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April 29, 2001
Short Attention Span Theater Presents: Mindless Desiderata
Always gotta purge, after a huge piece, with a few spurious links to meaningless desiderata.
At Free Vengeance, films made on Game Boys. I like Joueur de Flute.
also: Baseball teams made up of independent movies, among other things. Of particular note: this team is managed by entomologists.
Don't you hate it when you log on intending to find stuff on the FTAA for a student and alternative education for a friend, and you end up digging through this stuff? sigh. a short attention span is a terrible thing to waste.
Posted by me at 10:53 PM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2001
Eating Gas
Note: This is just a blow-by-blow first-person of what happened last weekend. It has simmered in my posted-but-not-published queue for a week, and I have missed out on writing any number of other things as a result. I've never felt compelled to use the John McPhee tactic of rearranging your notecards visually with this blog before, and I did it this time; this has to stop, I won't be dogged by these thoughts any more. There was more thoughtful stuff I had to say, but in the end I believe I will turn that into a paying article, because it feels more like Art than usual, and it is taking too long to write. So here this is.
One more note, just because I realize there will be people out there who don't know why the hell an American citizen would be getting tear-gassed in Canada: We were there to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas. If you don't know what it is, I can tell you this: Bush supports it, and this is what it does:
Step 1: Your government (if you live somewhere between Canada and Tierra del Fuego, Argentina) makes a law protecting its environment from pollution or its workers from exploitation.
Step 2: FTAA goes into effect, claiming to "protect the rights of stockholders."
Step 3: Company X decides to set up shop in your country.
Step 4: Company X says, "Hey, I want to dump my fifty billion tons of excess DDT in your water supply! The law that your democratically elected lawmakers have made to protect your children is infringing on my stockholders' rights to make more money!"
Step 5: Company X sues your government's a$s off, running up huge expenses and costing taxpayers millions. (It has already happened under NAFTA in Mexico and California.)
Any questions? (If you are my Uncle Bob, you are not permitted to ask belittling questions that you really should know better about, seeing as even most intelligent free-market capitalists admit this system has its abuses.) I hope to see all you democracy-lovin' citizens in the streets with us next time.
Stephan and I slipped across the border in perfectly legal fashion at 5:00 a.m. (Our trick? We said we were going to Montreal, not Quebec City. They didn't bat an eye.) We were lucky enough to catch one of a dozen protest-bound schoolbuses from Concordia University in Montreal, and arrived at the Universite Laval in Quebec City shortly before noon. We were told we could leave our bags in the gym, so we headed there. The Olympic-sized indoor stadium was carpeted from wall to wall with sleeping bags and luggage, an indicator of the size of the crowds to come.
In the company of a group of Mexicans looking for the anarchist bloc, we joined the pacifist student march to the main meeting place. Stephan and I had a long conversation with one of the Mexicans, a middle-aged woman, cobbling sentences together in French, Spanish, and English. Like the Canadian students around us, who carried signs reading "Public education is NOT for sale!" she was greatly concerned that free public education should not be privatized.
The march of students chanted "SO-SO-SO, SOLIDARITE-EH!" Residents came out onto their balconies or peered out from behind first-floor curtains. Some of them had cameras, like us. Some looked apprehensive; some gave us looks of contempt. "DANS-LA-RUE! A-VEC-NOUS!" called a chorus of female voices behind me.
Eventually the road opened up on a park. Our march of thousands was joined by thousands and thousands more, pouring in from every corner. Seeing this evoked a surge of joy I can't compare to anything else. I think of seeing your regiment emerge safely from the woods at the news of a ceasefire -- of seeing a running herd of buffalo and realizing they weren't all wiped out -- no metaphor really fits. Final estimates of the number of people in Quebec City that day were in the tens of thousands -- between thirty and sixty -- and I think they were all there, coming across the lawn, beating on buckets and carrying signs and waving red flags. There was even a bagpiper.
There were a few brief speeches made at the park, again in three languages. Stephan and I decided we wanted to go elsewhere, possibly to find the IMC, so we took off, joining an offshoot of the continuing march.
When you are at a protest, the way to find the action is to look overhead and head for the location of the nearest hovering helicopter. Our march was heading towards a helicopter. Then some organizers, kids with orange armbands, started nervously waving us around a corner... and we split off from a contingent carrying red and black flags, which was ignoring the organizers... and my stomach started feeling heavy. I looked down the street we had just been turned away from. A white geyser of tear gas erupted at its end.
That was the first indication I saw that the plan to have "red, yellow, and green" zones to distinguish intensity of action was falling apart. It was also the first volley in the second day of the poisoning of Quebec. Stephan and I pulled up our damp bandannas, which didn't help. I cursed myself for not grabbing packets of vinegar at a fast food joint. (How lucky to have a gas war in a country where one of its antidotes is the preferred condiment for french fries.)
Either the terminology has always been different, or there was enough gas in Quebec that it changed: people spoke not of breathing gas, but eating it. I can't describe what it's like. I think in cowardice I am trying to forget it. It smells like burning vinyl. It tingles in your mouth and nose evenly, too evenly and drily to be a hot pepper. Kind of like a bad sunburn in your mouth, but one so perfect it seems calculated to torture you. Your eyes begin watering; then you really do start to cry. Up to that level, being gassed is unpleasant but, in retrospect, unremarkable -- like a running in Los Angeles on a smoggy day. I didn't get any further than that. I was about ready to hyperventilate, and all I could think of was retreating to the shelter of the IMC.
