I don’t know what will happen but I know what I’ll do

For me and many of my friends, it’s going to be hard to feel sane for the next few days. And it might stay hard for the next few years. Or even the next few decades. But I really do want to stay not only sane, but calm, kind, and even hopeful. And strangely enough, I think I’m going to be able to. Because even though I don’t know what the outcomes of my efforts will be, I know exactly what I’ll be doing the day after the election.

All my jobs will be, in essence, the same. I will be a friend and family member to all with whom I am lucky enough to share my life; I will be a writer, scholar and educator grappling with all the ideas and potentials that the present moment offers and threatens; I will be part of a labor movement that seeks dignity and justice for all workers in and out of unions; and I will be a Christian struggling in faith to discern and do my small part to make God’s vision a reality on this earth.

I also know what I won’t be doing the day after the election. I won’t be facebooking, tweeting, and googleplus-ing my euphoria or despair. I won’t be indulging in the certainty that this is the end of my nation, my party, or my movement. I won’t be celebrating as if this is the end of my frustrations, the imperfections of my political organizations, or the need for me to be actively involved in the conversations and decisions that affect the world.

Because it’s never just my world, it’s always the world that my choices, our choices, and everybody else’s choices are creating. There will never be a way of turning that into a system that can just be kickstarted with a single candidate or finished with a single election and left to run itself–at least not in a way that will create a world we will celebrate.

Is this all just an intellectual defense against the grief that I will feel if Mitt Romney is elected, which might even dwarf the grief I felt in 2000, 2003, and 2004, and 2008 over the news from California? Is it Pollyanna talk that won’t help if Proposal 2 fails and I lose my right to collective bargaining next semester? In part, it must surely be. My grief if these two things come to pass will be real. As in the past, it will never really go away, it will change forms and maybe dull over time. As in the past, it will not be in vain, either

Is this all just tough talk that will fade away if Obama is re-elected and Michigan becomes a state that has workers’ rights in its constitution? More than ever, I don’t want it to be. In the past year, I have encountered so many prophetic voices that are all saying versions of the same thing: the world we desire requires activism that is sustainable, long term, small and persistent. I have been lucky to have growing web of people around me who are providing examples of how to do this. Slowly, the anxiety I once felt about “stealing” time from building a career is being transformed into gratitude for the call to build a life. I don’t particularly want to go home from activism anymore, although I am highly aware that it has taken me a long time to be able to say that.

If the worst happens and I once again feel that I am in spiritual exile from the country of my birth, I have spiritual tools to sustain me. I have the memory of how unproductive post-election ranting can be. I have a newfound appreciation for the Psalms–aka, how to survive and thrive in exile. I have a heart that is softening towards one of the Bible’s hardest messages: our hope is not in changing the past, it is in creating the future. No one will ever be able to truly repair the damage that any election has done in anyone’s life–and civilians all over the globe can attest to the damage that US elections have a way of doing. No matter what happens there will be more than enough grief to go around, on all sides, in a patchwork of hopes fulfilled, betrayed, and postponed. There will be people who feel that they are in exile for more reasons than I can know or count.

But future will not depend on how I feel after the election. The future will depend on what I, we, you, and they do after the election.

For the day and the week after the election, I am going to try to take refuge in reflection and recovery, in prayers that don’t assume to know the answer to all the problems no single election or single day can change. I will try to be open to conversations with friends who are reeling from the election and conversations with friends who still, somehow, will barely even have noticed that it happened. I will continue, in as many small acts of care as I can imagine, in the willingness to see the faces of people with whom I have never talked, and in the willingness to ask hard questions of myself about my role in the future being created.

Despite and still

I’m writing again, after a year in which the hour a day I had gotten into the habit of devoting to poetry started to seem like the 50 pages I wasn’t reading for prelims. Prelims are over. So is the campaign for research assistants at my university to get the right to form a union, the other reason I had stopped writing. Again, that hour a day I wrote largely unintelligible (and certainly unpublishable) fragments in my notebook started to seem legible only as the hour I wasn’t writing a press release, knocking on an office door to have an organizing conversation, or simply marshaling the immense emotional resources required for an introvert to do such things. Compared to other things I should have been doing, writing started to seem like time I couldn’t afford.

