Fox Update + Poem: Hemphill + Cioran Quote

I can't claim any credit, but Yahoo! news is reporting that a "redfaced" Mexican President Vicente Fox is backing off his racist comments about Black people. It appears he did so after being labeled "racist" by Mexico's daily El Milenio in a headline; in an editorial, the newspaper condemned his comments as ""shameful, undignified, unacceptable," and columnist Yuriria Sierra added: "Can someone remind him of the race to which Kofi Annan, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice belong?" (I won't go there.) Rev. Jesse Jackson, lately of the St. Schiavo shenanigans, beat everyone in Congress to the punch, noting Fox's comments' "ominous racial overtones." The White House's response--well, who knows. I haven't heard anything. But the US government, via the State Department, did officially note that this "level of dialogue doesn't merit comment. President Bush's commitment to immigration reform that is rational, legal, common sense, decent and compassionate is well documented." But I'd have to disagree with the State Department's appraisal (where was the dialogue? the Emperor's immigration commitment has been "compassionate"???). Fox now finds himself with less credibility in Mexico and the US, and less ability to influence the problematic immigration policies that are soon to be federal statutes.

* * * * *

I frequently link to the mainstream media, but I just as frequently criticize them for their timid, shoddy, poorly-informed, unprofessional approach to the profession of journalism. The last five years alone have demonstrated repeatedly the impact of even an inept, misguided and gullible press; from the steady drumbeat of misinformation and outright lies about the reasons for the War in Iraq, to the timorous accounting of the Emperor's and his administration's series of dissimulations and disinformation campaigns, to the execrable coverage of the most recent presidential election, the mainstream media have gone out of their way to show how lost and disoriented they are, and yet still manage to influence the public discourse and even more dangerously, real events, to a significant degree. Most recent example: Now we learn that numerous people may have died because Newsweek published a "brief item," by reporters Michael Isikoff (one of the key cogs in publicizing what became the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal) and John Barry, that may have erroneously claimed that US officials at the notorious Guantánamo Bay Prison tore pages out of the Muslim's most sacred text, the Holy Qu'ran, and flushed them down the toilet.

News of this alleged outrage sparked violent protests first in Afghanistan, causing 16 deaths and more than 100 injuries. The protests have since spread to Pakistan (in both countries it is a capital crime to desecrate the Qu'ran), Indonesia and the Gaza portion of Palestine, and provoked condemnation from a host of nations, beginning with Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam's holiest cities. It turns out that the off-the-record government source was unable, when pressed, to back up the claim that he had seen the charge in an official report, though Newsweek noted that former detainees have made similar allegations. Based on the existing detailed accounts of abuse, torture and manipulative techniques supposedly used there and at other military prisons since the "War on Terror" began, this would not seem excessively farfetched. Still, shouldn't someone have pinned down a factual, textual source for such an explosive charge? Wouldn't multiple verifications be in order? Or are our media still that gung-ho on relying upon tainted or inaccurate sources (cf. Curveball, etc.) and just that tin-eared when it comes to other cultures' values, expectations and assumptions. (Well, yes, but....)

Newsweek has now apologized, but according an account I saw somewhere, the periodical will be firing no one over this. I guess in addition to following the employment practices of this administration (not punishing those whose lies or ineptitude lead to others' deaths) they've got to keep Isikoff on board in case a Democrat reoccupies the White House in 2008.

* * * * *

Many thanks to Caesar N., President of NYPLC, for forwarding this Essex Hemphill poem to the group list. After seeing it again for the first time in a while, and after thinking about some recent experiences and converations I've had, I think it's extremely apropos.

FOR MY OWN PROTECTION

by Essex Hemphill

I want to start
an organization
to save my life.
If Whales, snails,
dogs, cats,
Chrysler, and Nixon
can be saved,
the lives of Black men
are priceless
and can be saved.
We should be able
to save each other.
I don't want to wait
for the Heritage Foundation
to release a study
stating Black men
are almost extinct.
i don't want to be
the living dead
pacified with drugs
and sex.

If a human chain
can be formed
around missile sites,
then surley Black men
can form human chains
around Anacostia, Harlem,
South Africa, Wall Street,
Hollywood, each other.

If we have to take tomorrow
with our blood are we ready?
Do our S curls,
dreadlocks, and Phillies
make us any more ready
than a bush or conkaline?
I'm not concerned
about the attire of a soldier.
All I want to know
for my own protection
is are we capable
of whatever,
whenever?

Copyright © Essex Hemphill.

* * * * *

And on a not so blue, but final note, the saturnine Cioran:

"Klee liked to quote: 'the art of drawing is the art of omission' (Liebermann). Which is how one might define the art of the aphorism.
For me, to write is to omit. That is the secret of laconicism, and of the essay as a genre."
--E. M. Cioran, from Cahiers

Fox: "Jobs not even blacks want do" + 299 Missing Black British Boys

So it's like this. The president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, who was supposed to represent a new era in his country's politics but who's turned out to be a dud, decides to appeal to a group of US business people in Mexico City to resurrect a guest worker/amnesty program for the millions of nationals from his country who are resident in the US without documentation or legal approval. We know he made some kind of deal with the Emperor W, not only because the mainstream media have reported it, but also because big business interests in the US benefit tremendously from cheap immigrant labor, W's closest friends, along with the Fringe Right, are the Corporatists, and W wants more Latino votes (and got more in the past election).

But the Emperor W has had to dance around that earlier agreement because of the 9/11 suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which pointed to, among other things, the bankruptcy of the immigration system. And the Emperor W has also backed off his earlier pro-amnesty stance because the right-wing elements of his party have decided they don't want the 10-12 million undocumented or illegal non-English-speaking arrivants, a good many of them mestizo and Indian people, a good many but not all of them from Mexico, being afforded the same kinds of amnesty opportunities that many of their own ancestors received. (If they were from Germany or Ireland or, let's say, Latvia, I doubt there'd as much opposition.) Because not all of the right-wingers can trace their ancestry to Charlemagne, like the Emperor W.

But anyways, Fox is meeting with these business leaders from Texas. Maybe they're Mexican-American or Latino, though I'd guess they're white folks. Maybe they're white-identified Latinos. I don't know. But I seriously doubt there are any Black folks, Black Americans, Black Mexicans, Black Latinos, self-identified Black anybody in the room, because as part of his plea, he stated that Mexican immigrants "do jobs that not even blacks want to do," so that's why the US has to resuscitate the guest-worker/amnesty program, and why W shouldn't sign into law the recently approved tougher new driver's license provisions or the extension of the "security" fence dividing the two countries. (Is it a fence, haven't the right-wingers also been talking about Pat Buchanan's proposed wall? And what about those armed Minutemen?) Unfortunately, Vicente Fox, your "friend and partner" W is planning to sign these riders to another bill into law, without blinking an eye. But back to Fox: Now, let's set aside for a minute that Mexico has its own Black people (thousands of them)--a marginalized population by many measures--some of whom are among the undocumented workers in the US. Let's also set aside the fact that the second largest group of self-identified Black Latinos in the US, according to the 2000 US Census, come from or have ancestry from Mexico.

Did Fox really need to make this statement? Whom was this supposed to convince or impress? The American business leaders? The Mexican press? The US press? The foreign press? The Mexican people? Mexican undocumented immigrants? Mexican legal immigrants? Mexican-Americans and other latinos? Americans? Blacks? See, he wanted to invoke a standard he was sure those business people would understand--we "blacks," the descendents of slaves, the "mudsills," no longer the largest "minority," are, in Fox's (and American society's) eyes, the absolutely lowest benchmark or standard. And if "blacks" don't want and won't take the jobs, then you know the jobs must be bad, but hey, you've got his fellow Mexican citizens who are willing to do them. And so America had better find a way to let them stay, because who else then will take them if the Mexicans are barred from working or sent back? Can't expect "blacks" to. Nor, one assumes, the thousands (millions?) of "other latinos/hispanics," "asians," "arabs," "native peoples," "others," and above all, not the "white" people! Lord knows, not them! Not only was Fox's statement offensive, to Black people (we're people, Vicente Fox, not just some nebulous figments of your rhetorical argument, we're in your country too) and Mexicans, but it was also just plumb ignorant.

