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Provocation: Historical Poetics Now

This is the text of the “provocation” I delivered at the Historical Poetics Now conference at the University of Texas, Austin, this weekend. A forthcoming article in Literature Compass discusses Mary Austin’s theory of free verse and its effect on modernist conceptions of Native American poetry in more detail, as does my book manuscript in progress. 

A Provocation from an Americanist

Thank you to the conference organizers for inviting me to be one of the provocateurs at this event––I’ll try to live up to the designation. I’ve been charged with being the provoking Americanist, and I’m afraid I’m also really a modernist these days, so I’ll be giving my views on what historical poetics offers from the standpoint of someone who works primarily with materials from the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My provocation today consists of two main linked claims: first, historical poetics is not only about historicizing poems, and second, historical poetics can help to elucidate some of the ways that contemporary literary studies remains attached to its white supremacist foundations. Put differently, historical poetics can be one tool we use to chip away at the foundational whiteness of literary studies.

Claim 1: historical poetics does not simply mean historicizing poems. A historical poetics approach to literary study pushes scholars to ask which terms we hold stable in order to narrate the literary histories that emerge in our scholarship. Work in historical poetics starts from the premise that, as Michael Warner puts it, the modern academic critic is “a historically unusual sort of person” (“Uncritical Reading” 36) whose habits of critical reading are markedly different from the habits of most other kinds of readers. Academic critical reading is very good at elucidating certain kinds of poetic texts, but many poetic texts have been illegibile to modern literary scholars––for instance, most of the poems written and circulated in the United States in the nineteenth century.

This situation meant that, for a few decades at least, nineteenth-century American poetry was essentially disappeared from English departments, aside from works by Whitman, Dickinson, and maybe sometimes Poe. As Kerry Larson writes in the introduction to the 2011 Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, “It cannot be said of nineteenth-century American poetry that it needs no introduction” (1). For generations of scholars, it seemed self-evident that convention, rhyme, repetition, and imitation were marks of bad poetry, and that bad poetry isn’t worth the investment of time required to make it yield interesting knowledge. Hence, nineteenth-century American poetry was simply ignored. Historical poetics scholarship, along with feminist recovery projects, book history studies, and any number of allied fields, has fundamentally reoriented our view of the nineteenth century in the Americas, pushing critics instead to see how twentieth-century literary critics “ask[ed] questions that nineteenth-century American poetry didn’t seem [able] to answer,” in the words of Mary Louise Kete (15). The scholarship that has investigated how to ask the questions that nineteenth-century American poetry does answer has been as varied in method and scope as nineteenth-century American poetry itself. In general, though, such scholarship can be said to push back against the once pervasive ideas that 1) readers have always understood capital P Poetry to be a meaningful generic category, 2) that conventionality is a mark of bad artistry, and 3) that poetic forms and genres evolved in any kind of progressive way. This latter strand of criticism is the strand I want to pick up in this talk today.

With the time I have remaining, I want to present to you a case study in historical poetics, to show what happens when we no longer hold generic and formal terms––especially terms like meter and prosody––stable as we analyze poetic texts. [I have to ask you indulgence here, because I’m going to be talking about modernist studies and texts from the early twentieth century, but it’s my hope that this conversation will have some theoretical utility for scholars working prior to the twentieth century.] As a practitioner of historical poetics, I am interested in the consequences of the return of nineteenth-century American poetry for fields that have relied on its disappearance for their own existence--namely, modernism. I am especially interested in the question of how to narrate historical accounts of modernist poetry from the premise that, as Max Cavitch so eloquently puts it, “Poetry’s liberation from the shackles of meter is one of the most important nonevents in late nineteenth-century literary history” (33). When scholars of modernism talk about free verse, they still position it as a real break with the prosodic experiments of the nineteenth century. This narrative covers over the white supremacist theories of meter that developed in the modernist era. A historical poetics approach to the history of free verse poetry can, I propose, reveal how white supremacist ideologies continue to inhere in some scholarly assumptions about the relative values of various poetic forms. In other words, historical poetics is not simply about historicizing poems; it is an approach that challenges the often reflexive, unexamined narratives of progressive generic and formal evolution that sometimes continue to structure otherwise historically-minded scholarship.

My abridged case study today is part of one chapter in the racialized development of free verse in the Americas in the early twentieth century. Mary Austin created a position for herself in the 1910s through the 1930s as one of the foremost “interpreters” of Native American poetry and cultural traditions. She was appointed to the School of American Research in Native American Literature in 1918, authored the “Aboriginal Literature” entry for the Cambridge History of American Literature in 1921, and published widely on Native American literatures and cultures in popular magazines like The Nation and Atlantic Monthly. She managed to attain this stature in spite of the fact that she spoke no Native languages. Though Austin did advocate for the importance of Native American poetry, which she presented as the earliest known form of free verse, she also managed to turn free verse into a tool of settler cultural domination. Austin proposed that free verse poetry was a technology for managing time—specifically, for integrating Native Americans into the relentlessly linear march of what Mark Rifkin has recently theorized as settler time. Austin’s theories of free verse had significant, distorting effects on the way Native American oral expressions were presented as poetry in modernist anthologies. While free verse is still all too often mapped onto historical narratives about progress and democratization, Austin’s work shows that ideas about free verse were in fact part of settler attempts to control and mediate Native cultural expressions in a way that benefitted non-Native artists and literary cultures. This case study highlights the need to question the way we narrate changes in the use and theorization of poetic forms.

I don’t have the space to get into all the wonderfully baroque and twisty logic behind Austin’s prosodic theories. I just want to highlight the effects of her understanding of free verse for Native poets. Austin argued that, because Native American poetry was a type of free verse, it had a unique relationship to the blank, white space of the printed page. She explained that printing what had been oral expression as free verse poetry revealed that, much like with Imagist poetry and other compressed forms, “the supreme art of the Amerind is displayed in the relating of the various elements to the central idea” (AR 56). Austin claimed that this economy of form showed that “the Amerind excels in the art of occupying space without filling it” (AR 56), both literally and literarily. 

Furthermore, Austin argued, Native American poetry was “for the most part of the type called neolithic” (AR 20), and was incapable of being translated into the modern world without the resources of the English language. Austin’s logic went thusly: she argued that “accent does not appear to have any place in Amerind poetry” (AR 61). This mattered because accent in poetry was “a device for establishing temporal coincidences” (AR 63), both metrically within a poem and in a larger historical sense. Without the technology of accent, Native poetries were destined to remain firmly rooted in their “Neolithic” moment. By being translated into English-language poetic forms, however, that Neolithic verse could be brought into the future, and in the process the English-language interpretations of Native verbal arts would become privileged poetic objects. English free verse interpretations were needed to unpack the fossil poetry of Native verbal arts in order to preserve a cultural heritage that would otherwise have been lost in the inevitable march of historical and generic progress. Non-Natives (and only non-Natives) could create a “temporal coincidence” between the beginnings and the ends of poetry, according to Austin, through their use of accented poetic rhythms in “aboriginal” free verse forms. It had been the technology of poetic accent that had allowed Vachel Lindsay to create “points of simultaneity” between “the Mississippi and the Congo” (AR 32) in his free verse poetry, and it would be the technology of accent that would lead non-Native poets to nurture “the common root of aboriginal and modern Americanness” (AR 54) into what Austin called “the rise of a new verse form in America” (AR 9). The right poetic rhythms, in other words, wielded by white poets, could create material linkages between the past and the future, making history visualizable and graphically representable as the rhythms of modern poetry. Rhythm was a time machine that moved between the “unaccented dub dub, dub dub, dub dub, dub dub in the plazas of Zuñi and Oraibi” (AR 11) and the accented “chuff chuff of a steam engine” (AR 64). This translation across time would make those primal unaccented rhythms intelligible to the non-Natives on board the forward-moving train. Not coincidentally, Austin repeatedly returned to this image of a train as a sort of time machine running back and forth on a single track between the rhythms of “primitive” man and modern man, a la Back to the Future Part III. Running this track, according to Austin, allowed both rhythmic systems and both types of man to merge into a singular and inevitable creation—namely, the modern American. 

Austin’s theories of Native American poetry as neolithic free verse affected the design of anthologies of Native American poetry in the modernist era. Take, for instance, the 1918 anthology The Path on the Rainbow, to which Austin contributed the introduction and seven “interpretations” of ethnographic translations of Native American songs. 

The anthology was hugely commercially successful, and the form of the anthology was widely imitated well into the twentieth century. And that form is deeply influenced by the logic of generic and cultural succession. The anthology performs the metabolization of Native American oral arts by white poets in its very design. The anthology first presents literal translations of Native American songs and oral expressions, made by non-Native ethnographers and divided into “songs” from various geographical regions. Labeling these works as “songs” may seem to indicate an awareness that “poetry” and “verse” are non-Native categories, but the anthology works to fit these transcribed and translated oral expressions into a stadial theory of generic evolution, in which the earliest poetry was a communally authored oral expression that included ritual dance as a necessary component, and in which the end goal of generic evolution is individually authored printed poems. In the table of contents to The Path on the Rainbow, the translators of the collected “songs” are named, but they are not named in the text of the anthology itself, reinforcing the idea that the songs were anonymously or communally authored. 

These ethnographic translations are followed by “Interpretations” by Constance Lindsay Skinner, Mary Austin, Frank Gordon, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Pauline Johnson. Where the ethnographic translations are marked by the names of their collectors and the tribal groups that produced them, the “interpretations” do not have consistent textual apparatuses to explain which sources, if any, the poets were interpreting, indicating that the cultural specificity of the oral arts of different Native groups mattered less to the anthology’s editors than the ways those oral cultural productions were interpreted by non-Native authors. 

The message of this design is clear: as “neolithic” poetry, Native American verbal arts were waiting for more “advanced” literary artists to polish and perfect them. The anthology made Native American poetry “productive” for American literature. Its seemingly unsystematizable, unaccented poetic rhythms would be incorporated into the system of English-language poetic rhythm, meaning that Neolithic Native cultures would be brought into the modern world on settler terms. Austin’s introduction ends with a call to action for non-Native poets: the translators of Native American poetry had done their job, according to Austin, but “The interpreter’s work is all before him” (xxxii).

So, why have I yammered at you about problems in modernist studies for so long? I hope to have made a convincing case for the need to interrogate the terms that can easily go unquestioned in historicist work. One can historicize a poem without ever questioning why we call that text a poem; it is harder to historicize a poetic term or form or genre without questioning how ideological investments have shaped and continue to shape our literary histories. This, from my vantage point, is what historical poetics approaches offer to scholars working in any historical period. In the case study I’ve presented, I’ve tried to show that accepting one historically-situated understanding of a poetic form can perpetuate exclusionary, racist, colonialist lines of thought. To continue to narrate the advent of free verse as a break with the past, without acknowledging the white supremacist colonial thinking that helped to create that idea of a prosodic break, seems to me to be a pretty serious problem. It may be a problem specific to modernist studies, but I hope this talk can provoke discussion about the terms in other periods that tend to get stabilized or reified. 

Works Cited

Austin, Mary. The American Rhythm. Harcourt Brace, 1923.

---. “Introduction.” The Path on the Rainbow, edited by George W. Cronyn, Boni and Liveright, 

1918, pp. xv–xxxii.

Cavitch, Max. “Stephen Crane’s Refrain.” ESQ, vol. 54, no. 1, 2008, pp. 33–53.

Kete, Mary Louise. “The Reception of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry.” The Cambridge 

Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, edited by Kerry Larson, Cambridge 

University Press, 2011, pp. 15–35.

Larson, Kerry. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American 

Poetry, edited by Kerry Larson, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 1–14.

Warner, Michael. “Uncritical Reading.” Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, edited by Jane Gallop, 

Routledge, 2004,  pp. 13–38.

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Quit Lit, Stay Lit, Light it All On Fire

I have fantasized often over the past three months about being able to make this announcement publicly: I’ve accepted a job as an assistant professor of English at Tulane (my second tenure track position; I’ve been at Missouri State University for three years). In addition to having fewer teaching duties and more support for my research, I’m getting an $18,000 raise (only possible because my salary has been criminally low, and it’s not even the worst of the worst!). I’m elated. But of course this is not an uncomplicated elation. This is also the time of year when a lot of brilliant people realize they can no longer sustain all the costs associated with looking for a good academic job (one with a salary that is at least not insulting and with benefits).

[I can’t co-sign this terminological change hard enough.]

This is a piece of stay lit, not quit lit. I’m in no position to tackle the complicated morass of emotion from which quit lit emerges (though I was in 2015, when my mentors convinced me to give it one more year). But I’ve been thinking a lot about the cost of a tenure track job, both literal and emotional. I’m offering what it has cost me because I think it’s good for everyone in academia—especially those who have been removed from the pain of job searching in this decade—to be reminded of what it takes to stay. I also want to think seriously about real (read: difficult and costly) solutions to a genuine crisis. (I’m not here for any of the “it’s always been bad” takes.) I don’t want to turn into the type of professor whose politics are performative. Nothing changes if the ones who stay don’t think seriously about the structures we’re staying in and propping up. (It’s also worth noting that not all tenure-track positions are created equal. I’ve been privileged to have the job I had at Missouri State. But I also worked my ass off, teaching between 60 and 90 students a semester, which, please never forget, includes a lot of time serving as a de facto counselor to students in crisis, a job for which I am most definitely not trained and which I find completely and utterly exhausting. Between all of that mental and emotional labor, service work, and trying to keep publishing things, most days I didn’t have the energy to follow the plot of a Top Chef episode, let alone organize for contingent faculty on my campus or anywhere else. And pre-tenure faculty are not exactly in the most secure positions when it comes to rocking the institutional boat.)

The cost of staying

Many people warned me before I started graduate school that I was “mortgaging my earning potential in my twenties.” I sort of understood this, but also I was twenty-three years old and had no real sense of what that meant. Eventually I’d have a stable job, so what did that really matter?

Well, for me now, at thirty-six, I see how it mattered. I’m not starving, but I have no savings (aside from $9,000 in a retirement account that I was only able to start at age thirty-three), no assets, and about $18,000 in debt (some low-interest student loans and some high-interest credit cards). Here’s how the credit card debt happened.

Income through grad school and first years on the job market:

2006–2007 (Grad School Year 1): $12,000 stipend plus $5,000 fellowship

2007–2008 (Year 2): $16,000 stipend plus $5,000 fellowship

2008–2009 (Year 3): $16,000 stipend

2009–2010 (Year 4): $18,000 stipend (raised because a TT faculty member went  to bat for us—I think this was the year it was raised, though it may have  been the following year)

2010–2011 (Year 5): $18,000 stipend

2011–2012 (Year 6): $18,000 humanities center fellowship at my home  institution

2012–2013 (Year 7): $25,000 external fellowship

2013–2014: $19,000 salary at a one-year “VAP”

2014–2015: $38,000 one-year research fellowship

2015–2016: $26,000-ish adjuncting (4–6 courses per semester)

2016–2019: $52,000 salary in a TT position (3/3 teaching load)

2019–?: $70,000 salary in a TT position (2/2 teaching load)

Prior to the MSU job, 2014-2015 was the only year I made enough money to cover my expenses. My family is not in a position to help me out (my parents have had their own job struggles that have coincided with my college and grad school years). Each year there were things I had to have that I couldn’t pay for. They went on my credit card, which had a $20,000 limit, even though my annual salary was almost never above $18,000, because Bank of America is a predatory institution. I’ve never been able to successfully negotiate for more money or resources in a job offer because I’ve never had any leverage, because getting one job offer is a goddamned miracle.

