Sorry, blog-readers, if you exist. this will not be about most of the things listed in the title, but it will be about UShistory and its recent apologetic tone, which annoys me. Apologizing for what, exactly? Usually it's the blindnesses of the past, but you know what - first of all, i think that we all need to take a break from apologizing for the blindnesses of the past, because an unspotted history is essentially impossible; and second, i think that contemporary scholars of US history give the past a lot less credit than it deserves for having thought things through in substantial ways.
Just hear me out. Lately the discourse in US history has been to follow a sort of postcolonial rhetorical trajectory in discussing the fallacies of the previous era's thought, notably racial superiority and exceptionalism, but i think it's dangerous - and just bad historiography - to do too much apologizing for and critical vetting of the past, because it reveals the very problems that are present when you do any kind of history with moral judgments. which is not to say 'with a lack of objectivity,' because obviously people have ideological commitments, and it's important to put those on the table. but the invasion of postcolonial studies - essentially an outgrowth of literary theory - into historiography is not yielding very good stuff. in fact, it's yielding simplistic vindicating narratives.
almost nothing strikes me as so goofy as many current historians' theory-driven and -laden readings of previous conflicts and debates through the very construction of that rhetoric which informs triumphal narratives of history. a standard move is to invert those narratives and show their seamy underbellies; what gets buried in this technique is the agon that took place to shape each narrative before it became the standard that we, in our post-post 'wisdom,' revile.
my gripe is less about deconstructionism than it is about pragmatism and historiographic legwork. any rudimentary glance at a popular newspaper or journal of the day - say, the new york times or harper's weekly - reveals that nearly every issue on the table - for example, the early 20-C foreign policy quagmires that seem eerie forebears of our own - was exhaustively argued and approached from a multiplicity of angles before one won out, that one not necessarily synching up with the opinion of 'the people' or whoever held the means of 'power,' however that's defined. to think, for example, that the british people were wholeheartedly in favor of imperialism is to think that the american people are wholeheartedly in favor of GW bush's most brutal policies. it's sadly probable that in future history books, if they exist (and unlike fukuyama's naysayers, i think that they will), all of the gentle backlash among liberals to bush's illegal and cruel acts will likely be stricken from the record, because, in the final measure of things, they didn't stop the bush doctrine or prevent it from happening or anything dramatic like that. they just criticized it, and we all know that texts are not necessarily less ephemeral than performances; it's the power behind the rhetoric, its strategic emergence in the public sphere, and the narrative pull that counts. or, perhaps, just the PR framing of the past through its images and those sort of brechtian 'gestus' tricks to freeze-frame movement into easily comprehensible retrospective viewpoints.
it's like the panama canal and teddy roosevelt, one of the most beguiling and misleading figures in the US's historical record. in my scholarship on TR, i've found that very few people truly understand how controversial he was throughout his career. even measures that were retrospectively painted as fully positive - like the panama canal project, which was not steadily critiqued post-construction until the 1960s - received an onslaught of criticism and opposition in their development days, before they were launched and all problems patched up. it may be nearly impossible to gauge how popular support for the canal matched up to the administration's actions, but from what i can gather, there were at least three positions on the issue, and the administration's position was not the popular one until it got underway (aided in part by TR's physical visit to the canal zone, and if you're interested in that, well, you can read my paper on the subject....). there was a lot of touring, hand-shaking, photographing, and other public relations performance-y stuff that went into the effort to get the public to 'warm' to the idea of the canal as an american colony and economic investment - especially considering the french failure just a few years earlier.
anyhow, so that's one example of the multifaceted debates that have gone on for about as long as the printing press has been used to print things other than the bible (and probably then as well) about various events in human life - probably even before the habermasian public sphere and the entrance of bourgeois citizens into political life and all that. what about elizabethan broadsides, after all? okay, i feel that i've sufficiently made my point. ultimately, the goal of the point was to say to contemporary revisiters of history: hey. enough already! give them some credit, those people who you would primitivize like in their temporospatial ghettoes. all right, rant over!
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
feeling things well up in me - good things
hey all,
it may strike my nonexistent readers as odd that i have a baseline opinion of hating to talk on the phone. when given the choice, i prefer that ever-elusive 'liveness' (either that or the epistolary puppetry offered by email), and phone conversation often constitutes a middle-ground that leaves me unsatisfied, not knowing how best to inflect my voice (so as not to sound, oh, hyper-enthusiastic or jaded or logorrheic or flustered or what have you - conveying appropriate emotionality through voice modulation is harder than you'd think). yet today a friend called me on the phone and filled me with a certain sense of hopefulness and ideas - some swirling of possibility, let's say - that really redeemed the old móvil, whatever cancerous objects it may implant in my head sometime down the road. funny how laughing with others can be so good. actually, i want to do some kind of psychological study of 'the threshold of laughter' and why it's such a nice thing to make someone else laugh. also, sometimes i feel like the things that my friends are doing in the world astound me and make me say "yee-haw," because there are real aesthetic and political interventions taking place, people! not merely to be read about in books! argue with me about this, i invite you! if you're trying to contest the 'real,' however, i might just have to punch you in the head. in a non-violent way, of course. more like a gentle, obamastyle fist-bump to your insolent deconstructionist skull.
