Last Day of Classes + The Fashions of Walter Van Beirondonck

Today was the last day of winter quarter classes.

Boardwork for the LGBTQ American lit class discussion on "trans"

Such is this year's calendar that reading week begins tomorrow, and exam week commences next Monday. I shall have many short stories to read, but I decided to follow a colleague's lead and allow students in the literature class to choose between a critical paper or a creative project, and thus I'm hoping for some very interesting submissions alongside the more conventional essays.

I almost cannot believe the classes are over; the writing class was three times a week for 50 minutes, so it felt like a running relay in which I was the only one holding the baton, while the literature class felt like a half-marathon in which I got a second wind after the third class, the advanced fiction writing class, ended halfway through the quarter. That would felt like the 100-yard/meter dash, if a jet-fuel pack were on my back.

I am still recovering from that class, and missing my wonderful students (who I do get to see, even enjoying the benefit of reading with one of them at the final winter quarter student faculty readings last Monday, before the Associated Writing Programs conference blew through town), and the combo, along with Chicago's slightly warmer but still chilly weather has made the past 10 weeks come to feel like 50.

Last night it even snowed, lightly, before the fine lace covering my windows and the roadway dissoved in the sunlight, though outside its grasp a gossamer pane of ice remained. My apartment's radiators crank frequently, but for whatever reason the rooms themselves stay chilly, or my bones are no longer holding the heat so well. At any rate I will have more time to chill: now, no classes, just theses (honors, MFAs, a dissertation to read), final stories and papers and projects, and I hope somewhere amidst all this that I can find time to compete a paper for a spring conference, and my own creative projects, as well as my capacity even for short form entries on this blog. I do miss it.

In lieu of something not even slighly coherent from me, and given that it's still the fashion season (now drawing to a close in Paris, after the spectacles in New York and Milan) and I have always loved watching fashion shows as a way of brightening my day (disidentification, you know), here are three videos of rather male fashion shows by a not very well known but very innovative queer designer and artist, Walter Van Beirondonck. Note that the second video starts automatically (it's an iframe-coded video, and I'm not sure how to turn that autoplay off in html), so turn off the sound or just click to stop if you don't want to watch it right away.  Enjoy!

UPDATE: In the comments section, Jenny (thank you!) links to this note from Racialicious on Van Beirondonck's racial fetishist thrust in many of his collections. I hadn't seen it before nor had I seen his Fall 2012 collection, which it particularly calls out, but I do agree with its ambivalent take on his work, and would suggest it could apply to any number of major designers, from Jean-Paul Gaultier to the disgraced John Galliano to Diane von Fürstenberg to many others who have sampled the "tribal," trafficked in self-proclaimed "exoticism," and engaged in Orientalism,  as a way of creating luxury commodities for the richest among us to consume. Just two years ago, in the Financial Times, reporter Marian Hume, in an article that began by talking about young fashion sensation Doru Olowu, quickly segued into how von Fürstenberg and other heavy hitters were "interested" in exploiting this cultural material as much as they could...

Brothers: Hand on Heart: Winter 2011/2012

Walter Van Beirendonck Winter 2011/2012 from Walter Van Beirendonck on Vimeo.

Billows: Cloud #9: Summer 2012

Bears: Wonde®: Summer 2010 (if you don't like seeing big hairy men in underwear, skip the end)


Walter Van Beirendonck Summer 2010 from Walter Van Beirendonck on Vimeo.

Last (Really) Day of Classes + BP's Gulf Cataclysm + Griffey Jr. Retires + RIPs + UN: Eat Less Meat

Today, finally, was my last day of classes! It's hard to believe that my quarter is nearly over, but it is. We discussed the final two novellas, all of which will be due, in their revised forms, next week. All of my former fiction students know how enjoyable and difficult--grueling, at times--a process this is, but I must say that even with prior experience and deep enthusiasm, nothing quite prepares you for closely reading, marking up and writing a critical letter (of at least 1-page length) for over 1,590 (or 15students x (2+2+2+5+10+20+20+45 pages each)) pages of fiction* in about 14 weeks. (Just for comparison, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkonsky's 2007 translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, sitting beside me on my desk here in Chicago, is a slender 1264 pages.) And I'll still need to read the final versions of all 15 novellas, some of which are approaching 60-80 pages. It nevertheless was an exciting experience, and I can say now that as with my other writing classes, I witnessed ostensible progress and improvement, transformation even, not just aesthetically and technically, but personally, among many of the students. This is one of the things that as a teacher you hope for. Then too there's the reality of their having a portfolio of work they can call their own. By this time two weeks from now, they will have written as much as some writers accomplish in several years: 3-4 complete short stories (during the first half of the sequence), and a novella. Congratulations to all of them!

