May Thoughts

It's 6 days into May and I've only managed to update my May book selections, but I guess that's better than nothing. The final poetry posts for April are still in draft form, but by the end of this week I should be over the (reading) mountain and able to post a bit more frequently. I think. I have been reading for pleasure and edification a bit more, and not just online articles, blog pieces and news stories as happens when I'm bogged down in work-related reading. I'm nearly finished with Thomas Glave's new collection of stories, The Torturer's Wife (City Lights, 2008) and had the pleasure of hearing him read from the title story and the final, arresting final one (set in Jamaica), and I've also gotten about halfway through Forrest Gander's first novel, As a Friend (New Directions, 2009), whose chapter that can only be described as a poetic tour-de-force. Written by an accomplished poet, no less. One thing I love about books of stories (and publishers really could do more to emphasize this) is that you can dip in and read 1-2 at a time, or, if you're really motivated, read as many as you like, though some authors' short fictions require breaks (Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, etc.) to process even one piece, and Thomas's work is like that. You really have to let what you've just read steep a little. Short novels and novellas, the queer fish of American publishing, are also a blessing. Forrest's prose slows your reading and requires focus, and yet the book is still short and tight enough that you can get through it fairly quickly. I've got such a huge stack following these two that I may have to pick up the/my speed, though.

***

Speaking of reading, I haven't gotten to Colson Whitehead's new novel, Sag Harbor, but Reggie H. forwarded the link to Touré's New York Times review, in which he launches provocatively on a bit about "post-blackness" as if his take on it is a settled matter. I'm not a big fan of Touré's work (though when I met him years ago at Bread Loaf, before his ascendant fame, he was pretty cool), and I feel like his whole "post-black" prologue is trying to mark out some sort of conceptual space for reframing Touré's work rather than offering anything insightful to say about Whitehead's novel, which Reggie H. tells me is quite good. (Whitehead is a very talented novel, and wrote one of the freshest novels of the last 25 years, The Intuitionist.) It's as if he never heard or read any critiques about the term and is unfamiliar with Trey Ellis's "The New Black Aesthetic" essay, which animated conversations at the Dark Room more than 20 years ago.

What I also wrote on the CC list, where a lively series of responses ensued, was this (or some of it):

I'm glad Brian [Gilmore, a lawyer, poet and journalist] mentioned Trey Ellis's famous essay,which caused (and is still causing a stir) when it first appeared, just as Thelma Golden's term set it off too and is still provoking discussion. But then Kyle listed Hughes's "The Racial Artist and the Negro Mountain" on his syllabus, and Hughes's is making an argument heading in this direction at the end of that essay, and also challenging DuBois's "Criteria of Negro Art" and other prescriptive, racially responsible-focused readings of black art and blackness, so perhaps the conversation, the contestation, is a longstanding one.

I wonder if the issue isn't really that post-black is supposed to equal post-essential(ist).

As others have noted, blackness DOES mean many things, always has, with tremendous complexity, in the realm of ideas and in the world. Blackness has conceptual, discursive and ontological power and meaning, and isn't just an empty signifier, just as whiteness isn't. Blackness (and whiteness) have been central organizing principles and tropes for modernity broadly, as [Paul] Gilroy notes for European and American modernities in particular, and as [Toni] Morrison and others have pointed out, for American society, politics, economics, and culture. Randall [Horton]'s citation of various sources is great, and perhaps a course on post-blackness would look at theoretical discussions of race, racism, racial production, blackness as concept, idea, performance, and so on, in order to pivot into a discussion of what "post-blackness" might look like and how it is produced discursively and in other ways, what its effects are, and so on.

In terms of Toure, I won't get personal, but I do wonder if he's not just trying to position himself, as [Tyehimba] Jess says, in a vanguard of some sort, since his work continually fails to do that for him. I'm suspicious of the people who keep labeling [President Barack] Obama and his administration "post-black," or talking about the "post-racial" society we now live in especially given the frequent racist outbursts we've witnessed since January, but also the continued non-spectacular displays and systems of racism that continue. Just look at who's suffering the worst from the economic crisis; the housing crisis; the employment decline. Who still fills our jails? Who's being targeted for attacks because of this current flu outbreak? I can assure it ain't the industrial meat industry.

And I added, responding to a specific point by Reggie:

As for Michael Steele, I think he's quite happy to be black; it gives him a unique space in which to perform his buffoonery. Shelby Steele is the one who has always struck me as trying to flee blackness, but both would do well to listen to Claude Steele, who's the one who got all the smarts.

Really, if we do have to hear from one of these Steeles, let's push for it to be Dr. Claude, okay? And let's stop calling Obama "post-black," at least people who're informed about such things and have good sense, anyway.

