebec, who broadcast a story about the U.S. denial of collective bargaining rights over the WSF's own radio station while we were there and also recorded a program to be played on Montreal radio when she returned.
IMPORTANCE OF SOLIDARITY
We all returned inspired by how workers in Venezuela, and throughout Latin America, are organizing and making improvements in their living and working standards. We were also impressed at how clearly they saw that American workers were not their enemies, but their brothers and sisters in a struggle to improve the lives of all workers, even though our government has been working to undermine their achievements. We returned committed to telling the truth about how Chavez's democratic revolution is benefitting the workers of Venezuela, and to prevent Bush from intervening in Venezuela.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Resolutions and high-profile friends
I kinda sorta made a new year's resolution to "blog more." I'm not sure why, exactly, but it may lead to more writing on here, has already inspired a new design, and will probably mean a new direction and some attempt to attract readers.
If you just stumbled upon this, the best writing is not really what's below (which is, of course, hardly writing), but rather the writing from 2005.
Meanwhile, looks like my old Iowa friend Jamie Schweser is going to be in the New York Times Style section this Sunday. Check out his website.
If you just stumbled upon this, the best writing is not really what's below (which is, of course, hardly writing), but rather the writing from 2005.
Meanwhile, looks like my old Iowa friend Jamie Schweser is going to be in the New York Times Style section this Sunday. Check out his website.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Shell beans
Like sentences, shell beans are a great deal more trouble to produce than anyone who isn't producing them knows. You have to shell the beans, slipping open the pods with your thumbnail and then tugging the beautiful little prismatic buttons from their moorings — a process that, like writing, always takes much longer than you think it will. And then even the best shell beans, cleaned and simmered, are like sentences in that nobody actually appreciates them as much as they deserve to be appreciated. Shell beans are several steps more delicious, lighter and finer, than dried beans, much less canned beans; but the sad truth is that nobody really cares beans about beans, and not many eaters can tell the fresh kind from the dried, or even the canned.
—Adam Gopnik
Friday, December 08, 2006
Vocabulary
The other night, I took E to see the modern dance company Pilobolus. She is very much into dance (ballet especially, of course, but with a healthy appreciation for other forms of dance as well).
I enjoy dance, but I can't say that I have ever before been completely entranced by an entire dance performance. The program talked about how Pilobolus uses collective improvisation to create a new "vocabulary" for dance — different than the "vocabularies" of ballet, or modern dance, or hip-hop — and the results are in fact strikingly original. "Memento Mori" wasn't so much dancers dancing the parts of a marriage, but dancers who had so closely observed the physical vocabulary of a marriage — the grimaces, grins, preening and poking, exasperations and expectations that our bodies develop for each other during long companionship — and used them to create a piece of art that was very classically structured (unlike most marriages).
* * *
I've started a new job, and a new blog. The new blog is at MySpace, and it's just about food. What I've cooked and how to cook it. I've moved a post or two over there from here, posts that were, for the most part, just recipes. I also deleted a few posts from this blog which were just notes about news or such — I'm trying to keep this to be just, ahem, writerly things.
My new job is primarily writing. My official title (officially conferred upon me on Wednesday) is "Assistant to the Director of International Affairs," but basically I am a grant-writer. Clear narrative, careful attention to crafting our proposals within the shade of political language preferred by each grantmaker in turn, and most importantly: meeting deadlines. I like being clear, ferreting out shades of politics and I'm pretty good at making deadlines.
But I do have issues about writing as work. Flipping burgers is work, running machines in a factory is work, serving customers is work, teaching is work. And really, writing is work, too, but it has been so tied up in my mind with privilege that, before starting a writing job, I've always tried to write (both the blog and writing leaflets, etc. for the movement) in the corners of my time — during down time at work at my customer-service job (I'm fine with using the boss's time), or if I wake up early because of my occasional insomnia, or on the weekends when the laundry is all done and the house is fairly clean and H has taken the kids off somewhere.
* * *
I first read blogs about two and a half years ago, mostly mommy blogs, primarily the excellent though long-defunct days of the week, but also dooce and fussy and some others (until they all blogged about proudly crossing picket lines at a mommy-blogger-convention in SF — I haven't looked at them since). Now that the kids are older, more person-like at 6 and 8, I suppose I don't feel like I need even the minimal validation of reading blogs about other parents who are also driven crazy by the mysteries of small-child-behavior, who form the online bad, but not so bad, parents club.
