Sunday Quote: Sergei Eisenstein

Very well--what would be a linguistically accurate characterization of a man?

His raven-black hair...
The waves of his hair...
His eyes radiating azure beams...
His steely muscles...

Even in a less exaggerated description, any verbal account of a person is bound to find itself employing an assortment of waterfalls, lightning rods, landscapes, birds, etc.

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects? Language is much closer to film than painting is. For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents--as an element--the greatest difficulty in manipulation. So why not rather lean towards the system of language, which is forced to use the same mechanics in inventing words and word-complexes?
--Sergei Eisenstein, "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form" (1929)

DR Scenes 3

Artist on el Conde

A tailor at work

Selling palm fruit and other delicacies

Portrait of a bride

Mirror scene

Open window

Glimpsing the mime

Night stroll

Roberto Bolaño's "Distant Star" and "By Night in Chile"

A few weeks ago, the New York Times's South American correspondent Larry Rohter penned a laudatory piece on Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), the late, peripatetic Chilean author who, in the last decade of his brief life, achieved tremendous acclaim throughout the Spanish-speaking world as the result of a series of brilliant novels that included the Rómulo Gallegos Prize-winning Savage Detectives (Los detectives salvajes, 1998) and his magnum opus, 2666 (2004), which is set to appear soon in an English translation from Farrar Straus & Giroux. At the same time, the New Yorker, which has published little new Latin American fiction in recent years, published one of Bolaño's stories, the beguiling "Gomez Palacio."

Before Rohter's piece and the New Yorker publication, I think it's fair to say that Bolaño had gotten relatively little English-language press (to provide some unscientific evidence, Googling both "Bolaño" and "Bolano" primarily brings up Spanish-language sites) beyond reviews of his two relatively short novels, Distant Star (Estrella Distante, 1996), and By Night in Chile (Nocturno de Chile, 2000), which New York-based, longtime avant-garde publisher New Directions Publishing Corporation (who put out my novel) had published in the last few years. (They will be publishing a collection of his stories, Last Evenings on Earth and Other Stories in 2006.)

I took both of the New Directions volumes on my trip and finished both in amazement at Bolaño's talent and skill: he was--is--the real thing. Both books deal, in masterful ways, with politics, and in particular, the political situation in Chile from the years of the Allende presidency, in the early 1970s, to the military coup in 1973 (which we learned in recent years was facilitated by the United States) that put dictator General Augusto Pinochet in power. Bolaño, who was born in Chile and spent part of his childhood and adolescence in Mexico, returned just as Allende's government was underway, with the aim of promoting socialist ideals, yet after being briefly jailed under the new dictatorship, he left Chile and lived like a vagabond, ultimately settling in Spain, where he died awaiting a liver transplant. In each text, Bolaño manages to capture the perversity and deformative horror of life under the right-wing government, but in an indirect and ultimately more chilling way; the narrators of both texts are profoundly affected by what they've lived through, and in By Night in Chile, what they've actively participated in.

Taking that work first, let me say that is the finer of the two novels, mainly I think because of Bolaño's deft mastery of the narrative voice, which he sustains, in the form of an almost endless sentence, for the entire novel, creating a tour de force. At the same time, the narrative succeeds both as an fictional memoir and as an allegory. By Night in Chile records the deathbed confession of Catholic priest and respected literary critic and powerbroker Fr. Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a priest who we come to learn is being haunted by "the wizened youth," which we come to realize is both one of the victims of the regime and his conscious. The voice of this unreliable narrator is by turns simplistic, exalted, raging, persuasive, grating, lulling, commanding, insipid, and often dazzling, managing, like a vast net, to haul in biography, philosophy, literary criticism, and historical accounts, as well as the basic narrative elements of exposition, description and dialogue. What especially fascinates me about the text is how Bolaño, through the tide of verbiage, manages to evade the central issue for most of it, which is to say, to embody the priest's psychological, emotional and moral evasions of his actions on behalf of and in collaboration with the regime, while steadily damning him in the very process of the voice's undammable unfolding, its frantic, rear-guard work against the harsh and ultimate judgment of the condemned, the murdered and disappeared, the void--History.

In one section, Urrutia describes his mentorship by one of Chile's leading pseudonymous right-wing critics, and the submerged psychological and sexual tensions that the priest only bare staves off, in part by a process of emotional distancing and recourse to an inner poetic landscape, which Bolaño captures in the repeated phrase "Sordel, Sordello, which Sordello?" referring to the question Urrutia asks his mentor about the troubadour poet and his internal mental trigger to disengage. In another Urrutia recounts his visits, on behalf of two extremely shady Chilean characters (linked to the ultraconservative Opus Dei movement, and also to the landed interests and the dictatorship), to historic churches across Europe. Ostensibly he is looking into the problems of ecclesiastical architectural preservation, but what Bolaño provides us is one of the strangest, most elusive discursive movements I can think of in a novel I've read in recent years: Urrutia launches into a litany of the various churches and the officials he encounters, focusing less on the supposed topic of his study and more on these various clerics' falconric interests, in a tone and pace that verge on the manic, going on and on before ending in the plangent scene of Urrutia's encounter with a dying Spanish priest whose falcon Urrutia, out of mercy (or conscience or both), sets free. There is little priestly about the whole encounter, which is redolent of Duncan's "My Mother Would be a Falconress," the surface of the narrative papering over something truly creepy, and possibly evil. Moreover, Urrutia deftly slips into list the offhanded remark that he saw to some other things while traipsing around in Europe, remaining always in contact with one of the Chilean agents, and the understatement, juxtaposed with the almost maniacal account, goes off like an explosive. Later, we learn that Urrutia agreesto teach Marxist theory to Augusto Pinochet and the members of the ruling junta, and again, the priest's account succeeds in the dual task of making the bizarre sound plausible while revealing, by ellipsis, the truly horrible subterranean elements of what we know happened to those on whom Pinochet used this new-found knowledge. The novel's most shocking section, however, is based on the real account of a Chilean society woman whose American husband was engaged in horrific acts on behalf of the regime (including the assassination of Chilean envoy Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976), and rather than giving it away, I'll say only that Bolaño so effortlessly weaves it into the tapestry of this torturous and tormented voice that by the end of the novel, the reader utterly understands the implications of the final sentence, and of the unrelenting hell that memory, and conscience, can create.

Distant Star, the older work, is a quasi-detective novel and thriller, another triumph in the literature of negation, written in the form of a collaborative writing effort that aims to present a truthful account about a shapeshifting sadistic aesthete, Carlos Wieder. This monster Wieder both figuratively and literally slides in and out of the life of the novel's narrator, and by extension, we eventually see, of history itself. He is a phantom, in the true horror sense, and a phantasm. Wieder first appears, to us and to the narrator, in two Southern Chilean poetry workshops as a young, autodidact poet named Arturo Ruiz-Tagle (Bolaño adroitly plays with names) who disdains his fellow male poets and draws in the female members, especially the two stars, the beautiful and, to our narrator and his best friend Bibiano O'Ryan, unattainable Garmendia sisters, like a magnet. Shy but confident, something awful lurks under Wieder's quiet surface, and Bolaño, in devastatingly suspenseful fashion, eventually shows us what it is just as the coup is taking place and Allende and Chile's socialist experiment go to their graves. But by this point, Wieder, having disappeared, reappears as the leader of a new avant-garde movement whose bizarre, compelling creations manage to combine both the truly marvelous, ephemeral skywriting creations of the progressive Chilean poet Raúl Zurita (whom I've written about here), transformed into something closer to the pre-Vichy ventings of Brasillach, Céline and Drieu la Rochelle, and the ultraviolent, protofascistic ideology of the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti. When Wieder stages his most magnificent and unspeakable stunt, Bolaño completely hits his novelistic stride and succeeds in capturing the murderousness of two decades of Chilean life in a single, symbolically charged scene of discovery and vengeance.

As Ernst Bloch notes in his famous essay on the detective novel, Bolaño, like Poe, Fontane, Mann, and others (Borges and Ricardo Piglia come immediately to mind), utilizes the detective novel genre for ulterior purposes, not simply as a means of saying exactly who Wieder is--for ultimately what is the truth of a creature of multiple identities and inhuman capacities like Wieder/Ruiz-Tagle/__?--but of bringing the process of establishing truth itself, the struggle, the search, the negotation, to light. The ending powerfully and stunningly concludes the detective story structure but conversely with a formal and narrative openness that is emblematic of the entire masterpiece.

I am definitely looking forward to the translation and publication of Bolaño's other works, especially the stories and several of the novels, including one of his earliest ones, La literatura Nazi in America (1994), and highly recommend both novels, which are available from New Directions.