***

I also want to highlight two bits of good news about colleagues and friends. Sarah Schulman received the 2009 Kessler Award, which means that she has been selected to deliver the David Kessler Lecture this upcoming fall by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York Graduate Center. This is a huge honor, as the Kessler lecturer is always someone who has made a major contribution to LGBTQ studies and cultures, and previous Kessler lecturers have included such renowned figures as Samuel R. Delany, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Cherrie Moraga, Judith Butler, Monique Wittig, Barbara Smith, Joan Nestle, John D'Emilio, and Esther Newton, among others. Sarah's important and pioneering work, which continues to combine a powerful, original and vital imagination with an unremitting activist vision and an ethnographer's attentiveness to lived experience, has helped to create the space in which several generations of creative writers and scholars have done their work, especially at the intersection of feminism, discussions of economics and class, and lesbian and anti-racist writing and studies. She has also been a mentor to a number of younger writers, especially women and writers of color, and has put her career on the line more than once to advance causes that benefit countless others, including her recent efforts to address the ongoing paucity of work by female playwrights on New York stages. She is the real deal. Congratulations, Sarah!

Also, congratulations to my colleague Reg Gibbons, who recently received the from the Texas Institute of Letters' Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Literary Translation for his exceptional volume of translations, Sophocles' Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments (Princeton, 2008). Reg, you may remember, received a 2008 National Book Award nomination for his beautiful collection Creatures of a Day (LSU Press, 2007), which includes a number of fine short lyrics and a moving long poem, "Fern-Texts," that draws from and converses with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's notebooks. His other translations include such texts as Sophocles' Antigone and, with the late classicist Charles Segal, The Bakkhai (Bacchae), as well as Spanish and Mexican (Luis Cernuda and Jorge Guillén, among others) and Russian poets (Ilya Kutik--these are on their way, I believe). The last set of translations has also seeded, in part, a series of sparkling and profound essays in The American Poetry, on such topics as rhyme's cognitive power and effects, and I hope these become a book as well, very soon. Somehow he does and did all this while teaching full time, producing many volumes of highly regarded poetry and fiction, and, for many years serving as an literary magazine editor, before later serving as department chair (how!?) and now director of a literary center. The prodigiousness deserves an award all its own. Congratulations, Reg!

***

I'll end on the sad note that a good friend, Larry Knight, a brother in spirit, really, passed away earlier this week. It's tough to think and talk about , but let me just say that may his memory live long, may he rest in peace, and may his surviving partner Roberto V.'s sorrow be lifted soon.

In the Garden + Rich's Kessler Lecture & Duncan Poem

Today felt like autumn, which is only a few weeks away on the calendar. It was one of the last days I could work in the yard and garden before I head back west and plunge into teaching, and so in addition to cutting the grass, I snapped a few shots of some of the plants, which have far exceeded our expectations.

Here are the basil and tomato plants. C has repeated taken cuttings from the basil, and the tomato continues to produce fruit. We harvested the first batch back in June, and I was able to make homemade marinara sauce for the first time. (It actually turned out well.)

Some of the first batch of tomatoes

This was an early batch of blackberries (and one blueberry near the center of the bowl). The blackberry plant produced fruit just once, and then decided to try and spread across the entire lawn. It is a warrior so I warn anyone: be ready to do battle with it. The thorned bush has grown twice as fast as the thornless one, and it sends its shoots far under the ground so that they turn up in the unlikeliest places, such as under tables, other plants, beyond fences. When you try to get rid it you have to root it, and the thorns on several of the stalks, which cut through my gardening gloves, as well as the tenacious roots, which refused to loosen, provided more of a workout than an hour at the gym.

The mint plant, in front of weeds. This is a very hardy plant that has come back in several spots.

The rosemary and sage have grown steadily all summer. I need to figure out what to do so that they'll return. The prior rosemary plant flowered for a year, then died off this past winter.

Brussel sprouts! I took me a month to figure out that like other plants of this sort you have to remove the lower leaves, and then when I snipped off the first few heads I thought we were done, but now there are about a dozen or more new sprouts coming in, which amazes me. I was worried that they hadn't received enough water and would be, as I saw online, "bitter," but the first batch tasted fresh and mellow in flavor, so I'm not worried about the upcoming crop.

Here are the red cabbages, which looked sickly earlier in the summer, but which are steadily growing. Caterpillars were devouring the leaves, but eventually they passed on to the next stage of their existence, sated with cabbage, and now the plants are nearing harvest. In fact, I think the one at the center of this picture may be ready, though I keep thinking it's still got a ways to g(r)o(w).

The strawberry patch is even thicker than last year, but only the tinier Alpine strawberries (the little leaves at right) produced fruit, which is about the size of a thumbnail and swiftly devoured by birds, stray cats, ants, or whatever gets to it before we do. Something else is pocking all the strawberry leaves, so I need to figure out if we have to cut them back and how much so that they'll produce fruit next year.

The honeysuckle is again flowering, though it's not so fragrant these days. It has had to battle for survival with the blackberry bush, though C gave it a leg up a few weeks ago. Earlier in the summer its blooms were so bright it looked like it was filled with birds of paradise. I think these are its last blooms of the season.

