Peter Handke: Kaspar and Other Plays

 Is it a tribute or a reproach that I couldn't help but imagine how I would produce these plays as I read them?  Was I imagining the possibilities that the author opened up before me, or trying to imagine how the flaws could be repaired?  A little of both, as it turns out.  Handke makes no secret of his intention to challenge the audience, rather than to entertain.  The obviously titled "Offending the Audience" is not the only example of his gleeful contempt.  I wouldn't be surprised if, had I cared to consider critical approaches to this work, they were filled with comparisons and connections to Samuel Beckett, a similarly sneering playwright for whom I have never developed a taste.  

And yet the ideas in these plays were undeniably interesting.  Fun, even.  I thought about different ways to stage the works as I read them, and came up with some rather creative, if I do say so, ways to remove the the voice of a mediocre white male whose pride has been bruised from them and make them enjoyable without diluting them.  Neither is it only in the tone of the works that the author is the chief obstacle.  It is no surprise that the man who created these diatribes is also something of a controversial figure, and by some measures a genocide apologist.  No one else could have possibly been so brazen.  

I like brazenness, of course, and I like diatribes. I even like offense and scorn and contempt.  They all have their part to play in literature, and perhaps especially on the stage.  In this case, however, I wish that they just didn't smell so much like fragile male ego.  These were not works of genius, but they were works of incredible gall, and that is at least something.

박하령: 기필코 서바이벌!

 유챃과 읽기 실력을 노피기를 위해 읽은 캑 뿐이다.   깊은 의미를 찾을 기대가 안 됐음에도 불구하고 인문학 전공의 본능을 못 말려 생각이 든다.  한국 아동 소설 중에 부모 둘 다 제대로 대해주는 이야기가 없는가?  물론 서양 아동 소설 중에도 고아 주인공이 있기는 있지만 전부 다 그런 게 아니다.  제가 자라면서 읽던 책들에 위로해 주고 충고해 주는 부모 절반이상였다.  이왕에 말 나오는데 한국 아동 책 뿐만 아니라 모든 한국 소설에 부모가 없거나 원수가 돼서 없는 샘인 이야기 . . . 95%이상? 제가 아는 한국 친구 중에도 부모 둘 다 옆에 있어주는 사람이 없다.  

재목에 나오는듯이 이와 같은 잔인한 끔찍한 세상에서 서바이벌 밖에 생각이 된다.  기필코 행복이란 책이 한국에서 연출할 수 없겠다.  오히려 의지를 펴서 군략을 쓰고 적을 격퇴해야한 다는 이와 같은 책 필요하다.

In The Heat of the Night

 Objectively speaking, this is the perfect film.  Every single element of it was executed to the very highest standards, not just mine but those who are in charge of doling out awards and laurels of various sorts.  Furthermore, it transcends the realm of good filmmaking and reaches the apex of "great" by virtue of having a reason to exist, a painful truth to uncover, and a message that people needed to hear whether they wanted to or not.  

Which makes my reaction to it a bit incongruous.  When the movie ended, I was seriously frustrated.  Such a good movie, and yet so many plot holes, unanswered questions, and tenuous connections.  I stewed in that frustration for a good while.  As a film, it was genius.  As a story, it was almost insultingly amateurish.  So I thought.  

Whether intended or not, my reaction revealed another element of the genius of this film.  somehow over the course of the film, I had become so invested in Tibbs' story, his outlook, that I had fallen into the same trap that almost undid him.  Those plot holes and incongruities that so frustrated me--they didn't really exist.  I only felt them because I expected something else, for the vast conspiracy at the heart of the mystery to be exposed, and for the bigots and bullies to get their comeuppance.  When that didn't happen, I was so frustrated that I instinctively blamed the film for what I perceived as a flaw, but was instead the very fabric of the story.

If I had watched the movie purely as a murder mystery, it would have been tied up in my mind as neatly as Jessica Fletcher or Matlock could have hoped.  But I didn't watch it that way.  I scarcely noticed the ostensibly central mystery, just as Tibbs did and, like him, was blinded.  Blinded to the extent that for some time after the movie was over, I didn't even believe that the mystery had been solved.  And that, in my book, is art.