(I am reminded of the time I was stung by a ray in Mexico. I had been yelping and cringing in fear as we walked through the infested waters, spearing the little parasites to feed them to sea turtles. I didn't really want to do it at all. Given the choice, I would rather not put myself in the way of physical harm. I lifted my feet too high, and stepped on one, which stung me. I ran from the water in terrified surprise. Nobody knew I'd been stung for a few minutes, because I'd been so noisy about my squeamishness.)
Stephan and I fell in with a pair of women who were also looking to hide, and headed away from the heaviest gas. One of them had a lemon, a stand-in for vinegar. I dripped it on my bandanna. Instantly the world was clear and sweet. My throat stopped itching. I started praying, laughing, swearing I would wear a lemon talisman around my neck for the rest of my life. Later I bought my own lemon, and kept it in my pocket until there was nothing left but a tapped-out peel drooling down my leg.
We ducked into the IMC, narrowly avoiding a cloud of gas floating down the hill towards us. As we entered the IMC was in the process of closing down a street-level welcoming center which was poorly ventilated and was suffused with gas. We were not the only building with this problem. Le Soleil, the Quebecois newspaper, reported the next day that the Board of Health had closed down a hotel restaurant for the same reason, and that a senior citizens' home had been similarly threatened.
The Quebec IMC, known by the Francophone acronym CMAQ (pronounced Smack), had a setup which proved quite useful. The main space, a cavernous black sound stage, was deep in a warren of local media outlets -- Radio Basseville, Fisheye, Medea, some artists' lofts, video producers. From one approach it was hard to find, useful for confusing secret police; from the other, it was moated by a lobby where protesters came in to detox in the bathroom or crash in an upstairs café. On the second floor, there was an FM radio station from which we did sporadic broadcasts.
I got restless staying in the IMC. The dispatcher didn't give me a good opportunity to plug in and help, and there was more action in the streets than I'd ever seen. So Steph and I headed out again.
The sixty thousand people from the morning march had not dispersed; they did not go to earth. Crowds of threes or dozens loitered in the middle of the roads and by the walls, regrouping before returning to the bang of the gas guns in the middle of the clouds. People visited stores to buy face protection or vinegar, or just to get out of the gas. Bars were crammed with people scanning the television news. Locals offered their hoses to those who had succumbed to the lacrymo.
This time I had secured a pair of goggles for myself, so we ventured up to the intersection of St. Jean and St. Genevieve. I had my camera with me, out of guilt. I felt bad that there was so much going on, and I wasn't going to come back with images of any of it. (You know what? I think I was trophy hunting.)
The line of skirmish was haunted by a different kind of drums -- military-sounding drums, not polyrhythmic African ones. I found myself among the Western Massachussetts Drum and Bugle Corps, in gas masks and denim with an American flag logo on their backs. Their music was changing the mood; it was sober, elegiac, not something that made you want to dance in front of the cops. Some of them had plastic buckets; one or two had snares. Under the mask I saw someone I knew, another Hampshire student; later I found out an IMC compadre was under another mask. It was hard to tell who was who.
It was hard to tell what was going on generally; my goggles were fogging. I heard explosions. gagged on the gas and ran. "SO-SO-SO!" chanted the crowd. People I dodged called, Take it easy. I found Stephan. You want the camera? I asked. He hedged. I threw it at him. I ran back to the IMC, emerging again only to hang out at the periphery, hunting for a store that was rumored to still have gas masks. (It had, like every other store, sold out. Pharmacists had also sold out of swimming goggles.)
Sometime that evening -- I had by that point completely lost track of time -- I re-entered the press room to the sound of a baby squalling. Half a dozen IMC volunteers were standing around with newspapers, fanning a woman holding an infant. The mother and child had apparently been tear gassed. The baby's cries were beyond anguish; it sobbed over and over on the same harrowed note. Its face was open, too stunned to wrinkle, gelid with tears.
A huge man with a ponytail was frantically giving the mother advice. Let's take off the suit, he said, and they stripped the baby of its fleece jumper, down to its bare skin. Can I still breastfeed? the mother asked. Yes, the man said, the antibodies should do him good. (I don't know if this was accurate advice. He may have been clinging to the best things he could think of.)
The crowd parted, and the mother and child were escorted upstairs. The ponytailed medic dropped to his knees, crying in the arms of another man.
I snuck past to get out of the press room. Directly outside the press room was a lobby; the lobby was separated from the press room as it was from the outdoors by two sets of doors, with a little "airlock" in between. The gas had gotten bad enough that teams had been stationed at each airlock to let people in and out, so that gas would not be let in to the unventilated central space. As a result, the press room had gotten quite stuffy. We ached for clear air. By this point there was no question of going outside, though. The gas engulfed the neighborhood, and police were on all sides of the building. Stephan had volunteered to work the airlock to the outside, which was crowded with people rubbing their eyes and removing gassed clothing. I was lonely and wanted to talk to him, but I couldn't get through. I wrote messages on a pad and showed them to him through the glass.