I’m writing again despite the knowledge that my having time to write is underwritten by the middle class-ness that implicates me in the overlapping systems of oppression my writing has not the slightest chance of changing. I’m writing pieces driven largely by my life, despite the fact that my life is noteworthy only for its viritually exact replication in countless other middle class bodies: white, female, 30, grad student three times over, married, able to afford food every day. I’m trying my hardest not to write this poem: “I ate/did/saw something yesterday that was so delicious/meaningful/pretty. It taught me X.” But on many days, every poem seems like that poem.

I’m trying to write despite not having conquered the impasse of my MFA defense: one committee member telling me I had lost my voice, that the writing I did before the MFA was better; one committee member telling me that wasn’t necessarily true but offering little in the way of feedback to help me understand what I might now be trying to do. One reader saying I’d gone too far in trimming out the emotions, one reader saying the emotions weren’t what was missing but something else still was.

I’m going to write even though I’m pretty sure I’m never going to publish. At some point, because I want to be read because I want to keep growing, I’ll probably start trying to get published again, but if readers are what I want, I don’t think publishing in places I currently know how to publish is the answer. I don’t need acceptance slips, I need a community–but all of poetic history tells me you can’t plan those, they just happen in certain cities at certain times, so I have assuredly missed that boat. I’ll write anyway.

I’m going to write even though I also feel fairly certain that I am part of a lost, or at least a gap, generation in many regards: my parents, literal and figurative, have for a long time been unable to prepare me for the meaning of work and achievement in the world ahead of me. I grew up in one world of achievement and am an adult in a very different one. I spent several years trying to become a writer for the future, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to do that in any meaningful way through trying to. As a literary critic in training, the gist I’m getting is that the approach to dealing with the massive poetic output of present moment, the concrete evidence that my feelings of unimportance are not defeatist but just accurate, into a blender and running a nutritional analysis of what comes out rather than reading individual writers. I don’t know how to write around this except to stop writing, and I now think I am not willing to do that  just because it would make sense.

As I’m writing, I’m thinking about just putting my poems on my blog and sending links to friends who might be interested. I’m feeling pretty far outside of any other social network that is likely to lead to formal publication of any kind. Given my frustration with whats getting published via the sampler systems of PD and DV these days, I don’t think I could embarrass myself that much worse than many others appear comfortable with. It’s a thought. What generation am I writing from if I don’t do it? If I do?

 

On fields

“Field” is a word I put to many uses. It has been my leading poetry tick for several years now–the crutch word I use when I want to represent a sense of existence that is larger and less definite than a narrative. Sometimes I use it literally (as in a few poems about standing alongside fields in Iowa), sometimes I use it in a more general way (in poems where I imagine a kind of actual field of grass or color), and sometimes I use it to turn things that have no rightful sense of field attached to them into fields of some variety (a window, for example). Fields seem much more appealing than stories. They hold an infinite number of potential points. They can be worlds unto themselves.

Fields are also what I’m supposed to be defining for myself this summer in the process of reading for prelims. Mine are, predictably, broad, (Multiethnic US Lit Post-1850 and Life Writing) and my biggest challenge is going to be explaining exactly what their limits (historical, aesthetic, thematic) are and why I think those limits are important.

Any kind of space can become a field–vastness can emerge from attention to small things. Jonathan Edwards puts it beautifully as he describes his experience of reading scripture: “I seemed often to see so much light exhibited by every sentence, and such a refreshing food communicated, that I could not get along in reading; often dwelling long on one sentence, to see the wonders contained in it; and yet almost every sentence seemed to be full of wonders” (from “Personal Narrative”). Time and the world can somehow expand when we force ourselves to inhabit boundaries.

Lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe fields are a bad habit of mine. Or at least, a habit that needs a counter-habit. I’ve started thinking that often when I imagine a field, I imagine myself outside of it. I’m looking at the field. As soon as you step into a field, it changes from a field into a specific cluster of grass making your knees itch and a specific bee you are swatting away from your hair. Your shoes get damp. You’re not in the shade. You kind of want to get out of the field, so you start taking steps and before you know it you’ve created a path through the field. As it turns out, you could not inhabit the entirety of the field, indefinitely. You did have to choose a specific set of steps through it.

