A Brief Note On the Election

The results of yesterday's election, in which Republicans Donald J. Trump and Michael Pence defeated Democrats Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine by winning a majority of Electoral College votes (about 290 so far) versus 230 and despite losing the popular vote, was a difficult day for so many of us. Making it even worse, the obstructionist GOP caucus also retained control of the US Senate and House, and will now have the power to give President Trump whatever he asks for--or they can convince him wants, including a far-right jurist to fill the seat of the late Antonin Scalia. As I told a friend and colleague, we've lived through times as tough as these and worse, and we'll get through it if we stick together, though we'll suffer along the way.

 The first step, though, is acknowledge that Trump's victory occurred, recognizing the many people and things that made it possible, and then not throwing up our hands in sorrow, anger and apathy, and allowing him to steamroll over everyone and everything.

This election reminds me a lot of 2000, only torqued up a few hundred notches. That one also included a Democratic duo winning the popular vote yet losing to the Republican ticket, after over a year of grotesque media malpractice, and lots of liberal handwringing about how the successor of a popular president could lose. Republicans and the media salivated over having an allegedly "compassionate conservative" "businessman" take over the reins of government, promising us reform and a new path. Most voters then, as now, and particularly African American and Latinx voters, rejected it. The true outcome, however, would become clear shortly thereafter when the US suffered through rolling blackouts, the beginnings of warantless wiretapping, a major trading firm (Enron) collapse, and finally, in spite of warnings and red flags, the worst terrorist attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001. I hope and pray that horrors of this magnitude do not befall us under Trump and Pence, though after the experience of that earlier election, I am trying to steel myself for whatever may unfold, and remind myself, organization, coalition-building, dialogue, and resistance, in every way are key.

There were some bright spots in yesterday's election, however: The US Senate will now have the most women of color in its history, with the election of Kamala Harris (CA), Tammy Duckworth (IL), and Catherine Cortez Masto (NV) joining Mazie Hirono (HI), all of whom are progressive Democrats. Also, the Democrat Maggie Hassan eked out a win for the New Hampshire Senate seat, so the Democrats will have 48 votes (46 + Bernie Sanders and Angus King), meaning they'll be able to provide some semblance of a check on Trump, McConnell and Ryan. I'm holding on to this, and to the knowledge that we won't give up, because we cannot, and will keep fighting for a better future for all of us. That's what my ancestors did, what my parents did, and that's what we must do.

Obama & Biden Win Reelection!

President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama
Vice President Joe Biden and Second Lady Dr. Jill Biden
(Sept. 7, 2012, Portsmouth, NH (AP Photo/Jim Cole))

They did it, we did it! President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden won yesterday's national contest over Republicans Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, by a margin of 303 electoral votes to 203 for the Romney-Ryan ticket! Our 44th President and his Vice President will have 4 more years to continue the work they began in 2008, with a more liberal US Senate, including new progressive Democratic senators like Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and the first out lesbian senator in US history, Tammy Baldwin, of Wisconsin. Despite the Romney's campaign's head games, which beguiled the establishment media, the Obama campaign did enough to energize its DEMOCRATIC coalition, and won the majority of the swing states, including Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Colorado, New Hampshire, Nevada, and VP nominee Paul Ryan's home state of Wisconsin, sealing the victory for the Democratic ticket. Despite the ongoing economic crises, enough voters felt things were turning around to give the President a second chance. Despite billions from secret Super PAC funders, many of them billionaires and multimillionaires, the outright plutocratic Republican ticket lost.

I sincerely hope President Obama will take a few more tips from his predecessor and campaign energizer, former president Bill Clinton, who despite all the gloomy predictions, especially from the right and mainstream media, modestly raised taxes in 1993 on everyone, including the rich, and went on to preside over the most successful economic expansion of any president in the last 50 years. I hope he--and voters, since the media are paid to be obtuse--realize too that as Bill Clinton, who repeatedly accommodated the GOP learned the hard way, there is only so far you can go. They will still try to destroy you, so negotiate from strength, not weakness. Ignore the Washington consensus, and push for what you believe in. Obama will have an increased Democratic majority in the Senate, led by the wily Harry Reid (D-NV), so if a jobs bill requires reconciliation, push it through. If smart-grid funding requires reconciliation, push it through. With bills that might merit bipartisanship, like immigration reform, extend an olive branch to the GOP. Otherwise, do no let them roll you, and keep pushing forward, especially on green technologies, a saner foreign policy, a progressive judiciary, and fiscal plans that shrink the income gap and increase job opportunities for the 99%.

