Scribblings with Green Chalk

Animals and Your Soul
If you’re like most people, baring your soul is tough, so the first thing you should do is get yourself an avatar from the animal world on which you can project your fears, your loves, and, most importantly, your festering hates. We suggest finding an outcast member of the animal kingdom to represent your soul’s voice. Perhaps start with a lemur. Say what you really want to say, but as a lemur might say it. Everyone will be all “Wow, I’ve never read a poem from a lemur’s perspective before!” (“Poetry by the Numbers” by Gary Rudoren)

I don’t know what kind of writing animal I could I be. It’s difficult to type or hold a pencil with a paw.

I know. It seems I should quote one of her brilliant, ironic poems to celebrate her birthday. But wouldn’t the poet feel bored if she happened to stop by? Sto lat, Droga Pani. (Tak na wszelki wypadek, gdyby tu Pani się przejazdem znalazła.) I wish us all many more of those poems. And if Wisława Szymborska should ever click over to this blog, I link her discreetly to one of my favorite poems by Mary Jo Bang. Because what could inspire writing more good poetry if not reading someone else’s good poetry?

As much as I hate cigarettes, I love how delighted W.S. looks in this picture. There are songs about such moments…

Long, long ago, before the ministry of education was taken over by lunatics who wanted to censor everything, high school kids were allowed to read some meaningful Polish prose. It is a well known fact that when you’ve got acne and a self-perpetuationg existential crisis, nothing cheers you up as much as books on the vacuity of being spiced up with more than a touch of camp. Witold Gombrowicz and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) blew our minds. Even putting them in one sentence makes a paragraph sizzle.

While Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke reassured us that, indeed, all people were fakes, Witkacy showed us how to put feathered hats on party with that idea. On his search for what he called “the pure form,” he shot fountains of brain-twisting puns and neologisms, knitted vulgarisms out of newspaper clips and old wives’ tales. “Eyes a divine blue like buttons on a pair of underpants,” “son-of-a-shriveling-gut”: you can’t help wishing you could cuss like that, with nonchalance and neon glare. Certainly something to twist the censor’s scissors with.

Just like his biography. Witkacy was a child prodigy who was educated by private tutors. An artist’s only son, Witkacy clung to the bohemian enfant terrible act long after he’d grown out of his shorts. In his snazzy villa in Zakopane, he wrote letters announcing to unsuspecting souls that he’d “unfriended” them. And he painted. On vodka, on absynth, on whatever drugs he could find. Knowing that creating under the influence was not a great feat in itself, he turned it into a business. He set up a portrait company with prices differing according to the degree and kind of intoxication. Since not that many were interested in boring “clean” paintings (which were also the cheapest), Witkacy experienced many trips during which he encountered happily disjointed female heads among oranges, artistic vortexes bending space, and his own grimacing face. And this he shared on canvas.

“A woman need not be beautiful,” biographers scribbled down. “She must, however, be interesting.” Troubled as he was–the painting above is the famous “Fałsz kobiety” [A Woman's Falsehood] and not to forget those ambiguous disjointed heads–his female portraits are entrancing. Burning eyes, wild hair, surprising poses, no dolls with empty faces.

It’s not that as a troubled teenager I dreamed of being one of Witkacy’s women. Glossing over the tragic ending, I wanted to be him: hanging out with my genious friend Bronisław Malinowski, making art like a demon, and then ending up in a Swedish novel.

With idiots wanting to butcher up his beautiful crazy fiction, I can only say that the sons-of-a-shriveled-gut can poke their hollow blue-as-underwear-buttons eyes out. Until things improve in Po(e)land, I unfriend the lot.

Only silly things come to my mind like that I began to miss the earthy taste of soymilk last night around midnight. To spare the reader my adventures in the Őkoladen, I will divert their attention with a poem. I hope I don’t get shot for this, but I have a double excuse: it’s National Poetry Month in the US and this is an earthy poem.
 