The field can become a temptation. Ask Edna Pontellier, as the ocean she walks into at the end of The Awakening becomes the prairie of her childhood: “She did not look back now, but went on and on, thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when  little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end.” A seductive, and ultimately (for Edna and perhaps for others) self-destructive form of liberation. There is going to be a beginning and an end, and at some point it might be wise to reckon with that. Otherwise, a field can also become a way not to decide what to focus on and a way to avoid the details which inevitably present themselves upon interaction. There is a time for sentences to become wonders and a time to force oneself to try to put sentences together, one after the other, and try to say something. This is the only way new, wonderful fields can be created. An image, a poem, or a sentence that tried to say everything would ultimately say nothing. First, one has to commit to trying say, see, or be one thing.

On tap

I have been officially finished with all tasks pertaining the second year of doctoral study for over a month now. Which means I’ve started preparing, with a few existential hiccups and hang-ups along the way, for the primary task pertaining to the third year: the preliminary exam, or prelims as we call them.

Prelims in my discipline means a two hour oral examination covering two reading lists that are meant propose two fields of study. I get to pick the fields and make the lists–there’s no required texts, but my committee does have to approve whatever I pick. My fields are: Multiethnic US Literatures Post-1850 and Life Writing. No one has ever accused me of being too focused! The combined total for my two lists is currently running around 240 books (roughly 60% primary and 40% critical) with the goal to chop it to no more than 200 by the end and preferably more like 150. How that is going to happen, I’m not entirely sure, as I am an unrepentant comparatist (comparativist?) and that means having a chunk of foundational knowledge in a lot of different areas. But, the basic roadmap is in front of me.

I’m hoping to blog on a regular basis both about what I’m reading and how I’m fitting it into the jigsawed horizon I call my intellectual framework. And if I’m doing that, I’ll probably also be reflecting on just where all this work I’m doing fits in to the work of being a citizen and human being–another way of saying, fresh off a contract year of union volunteering, I’m feeling like the words “political” and “activism” need to be used to describe ways of being, not side projects that must inevitably detract from my professional work. And while I’m doing that, I’m also hoping to have a summer of consummate Michigander-ness, replete with Oberon, long runs in ungodly humidity, and tornado watches.

Hopefully, I’ll be back quite soon for a report on how all that’s going.

Lascaux

(I have tried and tried to get the opening image from this Life gallery to show up here. WordPress not being my friend today–but do click!)

Beautiful pictures from original Life photo shoot @ Lascaux caves. That the drawings are all of animals, and so beautiful and motion-filled, seems especially striking to me today. I just feel this immense respect and love for animals coming from these drawings. And the idea that these are probably the oldest art we have access to also seems moving–this is what humans did first. We tried to understand animals. Animals were the mystery and beauty that made us make tools to draw on rock. So when Aristotle writes in the Poetics that human beings are mainly interested in watching other humans, he might actually be revising history rather than stating an obvious starting point for mimetic art. We might not always have been so self-centered. (Interesting that the gallery alternates between pics of the cave and pics of the pic takers–demonstrating that we no longer quite as content as the pic makers were to focus on something other than humans.)

Transitionless

I looked out the kitchen window this morning as I was stirring milk and sugar into my tea and realized that the neighbor’s tree has no leaves on it. The last time I looked, it had a few bright yellow holdouts, which caught the sun and made it seem like fall was still here and might stay here indefinitely.

That feeling of not knowing exactly when changes that, in hindsight, are quite momentous happened has characterized these first few weeks of my second year in the PhD program. One day I was a grad student, wearing shorts and t-shirts with holes in them as I organized my day around reading books in my overstuffed office chair. Then a Tuesday came, and I was a teacher, wearing hose and black shoes and blocking my day into slots of reading for class, preparing for discussion, holding office hours. It was summer. I looked again and it was fall.

A little further into fall, a day came when I went into a room and explained what I had been doing my whole first year of grad school and walked out of it explaining what I was going to write my dissertation about. (Still very much up in the air, but for the first time, I felt like the word “project” was a word that might apply to my work.) I was incoherent, and then I was coherent. Well, more coherent. And coherent because I’d started to find a way to explain to other people why the connections I saw might be important, not just because I’d decided to agree with them that what they saw was more important.

A month after that, I went from being 28 years old to 29. I was reading an oral history of a Chinese feminist recently, and she spoke about a scheme of life where you spend the first 29 years of your life learning, the next 29 years working, and the last 29 teaching. Overnight, I’m in the second phase. I don’t feel like I’ve learned nearly enough or accomplished nearly enough. I also don’t feel like that anything I’ve tried to begin could have been finished in a short decade of young adulthood, and at certain times on certain days I do feel like I have work to do, and that the return of grey skies and grey trees isn’t the sign of a wasted year, but the sign of a year that is on its way to becoming the next one.