But that all will be work to undertake after being sworn in a second time. With the victories for marriage equality in Maryland and Maine, the positive ballot measure victories in New Jersey and elsewhere, and the defeat of hatemongers like Republicans Joe Walsh of Illinois and Allen West of Florida, the country outside the deep South does appear to have rejected the politics of negation, dissimulation and aristocracy, and is showing it is willing to move forward. It's up to all of us now to maintain that movement, and keep pushing, as hard as it will often seem. Even the Clinton-era rates, set to return in January 2014, won't pry the cold fingers off the millions of those willing to spend everything to rewrite laws to benefit themselves and their elite class.

Congratulations to President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. You did it, we did it. Now we need to really do it, and keep the country moving the best direction!

A Little of This, A Little of That

Today, after a false morning alarm, which involved the electricity surging on while I was in the shower,    only to shut off not even 10 minutes later, it finally clicked back on as I was scrubbing the refrigerator clean of its foetor, and there was easily enough within its walls and those of the little cooler that became a makeshift mini-fridge to supply biochemistry experiments at every local university and college. So far, it has held. We are expecting a nor'easter or some other serious storm tomorrow, with high winds and waterline surges, so I am praying that whatever the problem turned out to be, our local energy company, PSE&G, has resolved it for the future. We went nearly eight days without electricity, in the absence, at least in our area, of severe flooding or extensive pole damage. The capacitors (?) in the transformers, I heard someone say on the radio. PSE&G has said anything at all about what was wrong, instead referring us to a vague online article. Once the entire city and other towns, the worst hit of which will require many more weeks, perhaps even months, of rebuilding at every level, have power and are on the mend, I plan to suggest to every official I can find that they take into account the recommendations of the American Society of Engineers, who offered useful suggestions in 2009 on how to address the storm Hurricane Sandy turned out to be, with a push for greater regulation of the power companies, and for those at the federal level, I will do my part in renewed efforts to get them to pay attention to global warming and climate change.

===




Unlike many parts of New Jersey, our voting precinct thankfully was functional, so we didn't have to try either the provisional ballot or far more experimental email/fax options, and C and I went to vote first thing this morning. The building, a nearby senior center, had gotten electricity a night or two ago, and was buzzing when we arrived. I have never seen it that busy; perhaps it was in 2008, though because I had to be in Chicago to teach I voted by absentee then, with the benefit that I was able to head down after class to Grant Park, where then President-elect Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and the First daughters Sasha and Malia Obama greeted the enthusiastic, festival-like crowd. Tonight I will be at home, I hope with working lights, TV and Internet, and remain cautiously optimistic that the president will be reelected and that the Democrats will not only retain the US Senate but gain a few seats in the bargain. My hopes for the US House are less expansive, but I would love to be surprised in a positive way (the departures of the likes of Michele Bachmann, Allen West, being more important than the lagniappe of Democratic control; or should I make that the reverse? etc.).

I've expressed my thoughts on the last four years on here before, but I do think the President has some real accomplishments, such as the Affordable Care Act, the bailout of the auto industry, Dodd-Frank (as weak as it nevertheless is), the righting (if not the less successful right-winging, i.e., austeritization) of the eoconomy after the debacle of Bush, the two new Supreme Court justices (Sotomayor and Kagan), his glacial affirmation of same-sex marriage and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the increasing greening of the economy. His record on  a range of other issues, warmaking and warmongering has been more mixed, with the Iraq War's end more of a mulligan and Afghanistan mostly a bloody wash, the horrendous National Defense Authorization Act, the normalization of drone warfare, the demonization of whistleblowers, the continuance of Bush's War on Terror and multi-decade War on Drugs, the magazine-wielding against Iran, and other deleterious policies that crush our civil liberties, extend the worst aspects of the military industrial state, and advance neoliberalism and neoconservatism all reasons to give a voter pause. As has tended to be the case in presidential elections, the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, a hyper-secretive, ultra-rich Trojan Horse for the plutocracy, is far, far worse. In fact, he might be the worst Republican nominee I had the opportunity to vote against in my lifetime. Almost nothing he says is consistent with what he's said, let alone done, in the past, and his Vice Presidential running mate, Rand-roid Paul Ryan (R-WI), is so far to the right he's almost off the charts.