Dante Alighieri: Divina Commedia

 I wonder if Dante was satisfied when he finished this.  With neither progenitor nor offspring, this work certainly has earned its place in the pantheon of world literature.  No work before or since can compare to it in ambition as far as I am concerned.  it is not simply that Dante set out to explain the mysteries of the afterlife; evidently that would have been to easy for his taste.  Rather he set out to do that backward and in heels, so to speak, in a hobbling meter of his own device, and with a radial symmetry that would impress even with today's ability to go back and adjust things after the fact.  This would have been a herculean task for any, but he did the thing, and then topped it off with riveting narration, indelible characters, and a cosmic imagination so profound that many today take it to be gospel fact.  The orders and ranks of angels, for example, are taken as metaphysical fact in some circles, when in fact this is something of Dante's pure invention.

Dante's trip through hell is the most widely known, of course, and I had even committed passages from it to memory decades ago.  Naturally, the gruesome and inventive punishments there tend to capture the memory, and who among us has not found ourselves "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita"? Even those who have not yet reached the "mezzo" can relate.  

Familiar though I was with the Inferno, I had never touched the other two books in the Commedia before finally setting myself to it this year.  Fully aware of the book's import and influence, it seemed insulting to read it in English, and I set out to do it backward and in heels--in Middle Italian.  Refusal to do things the easy way is a point Dante and I have in common.  Like Dante, I set my nose to the belt sander, and did it.  I wonder if, like me, Dante also felt dissatisfied with the result.

The Commedia is a masterpiece; of that there is no doubt.  It's a fractal mosaic of words and ideas, as awe-inspiring in its geometry as in its language.  But that was the easy part.  Dante eats words and shits terza rima.  What he set out to do, however, was not merrely to write a glorious labyrinth of epic poetry.  He set his sights no lower than to solve the mysteries of existence, and resolve the fundamental contradictions at the heart of the religion that shaped his entire life.  His decision to make himself the sojourner in the story makes it obvious that it's an allegory of the doubts he wrestled with in life, but it would be a mistake to stop there.  The journey of the character Dante parallels that of the believer Dante, to be sure, but there is a third journey here:  that of the author.  The Commedia is not an explication of the conclusions that bolstered  his faith; it bears the marks of a thought in progress, the conclusion of which was unsure at the outset.  

And the conclusion of those three journeys, the believer, the writer, and the character, might possibly have been less definitive that they would have wanted.  After all of that, after a literary, if not literal, trip to hell and back, the answer to the question, "How can all of this that I believe and have been taught possibly be true?" turns out to have been, "None of your business.  It is for God to know and understand.  It is for you to believe and follow."  The character was satisfied.  He even pretended that it was an actual answer.  Maybe the believer in Dante was also content to leave it there.  But how could the writer have been?  How could a mind that would bother to ask the question have been satisfied with that answer?  One who set out to prove by logic and theology that God is indeed just and good . . . surely he saw how thoroughly he failed at that task.  And the reader--this reader, who wore Dante like a robe while reading, and eagerly awaited the ultimate answer in the ultimate sphere, some truth buried in the cornices of this towering masterpiece--how could he feel otherwise?

마부

 예술과 문학은 무슨 역할을 맡는 걸까?  우리 아는데로 보여줄까? 아니면, 우리 보는대로 보여줄까?  이 질문은 왔다 갔다 하는 추처럼 예술의 역사의 핵심 질문이다.  Caracci와 Caravaggio, Constable과 Turner, Manet와 Monet, 예술 뿐만 아니고 전체 문화의 쟁점이다.  한편에, 오발탄과 같은 작품이 우리 겪는 대로 존재를 반영하는 점에 가치가 있다.  윗사람들이 아랫사람들을 밟는 게 현실이라 그렇지 않다는 게 착각 뿐이다.  예술은 위로해야 하는 역할 아니라 아무리 끔찍해도 현실을 밝여야 한다는 측면이다.

다른 한편에 오발탄과 같이 1961년에 개봉한 마부는 무참히 현실을 반성할 필요가 없다는 측면이 있다.  우리 다 겪는 고통스러운 생활을 화면에서 볼 필요가 있냐는 작품이다.  잠깐이라도 인생에서 탈출해서 안도할 수 있다면 좋은 거 아닌가에도 의미가 있다.  마부에 나오는 얘기는 현실에 볼 수 없다.  아무리 열심히, 아무리 도덕적으로 살아도 결국은 또 같다. 인명재천이라더니.  기적을 기다리자는 작품 아니고 잠시 기적을 기다리면 안 되는짖를 잊자는 작품이다.