Letter to A re: Sufjan

So, Sufjan last night. He played a couple things from All Delighted
People and most everything from Age of Adz, which came out Tuesday and
if you don’t have it yet, I can drop it for you!

It probably encompassed more mood swings than any other concert I’ve
ever been to, so I just have to share with a fellow Suf lover. Fair
warning: opinions expressed below!

He led off w/ the full version of All Delighted People, which was a
really solid opener I thought. Rocked out a bit more than it sounds on
the EP. During the song he did, indeed, gesture for anyone currently
delighted at the show to raise their hands, but as it was only the
first number and I was a little frightened of what I heard of Age on
the car on the way over, I declined to do so.

Very quickly after that, I began to feel like a long time Bob Dylan
fan who just happened to get her first ticket to see him at the
Newport Folk Festival. I thought all the songs were too long by at
least twice, all the lyrics were flat and depressing, and all the
dissonance added up to nothing. Also, almost every song had
psychadelic animation projected behind the stage, planets flying
around and turning into purple vines and then naked women, etc. I will
just be really closeminded here and say those images annoy me. They
just make me feel like a toddler crawling around on the shag carpet in
the basement, lost among the covers of my mother’s record collection.
And also, if your song needs animation that looks like it was
concocted by someone tripping in 1970, maybe you should have
considered including one of the following things in it: a melody, a
verse, a harmonic progression.

About the middle of the show, Suf confirmed that the analogy I had
formed was correct, by saying “W’ere really happy to be here and
playing all new stuff–bet some of you are really bummed. But I had an
aesthetic crisis, and this is my new way of songwriting, based on
sound and ideas. Coming from the same place, I promise.”

After that, I was just sad. I’m not a hater, I like artists, I like
development. I read Language poetry for fun. But I just really missed
beautiful Suf. I wasn’t ready for noisy Suf. Plus, this stuff is
really heavy–based in part on work by an outsider artist from New
Orleans who was a paranoid schizophrenic and died alone despite having
eleven children. Suf introduced every song as “this is a reflection on
the apocalypse,” or “this is a reflection on standing on the rim of a
volcano and thinking about jumping in.” Good thing he told me not to
do it; I was considering it after that song too. Which isn’t to say
that any of the songs or the performance itself was anything less than
really, really well done. I just didn’t like it, and I didn’t like the
idea that there was no more were Illinoise came from. So sad.

But then.

Something happened right about when D figured out I was miserable
and wanted to leave. Suf announced they were playing the whole 25
minute mess of Impossible Soul (it’s a little like listening to one of
my undergrad’s papers, very draftlike), the last track on Adz. And
then I said, okay, I’ll stay at least until the autotune part. Which
sounds pretty fun in person, I have to say. Then it sounded better.
Then we had someone gone from soulful guitarness to rock to Passion
Pit dance groove and we still had two more lives to go, and everyone
was dancing, and Suf was dancing (like the white boy he so is) and
suddenly it felt a little better. A little.

Then something really amazing happened. They followed up Soul (during
which, I have to say, a few hecklers had made their preference for
“old stuff” known, which made me feel embarrassed for being a similar
kind of dismissive on the inside), with All Things Go from Illinoise,
and I got, I saw it–the new stuff is that road about 1500 miles
further down. I went from being near tears to being kind of amazed.

Just to seal the deal, he came out to play The Revenant on the piano
all by himself, and then that sad pretty one about bone cancer and
ended with what I think might be his greatest piece of pure, lyric
poetry-esque song writing, the song for John Wayne Gacy, which was as
beautiful and creepy as hell.

And then we drove home totally exhausted, and I woke up singing to
myself, “it’s not so impossible.” Hmmm. Maybe.

That is all, if you put up with all that this far!