okay, so as not to get too gooey/sentimental here, i wanted also to mention that i was recently at a conference and on a panel about 'performance and the state.' it was a good panel, all told, and the papers were on the whole well-mellowed and mature things, not the objects of a lusty engagement with derrida amid fits of procrastinatory pencil-chewing. this by-and-large goodness of papers was partly the result of a couple well -seasoned old pieces of hardtack (that is, professors) having been included on the panel along with us mojados. anyhow, one of them had written what was basically a love-song to vladimir putin, and she included various pictures of putin without a shirt (apparently the phrase "man-boobs" was written in russian somewhere on the trash-mag included with this image), putin wielding nunchucks, putin singlehandedly tranquilizing a siberian tiger, etc. also included in this wildly multimedia paper were links to youtube videos - putin montages and sung homages, such as this one by a pop group called "Singing Together," the refrain of which goes:
Someone like Putin, full of strength
Someone like Putin, who doesn’t drink
Someone like Putin, who doesn’t hurt me
Someone like Putin, who won’t run away.
I just thought that that was sort of a gem, guys, and so i wanted to share it with you "all." interestingly, her paper concluded that putin presents two very different faces - one focused on the West, and one turned inward to the Volk of russia (which term i used to know, but which i've since forgotten. this lady, who is an excellent scholar of russian theatre and performance history, eventually started to get a little bit too intense with her 'analysis' and commented at one point that in the course of her research, she'd begun to fall for putin, or something of the sort. i guess that's some form of stockholm sydrome?
Coming up in the next post:
-more drear and droll thoughts about history (hopefully more droll than drear)
-thinking about writing a satirical essay entitled "new forms of radicalism" as a sort of eulogy to the Radical Left
-thinking about doing a series of performance art pieces predicated on the notion of "help" and the way that's developed in the US both globally and domestically...this would involve thinking about things like: current translations of judeo-christian practices of charity, including tsedaka/tithing or leaving the corners of your field unreaped; racism and voluntarism (like the thing that i was going to do several months ago involving a black male performer who went around and asked people if they needed help); gender and help (of course) - thinking especially about issues of aid and shame; and the welfare state vs. capitalist individualism, since this is now a prime moment to think about how the state shades moral and how this may or may not intersect with issues of collectivism/individualism. Which leads to a discussion of heroism in all its very American manifestations - the Anglo, square-jawed man who runs in to save the white-clad virgin from the little dark guy who means to do unspeakable things with her chaste body. Okay, perhaps this is a bit overplayed, but i do think that the collectivism/individualism/morality triad is worth examining. it's just interesting to me that 'communists' are linked to so-called 'degenerates' of all stripes, despite communism's ideological flexibility - though this could well be subject to argumentation, i know, since marxism had a lot to do with liberation theology and communism has often been extremely ideological, reaching into all areas of cultural representation and touting dogmas about fealty and the like...hm. okay, so this is not just political economy. but still, thinking about the welfare state as it intersects with the moral discourses contained in the multivariable concept of "help" is, i think, worthwhile.
any thoughts, please add 'em! this lady, like NYC post 9/11, is open for business.
oh - oh - also, help/disgust. for example, in order to strike many 'activist consumers' as appropriately deserving, those in need of help seem to need to hit certain marks of representation, be they the wide-eyed starving child in the third world or the manly, dignified anglo who has to suck it up and ask for help but would not normally do so outside of these extreme circumstances. help has a lot to do with a certain part of our brains linked to maternity, care, love, eros, generosity, dignity, and other keywords. i would argue that if our disgust sensors light up, we are much less likely to 'help.' okay, Jesus knew that, and that's why he did the stuff with the lepers. so the fact that Jesus was able to repress his disgust functions means that he was some sort of deity. See the problem with Christian love?
okay, that was nearly a rant. but the shame/respect thing is also strong. again, Mary Douglas is the one to see about these things. i do, however, think that exploring these ideas through methods of representation (be they performance, video, or another type of visual art, perhaps one more fixed) may help us to gain a better understanding of this whole 'help' nexus, which - with its shades of guilt, altruism, desire, and disavowal - seems to infect almost everyone these days. not that we should be 'free' of this - that's what the goldwaters in this world want. (and by that i mean the barry goldwaters. I'm sure that there are perfectly lovely and sweet-tempered goldwaters living somewhere in the world.) i just think that there are so many complications that arise from the idea of 'help' and the desire to help - which is extremely important, i would say - that often this inchoate desire does not translate into material effects and often results in harm. what's needed on this path between the desire to help and the outcomes of this desire is a sort of help intestinal tract, a middle(wo)man who can smooth along the aid and link the beginning of the worm to the end, as it were. not sure if this makes any sense.