I don't think even they can steal this election, as occurred in 2000; but every election in the US is always a leap into the dark, with those running things the only ones with strike matches and a map at hand. Still, I think Obama will win reelection, and when that's certified, the real work begins again.

===

The transportation systems connecting the New York metropolitan area are still recovering from the hurricane and its aftermath. As of today, there is no PATH train service originating from the World Trade Center, which is one end of the line whose other is Newark. There is also no Newark Light Rail or subway train yet. Yesterday I took C to the NY Waterway ferry to NYC; the first departure point, at Paulus Hook, had a line easily a half-mile long. The second pier, at Newport, appeared more manageable, and despite his bus hitting a taxi, he got to work. I on the other hand had to drive to Newark, and picked up a colleague who also was teaching on Mondays. Gasoline is still scarce in many parts of this area, but I had filled up the car, which has decent fuel economy, and was able to ferry us to the university without a problem. Getting home was more a challenge; the traffic exiting Newark was slower than molasses in the cold, and I probably burned twice as much gas leaving as arriving. I am glad, though, that I did not get rid of my little car, which carried me, and my cousin when I wasn't in town, all over Chicago and the Midwest. I sometimes think I no longer really need it, and then an event like the hurricane occurs that reminds me how necessary it can be, even if, under regular circumstances, public transportation is a far more ecologically and financial sound option.

Many of my students are still dealing with the effects of the hurricane. Many also lost electricity and either had just gotten it back or were still waiting. One student who lives in Newark told me that her mayor, Cory Booker, had brought her family and others pizza to ensure they ate during one chilly, light-less night. Another who lives in Manhattan told me it took him four hours driving to school via the Lincoln Tunnel. Another is still without electricity and was so worried about his grade he sent me multiple pleading emails not to penalize him for not submitting an assignment. The university has asked us to be flexible, and one of the things I've learned over many years of teaching is that creating a syllabus that you can compress or expand depending upon circumstances--though with lots of notice especially for undergraduates--is the best plan. In the undergraduate Afro-Latin literature class we are now reading Mayra Montero's tragic novel The Messenger, which I trust will draw the students back into the course, and in the graduate class we're talking about Ray Kurzweil's interest in "the singularity" and the possibility of infinite life, or, as Jean-François Lyotard suggests in his famous article, of the survival of the mind after the death of the body, yet another point on the spectrum of the transhuman as well as the posthuman, which this hurricane's terrible effects held up as if under a magnifying glass.  In both courses we are working around the challenges the lost last week and the early part of this one have dealt us. Above all I sincerely hope every one of my students and their families, like everyone else affected by the storm, is on the path to recovery.

===

Congratulations to the San Francisco Giants, who won this year's World Series by defeating the Detroit Tigers in 4 straight games. The Giants, mostly unheralded all season and featuring a bevy of talented batters from Venezuela as well as excellent starting and relief pitching, took the final two games of the National League Championship Series from my St. Louis Cardinals, last year's Series champs, who had already knocked out the top NL team, the Washington Nationals, then proceeded to blank the Tigers in the first three games, allowing runs only in the fourth and final game. Many on this roster were also on the team that won the 2010 World Series, vanquishing the Texas Rangers, and they still have the talent and drive to return next year, though something tells me it'll be a new NL team vying for and winning the crown.

===

Rest in piece, Elliott Carter, after 103 years of innovative composing. An American original!