+++

I've been wanting to write about the horrific catastrophe BP, Transocean and Halliburton (of course their fingerprints all over this) have created in the Gulf of Mexico, but everytime I think about this cataclysm I start to feel such rage, at these environmental terrorists and criminals, who apparently and knowingly flouted all sorts of regulations to cut a few million dollars off their costs, with this inestimable disaster as the result, and such powerlessness at our impotent federal and state governments, who appear to be doing everything they can to coddle BP, to let them control the non-clean-up, set the agenda, and protect their multibillion-dollar Chernobylesque investment, which continues to spew massive quantities of oil and natural gas into the Gulf.

If we had anything but corporate lackeys running the country, we'd have seen BP's domestic operations nationalized, top scientists and engineers brought in immediately to neutralize the leak, and a strict clampdown on any current and future offshore drilling. Instead, we get a president talking out of both sides of his mouth, federal agencies operating like Keystone Cops to the benefit of the oil industry, and corporate liars, led by the Rowan Atkinsonian Tony Hawyward, so dense and incompetent that they actually believe anyone except the fools in the mainstream media Congress and their own lobbyists are gulled anything they're saying. It was clear when BP talked about putting that giant steel condom atop this gusher that they were on a steady track record of FAIL, and it's been nothing but that since. They are determined not to do anything that would radically block up that gusher, no matter how much damage it's causing, no matter how much dead flora, sea life, careers in the Gulf Region, other countries affected, it engenders. According to the administration, we're supposed to just sit by till August, September, who knows, while BP bumbles forward and drills relief wells (or someone does), whining and dissembling, and finagling Congress into limiting its liabilities.

Really it's as simple as this: US (BP) to Gulf Coast: Drop dead!

+++

Ken Griffey Jr., 40, one of the best baseball players of his generation, has announced his retirement after 22 seasons. Never carrying the taint of roids, playing full out year after year, even starring alongside his father for a short time, this former Rookie of the Year was one of the on-field leaders during the 1990s. Though he had many amazing years, especially during his initial 10-year stint in Seattle, perhaps the two most remarkable came in 1997, when he hit .304 with 56 home runs, 147 runs batted in, 125 runs scored, a .646 slugging percentage, a 1.028 OPS, and 393 total bases. He won the League MVP, and Seattle finished first in the AL West, though it lost to Baltimore in the League Division Series. The next year, in 1998, he again hit 56 home runs, drove in 146 runs, scored 120, had a .611 slugging percentage, stole 20 bases, and scored 387 total bases. Alongside these outsized years, Junior Griffey had many very good ones, hitting 40 or more homers 7 times and driving in 100 runs 8 times, and was a stellar fielder for nearly his entire career, winning 10 Golden Gloves. His playing time had dwindled this season to benchwarming, and with a .184 average, no home runs, and just 7 RBIs, he decided to bow out. Seattle and baseball fans in general are indebted to all he brought to the game. He'll be sailing into the Hall of Fame.

Classes (Nearly) Over + 2010 FIFA World Cup

Classes have (nearly) come to an end. Or rather, this is the final official week of classes in the College, though I still have one more class to teach next week, during reading week. (We'll be discussing the final three student novellas in workshop.) Now that it's over, I can shout from the blogtops Conceptual Art/Writing class exhilarated me; I feel incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to teach the class, and to have been able to do so with students who were willing to step out, as it became clear, on what sometimes initially appeared to be shifting ice. By which I mean, to be looking at, thinking about and creating work--and whose exemplars--that remain under tremendous contention.  The class served as an intellectual transfusion for me, as it required me to think through a genealogy that was indistinct, but discernible, and put it together, in coherent fashion, for the class, while also making clear that this was only one reading of the history of this constellation of art forms. (It helped too that we have the graduate level Poetry and Poetics Working Group, because its conversations informed those in my class.) Now that I've done it, I feel I have a much clearer and deeper sense of conceptual art's history, its origins and antecedents, and its relation to and phantasmal presence in other canonical and non-canonical artforms. As I was saying to a friend, I feel capable now of reading backwards, before the coining of "conceptual art," to see conceptual practices in many different places and forms. (This was also the first time that I've taught the work of figures such as Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Goldsmith, Rob Fitterman, Mendi + Keith Obadike, and many others.) The students all created 6-8 projects, grounded in language and its possibilities, and it was a delight to read them, and imagine how the ones containing the possibility of performance might be realized. One student proposed realizing them--performing some of them--during the assigned exam period, so we'll see how that turns out. At any rate, the class, like the other one I'm teaching, represents one of the most enjoyable aspects of teaching, which is transmitting knowledge to students, watching them learn, grow intellectually and create knowledge, and learning from them in the process.  And who knows, down the road another Yoko Ono or Marcel Duchamp might emerge from this experience.
+++

The 2010 FIFA World Cup begins in two weeks, on June 11, running till July 11, in South Africa. This is the most watched sporting event in the world, and this is the first time it'll be held in Africa, with the host country leading a group of 32 national teams, including prior winners England (1966), France (1998), Italy (1934, 1938, 1982, 2006), Germany (1954, 1974, 1990), Brazil (1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, 2002), Uruguay (1930, 1950), and Argentina (1978, 1986), and stalwarts such as Netherlands, Japan, Portugal, Mexico, Denmark, Cameroon, South Korea, and, interestingly enough, North Korea. Though the opening matches, pairing South Africa and Mexico, and Uruguay and France, will be held in Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively, subsequent matches will be held all over the country, culminating in the third place match at Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium in Port Elizabeth, and the championship match at Soccer City in Johannesburg.