In addition to the financial costs, there are also of course the mental and emotional costs of knowing you’re only going to stay in a place for a year (nine months, really), not to mention moving costs that may or may not be reimbursed, and the isolation that, for me at least, has come with the jobs I’ve had in very small, insular towns. Others have written about this more eloquently than I feel capable of. I just want to note that financial stress and emotional distress work together to amplify each other, as you know if you’ve ever had a depressive crying jag interrupted by a phone call from a bill collector.

I love this profession with my whole heart. It is a complete and total joy, even when it’s difficult, to think, write, and teach. It’s everything I’ve ever hoped for in a professional life. This shouldn’t be a privilege for the few. And that means the few need to fight harder for everyone else playing the good life lottery.

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“We travel far in thought”

I'm not quite sure what this piece is: a travelogue, a defense of tastelessness, an exploration of the meaning and value of the sign "woman" now, a manifesto for living, a meandering record of thought. It's mostly a collection of things I needed to work out for myself that I post here in the hopes that they'll resonate with someone who's also trying to work some of them out.

I. Itinerant "My imagination wandered at will; my dreams were revealing.... Thoughts were things, to be collected, collated, analysed, shelved or resolved. Fragmentary ideas, apparently unrelated, were often found to be part of a special layer or stratum of thought and memory, therefore to belong together; these were sometimes skillfully pieced together like the exquisite Greek tear-jars and iridescent glass bowls and vases that gleamed in the dusk from the shelves of the cabinet that faced me where I stretched, propped up on the couch in the room in Berggasse 19, Wien IX." -- H.D., Tribute to Freud

I came to Vienna, like so many before me, for Freud.

In between conference presentations (one at the American Comparative Literature Association's conference in July in Utrecht and one at the Modernist Studies Association conference in August in Amsterdam), I am loosely tracing threads that made up the poet H.D.'s life a hundred years ago, including her time as an analysand of Freud in 1933 and 34. This has meant taking a meandering path from Amsterdam to Berlin to Prague to Vienna to Rome to Corfu to Athens to Syros to Lesvos to Zurich and back to Amsterdam over the past six weeks, planning each leg as I get to it, taking fast trains and slow ferries, writing and thinking all along the route.

There is no particular reason to follow these threads now. I teach H.D. occasionally, and I wrote an undergraduate thesis about her, but I don't work on her anymore (my conference presentations are about Mary Austin and James Weldon Johnson, contemporaries of H.D.'s who had nothing to do with her). But when I realized I was going to have a little over a month to travel in Europe, when I thought of where I wanted to go, I thought of Corfu, where H.D. had a vision that was significant for her, and that thought has shaped the contours of this trip.

It's fitting, given the Freudian connection, that as I've traveled I've discovered a number of submerged reasons for the sudden desire to return to H.D. now. They have to do with loss, and identity, and class, and criticism, and taste. They have to do with recovery, and with poesis. They're about solitude and connection. They're about the disconnect between my personal and my professional lives and the submerged threads that loosely bind them.

I started reading and writing about H.D. about the same time I started a relationship that lasted through almost all of my twenties. Though the relationship is long over, the process of sorting out the stories and the selves it generated hasn't really stopped for me. Is this an overdue project? Yes and no. Somewhere in A Lover's Discourse Barthes writes about those who are disorganized by mourning for longer than is acceptable. In Freud's terms, such a person is melancholic -- they can't get past an event or a feeling. I am prone to melancholic loops. It takes me ages to fully process emotions and to understand intellectually what I've been feeling intensely. Common knowledge has it that it takes half the lifespan of a relationship to get over it. If that's so, I'm well past the expiration date for thinking about this one in any kind of sustained way. But what does it mean to get over a part of your history, a part of the things that make you you? What would it mean to fully process it? What about the lingering emotions and questions that exceed the memory of the person or the relationship itself, which is really what I'm talking about here, since I no longer know the person(s) my ex has become, just as he no longer knows me? Isn't it worse to fail to reconcile with these lingering questions, to just put them aside, to pretend things end neatly, or at all?

Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost is one of the books I loaded on my Kindle before leaving the States (I know, I know -- a little on the nose for traipsing around Europe), and I was struck by the following lines in the essay "Two Arrowheads": 

"A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story ... The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses." 

One mirror shard: we made each other worse versions of ourselves. Another: I was cruel. Another: from the beginning, he had a lot of stories about who I was that didn't have anything to do with my experience of myself, that were classed and gendered on both sides.

I think that on some level, with this trip I'm trying to go back to a point before that doubled and multiplied story, to tell a new one of myself in relation to myself, my thoughts, my non-romantic relationships, places, books, systems, landscapes, genealogies. These are all stories I already tell myself, that I already share with others, that I already live, but I think I wanted to make them mappable. All of the international travel I've done in my adult life was with that partner; this is my first overseas trip alone. It is a chance to carve out new territory, layer new experiences on the old. It's a chance to, so to speak, reclaim my time, in a political era that is both hostile to my existence as a woman and that commits violence in the name of a quality it ascribes to my body (white womanhood, always in peril).

I wrote my undergraduate thesis about H.D. after falling in love with her epic poem Trilogy in a class on American women writers. At the time I knew it was pretentious to talk about this project as the beginning of my intellectual career, but I also really liked to talk about it in those terms. I had always been the smart kid, but this project was the first time that it truly seemed that ideas could be, not just instrumental (good grades, college admissions, stable career), not just interesting, but the stuff of a fulfilling life's work, a significant part of a life. The class in which I first read Trilogy was all about taking womens' ideas seriously. My undergraduate advisor took mine very seriously, encouraging me to apply for fellowships, nominating me for prizes, helping me to see my ideas as part of a conversation with "real" scholars -- the first of a long line of women to do so, to whom I owe the career I have now. 

One of H.D.'s favorite tropes to play with was the palimpsest. "Palimpsest" refers to a piece of parchment or paper that has been written on, partially erased, and then overwritten with another text. The first writing is obscured and fragmentary, but still there as an echo or a trace. In extended, metaphorical usage, "palimpsest" is anything that has been reused, written over, but that still has some evidence of its earlier forms. It is the perfect image for a poet who wanted to think about history and the unconscious and trauma -- for all of the things that seem to be over and gone that keep returning in altered forms.

[Palimpsest in Ermoupolis]

The image of the palimpsest that H.D. worked and reworked is a way to think about loss differently-- to look at all the layers that make up a life, including the traces of things that have ended or been destroyed, that shift to form patterns and shift again to create a blur that maybe becomes a pattern again. I realized consciously, standing in front of the reconstructed Bella Venezia hotel in Corfu town (the original was destroyed, collateral damage of WWII), the site of H.D.'s Corfu event, that I came on this trip to think about my own personal palimpsest -- an image that's complicated and simple and meaningless and my entire world, the way that all individual lives are infinitessimally small and infinitely large at the same time. (At a Passover dinner in Missouri this spring, part of a new layer in my palimpsest, my friend Rachel read us the Talmudic saying that who saves a life saves the entire world. I think of this often when I'm tired of/from activist work in the Trump era.) My palimpsest includes that relationship that defined my twenties, but it does not start or end there, as I sometimes used to like to pretend it did.

Others have made the case for the seriousness of womens' thoughts and lives and creations in ways I now find more compelling, but H.D. will always be the first who made me think in a sustained way about these things. For that reason alone I wanted her to be part of the palimpsest or pattern or constellation I decided to trace this summer. I wanted to weave her more fully into the life that tendrils out from Iowa to Amsterdam to Corfu to Zurich to Missouri and on and on. And so I came to Vienna, and Corfu, and kept going.

II. Corfu: Vision "We had come together in order to substantiate something. I did not know what. There was something that was beating in my brain; I do not say my heart -- my brain. I wanted it to be let out." -- H.D., Tribute to Freud

I haven't thought about H.D. much since I started grad school. When you talk about H.D. in academic circles, you have to hedge and qualify. There is something embarrassing about her. She is excessive -- excessively melodramatic, excessively self-serious. And yet. And because. I like excessive women. I especially like women who insist on giving weight to the experiences and emotions that get coded as melodramatic or self-indulgent. I like H.D.

H.D. had a breakdown/breakthrough in Corfu town in 1920. She was fleeing London and WWI and what she experienced as the total fragmentation of her personal world and the world at large during the war. While staying at the Bella Venezia hotel, she had a vision of mysterious hieroglyphic writing on the wall of her hotel room. Much later, in 1933, she underwent a brief period of analysis with Freud in Vienna during which they tried to decipher what the writing meant.

[The new Bella Venezia]

I took great pleasure in re-reading H.D.'s account of her analysis with Freud on the train from Vienna to Rome, adding another layer on top of her narrative of their interweaved patterns, which linked Vienna and Rome and Corfu. I had forgotten how much I admire Tribute to Freud in all its excessiveness. It's self-indulgent, yes, and free-associative, yes, and at times utterly impossible, but it's also a text in which H.D. asserts her authority to interpret her own life in ways that Freud did not sanction, and in which she insists on a reparative reading of history, in spite of the very real trauma she lived through (H.D. experienced much of the violence of both world wars at firsthand -- she lost a brother in WWI, suffered a miscarriage, had a severely shell-shocked husband return home to her, and then lived in London during the Blitz).

In Tribute, H.D. repeatedly stakes a claim to her right to interpretation and to self-knowledge that both depends upon and is separate from Freud's authority. H.D.'s palimpsest involved stories and symbols from all kinds of classical mythological worlds, which overlapped with Freud's more skeptically tinged interest in antiquities and the history of religion. She explained that due to this overlap, "Sometimes, the Professor knew actually my terrain, sometimes it was implicit in a statue or a picture, like that old-fashioned steel engraving of the Temple at Karnak that hung above the couch. I had visited that particular temple, he had not" (10-11). It's a small but important moment in which H.D. asserts the value of her personal experience as part of her dialogue with Freud. He may be the analyst, he may have the collection to testify to a vast body of knowledge about the classical world, but she too had her ways of knowing. 

[Part of Freud’s antiquities collection, which I spent a long time examining at Bergasse 19]

Famously (among H.D. scholars, at least), H.D. wrote that "there was an argument implicit in our very bones" (17), and that, though she "was a student, working under the direction of the greatest mind of this and of perhaps many succeeding generations ... the Professor was not always right" (24-25). Their argument came down, essentially, to hope; Freud diagnosed H.D. with a type of religious monomania -- the desire to found a new religion -- and saw her desire for meaningful signs and symbols, for a pattern or order in the world, to be a dangerous symptom of a delusion. 

This was especially true when it came to what she called the "writing-on-the-wall" episode in Corfu. 

[Writing on the wall 2017 -- the more things change. I’m writing this caption the day after Charlottesville.]

In her long description of the vision and her argument with Freud about the vision, H.D. explained, 

"We can read my writing, the fact that there was writing, in two ways or in more than two ways. We can read or translate it as a suppressed desire for forbidden 'signs and wonders,' breaking bounds, a suppressed desire to 'found a new religion' which the Professor ferreted out ... Or this writing-on-the-wall is merely an extension of the artist's mind, a picture or an illustrated poem, taken out of the actual dream or day-dream content and project from within (though apparently from outside), really a high-powered idea, simply over-stressed, over-thought, you might say, an echo of an idea, a reflection of a reflection, a 'freak' thought that had got out of hand, gone too far, a 'dangerous symptom'" (75-76).

A hysterical woman, or an artist? Irrational emotions or ideas worth attending to? Her right to her ideas -- to stay with them, to think about them intently, to consider what they could signify aside from some kind of disorder in her mind -- is at the heart of Tribute to Freud as much as her genuine homage to the man who "had first opened the field to the study of this vast, unexplored region," the "shapes, lines, graphs [that made up] the hieroglyph of the unconscious" (140). It is this fight that remains at the heart of my love for her work.

III. Rome: Scale "What does it mean to call something petty, or to be petty yourself? Pettiness has to do with being out of scale. We might understand pettiness as a relation between attention and object of attention: you are being petty when a small or seemingly irrelevant detail generates disproportionate irritation; you are also being petty when irritation leads you to pay disproportionate attention to a small detail."

Though I didn't see it when it started (indeed, I didn't see it until after very many years of therapy and much nudging from my own analyst), the relationship that defined my twenties involved a lot of him telling me that my ways of being in the world were wrong -- something I had accepted in part because this was a recurring experience I had in college, at an institution that I at first romanticized and very quickly became horrified by, as I was trained out of old habits and systems and assumptions and socioeconomic expectations and behaviors (some amalgamation of lower middle class/middlebrow, always haunted by the specter of slipping back in the poverty of previous generations, never secure about money or status, not trained to like the "right" things or to behave in the right ways) into new ones (the cruelty of old money, the desperation of new or aspiring new money). I value some of this retraining when it comes to the scholastic realm, but a lot of it never really took. This failure to be retrained shapes the kind of thinker and critic and teacher I am now. It has a lot to do with why I live in Missouri and why I felt immediately connected to my community there even as I'm exasperated by it. It is part of why I'm writing this as a blog post and not as a piece of professionalized writing.

The only physical book I brought with me on this trip is the third volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels because I was right in the middle of it when my flight took off and because I couldn't bear to be apart from the story. (I'm dragging it around now even though I've finished it and don't have room for it in my backpack for the same reason. I almost tried to squeeze in a visit to Naples and Ischia but couldn't swing it, so Rome had to stand in.) These novels often get reduced to "those books about female friendship," which they are, but they are also about the details of what it means to be trained out of the class you were born into, and about what it means to think about womens' lives as part of larger movements and systems but also as outside of and irreducible to those systems. They're about what women lose, intentionally and not, under patriarchy and capitalism, how the game is rigged and how it forces you to play anyway.   

Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle are currently my favorite readers of these novels because of the ways they've thought about how criticism isn't really up to they challenges they pose. In "The Function of Pettiness at the Present Time," Blackwood and Mesle read Ferrante's novels as, paradoxically, importantly petty. It is the pettiness of the details of the womens' lives in the books, they argue, that manage to accurately capture "the grinding quality" of gendered experiences of "rape, loss, poverty, abuse, marriage, friendship." I write this in the days immediately following the clip of Maxine Waters reclaiming her time going viral, another perfect example of the huge importance of pettiness. Steve Mnuchin is of course the one actually being petty by refusing to answer Waters's question, but Waters is the one forced to repeatedly assert her right to not have her time wasted with bullshitting. She has to say it over and over and over and over and over. And she does because she is a goddamn heroine, but she still has to engage in the grindingness of the exchange.

A petty, huge fight I had with the first person I dated after the relationship that defined my twenties ended started with the words "what's so bad about sexism really, though?" I only wish that that person, bless his heart, could have realized how fully he was enacting sexist violence through that question and his continued insistence throughout the fight that my nuanced arguments came down to "it makes women feel bad" -- a petty reading of a grinding experience indeed. In our era of presidential gaslighting, of re-entrenched sexism and misogyny (what a joke -- as if it had ever been uprooted an inch), I don't want to talk to anyone who isn't being petty, who isn't thinking about the minutiae of daily life and how fucking irritating it is to deal with this shit all of the goddamn time. Mesle and Blackwood: 

"The Neapolitan novels feel weirdly capacious to us because they have allowed space for ugly feelings to exist, and importantly not only in their fictional depiction. One thing that this ugliness has allowed us is new purchase on the experience of reading, interpreting, and practicing criticism as women. It seems to us, personally, and as women, that to love these novels is to hate how most everyone else talks, argues, and makes claims about them. In fact, to love these novels, as women, might be to hate everyone; that hate might be one of the best (yet still limited) tools we have to understand how gender continues, obstinately, to shape individuals' entrance into interpretation."

