September 2009 Archives
Hats Off!
Hats off to Timothy Schaffert, who ran another great (downtown) omaha lit fest this weekend! I loved the setting--the cooler-than-cool KANEKO in the Old Market. Cody Lumpkin, a UNL grad student and compelling poet, did a beautiful job moderating the panel I was on with writers Amelia Montes, Belinda Acosta (about whom you've heard so much of late), Jeff Koterba, and publicist Lauren Cerand. We talked about options for meaningful and effective self-promotion in the age of Twitter to a huge, lovely, and gracious audience. (Jamie, please come by and see me! Yes, you! Yoga lady, drop me a line!)
Hats off to Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who've donated hundreds of copies of their terrific new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (reviewed in today's NYTBR, featured in a recent NYTimes Magazine), so that they could get their important message of investment and uplift out into the community. Many thanks to Jacqueline Scoones, associate director of KANEKO, where Kristof and WuDunn will be speaking this fall, who sent me home with a box of 12 brand-new hardcover copies to distribute to colleagues here at UNL.
Hats off to Amelia Montes for her great reading today at the Bennett Martin Public Library here in downtown Lincoln! She read from the introduction, letters, notes, and text of her brand-new Penguin Classics edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 novel Who Would Have Thought It?. If you're in the mood for a witty Civil War satire by one of the first Latina writers published in North America (the style reminds me a lot of Dickens), you should check it out. Amelia followed the Ruiz de Burton reading with an essay of her own, "Queen for a Day," that had us all moved and laughing. Luckily, it will be published this December in An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots.
Regarding Peter Schjeldahl's piece in the recent New Yorker, however, I feel much as the narrator does at the opening of Moby Dick: "that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off." Here's why.
The concept of the destructive and reductive potential of the male gaze has been around in the culture for, oh, 30 years or so now, since John Berger and Laura Mulvey, so it's an unpleasant surprise to read not really much at all about the new Vermeer show at the Met in Schjeldahl's "Dutch Touch" but rather about the fact that one of Vermeer's milkmaid subjects is not quite to Schjeldahl's personal taste. She is "husky," he tells us--and then, two columns later, back on the topic, he makes sure to specify that she is "sturdy." Just in case we're unsure, he tells us that her "mass," "monumentally composed," "would stand [him] off, in an attitude of reverence, even if she were naked."
Um, thank you? (Oh, wait: Schjeldahl reads Proust, too, he wants you to know, and himself has a Proustian sensibility.)
This is what passes for art criticism in The New Yorker? Psssht. For shame.
Hats off to Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who've donated hundreds of copies of their terrific new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (reviewed in today's NYTBR, featured in a recent NYTimes Magazine), so that they could get their important message of investment and uplift out into the community. Many thanks to Jacqueline Scoones, associate director of KANEKO, where Kristof and WuDunn will be speaking this fall, who sent me home with a box of 12 brand-new hardcover copies to distribute to colleagues here at UNL.
Hats off to Amelia Montes for her great reading today at the Bennett Martin Public Library here in downtown Lincoln! She read from the introduction, letters, notes, and text of her brand-new Penguin Classics edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 novel Who Would Have Thought It?. If you're in the mood for a witty Civil War satire by one of the first Latina writers published in North America (the style reminds me a lot of Dickens), you should check it out. Amelia followed the Ruiz de Burton reading with an essay of her own, "Queen for a Day," that had us all moved and laughing. Luckily, it will be published this December in An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots.
Regarding Peter Schjeldahl's piece in the recent New Yorker, however, I feel much as the narrator does at the opening of Moby Dick: "that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off." Here's why.The concept of the destructive and reductive potential of the male gaze has been around in the culture for, oh, 30 years or so now, since John Berger and Laura Mulvey, so it's an unpleasant surprise to read not really much at all about the new Vermeer show at the Met in Schjeldahl's "Dutch Touch" but rather about the fact that one of Vermeer's milkmaid subjects is not quite to Schjeldahl's personal taste. She is "husky," he tells us--and then, two columns later, back on the topic, he makes sure to specify that she is "sturdy." Just in case we're unsure, he tells us that her "mass," "monumentally composed," "would stand [him] off, in an attitude of reverence, even if she were naked."
Um, thank you? (Oh, wait: Schjeldahl reads Proust, too, he wants you to know, and himself has a Proustian sensibility.)
This is what passes for art criticism in The New Yorker? Psssht. For shame.