Debate Debacle in Denver

Governor Mitt Romney & President Barack Obama (Salon.com)

What was he thinking? President Barack Obama, I mean. What was he thinking last night, and what was he doing beyond showing up, in Denver, at the University of Denver, to stand just a few feet away from Republican presidential nominee and his chief opponent, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and mouth a highly abstracted, jargon-thick passionless account of his policies and tenure?

As I was watching the president's performance in the debate was I thought it was just flat, but once he began delivering his rambling, stammering closing statement, I thought it was only a breath short of disastrous. Throughout the evening, except on a few issues, the president repeatedly refused to confront Romney—whom I tagged as #Romnocchio on Twitter--on his lies and misstatements (such as the alleged "$716 billion cut" to Medicare), nor did he once broach Romney's "47% " slur, which had begun to seriously wound the Republican nominee in the public consciousness and the Swing State matchups.

Instead, President Obama appeared alternately exhausted and peeved, when he wasn't both. He kept his head down, pursed his lips, and then when he cracked them, he went on extended disquisitions that were devoid of humor, muted in their enthusiasm, and overly wonky, as if he was speaking to a group of Washington and New York insiders, instead of uncommitted voters and his base. And Republicans who might be willing not to vote for Romney if his performance were lackluster enough.  Simplify, President Obama, and don't be afraid of showing a bit more emotion, or citing people, not just facts and statistics. 

Moreover, even if you have to do it in the nicest way you can, call your opponent out on his lies, and point out when he's flipflopping. Again and again, President Obama did not strike when he could have, not even when Romney gave him huge openings. There was no mention of Romney's missing tax files. No mention of Romney's Bain tenure or the thousands of jobs destroyed and pensions blown up by the private equity firm? Instead, Obama kept reverting to neoliberal bromides and conservative frames, only occasionally sounding like a liberal.

Then there were the contradictions. Does the President want to return to the Clinton-era federal marginal tax rates, as he suggested, which would radically trim the deficit (as occurred under Bill Clinton, along with the creation of 23 million jobs), or does he want that "balanced," "Grand Bargain," dreadful "Simpson-Bowles" plan--whose committee, which included Republican Vice Presidential nominee Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, couldn't even reach final agreement, leaving the two eponymous committee chairs to issue their own document--hat if enacted might spell the end of the Democratic Party?  Does the President really see eye-to-eye with Mitt Romney on Social Security, or not? And does he or no one else in Washington grasp that Medicaid not only provides services for poor children, but millions of seniors?

It did not help that Jim Lehrer, a longtime debate moderator with a history of haplessness, appeared incapable not only of asking cogent questions or moving beyond the narrow focus of Washington elites, but of keeping either man, particularly Romney, in check. Obama appeared to be expecting Lehrer to rein Romney in, but as soon as he realized that wasn't going to happen—and it wasn't—why couldn't he switch gears and at least challenge Romney directly himself, even in a polite fashion? The doe-eyed, sputtering Lehrer was so woefully inept he ought just to have stood up, set his papers down, and left the room altogether. 

Nor did it help that Romney came out ready to attack, but also made sure he kept repeating his tales and half-truths such that they appeared real, and he dropped in right-wing talismans, from defunding PBS (only a tiny sliver of the federal budget)—killing Big Bird—to citing the 10th Amendment.  Again, the President appeared ill-prepared to leap on any of these statements either. He even came at Obama from the left 1-2 times, hammering the President on the "too-big-to-fail banks" in "Dodd-Frank," as if he and the GOP cared one whit about the gargantuan size or excessive power and repeated unethical, sometimes criminal behavior of these global behemoths. Romney was determined not to mention Congressman Ryan or President Obama's predecessor in the White House, George W. Bush, knowing how unpopular both of them are, but why did the President choose radio silence on both?

On top of this, although this was supposedly a debate on domestic issues, countless important ones, ranging from employment, public and private infrastructure, the housing crisis, women's rights and reproductive autonomy, LGBTQ rights, the immigration debacle, gun violence and control, poverty and homelessness, the prison-industrial complex and racial profiling, the effects of climate change and global warming, and many others, never made it past Lehrer's lips, let alone Obama's or Romney's.