The 2nd Last Class of Quarter + Split This Rock Festival

Last week marked my second "end of the quarter," because the graduate schools' classes run an extra week, so after saying goodbye to my class of senior undergrads a week ago, I unfortunately had to reprise this on Wednesday with my smart and talented group of graduate fiction students.  This quarter I tried to loosely structure the readings along a trajectory that ran from very short (we began with microfictional stories by Melanie Rae Thon and Amy Hempel) to near-novella-length (our final story was Haruki Murakami's "Honey Pie"), and from realism (cf. Thon and Hempel above) to works that included elements of or were outright SFF (Nalo Hopkinson's long story "Under Glass" represented the culmination of this). For the last two weeks of the quarter I like to have the students read either a novel or a theoretical book, so this year I returned to James Wood's excellent though somewhat prescriptive treatise How Fiction Works (FSG, 2008), which, from what I could tell, the students found beneficial.  Throughout all my classes this quarter I taught the work of a number of authors I've never tried before, and they appeared to go over well. These include Jason Epstein, Percival Everett, Amy Hempel, Cristina Henríquez, Fanny Howe, George Saunders, Muriel Spark, Melanie Rae Thon, and Wells Tower.  Of course teaching new texts equals added work, but part of the joy of assigning new materials is that doing so requires that I must also read and think about different authors, styles, texts, than I've become used to. One of the other benefits of these new works is hearing the students' thoughts on them. The undergraduates' and graduate students' in-class commentary, critical papers and annotations, and creative responses, all served to illuminate these works in new ways for me.  Next quarter I'll be teaching works by authors I haven't before introduced into the classroom, including Vito Acconci, John Cage, Don Delillo, M. NourbeSe Philip, Nathalie Stephens/Nathanël, and Andy Warhol, among others, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes over.

I do wish our break was longer, though, because it represents the only time that my mind gets a breather, and I'll have opportunity not only to read a bit for pleasure and leisure, and rejuvenation, but for my own work as well. Writing while teaching multiple fiction classes is always tough, and the abrupt return in January was even tougher than the usual post-summer transition. But such is the teaching life.

***

I returned early this morning from my short visit to Washington to attend the Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation of Witness 2010, and I'm very glad I was invited to participate and able to attend.  The festival, first conveived in 2003 by poets opposing the Iraq War, and held for the first time as a full event in 2008, spanned 4 days and included readings, panels and workshops, a book fair, film screenings, and performances, and took place at venues throughout DC's U Street Corridor, including Busboys and Poets bookstore; the Thurgood Marshall Center; and the True Reformer Building; and in the Columbia Heights & Mount Pleasant neighborhoods, including Marx Café, Bell Multicultural High School, and the Dance Institute of Washington.  It even included a public cento, read aloud on Thursday at Upper Senate Park, to call attention to the misuse of public funds for war instead of for public education, health care for all, jobs, and other socially vital uses, that began with lines quoted from Adrienne Rich's  poem, "An Atlas of the Difficult World," from that eponymous collection. One of the things I loved about this conference was its atmosphere of political and social commitment, its very different cross-section of attendees from other poetry conferences (like AWP, for example), and the community-based venues. Also, with the focus not on networking or job-hunting but on social activism, people here (as at Adfempo, for example) related to each other on a very different, more relaxed basis.

My main contribution was contributing to a panel discussion that Reggie H. organized on the theme of Black LGBTQ Literary History and its relation to social activism. Other panel participants included poets Lenelle Moïse and Jericho Brown; Cheryl Clarke, one of the most important black lesbian poets of the last 30 years, was scheduled to join us but wasn't able to make it.  The panel tackled a number of issues, including the politics of our work and our work as political art; the ways in which we saw ourselves engaging in social activism; the question of non-traditional aesthetics and Black/queer literary canons; and dialoguing across boundaries. As part of my commentary, I drafted remarks towards a paper on "Translation as Activism," which I hope to complete and publish somewhere, and in the process of conducting research for it, I learned about the Translation and Activism: First International Conference, which occurred in 2007, at the University of Granada, Spain, and from which came a very important document, the Granada Declaration, concerning the necessity and importance of engaged, ethical, global translation and interpretation practice.

New Year?...Hey, It's January 8th!

For once this does feel to me like a new year. A new and very extremely busy year already (sigh), but fresh all the same. It was wonderful to be home with C for a little bit, and to get away for a hot minute too. (Besotes siempre a Anthony M.) But I did post a New Year's message, and I experienced no airline horrors getting back to Chicago, despite all the grim O'Hare flight news that besieged the holidays and holiday travelers, and so a correspondent wondered where I've been since, and I meant to reply to her as I did to a graduate student that I'm in the "mines" right now, so no or only a little posting.