 

In the evenings
I scrape my fingernails clean,
hunt through old catalogues for new seed,
oil workboots and shears.
This garden is no metaphor–
more a task that swallows you into itself,
earth using, as always, everything it can.
I lend myself to unpromising winter dirt
with leaf-mold and bulb,
plant into the oncoming cold.
Not that I ever thought
the philosopher meant to be taken literally,
but with no invented God overhead,
I conjure a stubborn faith in rotting
that ripens into soil,
in an old corm that rises steadily each spring:
not symbols but reassurances,
like a mother’s voice at bedtime reading a long-familiar book,
the known words barely listened to,
but joining, for all the nights of a life,
each world to the next.

Jane Hirshfield, “November, Remembering Voltaire”

Forgive me, I’ve been away with my head. Unaware of the intricacies of blog etiquette, I didn’t leave a hiatus post.

While I was gone, my absent blog persona was tagged by the lovely Wildly Parenthetical. Since we don’t have that much of a personality split, I reply–though outrageously late.

Here it comes:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Having put aside the Polish edition of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and the German edition of Szczypiorski’s Początek (do read that novel!), I reach for the book I don’t seem to be able to finish: Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. It’s on my bedside table most of the time and we’re outwaiting each other. I have not gotten to page 123 yet, so it’ll be a surprise:

That the war deaths occurred on behalf of a terrain in which pianos could be played and bicycles could be pedalled, where schools would each day be entered by restrained and extravagantly gesturing children alike, must be indicated by appending the direction of motive, “for my country,” since the deaths themselves are the unmaking of the embodied terrain of pianos and bicycles, classmates, comrades, and schools.

For My Country. Thus “to kill and die”–or in the idiom that embraces both simultaneously, “to hurt” (to hurt within one’s own body) or to “alter body tissue”–are alike in having no interior referent and, if they are to have one, requiring a separate specification. But precisely because there is nothing “interior” that itself stipulates and in doing so limits its referent, the act of “dying” or “killing” can be lifted away and coupled with a different referent. (Scarry 123-124)

Earlier, Scarry writes about the image of war in Homer and gets Homeric with her syntax, so I might have lost count.

This passage encapsulates what drew me to the book in the first place. Scarry’s thesis is that pain is mostly uncommunicable, transcending language. Transcending our ability to relate. What does it mean to empathize, when oftentimes we can’t even see that the person next to us is in pain? Even when we notice, we never feel their pain… Is our mental image of their pain anything close to what they could be feeling? Is pain just an “element of blank” to the one who isn’t experiencing it, like one of Dickinson’s poems tells us? And the person in pain… a body, distant in its suffering? If so, how easy is war?

My on and off reading of the book does not allow me to offer a full-blown meditation on these questions. I’ve got reader’s block. Don’t pick on me.

I tag the following charming people, who hopefully cannot empathize with me in my predicament: Denise of Wohnen in Wien, Bowleserised, Aulelia of Charcoal Ink, Anthony, and BD (do I have the right link?).

You can think many contradictory things about Charlotte Perkins Gilman (I do), but the title of her autobiography is a proof of sheer brilliance in at least one respect. She knew that when you noun it, you put a pin through it. Remember Baudelaire’s dusty love letters tucked in drawers? Butterfly collections under dust. Gilman didn’t want it, so she didn’t say “life” — an object, able to be caught, caught, lying there — she said “the living of.”

It’s the verbing, that’s how you get up and run. Gilman knew it, Whitman knew it, Stevens knew it. I wanna verb me.

Time’s dust is slowly accumulating between me and my essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s conception of poetry as a glass eye gifted with sight. I decided to close the process of revision and consider the essay done, though I still can’t read it without thinking that it could be improved in many ways. Today, I would also add other questions to my original inquiry. But that could be a separate essay, couldn’t it? The question of creative and created sight remains open.