I haven't wanted to talk to anyone who isn't feeling petty about gender since November 9th. But I also don't want to talk to anyone who isn't feeling petty about class and race, and in the academy, I find that people are rarely petty enough, for my taste, about class, Mesle and Blackwood included (we do slightly -- only slightly -- better about dealing critically with race. And of course it needs to be said, over and over and over, that these are not extricable categories -- you can't talk about gender without talking about race without talking about class. Though you wouldn't know it from the constant headlines about Trump voters, the "working" class is not exclusively composed of angry white men).

Two things irritated me about Mesle and Blackwood's brilliant reading of being irritated by readings of the Neapolitan novels: one petty and one very large indeed. The petty (which is of course to say the still large): they read a scene in which "Lenu realizes that her entire critical and creative life might be 'reduced merely to a petty battle to change her social class,'" which is indeed a crucial moment. The Lenu who has changed her social class has this thought, yes, that the fight may have been "mere." But when I read this line, the affirmation that such a battle would be petty, all I could think of was the bitter catharsis I saw in some of my middle school classmates, listening to Everclear on the back of the bus that took us home from school, singing along with the lines, "I hate those people who love to tell you / money is the root of all that kills/ they have never been poor / they have never known the joy of a welfare Christmas." It's merely changing your social class once you've done it, but there's nothing mere about it when you're living day to day, bracing for the petty economic catastrophe that could ruin you at any minute. (Would such a change be "mere" to the Lila who had to stop her education after elementary school, who destroys her body and mind working in the sausage factory?) In the context of the novel, the "mereness" has to do with a failure to live according to revolutionary political ideals -- to fit the personal into the larger systems that shape it and to take on the larger systems rather than the "mere" individual life. But the novels also show us the consequences of living for those ideals in the story arcs of Pasquale and Nadia. The system doesn't change, the individual life is ruined or corrupted anyway.

What I love about these novels, what I haven't seen discussed yet in criticism about them (which could be my own blindness, because I keep reading the articles focusing on gender), is how they also capture the grindingness and pettiness of the experience of "merely" changing one's socioeconomic status, in addition to capturing the ways it can make one myopic and self-centered. Lenu is an outsider to the world of the Italian academy -- it is a shock to her when she is admitted, tuition-free, to a university in Pisa -- and she marvels at her professor's children, who seem to move so naturally in a world of ideas she has to work to come to grips with. The passages about the frustration of not knowing how to navigate new social spaces, of not understanding what the rules are -- that show how difficult it can be to figure out what the game even is, let alone how to play -- struck me so forcefully. (This is why, of all the novels in the world, I will always remain deeply, intensely attached to Great Expectations. Pip never really gets it -- the game plays him, and he doesn't understand anything about it until it's far too late.) 

[This is also why I was thrilled to see The Goldfinch in person in the Hague; Donna Tartt's novel of the same name is a reworking of Great Expectations.] 

What you learn is to shut up, to imitate, to not speak up when an idea or assumption seems wrong to you, because you know that any wrongness is always located in the things you learned as a member of other, unprestigious communities, from people with no status. Take, for instance, Lenu's account of a discussion of an article she hadn't read about Italian politics:

"The subject made me uneasy, and I listened in silence. ... I was informed about world events only superficially, and I had picked up almost nothing about students, demonstrations, clashes, the wounded, arrests, blood. Since I was now outside the university, all I really knew about that chaos was Pietro's [her fiancee] grubmlings, his complaints about what he called literally 'the Pisan nonsense.' As a result I felt around me a scene with confusing features: features that, however, my companions seemed able to decipher with great precision, Nino even more than the others. I sat beside him, I listened, I touched his arm with mine."

Nino, who comes from the same place as Lenu, understands the game faster than she does (or at least appears to), and we see her here in some ways trying to take a shortcut through him -- attaching herself to his body, desiring to take on some of his facility in this world of ideas through physical contact, the same way her husband Pietro, of that academic, petit bourgeouis class, provides her a way in.

The novels also beautifully, simply, killingly describe the ways that changing one's socioeconomic status can alienate you from your family and them from you, temporarily or permanently. Lenu's family is of course proud of her, but also resentful of her and ashamed when she brings her new realm to them. When she finally brings her higher-status fiancee home, she waits until the last minute to tell her parents he's coming, which causes the following scene with her mother:

"She attacked me in very low but shrill tones, hissing with reddened eyes: We are nothing to you, you tell us nothing until the last minute, the young lady thinks she's somebody because she has an education, because she writes books, because she's marrying a professor, but my dear, you came out of this belly and you are made of this substance, so don't act superior and don't ever forget that if you are intelligent, I who carried you in here am just as intelligent, if not more, and if I had had the chance I would have done the same as you, understand?"

I still have a hard time thinking about how angry I was with my family for not preparing me better for the violent competitiveness, for the disillusionment, for the fundamental pettiness, of social climbing via educational institutions in America. They couldn't have, of course, and it wasn't actually them I was mad at -- it was the people constructing and enforcing the rules of the game -- but that didn't make the conflict any less real. It didn't make it any easier to go home, to see the ideas and ways of knowing and cultural productions I was now supposed to scoff at, to be better than.

A petty incident I haven't let go of and will never let go of (the same way I will not let go of ending sentences with prepositions): in a creative writing class, a fellow student wrote a story about meeting an autodidact. It was, to my mind, a shitty, condescending portrait written by a shitty, overprivileged prep school kid. The professor praised it as a true portrait of what autodidacts are like. I fumed for days to myself about this and was never able to express how fundamentally gross the whole exchange was. It was so dismissive of this character, of their way of processing the world, which irritated me deeply because of how many autodidacts I grew up with, who were autodidacts because education is a class-based system even in our supposedly democratic nation. Of course you process the world differently if you have acquired knowledge without the guidance of institutions designed to shore up class differences, which are also gendered and raced differences. Why that should then become a source of bemusement for people with access to those institutions, a way to write cute stories about how smart and talented they are after all their years in those institutions...well. It's a thing I have no desire to reconcile myself to. (And, it needs to be said, this truly is a petty incident, compared to the serious aggressions my non-white classmates faced daily in virtually every classroom, every space on campus.)

So, the petty irritation with Mesle and Blackwood's reading: it's not petty enough about classed experience. The larger irritation: I want them to go further, to double down on claims they gesture toward or feint at here that they assert forcefully elsewhere. In a non-scholarly article, they argue that "taste is just another name for misogyny," but in this piece they argue that this claim, when presented "as a truth claim at the foundation of an argument rather than the argument itself...can't hold ... it is out of scale with itself." But of course this claim can and does hold, and can be backed up with all kinds of careful, rigorous scholarship, as can claims that taste is another name for racism and for classism. Take Michael Omi and Howard Winant on racial formation, "the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories ... in the cultural realm, dress, music, art, language and indeed the very concept of 'taste' has been shaped by racial consciousness and racial dynamics" (qtd. in Bibby 493). Take basically all of Pierre Bourdieu's work, or the whole field of cultural studies, or race studies, or gender studies, or queer studies -- all of it provides more than ample evidence that taste is another name for oppression. I want Blackwood and Mesle to own this, to say, not just that taste is misogyny, but fuck the very idea of taste. It is worse than useless; it's violent.

I write "fuck taste," and take great pleasure in writing it, and mean it sincerely. And yet, as of April 2016, I am in a position to be the gatekeeper, the one who tells students that their ways of knowing are wrong, that there are other evaluative standards than the ones they know that they must apply if they want to enter a world of ideas. I spend a lot of time telling students that the ways they're used to reading literature will no longer work for them, at least not in my classroom. But I do what I can to explain that ways of knowing, ways of reading, are situational. They depend on communities and contexts, and the way they learn to read in the classroom isn't the only or even always the most desirable way to read. 

When I teach, I focus my students' attention on particular texts not because I think they're objectively good, as if that's something that could ever be evaluated, but because I think they contain ideas that my students need to encounter, to think about, to wrestle with to live lives that don't remain petty and quotidian, even as they remain grounded in those categories. I don't want them to have to be trained into a new class, though I want them to have the tools they'll need if they want to fight that battle. I want to make their worlds bigger. I want them to think about the types of communities they want to create for themselves, at all scales. I want them to dream, and to create their own palimpsests, and pull together the texts and experiences and people that they need, that define them, that make them bigger and better versions of themselves, that add to their stories. This project seems so much more urgent than evaluative criticism ever has been or could be. That probably makes it utopian and quixotic. But I also know that already, for a student or two, this approach has mattered.

"Good" is a useless term; "worth thinking about" is better. I want to live in a world in which people say "that's not for me" rather than "that's objectively bad," where we ask "what do the people who it's for like about it? What's interesting about this object when I try to remove my ego from the conversation?" and so I do my best to create that world for myself and my students every day. I can't make anyone else dwell there with me, but I try to make it an inviting place.

IV. Syros and Lesvos: Re-enchantment

[I was a free [woman] in [Lesvos] / I felt unfettered and alive]

Like a lot of women, I've been trained out of feeling that self-expression is seemly or necessary. This happened insidiously in various complicated ways, most of them having to do with writing. I've always written -- I made picture books out of construction paper bound with masking tape before I understood the alphabet; in elementary school I wrote stories in which I was a genius child detective; as a teenager I wrote a ton of earnest poetry about how many feelings I felt (one of them even won an award and I got to read it at a public event -- unsurprisingly, it bummed the audience out); as a young adult I tried to write fiction but quickly felt that I would never be successful at it (one of the last pieces I wrote in fact was about my fear of failure, inspired by the panic attacks that a change in anti-depression medication caused during my junior year of college. It lives on online, because what is millennial self-expression if it's not on the internet?). I discovered uncreative writing; I started dating someone who believed that self-expression was essentially just narcissism. After college, I stopped writing anything that wasn't career-oriented. I didn't even journal for myself anymore.

Being trained out of your class, being socialized as a woman, means learning to distrust your instincts and to put aside the things that merely make you happy in order to make room for the things that are Important, according to Important People. This trip has been at some level about reenchantment, about following desire and sensation just because they exist and I exist. Because I fucking love existing, and I fucking love writing about existing. (Someone I dated briefly told me he liked being with me because I took so much joy in the things I loved -- I believe his exact words were "experiencing things with you is fucking exhilarating." It remains one of my favorite compliments, one that I try to live up to.)

Something that had been shifting inside of me for a while broke open when I read Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts last fall. The way that she used academic criticism to think about her life was so elegant and free and liberating. It made me want to write again -- to give shape to my thoughts other than the very specific shape required by academic writing. It made me want to think about living as a creative act. It felt like one while I was on Syros and Lesvos.

I captured some of what Syros was like for me here. I slept in; I wrote my academic writing;  I swam in the sea; I drank ouzo and tsipouro and wrote my non-academic writing. I went for night swims and hikes and ate every fig I could find. I sat one day at the top of Ermoupolis, under pine trees overlooking the port and read Tribute to the Angels, book two of H.D.'s Trilogy. 

Ermoupolis is named for Hermes. I had forgotten that Tribute opens with an invocation of Hermes: 

Hermes Trismegistus is patron of alchemists;

his province is thought, inventive, artful and curious

Tribute is a book about reinvention, recreation after absolute destruction, pursued through writing. One of the central images is the vision of a holy woman, a palimpsest of Mary and Eve and Lillith and Isis and Astarte and Ashtaroth. The woman is described as "Psyche, the butterfly, / out of the cocoon." I don't believe in signs and wonders the way H.D. did, but, when I read those lines, a butterfly flew across my line of sight, and stayed, fluttering up and down on the wind until I finished the book. 

no trick of the pen or brush could capture that impression

**

Lesvos was, if anything, more magical than Syros, which I didn't think was possible. I only saw a very tiny corner of the north of the island -- essentially just Molyvos and Eftalou, but it was more than enough. The hot springs in Eftalou alone...

On Lesvos, I started reading Alana Massey's brilliant and funny All the Lives I Want, and made a million notes in the margins that were all variations of "fuck. yes!" The title essay, about Sylvia Plath fangirls, is especially marked up. Massey argues that Plath's poetry and journals, and the fan art on display in certain corners of the internet, are "ongoing act[s] of self-documentation in a world that punishes female experience (that doesn't aspire to maleness)," which makes them "radical declaration[s] that women are within our rights to contribute to the story of what it means to be a human." Reading the final line of The Bell Jar ("I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am."), Massey notes, it's difficult "to think of any line of thinking more linked to being a socialized female than to consider the declaration of simply existing to feel like a form of bragging." Massey stakes a claim for girlhood, for effusive emoting and navel-gazing introspection, as sites of strong affective attachments and sharp intuitions about the world that should be valued: "Young girls are smarter than they're given credit for, and more resilient, too. They like what they like for good reason."

In general the rating system on Airbnb makes me uncomfortable the way all rating systems make me uncomfortable, but my hosts on Lesvos wrote, "Erin is a joyful and adorable person." I was so tickled by their choice of words because they capture the spirit of girlhood that Massey champions:

"I want to call out to the girls who repeat Sylvia's poisonous directive, 'I must bridge the gap between adolescent glitter and mature glow.' This is a fallacy, a lie intended to kill the spirits of girls so that they might become what we have come to expect of women. ... Glitter is the unbridled multitudes of shining objects that have no predictable trajectory and no particular use but their own splendor. A glow is contained. Its purpose is to offer a light bright enough that those who bear it will cast a shadow, but not so bright that their features will come fully into focus. 'Never surrender your glitter' sounds like the cliche battle cry of a cheerleading coach or a pageant mom, but I still find it a suitable message for young girls."

My favorite beach in Syros was full of mica schist -- as you swam in the clear blue Aegean, the mica filled the water and glittered in the sunlight over your skin. I bathed in glitter every day on that island. Signs and wonders.

V. Zurich: Out of Line

In fifth grade, my teacher told my mother that I was a pleasure to have in the classroom. Without missing a beat, my mom replied, "You don't know what a viper you're nursing at your bosom." They were both right. I am joyful and adorable, and I am almost always, on some level, furious. (Someday I hope to work at Sam Irby’s school for girls with bad attitudes.)

I was made to feel unsafe three times on this trip: twice men followed me as I walked alone at night, and once a bus ticket taker didn't exactly assault me, but he didn't exactly not assault me. I expected things like this to happen on this trip, because they happen everywhere. But god. The way a patriarchal world will try to shut you down every time you try to take pleasure in it.