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Acosta, González, Stein--"The Difference Is Spreading"
Teaching literature can make for some pretty strange bedfellows. Today, I'm careening among Belinda Acosta's contemporary chica lit, Corky González's radical Chicano-uplift poetry, and Gertrude Stein's shattering of symbolic meaning, all in rapid succession. My brain aches.
First, Belinda Acosta visited my Chican@ lit class to talk about her novel Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, from which she'll be reading on
Wednesday, 9/16 at 7:00 p.m.
Bailey Library, Andrews Hall.
It's free and open to the public, and she'll be signing books afterward. She was great in the class--funny, engaging, warm, utterly unpretentious and candid. Her reading should be fun.
Once Belinda had taken off, the class turned to Corky González's long poem, "I Am Joaquín," which always strikes me as a transparently clear text--so much so, that I always feel a little redundant as a professor when I teach it. "I am Joaquín" had a tremendous cultural impact, impossible to overestimate, but the text itself isn't particularly difficult to understand. There's little to say, except to point out the mildly experimental typography, gloss the historical references, contextualize it in terms of the 1960s civil rights movements, and note the gender discrepancies, which are very much of their era. Yet it somehow manages to baffle students, and because we'd spent so much time laughing with Belinda, we didn't get to talk about it as long as we should have. Teacher guilt!
Tomorrow, for more bafflement, we'll be discussing Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons in a graduate class. (Have you read Stein? Not the easy stuff, like the autobiographies, but the hard, early, crazy stuff, like Three Lives and The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons. Why do I assign these texts?) As I prep, I'm recalling the moment when, years ago, teaching Stein to undergraduates in Texas, I received a parody of her work from one of the students, something like, "Gertrude must be shot. Shot once yet once, once yet not once. Gertrude must be shot, once, once, yet not once." Hilarious--and quintessentially Texan. I pinned it on my door.
More serious scholars (ahem) are torn between seeing Tender Buttons (written 1912, published 1914) as Stein's free play with the signifier (the word) that liberates language from patriarchal monologism--"as presymbolic jouissance and as irreducibly multiple, fragmented, open-ended articulation of lexical meaning," to quote Marianne DeKoven--and trying to find patterns of fixed meaning buried within the text (especially private, autobiographical meaning: "lover's code words shared by Stein and [Alice B.] Toklas concerning their sexual relationship," according to Howard Finn). If I were a grad student, and critical opinion offered me a choice between splashing happily in a text's sound-play, rejecting any strenuous quests for meaning while getting to feel pleasantly subversive, or doing the spadework to pry up a coherent through-line, I know which side I'd choose, for sure. Maybe that's just me being lazy.
On a happy, practical note, many thanks to unacknowledged legislators Gertrude and Alice B. for breaking some of the ground for us so that we no longer have to bury our non-hetero relationships or write about them in code. If you're interested in making your campus, workplace, or community more LGBTQ-friendly, go here, because the AAUP is interested, too. To quote Stein, "Act so that there is no use in a centre."
I love that. Not act as if. Act so that.
First, Belinda Acosta visited my Chican@ lit class to talk about her novel Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, from which she'll be reading onWednesday, 9/16 at 7:00 p.m.
Bailey Library, Andrews Hall.
It's free and open to the public, and she'll be signing books afterward. She was great in the class--funny, engaging, warm, utterly unpretentious and candid. Her reading should be fun.
Once Belinda had taken off, the class turned to Corky González's long poem, "I Am Joaquín," which always strikes me as a transparently clear text--so much so, that I always feel a little redundant as a professor when I teach it. "I am Joaquín" had a tremendous cultural impact, impossible to overestimate, but the text itself isn't particularly difficult to understand. There's little to say, except to point out the mildly experimental typography, gloss the historical references, contextualize it in terms of the 1960s civil rights movements, and note the gender discrepancies, which are very much of their era. Yet it somehow manages to baffle students, and because we'd spent so much time laughing with Belinda, we didn't get to talk about it as long as we should have. Teacher guilt!
Tomorrow, for more bafflement, we'll be discussing Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons in a graduate class. (Have you read Stein? Not the easy stuff, like the autobiographies, but the hard, early, crazy stuff, like Three Lives and The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons. Why do I assign these texts?) As I prep, I'm recalling the moment when, years ago, teaching Stein to undergraduates in Texas, I received a parody of her work from one of the students, something like, "Gertrude must be shot. Shot once yet once, once yet not once. Gertrude must be shot, once, once, yet not once." Hilarious--and quintessentially Texan. I pinned it on my door.