First of all, many "blacks"--by which I assume he means African Americans, but let's take the the increasing number of Black people from north Africa and sub-Saharan African, from the various Caribbean nations, from Central and South America, from Europe, etc. as our example--do take extremely low-wage, exploitative jobs. They do work in tobacco fields, in orange groves, on farms, they do work in underpaying factories, they do serve as cooks and maids, and so on. There are more Mexican documented and undocumented immigrants now filling these roles across the country, but there are more immigrants from Mexico than any other group. Since NAFTA and Mexican governmental incompetence devastated whole sectors of the Mexican economy, and since Fox has been ineffectual in creating opportunities for vast numbers of his country of 100 million people, and since the border between the United States and Mexico is as porous as pumice (despite fence and border agents and militia men), and since despite the best (or worst) efforts of the Emperor, the US economy has not fallen apart, it stands to reason that this would be the destination for Mexicans seeking work opportunities, just as it's the destination for millions from other countries as well. But the truth of the matter is that many of the "blacks" who are not considered or do not consider themselves African American actually do take these jobs, and there are probably more who would if they could actually get here and not be deported.

As for African Americans, whom I believe Fox was referring to, many of us also take these jobs. Still. The last time I looked, there were poor African-American people working in all kinds of extremely low-wage, un-unionized jobs across the country, including taking care of white people, which has been the case since the 1600s. In the Chicago area. In northern New Jersey and New York. In the upper South. And so on. The Gaullist Bill Clinton decided he would "end welfare as we know it," and so that remains nothing more than a chimera for the right-wing to conjure up--these days, folks got to work or find some way to get by, after a certain period of time. As I said above, there are more Mexican undocumented immigrants in many of these positions, but they're not the only ones. So Fox's comments were not only insulting to African Americans, all the other "blacks" in this country, and his own fellow Mexican immigrants, they are just ignorant. But ignorance passing the lips of international leaders, especially about Black people, should hardly be surprising. Fox's very good friend, the Emperor W, once asked the President of Brazil, a country that has the largest Black and African-descended population outside of Africa, whether it "had blacks too?"

Now I wonder, since Fox obviously didn't think he said anything offensive ("jobs not even blacks want to do"), will he apologize? Will anyone in the Mexican media, which traditionally has demonstrated very little interest in the Black population or history of that country (despite the fact that one of its early presidents, Guerrero, was Black, that it had a sizable slave population in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and that one of its greatest heroes, Emiliano Zapata, also had African ancestry), press Fox on this? More importantly, what will the response from the Emperor W or his minions be? Will Condoleezza Rice (one of the "blacks"), the play-acting Secretary of State, request an apology from her Mexican counterpart? Will they remain silent and hope it blows over? Will it take a Black member of Congress (one of the "blacks") to call attention to Fox's ignorance? Will someone on the right (maybe even one of "the blacks") use this as part of their campaign to derail even sensible guest-worker/amnesty provisions? Since the mainstream US media has reported, will they now let it pass into silence, since it insults two groups they really couldn't give a damn about, the "blacks" and Mexicans?

*****

Finally, on another note, I came across this extremely disturbing story, on Raw Story, in the London Evening Standard (via This is London): "Fears of Trade in Children as 300 Disappear." According to the article:

Scotland Yard today revealed it has been unable to trace all but two of 300 black boys aged four to seven reported missing from school in a three-month period.

Child welfare experts say the number highlights the scale of the trade in children brought to Britain as domestic servants and covers for benefit fraud.

The figure emerged through the murder inquiry following the discovery of a child's torso in the Thames in September 2001. The identity of the victim, named "Adam" by police, is not known but his background was traced to Nigeria, it is believed he died in a ritual sacrifice.

Say what? What is going on over there??? 299 Black boys go missing over a three-month period, and they can't be found? The "trade in children brought to Britain as domestic servants"? Huh? Didn't I just post something two days ago about "unforced labor" and servitude? Is there a public inquiry, let alone public outcry, over this?

Let me just say, there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. Maybe these black boys--is it really only boys, and why?--belong to undocumented families that are trying to elude the immigration authorities, and so they've moved to other parts of Britain, or other countries in the EU, or gone back home, or something reasonable and not horrifying. I hope it's something reasonable, some explanation other than the gruesome one that appears in the article. I also plan to check some British Websites, and especially Black British Websites about this. And poet Christina Springer is over there with her family now; I know she's encountered hostility from the NHS when she was trying to get treatment for her infant son. (She's also encountered coldness from some Black Britons.) Maybe she's heard something it appears the mainstream media in the US haven't (yet?) picked up on.

Sorokin's Blue Lard

Imagine a novel in which a clone of FDR roughly tops a clone of John F. Kennedy. Or maybe a Teddy Roosevelt clone has his way with the well-tanned, horsebroken backside of a Ronald Raygun double.* (Okay, maybe not!) Each scenario could, however, serve as an analogy of one of the most notorious scenes in Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin's (pictured at right) Goluboe Salo** (Blue Lard or Blue Bacon Fat or Gay Lard, etc.), a 1999 obscene, satirical novel that provoked a recent public protest by Moving (or Walking) Together, a pro-Putin youth cult.

These young patriots, reacting in particular to a scene in which a clone of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin sodomizes a clone of post-war Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev, labeled the novel "pornography," and destroyed copies of it in front of the Bolshoi Theater, which they were striking against because it was planning to perform a work using one of Sorokin's librettos. The Moving Togetherites promptly filed a complaint with the Office of the Public Prosecutor. Officials then began legal proceedings based on Article 242 of the Russian Federation Criminal Code, criminalizing pornography, which in turn led to a police investigation of Sorokin.

Unlike during the Soviet era, however, the majority of the public did not side immediately with the authorities. In fact, Sorokin's supporters argued on behalf of his freedom of speech, a new and tenuous right in democratic (or should I type "democratic"?) Russia, and snapped up the Blue Lard, making it a bestseller. (A 2002 article by Ilya Milstein in Novoye Vremya implied a more cynical reason for the support; Sorokin's commercial success outside Russia led his fellow writers to defend him.) The brouhaha in any case embarrassed the Kremlin, which eventually cleared Sorokin, who was facing a two-year prison sentence.

He has continued to publish works full of obscenities and scatology, and wrote the libretto for composer Leonid Desyantnikov's "Rosenthal's Children," which deals with, what else, clones, this time of famous European classical composers, sex, and degeneracy. Moving Together (pictured below, Dennis Sinyakov/AFP), has duly protested for several years now outside the Bolshoi, where the opera premiered this past March to packed crowds. (Naturally, a member of Russia's parliament, based on a TV report (!), initiated an investigation of this newest work by the author of "dirty poetry"; he claimed the popular opera's "sexual intimacy...[made] it not good for [the Russian] public." A ban is pending.)

At least one of Sorokin's books, his 1983 debut The Queue (Ochered in Russian), has been translated into English, though it's currently out of print. That book is reputedly more conventional and less "post-modern" in many ways than Blue Lard, and lacks the outright catalogue of perversions that so exorcised the critics of the later book. One Amazon reader compares The Queue favorably to Sorokin's later work, with its "excessive exploitation of sex/drug/alcohol abuse scenes." Which of course makes it sound appropriate to contemporary post-Soviet Russia--and the USA, especially the bizarro-America we are living in today. (This thought took me back to the final section of Peter Ho Davies's recent NU talk, with its emphasis on fantastic work that would be appropriate for the current political and social climate.) And it really makes me want to read Goluboe Salo.

Vladimir Sorokin
(from Lyricstranslate.com)

Because, truth be told, I've never read the novel, but I am dying to. But I cannot read Russian. I cannot speak Russian either. I do know about 10 phrases, some of which proved functional enough to startle my former Russian students at NYU. I learned them from my college friend Paull H; I'd taught myself the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet years before. (Digression: Russian actually has a consonant that fascinates me to no end, "shch," not found in English or most Western European languages, which always evokes the image of a coal-powered train pulling out of an icy station.) Paull H was studying Russian in the last years of the Cold War, not long before the Soviet Union began its process of disintegration, and student interest in the language, history, politics, society, and culture of the U.S.'s greatest Enemy, as it was then constructed, was still high. Condoleezza Rice, now play-acting as Secretary of State, apparently had the same jones only a decade earlier. But I neither had the time nor interest then in mastering Russian, which is highly inflected, a fact that makes its literature, especially the poetry, difficult to translate into English. That several famous Russians, Nabokov and Brodsky, actually moved from writing fluently in Russian to writing fluently (or at least more so than most native speakers) in English has always been testimony, in my opinion, to their genius. But I had no genius for Russian. So I've always had to rely on translations.