We had no luck with the arugula or the spinach, which produced its leaves and then withered. The fig tree did not take root, and when I touched it for a brief examination, it toppled over, the roots having shriveled so much that it was basically hovering in place. The dill plant also flowered, allowing C to harvest it, and then died, but I hope it will return as the thyme has, thick and ready for harvest. We had to replace our back porch, and the lavender, one of my favorite plants, took a beating, but I've figured out the trick to propagate it in the future: the soil must have enough lime. So next spring I'll be back, planting more lavender, and I hope we can get a fig tree that survives and produces fruit as well.

+++

Once upon a time I was very active with the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York's (CUNY) Graduate Center. I'm still a member of CLAGS, but I have not attended or been able to attend any of CLAGS's events in years. One of the events I most miss is the Annual David R. Kessler Lecture, which celebrates a major living figure in the development of LGBT and Queer Studies. Scholars offer brief remarks on behalf of the speaker, who then delivers a keynote. Previous Kessler honorees have included Joan Nestle, Monique Wittig*, Barbara Smith, Esther Newton, Samuel R. Delany, Judith Butler, Cherrie Moraga, Isaac Julien, and Edmund White. (In fact, there's the fine anthology, Queer Ideas, with a foreword by CLAGS founder Martin Duberman and with an introduction by former directors Alisa Solomon and Paisley Currah, which presents the lectures from the first 10 years of the award.)

This past year's (2006-2007) honoree was Adrienne Rich, about whom I've sung praises more than once before in these pages. Rich's lecture, as I read it, sought to connect the academic field of LGBT studies with its non-academic, poetic, everyday roots in the public and private activism, avant la lettre, of figures such as Walt Whitman, Robert Duncan, and Judy Grahn. In evoking these figures, she also noted that in addition to their work and lives creating and advance a discourse and traditions on which future LGBT and queer scholars, as well as LGBT and queer people in general, might build, they also sought to challenge other limits, other restrictions, other constraints, by positing more complex notions of identity, community, citizenship, an expanded social and political imaginary (in the non-Lacanian sense, I think), particularly in light of the voracious commodity society we live in--that they lived in and saw evolving towards what it has become.

What follows is the Duncan poem she quotes. It's short enough that I don't have to excerpt it, as I would Whitman's "Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand," or Grahn's much longer "A Woman Is Talking to Death." One of the things Rich's talk brings to mind is how the poem returns again and again to the notion of an affective collectivity, a circle of friends, which may increase or wane, but whose links Duncan evokes anaphorically at the start of each stanza, to ground his perspective and its authority, the poem's authority, as a statement beyond the merely personal, about desire and the difficulties of love. In addition to its relevance, I think, for a number of friends of mine--for so many LGBT people at this fraught moment in which we are pushed increasingly towards organized, consumerist, post-identitarian normativities into which many of us still do not fit, it is also interesting how the poem's metaphors move increasingly towards Capital; though we begin in a desire to which no set exchange or monetary value can be placed, it is very much a poem rooted in an earlier yet still persistent version of our society and its myths, in which, ultimately, the "honest wage," even of love, remains the desired goal.

But let me stop interpreting, and give you the poem:

Among My Friends Love Is a Great Sorrow

Among my friends love is a great sorrow.
It has become a daily burden, a feast,
a gluttony for fools, a heart's famine.
We visit one another asking, telling one another.
We do not burn hotly, we question the fire.
We do not fall forward with our alive
eager faces looking through into the fire.
We stare back at our own faces.
We have become our own realities.
We seek to exhaust our lovelessness.

Among my friends love is a painful question.
We seek among the passing faces
a sphinx-face who will ask its riddle.
Among my friends love is an answer
to a question
that has not been asked.
Then ask it.

Among my friends love is a payment.
It is an old debt for a borrowing foolishly spent.
And we go on, borrowing and borrowing
from each other.

Among my friends love is a wage
that one might have for an honest living.

Excerpted from Adrienne Rich's 2006-2007 Fifteenth Annual David R. Kessler Lecture,
CLAGS, CUNY Grad Center, Copyright © 1995, Robert A. Bertholf, ed., Robert Duncan,
A Selected Prose (New York:  New Directions Publishing Corporation).

__
*I asterisked Wittig's name, because I always remember once telling Reggie H. that I wished that when I walked into bookstores that my books were on the shelves like Wittig's--there was a time in the mid-1980s when it seemed that every bookstore I entered had at least one copy of two of her foundation works, The Lesbian Body and my favorite, the remarkable Les Guérillères--and he rightly responded that, well, perhaps her books weren't on the shelves as much as I imagined. It would be wonderful, nevertheless, to write a book or books, a foundational work, however flawed, to which several generations of readers, even a small number, continue to return. Isn't that what most writers of fiction and poetry aim for?