More serious scholars (ahem) are torn between seeing Tender Buttons (written 1912, published 1914) as Stein's free play with the signifier (the word) that liberates language from patriarchal monologism--"as presymbolic jouissance and as irreducibly multiple, fragmented, open-ended articulation of lexical meaning," to quote Marianne DeKoven--and trying to find patterns of fixed meaning buried within the text (especially private, autobiographical meaning: "lover's code words shared by Stein and [Alice B.] Toklas concerning their sexual relationship," according to Howard Finn). If I were a grad student, and critical opinion offered me a choice between splashing happily in a text's sound-play, rejecting any strenuous quests for meaning while getting to feel pleasantly subversive, or doing the spadework to pry up a coherent through-line, I know which side I'd choose, for sure. Maybe that's just me being lazy.
On a happy, practical note, many thanks to unacknowledged legislators Gertrude and Alice B. for breaking some of the ground for us so that we no longer have to bury our non-hetero relationships or write about them in code. If you're interested in making your campus, workplace, or community more LGBTQ-friendly, go here, because the AAUP is interested, too. To quote Stein, "Act so that there is no use in a centre."
I love that. Not act as if. Act so that.
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Happy Anniversaries!
Congratulations to the Rachel Maddow Show and to Indigo Bridge Books for great first years! Congratulations to UNL for opening a childcare center on campus! Congratulations to Obama for another great, important speech!
Thanks for checking in here; I've been out of commission for about a week, and I'm sorry. I have been going through it. But no worries, and I'm back better than ever.
Last night, I was happy to catch the free screening of Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning at The Ross. Livingston herself was there, and she not only took questions but also screened 27 minutes of a new work-in-progress that's about her own family--the loss of her parents, grandmother, uncle, and beloved older brother in the span of a few short years.
What struck me was the way that, in just 27 minutes, the filmmaker's own life managed to function as a painful mirror for the desires expressed by the poor, gay, transgendered African American and Latino drag ball regulars in Paris Is Burning. Again and again, the subjects of the first documentary expressed their desire for wealth, ease, luxury, glamour, and beauty. At the drag balls, they dressed up not only as women but also as military men and male executives in suit and tie. They talked about inclusion, access, and privilege against visual backgrounds of severe economic struggle.
Livingston's montage of home movies, by contrast, showed her family's homes and multiple Mercedes in L.A., while the voiceover described dividing up the family silver and diamonds after her parents' deaths. We saw the grandmother who paid Livingston's way through Yale, the grandfather who was an actual military hero (a WWI balloon spy), and the uncle, a Hollywood producer? director?, who gave Livingston her first job in film. Her life seemed to possess most of the attributes that her Paris Is Burning subjects longed for.
When asked about the continuum between the two films, Livingston made no mention of socioeconomic class or the structuring of capitalist desire. I wondered how it felt to interview people who wanted so badly a taste of what she'd grown up with. Livingston didn't say.
Thanks for checking in here; I've been out of commission for about a week, and I'm sorry. I have been going through it. But no worries, and I'm back better than ever.
Last night, I was happy to catch the free screening of Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning at The Ross. Livingston herself was there, and she not only took questions but also screened 27 minutes of a new work-in-progress that's about her own family--the loss of her parents, grandmother, uncle, and beloved older brother in the span of a few short years.
What struck me was the way that, in just 27 minutes, the filmmaker's own life managed to function as a painful mirror for the desires expressed by the poor, gay, transgendered African American and Latino drag ball regulars in Paris Is Burning. Again and again, the subjects of the first documentary expressed their desire for wealth, ease, luxury, glamour, and beauty. At the drag balls, they dressed up not only as women but also as military men and male executives in suit and tie. They talked about inclusion, access, and privilege against visual backgrounds of severe economic struggle.
Livingston's montage of home movies, by contrast, showed her family's homes and multiple Mercedes in L.A., while the voiceover described dividing up the family silver and diamonds after her parents' deaths. We saw the grandmother who paid Livingston's way through Yale, the grandfather who was an actual military hero (a WWI balloon spy), and the uncle, a Hollywood producer? director?, who gave Livingston her first job in film. Her life seemed to possess most of the attributes that her Paris Is Burning subjects longed for.
When asked about the continuum between the two films, Livingston made no mention of socioeconomic class or the structuring of capitalist desire. I wondered how it felt to interview people who wanted so badly a taste of what she'd grown up with. Livingston didn't say.