Perhaps, as former Vice President and debate veteran Al Gore pointed out to the Current TV post-debate panel last night, the president might have suffering from altitude sickness, having only arrived there at 2 pm, thus giving himself no time to acclimate. (I know I felt it when I was in Colorado.) Perhaps the President was thinking about his wedding anniversary, and couldn't focus. Perhaps he was so unused to being challenged, by anybody, especially someone spewing half and non-truths, that he was taken aback. Perhaps he could not rise above his past poor debate performances. Perhaps he just needed to be startled into action. Perhaps he was trying not to commit a gaffe and to speak to the DC/NY media, not the American people, many of whom are low-info folks who might just be tuning in to the race. Perhaps—though I seriously doubt it—this was a rope-a-dope/secret ninja/120th degree chess move, as a friend suggested, and he purposely tanked to give Romney false confidence. I don't know.

But I do know he better bring for the next debate. Too much, from the future of the Affordable Care Act to the Supreme Court to the wholesale destruction of the social safety net, is riding on the president's reelection. PBS isn't the only thing in Romney's and Ryan's—and the GOP's—crosshairs. President Obama must right himself right away, and be ready, truly ready, to thrown down at the town hall debate on October 16 in Hempstead, New York.

Video: Michigan Avenue/Grant Park Election Celebration

Way too much work today, so here's one of the videos from last Tuesday's celebration. It's taking place on Michigan Avenue. Enjoy!

Obama-Biden Win Presidency!

BARACK OBAMA IS THE 44th PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

BARACK OBAMA IS THE FIRST AFRICAN-AMERICAN PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

BARACK OBAMA AND JOSEPH BIDEN HAVE WON THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION!

CONGRATULATIONS, SENATORS OBAMA AND BIDEN!!!!

GOD BLESS YOU, PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA AND VICE PRESIDENT-ELECT BIDEN, AND THANK YOU, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOR MAKING THIS POSSIBLE!
YES WE CAN, YES WE DID!

VOTE

Revenu + Congrats + Sports + Hayden White on "The Practical Past"

Mucho tiempo, no hé blogeado. Or something along those lines. I'll attribute it to too much going on, especially in the larger world (cf. the ongoing economic maelstrom, the presidential election, etc.), though I do still have blog posts ready in my head every morning. The problem is that by midday and especially after I'm heading back from the work, the energy to write them is gone. So here goes another attempt to jumpstart things again.

***

After vacillating I ended up watching the third and final Presidential debate, which was much more of a debate, or at least a conversation (if only one way), than the previous three dis/infomercials for the crisis in our political system. As I'd felt with the first, I found it tough to watch, primarily because I cannot stand to witness people lying and blathering hypocritically and badgering as John McCain is wont to do, without any challenge, as Barack Obama is wont not to do. But, as I'd also noted about the first debate, Obama's approach is obviously the correct one for what he hopes to achieve in 19 days, which is to secure the votes of undecided voters and independents, who constitute the bulk of the focus groups the networks love to assemble, and thus become President of the United States, so props to him. He won the snap polls, he's increasing his lead in key states, and he looks ever more certain to gain enough electoral votes to become the 44th leader of this nation.

McCain's mugging, snorting and eye-bugging, his calumnies about William Ayers and ACORN, his bizarre scare quotes around women's "health" on the issue of late term abortions, and his annoying invocation of the Republican-plant and con man, "Joe the (Unlicensed, Tax-Owing, Keating-Related) Plumber" Wurzelbacher, would probably have set a less cool opponent off live. But Obama smiled, continually turned and addressed him respectfully, and, as was the case with the previous two debates, won the show.

I will be glad when Election Day comes and goes. Waiting this thing out is wracking my nerves; the previous weeks' seesawing poll numbers have taken an emotional toll. A few days I voted by absentee ballot, and I've been glad to see that large numbers of voters are taking advantage of early voting where it's available. (It is possible to do so in Illinois, but not New Jersey, which does thankfully have an excuse-free absentee voting.) Voting issues and standards really should be standardized at the federal level, however. Every state should have early voting, excuse-free absentee voting, automatic registration of ALL adults (regardless of convictions), severe penalties for caging and unexplained voter roll purging, electioneering, and voter intimidation of any sort, and standardized voting equipment and verifiable paper trails for all votes.