It's a metaphor I didn't think of several years ago when a younger writer asked what my quarters usually consisted of, but this ought to give some sense of what's up: winter quarter classes have begun (I have two, one an undergraduate introductory creative writing class, one an upper level undergraduate class in literary theory, about which I'll write more soon). I am also supervising the honors theses of 2 undergraduate students (one working on a literary study, one writing a fiction manuscript), the MA/MFA theses of 2-5 students, the doctoral dissertation of one student, and a independent study project of at least 1 undergraduate student. (I hope I haven't forgotten anyone!) And then there's the committee and departmental activities of which I cannot say more. The quarter's over in March. I'm going to try to post a bit more than once per week, but the entries may be thin gruel indeed, and it's not for lack of intent or interest....

***

Congratulations to CCer Aracelis Girmay, who won the 2009 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for her superb book of poems, Teeth (Curbstone Press)!

***

Today's RedEye (the free, dumbed-down, picture-heavy version of the Chicago Tribune) has on its all-black cover (wink, wink) the question "Is Racism Dead?" Because our 44th president is a black person, you know. (Please do note the images shown in the "Stories" list.)

Why don't we ask him, or him, or him, or them? And those are just the spectacular examples....

(And how could we ever forget this character, who'd like to fill Hillary Clinton's seat. "The Democrats are throwing the election away. And for what? An inadequate black male....Well, I got news for you, McCain will be the next president of the United States!": famous last words, Ms. Christian, famous last words.)

And then there are these buffoons! (And if you're looking for Facebook friends, wackpot and W enabler Ken Blackwell bragged today that he has more Facebook friends than the other contenders. Have you missed out on being part of his online posse?)

***

Police have arrested the quartet of Latino and Black men who brutally gang-raped a 28-year old Black woman in Richmond, California, on December 13, 2008, because of her sexual orientation. A Facebook group, "Help a Sista Out," has been established here.

If you would like to offer some financial support to her, her partner, and her daughter, you can do so here:

Community Violence Solutions
2101 Van Ness Ave.,
San Pablo, CA 94806
Attn: Mrs. Joanne Douglas

If you would like to send a sympathy card, you may do so here:

Richmond Police Department
Attn: Sgt. Brian Dickerson
1701 Regatta Blvd.
Richmond, CA 94804

I hadn't seen this very on-point post by Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell, one of Princeton's many brilliant lights, but it's definitely worth reading! (H/t to WOC PhD) I haven't seen Milk yet, but then I also didn't get to Noah's Arc: Jumping the Broom when it was in Chicago for an eyeblink. The DVD will be out in February, I believe I saw in this past week's Windy City Times, so I plan to see it as soon as I can.

***

The Israel-Hamas War continues, with a new front possibly opening up as of yesterday. The United States is uniquely placed to bring it to a cease-fire. We all know this. If you have not contacted your Senator(s), Congresspeople and the President-Elect and Vice President-Elect, demanding that they do so, please do so now.

While you're politely but firmly demanding they push for a cease-fire, please also let them know that letting all of the people who engaged in warrantless spying on Americans, who organized and authorized torture, extraordinary renditions, and secret prisons, and who kept Guantánamo in business deserve to be brought before a Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the very least, and prosecuted for War Crimes at best. They really should hear this as often as they can. As should our new president, Barack Obama, who appears poised to go the Clintonian route and sweep all the prior crimes under the rug in an effort to "move forward."

***

Speaking Obama, Illinois, and the junior Senate seat shenanigans, I found myself mentioning Blagojevich in reference to the concept of "tragedy" in my first afternoon class this past Tuesday, which got me to wondering how four major playwrights--William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, August Wilson, and Adrienne Kennedy--would explore the circumstances of his rise (he was elected not only twice to the governorship, but also to Congress in the seat Rahm Emanuel just gave up) and fall.

If I can offer some very potted thoughts, I think Shakespeare would focus on the fatal flaws in Blagojevich's character, and the colorful context and cast that surrounds him. His estranged father-in-law, Alderman Dick Mell, would certainly be a character as would Patrick Fitzgerald and Lisa Madigan. And then there's the ghost of Richard Nixon, whom a young Blago was quite enamored of. (Shouldn't some intrepid reporter have pointed that out to voters before the first election?) Shakespeare probably also would have made much punning on Blago's Kennedyesque affectations; delusions, hubris, grandiosity and denial; and hair. How many allusions to hair do you think Shakespeare would have come up with? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? When speaking before the legislature or to constituents, or when soliloquizing, he would speak in poetry, but in best Shakespearean fashion, when speaking on those tapes, we'd get pure prose (and some clever vulgarities too). The Avon Bard would probably also condense and distill the story so that we got the highlights and lowlights, but in a way quite different from the temporal compressions of contemporary dramas. I think the ghost of Nixon would factor into these. Would it end with impeachment, or just with Blago being marched out of his house by police?