Because the most interesting points about sight were made by Bishop, not by me, I hesitate to paste here any excerpts from my paper. One possible point of departure for more questioning would be this paragraph, which brings together many of the ideas that interested me then: Probing the limitations of perception is one of Bishop’s idées fixes. Regardless of whether we are dealing with objectivized narration or an emotionally-colored description, the problem of the sense and aim of observation inevitably returns. The knowledge gained through watching the world closely is always questionable, being a combination of what one sees and what one only desires to see. By recreating visual experience through linguistic means, the poem becomes, out of necessity, also a tale of the act of perception. References to other senses not only emphasize certain characteristics of the object but, above all, expose the limitations of sight, its dependence on memory and imagination. Naturalness and artificiality are therefore present in observation from the very beginning.

I’m glad I used “objectivized” and not “objective,” which settles the Krapp argument tentatively in favor of me being the same person now and then. Sight as Bishop constructed it in her poetry was never “pure,” innocent, or unquestionable. Not all-embracing, not all-knowing. Tricky.

About sight in poetry, she wrote:

Off and on I have written out a poem called “Grandmother’s Glass Eye” which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of a poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.

(Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box 212).

Although this applies to representation of sight, I think it could be extended first to extraliterary representation and then to conceptualizing sight as such. Not that this hasn’t been done, because it has — if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t even be asking about this, because the notion of disembodied objectivity still has rather strong appeal.

I’m thinking of Bishop’s modesty as pitted against the Objectivity of scientific representation. Remember what she did in Georgaphy III? The series of questions that opens that volume creates a skeptical lens through which to view space, distances, places, and phenomena from the poems. Sight according to Bishop is a modest sense. So modest that in “Poem” Bishop cuts it off from visionary pretences–

Our visions coincided—“visions” is
too serious a word—our looks, two looks

Is modest sight too dubious for science? Is vision the locus of objectivity? How can objectivity be questioned?

I could probably turn now towards modest sight as a david to scientific vision’s goliath in Bishop’s poetry, but in this sketchy post I’ll go in the other direction.

Whether scientists like it or not (and I know a few who don’t, because they will insist that linguistic is not a “real” science), language plays with them and their findings. The “objectivity” that is touted as the ultimate truth of inquiry and representation is language pulling their strings (and having its strings pulled to some extent). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after a bath in champagne. The legacy of sentimental novels, newspaper articles, and political propaganda entering “serious” research (not like the wishy-washy humanities) all the time, quietly, unnoticed. Sic!

Apologies for enjoying the irony so much (with probably more than a hint of a humanities “complex”). Being in language is inescapable as is being in culture, politics, society. An objectivity which claims that this is possible has ulterior motives. It’s an enticing objectivity, with pretentions of godhood, one floating above the mundane in an impossible trick of its vision.

Whatever I could say has already been said in a more cogent and convincing way by Donna Haraway, so I will let the quotes from “Situated Knowledges” do my work for me.

I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribed all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. [...]

The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit [...]. [...]Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. [...]

A tribute to this technology of direct, devouring, generative, and unrestricted vision, whose technological mediations are simultaneously celebrated and presented as utterly transparent, the volume celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Geographic society closes its survey of the magazine’s quest literature, effected through its amazing photography, with two juxtaposed chapters. The first is on “Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The choice is the universe–or nothing” (Bryan, 1987, p. 352). Indeed. This chapter recounts the exploits the exploits of the race and displays the colour-enhanced “snapshots” of the outer planets reassembled from digitalized signals transmitted across vast space to let the viewer “experience” the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the “object.” These fabulous objects come to us simulataneously as indubitable recordings of what is simply there and as heroic feats of techno-scientific production. The next chapter is the twin of outer space: “Inner Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The stuff of stars has come alive” (Bryan, 1987, p. 454). Here, the reader is brought to the realm of the infinitesimal, objectified by means of radiation outside the wavelengths that “normally” are perceived by hominid primates, i.e., the beams of lasers and scanning electron microscopes, whose signals are processed into the wonderful full-colour snapshots of defending T cells and invading viruses.