Best Wishes to Coretta Scott King+ Arthur Silber's The Light of Reason

My thoughts and prayers go out to Coretta Scott King, the 78-year-old widow of one of the greatest figures in Black/American history, civil and human rights visionary Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and a major civil rights figure in her own right. On Tuesday she suffered a stroke. Since her husband's assassination in 1968, Mrs. King has not only worked tirelessly to ensure that his life and life's work are carried forward, creating the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, pushing for the national holiday in his honor and promoting his philosophy of nonviolence, but she's also spoken out and supported a range of other civil rights issues, like women's rights and gay rights, and HIV/AIDS prevention, sometimes in opposition to other Black leaders and public figures (including her son, Martin Luther King III). Her leadership, courage and love have been beacons over the last five decades. Please pray for a full recovery for Mrs. King.

***

Although I generally and regularly disagree with the standard libertarian ideology (on the Libertarian Purity Test I score a whopping 22 out of 160), including in its objectivist form, I periodically drop by Arthur Silber's The Light of Reason blog to read his take on a range of issues. Silber consistently offers thoughtful, thorough and sometimes humorous takes on a range of issues ranging from politics to aesthetics (his critiques of Ayn Rand's aesthetic theories deserve booklength treatment.) Unlike some of the libertarians I've come across over the years, Silber, at least in The Light of Reason post, tends not to analyze issues by bracketing them off in the realm of the abstractions (or as he's said, as if dealing with Platonic form), but within the socially contextualized world we're living in today, which he rightly identifies as the standard liberal approach. Even when I disagree with him, I find his thoughts provocative, and suggest checking out what he has to say.

Norton's "Tales of the City," or on Black Street Fiction

I want to Reggie H. and others for pointing me towards "Tales of the City," James Norton's August 13, 2005 Salon.com article. (In order to read it you have to view an ad.) In the piece, Norton explores a certain genus of Black popular fiction that I'll call "Black street fiction," though "urban vernacular fiction" might also be appropriate. Black street fiction is basically the popular, often self- or independently-published, frequently autobiographical fiction, written by Black authors (and I use this term racially, not ethnically), that is sold for the most part in Black bookstores, on the street by book venders, and via mechanisms other than the mainstream distribution channels, though it is often available now on online sites like Amazon.com.

Norton provides an overview and pocket history of the genre, focusing primarily on best-selling authors like Teri Woods, who has sold millions of dollars worth of self-published books, which unsurprisingly has gotten the attention of the mainstream publishing industry in New York. (This sort of grassroots-to-the top phenomenon has occurred periodically over the long history of Black American literature.) Now bookstore chains increasingly are carrying these Black street fiction books, and publishers are vying to sign contracts with some of the authors, whose works are direct, roughly written and strive for authenticity, as opposed to being consciously literary and "avant-garde." (Though in terms of subject matter, some of the material certain goes beyond what mainstream publishing regularly issues, so avant-garde here would refer only to the formal aspects of the work.)

Norton provocatively suggests that these works may push acclaimed Black authors like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin off the shelves, and to buttress his argument, he quotes Dr. Gloria Wade Gayles, the eminent Spelman College scholar, who says that many young Black people are no longer being introduced to canonical works in the African-American tradition, so that encountering the works of the Black street fictionists could be problematic. I teach so few Black undergraduate students on a regular basis that I can't generalize, but most of those that I've taught--as well as most of my non-Black students--are quite familiar with Toni Morrison's work, and some are familiar with Baldwin. (I cannot think of one Black graduate student I've ever encountered who hadn't read at least one work by either author.) I haven't posed the question of whether or not these Black undergraduates are reading Black street fiction first, but I would imagine that if they are, they probably also are reading some of the established authors as well. When I think back on my year a decade ago teaching poetry to two classes of mostly Black and Latino 7th, 8th and 9th graders in New York City, I found it to be the case that the students who read anything on their own read everything they could get their hands on. One young woman in my 9th grade class was writing stories as accomplished as much of what I encountered in the first college creative writing class I ever taught, at NYU the following year, and she was voraciously reading romance novels, The Color Purple, anything that struck her fancy.

(And then again, as last year's NEA report "Reading at Risk" made quite clear, there's a national crisis in literary reading in general, so the issue extends beyond young Black readers. Norton concludes his piece by asking Woods who she considers influences (Morrison? Baldwin?), and she cites Jackie Collins. And here I was, thinking she'd mention Julian Mayfield and Toni Cade Bambara [sarcasm alert].)

But back to Norton's article, I find it problematic to be presenting the increasing success of Black street fiction vis-à-vis canonical works as one of opposition. Doing so is simplistic, reductive and squares up aesthetically incommensurate works. Woods' and Morrison's novels, for example, may share some similarities--they're both by Black authors, written in the United States, utilize vernacular elements and motifs, etc.--but in other fundamental ways they differ so considerably (in terms of basic genre, intention, scope, use of voice, rhetoric, formal play, etc.), that it makes little sense to compare them, or pit them against each other, though the Battle Royale mentality burns brightly on, of course. They both fall within the larger category of Black American writing, and more specifically fiction, but are operating on very different levels. No one would suggest that Jackie Collins and Philip Roth, for example, or Cormac McCarthy or Mary McCarthy even should be categorized in even vaguely similar ways (except as "authors"), and Norton actually does state this at a certain point, and yet the premise of his article strives to draw this sort of silliness out. Why can't there be room for the sorts of books both Woods an Morrison write? Just as there's room for Clancy and Dan Brown, and the McCarthys? Moreover, the sort of vertical cognition that can only view things as either-or flies in the face of Black tradition, life and experience--if we'd proceeded by either-or, we'd have disappeared a long time ago.

Second, I actually read one of the books mentioned in the article, Homo Thug. I saw it on a bookstand in the West Village (just steps from Barnes & Noble on 6th Avenue and 21st Street to be exact) early this summer, bought it, and vowed to read it to see what the fuss was about. The fuss, if there's any at all, should center on getting your money back if you actually paid full price for it (I bartered it down). By any measure, it is an awful book. It is badly--horribly--written, homophobic, implausible, artless. It consists of a tissue of clichés that become particularly clotted and insipid once the author has to describe sex, or really anything having to do with sex, including genitalia, sexual acts, the emotions surrounding them, such that it blunts any possibility of eroticism or even pornographic interest. The main word that comes to mind with regard to this book is lack: it lacks a sense of pacing of pacing, a believable plot, an ability to sustain anything other than voice. In fact, voice is really all it has, along with a few nuggets of interestingly precise details (drawn obviously from the author's life experiences), some almost cinematic action, and a fascinating, framebreaking postscript, in which the author intrudes to let us know that despite the central theme of the book, which is crystallized in the title, he is not homosexual. Whew, thanks for reassuring me. Still, I found the book interesting--I even convinced C. to read it, and he could barely stomach it--in part because I feel it's representative of and a window into the popular literature (I use the word in its older sense) that many folks are reading. (And I do think folks are reading books like this, despite the dire NEA figures.) Its indexical, representational, aesthetic, symbolic, social, and material functions and values, among many others, fascinate me. But I also read it, contextually of course, as a work of fiction in and of itself. The author of Homo Thug not only felt the need and desire to write a book, but he (and I'm assuming that it's a he) carried it through.

As a writer, teacher, and an avid reader--as someone who actively engages with literature and the printed word--and as someone who eagerly explores many facets of Black experience, I have often sought out texts like this one over the years. I believe they have their value, and even multiple values; but I also can say without hesitation that they are won't be replacing either works by Morrison or Baldwin, or by any of the major Black authors, anytime soon.

DR Scenes 2

Young man with pet monkey

Mirándome

Frente de una casa de cambio

Barbers waiting

Niñito con su perro

Esperar

At the Sports Bar

Esperar II

Monday Quote: Baldwin on Wright

"Richard went to Paris in 1946, when I was 22, he was 38. Now, it took me a long time; I had to get to be much older to realize something. I didn't realize it that day at all. I was not born in Mississippi; I was born in New York. And I did not leave Mississippi to go to Chicago. And endure all that. I was much too young to realize what I was looking at really. But, that's a journey. To go from Mississippi to Chicago to New York to Paris in 38 years is amazing. You might as well have walked all that distance, it's almost that remarkable."
--James Baldwin on Richard Wright (remarks delivered at Yale University, November 2, 1983, from the CLR James Institute Website)

Neo-Nazis(m)--in Russia (and the DR?)