I never felt much kinship with other "stay-at-home dads," probably because most of them were still men, and they either retained too much manliness and wanted to talk about sports, or were too into renouncing their manliness and wanted to talk about feelings. I liked the mommy-blogs because they spoke the vocabulary of the Small and Daily and Material, not the Big and Important.
I enjoy dance, but I can't say that I have ever before been completely entranced by an entire dance performance. The program talked about how Pilobolus uses collective improvisation to create a new "vocabulary" for dance — different than the "vocabularies" of ballet, or modern dance, or hip-hop — and the results are in fact strikingly original. "Memento Mori" wasn't so much dancers dancing the parts of a marriage, but dancers who had so closely observed the physical vocabulary of a marriage — the grimaces, grins, preening and poking, exasperations and expectations that our bodies develop for each other during long companionship — and used them to create a piece of art that was very classically structured (unlike most marriages).
* * *
I've started a new job, and a new blog. The new blog is at MySpace, and it's just about food. What I've cooked and how to cook it. I've moved a post or two over there from here, posts that were, for the most part, just recipes. I also deleted a few posts from this blog which were just notes about news or such — I'm trying to keep this to be just, ahem, writerly things.
My new job is primarily writing. My official title (officially conferred upon me on Wednesday) is "Assistant to the Director of International Affairs," but basically I am a grant-writer. Clear narrative, careful attention to crafting our proposals within the shade of political language preferred by each grantmaker in turn, and most importantly: meeting deadlines. I like being clear, ferreting out shades of politics and I'm pretty good at making deadlines.
But I do have issues about writing as work. Flipping burgers is work, running machines in a factory is work, serving customers is work, teaching is work. And really, writing is work, too, but it has been so tied up in my mind with privilege that, before starting a writing job, I've always tried to write (both the blog and writing leaflets, etc. for the movement) in the corners of my time — during down time at work at my customer-service job (I'm fine with using the boss's time), or if I wake up early because of my occasional insomnia, or on the weekends when the laundry is all done and the house is fairly clean and H has taken the kids off somewhere.
* * *
I first read blogs about two and a half years ago, mostly mommy blogs, primarily the excellent though long-defunct days of the week, but also dooce and fussy and some others (until they all blogged about proudly crossing picket lines at a mommy-blogger-convention in SF — I haven't looked at them since). Now that the kids are older, more person-like at 6 and 8, I suppose I don't feel like I need even the minimal validation of reading blogs about other parents who are also driven crazy by the mysteries of small-child-behavior, who form the online bad, but not so bad, parents club.
I never felt much kinship with other "stay-at-home dads," probably because most of them were still men, and they either retained too much manliness and wanted to talk about sports, or were too into renouncing their manliness and wanted to talk about feelings. I liked the mommy-blogs because they spoke the vocabulary of the Small and Daily and Material, not the Big and Important.
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Hanging odes
I just finished reading an account of the culture of medieval Islamic Spain, The Ornament of the World (see http://www.twbookmark.com/books/33/0316168718/ ). The book describes a vibrant, tolerant and multicultural medieval Spain, when Islam was dominant as both religion and cultural influence, and also traces its downfall at the hands of fundamentalist tendencies from both within Islam and from Christians to the north.
Works of creativity, and especially poetry, are at the heart of this account. Menocal traces one thread of this love of poetry back to pre-Islamic Arabian tribes, who are reputed to have gathered for a yearly poetry competition. Winning odes were displayed on gold-embroidered banners; as the banners were hung for display, the best poetry became known as "hanging odes."
* * *
One of the books I remember from when I was a kid was about a field mouse named Frederick. While all the other field mice were gathering nuts and seeds and such to store for the winter, Frederick lazed about in the sun, admired the flowers, and acted in a generally bohemian manner. During the winter, when the field mice huddled together in dark burrows under the snow, Frederick recreated the sunshine and the flowers for them with poetry.