Happy listening!

voice and Empire

Brian Spears recently tweeted to my attention two pieces debating the ethics of poetic appropriation of experiences you didn’t have and words you didn’t speak. The first is by Abe Louise Young, a poet who helped to curate an online collection archiving the oral histories of people who lived through Hurricane Katrina. The second is by Raymond McDaniel, a poet who used text from those oral histories with acknowledgement but without permission in his book of poetry, Saltwater Empire. (For the record, I have never met McDaniel despite geographical proximity.) There are things I disagree with in both pieces: McDaniel’s disdain for the autobiographical & his apparent belief that he has the right to exist in “the state of being categorically indiscriminate” (good luck with that), and Young’s equation of aesthetic experiment with political indifference for starters, but seeing as I’ve got issues of about something outside one’s direct experience on the brain, I’m going to focus on that.

Imagination. Engagement. Appropriation. Is one of these things not like the others?

Last week, I pulled out the a-word during my discussion of Virginia Woolf, Jack White, and Jack Kerouac. In that post, I made the beginning of a case for the idea that being inspired by or desiring the life of someone you could not possibly be mistaken for is not, inherently, wrong or bad. Of course, Woolf, White, and Kerouac didn’t literally use words that someone else spoke. They, for good or ill, came up with their own words to try to reach social worlds that seemed distant. They also did so within genres that made the creative act clear–Woolf was writing a novel, inventing a character; White  was counting on being judged on his musical chops and whether or not he had earned, musically, his quotations & homage, and Kerouac was explicitly writing in the first person, inviting us to see what he saw and then critique how he saw it.

Here we’ve got a case of someone else’s words and someone else’s experience. I think the problem we perceive here has more to do with the latter than the former. McDaniel cites his source, so it’s not exactly plagiarism. We could count words and quibble about fair use,* but that wouldn’t resolve the bigger question mark, which is how to read what he did: Is he using someone else’s painful experiences to refract off his own, and thereby root it in a context that feels more culturally important, relevant, serious, etc? Or is he using textual material to say something creatively? I’ll admit to being intrigued by his description of the “aesthetic and ethos” of the book. He describes sitting by an apartment swimming pool in August: “All three—water, air, rain—felt like different shapes of the same substance. Different, yet the same. Impossible.”

My critical mind is fairly open on the question of the potential literary value of telling stories that aren’t exactly yours. I’m a fan of the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I’m sympathetic to arguments that Buffalo Child Long Lance made the best out of a rotten social hand when he passed himself off as a Blood Indian and subsequently wrote an autobiography that should be read as a complex social allegory rather than fact, and I get absolutely furious when people criticize Woman Warrior as a memoir because so much of it is devoted to telling other people’s stories or lack of story. (Probably because I once studied with Bradley, I do hate James Frey, however.)

My less theoretical mind, though, is much more sympathetic to Young than to McDaniel.  McDaniel points out that he acknowledges the Truth Alive site, its creators, and its narrators in his book and includes a section discussing his method. I understand, to some extent, why this had to be enough for him: he didn’t want collaborators, he wanted material. Asking for permission would have meant giving other people a say in how his book turned out. In his mind, getting that material rather than making up his own was a way of getting outside of himself and acknowledging others’ voices. There is an argument to be made for using quotations rather than coming up with some fictionalized, truthy version, and there’s also, as Young points out, a tradition of poetry of witness. There are ways, Young suggests, that you can ethically engage.

McDaniel has tradition on his side too, although it’s a tradition that’s getting fairly picked apart in the critical world–the tradition of Pound and every other modernist that’s used source texts at will and with an insistence on the mystery & insularity of the creative process. Collaboration is not an aesthetic that gets much traction in this tradition.

If the issue, then, isn’t that it’s impossible to use others’ lives and texts to drive your own work but that McDaniel “did it wrong,” what beyond his biography tells us so? I am perhaps swayed by the way Young narrates her own decision as a poet to devote her time and energy in New Orleans post-Katrina not to writing poetry about it but to giving people who were potentially being reduced to media images a chance to speak publicly about it in a well-supported way. Yes, she could have gone the McDaniel route and used all the text around her as a prop for her own work, but she didn’t. I’m sympathetic to that choice, and perhaps my sympathy has something to do with growing up female and absorbing the idea that someone has to do what should get done before she does what she might want. Is that the only ethical choice one can make as a poet, or as a poet who has at least as much privilege as to have gotten an MFA? I don’t know if I’d go that far, either.