The other afternoon, while riding in a taxi in the Colonial Zone of Santo Domingo, I spotted through the window a young man sporting what appeared to be a Nazi armband. It was red, with a white patch in the middle, in the center of which sat a swastika. Yes, a Nazi swastika, and not the reversed kind that Native Americans or Indians venerated as a sacred symbol. The young man, whose complexion was similar to mine (and not a White or very light-skinned Dominican) was wearing an olive uniform-style shirt, an array of medals spread across his chest. I was carrying my camera as always, but by the time I called him to C.'s attention and turned the camera on we had sped past. So no photo; but the experience was momentarily jarring, and quite bizarre: my immediate thought was, maybe he was in costume, for a play or party. There had to be some explanation that might explain away the visual (and thus cognitive) dissonance of a brown-skinned, swastika-sporting person in a nation that overwhelmingly consists of mixed-race and African-descended people. Just a few blocks on, we passed another (brown-skinned) man, decked out in a musketeer's outfit, serving as a greeter to what I suppose was a restaurant or club, so maybe the work outfit bit wasn't utterly implausible. But what sort of business--in the Dominican Republic, no less--would feature an employee in Nazi regalia? Even the Haitian-and-Black Dominican-slaughtering dictator Trujillo saw fit to invite Jewish refugees (as penance, as a political stunt, but he did it) from Hitler's murderous regime to Sosua....

This strange incident flashed in my head as I was reading Anna Badken's article, "A gathering storm of Russian thugs," about the rising tide of Neo-Nazi racism and thuggery in Russia in SF Gate today. Anti-Black and anti-foreigner racism and violence in post-Soviet Russia is nothing new; although the country's self-acknowledged greatest poet was a self-acknowledged person of African descent (Alexander Pushkin, pictured at right, painting by Kiprensky), xenophobia has long permeated Russian society and culture, and racists over the last few decades have regularly targeted Blacks, who in the Communist years mainly comprised African immigrants who were invited to study at Russia's universities for political and ideological reasons. Racist and religiously tinged anti-Semitism extends far back in Russian history (think pogroms, the Pales of settlement, Cossacks, Stalin, etc.), as have other forms of racism and exoticism involving non-European Russians (as well as against specific European ethnic groups, like the Ukranians, etc.), perhaps not in spite of but because of the country's longstanding ethnic diversity, a result of its vast and variegated geography, which straddles Europe and Asia. The recent Russian wars against the Muslim separatists in Chechnya and Ingushetia, the political value of xenophobia, and the tenuous economic situation most Russians face have only exarcerbated this pervasive complex of racist and ethnocentric attitudes.

Badken writes:

In a country that lost at least 26 million people to Nazi Germany 60 years ago, tens of thousands of young people are embracing the beliefs their grandparents fought against, attacking foreigners, especially anyone with dark features hailing from the Caucasus, Asia or Africa.

Driven by the combination of outrage over terrorist attacks by Chechen insurgents, rising nationalism and inequitable economic conditions, they are turning to a savage blend of Nazi ideology and Russian chauvinism, say Russian and Western human rights activists and neo-Nazis themselves.

She goes on to note that ultranationalist and racist parties and elements are increasingly outspoken in the country, that there are anywhere from an estimated 100,000 to 500,000 Neo-Nazi and skinhead extremists in Russia, that over half the world's skinheads (about 50,000) live in Russia, and that in 2004 alone, people identified as Neo-Nazis killed 44 people across that country, double the number in 2003. She also points out that in a recent survey of Russians by Moscow's Yuri Levada polling center, "58 percent of those polled approved of the 'Russia for Russians' slogan, almost twice the level recorded in 1998. One out of 5 of those polled said all non-Russians should be evicted from 'traditionally Russian territories.'" The irony of people condemned by the Nazis for being racially inferior and degenerate touting the same hateful claptrap is lost on this 58%, obviously, but then again, it hardly surprises me.

Russian society remains in crisis, economically, politically and socially. Russia is losing its own citizenry faster than it can replace them (either by births or immigration, since the death rate exceeds both), its economic experiment with capitalism stumbles along despite some obvious successes, and its political experiment with democracy hovers beneath obvious and hidden forms of authoritarianism. For disaffected and alienated youth there, as elsewhere, the easiest option, other than turning on oneself (which is symptomized by the country's problems with alcohol and AIDS seroconverstion), is to turn on scapegoats. Who is easier to identify than a person of different, darker skin color, a person with different-looking eyes or hair texture, or whose clothing marks them as different? And in a social context that includes indifference by the government and courts, and support by security forces, there is no incentive not to choose the second option (which also can coexist quite well with the first).

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Neo-Nazi Right has become quite strong in its traditional bases in Germany, especially the economically depressed former East Germany. In Austria, which for half a century has assumed the fictional victim mentality despite having bequeathed Hitler to the world and cheered his troops' annexation of its terrority, an ultraconservative governing coalition, led by Nazi sympathizer Jörg Haider is still in control. Just a few years ago, the popular response to political and economic problems in France was the near-election of ultrarightwinger Jean-Marie LePen (instead, the French people chose the slightly more palatable crook, conservative Jacques Chirac).

Given the turn of events over the last five years, and especially since the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands and the Spanish and British train bombings, it would be a miracle if right-leaning, racist and ethnocentric ideologies did not surge in response. In fact, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's recently announced policy of expelling radical Muslims (as opposed to immigrants of any background or faith who vocally advocate violence against particular sectors of society) is yet more testimony to a rightward shift even among the (so-called) left leadership. (And such calls are legion here in the United States, where racists and racialist elements participate in border-guarding vigilantism under the patriotic-sounding moniker of "Minutemen," while people on the right and in the middle call for racial, ethnic and religious profiling, expulsion of immigrant dissenters, and more misguided violence, including war with Iran.) But back to Russia and Badken's article: it's definitely worth reading, as its story reflects trends occurring in a number of other places. It doesn't provide an explanation for the young man I glimpsed on that Santo Domingo street.

(And while I wouldn't be telling anyone I know anything new by stating for the record that racism and white supremacy are alive and, unfortunately, thriving, I also want to note that I came across this extremely disturbing article, via the Raw Story, about an allegation of attempted racial segregation and racist retaliation at a Tyson Foods office in Alabama in the 21st century. Then there were the recent racial attacks in Brooklyn and Manhattan....)

DR Scenes

Hecho a mano

Wooden statues

"Desaparecido"

Wedding Portrait

Sunday street scene

Selling CDs

Creativity

Domínguez's Historia Dominicana

Last year, in the magazine store at Gómez Peña International Airport in Santo Domingo, I spotted Jaime de Jesús Domínguez's Historia Dominicana (ABC Editorial, 2001) on the shelf and bought a copy. I was already quite familiar with the history of the Dominican Republic from Rout's standard volume on Africans in Spanish America, Sagás and Inoa's The Dominican People: A Documentary History, and Cambeira, and Cambeira's Quisqueya La Bella: The Dominican Republic in Historical and Cultural Perspectives, as well as numerous works on Hispaniola in general and on Haitian history. But I grabbed Domínguez's book, in part based on the cover, which depicts a realist battle scene (I believe it might be of Restoration Day, which occurs early next week and marks the restoration of sovereignty, from Spanish annexation and rule, in 1865) painted by Marino Gúzman (and which is in the Colleción Jacinto Peynado). Domínguez's book turned out to be a very thorough and engaging popular history of the the DR, which doesn't stint either on visual representations (like the Gúzman painting) or discussions of the Black contributions to the nation's history. In short, I found what is a very readable, vivid popular history, written I would imagine for Dominicans and others whose primary language is Spanish, that is also in a way a little subversive, especially in light of some of the longstanding historical and cultural discourse about Dominican history propagated by the ruling class(es) there. I'm thinking of the general lines of thought about the African contribution and presence, and the relationship between Spain and DR, and Haiti and DR, that are to be found in the works of former dictator and president Joaquín Balaguer, or to give a more recent example, in the tourist guide I found in my hotel room last year. (This discourse mirrors in many ways the standard discourse about Latin American history and cultures). I've been trying to find out more about Domínguez; does anyone know any of other works he's published? Is he a scholar, like Sagás and Cambeira? What about the painter Marino Gúzman?

Blogroll Four (Basquiat/LLExperience/Direland/Ffactory)

Frank Leon Roberts, the young New York cultural critic, posts two very provocative pieces on gay marriage, "Why I Hate Gay Marriage, or Notes on Queering Black Gay and Lesbian Politics" (a version of which will appear this fall in Think Again 2, which Frank is co-editing with poet Marvin K. White, to be published by the New York State Black Gay Network, AIDS Project Los Angeles, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, National Black Justice Coalition, and Black AIDS Institute) and "Why I Hate Gay Marriage II" on his blog Brooklyn Boy's Blues. I find that Frank makes many cogent points, particularly concerning recentering the debate from an equality of norms as they exist to revisioning new possibilities for queer families and association, and intend to respond when I return from a short trip.