When I was a young, bohemianish creative person I liked remembering this story for its obvious promotion of bohemianish creativity, but now I like remembering this story for its clarity about the social relations that govern creative work. Physical labor is necessary to sustain creative labor. In the "primitive communist" society of these imaginary field mice, Frederick is not appointed as the mouse laureate -- he must take the initiative and is subjected to reprimand for evading his nut-gathering duties -- but the value of culture, at least during the dreary winter, is affirmed in the end by the community. The food gathered by the others is shared equally with Frederick.
* * *
As a teenager I remember always seeing a book called "Albion's Fatal Tree" on the small bookshelf that sat just to the right of my father's seat at the kitchen table (the same seat I would take over after my parents went to bed, and I would stay up late reading and listening to the all-night jazz show). The title and something about the design of the book always fascinated me, but every so often when I would pick it up the academic-ness of its contents would always put me off -- it was a collection of 5 longish essays on crime and society in England during the early days of capitalism. The title references the explosion of crimes punishable by hanging during the eighteenth century. To quote the back cover, "From one point of view eighteenth-century England, with ... its polite arts and culture ... appears as a stable, self-assured civilization. ... This book explores these contrasts: a settled ruling class which could only rule through forms of judicial terror; a population deferential by day but deeply subordinate at night."
* * *
Maria Rosa Menocal, who wrote the Ornament of the World, is a professor at Yale. Yale is a hugely rich institution in the middle of a struggling, blue-collar city. It is the alma matter of both Bush presidents, as well as John Kerry. Its institutional hostility to recognizing the value of labor extends even to its own graduate employees (who are overwhelmingly from white middle-class backgrounds), who have fought an uphill and so far unsuccessful battle for union recognition for well over a decade. The Muslims, Jews and Christians celebrated for their "culture of tolerance" in Menocal's book are overwhelmingly men of power; the fundamentalists who tear down their sumptuous, cultured palaces and ultimately their polity are poor.
Works of creativity, and especially poetry, are at the heart of this account. Menocal traces one thread of this love of poetry back to pre-Islamic Arabian tribes, who are reputed to have gathered for a yearly poetry competition. Winning odes were displayed on gold-embroidered banners; as the banners were hung for display, the best poetry became known as "hanging odes."
* * *
One of the books I remember from when I was a kid was about a field mouse named Frederick. While all the other field mice were gathering nuts and seeds and such to store for the winter, Frederick lazed about in the sun, admired the flowers, and acted in a generally bohemian manner. During the winter, when the field mice huddled together in dark burrows under the snow, Frederick recreated the sunshine and the flowers for them with poetry.
When I was a young, bohemianish creative person I liked remembering this story for its obvious promotion of bohemianish creativity, but now I like remembering this story for its clarity about the social relations that govern creative work. Physical labor is necessary to sustain creative labor. In the "primitive communist" society of these imaginary field mice, Frederick is not appointed as the mouse laureate -- he must take the initiative and is subjected to reprimand for evading his nut-gathering duties -- but the value of culture, at least during the dreary winter, is affirmed in the end by the community. The food gathered by the others is shared equally with Frederick.
* * *
As a teenager I remember always seeing a book called "Albion's Fatal Tree" on the small bookshelf that sat just to the right of my father's seat at the kitchen table (the same seat I would take over after my parents went to bed, and I would stay up late reading and listening to the all-night jazz show). The title and something about the design of the book always fascinated me, but every so often when I would pick it up the academic-ness of its contents would always put me off -- it was a collection of 5 longish essays on crime and society in England during the early days of capitalism. The title references the explosion of crimes punishable by hanging during the eighteenth century. To quote the back cover, "From one point of view eighteenth-century England, with ... its polite arts and culture ... appears as a stable, self-assured civilization. ... This book explores these contrasts: a settled ruling class which could only rule through forms of judicial terror; a population deferential by day but deeply subordinate at night."