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Give Me Jury Duty
Turns out kidnapper and child rapist Phillip Garrido was a Jehovah's Witness. As was, apparently, his aiding and abetting wife.
"Psychologists have speculated," says one article, "that Mrs Garrido was a victim of catastrophically low self-esteem and, once under her husband’s spell, would do anything to hold on to her man." On the other hand, a wife's subjection to the head of the household was also part of what we regularly heard from the Kingdom Hall lectern when I was growing up. Not that those two elements--catastrophically low self-esteem; religious/cultural dictum--are mutually exclusive. Not by a long shot.
I'm just sayin'.
Yesterday, I really did have jury duty--or at least, I was called to the local Hall of Justice for jury selection. We were in the courtroom of Judge Jean Lovell to be vetted to serve on a drunk driving case, and I know everyone always talks about jury duty with resigned dread, but it was actually pretty fascinating, and different from what I expected. Everyone--the clerk, the judge, the attorneys, even the metal-detector lady--was super-polite and explained everything, while I'd thought they'd be all brusque and impatient with us mere civilians, like on courtroom shows. Also, I'd only seen the insides of courthouses in West Virginia and Louisiana before, so I was startled by how clean, new, and plush everything was. The courtroom didn't even have a smell. And our jurors' chairs were padded and could rock backward.
Once the action started, the whole process was intriguing. (And even though the attorneys told us that it would be nothing like CSI or Law & Order, guess what? It kinda was.) The defendant--she of the alleged drunk driving episode--was actually sitting there eyeing us the whole time, which felt peculiar. She later gave her attorney whispered input about which of us to jettison.
The process of the voir dire, the vetting of jurors for bias by the attorneys (which the Nebraskan attorneys pronounced sort of like boudoir, which was confusing), took hours. Have you ever taken a breathalyzer test? Have you ever worked in a place that served alcohol? Do you have formal training in the chemical and biological aspects of alcohol metabolism? We knew a whole lot more about each other than most strangers do. (And I've got to say, this is a mighty drinkin' town.) By the time the lawyers were making their secret checkmarks on the list of our names, deciding who to get rid of, I was so interested and invested that I wanted to stay.
Alas, they gave me my walking papers. I don't know which thing I said made one of the lawyers cross me off, and I never get to learn which lawyer it was. Sigh.
I hope I get called again. Seriously, I do.
"Psychologists have speculated," says one article, "that Mrs Garrido was a victim of catastrophically low self-esteem and, once under her husband’s spell, would do anything to hold on to her man." On the other hand, a wife's subjection to the head of the household was also part of what we regularly heard from the Kingdom Hall lectern when I was growing up. Not that those two elements--catastrophically low self-esteem; religious/cultural dictum--are mutually exclusive. Not by a long shot.
I'm just sayin'.
Yesterday, I really did have jury duty--or at least, I was called to the local Hall of Justice for jury selection. We were in the courtroom of Judge Jean Lovell to be vetted to serve on a drunk driving case, and I know everyone always talks about jury duty with resigned dread, but it was actually pretty fascinating, and different from what I expected. Everyone--the clerk, the judge, the attorneys, even the metal-detector lady--was super-polite and explained everything, while I'd thought they'd be all brusque and impatient with us mere civilians, like on courtroom shows. Also, I'd only seen the insides of courthouses in West Virginia and Louisiana before, so I was startled by how clean, new, and plush everything was. The courtroom didn't even have a smell. And our jurors' chairs were padded and could rock backward.
Once the action started, the whole process was intriguing. (And even though the attorneys told us that it would be nothing like CSI or Law & Order, guess what? It kinda was.) The defendant--she of the alleged drunk driving episode--was actually sitting there eyeing us the whole time, which felt peculiar. She later gave her attorney whispered input about which of us to jettison.
The process of the voir dire, the vetting of jurors for bias by the attorneys (which the Nebraskan attorneys pronounced sort of like boudoir, which was confusing), took hours. Have you ever taken a breathalyzer test? Have you ever worked in a place that served alcohol? Do you have formal training in the chemical and biological aspects of alcohol metabolism? We knew a whole lot more about each other than most strangers do. (And I've got to say, this is a mighty drinkin' town.) By the time the lawyers were making their secret checkmarks on the list of our names, deciding who to get rid of, I was so interested and invested that I wanted to stay.
Alas, they gave me my walking papers. I don't know which thing I said made one of the lawyers cross me off, and I never get to learn which lawyer it was. Sigh.
I hope I get called again. Seriously, I do.
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