And no English translation of Blue Lard (pictured at right) exists. Yet. I know this because not far from the university, where one of the best independent bookstores in Evanston once stood, a Russian-Slavic bookseller now holds court. I've popped in his joint several times to ask about translations of Blue Lard, but each time, he or another knowledgeable member of the staff tells me that no, the book has not been translated into English. In fact, they don't have the book in stock. Nor does the university's library. And even if either the bookshop or the library did have Blue Lard, I unfortunately know no one who translates Russian. (I don't think I know even one of the Slavicists at the university, nor can I recall ever having attended or been invited to any event hosted by that department.)

So this is a call: does anyone out there know if anyone is translating Blue Lard? It sounds like the kind of book Grove Press would have published years ago, before they became respectable. But it also sounds like it might be bursting with too much transgressiveness to be taken up either by many of the larger, conglomerated US presses, most of the university presses, or many of the distinguished smaller, independent ones. I think it would probably sell well, given the tensions that now exist between Putin's backsliding Russia and our own US, the Christian-Republican Empire of W Bush. Oh, and then there's the graphic sex/drug abuse, etc. Michel Houellebecq's extremely graphic, philosophically grim gems are now on American bookshelves, but their outlook is quasi-right wing, quasi-libertarian, and intermittently racist, so maybe they aren't the best model. Perhaps a small and daring press like Akashic or Soft Skull will publish it. But first they'd have to find a (good) translator. As many Russian-English speakers are there are in the US, there's got to be one. And when s/he translates Blue Lard, this reader will definitely check it out.
--
*There is J. G. Ballard's (in)famous short story, "I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan," which appears in his non-sequential limit-text, The Atrocity Exhibition. When he learned of the pending publication of the collection (which also was later circulated at a Republican convention), publisher Nelson Doubleday supposedly grew so upset that he pulped the entire press run. Grove later published it, and Re/Search has reissued it in a terrific illustrated format, with commentary by Ballard, a sort of textual DVD.
**Also transliterated as Goluboye or Goloboye Salo.

Forced Labor Conf + Neptune Dying + Black Studies Conf Online

Freedom, freedom, freedom. How many times did the person passing as president use this word in his 2005 State of Dis Union speech? It turns out that millions of people across the globe are far from free. I don't just mean economically, politically and socially disadvantaged or marginalized, but actually enslaved or forced into labor without relief or compensation. During the latter years of the Clinton presidency, the plight of contemporarily-enslaved black Africans did briefly pierce the mainstream media bubble. Several nations in particular, Mauritania and Sudan, which is now hovering in and out of international attention because the genocide in its Darfur region, often received harsh criticism for abetting or overlooking the forced enslavement of people in the respective countries. In fact, Mauritania has engaged in diplomatic and military skirmishes with Senegal, its neighbor to the south, over abductions of Senegalese and other black Africans for enslavement and forced labor purposes.

Yet the problem of enslavement and forced labor goes far beyond Mauritania and Sudan. Numerous reports over the years have pointed to forced labor in China, Myanmar, Haiti, and many other nations. According to the International Labor Organization's 2005 report, 9,490,000 people--or around the the population of New Jersey--are believed to be in forced labor situations in Asia and the Pacific alone; over 12,000,000 people total across the globe are in various forms of bondage or forced labor.

This upcoming Saturday, the MIT Center for International Studies will host a "Symposium on Forced Labor in the Global Economy." This gathering marks a collaboration between the BBC World Service Trust and the Program on Human Rights and Justice at MIT's Center for International Studies, and BBC and WBUR, one of the local public radio stations, will tape several programs as part of the event.

The lineup of speakers includes some major activists and scholars, including Jean Robert Credet, a former child slave in Haiti who now teaches at the University of Cincinnati; Columbia University-based philosopher Jagdish Bhagwati; Terry Collingsworth of the International Labor Rights Fund; and Kevin Bales, director of Free the Slaves.

Anyone can attend to attend this special event, which will include the taping of WBUR's On Point program, which will air during the week of May 16, 2005 (between 7:00 and 9:00 p.m. in the Boston area), and a BBC World show, which will air the MIT debate on Saturday, May 21, 2005, and later offer the tape to public television stations in the U.S. (check local listings for airdates and times). Those in the Boston area who want to attend should RSVP to phrj@mit.edu or call 617.253.8306). The event will run from 9 am to 12 pm at 9:00 a.m. at MIT's Kresge Auditorium (Building W16). MIT World, the university's video-on-demand site, will also be broadcasting the programs.

*****

Speaking of Haiti, Yvon Neptune (pictured at right), the former Prime Minister under democratically elected-but-illegally deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is being illegally detained in a Haitian prison, and has been on a hunger strike since February 20, 2005. He was recently rushed to the hospital in critical condition, and some news sources state he is close to death. Neptune is alleged to have masterminded the slaughter of anti-Aristide supporters in the coastal city of St. Marc on February 11, 2004, just before President Aristide left the country, but Neptune has vigorously denied this charge. At the time of the incident pro-and-anti-Aristide forces were clashing frequently, so it is possible that Neptune did not have a direct hand in the deaths.

Still, though Neptune been in prison since June of last year, he has not been officially charged with any crime. Haiti's Constitution bars such summary imprisonments without charge. Neptune has said he will not eat unless he is cleared unconditionally and released; as he starves to death, Haiti's interim prime minister and ally to the current American administration, Gerard Latortue, who has presided over a steadily worsening public and political situation, dithers. The U.S., which may have aided the coup-plotters and insurrectionists, and which flew Aristide out of the country, has not pressed the interim government to act either way.

The Miami Herald's editorial page came out yesterday on behalf of releasing Neptune, before it's too late.

U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), who recently visited Neptune, issued the following statement: "The conditions that I observed in the prison where Prime Minister Neptune is being held were deplorable. Prime Minister Neptune was weak and could only speak in a whispering voice. He insisted that he had been jailed without justification and that he had committed no crime. He has not been allowed to go before a judge to challenge his confinement as required under the constitution of Haiti, and he believes he has been targeted to be killed."

If Neptune's plight matters at all to you, please contact your Congressional representatives, and urge them to act. As far as I know, the current Secretary of State has not discussed the turmoil in Haiti publicly since she took office.

*****
Recently I got the following e-mail, which I am reproducing verbatim (the language is Tobin Klinger's):

May 3, 2005
From: Tobin J. Klinger
419.530.4279
University of Toledo, Public Relations Office

Historic African-American Studies Conference Lives on in Cyberspace

In February 2003 a group of scholars converged on New York City's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for what would be an important three-day dialogue about the past, current and future of black studies around the globe.

While the participants and panelists were among the nation's leaders in the study of African-American culture, the gathering came and went. Until now, that is.

Thanks to a groundbreaking collaboration between eight universities, the entire event can now be accessed by anyone with a computer and the World Wide Web.

Each institution, including The University of Toledo, Central Michigan University, The College of New Jersey, Florida State University, Knox College, Northeastern University, Seton Hall University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has posted its share of the more than 60 hours of conference audio and video, which can be accessed through a single Web site: www.eblackstudies.org. The site is now live and will be available for use by scholars and the general public from any location in the world at 12 p.m., Wednesday, May 4.

The conference, "The State of Black Studies: Methodology, Pedagogy and Research," was co-sponsored by the Schomburg Center, the CUNY Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and Caribbean, and Princeton University.

"This has never been done before," said Dr. Abdul Alkalimat, director of Africana Studies at The University of Toledo. "The passion and cooperation that each of the participating institutions has displayed for keeping this conference and this discussion alive has been overwhelming."

Twenty-seven sessions in all, this is the largest undertaking of its kind, according to Alkalimat, who led the project. Previously, the UT professorled a similar project with the audio from a conference on civil rights leader Malcolm X in 1990.

'"This is much bigger," remarked Alkalimat. "Those visiting this site can virtually re-live the event. The subject matter here is as relevant today as it was in 2003. Through this collaborative effort, we are able to disseminate this knowledge that had previously only been available to conference participants."

"This kind of knowledge based on a virtual experience should be available to everyone," said Alkalimat. "Today's technology allows us to make that a reality and lets thebrowser participate in the discussion. This is a perfect example of a group of scholars using the Internet with that thought in mind."