* * *
Maria Rosa Menocal, who wrote the Ornament of the World, is a professor at Yale. Yale is a hugely rich institution in the middle of a struggling, blue-collar city. It is the alma matter of both Bush presidents, as well as John Kerry. Its institutional hostility to recognizing the value of labor extends even to its own graduate employees (who are overwhelmingly from white middle-class backgrounds), who have fought an uphill and so far unsuccessful battle for union recognition for well over a decade. The Muslims, Jews and Christians celebrated for their "culture of tolerance" in Menocal's book are overwhelmingly men of power; the fundamentalists who tear down their sumptuous, cultured palaces and ultimately their polity are poor.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Verse
I only know one poem by heart anymore, by Ogden Nash:
There's something about a martini
A tingle remarkably pleasant
A yellow, a mellow martini
I wish that I had one at present
Yes there's something about a martini
Ere the dining and dancing begin
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermonth
I think that perhaps it's the gin
It's somewhat embarassing, I suppose, that the only poem I know by heart is about what is probably the greatest threat to my own health (if "Life is a Highway," as my clock radio insisted one morning this weekend, waking me up to an unnatural wooziness, I should probably be pulled over).
I never knew that much poetry by heart, and don't recall ever spending much time trying to memorize poems, but I have a good memory and things tend to stick with me, for a time at least. When poetry was a regular part of daily life, I could recall large chunks of verse with the same ease that I now pull the measurements of favorite recipes or the family schedule of lessons, appointments and juggled nonstandard work hours or the location of a stored-away toy from my memory files.
Adolescence is like the big bang; the very boundaries of your universe suddenly begin expanding away from you so fast in every direction. Discovering sex, literature, driving, rock and roll, love, psychoactive substances, and the other side of midnight all at once is thrilling and intoxicating and extremely disorienting. For me, poetry was part of making sense of all this on a day-to-day basis, and I remember lines and fragments and whole poems of Ginsberg and cummings and Whitman just lodging themselves in my consciousness willy-nilly, like meteorites perhaps.
There is one other poem that I can remember a few lines of, but it is in Russian. It is a short poem by Pushkin, and I was told in my Russian classes that this is the poem that every Russian schoolchild learns by heart.
I studied Russian for the first two years of my higher education. It seemed a language full of both romance and the sweep of history. The coup which ended the Gorbachev era and cleared the way for Boris Yeltin happened the weekend before I left for college, and for a left-leaning 18-year-old it seemed like the Soviet Union might be poised on the cusp of a grand new marriage of freedom and socialism. But of course, things fall apart.
The first line of the Pushkin poem is "Ya vas lyubil, lyubov yeshcho bitz mozhe" mdash; "I once loved you," the poem begins unambiguously, but then continues with a phrase which (if I remember my Russian properly), could either mean "perhaps I still love you" or "perhaps love still exists."
There's something about a martini
A tingle remarkably pleasant
A yellow, a mellow martini
I wish that I had one at present
Yes there's something about a martini
Ere the dining and dancing begin
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermonth
I think that perhaps it's the gin
It's somewhat embarassing, I suppose, that the only poem I know by heart is about what is probably the greatest threat to my own health (if "Life is a Highway," as my clock radio insisted one morning this weekend, waking me up to an unnatural wooziness, I should probably be pulled over).
I never knew that much poetry by heart, and don't recall ever spending much time trying to memorize poems, but I have a good memory and things tend to stick with me, for a time at least. When poetry was a regular part of daily life, I could recall large chunks of verse with the same ease that I now pull the measurements of favorite recipes or the family schedule of lessons, appointments and juggled nonstandard work hours or the location of a stored-away toy from my memory files.
Adolescence is like the big bang; the very boundaries of your universe suddenly begin expanding away from you so fast in every direction. Discovering sex, literature, driving, rock and roll, love, psychoactive substances, and the other side of midnight all at once is thrilling and intoxicating and extremely disorienting. For me, poetry was part of making sense of all this on a day-to-day basis, and I remember lines and fragments and whole poems of Ginsberg and cummings and Whitman just lodging themselves in my consciousness willy-nilly, like meteorites perhaps.
There is one other poem that I can remember a few lines of, but it is in Russian. It is a short poem by Pushkin, and I was told in my Russian classes that this is the poem that every Russian schoolchild learns by heart.
I studied Russian for the first two years of my higher education. It seemed a language full of both romance and the sweep of history. The coup which ended the Gorbachev era and cleared the way for Boris Yeltin happened the weekend before I left for college, and for a left-leaning 18-year-old it seemed like the Soviet Union might be poised on the cusp of a grand new marriage of freedom and socialism. But of course, things fall apart.