Larry D. Lyons II sorts out the difference between some self-labeled "blog-infiltrator" Christians and Christ's life and message on his site, the Larry Lyons Experience. The last time I set foot in a Christian church (in Bahia, I believe it was, or maybe Rio de Janeiro; actually I cannot remember), it was as a tourist, and I long ago put the decade-plus worth of Catholic school (indoctrination) and Baptist Bible classes behind me. (Taking a course with Harvey Cox and speaking with Peter Gomes helped considerably.) So I'm taking this one purely from the viewpoint of a spectator. But wherever you fall in terms of your beliefs, Larry's blog is always worth checking out, both for the imagination he brings to his posts, his activism, and most certainly the images.

Doug Ireland again revisits the case of the hanged Iranian teens, who, it turns out, very likely were killed not as punishment for having raped a youth (not that that crime or any other merits being hanged, in a public square no less), but for the mere fact of having sex with each other. (I refused to retract my earlier post, because not only do I oppose the death penalty on principle, but subjecting young people to it, for whatever sorts of crimes they commit, strikes me as particularly inhumane.) Direland looks carefully at several subsequent reports, and speaks to Iranians who note that the city where the boys were murdered, Mashad, is the second holiest in Iran. He provides valuable information about worldwide protests against the inhumane acts against these young men, and again calls attention to the fact that LGBT organizations in the US need to move beyond parochialism and consider the plight of LGBTs across the globe, as LGBT organizations in Europe have done. One caution I would suggest for Direland and others is that the easy equation of same-sexual practices and Western notions of "gayness" should be problematized; the two young men very well may have seen themselves as "gay," and as Direland points out in a terrific section, there is a long tradition of same-sexual desire and practice in Iranian and Islamic culture--expressed in some of the most moving poetry ever written--which both the Shah's regime and the post-1979 Islamic regime have viciously repressed, but "gay" still should only be seen, at least in this case, as a kind of shorthand--it is not merely Western notions of "gayness" and homosexuality, but same-sexual practice in general that these fanatics, like the ones in the US, so utterly fear and want to eradicate. At any rate, check out Direland's full post.

Bill of Ffactory writes a great post on one of my favorite TV shows, HBO's Six Feet Under. As he always does, he delves deeply into why the show is so significant, exploring the essential novelistic aspects of the show, and its superb writing and deft and often dazzling handling of character. He even quotes David Foster Wallace on Dostoevsky in assembling what I find to be a very persuasive reading. I did feel at the start of this season, Six Feet Under's final one, that the show was becoming unremittingly gloomy, and then...well, if you get the opportunity, catch the past seasons and this one. Sex and death are fundamental drives, and the narrative artists behind Six Feet Under know, at least most of the time, how to make the best use of them.

Nataleehollowaymania

While rereading Allucquère Rosanne Stone's 1995 seminal critical study-performance, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (MIT Press), which explores the relationship between cyber/technologies, society and social relations, and self-articulation and constitution in the physical and virtual realms, I had an aperçu, which was this: the fixation, particularly among Fox (or Faux, as I've called it elsewhere) News Channel viewers, and more broadly among cable news channel viewers, with "missing white women" (MWMs, and most of the women the media and its viewers fixated on tend to be middle and upper-middle-class), is symptomatic of the fact that these MWMs, and especially Natalee Holloway, the young Alabama woman who went on a class graduation trip to Aruba and disappeared, function--are reconstituted--as a kind of narcissistic, psychomythic proxy/prosthesis. These Natalee-fixators are living in profound fear of and denial about the United States's current status, role and actions in the world, and particularly in Iraq, as a hyperpower. Whew! I got that out.

Now I acknowledge that someone else somewhere may have articulated this before me. So be it. Also, let me state for the record that I wish the best for any person, of any background, who goes missing, and hope she or he is found, alive, well, unharmed. I am not the first person to call attention to this current media fixation, which of course predates the recent spate of cases. I also do sincerely believe that Natalee Holloway's parents, and her larger family and friends, desperately and sincerely want to know what happened to her, and seek justice for whoever did harm her. But what about the millions of others who keep Fox News and its advertisers grinning all the way to the bank, when there are countless other missing people--poor, male, elderly, White, Black, Latino, Asian, Mixed, differently abled, etc.--as well as countless other pressing issues facing our society, imperative issues that really deserve public debate and discussion? After coming across a piece in New York Newsday that described how Fox News program "On the Record"'s host and lawyer Greta Van Susteren (who cut her chops on the OJ Simpson trial) dramatically increased her viewership once she began focusing on the Natalee Holloway case, and once I read the statistics that Fox News Channel had covered the case far more than its other rivals (434 mentions in just the last two months), and that on the very night that President W, for whom Fox News Channel serves as a propaganda organ, nominated an ultraconservative Washington lawyer, John Roberts Jr., to serve on the Supreme Court, yet Fox News Channel devoted more time to the Holloway case, I devoted a little more brainpower to this.

So what do I mean? Well, my conjecture is that in addition to all the other international problems the US faces, the military situation in Iraq, as should be obvious to anyone who has functioning brain waves, is not going well, and this is a paramount concern for many Americans, especially the ones who are hyperpatriotic and yet not totally zombified. On the one hand, we have a President and his Secretary of Defense telling us that things are succeeding and a Vice President who tells us that the insurgency-rebellion-resistance is in its "last throes." Surrounding them is a vast right-wing echo chamber, with some still not-dissillusioned, dismayed, dissuaded or simply deluded moderate and liberal hawk choralists. Yet we have US military commanders on the ground who claim that the insurgency is strengthening and that Iraq not only cannot defend itself (Iran has stepped into the breach to do that) and has become a terror bootcamp, but that the war may be unwinnable. 1821 US troops have been killed (forty in the last 12 days), hundreds of other "coalition" troops have died, more than 40000+ have been wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens have died or been badly maimed, and Iraq is in a worse physical and infrastructure state than before the invasion. In addition, the administration and US military have suffered grave damage to their reputations as allegations and proof of torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and other prisons and military facilities, as well as other brutal, savage non-constitutional acts, like extraordinary rendition, have been revealed over the last three years. On top of all of this is the basic fact that the chief rationales for the war, the threat of Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction," which a daisy chain of administration officials trumpeted in the run-up to the war, and the oft-stated link between Saddam Hussein (who was aided and abetted for 8 years by Ronald Raygun and George H. W. Bush) and Osama bin Laden-Al Qaeda, both were proved to be false. No "weapons of mass destruction" have been found in Iraq, and no credible authorities have established plausible links between Hussein and Osama bin Laden, particularly concerning the 9/11 atrocities. Now many Americans, as millions overseas did three years ago, see the neoconservative boondoggle for what it is--or at least are seeing enough propagandistic fog dissipate to begin doing so.

So what does this have to do with poor Natalee Holloway? I see it like this: as a young, blonde, Southern, attractive, middle-class white woman, she serves, at least in the social and cultural imaginary of the people both of the people who are fixated on her, as well as for the nation as a whole, as a once embodied but now virtual psychomythic proxy, or constellated sign, for an imagined and idealized US, one that is virtuous and good, innocent, white, Christian, youthful, blond, comprising attractive middle-class people; a US that not only has a future, but that is still the world's imagined promise for the future, the "envy"--in whatever positive sense you might construe that term--"of the world," as former Vice President and Heartlander Dan Quayle once put it. Natalee Holloway wasn't not dark-haired or dark-skinned, poor, fat, unattractive, a sexual (as far as we know; in fact, the assertion of her sexual "virtue" as a "virgin" was not uncommon early on in the news coverage), religious or political minority (did she even have political stands?), mentally or physically challenged, an immigrant, from a blue state or the coasts or in any way associated with the frequently derided "cultural elites," that is, in any way alien. She embodied and represented a quintessence which which we're bombarded on a nonstop basis by a web of discourses in this society--the psychomythic sign Natalee Holloway is supposed to represent is discursively constructed, produced and reinforced.