Shaw would probably focus on the malign influence of money, Blago's working-class background, and his desire for greatness fatally undercut by his lack of good faith. I can see one scene including Blago's very public and vocal denunciation of the ever-growing bemoth Bank of America at the Republic Windows and Doors Factory sit-in followed by his very public and shocking arrest right thereafter. One of the key elements of Shaw's treatment would, like Shakespeare's, be the monologues each character delivered. Shaw's Blago would probably have a more gilded tongue than the real governor, and almost convince us spectators of his virtue, just as he conned a majority of Illinois voters before his re-election, despite the fact that the festering pustules of corruption that were eventually to burst would be evident to anyone listening to and watching carefully what was unfolding on the stage. Another key element would be comedy, caustic but effective in getting us to see some absurdity at the base of the tragedy before us. I'm not so sure how Shaw might end the play, except to say that we would probably have a bit more sympathy for Blago, which makes me think that the Burris legerdemain would factor in. Now admit it, didn't you have to give Blago props for his audaciousness in pulling this mess off?

August Wilson would probably also include a ghost, but not Nixon. His ghost might be Martin Luther King Jr., and his focus might be on either Jesse Jackson Jr., who can give a good speech, or Roland Burris, whose ego is Shakespearean, to put it mildly. Barack Obama would certainly be part of this cast. Two of Wilson's greatest strengths as a playwright are his compelling poetry and his gift for encapsulating an epoch in a few gestures, conversations, several acts, so I think if he were to focus on Jackson Jr., we might see a contrast between the dreams and actions of his father and the Civil Rights era, and the contemporary moment, when even a Black person can be as corrupt and connected a player as anyone else. He also might give us some of the hidden family drama unfolding among the Jackson clan: imagine the exchanges Wilson could come up with between Jesse Jackson Sr.; Jesse Jr.; brother Jonathan Jackson, who's allegedly linked to the Blago Senate seat selloff; Jesse Jr.'s wife Sandi, a Chicago City Councilperson; and mother Jacqueline Jackson. If the men ended up wrestling on the floor, while uttering unforgettable lines, would you be surprised? How would Wilson end the play? With Jesse Jr. alone in his Chicago office, watching a TV set on which Burris was being sworn in as Obama stood by (poetic license, you know)?

Adrienne Kennedy, the only one of the playwrights I've invoked who's still alive and writing, would have a field day with this story if she took it up. I could see parallel narratives, one with Blago being sworn in as president of the US, the other of him in jail, telling the story. He might even be represented by various personalities/selves, designated by grotesque masks or grotesquely made up actors, including one who was actually a version of Richard Nixon, one a version of John F. Kennedy, another Richard J. Daley. Or one might be, in outlandish and brilliant Kennedy fashion, a major, tragic female figure from history, like Queen Anne of Great Britain, or Joan of Arc. Given Blago's strong support among Black Chicagoans, one self might be Jean Baptiste Point du Sable! All of them would end up cleverly mixing snippets of Blago's speeches with their own (or invented) words, all undercut by the Blago-in-jail narrator, who would assure us that in fact, the true outcome was that he was elected President, far in the future. I would particularly look forward to the final speech or portion that unraveled or complicated the delusional stance of the governor, and the revelation that the nondescript office was, in effect a jail cell. Kennedy could certainly pull it off.

Last Day of Classes + Brother to Brother + Winter

Today marked the final meeting of my classes for the fall quarter; the undergraduate fiction writing classes ended last Friday, and this week I'll be holding conference and office hours for students in those classes, while the graduate fiction writing class met for the last time tonight. As in all my past years, the students were a joy and though I'll see many of them this week and receive their revised short stories next Monday, I already miss working with them. But this was probably the toughest quarter I've had since I came to the university. It often felt like tunneling through an immense iceberg with a blunt spoon, while also trying to direct traffic behind me. The greatest difficult, in addition to the whirlwind schedule and the isolation has been the sheer amount of material to be read thoroughly; because other university duties don't cease I've more than once come close to (crossed) my physical and mental limits in terms my ability to process everything, though I'm glad to say that as in past extremely rough years, I haven't stinted an iota with the students' work, but it's been rough. I realized a few weeks ago that I could barely type out a blog post after one particularly brutal week, and even reading things online--whether emails, articles and the news, or the many blogs I link to and love to read--has been difficult. Now I find I have to wear my eyeglasses (which I probably need a new prescription for) or I start seeing double when I look at computer screens and get severe headaches, though I'm hoping that the break will clear this up a bit.