The first line of the Pushkin poem is "Ya vas lyubil, lyubov yeshcho bitz mozhe" mdash; "I once loved you," the poem begins unambiguously, but then continues with a phrase which (if I remember my Russian properly), could either mean "perhaps I still love you" or "perhaps love still exists."
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Death and writing
This morning on the bus, I was reading a review by Chris Hedges of two recent books on the invasion of Iraq. Hedges opens the review with the point that only the vanquished can tell the truth about war, because only those who have suffered the violence are immune to its allure and seductiveness. But, he warns those who would try to know war from what is written about it,
2004 was the year my interest in writing resurfaced after years of neglect. As a teenager, I occasionally fancied myself a writer of stories and even, in the depths of teen angst, the occasional bit of poetry, but I certainly never felt that it was a calling. In my forays into the world of higher education, I always received praise for my writing skills, and even derived some enjoyment from it. I was a high school student who received high marks for original but I imagine poorly organized and sloppily reasoned essays papered over with rhetorical flair beyond my years. It wasn't until the second college I attended that professors began to hold me to some standards, insisting that graceful style does not exempt one from the standards of an academic discipline and demanding that my arguments be not only clever but supported with evidence. It was a bit of a shock, but I took to the new discipline well, evolving from a late-night stream-of-consciousness essayist to a careful, sentence-by-sentence self-editor.
After dropping out of the higher-educational system, I still carried writing around in my skill bag, but for years I never thought about it except instrumentally, in the course of activism. I provided content for union newsletters, crafted resolutions and policies, wrote (or ghost-wrote) letters to the editor and op-eds to influence public policy, and even delivered a speech to a major anti-war rally in the state capitol. I enjoyed doing the work when asked, but never went looking for it.
I spent a good portion of yesterday, while the kids were at school, working to finish my father's writing. He died a few days before Christmas. He had been in the hospital for about a month, suffering various infections and inflammations and procedures and surgeries, all ultimately stemming from the biliary duct cancer he had been fighting for five years. On Tuesday, he learned that his liver was irretrievably damaged. That evening I sat by his hospital bed while he made sure to go over, with me and my mom, the three articles he had almost finished before entering the hospital. One had already been accepted for publication, and one only needed to have the correct citations, hunted down by a research assistant, added into the footnotes. But the third, an examination of Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America and its implications for modern constitutional law and theory, still needed at least one piece of rewriting.
This is what I did yesterday. A combination of clerical work (typing the footnotes and correcting types), a stray bit of editing here and there where academese took over my father's writing style, and the intense rewriting of one sentence. That one sentence, compressing an overview of current constitutional interpretation about the rights to political speech in the media into its first half, then providing a "Toquevillian" critique of that same interpretation in the other half, had to be revised in light of a multi-page memo from a colleague more versed in the rise and fall of the "fairness doctrine." I read and re-read through the whole article to make sure the new sentence remained compatible with its meaning and style, through the memo — which was a little dense in legalese — and finally, by three in the afternoon or so, came up with an servicable new sentence.
Her Little Bird, who convinced me to start this blog at the end of last summer, told me the other day that writing was the writer's attempt to survive death. It may be, but it is also the way in which we can expand our conversations, our debates, the thinking-together which is a necessary part of social human existence, beyond the immediate bounds of our family, neighborhood and workplace.
The last several days of my father's life, when I was up at the hospital for a good chunk of each day but he was often asleep, I was reading the October issue of Monthly Review, which was devoted to rememberances of Paul Sweezy, a Marxist economist and one of the two co-founders of the magazine, who died in February. Monthly Review is a magazine with a truly international impact; its editors and writers advised Fidel and Che in the early years of the Cuban Revolution, and it is one of the only American publications taken seriously by the Left in the global south — as reporting and analysis from the heart of the Empire, as it were. Paul Sweezy's analysis of monopoly capitalism speaks from beyond the grave, of course — it is still highly relevant to today's eventy — but more importantly, it connected him to, and helped to strengthen and guide, a world community of activists and intellectuals whose dedication and analysis have been, and will continue to be, a critical part of the struggle for a peaceful, just and humane world.