This US, as embodied by the mythic Natalee Holloway, would not attack people unless threatened; this US follows the codes of society, the rule of law, the immutable law of a Christian God that some would like to have supplant our civilly derived system; this US is uniquely blessed by God, is special, is chosen, and so will be protected against the dangers of those who seek to harm it, that is, after it acts to protect itself. The signifier lies in the images of Natalee Holloway that Fox News Channel shows repeatedly, her smiling yearbook photo, this body reduced to a one-dimension headshot, while the signified is, as I said, this very powerful mythic construct. Amidst the horrors in Iraq (and elsewhere, like Haiti, which the US's fingerprints are all over, and let's not even broach the other Al Qaeda-related terrorist incidents in foreign countries that the American media seem not especially interested in), Natalee's disappearance, in a small, foreign (and colonial, no less) outpost, full of brown-skinned people, serves as a (perverse) kind of counterweight. The missing fiancee in Atlanta, and Lacey Peterson, served a similar purpose, but their personal crises (the flight of the fiancee, the horrific murder of the pregnant young woman) place on or close by American shores, while the dark specter of a foreign society and nation--and its unknown representatives--devoured Natalee Holloway.

Whereas the US government and military, despite their efforts, best or otherwise, cannot contain the metastasizing horrors emanating from the now renamed "Global Struggle against Violent Extremism," to which the War in Iraq was wrongly attached, Natalee's family and friends, other interested parties, and the media, with Fox News Channel and its commanding officer Greta van Susteren leading the charge, have responded by enacting not only a media but a physical autopsy on the suspect, dangerous, now terror-ridden body of Aruba itself--Americans and Arubans combing the seabeds, dredging an artificial lake, foraging through garbage dumps and woods, demanding to inspect the well and backyard of the father of the current chief suspect, a young White Dutch national, Joran van der Sloot, though initially the media reassured Americans with the initial arrest of two Black men who turned out not to have been involved--anything to open up this body and wrest Natalee, and metonymically, American virtue back, particularly when the Iraqi national body not only is in an advanced state of gangrene, but literally being torn apart (by nationality, ethnicity, religion and sect, class, gender, etc.).

Greta van Susteren, then, is an empowered analogue of generals like Myers, Casey and Petraeus; while they cannot stem the flow the blood from the diseased national body which they occupy, despite commanding the best military on earth, van Susteren, who represents another aspect of the American ideal and functions as a mother-figure/sign (the signifier being the appealing persona she presents, with her White, middle-aged, plastic surgery-altered face and preppy outfits, the signified being the upper-middle-class, highly educated authority she commands as an officer of the law and a media celebrity). For her viewers, and especially the Natalee fixators, she may prove much more capable of effective work (drawing as she can on the American media and legal apparatuses), by somehow "rescuing" the real Natalee Holloway--or at least locating and returning her "real" body or even elements of it (bones, hair, clothing, even DNA tags, however infinitesimal), the virtuous American psychomythic prosthetic, to American hands. She can be buried, honored, memorialized. There's no way we could ever get our military back or national reputation whole after the Iraq debacle is over, at least not any time soon, and in any case, sovereign Iraq never was ours to begin with, despite the bonds of pragmatism and finance that held together the Reagan-Bush administrations and Hussein. But the mythic, phantasmal Natalee Holloway and the saga of her disappearance and possible return remains a promisinng possibility, and so millions, it seems, cannot do without this prosthetic, hold out hope against hope....

Round-Up

John H. Johnson, publishing industry pioneer and founder of Negro Digest, Ebony, Jet and the Johnson Publications empire, died in Chicago at age 87. Johnson, who was born in poverty in Arkansas, founded his company in 1942 with a $500 loan on his mother's furniture, and built his company into one of the major Black-owned and operated businesses in the nation and world. His vital goal, of presenting positive portrayals of African-American culture and people, has helped to shape representations in the entertainment and media industries in general, and in society itself.

Musician Ibrahim Ferrer, one of the most famous and senior Afro-Cuban soneros, passed away in a Havana hospital at the age of 78. He was affiliated with the Buena Vista Social club, which returned to the limelight after Ry Cooder's documentary, a raft of CDs, and international concerts reawakened fans to their powerful music. Felix Contreras discussed Ferrer's "late rising star" on Ed Gordon's News and Notes radio program this morning.

Several other musicians, including jazz bassist Al McKibbon (he was 86, in Los Angeles), jazz saxophonist Lucky Thompson (81, in Seattle), and blues singer Little Milton (71, in Memphis) passed away. Italian abstract sculptor and art critic Pietro Consagro also died this past week in Milan.

One of the highlights of the past three days was NYC's Pride in the City, or annual Black LGBT Pride celebration, sponsored by Brooklyn-based People of Color in Crisis. Ocean of Brothaluvcafe has lots of photos of the events. Bernie of Bejata.com, however, asks whether some LGBT SGL folks feel they've aged out of such events, and of the youth-oriented (mainstream and Black) LGBT network in general.

As Keith Boykin notes on his blog, there have been a spate of bias-related attacks in New York City this summer. Among the most recent were the brutal attack by a pack of White youths on a young Black man in Mill Basin, Brooklyn; a duo's assault, complete with anti-gay epithets, on a Black man who was walking with a White friend in the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, an attack by a group of Black teenagers on gay Latino youths in Staten Island; and an array of protests and counterprotests (scroll down to Eltman's article) that have accompanied the intermittent attacks against and forced evictions of Latino immigrants in parts of Suffolk County.

Photos: Garden State

3 photos from the Garden State:


Wonder Bar (on the Asbury Park "circuit," Ocean Avenue)

Asbury Park Convention Hall

The Garden State Parkway (heading north towards Woodbridge exit)

New Books this summer and fall

Narrativist par excellence and literary visionary Renee Gladman, whose handsewn chapbook series leroy published a vanfull of the most innovative and exciting contemporary writers in America, now has a new perfect-bound imprint, Leon Works. She recently released the first volume in what I hope will be a long-running series, California resident Mary Burger's Sonny (2005, ISBN 0-9765820-0-7). I received a copy of the beautifully designed volume a few weeks ago, and have dipped into it with enjoyment. Burger is the author of four previous books, has edited the Second Story series since 1998, is a co-editor of the online journal Narrativity, and of the related anthology, Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative.

Here's a fair-use length excerpt from Burger's lyrical, philosophical weave of specific and generic stories, one of which draws upon the biography of Manhattan project pioneer and A-bomb visionary J. Robert Oppenheimer:

Desert--canyon--mountain range. A boy who knew the West as a vacation. A boy who knew nothing else.

The boy who threaded his horse through canyons.

As stone heads and wooden masks stood in for the terror they made themselves.

They made themselves.

Who would declare,

I am become Death.
I am nine times brighter than the sun.
I eat the air.

You can purchase the book, and many others (like Renee's superb novel The Activist) at Small Press Distributors.

My former classmate's and friend Martha Witt's debut novel, Broken as Things Are, has just been published in paperback by Picador (ISBN 0312424868). The lovely novel tells the story of North Carolina siblings Morgan-Lee and her troubled older brother Ginx, whose obsession with her becomes clear as the novel progresses. Martha's literary grace, humor and poetic touch with observation are evident throughout the book, as this passage demonstrates:

When he was around five, Ginx started to practice his figureeight drawings. It was after our father gave him a train set with a track in the shape of a figure eight. We put the train on that track and let it run. Ginx sat in an overstuffed armchair, and I sat on the ground. "Look," he said. "Pannot." And the train went round and round in its figure eight, the circles melding into one another. I never spoke about our train, because I soon realized that other kids built towns or made tunnels over their tracks. Other kids had their trains run on bridges or stop to load and unload pretend cargo. Ginx didn't even open the box of toy houses, trees, and tunnels that Aunt Lois had given him for his birthday. We would just sit, watching the train. Sometimes, Ginx would rock, but usually he sat in the armchair, digging at the cloth in the armrest. By the time he was six, the armrest was covered in dug-out circles, and our father gave the chair away.

***
Some forthcoming books that I'm looking forward to reading include:

Cultural and music critic and longtime friend Scott Poulson-Bryant's eagerly awaited non-fiction exploration Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America, which will be published by Doubleday (ISBN 0385510020) this October. From the description, this ought to be a provocative, exciting read. For more information about Scott's book and his other writings, check out his blog, The SPB-Q.

Acclaimed poet, teacher and friend Elizabeth Alexander's fourth book of poems, American Sublime, is due out from Graywolf Press (ISBN 1-55597-432-5) this September. At some point in the next few weeks I hope to post my reading of one of my favorite poems in the book, the remarkable quasi-sonnet "When." I can say with confidence that in addition to "When," the collection is full of amazing poems, including some very novel and memorable artes poeticae that Elizabeth read a few years ago when she read and spoke at the university I teach at.