or maybe (and this is the more cynical way to go) we can never control the things that we put out in the world, and our desire is destined never to amount to something concrete, because 'help' and its effects cannot necessarily be measured, even when it seems like it can. this is the direct result of confusing long- and short-term effects - the 'teach a man to fish' dilemma. i was actually talking about this issue in the company of some governicrats the other day, because one of them (about whom you will hear MUCH more, dear readers) works for the department of homeland security (yes, i had a beer with Satan) and so is in on these discussions surrouding the DHS's many interminable 'wars' with indeterminable outcomes. what happens when you can only measure bad results (like towers bombed, people killed, and defenses broken)? is this, in fact, inevitable? Wasn't this why people were skeptical of Freud - because his theories had no inbuilt process of proof? Marx, too - weren't his critics quick to jump on the fact that his historical materialist timeline could well be a bunch of hooey, because it ended with a sort of 'book of revelations' flair? Okay, people, i'm going to seriously turn around here and say that like Marx, like Freud, and like the War on Terror, we must continue to have these desires and projections even if there is no palpable way to measure their efficacy. That is, while we throw out cause-and-effect and consign ourselves to chaos theory, we must, nevertheless, continue to pretend that we can judge the outcomes of our actions. i say "we must" in the sense of inevitability and a certain mandate not to flag in our hope. which is to say that while i'm pro-marx and freud, i'm against the war on terror, because i have the sense from the outset that the war on terror is not going to yield as many good effects as it is going to yield bad effects. note that i have not been entirely cynical and said, "well, we can never know, it's in God's hands, so let's just continue these shoddy and disastrous policies." No, i'm saying that my commitment to the idea that outcomes have material effects that can be understood by someone at some point in time leads me to want to develop something better, more effective, and infinitely less harmful than the 'war on terror.'
again, that may have been convoluted. but i'm still developing all of this, rolling it around in my head...and actually, i left off with a pretty good segue into my new thoughts about history, which will appear in the forthcoming Blogge Poste.
-
it may strike my nonexistent readers as odd that i have a baseline opinion of hating to talk on the phone. when given the choice, i prefer that ever-elusive 'liveness' (either that or the epistolary puppetry offered by email), and phone conversation often constitutes a middle-ground that leaves me unsatisfied, not knowing how best to inflect my voice (so as not to sound, oh, hyper-enthusiastic or jaded or logorrheic or flustered or what have you - conveying appropriate emotionality through voice modulation is harder than you'd think). yet today a friend called me on the phone and filled me with a certain sense of hopefulness and ideas - some swirling of possibility, let's say - that really redeemed the old móvil, whatever cancerous objects it may implant in my head sometime down the road. funny how laughing with others can be so good. actually, i want to do some kind of psychological study of 'the threshold of laughter' and why it's such a nice thing to make someone else laugh. also, sometimes i feel like the things that my friends are doing in the world astound me and make me say "yee-haw," because there are real aesthetic and political interventions taking place, people! not merely to be read about in books! argue with me about this, i invite you! if you're trying to contest the 'real,' however, i might just have to punch you in the head. in a non-violent way, of course. more like a gentle, obamastyle fist-bump to your insolent deconstructionist skull.
okay, so as not to get too gooey/sentimental here, i wanted also to mention that i was recently at a conference and on a panel about 'performance and the state.' it was a good panel, all told, and the papers were on the whole well-mellowed and mature things, not the objects of a lusty engagement with derrida amid fits of procrastinatory pencil-chewing. this by-and-large goodness of papers was partly the result of a couple well -seasoned old pieces of hardtack (that is, professors) having been included on the panel along with us mojados. anyhow, one of them had written what was basically a love-song to vladimir putin, and she included various pictures of putin without a shirt (apparently the phrase "man-boobs" was written in russian somewhere on the trash-mag included with this image), putin wielding nunchucks, putin singlehandedly tranquilizing a siberian tiger, etc. also included in this wildly multimedia paper were links to youtube videos - putin montages and sung homages, such as this one by a pop group called "Singing Together," the refrain of which goes:
Someone like Putin, full of strength
Someone like Putin, who doesn’t drink
Someone like Putin, who doesn’t hurt me
Someone like Putin, who won’t run away.