Still, as I said, I'll definitely miss the students, whom I eagerly looked forward to seeing (my hands bearing marked up manuscripts, as they can attest) every week, and whose individual voices really have been coming through in their stories. Since all three classes wrote and submitted at least two stories or novel/novella chapters (for a total of around 70 total, plus the two from my graduate fiction thesis advisees, which were about 5-7 each), I've had an opportunity to witness the development, in the case of the introductory students, of individual voices and styles; in the case of the advanced undergraduate students, of much more complex, inventive and rich narratives that approach graduate-level work; and in the case of my graduate students, of mature manuscripts of short stories and novels beginning taking shape.

A few things I learned from this recent triad of fiction classes and from discussions with the other graduate advisees:

1. More students are interested in and willing to try writing novels, and a few have already written them by the time they start college (and have even contacted publishers and agents, I've learned) or before they're required to in the novella portion of the fiction major advanced sequence;
2. Raymond Carver remains the most beloved and most influential of the writers we read, while stories by Hemingway, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Donald Barthelme also remain perennial favorites;
3. Stories by contemporary writers like Susan Minot, Jhumpha Lahiri, Junot Díaz, Haruki Murakami, and Victor Pelevin are also very popular, and students are able to take them apart and discuss them with considerable sophistication; and, for the first time in one of my classes, a student said that Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson" was the most useful story she read in the class (yea!);
4. I've read stories about ninjas, "care bears," a conscious, inflatable male doll, many characters living in the cities of or suburbs near Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, and a several people with multiple personalities or personae, as well as several stories told backwards, and one revolving around the concept of the double helix;
   
5. While the intro students were not so fond of Chekhov's "The Kiss," the advanced undergrads, who read a number of his stories, appeared to get quite a bit out of reading his work, and I personally enjoyed reading all the Chekhov stories and could do so again and again, because every time I do so more nuances come through;
6. Reggie H.'s suggestion to use Z. Z. Packer's stories in Drinking Black Coffee Elsewhere in the advanced sequence was one of the best I've received in a while, and after I reread the collection this summer, I've finally become a fan;
7. Many students have already discussed topics such as religion, sexuality, and so on while in high school, so they generate less controversy than they once did, though race continues to be a tricky subject;
8. Junot Díaz was one of the most galvanizing visitors I've ever had a hand in bringing to campus (thank you, JD!), in part because he really doesn't brook any BS, and knows how to get right to the heart of topics, like a lightning bolt;
9. Among the intro fiction students, the status of fiction vs. (creative) nonfiction remains contentious, and the issues of truth and authenticity in fiction, and fiction's relation to nonfiction writing, require continual discussion;
10. 10) Lots of students, like people everywhere, go to Wikipedia first, since that's where Google often sends them, so perhaps scholars and creative folks should do our best to ensure that the entries there are as accurate as possible;
11. You should think twice about referring to films as analogies from any period before 1995, unless you're talking about pop extravanganzas or Hollywood blockbusters, since undergrad students today were born, well, between 1990 and 1994-5. Even films like Mulholland Drive, The English Patient, and The Silence of the Lambs, which all seem so recent to me, came out when they were still pretty much in infancy or very small, and there's no guarantee they've seen them, let alone read about them. Star Trek, Stars Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and any similar films exist in a separate, well-known and deeply traveled realm (but then I felt the same way when my professors referred to films from the "classic" era of Hollywood studio filmmaking, and I didn't come to love some of those films until I was in my mid-20s);
12. Students at every level to do not shrink from more formally or thematically experimental stories, so they should be part of the curriculum;
13. For once several students were less fond of one of my favorite stories, Octavia Butler's "Bloodchild," so I'll have to find a new Butler story as a substitute, since I always want to include a SF story or two, especially one by her, in the mix;
14. Having an online course site, with a dynamic discussion component, remains a useful element of fiction writing courses, though mimetic realism remains far and away the dominant mode, other than SF, in which students write stories;
15. Most students who are interested in majoring or minoring in writing, whatever their other majors or interests (be they drama students, mathematicians, future doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, you name it), still love to read, particularly love to read novels, and not only gravitate to the various long-championed works in the American literary canon, from 17th century poetry through, yes, the likes of the Roths and Updikes (though students continue to cite Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, J.K. Rowling, etc. as favorites), despite what right-wingers like to claim, but also...Shakespeare! T'is true, they read Shakespeare, they can talk authoritatively about Shakespeare's plays, they thronged last year's events centered on the One Book One University-selected Othello, and they take courses in Renaissance literature, which means they read, analyze and write papers on non-contemporary British literature written by authors other than Shakespeare, etc.....

In the spring I'll be teaching a huge lecture course, which ought to be interesting. Which reminds me, I need to start preparing for it pretty soon....

***

I'm delighted that Lisa Moore's RedBone Press has reissued the landmark anthology Brother to Brother, which Joseph Beam, the editor of In the Life, conceived before he passed away, and which the late Essex Hemphill edited. Originally published by Sasha Alyson's Alyson Publications before it went out of print, Brother to Brother gathers together work by an array of writers (and some artists) from the mid-to-late 1980s, one of the seminal periods in Black gay male writing, and remains one of the central texts of Black queer male literature, just as it's an important work in late 20th century African-American and American literature. It heralds an era when AIDS struck so many silent, when "identity" was not a bad word, when queer had yet to gain currency and "gay" was still uttered in hushed tones, and when a new generation of Black queer male writers, empowered by literary and activist predecessors from the Harlem Renaissance to Malcolm X and James Baldwin, from Phillis Wheatley to Fannie Lou Hamer and Audre Lorde, were willing--daring, really--to sing their--our--own songs.