Writer, activist and friend Thomas Glave's first book of essays, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent, will be out from the University of Minnesota Press (ISBN 0-8166-4679-1) this fall. Like his extraordinary debut story collection Whose Song? And Other Stories (City Lights, 2001), the pieces in Words to Our Now actively challenge formal conventions of prose (genre, style, voice and address, objective feeling), while exploring some of today's most pressing topics. Thomas, I'm delighted to say, will be on campus during the winter quarter, so I'll once again get to hear him read his work in person.

MTV's True Life: "I'm Dead Broke"

MTV: you know it, I watch it. I am even known to mention some of its more notorious programs in my courses. For all its faults, both historical and current, which are numerous and worthy of strong critique, the station often ventures where few other TV channels go, even if for obviously commercial and very possibly cynical reasons. Some of its shows are utter dreck (Date My Mom); some are basically extended commercials or infomercials (Pimp My Ride); some take the current standard of narcissistic voyeurism to nauseating levels (Diary); many are politically, socially and economically retrograde and reify the worst aspects of capitalist consumer culture (Cribs; MADE); some are so avant-garde and bizarre (Jackass; Andy Milonakis Show) while being simultaneously infantile and you have to wonder if they're not subliminally converting you to right-wing Republicanism. In all cases, though, MTV strives to entertain.

Yet MTV also was among the first stations, I believe, to portray in a regular series not only a self-empowered, out gay person--in a cross-ethnic relationship, no less--but a self-empowered, out person living with AIDS, his struggles with the disease and his activism; even if one discounts its video spectacles (and after overcoming its reluctance in the 1980s at running Michael Jackson's videos, it was a pioneer in promoting commercial hiphop, which is now the dominant popular music form in the United States), it regularly presents more racial, ethnic, gender, and class diversity that the rest of TV (I'm speaking comparatively here, and yes, MTV's The Real World (whose first season included a Black male poet, a Black female rapper, and a White gay male artist), which is hardly "real" and regularly traffics in stereotypes, has never featured an Asian male house member, or any Arabs, as far as I can tell); it not only colludes in the insistent marketing of sex, but runs ads for condoms, PSAs promoting HIV testing, and programs that show the social contexts and consequences of (youth) sexual activity, without much of the bad faith or moralism of other TV channels. (I can't recall if MTV has portrayed the reality of abortion in recent years, but I seem to recall that it has done so at least once.)

And I could say more but I want to get to my main point, which is that I watched MTV's True Life, episode 702, "I'm Dead Broke." Certainly, this show and this episode had their problems--the lack of critical commentary, which is not part of the show's framework, I do understand, being chief among them--but I have to say, it was one of the rare moments I can think of when I have been staring into the ocean of constructed "reality" being passed off as "reality" and actually saw difficult, ugly, messy, saddening, but "authentic"--at least to a degree that differs from the excessively mediated and constructed realities of the "reality TV" genre-- "reality" staring back at me. By which I mean, the episode's title really is a throwaway, since the show wasn't about not having money, but about THE POOR--three VERY poor young people in the United States. THE POOR--those millions of people who are never shown, discussed, addressed, engaged, in so much of our culture, politics, society. The poor: DeMarlon (pictured above), a 19-year-old Black man living in Pemberton, Illinois, in desperate conditions that numerous other Americans share yet which are rarely treated in our mass media; Alexa, an 18-year old White woman living in West Plains, Missouri, who had dropped out of high school in her native Indiana, moved west, and found herself without the means to work and complete her high school education; and Sandra, a 22-year-old Latina from East Oakland, California, who was struggling to make ends meet and facing homelessness as she worked at a low-wage service job and lived with her boyfriend, Armaan.

In fact, all three of these young people faced homelessness, which basically is not discussed in the public discourse any more, except as a "choice" or pathology. They also held very low-wage jobs which did not or barely paid enough on which to survive, and though such jobs are the main growth sector in our economy, this fact and the structural transformation of our economy are not discussed in our public discourse either. The three protagonists all seemed not to have gotten very good high school educations, though each of them made clear they valued education, to the extent that the young man was trying to remediate himself in order to qualify for the military, which he saw as his only employment option (he was on open probation, though, and thus not permitted to serve), while the young woman from Indiana stressed constantly how much she wanted to finish her final year of high school and graduate. Public education, and our educational system in general, which is increasingly stacked against the poor and working classes, and even the middle classes, however broadly construed, don't receive enough discussion in the public discourse, except as soundbites during campaign time or as pawns and straw people in ongoing cultural wars. In fact, most of what this one MTV episode portrayed isn't dealt with almost anywhere else in our media, except as elements of the standard, controlling narratives that replicate and reinforce the hierarchical, unequal social relations and confirm the fantasies and projections of the ruling classes, as in Hustle & Flow, with its Black pimp who aspires to be a rapper blah blah blah, or Crash, with its false pieties and hollow depictions of racial and class differences, and so on.

At any rate, the episode angered and provoked me (as opposed to leaving me in a comatose state, or enraged, or anesthetized, or wanting to rush out and buy something or burn something down), and it also made me wish that some executives somewhere within the vast media system that constitutes television, the most powerful mass medium we have today, would take the revolutionary step of telling more such stories, and exploring them in greater critical and analytical depth. They would all have to be framed in such stark and reductive economic and class terms, though a greater attention to economics and class would be excellent, but through the complex lens of the diverse positionalities and social relations that characterize our, and every, society. Of course I am asking TV, as we know it, to take a scalpel to itself. MTV, I think, took at least a little slice with this one.

Thursday Quote: Reitz, Kluge and Reinke

As is well known, language has an advantage over film, owing to several thousand years of tradition. Modern Western languages derive from the differentiated languages of antiquity, which in turn are influenced by more archaic languages. If the cinema were to cultivate the narrative forms necessary to cope with the d'Aurevilly text over a longer period of history, at a later date a whole range of filmic metaphors would be available to filmmakers, allowing them to achieve the same economy of narration as is now available in the figurative and conceptual ranges of language.... Only when the cinema will have sufficiently enlarged its tradition of figuration will it be able to develop abstractions and differentiations comparable to those of literature. Because it already includes language anyway, film would actually have the capacity to articulate meanings that elude the grasp of verbal expression.
-Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge, and Wilfried Reinke (tr. Miriam Hansen), form "Word and Film," in October 46 (Fall 1988), p. 86.

Field Research Study Group A: Emotional Outreach Project

The Field Research Study Group A is planning to relaunch the "Emotional Outreach Project," which appears to be even more necessary and appropriate today than it was when it was first initiated in 2002-03.

To give you background, the "Emotional Outreach Project" consists of a series of business card-sized vouchers, which I distributed free of charge and with disinterest to individuals, under various controls and using specified variables.

On one side of the cards, in bold black ink and all capital letters, an emotional state, response, stage, trait or process (hate, joy, schadenfreude, cold-bloodness, selflessness, horror, indifference, etc.) appeared, with the clear non-bolded caption "Free Emotional Voucher" beneath it.

On the flip side, originally the cards noted

Dear friend, please accept this emotional voucher. Although it possesses no monetary value, you should feel free to draw upon it at any point, particularly if you believe you lack sufficient personal reserves. Acknowledging and managing one's emotions is crucial to psychological and physical well-being.

In the second version of the cards, quotes on the emotions or the passions of the soul by a range of figures, including Arnold Bennett, Eric Hoffer, Plato, Spinoza, and others, were appended.

The relaunched versions will be similar to the second edition, and a full sheet of cards, printed and signed, will be offered free of charge (to be sent by US Postal Office mail) to the first ten people who 1) express an interest in receiving them, and provide a valid address; 2) agree to provide the name and address of at least one other living person you personally know who should receive 1 (one) of the vouchers [not a sheet]; 3) and in your e-mail stating that you would like to receive a sheet and providing your name and address make it clear that you are suggesting a candidate for positive outreach and not for the purposes of harassment, vandalism, or any other negative or problematic reason (that could be so construed or that violates any pertinent laws or statutes in any states or regions of the United States of America and its legal jurisdictions). Basically, I'd like this stage of the project to benefit those who might appreciate it.

As soon as the first ten people have responded, no further names will be accepted until the next stage of the project. Thank you for participating!

Update: Slowly but surely we're getting there. Please click on the word "e-mail" itself, which is hyperlinked, to sign up!