I just thought that that was sort of a gem, guys, and so i wanted to share it with you "all." interestingly, her paper concluded that putin presents two very different faces - one focused on the West, and one turned inward to the Volk of russia (which term i used to know, but which i've since forgotten. this lady, who is an excellent scholar of russian theatre and performance history, eventually started to get a little bit too intense with her 'analysis' and commented at one point that in the course of her research, she'd begun to fall for putin, or something of the sort. i guess that's some form of stockholm sydrome?
Coming up in the next post:
-more drear and droll thoughts about history (hopefully more droll than drear)
-thinking about writing a satirical essay entitled "new forms of radicalism" as a sort of eulogy to the Radical Left
-thinking about doing a series of performance art pieces predicated on the notion of "help" and the way that's developed in the US both globally and domestically...this would involve thinking about things like: current translations of judeo-christian practices of charity, including tsedaka/tithing or leaving the corners of your field unreaped; racism and voluntarism (like the thing that i was going to do several months ago involving a black male performer who went around and asked people if they needed help); gender and help (of course) - thinking especially about issues of aid and shame; and the welfare state vs. capitalist individualism, since this is now a prime moment to think about how the state shades moral and how this may or may not intersect with issues of collectivism/individualism. Which leads to a discussion of heroism in all its very American manifestations - the Anglo, square-jawed man who runs in to save the white-clad virgin from the little dark guy who means to do unspeakable things with her chaste body. Okay, perhaps this is a bit overplayed, but i do think that the collectivism/individualism/morality triad is worth examining. it's just interesting to me that 'communists' are linked to so-called 'degenerates' of all stripes, despite communism's ideological flexibility - though this could well be subject to argumentation, i know, since marxism had a lot to do with liberation theology and communism has often been extremely ideological, reaching into all areas of cultural representation and touting dogmas about fealty and the like...hm. okay, so this is not just political economy. but still, thinking about the welfare state as it intersects with the moral discourses contained in the multivariable concept of "help" is, i think, worthwhile.
any thoughts, please add 'em! this lady, like NYC post 9/11, is open for business.
oh - oh - also, help/disgust. for example, in order to strike many 'activist consumers' as appropriately deserving, those in need of help seem to need to hit certain marks of representation, be they the wide-eyed starving child in the third world or the manly, dignified anglo who has to suck it up and ask for help but would not normally do so outside of these extreme circumstances. help has a lot to do with a certain part of our brains linked to maternity, care, love, eros, generosity, dignity, and other keywords. i would argue that if our disgust sensors light up, we are much less likely to 'help.' okay, Jesus knew that, and that's why he did the stuff with the lepers. so the fact that Jesus was able to repress his disgust functions means that he was some sort of deity. See the problem with Christian love?
okay, that was nearly a rant. but the shame/respect thing is also strong. again, Mary Douglas is the one to see about these things. i do, however, think that exploring these ideas through methods of representation (be they performance, video, or another type of visual art, perhaps one more fixed) may help us to gain a better understanding of this whole 'help' nexus, which - with its shades of guilt, altruism, desire, and disavowal - seems to infect almost everyone these days. not that we should be 'free' of this - that's what the goldwaters in this world want. (and by that i mean the barry goldwaters. I'm sure that there are perfectly lovely and sweet-tempered goldwaters living somewhere in the world.) i just think that there are so many complications that arise from the idea of 'help' and the desire to help - which is extremely important, i would say - that often this inchoate desire does not translate into material effects and often results in harm. what's needed on this path between the desire to help and the outcomes of this desire is a sort of help intestinal tract, a middle(wo)man who can smooth along the aid and link the beginning of the worm to the end, as it were. not sure if this makes any sense.
or maybe (and this is the more cynical way to go) we can never control the things that we put out in the world, and our desire is destined never to amount to something concrete, because 'help' and its effects cannot necessarily be measured, even when it seems like it can. this is the direct result of confusing long- and short-term effects - the 'teach a man to fish' dilemma. i was actually talking about this issue in the company of some governicrats the other day, because one of them (about whom you will hear MUCH more, dear readers) works for the department of homeland security (yes, i had a beer with Satan) and so is in on these discussions surrouding the DHS's many interminable 'wars' with indeterminable outcomes. what happens when you can only measure bad results (like towers bombed, people killed, and defenses broken)? is this, in fact, inevitable? Wasn't this why people were skeptical of Freud - because his theories had no inbuilt process of proof? Marx, too - weren't his critics quick to jump on the fact that his historical materialist timeline could well be a bunch of hooey, because it ended with a sort of 'book of revelations' flair? Okay, people, i'm going to seriously turn around here and say that like Marx, like Freud, and like the War on Terror, we must continue to have these desires and projections even if there is no palpable way to measure their efficacy. That is, while we throw out cause-and-effect and consign ourselves to chaos theory, we must, nevertheless, continue to pretend that we can judge the outcomes of our actions. i say "we must" in the sense of inevitability and a certain mandate not to flag in our hope. which is to say that while i'm pro-marx and freud, i'm against the war on terror, because i have the sense from the outset that the war on terror is not going to yield as many good effects as it is going to yield bad effects. note that i have not been entirely cynical and said, "well, we can never know, it's in God's hands, so let's just continue these shoddy and disastrous policies." No, i'm saying that my commitment to the idea that outcomes have material effects that can be understood by someone at some point in time leads me to want to develop something better, more effective, and infinitely less harmful than the 'war on terror.'
again, that may have been convoluted. but i'm still developing all of this, rolling it around in my head...and actually, i left off with a pretty good segue into my new thoughts about history, which will appear in the forthcoming Blogge Poste.