Okot p'Bitek: Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol

Progress or tradition?  When I say "fuck, no" to the cisheteronormative white ableist phallic theocapitalist kyriarchy, am I just another colonizer?  Just another outsider trying to impose my beliefs on a long established culture that celebrates all the things I abhor?  When I say that religion is unequivocally harmful, and I do, am I really a paternalist know-it-all with an inflated sense of my own importance?

As ever, the problem is on its face an either/or, a dichotomy in search of a synthesis, and p'Bitek's work is a revealing study of the problem.  What is his conclusion?  Whose side is the author taking, Lawino's or Ocol's?  Is p'Bitek in favor of tradition, or progress?  It would be understandable if one took Ocol to be a straw man, a comically oblivious and deluded foil, whose only purpose is to strengthen his opponent's arguments.  It is surely not without purpose that the author paints him so clearly as a sad pawn in the political games of the Pan-African movement.  Lawino gets an undeniably more forgiving treatment: the woman wronged, the preserver of tradition, the voice of reason, not to mention around three times as many pages to make her case.

But she is wrong.  Maybe not on every level, and maybe not even in the broader intention of the work, but she is wrong, and p'Bitek does not shy away from highlighting it:

That child lying

On the earth

. . . Heavy with malarial parasites

Raging through his veins,

The mad woman

spits on the palms

Of his hands

And on his feet,

Squirts beer

On his face

to cool him,

Spills chicken blood

On his chest,

A gift to Death! (III)

 

This boy does not need chicken blood; he needs quinine.  The old ways may be lovely and touching, but they are false.  There is no disputing this.  And the new ways that Ocol is championing are not, as Lawino seems to think, some ridiculous Western intrusion.  She rails against the ridiculousness of the celibate priests; the dry, spiritless teachers who can't even dance properly.  She glories in the wild freedom of the culture she knows.  To her, of course her husband is ridiculous, learning English, desiring a Westernized moppet, wearing ludicrously impractial trousers.  Her wit is so biting, her imagery so vivid, one is seduced into thinking that she is the voice of this book.  In reality, it is Lawino who is the straw woman.  

Ocol struggles, to be sure.  His position is unsolidified, even contradictory.  He rails against Western intrusion, declaring,

To the gallows

With all the Professors

of Anthropology

And teachers of African History,

A bonfire

We'll make of their works,

We'll destroy all the anthologies

Of African literature

And close down

All the schools

Of African Studies

But it is not because they intrude that he wishes to abolish them.  It is because they remind him of something he doesn't want to see, and which he desires to escape:

 Smash all these mirrors

That I may not see

The blackness of the past

From which I came

Reflected in them (III).

One doesn't need to know that this very closely reflects p'Bitek's own stated position in life, to make the connection.   As beautiful as the old ways are, wild and free and glorious, they are wrong.  Quinine works.  Chicken blood does not.  To Lawino, this Ocol is just a colonial stooge, but to p'Bitek he seems to be more.  He is a man struggling with the reality that progress is good, but the ways in which progress wants to come are bad.  Ocol, in his poem, is on the verge of realizing what p'Bitek knows: that Leopold II, Bismarck, Livingstone and Stanley bring nothing but death with them.  But so did Mansa Sulayman, Askia, and Shaka.  None of these has the answer.  What is needed is not a Western answer to an African problem.  What is needed is "A new City on the hill" (IX),  a truly African way forward that is beholden neither to colonizers nor to ancestral spirits.  Ocol never does resolve this dilemma, and his diatribe is correspondingly inconsistent,  but somewhere in this dilemma there is an answer.

Gil Vicente: Four Plays

 I am reminded of a terrible movie: Art School Confidential, wherein one of the characters' paintings is lauded because "it's as if he's never seen a painting before."  This is exactly the impression I get from reading these accidental attempts as drama by a man for whom play-writing was certainly not a primary vocation.  Vicente was, as far as we know, a goldsmith who offhandedly prepared a little staged production for the Queen, and turned out to be rather good at it.  Because he was nothing resembling a literato, his plays are startlingly unplaylike, something of a bridge between medieval passion plays and commedia dell'arte.  No plot, nor characterization, nothing that we would think of as suitable for the stage, rather more like arranged speeches.  Convoluted and inelegant.  Charming, and occasionally insightful, there was nothing here that I am likely to read again.