For many years I was suspicious of intellectual pretentions, of "ideas people," of those who claimed that writing was worthwhile work of the movement. But I think I am beginning to soften a little on this point, especially as the road ahead looks longer and harder than it did in the later 90s. I still believe in collective action, but I'm coming to realize how important collective thought is, how writing is essential to collective thought, and how it is important for us to write against death, individual and collective.
the words of the vanquished come later, sometimes long after the war, when grown men and women unpack the suffering they endured as children, what it was like to see their mother or father killed or taken away, or what it was like to lose their homes, their community, their security, and be discarded as human refuse. But by then few listen.
2004 was the year my interest in writing resurfaced after years of neglect. As a teenager, I occasionally fancied myself a writer of stories and even, in the depths of teen angst, the occasional bit of poetry, but I certainly never felt that it was a calling. In my forays into the world of higher education, I always received praise for my writing skills, and even derived some enjoyment from it. I was a high school student who received high marks for original but I imagine poorly organized and sloppily reasoned essays papered over with rhetorical flair beyond my years. It wasn't until the second college I attended that professors began to hold me to some standards, insisting that graceful style does not exempt one from the standards of an academic discipline and demanding that my arguments be not only clever but supported with evidence. It was a bit of a shock, but I took to the new discipline well, evolving from a late-night stream-of-consciousness essayist to a careful, sentence-by-sentence self-editor.
After dropping out of the higher-educational system, I still carried writing around in my skill bag, but for years I never thought about it except instrumentally, in the course of activism. I provided content for union newsletters, crafted resolutions and policies, wrote (or ghost-wrote) letters to the editor and op-eds to influence public policy, and even delivered a speech to a major anti-war rally in the state capitol. I enjoyed doing the work when asked, but never went looking for it.
I spent a good portion of yesterday, while the kids were at school, working to finish my father's writing. He died a few days before Christmas. He had been in the hospital for about a month, suffering various infections and inflammations and procedures and surgeries, all ultimately stemming from the biliary duct cancer he had been fighting for five years. On Tuesday, he learned that his liver was irretrievably damaged. That evening I sat by his hospital bed while he made sure to go over, with me and my mom, the three articles he had almost finished before entering the hospital. One had already been accepted for publication, and one only needed to have the correct citations, hunted down by a research assistant, added into the footnotes. But the third, an examination of Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America and its implications for modern constitutional law and theory, still needed at least one piece of rewriting.
This is what I did yesterday. A combination of clerical work (typing the footnotes and correcting types), a stray bit of editing here and there where academese took over my father's writing style, and the intense rewriting of one sentence. That one sentence, compressing an overview of current constitutional interpretation about the rights to political speech in the media into its first half, then providing a "Toquevillian" critique of that same interpretation in the other half, had to be revised in light of a multi-page memo from a colleague more versed in the rise and fall of the "fairness doctrine." I read and re-read through the whole article to make sure the new sentence remained compatible with its meaning and style, through the memo — which was a little dense in legalese — and finally, by three in the afternoon or so, came up with an servicable new sentence.
Her Little Bird, who convinced me to start this blog at the end of last summer, told me the other day that writing was the writer's attempt to survive death. It may be, but it is also the way in which we can expand our conversations, our debates, the thinking-together which is a necessary part of social human existence, beyond the immediate bounds of our family, neighborhood and workplace.
The last several days of my father's life, when I was up at the hospital for a good chunk of each day but he was often asleep, I was reading the October issue of Monthly Review, which was devoted to rememberances of Paul Sweezy, a Marxist economist and one of the two co-founders of the magazine, who died in February. Monthly Review is a magazine with a truly international impact; its editors and writers advised Fidel and Che in the early years of the Cuban Revolution, and it is one of the only American publications taken seriously by the Left in the global south — as reporting and analysis from the heart of the Empire, as it were. Paul Sweezy's analysis of monopoly capitalism speaks from beyond the grave, of course — it is still highly relevant to today's eventy — but more importantly, it connected him to, and helped to strengthen and guide, a world community of activists and intellectuals whose dedication and analysis have been, and will continue to be, a critical part of the struggle for a peaceful, just and humane world.
For many years I was suspicious of intellectual pretentions, of "ideas people," of those who claimed that writing was worthwhile work of the movement. But I think I am beginning to soften a little on this point, especially as the road ahead looks longer and harder than it did in the later 90s. I still believe in collective action, but I'm coming to realize how important collective thought is, how writing is essential to collective thought, and how it is important for us to write against death, individual and collective.
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