I say "our" because it was also a crucial book for me, since I published my second short story ever, and first anthologized piece, "Adelphus King," in its pages, and had the greatest fortune to witness Essex at work as an editor, firm, visionary and gentle, before he died. It's an experience I learned a great deal from and will never forget. The new edition has an introduction by Dr. Jafari Sinclaire Allen (hey Jafari!) and an afterword by Blackstripe founder Chuck Tarver (hey Chuck!). Lisa and RedBone have been publishing a number of books I've recommended on this blog, from Ernest Hardy's award-winning Blood Beats: Vol 1, Demos, Remixes & Extended Versions, to Ana-Maurine Lara's remarkable first novel Erzulie's Skirt, and it's exciting to be able to recommend another volume from this little publisher, whose vision, determination, and activism really give me and quite a few others out there tremendous hope. If you don't have a copy of this book, buy one, and urge your library to get purchase one as well. And above all, enjoy it!

***

Winter's definitely here. This past Saturday morning it snowed here in Chicago, and by the evening it was a slushy mess. My car went from being covered with leaves, because the trees didn't turn until the last minute (and some are only now fully golden or orange) to being covered with snow, then with ice. Most of the snow and all the ice melted yesterday, thankfully, because this afternoon it was freezing, though when I came out class tonight another front had rolled in, and it was a little warmer, though still very cold. I wanted to walk over to the beach to see what the lake looked like, but I ran out of time and couldn't manage it. I haven't seen the sun in days; I often feel like living in Chicago in every season other than summer would be great preparation for living on the moon. Tomorrow, a student noted, we're supposed to get more snow. I hope it bypasses us, though that doesn't seem likely. I've been carrying environmentally friendly salt, a scraper, a can of lock de-icer, and a shovel in my car, though, since last winter, just in case.

Classes + Myanmyar + Strike Over + Kehinde Wiley Busts

CLASSES BEGIN
It's the first day of classes, and so far, so good! Such smart students, all of them are avid readers, and among the writers they listed as their favorites were Dostoyevsky, Ellison, Hemingway, Kerouac, Flaubert, Melville, Vonnegut, Murakami, and Salinger. Who teaching writing wouldn't want to start with such a baseline!

(That's me at right, in my office, in front of the Luis Luma painting and Ella Turenne's Neg Maron print.)

MACARTHUR AWARDS
Congratulations to the 24 recent recipients of MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowships! One is my colleague at the university, the rightly esteemed and remarkable fiction writer and poet Stuart Dybek; another is the New York-based artist Whitfield Lovell, who follows his partner Fred Wilson in receiving this honor (thanks for the h/t, Bernie); another is the blues musician Corey Harris; the playwright Lynn Nottage, whose Intimate Apparel received excellent reviews when it debuted several years ago; and vocalist Dawn Upshaw, best known for her work in opera and contemporary art song. Congratulations to them and to all the other recipients!

2007 CAVE CANEM PRIZE TO RONALDO WILSON
Ronaldo Wilson, one of the founders of the Black Took Collective, is the 2007 Cave Canem Prize Winner! Congratulations, Ronaldo! His prose-poetic manuscript, The Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, was selected by judge Claudia Rankine. Serena! F.I.E.R.C.E.ness, and I think it's fair to say that Cave Canem has shown how expansive its aesthetics are with this and last year's selection, of Dawn Lundy Martin's first book of poems! This year's runners up were R. Erica Doyle (!!!) and Nicole Terez Dutton. Congratulations to both of them too, so much fierceness in one year.

PROTESTS IN MYANMAR
The protests in Myanmar, which I highlighted a few days ago, continue to gain international attention, especially now that the government's security forces have started to brutally suppress them. Again, I am impressed and moved by the courage of the Buddhist monks, held in the highest esteem by their society, to put their lives on the line to challenge the horrible, oppressive conditions and the military dictatorship that has imposed them in that country.

The US has propose new sanctions, but I keep hearing that China is the lone country that can put pressure on the ruling junta and its government, and supposedly China may have already done so, but after the defense forces attacked, shot and arrested a number of the monks yesterday, it's clear that China's input may have its limits, though perhaps harsher penalties, such as cutting off arms sales, political support, and other forms of cooperation may do the trick. But does China want to buttress pro-democracy efforts in a neighboring country when its own record is so horrible? Would it, and wouldn't that be telling its own people to try something according to the Tianenmen Square rallies and protests again, despite the country's economic successes? Would the business élite even support such a move, or are they too intimately linked these days to the Chinese government?