Medics had set up camp in the lobby. The medical center had been shut down by armed police, it was said, sometime that night. Clusters of armbanded volunteers huddled around people on the floor. One man was on his stomach. There was a red waffle mark the size of a hockey puck on his back. It appeared he had been hit by one kind of rubber bullet. Others were also in use; someone told me they had seen a protester open a bag with a startlingly large collection of bullets and gas canisters which he had collected on the street. I got to see one an IMC volunteer came in and held up. It was the size and shape of a nail polish bottle. It wasn't like an eraser, as I always expected from the term "rubber bullet." It was quite hard, more plastic than rubber.
Returning to the inner sanctum, I headed upstairs to the radio station. The mother I had seen earlier was in the hall. In her arms, the baby was completely naked, smiling broadly, grabbing for the bottle of water she held. The mother told me that the baby hadn't been crying because of the gas, but because he was hot. I didn't know whether to believe her. It could have been true, or she might have been feeling like a bad mother for having her baby out late and in a war zone.
Five flights up CMAQ had some quiet space in the artists' lofts, which the communications team had co-opted. This space served as an excellent crow's nest, and they were able to relay messages about skirmishes they could see up by the steel fence to a dispatcher downstairs.
The building was also blessed with a six-story stairwell with bay windows. I staked out one of the three landings with a handful of other videographers. From there, we could see Côte d'Abraham at street level, where there was a frightening charge of cops at about two a.m.; the edge of the cliff our building sat on, which protesters swarmed up, scavenging rocks to throw and things to burn; the fence in the distance, now well guarded by a line of storm troopers who kept arriving in vans and trotting out new weapons, including a water cannon; and a freeway overpass in the distance, under which a bonfire taller than a building was attended by a nonviolent, energetic dance party. Every now and again a wave of gas would roll off the top of the bridge. This panorama was periodically obscured and revealed by veils of smoke and gas.
When the cops charged the crowd of protesters a final time and cleared out down Côte d'Abraham, I decided to sleep. (That's a rare move for me at the IMC, an indicator of how difficult CMAQ had made it to find something to do.) The compound was particularly short on sleeping space; what space there was in the lofts upstairs had been hogged by despairingly drunk CMAQ organizers. No great loss; what I really wanted was to be right where I would be awoken promptly in the event of a raid. I stretched out on the floor of an underused tech crew space, and fell soundly asleep. I was awoken by a stranger offering me a sleeping bag. I took it, and he stretched out on his pad nearby. When I woke at nine thirty, he was not there. A kid who had lent me his goggles the previous day was sacked out there instead, curly blond hair framing a face still puffy from forced tears.
I ventured into the streets. The gas had been dampened by an overnight fog; you could still smell it, but it didn't hurt as bad. The streets were a mess, charred places still smoking. Here and there you'd find broken goggles or empty vinegar jugs. Up by the fence, there was a huge pile of abandoned brassieres. Apparently there had been a large feminist demonstration there. Groups of protesters moved through the alleys, putting garbage in bags. Residents appeared with brooms. A metal ring caught my eye. It was attached to a pin -- a grenade pin, I think it was. I pocketed it to show to my students.
Now I got to see the neighborhood that had been closed by the threat of gas the day before. Many of the stores along the fence had pre-emptively boarded-up windows, but they bore signs which read "Welcome to the neighborhood of St. Jean Baptiste. We have a long tradition of resistance. We're with you. Have a good demonstration!" Some boarded windows had been decorated, by employees and by protesters. A bookstore had plastered its boards with copies of covers of progressive books, with word balloons describing what the book was about in French.
We left at noon, having spent almost exactly 24 hours in the city. Returning to the Université Laval, we ate the clean air with gratitude.
Posted by me at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2001
From The Vaults: Essay I wrote for a really awful nonfiction course at Smith
On Grammar, Syntax, Punctuation, Spelling, and Capitalization
Punctuation
Gandhi once said that a society could be judged by the way it treats its animals; but in truth punctuation is the one true measure d’une societé, the one true measure of a society. Whole city layouts can be read in its skillful use: the courthouses, the main thoroughfares, the corner delis, the red-light districts, the dog pound and its attendant heap of euthanized corpses. When punctuation is misused, cities come tumbling down in stature; the great city of Athens becomes Des Moines or Winnemucca, Nevada overnight.
Indeed, punctuation quite literally inspires us to write; without it, every citizen would recoil from writing, fearful of picking up his fountain pen and ruining his good name and future standing in society by penning a run-on sentence. Punctuation piles the Ossa of refined society on the Parmenides of the world’s great thinkers; punctuation is next to godliness-- nay, is godliness!--; punctuation is modern civilization’s glob of AquaLube, closest to our thoughts in our most intimate moments.
One embarassing example of mispunctuation I can think of appeared in the New York Times in an article about the brands of boots that locals wear to line-dancing clubs. The hyphen in "sh!t-kickers" was inadvertently omitted throughout the article.
Needless to say, their editorial mailbags were full for the next week. "If you don't know a good pair of sh!t-kickers from a couple of dirty sh!t kickers," one irate third-grade teacher wrote, "I'll never help fill the space you provide for Letters To The Editor again, and let me tell you, I've been a regular contributor."