But of course that view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god-trick. I would like to suggest how our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (though not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation), and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as a route to disembodiment and second-birthing, allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent objectivity.

(Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of the Partial Perspective.”The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. 86-87)

I took a peek at Jonathan Carroll’s blog today.

Carroll is one of those authors to enjoy astounding popularity in most unlikely places. Not many of his compatriots are aware of him… but he’s a bit of a cult author in Poland. His debut novel, The Land of Laughs was the novel of the beginning of the nineties — first printed as a serial in the legendary magazine Fantastyka, then it went through several book editions, was nonchallantly mentioned on various TV shows, and read by everyone who wanted to be someone, it seemed.

I first read The Land of Laughs when I was 15. I then read almost everything he published until I got tired with the recurrent themes — collecting fountain pens, suspension between Vienna and Connecticut, talking animals, interestingly flawed women and the sensual feel of the back of their heads when caressed by the protagonist…

I find myself returning now and then to two of his novels, the debut and Bones of the Moon and to his short stories, especially the ones collected in The Panic Hand (or rather: Upiorna dłoń, because the stories might have been published in a different form in English). Bits of God captured in a woman’s casual pencil drafts, dogs that can smell evil, fashion for a dying man. Themes I like in the way I like pieces of chocolate slowly melting on the tongue. not to be dead sophisticated but tickled on my imagination gray cells.

Like one of the reviewers on Carroll’s official website, I wish he had written the children’s stories from the Land of Laughs. The language blows me away every time:

The Land of Laughs was lit by eyes that saw the lights that no one’s seen.

The plates hated the silver, who in turn hated the glasses. They sang cruel songs to each other. Ping. Clank. Tink. This kind of meanness three times a day.

The voice of Salt loved Krang too. When it was with her, it always whispered.

I’m touched:

In the preface to the Polish edition of A Child Across the Sky (Dziecko na niebie), Carroll writes that he feels fulfilled as a writer when he thinks that a person in Wrocław is sitting on the tram going home after work and enjoying one of his books.

On his blog, in the entry “CarrollBlog 1.6,” he quotes Magdalena Samozwaniec, a largely forgotten Polish writer. Warm laughter. Thanks.

Januaries, Nature greets our eyes
exactly as she must have greeted theirs
…

This is where the multiple Januaries come from. All the way back to the year 1501, weaving inaproppriateness, conquest, exoticism, leaves, and lizards in a January rush. I’ve always felt that January was a month running quickly downhill. My birthday is in January and each year I get the impression that the days are rolling towards it faster than I can count, which makes me feel irrationally old (but not wiser).

I got a lovely letter from Wildly Parenthetical, saying she liked the idea of multiple Januaries and I thought it’s worth elaborating on if only by means of random associations. Frankly, I didn’t think that anyone would be interested in my choice of blogging name (more on that later) and so I never bothered to explain it. It is more or less a play of associations: the month, a vague resemblance to my actual name, Elizabeth Bishop’s arrival in Brazil, this song. I’ve never had any ‘effective’ nickname, so I enjoy the impersonality of many Januaries.

It’s a good question, though, how people choose their blogging names and what to make of the choice to blog under one’s real name? Anthony says he’s more reserved towards bloggers who use their real names (Anthony, please write a post about this so I can link here), I would make an exception with fiction writers, because their kind of writing entails an additional degree of distance and play (though does it always?…).

I couldn’t find the poem online, so if you wish to read it in its entirety, I can only suggest you look for The Complete Poems 1927-1979. Bishop is my favorite poet. I admire her technical skill, her use of imagery, and the curious humor. Like in these lines from the final stanza:

Just so the Christians, hard as nails,
tiny as nails, and glinting

Hmm… There is (was?) also an LA band called The Januaries. Not that I’m surprised…

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

My guiding thought for the new year. Or any year.

It might seem like a sign of sad disenchantment to say that people generally aren’t good and kind, but outside of Disney movies that has always been the case.