And yet.

What a bizarre overlap there is with Benvenuto Cellini.  Both European men operating around the year 1500.  Rather a tenuous connection.  Both goldsmiths first and writers offhandedly.  Very well.  Both inadvertently engraved in posterity for something they no doubt thought of as a trifle at the time.  More promising.  Compare, however, these words of Vicente's:

If hard work and merit spelt success I would have enough to live on and give and leave in my will (To the Conde de Vimioso, III. 382-3).

with these of Cellini:

It is not enough to be a man of virtue and talent (Autobiography, can't be arsed to look up the page number).

This takes the parallel from convenient to spooky.  One is tempted to look for evidence of Cellini's frustration in Vicente's plays, and vice versa. for now, I will instead observe the frustrating truth that talent, hard work, and merit (I make no claim to virtue) have absolutely fuck all to do with what this existence recognizes as success, and that I can sympathize with both men. 

Robert Hughes: Seventy Proven Hypnosis Scripts

 There is not much to say about this book, but an awful lot to say about the place it represents on my current path.  I took some valuable concepts and tools away from it, several that I have already applied with success.  On the whole, it is repetitive and reductive, and by no means needed to be as long as it is.  One gets the impression that vast swaths were copied and pasted from one section to another, which is presumably because they work.  

But what can I say about the new doors that are opening to me, of which this is a mere splinter?  Shall I wax dramatic, and marvel at the wonders of the human mind to which I am being awakened?  Shall I confess my fear that I am not suited to open these doors and ask these questions?  Shall I make some forced attempt to connect what I am learning about human experience to the rather more stable rocks of literature and philosophy?  Shall I leave the reader, of which there are presumably none, with the impression that I might be going mad?  Yes, I think this last one will do nicely.

Svetlana Alexievich: In Search of the Free Individual

I am an unapologetic, though recovering, completionist.  As one who has stumbled across my blog might gather, it is rather a sense of pride that I have written about absolutely every book iI have read (and some movies I have watched) for roughly fifteen years.  Even though it scarcely qualifies as a book ( being rather the transcription of a speech), reading, and writing about, this item is definitely a sacrifice at the altar of completionism--twice so, insofar as it is also a notch on the list of "Nobel Prize winners".  

How frustrating, therefore, that it has done rather the opposite of what I intended.  I had hoped to cross Alexievich off the list, add her to the collection, and set her upon the shelf to be admired.  I was, instead, smitten by her perspective, brutally realistic and deeply philosophical.  Raw and clear, and most importantly unafraid of the implications of what she sees.  I have read rather a few books in my time, quite a few that are brutal observations of reality, and slightly fewer that are bold and clear attempts to answer unanswerable questions.  If this brief glimpse is to be trusted, Alexievich is of that rare flavor that dares to do both.  

Accordingly, as much as I want to put her on the shelf and mark her "done," I simply cannot.  I am intrigued and smitten, and must dive further into her mind before I can let her go.

Tom Stoppard: Complete Plays Volume 2

 It is in the fabric of this volume, consisting as it does only of dramas written for radio, that it feels somehow more and less complete than Stoppard's fully staged works.  There is something liberating about not being beholden to visualization.  The fact that these plays are entirely auditory means that there is no imagination required.  What is on the page is all there is, unlike staged works which are designed to incorporate the additional elements of set, lighting, costume, etc.  The mind needn't wander.  The writer has possibly even more freedom.  He needn't ask himself while writing, "Is is possible to do this even?" It is all possible.

And yet these freedoms from constraint are also limitations.  The first apparent of such limitations is that of length.  So many of the ideas Stoppard considers here are left undeveloped, with the possible exception of "In the Native State," the longest of the radio plays.  It is a great comfort to know that there are three stout volumes filled with his other works on my shelf, and plenty of room for these ideas to blossom.  The other unique feature of these plays, however, is analogous to the limitations of reading a fully staged work.  Stoppard so often relies on the main creative tool allowed to an audio drama: simultaneity.  It is manifestly impossible for me to experience the words on the page in parallel as they were intended, and, as with other dramatic works, there is simply no substitute for the experience of the finished product.