So what is to be done to help the people there? What can the rest of the world do? Will US sanctions have any effect at all?

UAW STRIKE OVER
I woke to the NPR news that the United Auto Workers (UAW) had called off its strike against General Motors (GM) because the two sides had reached a compromise during their all-night negotations. Supposedly the agreement hinges on GM creating a retirement health care benefits trust fund, to be administered by the UAW, that will relieve a huge financial burden from the carmaker's books. Hearing this I immediately thought that if we had single-payer, government financed, comprehensive, cradle-to-grave health care, there'd be no need for such a trust fund, and GM, thus relieved of one of its major competitive setbacks, would face having to produce better, more affordable, and more appealing cars. Note to Democrats: this is another gift horse staring you in the face. It also makes me wonder about the old pension system, which many corporations exploited for their own gain and little penalty, at the expense of retirees and US taxpayers. If GM had a real, well-invested, well-managed pension, this turn of events also would not have come to pass. But the world of pensions of old is gone; in fact, as we saw in 2004, we can never relax our vigilance about making sure that Social Security remains viable and properly funded. I'm glad, though, for the GM workers who were about to face a terrible hardship; at least for now they can sleep a little easier.

SCHIP + WAR FUNDING
Yes, this isn't an original argument and it's so obvious it could be in a Bob Herbert column--I enjoy reading him, but you get my drift--but it looks like W will veto the SCHIP bill, which doesn't have a veto-proof majority in the House, because of the GOP, claiming that the $35 billion is too costly and that more American middle-class families will avail themselves of a public, government-funded program, and yet he's sent his Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, up to Capital Hill to request $190 billion in additional funding for the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, if SCHIP fails to be funded, poor American children would be the first to suffer.

Gall, shamelessness and arrogance don't come close to describing this man and his government!

Senate Majority Reid vowed the other day not give in to more of Bush's shenanigans. I'll believe it when I see it, but as a Republican Senator suggested about SCHIP, the House should keep reintroducing the bill over and over, and forcing the president to veto it. Eventually enough Republicans will be embarrassed enough that rather than tethering themselves to his sinking ship, they'll join the Democrats to provide enough votes for an override vote. As for the war funding, tell the president absolutely NOT until the information and testimony the Democratic chairs have requested on a range of Iraq-related issues, such as the gross corruption, Blackwater's actions, the faulty equipment (this week brought the news that the infantry must contend with guns that frequently jam, unlike their opponents!), and so forth, are adequately addressed. And don't worry about the American people; we're quite aware of the scare tactics and demagoguery this administration is going to tuse.

KEHINDE WILEY BUSTS AT CEREAL ART
Kehinde Wiley's work, drawing as it does upon current artworld and critical-theoretical trends and discussions around appropriation, the archive, Black and popular cultural studies and performance, and sexuality and gender studies, has fascinated me since I first saw it, but also confounded me somewhat as well.

His paintings (at right, a photo I took of his "Saint Andrew," oil on canvas, 7'x8', 2006 when C and I went to his "Scenic" show at the Rona Hoffman Gallery in River East, in Chicago) are physically breathtaking, especially when viewed up close, and increasingly polished in terms of their technique, while also deeply suffused with an irony-edged eros, but I feel like he's found a socially and commercially viable strategy and keeps, well, exploiting it, a strategy that's meant to appeal, rather obviously, to the powers that be in the artworld, while please the Folks along the way.

His evidently and playfully ironic use of Eurocentric references, both as ground (composition, figuration, etc.) and in the titles--which I think of as falling in a long and broad lineage, but in a specifically queer way to Bob Thompson, for example, though Wiley is very interested in aspects of mimetic realism and expressionism, whereas Thompson, who wasn't gay, was far more grounded in abstraction and the emerging color-field school--underlines this so forcefully for me. Nothing unusual there, and he's well within the mainstream, both of the past and of today. But were he engaged in a more resistent form of détournement, say, or using classical Chinese models, for example, would his work, whose technical achievement is undeniable, be as celebrated? Would it be dismissed as Afro-Chinoiserie, or not discussed at all? (And what would that kind of work, a more complex and provocative anti-Afro-Orientalism, say, look like?) As I said, Wiley's not the only person, in visual arts or any other area of the arts, who's doing this, but I can't stop thinking about it when I consider his work. We all to some extent work with the terms set before us, but where does the limit lie? Is it unfair for me, an admirer of his work, to introduce these questions into the debate?

I'm still very drawn to his work, and so when I received a recent email from Cereal Art in Philadelphia about the availability of a new set of his busts, including his "After La Negresse, 1872," I had to check them out. I've never seen this in person, but they appear to replicate the formal and thematic concerns of the large paintings in this new form, which I think increases the layers of irony (cast marble and resin busts, all white, etc.) and humor--to what end? I don't think I have an answer, but I'm enjoying looking at them.

Cereal Art is selling them as a "special project" at $1400 a pop. What do you think?