Maggie Nelson writes about the "many-gendered mothers of the heart” who help her live in the world; Massey writes about her famous friends (celebrities she's never met) who help her do the same. For me as for Massey, Courtney Love is one of those many-gendered mothers who helps me cope with the constant misogynistic violence of the world. Courtney was loud and messy and dramatic and ugly and gorgeous in the 90s, when I first became aware of her. Though I didn't exactly have the language or the concepts for it then, I felt the truth that Courtney embodied "female rage as ... the logical response to a hostile world,” as Massey describes her:

"When evil is done to a person, it gets under their skin, if there is enough of it, it'll sink down through the flesh and into the bones, becoming part of its target. For most of us, the pain is absorbed as poison rather than power. We see a world awash in women's blood and tears. We endure claims that the most profound kinds of pain are the exclusive possessions of men, that they are best equipped to make art from this suffering. Instead of bearing witness to it, we are asked to be killed by it, quietly if possible. But Courtney did nothing quietly." (Courtney: "honeysuckle / she's full of poison / she obliterated everything she kissed")

Like Massey, "I have not seen a fraction of the cruelty that the world is capable of, but I have trembled often enough in the aftershocks of my own resistance to a world built to break me to know that female brutality is not just an acceptable response, it is the most sensible one, too." I saw Courtney in the play Kansas City Choir Boy at the Oberon theater in Boston a few years ago. The play was...not for me (it was for a certain kind of creative white man), but Courtney was. She passed so near my seat at one point I could have reached out and touched the tiny flower tattoos on her arm, could see the glitter eyeshadow she wore. I was so, so happy sharing space with her. I love that bitch. I love her for being angry and messy and never apologizing. I'll hold that moment in my heart forever.

Of course, to refuse to behave respectably, according to gendered, classed, raced codes, is a particularly fraught survival strategy for people who inhabit bodies that tend to get disciplined and punished. (Just look at the police response to an actual fucking Nazi rally and compare the way they’ve treated peaceful black protestors.) I read a lot of books by white women on this trip -- actually, a lot of books by white women my age, who spent their late teens/early twenties in and around New York -- in part because I wanted to navel gaze, to dive into my own experiences and identity. But of course identity, experience, only happen in relation to other identities and experiences. The women I've been reading have suffered, have felt pain, have expressed it in ways I've found compelling. But they're also insulated from some types of pain, the same way that I am, by my whiteness, by what some people read as "adorableness" or attractiveness. It's easier for me, and for the women I've been reading, to access some survival strategies than it is for other women. White girls can act out with relatively less punishment than black girls; those of us who write/think for a living often have access to grants and funding structures that allow us to be selfish, to take the time to pursue ideas.

I stopped in Zurich for a day and a half on my way back to Amsterdam because it is where H.D. lived in the last years of her life, where she wrote a few of her major works. It is also near where my paternal ancestors are from, so it was a chance to take a selfie in Kappeler alley and Kappeler park.

I thought a lot about privilege in Zurich, one of the most insanely expensive cities I've ever visited. The places where H.D. lived and wrote in Zurich are gorgeous and peaceful. 

[The Klinik Hirslanden, where H.D. spent her final days]

The peace she found there was hard fought, and it makes me happy to know she was able to make that place for herself. But she was able to make that place because of her heiress lover, her whiteness, her access to certain kinds of privileged spaces.

In Zurich I started How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell (which is such a compelling read). It's another story of a privileged white female writer, but it's also the story of an addict. And oh my god, if you want your heart broken, read Marnell's description of what her parents did with her zine. The way they shut down her means of self-expression, of effusion, of girlish excitement and emotion, is brutal, and brutally common for girls, even if they're rich, even if they're white. Marnell, like Love, survives by acting out, by refusing to conform, to be quiet and docile. It's not necessarily a good strategy -- Marnell's is not a happy story, and it's questionable how long she will continue to survive. But it is a significant strategy, a way to protest, "the logical response to a hostile world." (It can't destroy you if you destroy yourself.)

[There is a beautiful cemetery across the street from the Klinik Hirslanden, full of statues of women like this. They mark women whose lives are long over, who may or may not be remembered. They seemed to me both tragic and defiant, poignant symbols of loss and endurance.]

***

What does it mean for me, a white cisgender woman, to remain invested in the category "woman" now? What does it mean to claim my experiences, my existence as important, when I exist as a white woman in a country where white supremacism is newly emboldened and sanctioned? (And, to borrow a phrase from Mesle and Blackwood, let’s be crystal fucking clear about this: white supremacism has always been there. It’s structurally a part of our country in a million different ways. What we’re seeing today isn’t surprising or new; it’s the logical outcome of our failure to confront how white people maintain oppressive structures because we benefit from them.) As Mesle and Blackwood argue in their reading of Ferrante,

"it is worth saying that 'woman' is obviously a troubling category. 2017 is a year when the world has emphasized both how radically women are vulnerable as women, with pussies to be grabbed, and also has made the violence that white, straight, middle-class women do to others crystal fucking clear. (Trump's voting block depended precisely upon the pettiness of white women.) Further, we can't even use the word 'woman' without mobilizing a language that is inherently false, and heterosexist, in its understanding of what it means to be human. Perhaps 'woman' is a word that should have no force in criticism. Many people think this, and we see their point. Yet we - we, the writers of this piece -- are uncomfortable with the way this formulation allows human knowledge, here literary criticism, to hopscotch yet again over the responsibility to understand the particularities of women's experiences, in the way that science and medicine and economics and history often have done. ... This is the tension of the sign of 'woman': that it is out of scale, simultaneously universal and particular, simultaneously useful and an obstacle, outmoded. We have to talk about it, and yet can't."

I don't believe that there are any universal or essential experiences of womanhood. "Woman," "female" are of course socially constructed categories, not empirical realities. But the experience of being socialized as a woman does things to you. It creates problems and opportunities and frustrations and acts of violence and intense, intense pleasures. It creates the particularities of individual lives. The experiences of people who live as women matter to me, fundamentally and completely. My attachment to the sign "woman" is serious and real, even as it's fraught and falls apart as soon as I start to interrogate the category with any rigor. Perhaps "woman" is simply the sign for what Mesle and Blackwood identify as "a kind of ecstatic bitterness that is the opposite of consensus making or persuasion. It is aligned with the lived-ness of gender, with the deauthorization of all those whose lives never stand as common sense. This bitterness reminds us that it is always a privilege to have the luxury of leaving pettiness behind."

VI. Missouri: Enlargement

This has been a hard year, personally and politically. I love the new life I started making when I accepted my first tenure-track job in the spring of 2016, but making a new life is difficult and draining work. I think I would have been emotionally tired no matter what. But this was also a year in which I decided I'm going to keep consciously rejecting the versions of adult female life that are legible to people, which is right for me but also a difficult thing to do. And, of course, it was the year of the worst imaginable presidential election outcome, and of moving to a state where the state government is actually worse than the current presidential administration. It's hard to realize how many of your neighbors are contemptuous of you just because you're female, and of your friends because they're trans, gay, bi, non-binary, not white, an immigrant, economically disenfranchised, neurodiverse, ill, and on and on and on. By the end of the spring semester I was tired and emotionally sick in a way I've never been before. Planning this trip was a way out of that structure of feeling for me -- it was a way to chart a new course, build a new structure, enlarge the space in which I feel safe and free to exist.

Years ago, when Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? first came out, I fell deeply into that book and spent a lot of time thinking about it. I copied the protagonist and made a mental catalogue of what non-material things I had at my disposal. I wrote it down on an abandoned blog somewhere. I'd forgotten about it until I read re-read this passage in Tribute to Freud: 

"We [H.D. and Freud] had come together in order to substantiate something. I did not know what. There was something that was beating in my brain; I do not say my heart -- my brain. I wanted it to be let out. I wanted to free myself of repetitive thoughts and experiences -- my own and those of many of my contemporaries. I did not specifically realize just what it was I wanted, but I knew that I, like most of the people I knew, in England, America and on the Continent of Europe, were drifting. We were drifting. Where? I did not know but at least I accepted the fact that we were drifting. At least, I knew this -- I would (before the current of inevitable events swept me right into the main stream and so on to the cataract) stand aside, if I could (if it were not already too late), and take stock of my possessions. You might say that I had -- yes, I had something that I specifically owned. I owned myself. I did not really, of course. My family, my friends and my circumstances owned me. But I had something. Say it was a narrow birch-bark canoe. The great forest of the unknown, the supernormal or supernatural, was all around and about us. With the current gathering force, I could at least pull in to the shallows before it was too late, take stock of my very modest possessions of mind and body, and ask the old Hermit who lived on the edge of this vast domain to talk to me, to tell me, if he would, how best to steer my course" (17-18).

I got to pull into the eddy and take stock this summer. I am grateful; I am well supplied. I am ready to put my oar back in, which I must, because the current is still gathering, and we all have to do our individual parts to deal with the destruction that is here and that is coming. I am ready. I am, I am, I am.

[erinkappeler]

Heaven

When I imagined what Greece would be like, I imagined this.

There’s a beach near where I’m staying that, if you get there early enough, you can have basically to yourself for a good part of the morning. The water is just cold enough and perfectly clear, and the sand is full of tiny particles of mica that make it glitter through the already glittering water.

Syros is dry and mountainous, with ancient towns cut into hillsides and tiny roads full of sharp switchbacks. Everything shuts down between 3 and 5 for an afternoon rest. All of the restaurants in the town I’m in are so close to the water they’re almost in it.

There’s a kind of aloneness that is indulgent and voluptuous, that is like swimming in the calm water I’m surrounded by. I have it here. 

I’m spending a lot of time with the slow and sensuous pleasures of the world. I sat under these pines for I don’t know how long, just breathing their smell until I understood the existence of mastiha. I’m spending hours on my patio, staring at the way the blue of my neighbor’s shutters matches perfectly the blue of the Aegean, and doing the kind of writing, personal and professional, that is only possible for me when I have the space and time to spread out mentally like this.

One of the town’s mini marts had fresh figs today,

and the colors matched some of the flowers I see on the walk there.

I’m ruined for regular life.

[erinkappeler]

Corfu/Kerkyra

The trip I’m on has multiple functions, one of which is to make a literary pilgrimage. I’ve been loosely following some of the threads of the poet H.D.’s life, including a significant event on Corfu, for reasons that I’ll write about later (there are many, it’s complicated, I’m not sure why I’m following them now, but here I am). 

I am both glad I’m here and I can’t wait to leave. The island of Corfu is ridiculously beautiful --

and ridiculously cheesy -- 

(if you listen closely you can hear the Muzak version of “The Girl from Ipanema” coming through the beach bar’s sound system.)

Because my travel funding came later than expected, I didn’t book a hotel room until much too late in the season, which means I wound up staying in Sidari rather than my desired destination of Corfu town. (Had I understood the domatia concept/system, this would have been a very different trip.) Sidari is, essentially, the British version of the Jersey shore. (”Sidari is no good,” according to an Airbnb host in Corfu town, and I can’t say I totally disagree.)

Think Wildwood -- families on holiday, kids building sandcastles, teenagers cruising each other, everyone sunning themselves into a radioactive hue as if news of skin cancer failed to travel this far, empty yet deafening nightclubs straight out of the Inbetweeners movie. Sidari may have once been a Greek town, but it is now little Manchester. 

Every restaurant serves buttys and toasties and Irn-Bru and Guinness. You can’t swing a beach towel without finding a place to watch a football game, and every night, although my hostel is decently far from the town center, I’m lulled to sleep by the sounds of karaoke and kids racing scooters down the main drag. 

There are things about Sidari that are charming. Everyone I've met, including some of those British tourists, has been lovely. When I was confused about how to find my bus stop, the driver called ahead to my hostel to confirm things with the owner, Angelica. ("Ah, Greek men," said Angelica when I arrived. “[noise somewhere between amusement and resignation and frustration] — they like pretty girls. These bus drivers, they are not always so nice, yes?") Angelica herself has been delightful. She's told me a lot about Sidari and the guests she sees and Germany, where she was born and raised, and what it's like living through the current economic crisis ("It's a shit time. But at least on Corfu people can have chickens and gardens, so it does not look so bad here. But in the cities..."). Indeed, one day at a mini mart the clerk was clutching something to her chest. I didn't think much of it until a baby chick poked its head out of the towel she was holding. 

I've been delighted every time a clerk or waiter is amused by my parlor trick of having sort of learned how to pronounce thank you correctly in Greek, but disappointed to realize it really is only the men who find this paltry accomplishment charming. I keep thinking of the story of the hostel guest of Angelica's who, every morning would come up to the kitchen, spread his arms wide, and proudly greet everyone, "Calamaris!" (”good morning” = “kalimera”). When I can't take the tourist kitsch anymore, I’ve gone for runs in the gorgeous countryside, on tiny roads that wind through olive groves and empty buildings and subsistence farms of goats and chickens and orange trees and squash vines and bee hives and tiny tavernas where old men sit outside and smoke and drink (these men, they are also very friendly).

I’ve also been escaping to Corfu town as much as possible, but the bus system here is chaotic, to put it nicely. The town itself is only 30km away, but it takes an hour and a half to get there. (Buses are giant touring buses that barely fit on the tiny mountain highways; bus stops are unmarked and placed seemingly at random; tickets are sold on the bus, meaning you often sit and wait at a stop for 15 minutes for everyone to get paid up; schedules are mostly followed, kind of, but also you’d better be at your stop early just in case, but also be ready to wait for late buses, because they are always late.) On my bus this morning, the ticket taker asked if I would volunteer to give him a massage, then attempted to give me a massage, and then asked if I’d like to kiss while grabbing the back of my neck (”My name is Philip, would you like to kiss?” -- verbatim pickup line). These Greek men...

Of course, one of the other functions of this trip is to get myself to write, and Sidari is sort of a perfect place for that. There is nothing to do, once the novelty of people watching wears off (I am not trying to tan myself into a radioactive hue, so that pastime is out), and the concentrated thinking time has led to some realizations about what I’m trying to do in the book chapter I’m writing and in the larger book project as a whole. 

And the pilgrimage has been significant -- it meant something to me to be in the places in Corfu town that mattered to H.D.

[Corfu town near H.D.’s preferred hangouts]

Still. Corfu is one of the places where Odysseus was briefly stranded, and while he found its inhabitants welcoming, he was happy to leave. I’m looking forward to moving on to my next island too. 

[erinkappeler]

Roman Holiday

I had a glorified layover in Rome yesterday, and it was incredible.

I was afraid of Rome -- everyone I talked to said it’s awful in the summer, and the pickpockets are terrible, and it’s generally an unbearable place in July. (”Everyone there is crazy right now,” according to a Roman I met in Prague.)

But aside from the heat, which was real, none of the other warnings were borne out. I walked through the city all day long because I just couldn’t stop gawking at the scale of the architecture. 

I tried to capture what it’s like to round the corner onto the Piazza Venezia and to be confronted with the Museo Sacrario delle Bandiere, but pictures can’t do it justice. 

The Foro Romano, 

the Pantheon, 

even the passeggiata on the Via del Corso (even because I arrived late and missed all the best cruising/preening),

and the summer river fest I stumbled into while checking out the Trastevere neighborhood were all so intoxicating that I didn’t care that I had sweated through everything and gained new blisters from the cobblestones.

Ciao, bella.

[erinkappeler]

Wien

I got to run along the Danube today.

I ate Sachertorte that was not dry (praise hands!).

It was a good day.

[erinkappeler]

Ramblin’ Woman

I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants recently, which is uncharacteristic for me when it comes to travel. Other big trips I’ve taken have involved a lot of Lonely Planet guides and googling and asking around for recommendations and learning at least a few foreign language phrases, but this trip has been largely following whim after whim, improvising and stumbling. It doesn’t always work (see: sudden realization I can’t actually really get from Croatia to Greece when I want to; eye rolls whenever I tried to say “hallo” or “danke shoen” in Germany; utter failure to book lodging early enough) but when it does, it feels so magical.