It was fortunate that this eighty-one-year-old guardian of the English language notified the Times copy editors of their error, or they might have gone on for the rest of their lives unaware that the two phrases they pronounced “sh!t kickers” had embarassingly different meanings. Imagine being at a post-rodeo cocktail party and suggesting that a business colleague admire the sh!t kickers on your feet!
Spelling
"There's nothing to spelling," Lance Fugrath, chairman general of the Copy Editors Society of America, once expostulated. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter-- having lived within the culture that uses the words you want to spell, of course, and read their dictionaries a while, perhaps gone to school with their kids, or ordered some Hooked On Phonics tapes (and I don't mean that as an endorsement of any of these products)-- and then probably spelling will come naturally, like opening a vein. Except even I've done that and I still never get those rules where words pronounced 'ruff' and 'throo' happen to end in some completely nonsensical phonetic pattern like 'ough.'"
A quotable man, was Fugrath. And mostly right, too: There's absollutely nothing to spelling. The fear of appearing idiotic in front of one's peers should be enough to shame those who can't spell into learning this simple skill, at least, if not keep them sensibly constrained to verbal modes of communication. I once witnessed a group of schoolchildren for whom English was not their first language aprehensively passing a piece of chalk between them, trying not to be the one called upon to record the group's thoughts on bilinguallism on the blackboard. None of them had learned to spell correctly, of course, and none wanted to reveal that failling. In the end, they stood mute and wrote only a few words. The teacher, who wisely judged that it was more important for the children to learn to spell than to express themselves, ceased the lesson and adminestered a pop spelling quiz.
The skills of the average American in spelling are dropping alarmingly. It seems that never again shall we see the kind of spelling proficency demonstrated by our hallowed forefathers in the drafting of the Mayflower Compact. The American language has steadily been beaten to a bloodier and bloodier pulp by the scourge of poor spellers, cheered on by such demons as the rock group Metallica, 99-cent specials at fast-food restauraunts, Velcro, divorced atheist parents, and ever-expanding government welfare grants. The spoken language, willful and unruly as it is, has also aided in the downfall of spelling; sometimes I think it should just be banned entirely. Are you listening, Mr. President?
Anyway, your message, as I hope I have proven in these paragraphs, will be thouroughly incomprehensable to others if you misspell.
Grammar and Syntax
Many people now see fit to festoon their sentences with dangling participles, coming up with such sentences as “He’s someone I just can’t put up with.” Everybody makes these mistakes nowadays, and I find it morally reprehensible. The proper construction, of course, moves the gerundive before the subject, separating the nominative clause and the parenthetical nomendubium from the conjunction and flipping the verb into a sort of enjoyable syntactic limbo.
It is these same people who find it perfectly acceptible to split infinitives. Grammatical monstrosities such as “To boldly go...” should be done away with just as family heirlooms should be thrown out and replaced if they do not match your house's decor. Who wants a battered old Queen Anne chair when a new one from Ikea will suffice?
What is so odd is that college English professors, novelists, and the editors of Harper’s and the New Yorker seem prepared to allow these constructions to burn, pillage, and r^pe every sentence in their path. The president of Harvard University even told me to “go away and leave [him] alone” when I asked him how he could allow his English department to continue giving Bs to students who did not know the difference between “lay” and “lie!” Imagine the nerve!
Here are a few tips to improve your grammar and syntax:
•The words "The," “His,” “Her,” “I,” “My,” and “Suddenly” lead into many a meaningless message, just as marijuana leads to the abuse of harder drugs. Avoid them at all costs.
•If you must breathe new life into American literature, try experimenting with adverbs and adjectives; not enough young writers are willing to do this. Think how much improved the public's impression of Emily Dickinson might have been had she given up her capitols and dashes in favor of more descriptive words!:
I felt a grand funeral in my tired brain
and wretched mourners to and fro
kept slowly treading, treading carefully, until it seemed
that sense was slowly but surely breaking through.
•Try running a pen through every one of your sentences. It will improve your writing fantastically-- you’ll notice immediate results.
•No other writing is as lean and practical as a grocery list. Try writing your essays as a grocery list first, and then give them the sort of connections you’d see in an office memo or a brochure for medical equipment. I do it all the time, and I’ve been published.
* * *
Seriously, though, punctuation, grammar, syntax, and spelling should be given exactly the same amount of attention you would devote to buying a rhinestone cape for your Chihuahua. Because, really: if you own a Chihuahua, and you are inclined to worry that it is naked, you probably shouldn't walk it in public to begin with.
Posted by me at 1:54 AM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2001
Race
It is time to post this. I've spent too long on the draft, I've forgotten the perfect title I came up with for it, and the fire's dying.
In 1966 and 1967, Apaches at Cibecue portrayed "the Whiteman" as hippie -- mumbling, awkwardly effeminate, and... "rich but pretending poor." In 1970, VISTA volunteers descended on the community, and before long they were also providing materials for secondary texts. "The Whiteman" as VISTA worker was gushingly altruistic, hopelessly incompetent at simple manual tasks, and, for some reason I was never able to pin down, invariably out of breath. -- from "Portraits of the Whiteman" by Keith Basso
When I returned from my mid-March trip I was carrying too many books. Among these were My Traitor's Heart by Rian Malan, The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, and Portraits Of The Whiteman by Keith Basso. I brought the first with me; I bought Fadiman's book (which I had begun reading during my last days in the evil government program) and Basso's book (based on my love for an article of his I read in a first-year anthropology class) while I was still in Seattle.