Scott McCloud (ed.): 24 Hour Comics

 The nature of this book is such that the project/concept itself is more open to interpretation and reaction than the works it inspired.  Certainly certain among the offerings in this collection are outstanding in their own right.  Neil Gaiman and Steve Bissette, unsurprisingly, contributed my favorites and the latter in particular hit a little too close to home--in exactly the way good art and literature do.  

However it is the phenomenon itself that is most revealing to me.  The idea that extreme time constraints force something out of your subconscious that maybe would have remained buried if you were more at leisure, and that works that come from that deep well are often more vivid and real than things which are more conscious and deliberate, well this idea has a great deal of support from my own personal experience.  I'm sure it's no coincidence that a few days after reading this collection an idea for a short graphic novel sprang fully formed into my consciousness, and I have begun giving birth to it.  It's a shame that my artistic skill is not uup to the task of completing it in 24 hours. 

Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber

 It strikes me as a little odd that I don't have a lot to say about this groundbreaking and important work.  In fact, that's largely what I have to say about it: that it was important and groundbreaking.  If I didn't know better, however, I would assume that it was one of the author's early works.  It is vivid, engrossing, and wildly passionate.  Her strengths are on full display: creating a mood, scene, and images that work together to create the equivalent of a painting on the page.  Nonetheless, the additional elements that one might expect of a mature writer are somewhat lacking: clarity, flow, thematic development, cohesion . . . the impression is very much that of a gifted young writer with a great deal of promise, but room for growth.  One wonders if she ever took the themes that she obsessed over in this mid-career work any further, and lived up to its potential.  I'm very certain that it is worth reading her later works to find out.

Arthur Schopenhauer: Religion: A Dialogue, and Other Essays

 In the margin of "Psychological Observations", one of the essays in this collection, next to the sentence "It is true, indeed, that character always forms a consistent and connected whole; but the roots of all its qualities lie too deep to allow of our concluding from particular data in a given case whether certain qualities can or cannot exist together," I have scrawled angrily, "Ummm . . . then why do you do it so often?" (64).  This was neither the first nor the last time that Schopenhauer inadvertently revealed his blind spot in this collection, but it was the most suitably anecdotal.  The perceptiveness, objectivity, and rational acuity that he brings to bear resonate nicely with my own skeptical, even cold, nature.  He lacks, however, a certain quality, of which deficit he seems unaware, even as he sings its praises: perspective.  

I have written before about Schopenhauer being imprisoned in his own experience, but the irony in this collection is that he specifically praises the virtues of a broad perspective, even while failing to notice the walls of the well in which he is sulking.  He seems incapable of noticing the inconsistency of claiming that women are incapable of patience, and then on the same page proclaiming, "The course of our individual life . . . may be compared to a piece of rough mosaic.  So long as you stand right in front of it, you cannot get a right view of the objects presented.".  He proposes that "we can get a general view only from a distance," while stubbornly refusing to adopt such a distance himself (65-66).  

Thus is it that we find such glories of reason and objectivity as the titular dialogue on religion--incomparably and shockingly fair in its treatment--in the same volume as such grievously outdated items as "On Physiognomy", wherein he asserts that everything you need to know about a man is visible in his face.  When it comes to things he knows, Schopenhauer is incisive, fearless, and to my belief correct.  When he speaks of things of which he doesn't know, the results are far more mixed.  This is, of course, so normal and human as to be a solipsism, and not a problem in itself.  The problem is that Schopenhauer doesn't know what he doesn't know, and thus treats himself as an authority in areas where he is laughably oblivious.

Which fault makes me think about my own blindspots.  Both by nature and by nurture, I am pretty sympathetic to Schopenhauer.  I too look at the world, and see it as objectively evil and cruel, and furthermore especially evil and cruel to those like me who can see it clearly.  I too despair of reality, of human existence at least, and cannot keep quiet about it.  It's possible that I see one layer beyond what Schopenhauer can, that where my reasoning, education, or intelligence trail his, at least my perspective is broader.  I wonder, however, if I am falling into the same trap. Surely there is yet another exponent of this fractal that we inhabit, one beyond what I currently take into account.  What is it that I don't know I don't know?