Prague has been such a delight in a way that Amsterdam and Berlin weren’t quite (more on those legs of the trip in later posts). Even the train trip, which I realized would be pretty because I knew abstractly that Bad Schandau is pretty, turned out to be stunning enough that I’m planning a return bike trip at some point in the future. I booked a hostel more or less at random weeks ago, and not only is it not a party hostel as it threatened to be, it’s also in decent shape and provided good information about getting around town. 

(Not my digs — just buildings I dig.)

I basically only have a day and a half here, and tomorrow is taken up by a tour I also booked at random, so I decided to wander up to Prague Castle this afternoon. I was so charmed by everything. The buildings are all such confections. It’s easy to walk around, and I don’t feel ogled or hassled or in anyone’s way. In spite of all the obnoxious tourists (there are plenty), it feels like a down to earth place, especially away from Old Town. And the beer prices don’t hurt (I haven’t had beer this cheap since Vietnam).

(More architectural confections)

The walk just kept getting better as I went. I don’t understand anything about the language and I didn’t really read any maps, so I just kept walking uphill until I got to what seemed to be the right place. 

(a farmers' market I stumbled into)

(Castle spotting)

The entrance didn’t have any English signage, so I just wandered into what seemed to be the entrance. It was, in fact, Wallenstein Garden -- the senate garden. I almost tripped over a peahen before I realized there were multiple peacocks wandering freely through the garden. I kept going toward the sound of music, and stumbled upon a children’s choir (!) performing a regularly scheduled concert. Every turn seemed to offer some equally surprising and delightful discovery, like the owls caged in another corner, or the dripstone garden, meant to invite visitors explore hidden crannies and mysteries.

I’d forgotten how fun and necessary it is to wander without real reason and without a schedule. This works better in some places than others -- there’s an awful lot of scope for the imagination in Prague, as Anne Shirley would say, even if there’s also a sort of uncanny, hyperreal Disney aspect to some of the city’s charms (see: confectionary buildings, deliberately constructed whimsy in the dripstone). I’m glad I’m here now, though, and I’m looking forward to coming back for a longer stay.

[erinkappeler]

Ghostly June

June was a ghostly month for me. I spent a lot of time going back to palimpsestic places – places where experiences and emotions accumulated in ways that feel tangible to me decades later, every time I go back.

None of these experiences really mean anything, exactly. I’d forgotten about many of them until a family member or friend or object reminded me. They just have me thinking and feeling my way through what it means to exist in time, sensing the textures or afterimages of the past now. I don’t have anything particularly interesting to say about memory or distance – just small musings, photo caption sized, on my idiosyncratic experiences with feeling the past in the present. (If I’m doing anything in this post, I suppose it’s trying to write my way into a coherent reflection on thoughts I keep having about interfacing with the world through this body I live in. Idiosyncrasy: etymon Hellenistic Greek ἰδιοσυγκρασία, peculiar temperament or habit of body.)

West Branch, Iowa, where I played basketball, set a conference record in track, attended some kind of Raggedy Ann convention (?) with my best friend, felt alienated, ate ice cream, reconnected with family, felt nostalgia for pasts I didn’t experience...

Somewhere off I-80, an exit I took often after transferring to a new school. I took this photo during a trip home after I moved away because I thought it captured the gorgeousness and the sadness of places like the place I’m from.

I don’t even know where to start with Boston, the bike path along the Charles...

...the Somerville apartments and porches and bars, all the places where my twenties happened, where I rearranged myself and was rearranged.

Going back to Princeton is like prodding a bruise. It’s deeply painful and I can’t seem to stop doing it. Walking through this town feels like swimming in a sea of trauma and love and excitement and disappointment and depression and exhilaration and self-hatred and triumph and shame and discovery. It’s a horrible place and I’m sure I’ll be back.

Penn Station is a weird comforting minefield to me (yes I know that doesn’t make any sense). The fact that tasti D.lite still exists is as soothing as it is baffling.

Estes Park then...

... and Estes Park now. I had the rare experience of recovering a small forgotten memory here: watching hummingbirds at a cabin we rented when I was a child. I also got to have my breath taken away by the view at the end of a hike. My childhood and adolescence were punctuated by moments like that – actually gasping out loud at the beauty of the natural world. I didn’t realize how disconnected I’d become from those experiences or how much I missed them.

Nostalgia is a trap that I’m particularly susceptible to, and I like to try to guard against it. But going back to these places now, feeling the old feelings layered underneath new ones, felt more like a springboard than a snare. I don’t know if I’m capable of anything like re-enchantment after the disillusionments of living in the world for any length of time, but this trip was at least an experience of reconnection and renewed appreciation for me. I am grateful to be in this body, in this world, with the people who are my people, whether I chose them or not. I’m grateful I feel sensations and emotions as strongly as I do. I’m grateful to be able to appreciate how mixed up painful and joyful experiences and sensations and emotions are and have to be.

I haven’t felt like I’ve had much space this year to dream, or to experience joy, or even to feel much gratitude, in spite of everything I’m lucky to have. The hostility of our species just keeps getting foregrounded in a way that’s shut down parts of me. Reencountering old emotional fields like these helped to wake them up a little.

If June was about feeling the presence of the past now, July promises to be an exercise in projecting the past into the future. I’m looking forward to making it new.

[erinkappeler]

Seeing Straight

“I question everything

My focus, my figure, my sexuality

And how much it matters or why it would mean anything

…

I've been thinking about it every night” – Bully, “Trying”

When I moved to southwestern Missouri, I knew that I was moving into a new cultural scene. I wasn’t worried that it would be completely unfamiliar – I was born and raised in rural Iowa – but I knew that I would have to reacquaint myself with some social expectations and small talk questions that I had largely been able to sidestep during my time in college and grad school on the east coast. I was warned that I would get asked what church I attend, for instance, and I was ready to cheerfully out myself as an atheist. But what I was not ready for was how often I would be asked about my husband.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose, when someone at a party asked me what my husband did, even though I had not mentioned my husband and was not wearing a wedding ring. Nor should I have been surprised when a Walgreen’s clerk asked if I was watching the Super Bowl, and then, when I said no, followed up by asking if I’d have to put up with my husband watching it. I have, after all, been dealing with forms of this question for virtually my entire life (the “do you have a boyfriend yet”s of my teen years have seamlessly morphed into the “do you have a girlfriend yet”/“when will you get married”/“no really, why aren’t you married yet”s of my twenties and thirties).

I have known on a visceral level for as many years as strangers have been asking about my romantic life that marriage is not right for me. My sense has always been that it’s a raw deal for women, and that sense has only intensified as I get older. I remember being upset by the first weddings I went to when I was in elementary school – not only was I forced to wear girl clothes, but I hated watching fathers hand off their daughters at the altar. At the time it was the ceremonial severing of a familial connection that bothered me, but it didn’t take long for me to develop an even deeper discomfort with the affirmation of patriarchal order those ceremonies offered. Small surprise then that I have never been able to imagine my own wedding or my own children. As a kid, I would listen to my friends talk about what songs they would play when they walked down the aisle and what they wanted to name their daughters, and I would play MASH with them and dutifully try to imagine my own adult future, but I just couldn’t envision the wedding or the kids. And yet I still assumed that at some point I would want these things, and that they would naturally be part of my life.

It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that it struck me with real force, for the first time, that I could choose not to have kids. I was with someone at the time who I wanted to stay with, but I also started to realize that staying with someone didn’t have to mean marriage (these were not realizations my then partner had along with me). Feeling “no” as a possibility felt like breathing for the first time after being held underwater. The ticking clock stopped – I didn’t have to worry about convincing myself I wanted kids before my fertility diminished, and I didn’t have to get married to enter into adulthood.

The relief has never left me, but I still struggle to maintain my visceral feeling that no – to marriage, to children – is the right answer for me. Every seemingly friendly question about my husband is a reminder that my personal internal logic – the protest against organizing life around marriage that I live daily – isn’t legible to the rest of the world. The available figures people have to understand me are “unlucky in love,” “developmentally delayed,” and “closet case,” to name the least damning options. As I always do when I’m struggling, I’ve been reading to try to feel my way through the disconnect between how I identify internally and the identity I’m given by others. I re-read parts of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse this weekend and was struck by how concisely Barthes is able to pinpoint what makes the tangles of lived experience feel so knotty. A Lover’s Discourse is about many things, but mostly about a lover after love has ended. Who are they? Where do they fit? What is an adult who is not part of a couple? Barthes explains,

The world subjects every enterprise to an alternative; that of success or failure, of victory or defeat. I protest by another logic: I am simultaneously and contradictorily happy and wretched; ‘to succeed’ or ‘to fail’ have for me only contingent, provisional meanings (which doesn’t keep my sufferings and my desires from being violent); what inspires me, secretly and stubbornly, is not a tactic: I accept and I affirm, beyond truth and falsehood, beyond success and failure; I have withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance … Flouted in my enterprise (as it happens), I emerge from it neither victor nor vanquished: I am tragic.

(Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?)

I am a failure in the eyes of the world, tragic not in Barthes’ sense, but tragic as a cautionary tale of what happens when you don’t commit yourself to adult life as we insist it must be lived – with a monogamous partner, raising children. But I protest by another logic. I feel my other logic strongly and am committed to it the way most people are committed to the ideal of long-term monogamous coupledom. This doesn’t mean that commitment is easy to maintain in the face of a world that wants to know, “What does your husband do?”

 ***

I have a pattern of choosing to be with people who I know are, in some fundamental way, wrong for me, because I then always know that, whatever happens, marriage will not be a possibility we will have to confront. I do this fairly consciously most of the time. And I still find myself angry and hurt when those relationships end. This is partly just being human – knowing a relationship is going to end doesn’t preclude the development of real feelings and of real attachment. But these feelings of anger when relationships end also come from the unshakeable sense that you win or you lose, in love as in life, and that I have set myself up to lose in both. When such a relationship ended a few years back, I shocked myself (and my ex) by how mad I was at the other person, as if they had failed me by being exactly what I wanted them to be. The more I thought about where my anger was coming from, the more I realized that I was upset because I knew this person would get married pretty much immediately once we were over (they did), and I was angry about their ability to step into the role expected of them, without sacrifice or trouble or doubt. I was angry even though they were stepping into a role they truly wanted and that I truly didn’t.

This is the lure and the trap of coupledom Barthes so perfectly describes:

How is it that the sistemati around me can inspire me with envy? From what, seeing them, am I excluded? Certainly not from a ‘dream,’ an ‘idyll,’ a ‘union’: there are too many complaints from the ‘pigeonholed’ about their system, and the dream of union forms another figure. No, what I fantasize in the system is quite modest (a fantasy all the more paradoxical in that it has no particular vividness): I want, I desire, quite simply, a structure … Of course there is not a happiness of structure; but every structure is habitable, indeed that may be its best definition. I can perfectly well inhabit what does not make me happy; I can simultaneously complain and endure; I can reject the meaning of the structure I submit to and traverse without displeasure certain of its everyday portions (habits, minor satisfactions, little securities, endurable things, temporary tensions); and I can even have a perverse liking for this behavior of the system (which makes it, in fact, habitable): Daniel Stylites lived quite well on top of his pillar: he had made it (though a difficult thing) into a structure.

I don’t want the structures available to me, but I want to be legible within those structures. This is a larger and more impossible desire than it might appear.

 ***

A few years ago, after much too much scotch, a few friends and I found ourselves in an intense argument about sexuality and privilege, among other things. At some point, exasperated, one friend responded to another, who had been referring to himself as a straight man frequently throughout the night, “What does it mean to you to be straight? Why is that identity important to you?” I don’t think I’ve really stopped thinking about that question since that night. The world usually (not always) takes me to be a straight woman. In the coarsest sense, I suppose I am – my sexual desires usually involve male-bodied people. If I try to quantify my sexuality, I can calculate that 92.5% of the people I’ve had sexual encounters with have been male. If I try to think about it historically, it’s blurrier – at certain times the configurations of acts and bodies I have enjoyed have been illegal in parts of this country (anti-miscegenation laws, broad-ranging anti-sodomy laws…). Does that make these acts straight or queer? Is straightness always on the side of law and order? What is the difference between the way I was straight when I was 16 and 21 and 28, and the way I will or won’t be straight when I’m 50 or 68 or 73? Can my sex life be straight and my romantic life be queer, in the sense of opposed to heteronormative structures?

What does it mean if I claim to be straight, and what does it mean if I refuse to claim it?

Identity is of course always about power relations, and it matters that, if I could somehow force my erotic and domestic desires to coincide, if I could bring myself to want the state to be involved in my legal identity as it relates to who I have promised to sleep with (and to not sleep with), I have always been able to marry most of my former sexual partners. That’s important. But so is the fact that I am unable to want that, and that my sexual orientation means I am supposed to want that, according to all those nice folks asking me about my husband.

 ***

Barthes describes the person who isn’t pigeonholed, who is not taken up by the system, as the child who loses a game of musical chairs: “the clumsiest, the least brutal, or the unluckiest … remained standing, stupid, de trop: the lover.” De trop – too much, excessive, superfluous, without a place, unable to be contained. I want to be legible as de trop, not as femme manquée. This was one of many reasons why, when I stumbled upon a review of Emily Witt’s Future Sex, about a thirty-something single woman exploring the cultural obsession with organizing all aspects of life around marriage and potential alternatives to that model, I ordered a copy immediately.

Witt and I are roughly the same age and went through breakups while staring down the barrel of 30, when your failure to get married starts to become either suspect or tragic, and so I found myself identifying with many experiences in Witt’s account (giiirrrlll, the chapter on dating sites and apps…). But I was sad to find how sad Witt often recalls feeling about being de trop. Witt is essentially narrating a process of apostasy, of course, and so the sadness makes sense. As she explains,

When I turned thirty, in 2011, I still envisioned my sexual experience eventually reaching a terminus, like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center. I would disembark, find myself face-to-face with another human being, and there we would remain in our permanent station in life: the future. I had not chosen to be single but love is rare and it is frequently unreciprocated. Without love I saw no reason to form a permanent attachment to any particular place. Love determined how humans arrayed themselves in space. Because it affixed people into their long-term arrangements, those around me viewed it as an eschatological event, messianic in its totality. My friends expressed a religious belief that it would arrive for me one day, as if love were something the universe owed to each of us, which no human could escape.

Witt describes herself at this stage as “a person in the world, a person who had sexual relationships that I could not describe in language and that failed my moral ideals. Apprehensiveness set in: that this was my future.” I have felt this apprehensiveness and I understand it well, but I have also felt the possibility of that future as a non-tragic choice. The persistent reminders that single people are failures and the way so many of us internalize that message is what makes me sad – the way linear heteronormative expectations diminish, bury, and squander erotic opportunities. I prefer to live in the realm of the erotic rather than the domestic, but we don’t have a structural place for a woman who wants to sleep with men without ending the monorail ride with one of them. This is, in short, what Future Sex is about – the search for that structural place, which is quite possibly a structural impossibility.

Even if it is an impossibility, it’s a search that matters to me because I want a way to express the value of the non-teleological relationships that have made up my erotic and romantic life for the past six years – those relationships matter to me even though they don’t count as anything other than losses in our culture. The truly erotic (read: not future-oriented) encounter, which is about shared pleasure, is incredibly hard to come by in the “straight” dating world as its configured now, Tinder notwithstanding. On one side are the domestically inclined – the people who believe that starting from a place of eroticism dooms a relationship to failure – and on the other are those interested only in their own bodily pleasure, not a shared experience. It is profoundly meaningful to me when I find someone who enables me to stay in the realm of the erotic with them without expecting that it will lead us anywhere (if you have or are currently enabling this and are somehow encountering this piece of writing, I appreciate you).