-
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
something about history
so, right now i'm trying to put together my syllabus (not to be confused with syllabub, the british cream-based dessert) on western theatre history from 1650 to 1914, and it strikes me as extremely absurd that art would be divided up into movements and periods that correspond in some way with a little something called time. question: will we be able to say, four hundred years from now, that from 1980 to roughly 2080 (just to keep things in nice round numbers) there was an aesthetic movement featuring decadence (in Britain), whipped cream (in France) and eviscerated sheep (in the Low Countries)? or will things have splintered beyond movementization, as those poststructuralists would have us believe? is it, in fact, arrogant to consider oneself outside of history, when you're clearly not going to be the one writing the history? that is, is it arrogant to feel like you know as much as people will in the future, when we clearly know more than people did in the past? or do we in fact not know more - is THIS the truly arrogant move, thinking that we know more (and thus that there's been some sort of positivist development/progress narrative going on)than "they" did? what if i reverse this by claiming that knowing more actually makes us more "primitive," caught up in our own tangles of overknowledge? or is this a totally unintelligible and therefore untenable argument? okay. ohhhkay.
anyhow, it's really quaint to wrap up 500 years or so into a neat little package of "religious drama" or "realist art" or what have you. my guess would be that it's something like the rings of saturn - neat and consolidated-looking from a distance but fragmented and incoherent up close. i love that phrase, and the way that it rolls off the tongue as an explanation of chaos - "oh, rings of saturn." it doesn't even need a verb.
so, now to propose a solution to this 'rings of saturn' dilemma: let's start an aesthetic movement that consciously situates itself in history, taking place, oh, for about 40 years as a certain school attracting a coterie of talented youth of all shapes, genders, and races...so that it is at once a movement and a meta-movement, producing the documentation/archiving/historiography of itself as it exists. this is a sort of borgesian experiment, i'll grant, but i think that we should really make things easier for future scholars by inserting ourselves into history so they don't have to hunt around for us. ha-HA! this is so boring and not-funny! okay, enough.
anyhow, it's really quaint to wrap up 500 years or so into a neat little package of "religious drama" or "realist art" or what have you. my guess would be that it's something like the rings of saturn - neat and consolidated-looking from a distance but fragmented and incoherent up close. i love that phrase, and the way that it rolls off the tongue as an explanation of chaos - "oh, rings of saturn." it doesn't even need a verb.
so, now to propose a solution to this 'rings of saturn' dilemma: let's start an aesthetic movement that consciously situates itself in history, taking place, oh, for about 40 years as a certain school attracting a coterie of talented youth of all shapes, genders, and races...so that it is at once a movement and a meta-movement, producing the documentation/archiving/historiography of itself as it exists. this is a sort of borgesian experiment, i'll grant, but i think that we should really make things easier for future scholars by inserting ourselves into history so they don't have to hunt around for us. ha-HA! this is so boring and not-funny! okay, enough.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
seeing ghosts on the staircases of the upper west side.
hello - so this is not really a blog post, per se, but a couple of guilty moments grasping at pleasure. you know how that goes, readers. have to let the sap trickle into your mouth when you can.
so, i was recently at a halloween party, and i stayed out until roughly 3:30 am and took the A train home (how duke ellingtonian of me), to my friend's apartment, where i've been sleeping on the couch while doing some research in harlem. the apartment is very nice and swanky, full of delicate and expensive (and highly breakable) objets d'art. i feel as though i am a giant troll with rheumatoid arthritis while in this place, and so i've been happy to leave for my other friend's couch in the dust-filled crevasses of brooklyn. anyhow, though, so i was returning to this apartment, which is as far as i can tell full of israelis and ortho-jews, my kinsmen up and down the ivories of diaspora, such that the other night while staying there i heard the strains of "hinei ma tovu ma naaaaaim," as childlike voices rose up through the airshaft. it brought back memories, strangely poignant ones, which have lately fueled my weird fixation with the history (and historicity) of jewish music - or 'jew tunes,' as i've been calling them. you know, the greatest hits of the high holy days, sung by perry como and barbara streisand - songs so melancholic and good that they're allowed into the domain of goyische vegas crooners! amazing. kol nidre and its sort of "floating world" milieu, avinu malkeinu with its choir evoking some sort of cowering mass standing in fear before a column of fire; the good stuff like that. none of this new-agey, acoustic guitar, sitting on the bima crap. sorry, debbie whatever your name is, but your reinterpretations of jew tunes, and their emphasis on crescendoing major chords, are terrible. if i ever saw you at a bar mitzvah, i'd be tempted to throw a latke at your head.