For more information, contact Alkalimat at 419.530.7252 or abdul.alkalimat@utoledo.edu.
###

Peter Ho Davies & Fiction's Geneology

What is it with Chicago weather? Yesterday it was above 70F, as if summer had crept by spring and was ready to spread out along Sheridan for a while. Then last night and early this morning we had a spectacular twilight thunderstorm, which kept threatening to leap through the bedroom window, though it did cool things off, and by the time I stepped out of my office at 3 pm to grab a quick lunch, it was barely 40F, as if fall were stumbling back into winter's arms! It was so cold that my hands froze as I walked to downtown Evanston, eating my apple and trying to figure out, for the umpteenth thousand time how Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, or his predecessors, the native peoples, had lasted for more than a week during the winter and "spring" months on the shore of Lake Michigan. (When a certain excellent writer's book on the city's Black founder appears, I guess I'll find out.) I finally ducked into Barnes & Noble, which was nearby, and as usual did not find any of the books I was looking for (though I almost bought a second copy of Thomas Sayers Ellis's new collection The Maverick Room but said I'd let someone else happen upon it and leave with a book they wouldn't want to put down for a while), so I purchased a fiction collection I'll be teaching next fall and then headed next door for some tacos before returning to the university.

This afternoon at 4, I went to hear a lecture by Peter Ho Davies, one of the most acclaimed younger British novelists and a professor at the University of Michigan. He is serving as the distinguished visiting writer at the university's Center for the Writing Arts, and gave a strong reading several weeks ago. Today, Peter delivered a lively, brief talk on his idiosyncratic geneology of the short story. Though I admit to a wandering mind because of residual sleepiness (that thunderstorm last night and this morning), and not because of any longueurs or deficiencies in Peter's talk, here's my summary: he decided to teach a course at Michigan on the history of the short story because it interested him, naturally, as a fiction writer. He found little critical work on the short story (the English novel has received considerable treatment by Watt and others, and I have come across some articles in the media of late with other kinds of geneologies of the short story, but in general they're not so common). So he taught the course and the talk, like a precipitate, resulted.

This led to his major point, which was, paraphrasing Fyodor Dostoevsky, that contemporary short story writers (and not the Russian short fiction tradition) emerged from Nikolai Gogol's "Overcoat." In other words, that story, which appeared in the 1840s, has served as the foundation, in Davies' view, for the two major strands of contemporary short fiction, as it was both a realist and fantastic story written into one.

In the realist sense, it contained historical and political issues in a manner he described as submergence, and he went on to talk about how realist short fiction provided a means for addressing the concerns of all kinds of submerged groups, in terms of class, race, religion, sexuality, immigration, and so on. Yet a parallel aspect of "The Overcoat" was its incorporation of fabulist elements, as in Gogol's subsequent "The Nose," thus begetting an alternative tradition from Franz Kafka through Jorge Luis Borges to George Saunders. Although Davies mentioned Poe's influence as well, Gogol he argued took precedence over Poe, who Davies saw more as the originator of the detective story, though I would also point to horror fiction and Gothic strains in American realism as Poe's direct prodigy.

This notion of the short story as an initial, exploratory, politically infused form in which to insert particular, submerged minoritarian concerns that were not aspects of the pre-existing nonfiction or fictional discourse was fascinating, though I don't think it always holds--what about African-American literature, for example, where the earliest fictional works, from what we can tell, were novels, the longer prose fictional form that Davies rightly suggested existed in a symbiotic relationship with short fiction? Although there were some early short stories written by African Americans, I believe the prose tradition primarily includes sermons, the slave narratives and autobiographies, and, beginning in the era of Gogol and Poe, a few novels. Could chronology, and the subsequent models be the issue here? (Or am I totally spinning his argument into something else?)

Another interesting detail was his discussion of the conte, a French form perfected by Turgenev, which tended to be brief and open-ended. (A colleague, in the question and answer session, pointed out that Russians had a culturally specific term for the long, open-ended fiction of Chekhov: the povest [повесть]*.) He concluded by proposing that although the "hysterical realism," to use critic James Wood's term, of such writers as Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith was in vogue, and served as the template for what might be called (or derided, depending upon your orientation) as the "workshop story," with its techniques of avoidance and foreberance (formal perfection, easy irony, etc.), perhaps given the bizarre and absurd political conditions we were living in, more fantastical fiction might be appropriate. (I have been thinking along the same lines since around 2001.)

Davies' argument was tidy, provocative and persuasive, and got me to thinking about a lot of things, including where many writers I admire might fit into his bifurcated system. Some of them just wouldn't fit at all. And this results from the fact that not only is the model too simple (though useful), but I think he left out a number of short-fictional predecessors to the short story tradition, including oral myths and folk tales, fables, various kinds of personal accounts, histories, case studies, and so on. I imagine when he publishes the talk at some point he'll have worked through some of these, or other points. A student asked about Washington Irving, who provides a more direct line in the American tradition, but Davies suggested that no one reads Irving any more (hey, I did a few years ago), another way of saying, I think, that that link was lost, though I'm not so sure. I actually cannot remember any of the other questions, because I was starting to slump in my chair. Then after speaking to some colleagues and students I headed out to my car, and that cold air rushing off the lake woke me right up.

It's good for something, I guess.
---
*I tried to find this word online, but it appears to have the broader meaning of "legend, tale, novella/novelette," etc. If anyone has any clues about the definition in relation to Chekhov, I'd greatly appreciate them.

The Young Moroccans

I just had to post this picture (by Jonathan Player for the New York Times) from today's edition of the Gray Lady. It accompanied an article, "Christian Rock for Muslims," by Samuel Loewenburg, on Christian evangelical rock bands' participation in a concert in Morocco.

In what passes for our mainstream media, especially our televisual media, we rarely see images of young Muslims, or Muslims of any age, who look like this. Accoutured in the garb of hiphop and rock-influenced youth culture, with their hair colored and picked ('froed) out, flashing signs... (They remind me of [young] people I see in Jersey City, New York and Chicago, that I've seen in Santo Domingo and Rio de Janeiro and Paris and Toronto.) In fact, we rarely see depictions of the Muslims--the millions of them--who live next door to us.

Some many questions arise as I look at this picture. Who are they? What are their lives like? What are they thinking? What influences are shaping their lives, and how do they articulate these influences, their experiences in the world? How do they see themselves? How do they view and talk about their cultures, their society, their country, the world? What do they see in their future?

The image: I can't stop looking at it.

Here's a link to a really engaging but brief exploration, with great links, of the intersection of pop culture and the Middle East on Bill Sebring's FFactory Arts Site.

A Room of Your Own? (Novel: A Living Installation)

When I'm working on a short story, poetry, my novel, or even just preparing lecture notes, I often like to be in a mostly quiet environment, with little sound beyond the ambient. (This means many cafés these days are out, because they pump music like they're discos.) I also realize that it's tough to complete longer prose fiction texts while I'm reading lots of student writing, which is usually the case from late September through mid-June (the university's standard three working quarters). So a certain amount of quiet solitude, away from everything, especially the teaching, always is an ideal.

On the other hand, I love being able to spend time with my partner, our two new kittens, friends, family members, the world at large--I like being able to explore my home, get out and about, especially when the weather's decent and I'm in the New York area. To me there are few things as exhilarating as strolling the streets of Manhattan or Jersey City, especially at a fast clip, with nowhere set I need to be, just wandering where time, chance, and my internal compass guide me. Debord attributes profound psychogeographical effects to the Situationist's more carefully structured dérives, but mere flânerie has its own numerous benefits and rewards.

So I wondered about the performance art piece qua novel-writing bootcamp experience, "Novel: A Living Installation" at the Flux Factory, that Julie Salamon describes in her article, "Would You, Could You, In a Box (Write, That Is)?" in the Arts section of today's New York Times. (Subscription required.) "Novel" entails three published writers, Laurie Stone, Ranbir Sidhu, and Grant Baillie lodging in "pods," built by selected architect-artists, in designated space on the Flux Factory's premises, where they'll each be working on completing a novel (or more realistically, I think, a draft of one) by June 4. The enforced isolation sounds like a good prescription for getting a lot of work done, except that the viewing public can view the authors at work (or at least in situ) during selected time periods (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 3 pm to 5 pm; and Saturdays and Sundays from 12 pm to 4 pm). So if you can't bear having strangers observe you for extended periods as you work, you got a real problem. Also, all three are scheduled (required?) to read selections of what they've written at 8 pm on each of the next few Saturdays, and to participate in 2 public discussions this upcoming Sunday, May 15, and again on May 22. (There's lots of information on the Flux Factory and on the Olde Towne Review sites.) It's isolation, of a particular sort, and doesn't approach what you might encounter at MacDowell or Hedgebrook or Yaddo.