My Traitor's Heart is a book on South Africa and apartheid written by a white man, an Afrikaaner. I had read it once before, in Michael Lesy's nonfiction class, and hated it. In those days, when my ear for prose was hypersensitive, I found it uninspiring. I picked it up again in February because I needed it, badly.
I left for Seattle feeling completely overwhelmed. The year of government service I had just completed had been rotten. I had been lied to about my job description, and the disparity between what I thought I should be doing and what I was asked to do, compounded by blackmail on my boss's part when I tried to change posts, left me feeling demoralized. Office crowding and the hostility of the management made us all paranoid and suspecting. I had just begun to add up this toll on my emotions by the time I left.
Without good reason, I had come to furtively blame my unease on the Bronx itself. I felt I had no tolerance left for the people in the community. Their values, thought processes, and responses to conflict struck me as maddeningly backward. I looked forward to leaving. I fantasized about getting a cushy job at a magazine someplace, editing copy or writing silly little new-product features, something with a lot of perks and no relation whatsoever to my sagging commitment to social justice.
The aggravation I felt with the people around me frightened me. Did this mean I was racist? Was I lying to myself about the depth of the few friendships I had with people of color? Were my motives in coming to the community suspect, more missionary than solidarity? Should I not be working in impoverished communities at all if I had such a visceral reaction to the people there?
I took my questions with me to Seattle, where the friend I was staying with was halfway through a much happier year in the same program. She suggested I ask her boss, who has worked in youth services for fifteen years. We went drinking one night with her and some other friends. I asked the boss whether a person could be of service to a community when she felt so much frustration with the people there. Her response cut through the boozy haze of the evening. Maybe you should find another line of work, she said. You have to like the people you're working with.
It was a good time to be reading Malan and Fadiman's books, Malan's especially. The author tries earnestly to wrestle his most unsavory feelings about Africans to the mat. I frequently felt pangs of recognition. Malan talks about good but naïve intentions, internecine conflict, and fear. Late in the book he takes on love. "I was desperate to win black trust and friendship," Malan admits,
"to have done with the absurd bullshit, and often thought I saw an answering yearning in black men's eyes. I hate to inflict yet another contradiction on you, but I think this was a symptom of love. I had been obsessed with blacks all my life, you see, and it was not so different a feeling from that of first love, the truly intense and tragic kind. It was all distance and tension, and I read once that romantic love is a function of those very things. My relations with blacks had always been somehow adolescent, sweaty, and nervous, full of awkward gropings and unrequited yearnings -- and what is that, if not love?"
Fadiman takes a more clincal approach, considering ways in which medical practitioners can successfully bridge culture lines. She suggests that among educated white people who work with Hmong communities both in the States and in Laos, those who are most successful with their patients and clients love them:
"...Francesca Farr liked the Hmong. Loved them, I should say. That was something she had in common with everyone I knew who had ever worked successfully with Hmong patients, clients, or research subjects. Dan Murphy once said that of the ten most admirable people he had met in the last decade, seven or eight were Hmong. Jeanine Hilt told me that if her house csught on fire, the first thing she would grab was a framed [embroidery given to her by a Hmong client]... Sukey Waller said that after she spent time with her Hmong clients, Americans, by comparison, seemed dry. The anthropologists Eric Crystal and Dwight Conquergood were so intoxicated by Hmong culture that their ethnographic commentaries, while academically unimpeachable, sometimes sounded like mash notes."
Do I love the black and Latino people I work with?
I had to kick Catherine out of writing workshop soon after I returned from Seattle. She talked over all of my instructions. She interrupted me whenever I had tried to pose a question to the class. She asked if she could play music, go to the bathroom, get a drink of water, use profanity in her writing. With each of the example poems we read, she exaggerated the point that each detail in the poem showed that the author was GHETTO. I'm GHETTO, she said, interrupting again. I'm GHETTO too.
I sent Catherine to the program director. She balked for a good five minutes, pretending she was writing. Finally she angrily followed my co-teacher out, muttering in Spanish about how I didn't listen to her when she only wanted to ask a question. She said she would tell her mother I had sworn at the class.
I had sworn, more or less at my students. In an ill-advised, half-staged fit of rage intended to show them I meant business, I told them I wasn't there to stand around while they goofed off, that I was there because I thought it was a fucking shame that the kinds of things they were writing about-- one of them told a story about a landlord who had murdered their neighbor-- had to happen. (I didn't realize until later how ironic it was that Catherine was going to tattle on me when she constantly begged to use profanity in her own writing.)
When I talk to people about the Bronx, I tell them about what it lacks. I tell them about children who can't read because they are never taught the correlation between letters and sounds. I tell them about parents who encourage their children to stay home from school every week. I talk about the principal whose cockeyed understanding of educational standards is that they should be written at the top of every blackboard -- "5e: Third grade students will be able to analyze a story for narrative elements" -- and copied by students before the lesson begins. I talk about teachers who, it seems, never took a pedagogy class.