but where was i? hm, oh yes. so there are a lot of jews around this building. and in new york in general - it's mindboggling for me to be around all of these different iterations of jews. i can't say why, exactly, but there's a visceral quality, something massy and epic and abysmal (in every sense) pervading this feeling. the other day i was speaking with some friends, and one of them mentioned that she'd had this "vagina dentata" moment while contemplating the ineffable hugeness of the marianas trench. the other said that his moment of incomprehension came when he contemplated the unbreachable gap between sensations and the language that we use to express them. mine, i must say, comes in the company of domesticated animals and orthodox jews. something about looking into the eyes of the other and reading a blank stare...something about ideology. something about the strange plumage of ritual, particularly regarding the hair, and the fervid looks in orthodox jews' eyes, along with their pale cheeks with points of pink in their centers, as they read magazines and check out dvds in the "adult video" (wow, that really confused me at first) section of the williamsburg(h) branch of the new york public library, where i've gone during the days to attempt futile and flaccid but occasionally pellucid stabs at my fellowship applications.
keep this in mind, people: i am a jew. so i can say these things...?
also, i recently learned that my grandmother used to take part in the ritual where you swing a live chicken over your head, and over the heads of your loved ones, during the high holy days. you see, she grew up orthodox, and up until the point that she married my grandfather, she never questioned this ceremony. sort of the vodun of judaism, i guess - but circusy, with all those flying feathers and grim-faced, dark-suited (is)raelians.
aaaanyway, back to't. so i was walking into the building (inside the elevator of which i actually got hit on by this large musician who asked me if i was 'a thespian,' to which i applied in the negatory and then countered by asking him if he was an israeli - clever with my parries and thrusts, eh?), and at about 4 in the morning i was going up the back stairs (for some reason - maybe i wanted to try them out, because i always enjoy seeing old stairwells and the ways in which people take care to design newels and banisters and things like that, even if they're never meant to be seen - herein lies the antiquarian/steam punk in me), and as i reached the fourth floor, i was stalled by a soft noise like someone riffling through papers. it was something like the noise that a mouse would make with its tail. i should mention that all the residents place their recycling on landings in the back stairwell, which i didn't know, and which was sort of a letdown, all these piles of garbage gumming up the institutionally elegant passageway - and anyhow, i saw this old, old lady, hunched over with major scoliosis, emaciated like anita webster (see previous posts on impoverished prodigal pianists in panama), and with dusty clothes and two-tone hair (red and white, the red seemingly layered on top of the white, wiglike). this lady looked up at me with an air of banal skepticism spiked with an almost imperceptible bit of fear/surprise, and she simply kept going through the garbage, though i don't know if she was putting things in or taking them out, because she was moving very slowly. stupidly, i said "hello" in an automatic and cheerful voice (good proof that i am finally ready to work in the service sector). she did not reply. my face was half-covered with an intricate and lumpy-textured fake blood pattern, i should note, but that's beside the point. for some reason, i briefly entertained the possibility that this lady was a ghost, some kind of yearning apparition, which i decided was probably preferable (the idea especially congenial to my hostess in the building) to the possibility of her being a homeless person. then i tried to silently and seamlessly shift my body past hers without interrupting her "flow," as she did not seem to enjoy my being there with her. i wondered how she'd got into the building in the first place, whether she was a resident, and what she was doing up at this hour. the whole thing was odd but not necessarily off-putting. she seemed a friendly and timid ghost, if anything, even one incapable of speech. there was definitely a mute quality about her, and she moved as if in a trance.
anyhow, the weird thing is that after i got into the apartment, i repeated to myself about ten times that i would definitely tell the apartment's owner and my friend about this incident, because it had struck me so definitively, and yet when i fell asleep, i completely forgot about it until about four days later, when i was pondering the stairwell. strange to completely forget about such an encounter, especially one whose details impressed themselves on my mind with such intensity, and which left many dangling questions that i'd have liked to answer. another example of the mind's endless little sinkholes, into which important things disappear, leaving us with the comforting oil-slick of idiotic arcana to lap up on long commutes and in those blank vestibular spaces that we all know so well.