Giacomo Leopardi: Canti

 Reality wears many faces.  Although I see it differently from Leopardi, rather as a diseased tree bearing poisonous fruit than a singing girl, the effect is the same.  We are seeing the same thing.  The void.  The unbearable pain of existence against which all we can do is wail out in the wilderness, bereft even of the hope that we will be heard.  

Which is my characteristically melodramatic way of saying, although I cannot relate to the specific triggers of Leopardi's existential angst--frustrated love, life in a dissolute world that shames the glories of the past, imprisonment in a body that will never do me credit . . . oh.  Yes, I see now.  Oh my. 

Mercifully, it is not only this despair that Leopardi and I share.  Like so many who face the void, we both can see something inside of it.  There is peace to be had, as he says, in helping others, in seeing our place, in drifting anonymously in a meaningless sea, and, although he mentions it surprisingly little, there is also peace to be had in writing something wonderfully melodramatic and throwing it to the wind.

Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks

 "But little Hanno saw more than he was meant to see, and his eyes, those shy golden brown eyes ringed with bluish shadows. observed things only too well."

Little Hanno.  What could have happened if he had lived?  What would his life have been?  It's such folly to ask what happens after the final act of a play, after the curtain has drawn for the final time at night.  The answer is, of course, "The actors go home."  And yet we cannot but wonder what could have been for Hanno, if another life was possible for him, or for any of them.  If perhaps Tony could have been happy with her doctor, of Thomas with his flower girl.  We are even programmed to expect such an ending, to see in the gentle foreshadowing the possibility of some small happiness--in spite of the subtitle's warning: "The Decline of a Family".  No, happiness was not possible.  The world, and the book,  that they lived in would not allow it.

And yet, suppose it was possible for Hanno to escape.  I do not propose another ending of the book, but rather that Hanno escaped the pages of the book, the doomed story that was written for him.  If he were trapped, not in the pages of a novel, but rather in the real world, it's entirely possible that after his father's death, and the liquidation of the family business, his mother whisked him away to Munich.  There, safe from the pressures of business and the keeping up of burgher appearances, he could pursue work in a field more suited to his sensitive nature, perhaps studying writing or journalism.  Perhaps at the Technical University of Munich.  

Perhaps his writing would be well-regarded.  He might even publish a novel in his twenties that would later be cited as a reason for his being given the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Ah, dare we suppose that his sensitive nature might even find liberty in romance?  That his apparent love for the young Count Kai might find its adult expression?  No, this would be too much, even for the real world.  He would likely meet the external pressures of society and the internal pressure of his forbidden desires by marrying, perhaps a Jewish woman from an educated, well-regarded family.  Even this would likely not give little Hanno any rest, however.  A marriage of escape and denial is happy for neither party.  Besides which, the world would soon be at war.  

If not in marriage, perhaps there would be joy in parenthood, then.  As many as six children, what a joy!  And all of them marvelous, writers, actors, scholars, and one marine biologist who would go on to be known as The Mother of the Oceans for her tireless work in their behalf.  What joy this would bring, unless the world once again went to war.  Hanno's Jewish wife, and his refusal to compromise his morals, would surely make this period difficult as well.  They would have to escape, perhaps to America.

Finally, in America little Hanno would be free of the cruel European world that had held him under its thumb for 65 years.  That is, if it were not for the rise of McCarthyism.  He would be so many of the things they would hate, fearless, staunch, sensitive, and egalitarian.  No, this new world would offer no peace to a boy like Hanno.  He would have to return to Europe.  No doubt he would die there, aged 80.  

And so it was that Thomas Mann died twice.  He sealed himself in a book at the age of 25, and stayed there until his body caught up 55 years later.  His extensive journals reveal the upsetting ways his heart stayed, and will stay, forever in Lubeck, aged 15, holding the hand of his young friend the count, seeing more than he was meant to, and in the only small solace, finding a way to write it down.

Octavia E. Butler: Parable of the Sower

 I really wanted to like this book.  The characters were so vivid, the writing so fluid and honest, and the main character in particular so relatable. 