On top of the spectactular aspects of the art piece, there's another really tough element, at least in my opinion: Stone, Sidhu and Baillie are being allowed only a 90-minute daily excursus from their pods, and they're required to note on cards the reason why they're leaving. (Talk about flashbacks to hall monitors! And if they tarry, then what happens? Demerits? Expulsion? Hmm....) They will, however, share a communal dinner prepared by a guest chef every evening.

According to Salamon, "Novel" was the idea of Morgan Meis, an artist, ABD graduate student and founder of the Flux Factory. Originally he was thinking of performing a similar piece to complete his dissertion on Walter Benjamin. Instead, with with fellow Flux-resident Kerry Downey, he opened it up to a competition, and landed the three authors and the architect-artists who built their writing-houses. If nothing else, it represents a fascinating art-world recuperation of the "reality" phenomenon, which of course the artworld pioneered decades before, but now structured along the lines of frameworks established by relational aestheticists like Rirkrit Tiravanija. (I actually had suggested and written up a proposal for poet, visual artist and singer Krista Franklin to perform a similar project, called "Bed," for Studio Group A [qvp.] in Chicago a few years ago, but it went nowhere.) All three of the authors will get tremendous publicity for participating, and viewers may at least get to see three relatively unknown authors "performing" the act of writing, whether they're actually something or not--imagine a writing workshop where you're given an exercise and instead of the teacher and perhaps a classmate watching you as you scribble something down, you've got unknowns staring and pointing, placing you in a position sort of like Kafka's Hunger Artist--, but I wonder if any substantive fictional work will come out of it. Each author should have good notes towards a non-fiction work, at least, so perhaps they'll each write write something along the lines of Sylvia Molloy's En breve cárcel (Certificate of Absence). I think I'd take a few months in a Thoreau-type cabin in the woods (or maybe just in Harlem!), but then again, this could provide a jumpstart to a completely new and exciting project....

Gay Life, Yes?; Gay Lifestyle, No.

Today is Mother's Day, so let me first wish all the mothers and grandmothers, and those who serve as de facto mothers, a Happy Mother's Day. Mothering certainly isn't an easy job these days, but then it never was. I spoke with my mother this morning, and we had a great conversation.

One thing she never talks about in our conversations, thankfully, is "the gay lifestyle" or "homosexual lifestyle," though she has become more comfortable speaking about my partner and me, and is, to a greater extent than before, able to discuss LGBT issues. Some straight, and even self-identified gay people (and quite a few gay Websites, as a recent Google search showed) I know, however, do refer to a "gay lifestyle." They tend to speak of it as if it's some fixed, objective thing, though neither I nor anyone I know is living "it." We may consider ourselves "homosexual" or "gay" or "lesbian" or "same-gender-loving" (this is the term I adopted some years ago for political and racial pride reasons), and in fact there are "lifestyle" magazines that appeal to gay and lesbian and sgl people, or in a more limited sense ways of living shared by groups of gay people (people who practice BDSM, people who like to go dancing a lot, etc.), but I think these are qualified meanings of the term. There is no one set "gay lifestyle" or "homosexual lifestyle."

When I hear homophobic and heterosexist people use this term, I tend to correct them, and suggest they speak about "gay lives" or "gay people" or be more specific, because I find the term reductive and empty; what in fact is this "gay lifestyle" that far too many people, and especially homophobes and right-wingers, like to bandy about? Or that even too many homosexual people mention so casually? (For example, in February, a Fairfax County (VA) School Board Member denounced the "homosexual lifestyle" as "destructive" as a pretext to injecting his homophobic agenda into the school.) This term, steeped in the most ignorant, reductive stereotypes, has become a major organizing point for the anti-gay right and its allies; denunciations of a "gay agenda" often are based on the foundation of a belief in a "gay lifestyle." But is a "gay lifestyle" as the homophobes suggest something that can be properly categorized or quantified, subjected to a taxonomy and defined? I think not.

Let's accept for the moment the equation of "gay" as "homosexual personhood," which I'll define below. (And in using "gay" I mean lesbian and gay broadly; I knowledge that I am working with the particular European-American, bourgeois model of homosexuality as it developed from the period of the Industrial Revolution, and not speaking more expansively and carefully about the wider historical array of same-sexual practices; and I also acknowledge that there are self-identified homosexuals who utilize other labels for a variety of reasons, including political, ideological, cultural and other ones, as I suggested above with the term "same-gender-loving." I also admit that I am bracketing off transgender issues, which are related but really do deserve a discussion of their own.) Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, 10th edition, describes "lifestyle" as "the typical way of life of an individual, group, or culture." The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as "someone's way of living; the things that a person or particular group of people usually do." The Compact Oxford English dictionary says a "lifestyle" is "the way in which one lives." So is there a typical life for gay people in America? Are class, racial, ethnic, gender, and other social categories simply elided in this happy (or as some people like to suppose, unhappy) pursuit? Is there a common or shared way that we all live? What is it that gay people "usually do"? Is it just having sex (or even thinking of having sex) with a person of the same sex or gender, which more than a few people, some of them bi or ambi or polysexual;, some who do so because of the given social context [prison, same-sexual environments, etc.] who don't consider themselves homosexual or gay do; some of them actually homosexual but deluded or afraid or confused; etc., quite frequently? Is regularity or duration a factor?

Does it mean being in a relationship with a person of the same sex, or aspiring to? Living with said person of the same sex? Wanting to marry them, or, following the liberatory models of the 1970s, not? Patronizing gay bars, clubs, or really any gay institutions? Reading or writing or being interesting in literature by or about gays or with a gay subtext or at least semi-homotextual, or perhaps showing some interests in such things as they might be found in the arts in general? Being interested in fashion, gardening, Capri pants, lapdogs, same-sexual porn? Trying to butch it up, or femme it up, or act or perform in some way that differs from what's considered the social norms of behavior in your society? The word "gay" itself is encoded, as I say above, with particular historical and social resonances, and often is viewed normatively as white, middle-class, and male. Is it even possible to construe the lives of homosexual men and women so broadly as to assume they share a common lifestyle? The deeper one probes (!), the more the notion falls apart. And yet people cling to the idea of a "gay lifestyle."

Well, okay, the truth of the matter is, people who talk about a "gay lifestyle" usually are extrapolating from the basic fact of same-sexual practices, meaning same-sex and same-gender sex. Homosexuality for them equals same-sex sex, and the pursuit and practice of same-sex sex constitutes a "lifestyle." (Peggy Noonan, the speechwriter for Ronald Raygun, recently remarked that when a young man she met on the dance floor told her he was gay, she didn't want to know about who he had sex with.) It's an insidious, but commonly held idea that many homosexual people internalize, since it's reflected back to us on a daily basis via the media. A few years ago I tried to spell out on a listserv frequented primarily by LGBT people but open to everyone that we needed to unpack this idea of gay or homosexual personhood--and again, I understand that both terms are historically, socially and politically inflected, and that some people who might consider themselves to be defined in some way by these terms may reject them for a variety of reasons.

But back to the unpacking, as I see it, you could break down homosexual personhood in the following ways. First, there's

• Sexual orientation, which may or may not be acted on, and which isn't binaristic, but in fact falls along a spectrum. You cannot choose your orientation, despite the claims of anti-gay or ex-gay critics. (This is different from gender orientation.) I would imagine that most people who consider themselves homosexual or gay base it on what they perceive to be their sexual orientation, though it is also the case that some people may claim a homosexual identification for political reasons (as some lesbians, have done, say), and conversely, may deny being homosexual despite the realization that they have a homosexual orientation.

Related to sexual orientation are the following:

• Sexual identity and identification, which may square directly or vary dramatically from one's sexual orientation, since they depend on a variety of factors, including socialization and social, political and cultural contexts, one's subjective position and self-regard, and so forth. Identities have both subjective and objective aspects, and are fluid, and may not always be publicly performed. Also sexual identity differs from gender identity (though at times they're conflated);
• Sexual object choice, meaning the sex of the person you sleep with, which may flow or result from sexual orientation, or not, depending upon the circumstances;
• Sexual practice, which may differ from one's orientation, and may include a unity or variety of chosen sexual objects (by which I mean people), or no activity whatsoever.