What is the name for a present-oriented female sexuality? Is it straight?

 ***

Many of the individuals profiled in Future Sex are involved in diligent searches for the new rules and principles of sexuality that could give structure to their relationships without replicating patriarchal models; many of these individuals are also, not coincidentally, well-off Silicon Valley tech workers. I’ve spent a little time around the world of gentrified sexual exploration, and if anything, it’s less satisfying to me than the future-oriented straight world. (If I never listen to another polyamorous white man with a trust fund explain how liberated he is when he’s not working at a financial consulting business I will die happy.) It’s not just the hypocrisy of the well-to-do playing at liberation while working for oppressive institutions that turns me off; it’s the attempt to continue to codify and regulate desire, as if more or better rules could keep us from pain or disappointment or failure.

What I find myself trying to describe when I think about why the codified scenes Witt describes turn me off is nothing more nor less than the singularity of desire, which of course Barthes describes better than I ever could:

what is it in this loved body which has the vocation of a fetish for me? What perhaps incredibly tenuous portion – what accident? The way a nail is cut, a tooth broken slightly aslant, a lock of hair, a way of spreading the fingers while talking, while smoking? About all these folds of the body, I want to say that they are adorable. Adorable means: this is my desire, insofar as it is unique … Yet the more I experience the specialty of my desire, the less I can give it a name; to the precision of the target corresponds a wavering of the name; what is characteristic of desire, proper to desire, can produce only an impropriety of the utterance. Of this failure of language there remains only one trace: the word ‘adorable’ (the right translation of ‘adorable’ would be the Latin ipse: it is the self, himself, herself, in person.

There is something in a current object of desire that is located in the arms and hands but it’s not just that. I can’t describe it because it’s more like a feeling triggered by a visual cue, and neither feeling nor cue have precise names. It’s hardly even worth talking about except that it’s something I keep thinking about. It’s both banal and exceptional, universal and particular to a current configuration. But I don’t want anything aside from that feeling. What is the name for that desire?

 ***

I don’t want rules, but I do want representation.

There are representations of desiring women who are not destined for marriage – the party girl, the femme fatale, the Samantha. They are usually tragic figures (we all know the party girl parties to keep from crying, the femme fatale must be domesticated or die, the Samanthas of the world think they are liberated but are the most compliant subjects of capitalism). I don’t need a new language for desire; I am not, like Witt, bothered by being “a person in the world … who ha[s] sexual relationships that I [can’t always] describe in language,” probably because these relationships don’t “fai[l] my moral ideals.” But I do need a way to be read as an adult human woman who is not a failure because I’ve made and continue to make choices that aren’t based on the fantasy of a husband. Witt argues that “a straight woman who hooked up with people she met online in her search for a boyfriend was not different, in behavior, from the gay man who made a public declaration about looking for noncommittal sex,” except of course that we have names for the latter (cruising) that makes it legible as a practice, which makes the individuals engaging in the practice legible as adults making choices rather than as adults who are failing. I can count on one hand recent representations of women who have sex with people without expecting to marry one of them eventually. There is no straight cruising because we can’t escape the expectation that straight sex will eventually have a purpose.

My specific desires are singular, but I am not. Barthes:

Confronted with the other’s brilliant originality, I never feel myself to be atopos [“unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality”], but rather classified (like an all-too-familiar dossier). Sometimes, though, I manage to suspend the action of the unequal images (‘If only I could be as original, as strong as the other!’); I divine that the true site of originality and strength is neither the other nor myself, but our relation itself. It is the originality of the relation which must be conquered. Most of my injuries come from the stereotype: I am obliged to make myself a lover, like everyone else: to be jealous, neglected, frustrated, like everyone else. But when the relation is original, then the stereotype is shaken, transcended, evacuated, and jealousy, for instance, has no more room in this relation without a site, without topos – without what in French we call, colloquially, ‘topo’ – without discourse.

I want to stay within the “true site of originality and strength,” the unique relation that isn’t of a type that has to have a predetermined outcome (success or failure). Can there be a structural place for the person who desires to live in that space? What does it mean to be able to represent a person whose most desired relations are without discourse?

 ***

Over Christmas break I was driving somewhere with a newly sober family member. We were catching up on our lives and they jokingly asked about my singledom, “My therapist says I shouldn’t date for another year. What’s your excuse?” It was a question from one de trop individual to another, borne of anxiety about where we fit and what we are if we’ve failed to become the type of adults we’re supposed to become. What I want for both of us is not to need an excuse.

At the end of Future Sex, Witt explains that her journey through various scenes of modern sexuality left her with “a heightened perception of the power the traditional story had over the sense of my standing in the world, especially when I traveled to places where the old social order was intact, where small talk began with ‘Are you married?’ or ‘Do you have children?’” I do not know that I believe in the possibility of structural change in places like these (my home), even as I fight for it. In his review of Future Sex, Dion Kagan points out that “[s]ingle women who want to encounter different models for sex and life remain a potent source of anxiety because of their tendentious relationship to the systems of labor and kinship that reproduce capitalism.” The 20th and 21st centuries have taught us nothing if not the power of capitalism, of patriarchy, of white supremacy, to force us into all the old structural relations every time we try to escape them.

For now, I would settle for a corner, to the side, where I am seen as myself – someone whose desires have exceeded rather than failed her, who exists outside of an imagined relationship with a husband who doesn’t exist.

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#GOV101, or Democracy Demystified

So you’ve woken up. You understand that you haven’t been participating in our participatory democracy, and that this is part of the reason we’re in the mess we’re in. You know enough to call your senators about unconstitutional bans and unqualified cabinet nominees. But what else do you do? 

In addition to being activists at the national level, we have to be full participants in our democracy at the state and local levels. 

This weekend I got to attend an event hosted by Missouri House Representative Stacey Newman called #GOV101, which broke down how and why we all have to pay attention to politics at the state level. (Short answer re: why: some of the most hateful and harmful legislation in this country happens at the state level. We have to be vigilant.) I wanted to share what I learned to hopefully make it easier for others who are looking for ways to resist the white supremacist/misogynist/homo- and trans-phobic takeover of our government, which is happening at all levels, from individual city councils all the way to Washington, D.C.

Here’s what you’re going to do to resist:

Learn about your state legislature.

Find the contact information for your state-level elected officials.

Track bills related to an issue you care about.

Call your state legislators about those bills.

Go to a lobby day.

How are you going to do these things? Read on. 

Where to Start

Every state has a house and a senate that function just like the national house and senate. Your first job is to learn where your state legislature is located, when they meet, and which party is in control. In Missouri, our state legislature is in Jefferson City. Our state house currently has 163 members and a Republican supermajority. Representatives have 2 year terms and can only serve for 8 years total. Our state senate has 34 members, also with a Republican supermajority. State senators’ terms are 4 years (1/2 of the seats are up for election every 2 years), and they can also only serve 8 years total. Our governor is Republican (and, even worse, is a mini-Trump). Legislative sessions runs from January through May. 

Your second job is to find the names and contact information of your state (not your national) representatives. Google “[your state’s name] + senate” and “[your state’s name] + house” to find the websites of your state’s legislative branch (you’ll have to visit two different websites). In Missouri, the state Senate website is senate.mo.gov and the state house website is house.mo.gov. Both of them have links for you to look up your representatives by entering your home address. Program their office phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses into your phone or tape them somewhere visible, like on your computer or over your coffeemaker. 

Your third job is to figure out 1 or 2 issues that you are most concerned about and to start tracking legislation related to that issue or those issues.

From January until roughly May, state legislatures work to pass bills that directly affect your life. Most of us haven’t been used to speaking up about these bills; we figure our job is done if we show up to cast a ballot on election day. But all of us get a say in legislation. You can (and must) make your elected officials hear your voice and push them to represent you, not just the lobbyists who give them enormous campaign contributions.

Your state senate and house websites have all the information you need about proposed bills, including who is sponsoring them, the text of the bill, the last action taken on the bill, and the committee members who will vote to send it to the whole house or senate (there is a search bar on both house and senate websites that will let you look up legislation). If you know the number of a proposed bill that you’re worried about (perhaps your local paper has covered it), you can look up bills directly by name. If you don’t know what specific bills are being proposed but you know you’re worried about gun safety in your state, to take one example, you can do a keyword search for “firearm” and you’ll find bills related to gun safety. You may need to play around with keywords to find all relevant legislation; if you’re concerned about anti-abortion legislation, for instance, you’ll probably want to search for “pregnancy,” “abortion,” and “fetus,” among other terms. In places like Missouri, you’ll also want to search for “pregnancy crisis center.”

When you find a specific bill you want to keep track of, you’ll want to pay attention to the sponsor, the last action taken, and the committee members. Do your homework. What can you find out about the committee members? What is their voting record like? Where are they likely to stand on the bill you’re tracking? When will the committee vote, and when will the full house or senate address the bill? 

Your fourth job is to call your state senators and your state house representatives to tell them how you want them to vote. Your elected officials are supposed to work for you. Votes are blunt tools – they don’t tell electeds how their constituents want them to vote on every issue. You have to call them and you have to tell them. Every. Single. Week. Legislative sessions only last a few months, so you will get a break from the calls eventually. But not yet. 

(And if you’re one of those people who finds phone calls uncomfortable or unpleasant [not someone with a serious anxiety disorder – that is a different situation], think about how much more uncomfortable it’s going to be to live in a state that denies women access to birth control, or trans kids access to bathrooms in their schools, or black Americans the right to drive or walk without being stopped and searched. Get over your feelings and pick up the goddamned phone. Right. Now.)

Your fifth job is to find an organization near you that holds lobby days in your state’s legislature and to go to at least one.

We all know about paid lobbyists – the people who make a ton of money buying political influence for large corporations and special interest groups. But most of us don’t know that all citizens can be lobbyists, and that "citizen lobbyist” is a meaningful and effective role to take on.

There are progressive organizations in your state that hold lobby days at your state legislature. This means that the group organizes transportation to the location of the state legislature, chooses specific bills it wants to target, gives you talking points and helps you figure out how to tell a personal story you may have related to a specific bill, and helps you to locate your representatives to tell them how you want them to vote on specific bills.

The organizations I know of here in Missouri that hold lobby days in Jefferson City are Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, Missouri Health Care for All, PROMO (LGBTQ+ rights), and Moms Demand Action (gun safety). There are many, many more. I’ve signed up for lobby days with Planned Parenthood, PROMO and the ACLU because that’s what I can manage and they’re directly addressing legislation that will have immediate and significant impact on individuals in this state related to issues I care deeply about. If you google “lobby day + [your state] + [issue you care about],” you’ll be able to find organizations holding lobby days, as well as information about how to sign up. 

If you can’t make a lobby day, you can attend hearings about individual bills as a regular citizen. You have the right to show up, to tell your story, and to ask the committee you address to take your concerns into account when they vote. You don’t have to schedule anything; you can just show up the day of the hearing to testify (you’ll know about the hearing because you’ve been tracking bills, and because hearing dates, times, and locations are posted on state house and state senate websites). Check in with the ranking democratic member of the committee for help. If you can’t make a hearing, you can contact committee members who you know to be on your side (because you’ve done your homework) and give them questions you’d like them to ask during the bill’s hearing. 

You don’t have to be an expert to testify at a lobby day or as an individual. In fact, your power comes from being a regular constituent. Personal stories are compelling and can and do affect the way legislators vote. For instance, at GOV101, we heard from a representative of Moms Demand Action who told us that prior to the formation of that group 4 years ago (in response to Sandy Hook), no proponents of gun safety laws showed up in Jefferson City to push back against the deregulation of fire arms. This is why, since 2007, gun laws in Missouri have gotten murderously permissive (up until 2007 you needed a permit from a sherriff’s office to purchase a gun; in 2017 you need no permit, no background check, no training, and we are facing 2 bills that will make it legal to carry a gun anywhere [bars, libraries, schools, you name it]). When Moms Demand Action started to hold lobby days in Jefferson City, state legislators were totally discombobulated by the sudden appearance of hundreds of gun safety proponents. Hearing from the opposition matters, especially if your state legislature is used to taking it for granted that there is no opposition. You are the opposition. You have to show up. 

And of course it’s not all defense. Sometimes there are positive bills that you need to voice support for. This legislative session in Missouri, for instance, legislators will vote on the 4th Amendment Affirmation Act, which requires police departments to keep records of pedestrian stops (not currently a requirement) to gather data on racial profiling. The bill proposes that departments that show evidence of racial profiling will be provided with resources to develop anti-bias training (with penalties to follow if bias doesn’t decrease) and that non-biased departments will be rewarded. In this case, it matters that proponents call and show up to support this piece of positive legislation.

To recap, here is what you’re going to do:

Learn about your state legislature.

Find the contact information for your state-level elected officials.

Track bills related to an issue you care about.

Call your state legislators about those bills.

Go to a lobby day.

There is no outside of politics. You may think you have the option of not being political. You may think you can close your eyes and escape. But you can’t. If you’re being silent, you are endorsing whoever is in power. Right now that means endorsing an openly white supremacist government. If you can sleep at night knowing you are on their side, so be it. If you can’t, you have to speak up. You have to get educated. You have to pick up the phone. You have to show up. You have to start right now.   

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What you can do right now, next week, and in the weeks after that to oppose the Muslim ban

Right now:

Contact your local mosque(s) and ask what they need from their community right now. 

Find out if your senators have taken a stand against the ban; if yes, call them and thank them, if not, call them and tell them to.

Set up recurring donations to the ACLU, CAIR, the National Immigration Law Center, and other pro-immigrant groups as you’re able to.

Next week:

Join your local Indivisible group (start one if there isn’t one near you).

Sign up for Swing Left  – progressives have to sweep midterm elections.

Find out who is running for your city council, your state legislature, and for the U.S. senate and house in your area. Support the progressives. Start now – donate time, money, skills, or anything else you have to offer.

Weeks to come:

Keep calling your senators and house representatives (call the district office closest to you – check their individual websites for the number).

Write letters to the editor about your experiences calling your reps – let your community know what their elected officials are doing to support or harm its members.

Show up to city council meetings and town hall meetings when you can.

Set up a google alert for issues you care about/your state legislature/your congresspeople, and contact your representatives when issues come up.

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Apostrophe, Animation, and Aeroplane

At some point between Jeff Session’s and Rex Tillerson’s confirmation charades and the preliminary votes to gut the ACA (we finally got our death panel!), after a night of informal group therapy/ranting with some beloved friends, I found myself lying on their kitchen floor, asking sincerely and hopelessly the question so many of us have been asking lately: what the fuck do we do? We’re powerless in so many ways now. Innocent people are going to die just from the ACA repeal alone. 

I’m still committed to pragmatic action (keep calling your reps! sign up for Wall of Us!), but I am also overwhelmed. This is of course the intention of the GOP; you don’t rush confirmation hearings and push to dismantle protective legislation like this unless you’re trying to suppress dissent by opening all these fronts at once. Knowing this doesn’t make it easier to cope. 