The Auteur Theory (Brief Musings)

(Let's see if I can complete this entry in about 15 minutes.) Back when I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s the auteur theory of filmmaking seemed to be in great vogue, perhaps even dominant, in many articles and texts I was reading about film. Friends I had who were studying film also spoke quite a bit about it as well. From what I gathered, it developed in the French critical journal Cahiers du Cinéma (see below), in whose pages great filmmakers like François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard, three of the best known Nouvelle Vague auteurs, had gotten their start as critics. In the US, American critic Andrew Sarris, who, if I recall correctly, was reviewing for the Village Voice then (and later--perhaps still--the New York Observer), while also teaching film studies at Columbia, too up the auteur theory cause. I think Truffaut actually coined the term in a Cahiers du Cinéma article at some point in the 1950s or 1960s. He and likeminded critics initially used the term to champion certain Hollywood directors (like John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Raoul Walsh, or Mr. Auteur himself, Orson Welles) whose unique artistic visions and styles shone through whatever sort of film they made, a notion that Sarris and successive critics broadened somewhat.

As I learned more about it the auteur theory seemed--at least to me at the time--to invalidate individual failures in favor of the larger body of work. So for example while Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil and even the studio-butchered The Magnificent Ambersons are masterpieces, and The Lady from Shanghai is a fascinating disaster, the focus, from the auteur theory standpoint, would be on Welles's career as a whole, and the definitive artistic stamp he left on the films both generally and in relation to each other.

I read this as I would many critical projects by artists: this theoretical intervention--which was certainly less rigorous and programmatic than other sorts of critical methods in cinema studies that drew upon semiotics, feminism, psychoanalytic theory, deconstruction, etc.--served and serves as an ideational and explanatory manifesto for and powerful defense of an art of filmmaking, as well as the filmmakers themselves, as opposed to film as a commercial medium in which the artistic aspect remains in the background or isn't considered at all (the usual tendency nowadays in American moviemaking, where the main concern is the box office, as opposed to what's being put on screen to draw people in).

Anyways, I was very skeptical of the auteur theory back then, though I did enjoy reading Andrew Sarris's essays on it. Part of my skepticism came from a belief that works should be viewed individually and within the particular context in which they appeared, and part came from not seeing enough films by any of the authors who were being championed; this was in the days before DVDs, even before VHS versions of many films were available at rental stores, and to see many of the films you really had to go to a revival or foreign movie-oriented house or catch a university series, and I never seemed to be able to get my act together to do this for many of the auteurs.

There were then-contemporary ones, like Waters (one of my favorites from high school on), Fassbinder, Bergman, Scorsese, DePalma, Allen, Altman, Almodóvar, Cronenberg, Lynch, and Spike Lee (whose films I used to wait for, though after She Hate Me I may have to be dragged to see another one), whose films I was able to catch successively, but others--Ray, Roeg, Antonioni, Buñuel, Kurosawa, Fellini, Godard, Tarkovsky, Oshima, Pasolini, de Sica, Parajanov, Sturges, Cukor, Resnais, Cassavetes, Ousmane, Cissé, etc.--I would only catch sporadically or wouldn't see until years later, when I could actually rent the movies from video stores that actually had them, or got cable channels (like Sundance or Turner Classic Movies) that showed a number of their works (yet it's still rare to find even one Tarkovsky, for example, on any channel), or, most recently, signed up for Netflix (yes, this is my third or fourth mention of this company, but they're not paying me, unfortunately.)

In recent years there are some newer filmmakers who'd qualify as auteurs--I'm thinking of Tsai Ming-Liang, Claire Denis, François Ozon, Catherine Breillat, Abbas Kiarostami, Takeshi Miike, Alexander Payne, etc.--about whom I can say that I've actually seen quite a few, if not all, of their major films. For some directors, I find myself actively seeking out as many films of hers or his as I can find. Though I've read that the auteur theory has gone out of style as cinema studies and scholars themselves have moved on, I do read aspects of it and its influence in some reviews I come across, and I know that my fascination with cetain directors contains a desire to see aesthetic--formal, stylistic, conceptual, materialist, and so on--throughlines, consistencies, motifs, and details in their various works, and I attribute this to having assimilated, despite my youthful doubt, some of the best aspects of Sarris's (and, in opposition, people like Pauline Kael's) interesting arguments.

Right now, I am subjecting Wong Kar-Wai to the serial treatment. In the Mood for Love (one of the most beautiful films about desire I've ever seen) and Happy Together (poetry on the screen, despite a problematic script) are two of my favorite films, and now I plan to watch 2046, the sequel to In the Mood for Love, and Chungking Express, which preceded both in his filmography. Everytime I drop by TLA Video I see lots of Ozu films now in DVD format on display, so maybe I'll add him to my cinemathèque next. And then there're Belvaux, Kusturica, Hanneke.... (Oh well, 38 [45+] minutes--maybe next entry!)

Beauty and Power and Race (Three Articles)

Switching gears dramatically, I felt I had to post on several related topics that I'd come across on other Websites. The first is an excellent article by Amina Mire, on Counterpunch, that addresses the currently widening--not shrinking, mind you, but expanding--market for skin-lightening and whitening products.

Mire's thorough and compelling article, "Pigmentation and Empire," however, goes much further than mere reportage, methodically linking colonialism, Eurocentricity, white supremacist, and masculinist notions of beauty and sexualized/gendered (self-)(re)presentation to the global "beauty" industry's--and not just the media's, politicians' or individual ideologues'--centrality in promoting psychologically and physiologically dangerous "anti-aging" and "whitening" products across the world.

As she proceeds, she deftly explores the terrible nexus of racism/racialism and capitalism, the psychosocial and economic power and control embedded in the commodity system, with its reinforcement and stabilization of alienation and false consciousness, and new biological technologies. (In other words, Mire is describing one powerful example of the creation of racist, false psychological and emotional "needs" and the reification and internalization of alienating, monopolistic standards (even upon those who meet it, i.e., wealthy "white" Western women) generated through the industrial machinery of global capitalism system, aided by the mass media (which is a part of that system, of course), that numerous figures have identified and have repeatedly critiqued, resulting in a steady "industrialization of consciousness" that Kluge and Negt so powerfully warned against, functioning to the mental and physical detriment of millions). Aesthetics, as my students and I have discussed extensively over the last few years, do not arise or function in a social, ideological, political, economic, or spiritual vacuum, certainly least of all nowadays.

To quote her:

One of the ways in which L'Oreal enacts the biomedicalization of women's bodies and the racialization of the aging processes of women (gendered degeneracy) is through the visual technology of dismembering women's bodies. A close examination of L'Oreal's advertisings for skin-whitening products shows a systematic fragmentation of women's bodies. Almost all the L'Oreal advertising images which I have came across use cropped faces of women. One of the visual techniques used by L'Oreal is the pairing of two cropped faces: one of which bears certain pseudo-pathologies such as 'age spots,' premature-aging,' 'hyper-pigmentation,' and 'wrinkles.' The other cropped image would feature the whitened, 'smooth, wrinkle-free' face of a woman.

As a result, L'Oreal's advertising often visually conceptualizes the practice of skin-whitening both as a violent technological fragmentation of women's bodies as well as an instrument of bodily transformation. As the following advertising for L'Oreal's skin-whitening brand, Blanc Expert, shows, the visual fragmentation of women's bodies is often reinforced by the claims of the power of these skin-whitening products to penetrate deep inside the body thereby transforming both the inside and the outside of the users of these products.

She ends by linking "whitening" and "white supremacy" to W's War in Iraq and a moment in which an image of Saddam Hussein's face is literally being whitened. (Though she does treat the American experience with skin whitening creams and white supremacy, she does not, however, delve into various ideologies of whitening like "mejorar la raza" and "embranqueamento," which still have a powerful hold and reinforce racist, classist, genderist, and classist hierarchies in places like the Dominican Republic and Brazil respectively.)

This is an article that begs to be read and discussed, especially in light of the steadily expanding reach and power of global industry and capital, and in particular the centralization and monopolization of media corporations like Rupert Murdoch's conservative (and Orwellian) News Corporation, as well as in light of the narrowing focus on racial, ethnic and pigmentary profiling that is resulting from the West's attempts to get a handle on the "War on Terror" (or "The Global Struggle Blah Blah Blah"). It also gibes in keen ways with the pieces that follow.

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The Guardian Online offers a related take in "The Ugly Side of Beauty,"Julie Bindel's review-with-interview of radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys's sixth and newest study, Beauty And Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices In The West. In this work, as in previous texts, Jeffreys focuses on the oppressive, anti-feminist nature and structure of the now expanding (Western) beauty industry, and its ideological and sociopolitical dominance over women. The correlation to sexual and gender oppression is central to her argument. As Bindel notes, Jeffreys, a political lesbian since the early 1970s who is also known as the UK Andrew Dworkin, spends much of the book "arguing that beauty practices - from make-up to breast implants - should be redefined as harmful cultural practices, rather than being seen as a liberating choice." (What is a "political lesbian," those of you not around in the 1970s and 1980s, or not cognizant of the extensive literature on this subject, may ask? A lesbian who consciously chooses same-sexual psychological identification as a lesbian based on her political and ideological views, and not primarily as a result of innate sexual orientation. She may or may not have sex with another woman--or a man, for that matter--but the self-identification and allegiance is a conscious, dynamic and performative one.)