Like her, all I really want is to be heard.  My ideas make perfect sense to me, and I have devoted a lifetime to thinking them out, writing them down, and testing them in the brutal laboratory of life.  I'm not even attached to the idea that they are True or Right.  I would just love for someone to hear them without laughing or scoffing or backing away slowly, as though from a madman.  This world is terrifying and cruel, and at times seems to be teetering on the brink of exactly to the sort of collapse Butler describes.  In fact, her account of the fall of America seems entirely plausible.  The only thing that keeps me going most days is the possibility that I understand something real, something to which others are blind, and that I may have not entirely wasted my time here.  In so many ways, I am Lauren.  I feel her pain, her drive, and her clarity.  I would even be her if it were not for one thing:

Her ideas are sooooo stuuuuupid.

If there were any ring of truth in the ideas of Earthseed, which Butler presumably means to be taken in earnest, I would convert right now.  I'd change my official religion from Bokononist right this moment.  Where the book succeeds on every other level, however, it fails in this: to provide a philosophy any deeper than a flimsy NYT self help book.    I wanted so badly to get on board, to form an Earthseed cult and start recruiting.  At the very least, I wanted to enjoy this book.  But I  . . . seriously, I just can't.

Dances With Wolves

 I still remember the awe with which this movie was received when it was released, and being specifically struck with the gumption it must have taken for Kevin Costner to reveal his own bare buttocks (gasp!) on screen.  Some years after its release, I sat down to watch it with some friends on a battered VHS tape.  I fell asleep a quarter of the way through.

At least twenty-five years later, I can appreciate what I was unable to at the time.  The slow, vaguely European way the camera makes love to the scenery, in particular, was probably what put me to sleep at that first viewing, but finds a sympathetic audience in me now.  Unfamiliar as I was with the way indigenous people were usually treated in film, the novelty of a respectful treatment that gave agency to its subjects was also lost on me at that time.  

But I have missed the sweet spot where I might have truly appreciated this film.  I am too old and jaded to accept lovely cinematography as a justification for a film;  to me it is now merely frosting.  Likewise, I have become far too aware of the realities of Native American life to accept what was, at the time, rather a progressive approach.  The film is not as deplorable in its treatment as its predecessors, but still bears the marks of the white gaze, the noble savage trope, and the sanitization of complex issues. This film probably earned its accolades at the time, but while I am now prepared to stay awake for it, I cannot bring myself to bestow laurels today.

Mario Vargas Llosa: El Hablador

 When I last visited Llosa--has it really been over a decade?--I was tickled by the way I allowed myself to be confused by the identities and names of the different characters.  Was I an obtuse reader, who missed obvious markers early in the book and labored under an unintended misconception?  Was it a trick of language and/or translation?  Or was Llosa really clever enough not only to trick me, but to leave me wondering if I had actually tricked myself?

It is edifying to be able to report that not only is Llosa that clever (and correspondingly that I am not hopelessly obtuse), but that this cleverness has a theme, one that I merely suspected was intentional in La Ciudad y Los Perros, but occupies the very heart of El Hablador. It is, in fact, taken even further.  "Who is a person in relation to their name?" is broadened until the reader asks along with the various Habladores of the book, the writer, the narrator, and the eponymous speaker, "What is reality in relation to what is said about it?"

Llosa's answer, to the extent that he can be said to offer such a thing, is from a certain perspective, "Reality is what we say it is."  The stories that we tell about ourselves, our family, our culture, or reality itself, become real by virtue of the speaking.  Coy as ever, though, Llosa also allows himself a certain amount of wiggle room by offering multiple viewpoints and variations on the stories he tells here.  The central figure in the matroyshka of speakers, Saul, even peppers his stories with "Eso es, lo menos, lo que yo he sabido," a hedge that acknowledges the implicit fuzziness of the reality we create by speaking.  Which version is correct?  Which speaker is telling the truth?  And, as an important substrate, which view of important cultural and political issues is right and just?  It is no surprise that Llosa's answer is a non-answer, an irresolution, a return of the reader's gaze inward to ask "What has been said, Escuchador, what did it create for you?"

Italo Calvino: The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount

"Books are my religion," I said to a friend today.  He is not of a particularly literary bent, so he thought I meant that I just really, really, like them.  I do not like them; at least, I don't particularly enjoy reading as an activity.  I don't read for pleasure.  I read for understanding, and on rare occasion reading leads not only to understanding, but to being understood.  These moments are the equivalent of getting the Holy Ghost in church.  They are the moments where the divine is suddenly accessible to me personally.  I thought Italo Calvino understood me before these novellae.  The Baron in the Trees spoke to myself as a child.  His Italian Folktales (which some digging has revealed are far more his than not) spoke to myself as a scholar and a lover of stories.  But these two.  Man.