Since that hasn't happened already, I can foresee all sorts of Election Day and Night shenanigans, especially in states like Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Indiana, where the GOP has already tried its best to hinder the successful, massive registration drives by Obama and the Democrats. Let's hope that Obama and Biden, along with their down-ticket allies, have collected enough votes in enough states to make Republican trickeration less of a problem than it could be.

***

Lots of congratulations to go around. Let's start with people I know. My very dear colleague, writer Reg Gibbons, was one of five poets nominated for a National Book Award in poetry this week, for his book Creatures of a Day (LSU Press). Reg is one of the finest poets and people I know, so it was wonderful to see this news. Nominated in the same category is the powerhouse wordsmith Patricia Smith, whom I first met through her newspaper columns and then at the Dark Room reading series years ago in Boston. Now one of Cave Canem's doyennes, her book on the Hurricane Katrina survivors, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press), also received a nomination. In the fiction category, another colleague, Aleksandar Hemon, was nominated for his new and widely praised novel, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead). The National Book Awards are one of the most important, multicategory national book awards, so I know all three of these writers, like all the nominees, are really soaring right now.

Congratulations also to someone I don't know but do read regularly, Princeton professor Paul Krugman, who received the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday for his groundbreaking work on trade theory and the new economy. For a minute I wondered if the award wasn't also a fillip to the current Misadministration in Washington, and it might be, but everything I've come across suggests that Krugman's achievements in his field are substantial and lasting. As a blogger--is he the first Nobel blogger?--and columnist, which is to say, as a public intellectual of a new kind, he's been invaluable. Even when I've disagreed with him on issues, like his once-harsh criticisms of Obama, I still have respected his incisive grasp of the issues in general.

Congratulations also to the Hurston-Wright Award winners: in fiction, Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books); in nonfiction, Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf); debut fiction, Kwame Dawes, She's Gone (Akashic Books); and in poetry, Kyle Dargan, Bouquet of Hungers (University of Georgia Press)! And congrats as well to the two poetry finalists, A. Van Jordan and Remica Bingham!

And lastly, congrats to a brilliant person who just cleared one of the final hurdles in her ongoing intellectual journey. The good news was "music," I'm sure, to her ears.

***

I'd hoped to be able to offer congratulations to Marcelo Cerqueira, professor, activist, and the president of Grupo Gay da Bahia, who was vying to become a city councilor (vereador) in Salvador, Brazil, on the Green Party ticket. Marcelo unfortunately was not elected, but he has run in the past and I hope he keeps running, if he can, until he's finally seated. His work on behalf of LGBTQ and human rights is quite substantial, and he would add an important voice to the city's and region's administration. So boa sorte for the future, Marcelo, and please keep doing the good and hard work!

***

No Cubs no White Sox, don't blame me. I wasn't engaging in, as a friend calls it, hateration. I truly wanted to see an El Series for a change. With the White Sox winning, of course. That would, however, require that the Cubs not disappoint. Instead, Philadelphia's Phillies now hold the National League pennant, after a 28-year drought, and they will face the winner of the AL championship, either Boston or the Tampa Bay Rays. One of these latter two teams, not located in Florida, has won the World Series twice in the last five years, and is iconic in a city whose sports clubs seems to win championships at will these days, so I hope they do not return for another go-round this time. Philadelphia vs. Tampa Bay would probably be a broadcaster's nightmare (who but their fans and hardcore baseball acolytes would watch?), yet given the two squads, it could be quite thrilling, especially if you are like watching home runs leave the ballpark. The Rays will have to not squander leads like they did tonight, losing the Red Sox 8-7 after being up 7-0 at one point. Give up a run and they'll take a....