related to all this, i've been thinking a lot about writing a story about my grandmother, because i think that she represents an almost allegorical force, some embodiment of all the ways in which a person can tend toward extremes of bitterness and grasping need. clearly my grandmother is not all bad - in fact, i love her dearly for her punchy attitude and her eternal ennui - and my hope would be to portray this person both as an emotional parasite/black hole and as a supremely sympathetic character. you know what i'm talking about. perhaps this is hackneyed, but i feel like it needs to be exorcised. also, my grandmother is one of the most compelling characters i know, for the way that she speaks extremely mean truths and is at the same time under major delusions of grandeur. she's also one of those very lucid and intelligent people who have been frustrated in their attempts to produce something of this (in her case, housewifery took the reins, as four children emerged and world war II started), and her sense of regret and pungent dissatisfaction is evident in nearly everything that she does. anyhow, a cautionary tale.
on another note, i'd like to write a story about a mother who accidentally poisons her child and the various ways that this has wrought havoc with her sense of maternal goodwill. this story would be a comic-macabre sort of satire, something sort of darkly funny. that's what i'm envisioning.
i should also mention, before i go (i've snatched enough gratification from this particular session, i think) that my recent research has been totally fascinating, the sort of thing that's sucked me in for hours at a time, as though i'm disappearing down some tunnel into fantasy. these days, time flies by, because there's so much to do. and yet i'm not deliriously happy, and i'm really glad about that. delirious happiness is a major drain on the faculties, you know. much better is the ability to sustain attention, display continuity, and surprise yourself with levels of commitment as yet unseen in this quavery little wet noodle of a resolve. i think that bravery is a good thing to have, but the modest kind, of course - and altruism is stupid. anyhow, i've been interviewing people and reading letters and unearthing multigenerational networks of an amazing afro-caribbean diaspora in the US. it's really something, and hopefully i will be able to accommodate all this in my dissertation...not to mention live up to all these expectations - this time put forth by real people, not bureaucratic juggernauts, star ac(k)ademics, or institutional review boards. (sorry, irb. but you know i hate you.)
so, i was recently at a halloween party, and i stayed out until roughly 3:30 am and took the A train home (how duke ellingtonian of me), to my friend's apartment, where i've been sleeping on the couch while doing some research in harlem. the apartment is very nice and swanky, full of delicate and expensive (and highly breakable) objets d'art. i feel as though i am a giant troll with rheumatoid arthritis while in this place, and so i've been happy to leave for my other friend's couch in the dust-filled crevasses of brooklyn. anyhow, though, so i was returning to this apartment, which is as far as i can tell full of israelis and ortho-jews, my kinsmen up and down the ivories of diaspora, such that the other night while staying there i heard the strains of "hinei ma tovu ma naaaaaim," as childlike voices rose up through the airshaft. it brought back memories, strangely poignant ones, which have lately fueled my weird fixation with the history (and historicity) of jewish music - or 'jew tunes,' as i've been calling them. you know, the greatest hits of the high holy days, sung by perry como and barbara streisand - songs so melancholic and good that they're allowed into the domain of goyische vegas crooners! amazing. kol nidre and its sort of "floating world" milieu, avinu malkeinu with its choir evoking some sort of cowering mass standing in fear before a column of fire; the good stuff like that. none of this new-agey, acoustic guitar, sitting on the bima crap. sorry, debbie whatever your name is, but your reinterpretations of jew tunes, and their emphasis on crescendoing major chords, are terrible. if i ever saw you at a bar mitzvah, i'd be tempted to throw a latke at your head.
but where was i? hm, oh yes. so there are a lot of jews around this building. and in new york in general - it's mindboggling for me to be around all of these different iterations of jews. i can't say why, exactly, but there's a visceral quality, something massy and epic and abysmal (in every sense) pervading this feeling. the other day i was speaking with some friends, and one of them mentioned that she'd had this "vagina dentata" moment while contemplating the ineffable hugeness of the marianas trench. the other said that his moment of incomprehension came when he contemplated the unbreachable gap between sensations and the language that we use to express them. mine, i must say, comes in the company of domesticated animals and orthodox jews. something about looking into the eyes of the other and reading a blank stare...something about ideology. something about the strange plumage of ritual, particularly regarding the hair, and the fervid looks in orthodox jews' eyes, along with their pale cheeks with points of pink in their centers, as they read magazines and check out dvds in the "adult video" (wow, that really confused me at first) section of the williamsburg(h) branch of the new york public library, where i've gone during the days to attempt futile and flaccid but occasionally pellucid stabs at my fellowship applications.
keep this in mind, people: i am a jew. so i can say these things...?
also, i recently learned that my grandmother used to take part in the ritual where you swing a live chicken over your head, and over the heads of your loved ones, during the high holy days. you see, she grew up orthodox, and up until the point that she married my grandfather, she never questioned this ceremony. sort of the vodun of judaism, i guess - but circusy, with all those flying feathers and grim-faced, dark-suited (is)raelians.