Jeffreys' study, Bindel notes, questions much as Dworkin's 1974 volume Women Hating did the fall-off in feminist critiques of what she views as a insidious system,, and the notion among some liberal feminists that affording women the option to adopt practices and modes of self-representation that only decades ago were seen as oppressive is somehow liberatory or freeing. (In defense, perhaps a "liberal" feminist would argue in favor of the very fact of women having multiple choices in and of themselves.) Though I haven't read Jeffreys' book yet, from Bindel's article book Beauty and Misogyny does seem to be more than an extended one-note harangue, enfolding within its arguments a potentially enlightening history of the beauty industry.

Bindel indicates that the study also looks at the larger context of social and political gender hierarchy, and finds much to be upset about. As in earlier books, Jeffreys even assails some of the sexual practices of LGBT people; she specific criticizes BDSM, which she appears to be saying reproduces and eroticizes the dominance and degradation in force in traditional male-female sexual relations. She also writes up transpeople who reinscribe what she feels to be masculinist notions of femininity. Bindel, for her part, doesn't stint on presenting the comments of many of Jeffreys' opponents, who include not only right-wingers but many contemporary feminists as well. In addition to being called angry and full of rage, she was mocked by having a dildo ("The Spinster") named after her!

As I read Bindel's piece, I was reminded of a conversation I had last year while flying home during a university holiday break. A very sharp and funny, punked out young White man and his girlfriend were seated next to me, and when he noticed that I was intensely reading--what I cannot remember--he decided to strike up a conversation. Usually such interruptions annoy me to no end, but I was happy to be heading home and ended up chatting with him. At some point, he started talking about makeup, and asked me if I knew that most female beauty products, like blush, lipstick, eye shadow, and so on, aimed to recreate, at least to our brains, the appearance of women at the points of arousal or during and after orgasm. (I immediately noted that his girlfriend was wearing none I could detect.) I had heard a little of this before, but he went on to say, as Jeffreys's history suggests, that makeup was initially popular with prostitutes, and that other related products and artifacts, like nightshade-derived eyedrops to dilate the pupils and high-arched pumps, also aimed to mimic and replicate this same state. I believe he was passing this information on to me to affirm his political progressivism, since we'd been discussing politics in a general way, and I jotted down some of it, but I couldn't find my notes just a week later. So it was fascinating to come across Bindel's discussion of Jeffreys' critiques, which in effect restate a lot of this, though in a more encompassing way.

I'm not sure when I'll get to Jeffreys' book, but Bindel's overview jibed in keen ways with Mire's article, and has really gotten my brain spinning.

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The other day I'd posted on Amy Harmon's New York Times article on Black Americans and DNA testing as a means of understanding and completing our geneologies. I then came across Patricia J. Williams's Diary of a Mad Law Professor column in the June 20, 2005 issue of The Nation. Titled "Genetically Speaking," Williams assails Emma Daly's April 13, 2005 New York Times article, "DNA Tells Students They Aren't Who They Thought." Instead of exploring the relationship between genetics, ancestry and race, and the fact that there are no specific genetic markers for specific "races" per se, or that "race," as we usually understand the term, is a politically, ideologically and socially constructed concept mapped onto external physical differences and traits shared by specific groups sharing ancestral heritage, thus becoming a contingent, unstable ontological reality--that is, race is a real but unfixed political and social reality that doesn't correlate specifically with biological inheritance--the article, Williams notes, presented only three, intellectually unsatisfactory and problematic "columns" that failed to query longstanding notions about race, conflated race, ethnicity and nationality, and, as I read it, revealed the kind of racialist discourse that frequently and still passes without comment. As she says about the Pennsylvania State University sociology class study that used its students' DNA samples

"About half of the 100 students tested this semester were white," according to another instructor. "And every one of them said, 'Oh man I hope I'm part black,' because it would upset their parents.... People want to identify with this pop multiracial culture. They don't want to live next to it, but they want to be part of it. It's cool."

It is odd, this insistence that there is no such thing as race even as we wouldn't want it moving in next door. There is, too, a remarkable persistence in re-inscribing race onto the narrative of biological inheritance. This science is always pursued for only the noblest of reasons: in Shriver's instance, "the potential importance of racial or ethnic background to drug trials." I will save for later my concern about the commercial competition for "race-specific" medicines. For now, consider the description of one student who "discovered" she was "58 percent European and 42 percent African." Yet the "parent populations" tested for were described only as "western European" and "west African." The young woman "has always thought of herself as half black and half white because her mother is Irish-Lithuanian and her father West Indian." But Lithuania is generally considered a part of Eastern Europe, and therefore not technically part of the population tested for. And while "West Indian" is clearly used as a cipher for her African ancestry, one can be "white"--like Alexander Hamilton--while being West Indian. And the Irish were not considered white in colonial times.

These are excellent points, and have led me to critique the concept of biracialism, a particular idée fixe over the last decade, which assumes, for example, that there is either white or black racial purity, and that race and racial groups are somehow static, when extensive genetic intermixture has marked the history of all of Europe, and certainly the history of Africans in the Americas. On top of this, the notion that race is the same thing as ethnicity or national identity or identification is highly problematic, though the New York Times, in its series on race several years ago, sloppily, lazily or misinformedly approached these three related but different categories as if they were the same thing. (Its recent series on class was not much better for similar reasons.) Then there is the issue of identity and identification; how people view themselves or others doesn't develop in a vacuum, so the failure to mention the larger historical, sociopolitical and economic contexts, while not surprising (the right-leaning New York Times assiduously shies away from such difficult thinking), means that the classroom's discussion is, by default, operating on faulty premises. As Williams makes clear, the politics of race and racism, and white supremacy have not only affected Black people, but Whites as well--for example, the Irish, that is, who constitute the second largest European ancestral group in the US (after Germans), but who were not always considered "white," particularly in certain parts of this country and Britain. (Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control, Matthew Frye Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White, and Karen Brodkin's How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America all explore this and similar processes of racial construction and transformation in booklength study form.)

Moreover, the US government, and interested parties, have worked overtime to transform the blanket Hispanic/Latino ethnicity, which actually consists of people of different racial, ethnic and national self-identifications, into what amounts to a racial category, which is particularly confounding, as if as soon as people from Spanish-speaking countries (though not from other linguistically similar nations or regions) stepped onto US shores, whatever racial or ethnic identity they had in their native countries disappeared into an altogether new racial stew. (I once asked on a Website if the Hispanic category held why didn't Anglic or Gallic, all three of which reinscribe colonialist categories of nationhood, weren't also used, and met with silence; the answer, of course, lies in historical fallacies and fantasies, and also in nationalism and racism.) Fascinatingly, this concept, via the US media, has been shipped back to the countries of origins themselves, as have other US concepts, such as "African-American," which I read some Black Brazilians using on a Website a few years ago, though the term is supposed to name a specific ethnicity (as opposed to racial group) in the US.

But back to Williams; she later points out:

The jumble of who we are, particularly as residents of the New World, with its centuries of rapid, recent migrations, is not explored in the Times article. The single mention of migratory patterns is misleading: The students whose DNA revealed both African and European ancestors were described as "members of the fastest-growing ethnic grouping in the United States...mixed race." But to the extent that a DNA swipe shows "mixing," there is nothing "new" about it; our ancestors have been mixing it up since the first mothers left central Africa--in the long-ago, ancient sense, we are all "African." Moreover, genes show neither race nor the cultural practices we usually refer to as ethnicity. The absurdity is highlighted by one of the Penn State students, a warm-brown-colored young man pictured in cornrows, who says that even though he tested at "48 percent European" he values his blackness, since "both my parents are black." He goes on to muse: "Just because I found out I'm white, I'm not going to act white." The article ends with an observation that "whatever his genes say," the young man will likely always "be seen as black--at least by white Americans." Consider the narratives herein: Genes "speak" race, whiteness is a biological inheritance that can be consciously "acted," blackness is defined by the eye of the white beholder.

Even though I've excerpted much of her column, it's still worth checking out. I recommend it, and as you think about it, try to meld it with the other articles I've cited above. A lot of headwork for a Monday, I admit.