***

Yesterday evening before catching the debate I went to see the historian and critic Hayden White lecture on "The Practical Past." My very dear friend Phoebe M. turned me onto White's work decades ago, after I'd graduated from college and thought I knew all I need to about history, including intellectual history, only to learn that I didn't know a hell of a lot, particularly regarding postmodern approaches to that field. Enter White. And so my education continued and continues. His talk concerned the role of what he called, drawing upon the philosopher Michael Oakeshott's definition, the "practical past," to which he drew a distinction with the "historical past," which was, he suggested, again employing Oakeshott, the collective past, objective and purposive in aim, constructed and written by professional historians, and unmarked by such things as the encapsulated past (scars, wounds, traumas), our own deeply internalized skills and practice, the remembered past (discrete memories), the recollected past (research, recall, etc.), survived fragments of the past (artifacts, images), and so forth. In other words, a past that could stand up to questions of truth and falsity, its authenticity guaranteed, in ways the practical past cannot always be, by professional historians. White took the discussion down various byways, beginning with the history of history as a field and its attempts to become a science, in part to explore the relationship between history as it's currently written and written about, as a field aspiring towards the scientific without an intent or aim to provide a guide to the present or future, a role history once served (alongside other modes of knowledge, such as religion and metaphysics, natural science, etc.), and its familial relation, fiction, whose predictive powers are all too evident but, as a non-scientific field, bracketed off from the science of history (as in, history as a social science, as opposed to a genre of the arts and precursor of fiction and the novel) per se.

One area in particular, however, where White saw a convergence, and controversy, was in "witness literature," which involved the "practical past" in similar ways to fiction--and he cited "postmodern" (though he also rightly called them "modern") novels such as Toni Morrison's Beloved and W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz as excellent examples of works that drew upon varying aspects of the "practical past" in order to tell readers what they craved at times from history: how the past felt, and what we might look out for with regard to the future. What did American slavery during the period of Margaret Garner's life feel like, certainly an unanswerable question, except that through fiction, we might experience the physical embodiment, through our intellectual, emotional and psychological apperception of it in Morrison's text, as readers. As most fiction writers know, truth claims concerning fiction function differently from the ways they do with nonfiction (cf. Rigoberta Menchú, James Frey, Benjamin Wilkomirski, etc.), and depend upon the internal laws established by the work itself. Modern(ist) and postmodern fiction, whether realist or not, proceeds from the questioning of the real, however designated, and the illusory, often calling the artifice involved in the work's production and its aesthetics and poetics into question, and explores the boundaries or lack thereof between them, underpinning something critics have known since the beginning of storytelling: anything is possible in fiction if you can make it work, whether it defies all physical and other laws as we know them. The historical past, as written in nonfictional history works, deals with questions of truth and falsity; it tell us, by various means (empirical, statistical, narrative, etc.), what was, what existed, what happened. Or it tells us that we do not know what happened, and to reconstruct that absence would require, beyond reasonable speculation, to move into the realm of...fiction. White's interest in witness literature, then, pressed upon this boundary, asking, as I read it, how we might assess testimony, as history, that was undeniably real, to the speaker, yet perhaps not factually true, not documentable, not authenticable by historians. Because the aims of this literature, which includes works that hover between genres, like Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, in part was to assert truth, but also to make us feel what those who witnessed the experiences, who lived them, felt.

All of this got me thinking quite a bit about postmodern realism in fiction, especially in relation to history and historical aspects of fiction--and naturally enough, since I have been working directly in this vein for some time now--and how I might think with greater complexity about issues of truth, realism, the poetic utterance and its possibilities, and the invocation and use of the "practical past," which, he noted, is evoked and called upon every single day in so many ways. He noted Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's usage of it in their references to the historical aspects of their candidacies, but I also thought about how central it is to a great deal of what fills my TV and computer screens when they're not turned off. I'm still mulling over the many other fascinating things he said, and I've probably badly summarized them here, so if I can find a link to the paper from which he riffed his remarks, which also included pictures (including of a painting of the "gay saint," "Saint Sebastian" by Il Sodoma [the Sodomite, painted in 1525 and pictured above] and its use by Levi to describe a fellow prisoner about whom he had the most complicated feelings, Henri (Paul Steinberg)), references to Kant and Heidegger, and lots of pacing and pauses, I shall. Which will, of course, constitute an artifact, like my notes, constituting...the "practical past."