I have what the school lacks (or if I don't have it, I have access to it). I only realized this within the past few years; I had taken what I have for granted. It's funny that the little kids frequently look up at me and ask, "Are you Irish?", because I often think of myself as a leprechaun: Catch me, and I will be forced to give you my pots of gold, which are full of multiplication tricks and mnemonic songs and reading lists and the complete contents of SAT prep courses.
On the train home the day I swore at my class, I unburdened my soul to my friend Terrenova, who is large and black. I like Terrenova not because she is black; I like her because she is like me. A nerd.
I grant I like her better than many people in the program because, like my Puerto Rican friend Natalie in my last job, she reached out to me before I had a chance to pull into my shell, and welcomed me into her life. Terrenova started out talking about plays she was reading, and ideas she had for her own scripts. She has a philosopher's nature and isn't hung up on superficial things. In the first email she ever sent me, she told me, "By all means please pass on my e-mail, to whomever you feel is like the Tin man, Lion and Scarecrow and is on the 'Journey'... I met two other people yesterday who are moving in the Art/Music/Drama direction. So quite possibly one day we can all get together and change this damn world."
What Terrenova said about the 'journey' popped into my head later that week when I spoke with my mother. I forget what we were talking about -- it might have been why she chose her academic field, Slavic studies -- but mom said something to the effect of, I have never felt like I belonged in American society. I have always felt like an outsider.
This was the first time I ever heard my mother say something like this, though I know I took it in with her milk. I got it from my father, too. Little messages about social standing and normalcy said under the breath. Don't revere the lawyers. Don't be a cheerleader. Let's talk back to the newscasters. Stick out your tongue at that man who thinks the president is doing a good job. We're atheists.
Ultimately I think this is why I came to the Bronx to begin with. I identify with underdogs and rejects, the Oppressed and the Outkast. I'd like to think if you talk with any white middle-class nerd for long enough you'll find an empathy and a sense of justice that would be an asset working in a poor community.
Terrenova suggested my problem with my rambunctious writing club students is that it's so clear I'm not from the GHETTO. You should come into class next time, she said, and the first thing you should say is, I know I look like The Man, but I got news for you: I'm not.
Should I tell them I went to jail? I suggested, thinking that might have some cred. Terrenova didn't rule it out. You should dress up, she said. With the mm-mmm (indicating hips) and the mm-mmm (breasts), and walk in and be like, yo, you heard of J-Lo? Well, here's G-Lo. A little bling, and the earrings, and the baggy baggy, and the cornrows all up in your hair... She got lost in her fantasia.
I laughed hopelessly. Terrenova has only known me for a year, so she doesn't know how much a part of my high school persona it was that I couldn't get white-girl style right. I gave up trying one year for Lent, in a blaze of loud plaid and deliberately mismatched socks. How am I supposed to pull off the fitting-in trick in a language I don't even understand, with people who think their day job is laughing at teachers' clothes? (I think I'll take her up on the offer to go get cornrows done, though. I've been wanting to try that.)
If only it were possible for me to erase all my own cultural habits to appproach this work.
I would like to think there's another way. Fabiola, another of my students, approached me the Monday after the cursed Friday, and told me she was glad that there were white people willing to come to the Bronx. I thanked her, and we got to talking. Girls swirled around us, plotting fights to avenge each other's petty slights. Fabiola avoids fights, she says. In the midst of enthusiasm for other future jobs like Poet and Actress, Fabiola says she wants to help her community, run for office, or something. She seems to understand that the anger her peers sling at each other is misdirected, that there are more important uses for it.
There are certain people much older or younger than me, from places quite unlike those where I have lived... They are more familiar to me than the people who grew up with me simply because they were my age and their parents had similar socioeconomic standing. I wish that fate hadn't seen fit to separate me from these people because of age and rank and culture and geography. I hate the school where I work more than anything else because it keeps me from talking and playing with Fabiola and my other favorite students in an informal setting. I hated my own school for doing the same thing to my own teachers.
I share my father's reflexive misanthropy. I wish I didn't have to deal with the women with huge gold earrings and ten-foot nails on the subway who talk loudly about what they want to buy and who they are going to get back at, and who shove pacifiers in the mouths of their children, youngsters who are frantic with needs and questions about the world speeding by outside the scratched train windows.
I don't like uneducated, unthoughtful people. I do blame this on the racism of our society. I wouldn't have this prejudice if I hadn't been fenced into all the places a white girl with Mayflower ancestors gets fenced into, and if everyone else hadn't been fenced out. If I hadn't drunk from the same wellspring as William Safire and John Simon and similar as$holes. I have enough of a superiority complex, or am idealistic enough, that I feel everyone should join me on the thoughtful side of the fence.
Being intellectual doesn't make me a good teacher. Today in my cooking class, a tiny Dominican girl piped up and said, "Black people and white people are enemies!" I scruffed and shook her with questions. Did she really think that? She delivered the answer she knew I wanted to hear. I issued some blandishments about how those were the kind of words that make people fight. I had no idea what else to do. I am so lacking in empathy, intuition, and knowledge of the folkways that I hadn't a clue who might have put those words in her head, or why she would choose to repeat them so loudly and cheerfully.