Then, there's another aspect that in fact is quite salient:

• Social performance, which is to say, the ways one performs one's subjectivities and identifications in the world. "Straight-acting" versus "fem" for gay men, or "butch" versus "femme" for lesbians, or queer or gender-fuck or DL, etc., let's say, are all forms of social performance. Such performances are fluid, often contextual and contingent (based on a range of factors, such as socioeconomics, politics and ideology, cultural affiliations, etc.), and may not square at all with sexual or gender orientation. They have subjective and objective dimensions.
  

Much of this is probably old-hat to many people. But much of the public discourse around gay people, at least in my experience, fails to explore these elements (or other versions of them) with complexity, and in fact speaks of them as if they constitute a coherence. It's especially the case that homophobes who speak of "gay lifestyles" or "homosexual lifestyles" are fusing and confusing and conflating all of these things, creating an essential category, with little regard for the complexity of people's lives, especially people who consider and label themselves "gay" or "homosexual" (or same-gender-loving, two spirit, etc.). Of course if your perspective proceeds from a very delimited heteronormativity, and your aim is to demonize, oppress and repress, you're not going to worry about nuances. "Gay lifestyle" or "homosexual lifestyle" is going to be where you start, and anything and everything you believe falls within that category will fit, whether it does or not.

The truth is that each of the aspects of homosexual personhood I've delineated above provides a nexus for homophobic and heterosexist oppression. In addition to individual or group discriminatory actions (deriding people because they admit to a homosexual orientation, because they appear too effeminate or too butch, etc.), state-sanctioned oppression also can occur based on any of these. For example, despite Lawrence v. Kansas, which decriminalized same-sexual sex (and some sex acts performed by people of differing sexes) across the country, LGBT people across a broad swathe of America lack civil protections against discriminatory statutes or discrimination based on 1) being perceived to have a homosexual orientation; 2) perceived to desire a person of the same sex or gender; 3) for being known to have sex with a person of the same sex or gender (though the sex act itself is no longer grounds for prosecution; 4) being perceived to be "gay" or "homosexual" or something other than what a boss or landlord might deem to be outside the socially sanctioned (community) norm. Many of the discriminatory statues and acts--or the lack of protections against them--and the statutory bases or judgments for them were based on the view of homosexuality, and gay personhood, as being constituted solely as same-sexual sex. Yet as I've said, though same-sexual sex, between consenting adults, is no longer criminal anywhere in the United States, these other aspects of gay personhood remain unprotected from discriminatory laws or discrimination by individuals and groups.

"Gay(ness)" or "homosexual(ity)" is not merely a concept or idea, but has become a socially realized, ontologically valid category around which homosexual people--not all, but many of us--and our allies have organized aspects of our lives. We speak of "gay rights," "gay liberation," "gay pride," "gay marriage," etc., and it is out of such associations that we develop forms of identity, solidarity, and so forth. Yet we also realize how variegated and complex anything labeled as "gay" really is, how complex homosexual personhood is, how problematic even the covering terms "gay" and "homosexual" are. (The gender, racial, ethnic, class, religious, health status, and other kinds of differences that mark LGBT people lead to friction and conflict in and of themselves.) "Gay" has also become a socially realized category around which homophobes and heterosexists can rally. Yet they usually don't want to look at our lives with complexity; a reductive notion of the "gay lifestyle," and what homosexuality is and how we live it often lies at the core of their discriminatory aims and actions, and as such, should be challenged and corrected whenever possible.

Which brings me to note that I'd been working on a post inspired by the recent death of Jack Nichols (May 2, 2005) at age 67. One of the major pioneers in the lesbian and gay civil-rights movement, he was a founder with Frank Kameny in the early 1960s of the Mattachine Society, one of the most important pre-Stonewall gay rights groups, and helped to organize the first lesbian and gay protest at the White House, in 1965, and the first lesbian and gay civil rights demonstrations in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York from 1965 through 1969. (In fact the first one was held on Independence Day 40 years ago, in Philadelphia.) At that moment in history, the federal government would not hire lesbians and gays, and the American Psychological Association (APA) still classified homosexuality as a mental illness. Ultimately, Nichols played a key role in pushing the APA to remove homosexuality from its list of illnesses in 1973. Lastly, he and his partner Lige Clark were the publishers of America's first gay weekly, GAY. In my typing I didn't get beyond linking Nichols's activism to the nascent notion of a gay collectivity, but I hope to write more on this in the future, and also to talk about "queerness" as concept and practice. But not now. Gay life, perhaps, gay lifestyle, no.

Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn

If I've argued that Michelangelo Antonioni's (1919-) films of the early 1960s represent one of the possible ends of the cinematic art form for that era (while remaining benchmarks against which all cinematic art can be measured), then Taiwanese director and auteur Tsai Ming-Liang's (1957-) works over the last ten years represent another terminus of aesthetic possibility for films of today.

Recently I watched the Wellspring Films DVD version of Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Bu San), which appeared to great acclaim--and I would imagine, a matching level of exasperation--in 2003. The film ostensibly depicts the final evening (at least temporarily) of a large, old film theater in Taipei. Goodbye, Dragon Inn narratively consists of a series of loosely linked scenes of patrons in the theater watching the King Hu film "Dragon Inn," wandering through the theater's bowels, interacting or not interacting, and then, once "Dragon Inn" ends, the film itself soon ends. It is essentially plotless, and what plot you might discern seems almost too threadbare to sustain an hour and 20 minute movie. But, like Tsai's best prior movies, What Time Is It There?, The River, Vive L'Amour, and Rebels of a Neon God, it is a work of high artistry, with some of the scenes achieving what I'd term a contemporary sublimity, and it confirms him as one of the finest and most original directors of the early 21st century.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a distilled version of almost every previous Tsai film. Its subject, like the others, is the overwhelming alienation and difficulty of connection among people in contemporary capitalist society. Taiwan (and more specifically the capital Taipei) is the setting of most of Tsai's films, though What Time Is It There? also takes place in Paris, and the alienation could be extrapolated more broadly. In this film as in the others he employs his alter-ego, played by the handsome Lee Kang-Sheng (pictured at left), as well as one other actor from his earlier films in a role not unsimilar to ones he's played before. Goodbye, Dragon Inn like its predecessors uses long--and here extremely long, to the extent of 5+ minutes--unbroken shots, often employing mise en scène and deep focus, that are usually linked associatively, rather through traditional narrative plot points. There is even less of the minimal dialogue here than in his other picture. In fact, almost all the dialogue comes from "Dragon Inn," and the first line of character-spoken dialogue doesn't appear until 40 minutes into the film! It also uses almost no soundtrack music, except in key spots, like the very end, where the old Chinese song's nostalgia is so plangent that it's almost heartbreaking; most of the music we hear also comes from the theater's screen. Its humor is deadpan, and often ironic. And then there's Tsai's usual deluge--in his works, it's often raining outdoors and indoors. In Goodbye, Dragon Inn, it storms outside, with some of it leaking through to an upper storey.

As for the characters, they wander around in bubbles of isolation, though here the bizarrerie of characterization one finds in some of Tsai's other films is muted. One of the protagonists is a halt young female ticket taker (Chen Shiang-Chyi, pictured at right), one of whose legs is shorter than the other. As we eventually realize, she is pining for the projectionist (Lee) and clumps around the empty halls of the theater, first to deliver a heart-like pear delicacy to him, which he doesn't touch, and later to clean up after the movie is over. The other is a young Japanese spectator who unsuccessfully cruises various men in the theater. We learn he's Japanese only because he announces this in one of the rare verbal exchanges--but this connection is fleeting and goes nowhere. An elderly male character has brought what we assume is his grandson to the movie, though one can't be sure, given that this is a Tsai film; only at the end do we learn his link to another elderly male who's been the object of the Japanese man's attentions.

In fact, a queer undercurrent underpins almost all the characters and the film itself, as in Tsai's other movies; we are never told directly that this is a cruising theater, or has become one, but everything--including a scene in the bathroom that includes a funny twist, and several scenes of evidently same-sexual cruising in storage areas--points to it. Yet though the queerness is partially literalized, its economy is global. It also works towards the larger theme, which is the difficulty of desires that do not fit traditional molds or models and thus struggle to be realized, particularly in a world in which everyone is emotionally and socially detached. The young woman wants a man who doesn't really see her, the young foreigner seeks out various men who seem impervious to him and he to them, the two older men don't recognize each other for a long time, others in the theater demonstrate a complete lack of social etiquette (smacking on food or toasted watermelon seeds), and everyone's experiences are rendered basically as individual, monadic, alone. It is the space of the theater itself that provides the place of community, and Tsai, I think, is saying it's precarious, community is fragile, always beset by external storms and our frequent incapacity to look beyond our own self-regard.