My kitchen floor breakdown happened in Boston. I also spent a lot of time in bookstores there, and I realized at some point while packing a suitcase to go back to the Midwest that I have been building my own protective wall out of books, as I’ve always been wont to do. 

These are my recent purchases:

In the immediate aftermath I wanted the planning books, the ones with clues about effective organization. But I’m in a crying-on-the-kitchen-floor phase right now, and I want the ones that remind me of how many times authoritarianism has won, and how people kept living anyway (when they weren’t murdered). The ones that acknowledge how many losses we’re going to have to deal with. The ones that remind us that we’re not exceptional and our country has in fact created this same situation in other countries time and again. The Sympathizer is one of these books; it wrecked me in so many ways. I don’t know how to talk about it coherently yet. I haven’t finished Going to the Dogs (about life in Weimar Germany), but it’s giving me an odd sort of comfort, especially in the author’s preface to the 1950 edition, where Kästner describes the rise of the Nazi party:

“People ran to follow the Pied Pipers, following them right into the abyss in which we now find ourselves, more dead than alive, and in which we try to make ourselves comfortable, as if nothing had happened. 

The present book ... is no poetic photo album, but a satire. It does not describe what things were like; it exaggerates them. The moralist holds up not a mirror, but a distorting mirror to his age. Caricature, a legitimate artistic mode, is the furthest he can go. If that doesn’t help nothing will. It is not unusual that nothing should help, nor was it then. But it would be unusual if the moralist were to be discouraged by this fact. His traditional task is the defense of lost causes. He fulfills it as best he may. His motto today is as it has always been: to fight on not withstanding!”

The Sympathizer ends in a somewhat similar place, actually: 

“We remain that most hopeful of creatures, a revolutionary in search of a revolution, although we will not dispute being called a dreamer doped by an illusion. . . . We cannot be alone! Thousands more must be staring into darkness like us, gripped by scandalous thoughts, extravagant hopes and forbidden plots. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.”

I feel hopeless about the immediate future but I still believe in fighting on notwithstanding for our scandalous thoughts and extravagant hopes. A way out of this mess doesn’t exist if we can’t imagine it into existence.

But we also can’t live through this without mourning what we’ve already lost and what we’re going to lose. I find myself circling back again and again lately to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel’s cult classic album, in my ongoing attempt to reconcile loss and hope. In the Aeroplane is a concept album, a sort of palimpsestic narrative about an adolescent boy in the late nineties falling in love with Anne Frank (as much as it’s about anything – the lyrics are famously opaque and the narrative logic isn’t exactly linear). The songs seem to be about young love, sex, family trauma, and the Holocaust. They’re also about art’s ability to reanimate the dead and to help the living keep living. (In all of these themes it reminds me quite a bit of H.D.’s epic World War II poem Trilogy, another useful piece for coping with the persistence of human cruelty and our seeming inability to remember the lessons of the past.) 

I think part of what I find comforting about this album is the way it insists on the presence of the past, both as inescapable burden and as an incitement to ethical action and imaginative creation. Historical traumas aren’t described at a remove – they’re part of the fabric of life in the present. “Two Headed Boy,” for instance, overlays an erotic encounter (Anne and Peter in their hiding place? the contemporary adolescent boy and an imagined Anne? the boy and one of his contemporaries?) with bodies in the Nazi death camps:

We will take off our clothes

And they'll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine

And when all is breaking

Everything that you could keep inside

Now your eyes ain't moving

Now they just lay there in their climb

The eroticism of these lyrics – taking off our clothes, exploring the shape of a body, the flickering image of eyes rolling back in an orgasmic moment – is inseparable from the absolute horror of the past – the starving body that makes notches in a spine visible, the struggle to hold on to something internally while being slowly murdered, the eyes that can no longer move, the inevitability of becoming another body cast aside. It’s a grotesque pairing, but it’s also beautiful in its desire to breathe life back into the lost and in its will to look fully at historical suffering and to count it part of our present experience. 

This is also an album that understands the complications of giving voice to the dead in a particularly nuanced way. Apostrophe is the technical term for speaking directly to a dead person; Barbara Johnson describes apostrophe as “a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness” (30). In the Aeroplane flirts with and thematizes but never exactly uses apostrophe in a sustained way. The title track, for instance, describes the voice of a dead girl but does not throw words into her mouth; she is left present and absent, inescapable but untouchable. The desire to reanimate her makes the song, but the song stops short of presuming it can speak for her:

What a curious life we have found here tonight

There is music that sounds from the street

There are lights in the clouds

Anna’s ghost all around

Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me

Soft and sweet

How the notes all bend and reach above the trees

The usual direction of apostrophe is reversed – Anna’s/Anne’s ghost voice moves through the living speaker, making him into the ventriloquist’s dummy. And yet we don’t hear what she says through him, just that it sounds “soft and sweet.” It’s a dream of contact that can’t exist; the words we want to hear are left just out of reach. Leaving the content of Anna’s words a mystery is a beautiful solution to a literary problem: even if we imagine Anne Frank’s actual words here, some of which we have access to, being channeled through the living speaker, it is still the living speaker’s mouth that frames the words. We can’t hear Anne speak any longer, no matter how closely we listen. The next verse takes up this problem:

Now how I remember you

How I would push my fingers through

Your mouth to make those muscles move

That made your voice so smooth and sweet

This verse foregrounds the necessary violence in speaking for an absent other. It makes the figure of apostrophe fleshy and grotesque, describing the speaker as the ventriloquist who forces a corpse’s muscles to move through physical manipulation. It notes the fiction of speech at work here – the muscles in the corpse once made its voice smooth and sweet, but they don’t now. Now it is impossible for that murdered voice to be heard except through a brutal and clumsy approximation of what it once was.

In the Aeroplane’s simultaneous desire for and distrust of sustained apostrophe links it to Diana Fuss’s discussion of what she calls “historical corpse poems.” Fuss argues that twentieth-century literature is filled with poems in which corpses speak, but that,

the Holocaust appears to mark the historical limit beyond which the corpse poem hesitates to venture. The point is clear: after the unthinkable event of genocide, no fiction of the living dead can possibly be sustained. … The few Holocaust poets who do employ the voice of the dead tend to adopt neither an individual nor a collective persona but a unique voice that is both at once. “‘I am I’ -- /thousands of slaughtered I’s,” Jacob Glatstein declares in a poem that reveals not the poet’s desire to revive the dead but rather his own profound identification with the dead. Recent trauma theory reminds us that one might survive an unthinkable atrocity like the Holocaust and yet still not feel alive. (Fuss 64-65)

Anne Frank becomes Anna in “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” doubling her presence, making us think of a specific individual and of the mass of individuals simultaneously (how many individual Anne’s and Anna’s died in the camps collectively?). The song participates in the necessarily confused subjectivity of the Holocaust corpse poem. It also speaks to a belated survivor’s guilt – the guilt of one who wasn’t alive in 1945 but who recognizes that this is due to the simple accident of birth; the final line of the song is “Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all.” Why is the speaker here to imagine Anne’s voice? How can he do that, and how can he not?

Fuss argues that a poet who attempts to write corpse poems about the Holocaust “tentatively seeks to reverse the depersonalization of mass murder by lending to the unmourned victims of genocide his own individual voice. These singular poems do not presume to resurrect the dead, only to memorialize them from the respectful position of writers confronting the enigma of their own uncertain survivals” (65). This is the delicate project at work in “Two Headed Boy Pt. 2,” where the speaker acknowledges the need and the impossibility of giving voice, and the way this act is and is not for the dead:

And in my dreams you’re alive and you’re crying

As your mouth moves in mine, soft and sweet

Rings of flowers ‘round your eyes

And I’ll love you for the rest of your life when you’re ready

The necrophiliac insistence on eroticizing the ventriloquism of apostrophe – now it’s not just words that move through the dead girl’s mouth, but also the male speaker’s body – is both disturbing and yet part of the impossible project of memorialization. Fuss distinguishes “political corpse poems” from “historical corpse poems,” but these are in many ways one and the same. Fuss notes that,

[i]n political killings, the corpse is intended to function as a sign – a message (and most often a warning) to the living. … Political corpses are killed simply to make a point; deprived of subjective voice, these corpses do not so much convey a political message as become the message. The violent reduction of a person to a sign literally kills the messenger, stripping the body that remains of any meaning of its own. By giving voice to the cadaver, political corpse poems belatedly seek to undo this semiotic violence by multiplying the ways in which the dead body might signify and by complicating the terms of both its utterance and its address. These poems ventriloquize corpses not to perpetrate upon the dead another kind of profanation but to make manifest the violence of turning any physical body into a form of political speech. (61)

Anne Frank has of course become one of the most overdetermined symbols of the Holocaust. The potentially profane act of imagining an erotic encounter with her in this song becomes a way to work against the “violent reduction of a person to a sign”; Anne Frank the symbol becomes Anne Frank the individual, engaged in a radically singular and personal experience. It’s an invasive imaginative act, but it’s also a way to de-signify her death and to return her to an imagined personhood that exists apart from or in spite of state violence. Like so many of the images in these songs, it’s awful and gorgeous, heartbreaking and stomach-turning. It succeeds and it fails in its desire to reanimate the dead and to somehow make individual deaths both less symbolic and even more meaningful.

Fuss argues that “[h]istorical corpse poems offset the cultural process of forgetting with the literary work of remembering” and “invent[t] paradoxical new grammars to articulate the terrifying new realities of modern death” (66-67). As part of this tradition, the songs of In the Aeroplane invite us to remember as part of a way to resist future acts of violence. In “Holland, 1945,” Jeff Mangum sings,

And here's where your mother sleeps

And here is the room where your brothers were born

Indentions in the sheets

Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore

And it's so sad to see the world agree

That they'd rather see their faces fill with flies

All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes

We are not currently facing anything like the scale of death we faced at midcentury. But it’s hard not to think of that moment now, as our elected officials look their constituents in the face and tell them they would rather let those constituents die than support the ACA. I don’t know how to deal with people who’d “rather see their faces fill with flies.” I only know how to keep the dream of white roses alive, however fleetingly and imperfectly. And so I put In the Aeroplane on one more time and get ready to march and protest and call and write…

  Works Cited

Diana Fuss. Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy. Duke University Press, 2013.

Barbara Johnson. “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion.” Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 28-47. JSTOR.

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CALL YOUR REPS

Call your elected representatives. (If you think it won’t make a difference, read on.) Call them today and tomorrow and ask them to support delaying the electoral college vote and/or to support a full intelligence briefing for electors. It will take you 1 minute.

Yesterday news broke that Putin was personally involved in attempting to influence our election. At the very least, this issue deserves as much of an investigation as Hillary Clinton’s emails were subjected to.

If you're horrified about Syria (please never forget that Putin is on Assad’s side and is complicit in this unthinkably violent genocide), call your reps and ask them to delay the vote/brief the electors.

If you believe that foreign governments should not interfere in our elections, call your reps and ask them to delay the vote/brief the electors.

If you believe that it's important to at least try to stop this utterly disastrous administration before it starts, call your reps and ask them to delay the vote/brief the electors.

Look up senators here: http://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/ Look up house reps here: http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

Keep it simple: let your reps know that you're a constituent, that you're concerned that Russia's interference in our election has not been fully investigated, and that electors cannot make an informed decision on Monday without a full briefing on the situation. Ask your rep to publicly support a delay in voting and/or a full intelligence briefing for electors. Give your name and number and ask them to follow up with you.

Call these three representatives, who have publicly spoken in favor of a briefing, to tell them you support them and commend their bravery: Don Beyer (Va.) (703) 658-5403; David Cicilline (R.I.) 401-729-5600; Jim Himes (Conn.) (866) 453-0028.

You may think that calling your reps is futile. Individual representatives certainly do not have the authority to make a delay or a briefing happen. But calling your reps now and later matters in a deep and fundamental way.

Those of us who voted for Hillary Clinton had our right to political representation stolen from us. Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes. 2.8 MILLION.  America clearly said we wanted Clinton to be our president, and a combination of gerrymandering and foreign interference and fake news/propaganda took our right to self-governance away.

But voting is only one way to speak in a representative democracy. Another is to pick up a phone and call your elected officials. Calling our representatives en masse today and tomorrow and next month and for the next four years lets them know how many of their constituents do not accept the legitimacy of this administration. That matters when it comes time to fight the awful policies Trump is going to try to push through. He’s going to keep lying and saying that he won decisively and eventually people are going to forget that this is a lie. Call and write now to let your reps know that you know it is a lie. Trump does not have the support of the majority of voters in this country. (Even people who voted for him didn’t actually vote for the policies he proposed.) We have to shout this from the rooftops now and throughout this presidency.

Yes, the system is broken in fundamental ways; lobbyists have most of the power when it comes to influencing our representatives. There is no guarantee that pressure from constituents will make a difference. But there is an absolute guarantee that silence from constituents will make it easy for Trump to dismantle the EPA, Roe v. Wade, religious freedom, the Affordable Care Act, the minimal banking regulations we have, along with basically everything else that keeps life from being completely miserable for your average American citizen. We cannot make it easy for this administration to do any of those things.

If a senator’s office fields calls all day about one issue, they have ammunition to fight for what their constituents want. If a representative can bring a stack of letters to the House or Senate floor and show how many of their constituents care about an issue, they have proof that they are working for the wishes of the people they represent (a staffer in Claire McCaskill’s office told me that letters can be more effective than phone calls because they can be logged and collected, and a stack of paper is a visible representation of constituent concern. Calls are also good, but ask for the office to follow up with you – make sure they take your phone number and/or address and contact them again if they don’t follow up). I’ve talked to people who have lobbied for LGBTQ+ rights in Missouri – reddest of the red state legislatures – and who have won significant victories because they have been able to amplify the voices of Missourians who believe that civil rights are for everyone. We cannot be silent if we’re going to preserve civil rights nationally. Every single one of us who believes passionately that Trump is going to destroy this country (and this planet) has to call or write our representatives every time damaging legislation is on the floor or there is a chance to contest his legitimacy. It has to become a regular practice and it has to start now.

Democratic leadership has failed us in the fight to have a thorough investigation of Russian involvement in this election, which is a travesty. There is no evidence that they’re going to do a better job in the future, and this puts the burden of resisting Trump on us. There is no other choice but to lift that burden. Ordinary people are now the last line of defense against a madman. Get loud. Be heard. CALL YOUR REPS. We cannot go down without a fight.

Practical resources: check out this sample script of an effective call, and check out this guide to effectively resisting Trump’s disastrous agenda.

[erinkappeler]

Who You Talking To?

I talk to a lot of white people. The town I now call home is 88.7% white. The town I grew up in is 98% white (not an exaggeration, that is the actual 2010 census number). The city I called home for the last ten years, like so many other American cities, is built on decades of redlining and segregation and white fear. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the calls, immediately post election, to pay more attention to angry white people. We haven’t paid attention to rural white poverty, the story goes. What about the opioid crisis and the 2008 economic crash and the rapidly dropping life expectancies for white Americans? 

Yes. These things matter. We have to listen and we have to figure out how to address the needs of as many American citizens as possible. 

But.

What about the people of color who, literally since the beginning of the colonization of this continent, have been explaining, eloquently, loudly, and constantly, how much pain they are in? How they are murdered and assaulted and berated for merely existing every single day? Where was the empathy and the understanding when black Americans were being jailed for marijuana possession, which now provides lucrative career opportunities for white entrepreneurs? Why wasn’t crack treated as a public health crisis? Who was listening then? Where was white America? We didn’t show up. We didn’t listen. We didn’t care. We never have. Not as a collective body. 