Give up my predilection for people of reason, or cling to it... both ways have their price.
Posted by me at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2001
...well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?
Went out in mixed company tonight -- American and French -- to an Irish pub, to celebrate Samuel Beckett's birthday. The music was loud, so we ended up communicating by writing on the paper placemats.
For reasons I wasn't clear of, my friend who'd called the party ended up drawing this trinity on a mat:
The French guy across the table who I'd been trying to impress all evening was confused. "He's trying to explain the United States to you," I wrote, making nonsense out of nonsense. In response, he sketched,
"To Europeans, America is like this," he wrote. Then he sketched
For a minute he left it at that, then wrote, "Really, that's all." Then he picked up the pen again, and added:
We proceeded into a discussion in which it became clear that he took a more negative stance on religion than I do (and that's saying something).
I put this on the record this because not the faintest whiff of this negative concept of the United States is permitted to enter the airtight chambers of our popular opinion. We can't go on like this. We can't continue forever dreaming that we are the best country in the world while other countries -- including third world countries like the African nations whose leaders said they would hold up our last election to their students as an example that corruption happens even in first-world elections -- see us for all the flaws we ignore.
Posted by me at 2:00 AM | Comments (0)
En La Tierra Que Hay Detrás De Mis Ojos...
(actually posted yesterday)
It is my fault. Granted, I have yet to have a real immersion experience in Spanish -- the sum of my childhood in Los Angeles, nor my elementary spanish classes, school trips to Baja, the class I took on Neruda, or the past year I spent marinating in Spanglish in the Bronx does not add up to immersion or complete instruction -- but I am still not fluent, and I don't have a good excuse for it. And now I'm kicking myself, because I just discovered a blog entitled Antropoetica, and I can kind of hum along but I'm unable to really comprehend the thoughts in their entirety. (A pivotal problem seems to be my weak grasp of the verbs "ser" and "estar" -- the two forms of "to be.")
Still, this looks like one of the most thoughtful blogs out there. It's a nice change to find a blog that lives up to its interesting name. I like the idea of Anthropoetry. The participants in this blog seem to be meditating on the Zapatistas' march on Mexico City, at the moment. The combination delights me -- thoughtful, artsy leftists! This is one of the best things about this increasingly searchable, shrinking world: finding people so close to you in such far away places.
(The title is from a song by the group Café Tacuba entitled Flores De Color De Las Mentiras, which is also about the Zapatistas.)
Posted by me at 1:59 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2001
6^WD 1Z 3L337!
I'm sorry, but I'm not sure how comfortable I am with a blog written in ersatz h^x0r which devotes so much space to praising the Christian deity.
Posted by me at 12:56 AM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2001
From The Vaults: Vacation Diary August 1999, San Francisco
Crappy motel. Proof positive that the "sani-bands" on toilets mean nothing: I pull it off our room's toilet cover and find drops of urine all over the seat. Hotel's neon sign is right outside our window. Trolley goes by every ten minutes or so and the Patel Motel Cartel is having a family reunion next door. (Next door? Downstairs? Upstairs? The fact that the sound comes through every wall lends to our feeling of powerlessness against the sound and the general bad vibe.) Mom just called the main office, and the noise was louder in the background of the call... the owner said, "I jussel emma Kweitown, mam."
Everyone but me is talking about going someplace else tomorrow night. I, meanwhile, am enjoying the fact that the exact same print hangs over each bed... Man, I hope I'm not getting anything negative from the shower, which smells like egg-drop soup.
Ah, travel. Budget-style.
...Mom made a comment about how it's hard to know what kind of neighborhood you're in in a foreign place... that hitched itself somehow to some thoughts about the comprehensible universe of Poly and Pasadena... how it strikes me nowadays that there are so many people out there, oddly in spite of my having grown up in an area with millions of people... was I just used to seeing as scenery anyone who wasn't a "useful" person? Is this vertiginous sense of the expanding world a part of growing up? Or did I just think that everyone would eventually fall into some sensible slot? (with my strong sense of US and THEM in earlier years, I guess they mostly did...)
Posted by me at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)
April 9, 2001
Detritus: The Man Under The Marine Layer In The Coco Helado Suit
I've finally brought All Mirth No Matter Productions, my ridiculous little fantasy about producing short videos, to life. Currently Internet Explorer doesn't read the page right, so you won't get the video loading in the right frame like it's supposed to. It will load in another window you may not see right away, and take a while. There's not much up yet, but I just resolved some technical difficulties with Final Cut and should be using it to re-produce my inauguration piece soon, the Beanie Baby Liberation Front Sketch is still in production, and I just edited together a video I did with the little kids Jen lives with in Seattle, so there should be more soon.
Unbelievable smog today in NYC, the kind we Angelenos call "marine layer" and the kind New Yorkers like to claim only exists in LA. It was definitely marine layer, though, hovering over Central Park, where people were still jogging despite the fact you couldn't see three yards ahead of you. These people don't understand SigAlerts. Regardless, there I was out in the sun at 2:30 p.m. (god bless my new job!) and it was balmy, so I bought a coquito from the helado man and petted the carriage horses at the south end of the Park until my hands were stinky and I got to the subway and went home.