It is as though he is writing to me retroactively from the grave.  How did he know that I would be reading "The Nonexistent Knight" at exactly the moment I was struggling to believe that I even exist?  And even more startling, how did he arrange for me to read "The Cloven Viscount" after my own left side had been torn away in an accident?  This latter is far too specific.

I view my own religion, that of Books, with the same skepticism I apply to all religions:  it's fine unless you believe it.  I know very well that it is in my nature as a human to see myself in places that perhaps it is not.  And I know that it was possible for Calvino . . . no, for my friend Italo to have written what he did--not because it's specific to me, but because it is common to all humans.  But I can perhaps be forgiven for taking these moments of religious experience to heart, and allowing myself to be reassured that I not only exist and am whole, but that someone, even if he's been dead for thirty years, cares.

Meredith Talusan: Fairest

During the still incomplete process of trying not to be a trash human, there has been a certain amount of tension between my highly visible privileges (white, cis, and male), and my more subtle membership in less privileged groups (my disability is not obvious, and I can theoretically tone down the queerness if necessary).  The fact that my privileged aspects are the first thing one knows about me means that, even though I am technically disadvantaged, I largely navigate the world as though I were not.

Like any thinking privileged person, I am a vocal ally for trans people, women, and people who experience racial discrimination ("people of color", as some would say).  And like any self-aware ally, I am pained by the realization that my allyship is constantly corrupted by my concern with how I am perceived.  Perhaps I feel the danger of "performative wokeness" so keenly because I am such a performative person by nature that every action is in danger of being insincere.  I actually don't even know if it's possible for me to totally decenter myself.  Even this admission is itself somewhat performative, in spite of the fact that no one I know personally is ever likely to read this.  Everything I do is corrupted by the instinct to center myself, based on decades of being told by society that I am important.  Every action I take on the behalf of others, if I am not careful, could easily turn me into a micro-aggressor, a micro-oppressor even.

And there is a specific variety of performative allyship that pains me: the expression of rightly monnikered "white liberal guilt".  It hurts because it's so very true.  I do feel guilty.  I feel guilty that the black friends I grew up with didn't have access to the same things I did.  I feel guilty that I didn't see it clearly enough at the time to do anything about it.  I feel guilty that my family is comfortable from, in reverse chronological order, blindly accepted advantage, the enslavement of black people, and the theft of native land.  This guilt sometimes grabs the steering wheel and forces kneejerk answers to questions of inequality.  Its instinct is to always take the side of an oppressed group, sometimes thoughtlessly. 

As I read this book, my white liberal guilt kept grabbing for the wheel.  It kept looking for ways to root for the author, a trans woman of Asian descent.  It gave her the benefit of the doubt whenever possible, made excuses for her, and fought tooth and claw against the instinct that she was perhaps not a victim in her story.  How could she possibly be the villain, an oppressor even?  WLG would not allow the consideration of such a possibility.

This battle continued until the point at which she leveraged her white-passing beauty to try and steal her best friend's lover.  It was at that point that my WLG lost.  It wasn't just this grotesque betrayal, a villainy so profound and clear that in a fiction we would criticize it as a caricature, but also the offhandedness with which the author seemed to view it.  There was no glimmer of remorse, of self-reflection in the way she presented the story, and it stunned my WLG long enough for it to become clear what I had been trying not to see all along: this woman is a sociopath.

Nor was I disabused of this notion as I finished the book.  The scales dropped from my eyes, and the deficiency of her narrative popped into focus.  Until that point, I had only been vaguely aware of a general insincerity in her style.  Afterward, it became clear that what I was really feeling was an absence of human warmth.  What had before seemed like an overedited concern with the way she was portraying herself, was suddenly seen for the incapacity for empathy that it truly was. This white-passing trans woman had, seemingly without remorse, become that which I am terrified of becoming,which fear led me to give her the benefit of the doubt for 3/4 of the book: a member of an oppressed group who overcomes that oppression only to become the oppressor.