Some time before Christmas I had an interesting conversation about censorship and “smoothing out” fairy tales. All those cut tongues, cropped toes, missing fingers were taken away from us. And in exchange we got Bambi. Not even close to a real deer. Not like the ones I watched as a child run through the orchard, the ones I’d meet on a walk in the fields near our family house. Where my parents live has become suburbia: Bambi and Desperate Housewives. Neat laundry, controlled scream.

In my deep wintry sleep at my parents’ this Christmas I dreamt of toads and snakes coming out of my mouth, like in the uncensored Grimms’ tales. What doesn’t have to be kind by decree, may still discover its own kindness. Coughing roses doesn’t bring you closer to your truths, while toads and snakes make good company when what you think or say suddenly gets the stamp of vulgar and unacceptable.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, or don’t let the bastards grind you down, as the Wikipedia translation reads. The Handmaid’s Tale was published over twenty years ago. My last angry letter to a newspaper was in response to an interview with Atwood on the occasion of the anniversary. The interview is hardly worth mentioning, the interviewer wasn’t even skillful in concealing that she hadn’t read the book. She got the number of Polish editions wrong, unaware of the first one in the 1980s. The epitome of idiocy was reached with the question “What is the idea behind your writing? As most (sic!) readers, I’m interested in the thoughts underpinning the prose”… more than in the text, she should have added, because I can’t be bothered to read. Because critical insight, no, mere skepticism is too much to ask. We want Bambi, an easy conviction that if not “good” then at least everyone is “OK.” That all the ranting is useless, that apocalyptic visions belong to cold-war sci-fi, that what a woman wrote in Canada over twenty years ago has no connection to where we are heading.

I didn’t reread The Handmaid’s Tale over Christmas. As always during my visits, I tried to catch up with Polish press. The Republic of Gilead was dripping from the pages of weeklies and women’s magazines. Neo-Nazi rightwingers temporarily removed from power but lurking in the shadows. All-powerful clergymen checking the wires on their brainwashing machines, getting government funding for their latest whims. Celebrity women talking drunken nonsense about how they wish they were housewives, locked away with their kids in a space between the kitchen and the church. Single women as the new plague and a theory to put their sexuality in a box labeled “disease.” Feminist politicians laughed out of court for their lack of “dress sense.” A sex scandal victim shamed for not being pregnant with the corrupt politician who abused her but with someone else (in the zany world of prim and proper logic she probably should have been “faithful”)… and the rape jokes, the rape jokes that crop up everywhere… The Republic of Gilead adds bricks to its walls. We can’t be bothered to read, so we don’t know we’re not even original in this madness. And of course, let’s bow our heads and be nice in an eternal Christmas, let’s cough roses and say things are changing for the better.

Toads and snakes are creatures of the margins that remind us that darkness exists. There’s no place for them in the well-lit world of Bambi and newspaper rationalizations of everything. Where all the people are wonderful and our culture is our home, our religion is our law, and our thinking is anathema to the happiness that lies in complicity. I don’t believe any country and any people can be sane if they simply rename their totalitarianism. Is being ruled by a one-sex hierarchy claiming power over souls really any better than living under the boot of a foreign working-men dictatorship? This Christmas we didn’t even have snow to cover it up.

I want toads and snakes, a space for the genuine, so that smiles are not merely painted, but the tension of muscles could be felt under the fingers when you touch someone’s face. Not crowds frogmarched into churches but believers and non-believers and outright heretics safe from clergymen’s home archives’ all-seeing, all-punishing eyes. I don’t want a morality that comes from religious tribunals and our corrupt traditions but from people’s lives. In fact, I don’t want to write about how my visit to the country brought me down. I want toads and snakes, uncensored stories, uncut minds.

Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
Don’l let the bastards in you get you.

Happy new year, everyone.

I blame it on Denise (on whom I essentially blame the existence of Scribblings). If it hadn’t been for this post, my forever overactive curiosity would not have been piqued, I would not have written to a musically-literate Canadian friend about the possible bonds between curling, Canadian serenity, and good music. Moreover, I would not be stuck wondering–as always–about my personal level of musical literacy and my taste.