I live in New York, and yet I still haven't seen David Byrne (that link's a movie, but it's him playing Sessions at West 54th in an icecream suit and playing his guitar like an agoraphobic whiteman wailing from the Great Plains -- or like the voice of the last person left in the city who isn't screaming -- worth the download).
Things I thought today: Given a finite amount of time, I invariably waste it. Witness Hampshire (I majored in what?) and this afternoon (how did I end up watching Ally McBeal?) Knowing that, I thought maybe it's better that I don't know when I'm going to die, or I might end up doing nothing. (Faulty logic?)
Posted by me at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)
April 4, 2001
Detritus: "um, Whatcha eatin'?" "CHHHALK!"
Things of note: First of all, y'all Cali-haytas can step. If y'all still don't know why to like California, my sista take yo a$s to schoo. Captures the character of the local biome succinctly and vividly.
Nextly, check out Ariel's art. Nothin else like it nowhere. I hope she keeps arting in some way; it would be a d^mned shame if she didn't.
Nextly, it would appear Jhonen Vasquez has landed himself a cartoon on a pustulent Viacom-owned channel which will remain nameless. The irises are square, the expressions are strained, it's still classic Jhonen and I hope corporatalia hasn't kicked the sh!t out of his sense of humor. Do you realize how wrong this is, though? The creator of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is p!mpin' for N**kelodeon? There hasn't been a worse mismatch since they signed Pee Wee Herman up for a Saturday morning show.
You know, the variety of Black English Vernacular spoken in the Bronx is really punchy, much cleaner than the ivory-tower jargon I marinated in. I'm going to use it more often. By doing so I don't ever mean to denigrate the people as created it; it's simply a more powerful, more efficient way of talking.
Posted by me at 1:53 AM | Comments (0)
Stupid Newswire Articles #2034
Clinton buys a Cuban cigar in a London airport. His other purchase, a tie with frogs on it, warrants Reuters attention. And the continued embargo against Cuba? And Castro's policies, benevolent and malevolent?! What do you have to do to get attention in this g0dd^mn media sinkhole?!
I had a surreal Castro experience today. I was engrossed in some paperwork, sitting in on a class about HIV taught by my new boss, when I got the vague impression someone had asked about Castro's policy of quarantining people with HIV. Before I really knew what was going on, my boss's voice was aimed in my direction, and he was saying something like, "Well, some of us look more kindly on Castro's policies than others..." I looked up, he grinned at me, the largely immigrant class of city workers ruffled a little. What had I said -- I wanted to visit Cuba, I wanted to know more about Cuba's surprisingly successful biomed industry? sheesh.
Posted by me at 12:32 AM | Comments (0)
April 3, 2001
The Bearer of Bad News
Sometimes I feel I have been cursed with a long, slow adolescence. Some days I feel my body has been put together wrong, like my awkwardness is genetic. Broadcast without my ability to help it.
At my new job, where I manage administrivia for a class of city social workers, I was required to call a student out of class and relay to him that there was a family emergency. My boss relayed the message from his cel phone; he was not going to be able to tell the student, and he didn't tell me the nature of the emergency over the phone. For a moment I panicked. I have never been called upon to be the sole carrier of really bad news before. I frantically cast about thinking of someone else who could do it. I didn't think I would be sensitive enough.
To my relief this was not unexpected news to the student in question, a soft-spoken, solid man who pulled himself out of the class and followed me down the hall to the phone. He told me both his parents, who lived far away in another country, were very sick. I murmured condolences with what I hoped would not be read as feigned concern. I did feel awful.
He called his supervisor. He had some difficulty reaching her, so he left the office saying he would return to call in a few minutes. I stayed glued to some paperwork I was doing, unable to really process it but worried I would seem nosy if I was there listening and not doing something else. I scanned the page over and over, aimlessly waving my pen above it. I thought I should surreptitiously replace the chair he'd been sitting in to use the phone with the more comfortable chair I was occupying. He came back to receive the news. I found myself twisting my hands. His father had died, and I was hearing about it from his end of the conversation. His rich voice went hoarse. Only then did I realize that the socially appropriate thing to do would have been to leave him alone while he made the call, but I was trapped with him between me and the door. To get out at that point I would have had to push past him, or ask him to get up.
* * *
One thing I have learned from my interactions with people from minority groups is that no matter how bad I feel about a given social exchange, I should consider how much worse the exchange may feel to them. It never occurs to me until after the fact.
Posted by me at 12:41 AM | Comments (0)
April 2, 2001
Shameless Self-Promotion/ Shameless Self-Congratulation
the writer's dance
I have (I think, in retrospect) committed a horrible faux pas and posted an entire story as a comment on Kuro5hin in response to this story. It was something I'd been meaning to post to my site. arrrgh... never posted to Kuro5hin before, what a way to start. :PPP
* * *
So after a day of being up on K5 the post is now the highest-rated in response to the article :D! It's even more highly rated than a post by the founder of the site (ok, so I admit his rating of my post, one of three, is part of why my rating was so high.)
whoopee... something new for my ego to get tied up in. (Better than it getting tied up in my app for an internship at Harper's; I got turned down, tacked the rejection letter to my door and moped for a weekend.)
Posted by me at 4:38 AM | Comments (0)