The tone of the film combines loneliness, yearning and anticipation, matching the profound lonesomeness and unrequited desire the characters struggle with. The dark tone also parallels the looming end of the theater, which will mark the end of an era and ways of living. Tsai literally and glacially tracks the entire theater itself, a strategy of obliquity that serves as a kind of proxy for the distanced and thwarted emotions. The theater's interiors also can be read for the bleak, urban landscape outdoors, I suppose. Goodbye, Dragon Inn brims with shots whose formal perfection and duration surpass almost any film playing in theaters today (thought very similar, it's now clear to me, to Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Sokurov, or Welles, for example). He also utilizes ambient sound, so we see what is almost a still shot of an empty stairwell or hall, but hear the ticket taker's boot clopping well before she enters or exits the frame. Indeed, at times because of the use of the image durée, both in interior spaces and on the actors themselves, who froze their expressions and gestures--who became statues, or stills--the movie felt like a series of photographs that were only intermittently animated. And what gorgeous photographs. Most of the scenes are bathed in darkness or shadows, or conversely in harsh, industrial light, as befits the inside of a cinema (and a Tsai film), but the colors are vibrant, especially the reds and, need I say it, blues. In the scene most reminiscent of L'Eclisse or Nostalghia, the camera lingers on the empty, lit theater and its tiers of red seats--it lingers and then just keeps on looking, and looking, and looking.... (It's at moments like these that I imagine some viewers have grown exasperated, and I've seen online reports of people walking out. If you have a short attention span, require a plot-driven narrative, want to hear lots of lively dialogue, or manifest any revulsion towards sexual ambiguity, this film may not be for you.)

Tsai has once again created an existential poem in images, this one more lyric than the others in its unfolding, its reliance on thematic plot and imagery, and in its depictions--a long, almost silent poem, of yearning, and mourning. A yearning that suffuses every aspect of these lives, the waterstained walls, the guttering shadows, the empty seats, yet can never be satisfied, not even at the end, when the projectionist learns his fortune and finally searches for the young woman; and a mourning, as the two elderly men note in their conversation, of a way of life that is now disappearing. Gone. Except, of course, we have it, on DVD, as Goodbye, Dragon Inn.

Poems: Blackburn

A few weeks ago as I wandered in the labyrinth of the university's main library searching for a text I couldn't find and can't remember, I spotted Paul Blackburn's (1926-1971) The Cities crammed atop a row of books and pulled it down. I'd come across Blackburn's work in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry, but have never perused a whole collection. I'm slowly making my way through this one and enjoying it quite a bit. Here're two very short poems I thought I'd post by this important poet of New York City, who in 1966 helped to found the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, in the Village.

THIS COULDN'T HAPPEN AGAIN

the heavy pressure
of the presence of your body in the room
moving
O love,
is the end of my
imaginings
this late afternoon
feeling again at hte window
the sensation of weight received
in that displacement
the small waves
lapping against me
constantly

FLEXIONS

the rivers of afternoon
flowing about you as you
move . stop, standing
afterward in my bathroom
naked among the young plants
in the green light singing
softly to yourself

Both from The Cities (New York: Grove), Copyright © Paul Blackburn, 1967.

Today....

Today is Cinco de Mayo, a Mexican national holiday honoring that country's military's defense, under General Zaragosa, of the city of Puebla from French forces sent by Emperor Napolean III in 1862. (He would successfully establish a puppet imperial regime of three year's duration under Maximilian and Carlota in 1864.) Once celebrated in this country mainly in the Southwest and West, which were once part of Mexico, the holiday has become increasingly popular elsewhere in the US, I would imagine, because of the geographic diffusion of the growing Mexican-immigrant and Mexican-American populations, and a openness, at least in certain parts of the country, to cultural pluralism and diversity. Given that the French forces were defeated and the GOP's stated desire for increased Latino support, I wouldn't be surprised if Republicans started reciting annual paeans to cavalry leader (and later leader of Mexico) Porfirio Díaz. He was a dictator, don't forget.

Today also is National Holocaust Remembrance Day. I often think that there's little possibility anyone who's semi-sentient will forget how horrific the Holocaust was, but the truth is that historical education in this country is so crap-poor that many people cannot even discuss, let alone remember, the basics of American history and civics, such as what our Constitution is and how it came into being, nor when George Washington first took office or the city of Washington was established and why, nor the dates of the U.S. Civil War, nor the chronological window when slavery putatively ended in both the North (yes, Virginia, there were slaves in Maine and New Hampshire) and the South--or should I say, slavery as an official institution, nor the era of the Great Depression, etc. In fact, many Americans cannot locate the nation's capital on a map! So knowledge of events taking place elsewhere on this earth more than 50 years ago, even if as abominable as the Holocaust should not be taken for granted. And even with the presence of Holocaust museums and memorials in many of the major American cities, there still are many who have no clue. (Holocaust deniers or minimizers don't help.) Ignorance, Orwell once ironically wrote, is bliss, at least for some--but the truth is that promoting it is a sure means of gaining and maintaining power.

Today the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island held its general elections. The lapdog sitting Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who eviscerated the Labour Party all the way to two straight national wins, appears likely to win a third term, though I've read repeatedly that it will be a slender triumph. Exit polls predicted a drop of 100 seats, a number of them going to the anti-immigrant, racist-harboring Conservative (Tory) Party, which before Blair's charge in 1997 had held the reins of Britain for a generation. (Yet exit polls, as the 2004 U.S. presidential election showed, can be grossly wrong, especially with electronic voting machines that are easily hackable.) My late adolescence and early adulthood coincided with the dreadful reigns of Raygun the Ronald (who claimed he fought in World War II, though he was actually on a movie set) and the horrid, helmet-haired Thatcher Woman, who gutted Merry Olde England like there was no tomorrow, though she did show the dictators in Argentina a thing or two in successfully holding on to Britain's lone colonial patrimony in South America. The U.K. is still picking up (or through) the pieces; meanwhile, Blair has taken his party, once Britain's Social Democratic opposition, steadily to the right. As is well known, he has hewed as closely to W as Beethoven's beloved "trouser button," and was recently revealed to have been co-plotting the Iraq War with his Master in 2002, well before it was launched. (Big surprise!) He's also a devout Christianist who claims to never lie, though his record shows he's as slippery with the truth as his buddy, the horse masturbator.

There actually is a third major party in Britain, the Liberal Democrats, who once were the Liberals and the main, centrist party of the country (Gladstone, Asquith, Lloyd George, etc.), but since the mid-1950s, they have been relegated to third place status. (On the right there is the fascistic National Party, which would feel right at home with the likes of a total nutcase like Pat Robertson, who recently claimed that "activist judges" (meaning Republicans like Anthony Kennedy appointed by Republicans like Raygun) were a greater threat than, oh, Hitler and Osama bin Laden!) Oddly enough, since Blair has turned Labour into a catchall, Clintonian mush, the Liberal Democrats have become the major left-leaning party, and openly opposed the Iraq debacle. Right and sensible as that position is, the Liberal Democrats and their flame-haired leader are not expected to gain much traction.

A bizarre sidelight was the explosion of two grenades, early this morning, outside the building housing the British Consulate in New York City. New York's mayor and stadiophile Michael Bloomberg quickly reassured the public with blandishments, because, well, we can't have anything but business as usual, can we? (The Caterpillar Corporation also has offices there, and has been the object of past protests because, according to the New York Times, the Israeli military uses Caterpillar bulldozers.)