aaaanyway, back to't. so i was walking into the building (inside the elevator of which i actually got hit on by this large musician who asked me if i was 'a thespian,' to which i applied in the negatory and then countered by asking him if he was an israeli - clever with my parries and thrusts, eh?), and at about 4 in the morning i was going up the back stairs (for some reason - maybe i wanted to try them out, because i always enjoy seeing old stairwells and the ways in which people take care to design newels and banisters and things like that, even if they're never meant to be seen - herein lies the antiquarian/steam punk in me), and as i reached the fourth floor, i was stalled by a soft noise like someone riffling through papers. it was something like the noise that a mouse would make with its tail. i should mention that all the residents place their recycling on landings in the back stairwell, which i didn't know, and which was sort of a letdown, all these piles of garbage gumming up the institutionally elegant passageway - and anyhow, i saw this old, old lady, hunched over with major scoliosis, emaciated like anita webster (see previous posts on impoverished prodigal pianists in panama), and with dusty clothes and two-tone hair (red and white, the red seemingly layered on top of the white, wiglike). this lady looked up at me with an air of banal skepticism spiked with an almost imperceptible bit of fear/surprise, and she simply kept going through the garbage, though i don't know if she was putting things in or taking them out, because she was moving very slowly. stupidly, i said "hello" in an automatic and cheerful voice (good proof that i am finally ready to work in the service sector). she did not reply. my face was half-covered with an intricate and lumpy-textured fake blood pattern, i should note, but that's beside the point. for some reason, i briefly entertained the possibility that this lady was a ghost, some kind of yearning apparition, which i decided was probably preferable (the idea especially congenial to my hostess in the building) to the possibility of her being a homeless person. then i tried to silently and seamlessly shift my body past hers without interrupting her "flow," as she did not seem to enjoy my being there with her. i wondered how she'd got into the building in the first place, whether she was a resident, and what she was doing up at this hour. the whole thing was odd but not necessarily off-putting. she seemed a friendly and timid ghost, if anything, even one incapable of speech. there was definitely a mute quality about her, and she moved as if in a trance.
anyhow, the weird thing is that after i got into the apartment, i repeated to myself about ten times that i would definitely tell the apartment's owner and my friend about this incident, because it had struck me so definitively, and yet when i fell asleep, i completely forgot about it until about four days later, when i was pondering the stairwell. strange to completely forget about such an encounter, especially one whose details impressed themselves on my mind with such intensity, and which left many dangling questions that i'd have liked to answer. another example of the mind's endless little sinkholes, into which important things disappear, leaving us with the comforting oil-slick of idiotic arcana to lap up on long commutes and in those blank vestibular spaces that we all know so well.
related to all this, i've been thinking a lot about writing a story about my grandmother, because i think that she represents an almost allegorical force, some embodiment of all the ways in which a person can tend toward extremes of bitterness and grasping need. clearly my grandmother is not all bad - in fact, i love her dearly for her punchy attitude and her eternal ennui - and my hope would be to portray this person both as an emotional parasite/black hole and as a supremely sympathetic character. you know what i'm talking about. perhaps this is hackneyed, but i feel like it needs to be exorcised. also, my grandmother is one of the most compelling characters i know, for the way that she speaks extremely mean truths and is at the same time under major delusions of grandeur. she's also one of those very lucid and intelligent people who have been frustrated in their attempts to produce something of this (in her case, housewifery took the reins, as four children emerged and world war II started), and her sense of regret and pungent dissatisfaction is evident in nearly everything that she does. anyhow, a cautionary tale.
on another note, i'd like to write a story about a mother who accidentally poisons her child and the various ways that this has wrought havoc with her sense of maternal goodwill. this story would be a comic-macabre sort of satire, something sort of darkly funny. that's what i'm envisioning.
i should also mention, before i go (i've snatched enough gratification from this particular session, i think) that my recent research has been totally fascinating, the sort of thing that's sucked me in for hours at a time, as though i'm disappearing down some tunnel into fantasy. these days, time flies by, because there's so much to do. and yet i'm not deliriously happy, and i'm really glad about that. delirious happiness is a major drain on the faculties, you know. much better is the ability to sustain attention, display continuity, and surprise yourself with levels of commitment as yet unseen in this quavery little wet noodle of a resolve. i think that bravery is a good thing to have, but the modest kind, of course - and altruism is stupid. anyhow, i've been interviewing people and reading letters and unearthing multigenerational networks of an amazing afro-caribbean diaspora in the US. it's really something, and hopefully i will be able to accommodate all this in my dissertation...not to mention live up to all these expectations - this time put forth by real people, not bureaucratic juggernauts, star ac(k)ademics, or institutional review boards. (sorry, irb. but you know i hate you.)
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