I think my hang up is with the imbalance of power that the existence of the book embodies. One person speaks and it’s “just” oral history. Another uses that speech to create, and it’s art. In an ideal world, there’d be no way anyone could appropriate these narrators’ words because they would already be well-known in their own right. They’d be getting recognition not just as victims but as people who have done work to tell a story important for our culture to hear. Using an oral history today, right now from post-Katrina New Orleans is qualitatively different than using a long-dead Chinese poet because it perpetuates a systematic problem that is ongoing–meaning, it’s happening in the present so it can be changed, in some small way, by acting in the present. I can do that by reading some of the original texts and thinking about the way I approach writing.

There’s only one thing I wrote last week that these two pieces have really caused me to question, which is my assessment that the writers I talked about got away with their brand of ventriloquism because they did it well. By that standard, I should say I can’t possibly answer the question of whether or not McDaniel did something ethically wrong until I’ve read his poetry–when of course the two questions are unrelated. I have his book on request at the library now.* But I’d have to acknowledge to leave this question to be answered by “time,” by waiting to see if there is uptake of McDaniel’s work on the level of aesthetics and poetic tradition (whatever that may be), is another way of leaving this imbalance of power intact in the present. I think the most I can do right now is be aware of that, and think about how that will influence my own writing and teaching while accepting, and maybe even embracing, that others will not reach the same conclusions I do for their own work.

* I’m assuming that McDaniel is making next to no money from his book, the same amount that most poets make for their books. He was, however, in the process of gaining a fair amount of recognition, which in the world of academy-based work can eventually translate into financial gain. If, for some reason, he was making a ton of money from this book, the copyright or wrongness of this would be much more clear. He’d owe royalties.

*Not promising I’ll read the whole thing. The title of the long poem he built around text from the oral histories is entitled “Convention Centers of the World.” That title to me, as a writer, smacks of Big Idea and Intellectual Construct without Jagged, Unexpected Language to go with, and I’m not interested in that.

It Might Get Complicated

“By the time I was about 18, somebody played me Son House. That was it for me. This spoke to me in a thousand different ways. I didn’t know that you could do that, just singing and clapping, and it meant everything. It meant everything about rock and roll, it meant everything about expression and creativity and art. One man against the world. And one song. “
–Jack White, in It Might Get Loud

“But the difficulty remains, one has to choose. For though I have no wish to be Queen of England—or only for a moment—I would willingly sit beside her; I would hear the Prime Minister’s gossip; the countess whisper, and share her memories of halls and gardens; the massive fronts of the respectable conceal after all their secret code; or why so impermeable? And then, doffing one’s own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment someone’s—anyone’s—to be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaena sings to the fragments of Sophocles…But no—we must choose. Never was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile: Whittaker in his lodging-house; Lady Charles at the Manor.”
–Virginia Woolf, from Jacob’s Room

Earlier this summer, I took a walking tour of Denver with my friend the Kerouac specialist. He took me to a baseball field on the side of town that used to be the black & immigrant side of town. We stopped in front of the chainlink fencing alongside the foul line, and he read me a passage from On the Road (or was it the journal? I’ve forgotten) in which Kerouac talks about the feeling of elation, of immersion in the present moment and physical delight of sports, that he gets from watching young black & Mexican and “Indian” men playing baseball. He is so happy about being out on that summer night watching them that he talks about how he wants to be one of these guys, he thinks his soul might have been better off had he been poor & colored. On first read, any English major of the 2000s vintage cringes at this. Way to objectify and idealize the other while ignoring one’s own privilege, JK. On second read, as my friend suggested, we might want to ask another question–is there a more charitable way to read this passage? Is it possible that Kerouac was not just in earnest but making a point we should consider?

If there is, it has something to do with coming to terms with the free floating nature of identification and creative inspiration. I think that’s what both Virginia Woolf & Jack White are trying to describe in the passages I quoted above. Encountering both It Might Get Loud and Jacob’s Room for the first time in this past week, I couldn’t help but connect Woolf’s & White’s meditations about the fundamental strangeness of relating so profoundly to a life that could not possibly be yours that you feel driven to try to inhabit it in your work.

Woolf and White move in kind of opposite but similar directions. Woolf chooses to center JR in the life of a character who has more privilege than she does, while White passionately wants to adopt the persona of an artist with less social/political power than he as a white male has. Both of them are inspired by what life must look like in those very different shoes, and even more than that, recognize themselves and their ambitions in that other life. In doing this, they in some way transform their content beyond recognition as potentially autobiographical. In Woolf’s case, it might seem like she’s either misidentifying with a male character or not gutsy enough to make a woman her protagonist. For White, the charges could be worse, he could appropriating an aesthetic rooted in experiences he certainly hasn’t had.