Given our nation’s history and our refusal to acknowledge that history, this is unsurprising. But it is a point that can’t be lost as we strategize about how to deal with the open racism (not to mention misogyny, and ableism, and religious animosity, and xenophobia...) that Trump made trendy. Yes, we have to address the needs of poor white people. We also have to address the needs of poor people of color, who, let’s not forget, also lost factory jobs and coal mining jobs and management jobs when those sad angry white people lost theirs. (Though I’m obviously annoyed about the attention angry white people are getting, nota bene that my dad, a rural white man, lost his white collar job to outsourcing and corporate greed. He now drives truck, 14-16 hours a day, at the age of 60. He’s not sure when he can retire, especially with social security and medicare hanging in the balance. I’m not unsympathetic to how incredibly hard it is for working Americans trying to make a living. But my dad knows damn well that brown people aren’t the ones who put him in this position.) 

So how do we attend to the needs of working class whites and working class people of color? Move to the goddamn left already, Democrats. Unite us in our shared opposition to the super wealthy who are screwing all of us. Make your message clear and catchy and impossible to ignore. Quit. Giving. The. Super. Wealthy. More. Power. Trump is an actual movie villain, for crying out loud. Listen to the pain of angry white people, yes, but then teach them that brown people did not cause their pain. Trump and his kind did.

In the aftermath of a crisis I get intensely practical. I can't seem to stop myself from formulating plans and urging people to action. The problem of how we talk to white Trump supporters (the one who just ignored racism, since the ones who are proudly racist are probably beyond hope) so they understand that economic pain is caused by income inequality, not by immigrants and/or black or brown people, is huge and must be tackled on many fronts. Parts of this fight are currently out of the control of individual civilians. The worst has happened and we’ve put someone completely bent on normalizing racism while pulling in cash hand over fist in the White House. The next four years are going to be an utter disaster. But I still think that we can do some damage control as individuals, in two ways, one concrete and one more abstract:

1) Put as bluntly as possible, progressives have to show the fuck up (posting articles on Facebook does not count as showing the fuck up). If you know nothing about local politics, teach yourself real damn fast. Find out who is on your city council and in your state legislature and who your congresspeople are. Figure out who is going to run in midterm elections and support them (volunteer for their campaign; donate money; talk about them with your friends and family and on social media). Support Emily’s List and She Should Run and Off the Sidelines. Are you a woman, a person of color, a non-straight person? Consider running for something. Change starts locally. When a politician proposes something that is going to hurt American citizens, call your representatives early and often and let them know that their constituents do not support that legislation (Sign up for actionnow and check the “We’re His Problem Now” Google doc for alerts about damaging legislation). When politicians speak up and act for what is right, call or write to thank them. Let them know you’re watching. We can’t sit on the sidelines anymore and expect someone else to fix things. If this election has shown us nothing else, it’s shown us that. 

2) Listen to PJ Harvey. Specifically, listen to the song “Me-Jane.”

“Me-Jane” proposes something like an ethics of attention. Put simply, when violence happens, you attend to the person who’s bleeding, not the person who’s screaming. And it reminds us that the person bleeding is never going to be the angry white man; the angry white man is always going to be the person causing the bleeding.

I listen to this song every time I’m mad about misogyny (I listen to this song a lot), but it’s gaining new resonances for me these days. It so neatly skewers racist patriarchal logic and so satisfyingly insists on the voices of those who are done harm by it. In the first verse and chorus, Jane (of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ colonialist fantasy Tarzan of the Apes) speaks:

Damn your chest-beating, just you stop your screaming. You’re splitting through my head and swinging from the ceiling. Oh, move it over Tarzan, can’t you see I’m bleeding? I’ve called you by your first name, good lord it’s

Me-Jane! I’m running split head I’m reeling Me-Jane Me-Jane

The screaming white man always demands attention, regardless of what else is happening. “Can’t you see I’m bleeding?” Jane asks, and of course the answer isn’t “how can I help?” – it seems to be “who are you again?” (”good lord it’s Me-Jane!”).

Importantly, the speaker is not just Jane in this song, it is Me-Jane. Thanks to the Tarzan movie franchise, the exchange between the two that everyone knows goes, “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” The syntax privileges Tarzan; he is, of course, our hero. He is the subject, Jane is the object. Harvey’s song reverses this objectification. This Jane will not be a you. This Jane is me. Me-Jane. You Tarzan. Now shut up, Tarzan, and let me speak. 

Damn your chest-beating just you stop your screaming. All the time he hunting, swimming, fishing, breeding. Don’t you ever stop and give me time to breathe-in? I’ve called you by your first name, good lord it’s

Me-Jane! I’m running split head I’m reeling Me-Jane I’m trying To make sense of your screaming

Don’t lord it on me Don’t lord it on me Don’t lord it over me

Tarzan sets the agenda (hunting, swimming, fishing, breeding – in the jungle as in our red states) and forces Jane to try “To make sense/ of [his] screaming.” “Don’t lord it on me” reminds us that Burroughs’ Tarzan was British nobility, brought to Africa through colonial transit. And Gail Bederman reminds us that in Burroughs’ novels, Tarzan is introduced as “the killer of beasts and many black men,” and that he saves Jane, a white American, from being raped by a black ape (this is the beginning of their love story, naturally). This song reminds us that white masculinity kills in the name of purity (women’s imagined purity; nonexistent racial purity; ideological purity). It always has. This song is the fantasy of getting that killing masculinity to stop, even for a second, and to listen to the voice of one of the people it makes bleed.

In the recorded version, the song ends with a plaintive “Jane” from Rob Ellis (at least I think it’s Rob Ellis – I have no liner notes to guide me), which to me always sounds like a diminished Tarzan, finally speaking Jane’s name and perhaps pausing in his screaming to let her “breathe-in.” It gives me chills, no matter how many times I listen. It’s a fantasy I’ve always needed, but one I need especially now.

We can’t continue to let Tarzan set the agenda. Now is not the time to try to make sense of his screaming. Now is the time to get him to listen. I don’t have the answers for how. We have to figure these answers out together. 

James Baldwin knew this (James Baldwin knew everything). In The Fire Next Time, he wrote,

“I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. ... But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” 

It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

Attend to the bleeding, not the screaming. We don’t need to figure out how to cater to angry white America. We need to figure out how to get them to understand what they’re actually mad about. 

Baldwin again: 

“They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.”

We need to offer something in place of that toxic, killing identity. 

“[I]f the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.”

We will not make America great again because it has never been truly great. We have to make it something it’s never been: a nation that isn’t ruled by white fear and sustained by black death. We can make America what America must become. We have no other choice.

[erinkappeler]

Resistance Ain’t a Track Meet, it’s a Marathon

In the immediate aftermath of the election of an unqualified, hate-mongering bigot to the office of president, I didn’t know how to think about anything else. I changed all of my class plans to focus on discussing what just happened to us. I called my representatives and signed petitions and wrote anti-Bannon screeds and donated every last penny I had to Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. I went to progressive meet ups and had long post-mortem discussions with family and friends. 

For me, that was the right amount of attention to give the situation in that moment. It deserved nothing less. But like a lot of other horrified American citizens, I’m starting to grasp that a long-term commitment to resisting this administration is going to require a more measured approach. When Steve Bannon was announced as a cabinet pick, I was pissed off and scared enough to call or write someone about it every day. When Betsy DeVos was announced, and then Ben Carson (not once, but twice!), and Jeff Sessions, and Steve Mnuchin, and Scott Pruitt, and Rex Tillerson … I started to get overwhelmed. 

I need a long-term strategy to help keep me from that feeling of being up against too much if I’m going to be able to act effectively in a consistent way.

This is my personalized plan for resisting this administration effectively:

1. Realize that I was already doing resistance work, and do it more strategically now.

I’m lucky that I’m an educator, because my day to day life is already structured around work that can help us to survive and think past Trump’s administration. My research is about how white supremacist theories of human development influenced modernist poetics. I’m well-versed in the history of racist thinking and the insidious (and overt) ways it permeates our cultural fabric. Because I teach American literature and history from this angle, I already teach students to think harder about race and class and gender and sexuality in this country than they may have been encouraged to do before. 

But from here on out, I’m specifically committing myself to explaining, more than once a semester in all of my classes, that race is not a biological reality. Racial categories are about power and domination, not genetics. This is something I cover in my intro to literary analysis classes when we talk about postcolonial and race studies, but it hasn’t been something that I’ve explicitly incorporated into American lit surveys before. Some students already know this, but many don’t. It’s information they can’t afford to ignore, and it’s information that they may not get elsewhere.

I’m also explicitly committing myself to explaining, more than once a semester in all of my classes, that our economic system was built on slavery and settler colonialism. Again, we get to this in the intro class, but it needs to be a structural part of my other American lit courses as well. This is where divisions in this country come from, not from elitist liberals and reactionary red staters. This is where we must focus our attention.

I’m 99.9% positive that these are not facts that many white Missouri high schoolers get exposed to (my students of color have spoken up in class about how these are facts they grew up with, and how it’s frustrating for them that they’re not common knowledge among their peers). I’m also positive that there is a substantial population of white students at my institution who do not currently believe that race is an issue that concerns them but who are capable of being persuaded that in fact it concerns them very much (testimonies this semester by white students make this clear).

Angela Davis closed a speech she gave in St. Louis last year with the words “we have only just begun to tell the truth about violence in America” (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle 90). I will help to tell this truth every time I am in the classroom.

2. Realize that the fight has been going on long before Trump and will go on long after he’s gone.

I’m taking my cue from the folks who have been at this fight much longer than I have – the ones who understand that we have always been fighting white supremacist misogyny, and we always will be. That “in this world there is only incremental progress.” That love is not a victory march. 

I’ve been struck time and again at planning meetings for progressive groups by how those who have already been organizing and lobbying are able to remain focused on the work even as they’re terrified of what’s coming down the pipeline. They’re able to see our current moment, dark as it is, as part of a much larger history. The long view gives me courage and reminds me to stay focused on the actions and ideas that can stop some of the damage. Victories will be small, but they will be there.

3. Tap into existing organizations and volunteer.

There is already infrastructure on the ground, locally and nationally, that I can contribute my time and money and energy to. I started volunteering with Planned Parenthood pretty much immediately upon moving to Missouri, and post-election I set up regularly scheduled donations to PP and the ACLU, among other groups. I’m signing up for lobby days, attending informational meetings, and figuring out where I can be most useful in these existing groups.

Individual actions are good and important, but they’re not enough. Individuals alone do not change oppressive systems; collective organizing does. Progressives are panicking about our fundamental lack of organization, but this panic is, I think, misdirected. We are organized in many significant but dispersed ways. Finding ways for the highly active local progressive groups who have already been doing organizing work to collaborate is going to be the way forward (we are, after all, the majority, and we are already united behind the fundamental principle that all Americans deserve civil liberties). I’m heartened in my local community by the contact, planning, and collaboration that is happening already between groups with divergent but complementary interests and by the focus on impacting what happens in our state legislature. This is how we make a difference. 

Angela Davis again, speaking about Ferguson:

“I do think that movements require time to develop and mature. They don’t happen spontaneously. They occur as a result of organizing and hard work that most often happens behind the scenes. Over the last two decades I would say, there has actually been sustained organizing against police violence, racism, racist police violence, against prisons, the prison-industrial complex, and I think that the sustained protests we are seeing now have a great deal to do with that organizing. They reflect the fact that the political consciousness in so many communities is so much higher than people think.” (36)

4. Continue to call and write to my representatives, just at a less breakneck pace.

Right after everything went down, I made calls and wrote letters and emails and signed petitions every day. I wish I could continue to do that, but it’s unsustainable for me. I’m dedicating Tuesday mornings from here on out to phone calls to representatives.

I’m using the actionnow mailing list and the “We’re His Problem Now” google doc (praise be to crowdsourcing and document sharing!) to keep me apprised of important actions, and I’ll plan on unplanned emergency actions being a part of my weekly routine.

5. Stay angry. Stay informed.

Anger is useful. It can be, and has been for me, life sustaining. It motivates me to keep fighting for what I believe in even when I’m tired and it seems pointless. Anger at unjust systems is at the root of continued and effective resistance to those systems.

Staying informed for me means not just staying on top of all the atrocities the Trump administration is perpetuating and will continue to perpetuate, but also staying informed about the past, present, and future of activist work. I started this weekend with Freedom is a Constant Struggle (hence all the Angela Davis quotes in this post) and will keep educating myself, reading works from past and present progressive thinkers about how to move forward. (Interested in educating yourself also? Check out this bibliography I put together for my students.)

I’m committed to effective political action in all its forms, which includes visible and vocal resistance to murderous systems. Silence is complicity; silence is death. As Davis reminds us, protest large and small is part of effective political action. From her speech in St. Louis:

“I am here simply because I want to thank you Ferguson activists, because you refused to drop the torch of struggle. When you were urged to go home and go back to business as usual, you said no and in the process you made Ferguson a worldwide symbol of resistance. At a time when we are urged to settle for fast solutions, easy answers, formulaic resolutions, Ferguson protesters said no. You were determined to continue to make the issues of violence against Black communities visible. You refused to believe there were any simplistic answers and you demonstrated that you would not allow this issue to be buried in the graveyard that has not only claimed Black lives but also so many struggles to defend those lives. So I join the millions of people who thank you for not giving up, for not going home. For staking our claim for freedom on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, with such great power that Ferguson has become synonymous with progressive protest from Palestine to South Africa, from Syria to Germany, and Brazil to Australia.” (83)

 This is my plan moving forward. What’s yours?

[erinkappeler]

The Year of the Cool Girls

2016 may have been the Year of Our International Political Dumpster Fire (incidentally, can we be that far from subsidized time at this point?), but it was also the year of badass ladies making mesmerizing long-form music videos.

I finally caught up on Tove Lo’s Fairy Dust this weekend (I’ve worn Lady Wood out so I have no idea why it took me this long to find the accompanying film). I was totally taken by the bizarre choreographic vocabulary that develops throughout — spastic flailing, odd repeated hand gestures, a fixation with stretching out dancers’ mouths — which all made sense when the credits rolled and Denna Thomsen was listed as choreographer (she worked on Sia’s “Elastic Heart” video, also a spastic, mouthy, handsy delight).

[Lyrics frequently NSFW; end of video very NSFW/pornographic; melodramatic in the best possible way]

Ok, technically FKA twigs’s M3LL155X came out in 2015, but it was late in 2015, and 2016 needs to borrow some good things. This film is so stunning. Granted, I would pretty much watch twigs sit in a chair because she is just that mesmerizing, but still. She is also by all accounts an incredible and gracious collaborator, and no I don’t know why she’s with Robert Pattinson either.

And of course, the Queen of 2016 and of all time and of America (why didn’t she run for president??), Beyoncé. Lemonade can’t be praised enough. True story: I was at a friend’s wedding the night this came out. Twitter alerted me to its existence just as the wedding dancing was wrapping up, so I rushed home and watched it and died. The next morning I made my roommates watch it with me again. The day after that we had ANOTHER group viewing because we were all so excited about it, and then I taught it the following week. I’ll still drop everything I’m doing to watch it again if asked.

This year we lost what feels like a million icons, not to mention democracy and basic human decency and all kinds of other illusions, but at least there’s still good art. That’s something.