***

Other things that happened at various points in the past today (according to the Gregorian calendar) that I've basically cribbed from other Websites:

• 1818 Karl Marx is born, in Trier, Prussia
  
• 1891 Carnegie Hall (then known as Music Hall) opened in New York City, with Peter Tchaikovsky as guest conductor.
• 1905 Robert Sengstacke Abbott establishes the Chicago Defender newspaper, still in existence, calling it "The World's Greatest Weekly"
• 1925 John Scopes is arrested in Tennessee for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution (and in 2005 Kansas is debating whether to teach it or not)

• 1927 Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, is published, to tepid reviews (it is now considered one of the great achievements of 20th century literature)
• 1941 Emperor Haile Selassie I, Lion of Judah, (right) returns to his capital, Addis Ababa, five years after it had been occupied by Italy, then led by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini
• 1942 As World War II rages on, Japanese forces landed on the Philippine island of Corregidor
• 1961 Astronaut Alan Shepard becomes the first American space traveler as he made a 15-minute sub-orbital flight in a capsule launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

And in my lifetime:

• 1969 Moneta Sleet becomes the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of Coretta Scott King and her daughter at Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral
• 1970 US troops capture Snoul, Cambodia, which had been held by the North Vietnamese, but found no North Vietnamese troops there
• 1972 North Vietnamese turned back a South Vietnamese relief column that was trying to re1lieve the siege at An Loc
• 1975 Hank Aaron passes Babe Ruth's RBI record on his way to becoming the all-time home run and RBI champion in Major League Baseball (and he's never been honored enough for his greatness, in my opinion)
  
• 1985 President Raygun led a wreath-laying ceremony at the Bitburg Germany military cemetery, which included Nazi graves (cf. above under "Holocaust" and "Raygun")

Today it was easier to rattle off what happened today than come up with anything original. Sic transit...

Appendx (1997-1999)

So far, only four issues have appeared. I keep holding out hope that a fifth issue of Appendx will materialize, either online or in my mailbox, though the last online issue dates from pre-millennium 1999, and so far as I know, no new pages are in the offing. A long while ago I sent a query to one of the editors, scholar and architecture Darell W. Fields, who taught at Arizona State University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design and who's now on the faculty at Northeastern University. That e-mail traveled via my free, once-favorite, now defunct Africana.com account, and though those messages may be archived somewhere, I don't have access to them....
But back to Appendx, why my interest? As the three founding editors--Fields, Stull & Lee designer Kevin Fuller, and then- Arizona State assistant professor Milton S. F. Curry--declared in their explanatory preface, this journal of "Culture | Theory | Praxis" had mad goals:

Appendx is intended to mark a new beginning for architectural discourse. Seeking a space for the diffusion of multiple voices and disciplines on the subject matters mentioned, the challenge was to "position" the journal relative to market forces in the publishing arena without compromising the radicality of its prospective contents. In so doing, we quickly realized that we were constantly being overdetermined and categorized by those who cared little or nothing about our most passionate intentions for the project, but were more concerned with its "packaging."

"A new beginning for architectural discourse...radicality of its prospective contents." They were going to be talking about architecture, space, built and imagined environments, in innovative ways, and in particular, given that all three editors were Black and Fields's own work utilized race in interesting ways, through the lens of race. They went on to conclude

Within the life of the journal, we hope to present a multiplicity of views, reflections, and ideas that invigorate and initiate a rigorous approach to questions of cultural theory, difference, and so on. Far from laying claim to any single identity such as black, male, heterosexual, homosexual, female, etc., it is our hope that the journal will become home for a great number of voices, articulating intersubjective positions and theoretical proposals in as free a context as we can provide. This means holding issues of "political correctness" at arm’s length and suspending moral judgment of other identities that we—or potential contributors—consider to be non-negotiable. The projects that will appear in these pages appear on their own terms and are readily exposed to the consequences of their actions. Let us state very clearly in this inaugural issue that those who speak in these pages are speaking first and foremost for themselves.

The eclectic introductory issue included Fields' polemical "Black Manifesto," an exploration of race, architecture and aesthetic practice/praxis, which ended with the statement, "For all I know, I am silenced and lost already"; Milton Curry's "Emancipation Manifesto"; Kim Anne Savelson's feminist reading of architectural theorists on race and gender; Bryan Reynold's brief interpretation of the (de)queered space of the Harvard Science Center's men's room stalls (and his view of the editors' heterosexualizing impulses); a James Baldwin excerpt; and artwork by Dallas-based artist J. Juarez Hernandez. Whether or not it completely cohered wasn't, I thought, really the point--there were so few (no?) other journals or group projects tackling these particular theoretical and creative spaces that its presence and execution, however flawed, was necessary. And being a pioneer, weren't flaws expected? Though edited at Harvard, and rostered by Harvard-affiliated people, it seemed in the initial issue to augur a broader conversation, so I was excited to see where the editors and contributors would go.

Subsequent issues (2-4) included Fields's harsh Gatesian (auto)fable, "Living a Slow Death...or Porch Monkeys in the Dust," as well as pieces by Matthew Grant on gangsta rap; Richard Ford on the "three strikes" law; David Theo Goldberg on the architecture of conferencing; online art by Renee Cox; interviews with Cornel West and Anna Deveare Smith; digital videos by Philip Mallory Jones, Fields, and Steve Jaycox; and a few more bits tossed in for good measure. The second issue included a perceptive and constructive critique by RM Colina (?), on the initial issue's failures and aporias, and how it might make the kinds of interventions it set out it in that visionary preface.

And then...there were no more issues. The possibilities proposed by that preface never had a chance to be fully realized. We got a taste, and then.... So as I said, I hold out hope. I'm not sure where Fuller and Curry are these days, but maybe Fields will launch this craft again, even if for only a few more voyages. Given the current, degraded state of public discourse of all sorts, and of intellectual discourses and rhetorics in particular, not least on architectural themes and topics (cf. the debacles of "Ground Zero," the Iraq War, of the looming US-Mexican border-wall, etc.)--a new Appendx would be very welcome.

Shattuck's Portrait of "Choreographic Partners" Rhoden and Richardson

Kathryn Shattuck has written a sharp article, "After the Breakup, Still Choreographic Partners,"* in the Arts Section of today's New York Times, on the transformed intimate and artistic relationship between choreographer-dancers Dwight Rhoden (42) and Desmond Richardson (35) (pictured at right, photo by Heidi Schumann for the New York Times).

With a minimum of spectacle and stereotype, Shattuck addresses the topic of two amazing, Black, gay/sgl male artists who were a couple** for 17 years but split up last summer, though they are still close and have continued their working relationship in the group they cofounded in 1994, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, which opens a run of eight shows at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea beginning tonight.

It's a refreshing read, particularly for its critical, candid treatment of these men's complex lives and for its exploration and appreciation, even in such a brief space, of how private experiences often inflect upon but also differ from public expression and performance. In this case, the spiritual, psychological and emotional, social, political, and aesthetic exchanges that occurred in their relationship--the partnership they developed--have translated, in part, into the powerful onstage work that both men created together and individually, though Shattuck does challenge the simplistic equation than some journalists, biographers and fans make between the artist's life (or lives) and her or his work.

I've seen Richardson dance before--though not Rhoden--and afterwards was at a loss to convey my awe. If I can, I'm going to catch one of their sets.
___
*The NY Times requires registration.
**I cannot remember the last time I read about a Black or POC LGBT/sgl couple--whether in an intimate relationship, an artistic partnership, or both--let alone a relationship of this length, in a mainstream news publication, in the mainstream LGBT print media, or in the non-LGBT Black and non-white print media. It almost goes without saying that we are just as rarely portrayed in the televisual media.

The Encyclopedia Project

An exciting new joint, arriving this summer, encyclopedic in scope, edited by Tisa Bryant, Miranda Mellis and Kate Schatz.

The Encyclopedia Project: Vol I (A-E)

In the editors' own words:

Encyclopedia is a series of five annual literary/arts print publications that will constitute an encyclopedia of and about fiction. This first issue spans the letters A-E and addresses the question, what occurs under the sign of fiction? That there is no singular answer to this question allows for a wide-range of responses that invigorate genre, form, and content.

Encyclopedia will feature short stories, cross-genre work, visual art, translations, collaborations, plays, lyrical essays, and criticism. It combines the aesthetic, socio-political, and cultural merits of a high caliber literary arts journal with the educational and pedagogical functions of the reference book. With a commitment to accessibility as well as experimentation, Encyclopedia adds a vital publication to the literary/arts world.

What occurs under the sign of fiction, indeed? Encyclopedia will certainly give us some ideas. One of mine is even part of the mix....

Sunday Quote: Anthony Braxton

"My hope is that we will use this time space to renew our relationship with cultural dynamics and begin again the fight for the challenge of composite existence and positive experience. We must rededicate ourselves to the hope of world peace, human rights, and cosmic destiny. Creativity is the engine of evolution and healing. We are now in a new era and there is everything to do."
--Anthony Braxton, responding to the tragic events of 9/11/2001