I’d say they get away with it because they do it mindfully & really well, and by that I mean they do it not to get points for accurately representing how someone else lives but to get at what they themselves, as individuals & artists, so urgently had to say. Woolf doesn’t just disappear inside of Jacob even as she inhabits his world (a world of formal education and independence that was off limits to middle class women of her day)–she uses the realistic contours of his life to make us see life in general. Not only that, but her narrator never lets us forget how gender-driven Jacob’s social world is. She uses her own difference as a lens to make Jacob more complicated and his world less predictable yet even more familiar somehow.

What I like about how Woolf & White talk about their (mis)identifications is that they both use them to talk about the illusion of identification in the first place. As Woolf’s narrator points out in the quoted passage–in which she’s literally talking about which point of view to adopt to describe the scene but on another level, I think, also talking about how one organizes one’s fantasy life–whether you choose to situate yourself next to a male or female character, you are always outside of them, you are always guessing and “in exile” from the reality of their lives. You are also missing other viable perspectives. White, at another point in the film, talks about the problem of being a white suburban adolescent loving Son House–how was he going to get away with singing like him? His solution was to throw people completely off the scent by starting a band with his sister and dressing up like a kind of cartoon character. I guess the thought was people would just have no idea what to expect, so they’d have to at least listen to what came out. He had to find a way to channel the authenticity of his passion into a form that acknowledged his distance from the source. No one other than Son House can ever be him, but that’s no reason not to take your tradition where you find it.

I’m really invested in working through these questions as a critic and as a writer. So much of the time, I find myself in an awkward position of having to check my awareness of myself of a woman at the door in order to be as happy about the work of male artists as I want to be. I love a lot of what the guitarists in IMGL say about creativity, but am I even allowed to relate to them? What do I have to revise to apply their lessons? When I’m reading the work of minority (a term I’m ambivalent about but gets the point across for now) writers, how far can I go in assuming that, as artists, they must be positioning themselves not just as identity x but as creators, inspired by other artists no matter what tradition they are biographically associated with?

So, while I love that IMGL got made, there was also a frustration to watching it that I just had to kind of get past in order to love it. It’s never anybody’s intention, but when featuring “the greats” means featuring a bunch of dudes without, the idea that men make great music and women make great women’s music gets perpetuated. The musicians self-consciously position themselves in terms of race and class, but gender completely flies under their radar. (I think White was the only one to refrain from comparing or equating his guitar to a woman. And perhaps not coincidentally, he’s the only one of the three to have worked with a female performer for a long stretch of his career.)

Ultimately, I think I have to qualify my love for watching male guitarists jam over conversation until there’s a sequel in which a group of women rock artists–I don’t know who exactly, but surely one of the guitarists from Sleater Kinney would be in there–can do likewise, because I think it would be fascinating, not just fair play. But, in the mean time, I’m not going to say it didn’t inspire me, too.

I’ve been catching up on who you are

About a year after moving to my next city, I’m moving to my next blog–in which I hope to have some conversations out loud, whether that means I’m starting them or just piping up to say me too, me either, or huh, hadn’t thought about it that way.

While I haven’t been writing, I’ve been reading. SOS, I think about your phonecall to Holophane often and I promise I’m going to read Julie Klausner, TBQ, as soon as her book comes in at the library. I’m looking to Seacoast of Bohemia for how to live like a scholar and become a thoughtful teacher (nice blog theme, btw), and I wanted to give The Ethical Exhibitionist a high five for posting stuff to Scribd and making me realize I wasn’t the only one thinking about what it means to have an audience in the year 2010. I’m thrilled for Wide Lawns and her (growing) family!

The main reason why I haven’t been writing is that I’ve been thinking, and while I did that, I got a little older and a little less…emo, for lack of a more accurate characterization (and thanks to LCB for that one), and a little closer to being ready to use my own name. At first, I thought I didn’t miss writing in this format. Over the past few months, as I’ve tried to sort through the roles of writing in my daily life, I’ve realized that the writing I did in the blog world didn’t waste energy I should have been using to write other things, it just allowed me to write and think about different things. And I realized I definitely miss being part of conversation in this format.

So, here’s to talking again, if only to myself for the time being.