Far from being a musical explorer, I tend to rely on friends’ recommendations and good poetry. I tend to think I’m easily bought by well-written lyrics, persuasive praise, and perhaps a good concert atmosphere. In high school I went to dozens of garage band gigs: I can’t remember any names, only that I had fun. I can’t play any instruments, I’m convinced that on some level I’m incurably deaf (maybe the garage bands are partly responsible?).

So in the case of the Weakerthans, I’m recruited via Denise’s enthusiasm, obscure hints at curling’s zen-like qualities, their indirectly experienced concert skills (browse!), great lyrics, and the cat named Virtute.

Samson’s not a dead poet, so I won’t paste the lyrics to “Plea from a Cat Named Virtute,” but go into an unlikely linking frenzy: the lyrics and the NPR interview.

I honestly don’t know how he does it, but he manages to be optimistic and disillusioned at the same time. Virtute’s a tenderly-written cat. And while my mother’s cat would gladly taste my tinny blood, I’m sure it wouldn’t cure my melancholia. (Maybe curling would help?)

What’s wrong with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland?

When I first read it, which was a while ago, I didn’t give it a second thought. It seemed to be revolving smoothly, a well-oiled utopian music box. The structure appeared sound. As sound as a recipe: throw in the elements, concoct solutions, and pretend that it’s clear-cut mathematics. And then get an idiot to look at your equation. It took some shaking to realize that a few screws were loose in the story. I was the idiot looking at the equation.

There’s a mechanics of writing utopias and a mechanics of reading them. If you forget about the other one, you are the story’s dupe. This is no true forgetfulness but a combination of fear and laziness at the sight of a mathematical problem. You stare at the lines of numbers on a sheet and find yourself nodding, as they painlessly fly through your brain.

I have two crude pictures in my mind when I say “mechanics”: the author with measuring instruments, slowly putting the parts together and the reader, screwdriver in hand, bending over the work to dismantle it. Reading utopian fiction without a screwdriver is, to me, exactly like staring at an equation. It’s pointless. In the latter case you can merely say you like the shapes of the digits, in the former, that you’re intrigued by the author’s use of adjectives.

Utopias are planted in the author’s here and now. Unlike autobiographies and memoirs, though, they do not repeat that with every “I.” The sage leading you through non-place is that very same author that in a memoir is spanked by his or her mother, however. They’re showing you their own world with a twist: as if someone had cleaned all the streets, repaired all the clocks, made all the people kind and wise. Made all the people… Made all the people…–

Here is where Gilman’s music box gets stuck.–

Made all the people… white. Hear those screws rattle? I didn’t when I first read the novel. I put it away without a second thought. It was only when a teacher addressed the question of Herland’s whiteness in class that it sank in. Why did I miss it?

While it could be true that I have a gaping hole in my head through which intelligence, vitamins, and all the other wonderful undefined things escape, I would prefer to believe that there is still hope for me. My mistake was not to bring my screwdriver to the text. Or: I stared at the equation and didn’t try to solve it myself. You have to break into the utopia, because no utopia is a dream. Wrapped in neologisms, inventions, exotic moral concepts is the writer’s here and now, and as a reader you should feel its breath on your neck.

Read in isolation, every utopia is a pretty mechanism. It announces itself as a neutral solution tailored to humanity’s needs. You can read “neutral” and “humanity” from where you stand, you can take your all-inclusive formulation, but the writers were never where you are, they didn’t use your dictionaries. You find the utopia in their back yard. In their trash can, if they couldn’t afford a garden. In the streets they crossed during their daily walks, in the people they saw as the scum of the earth, in their prayer books, in their laundry baskets.

As entertaining as it might be, utopian fiction is never written solely for one’s friends and about one’s friends. It’s always a vision encompassing the world. My failure as a reader lay in my laziness to verbalize and follow up on these points: (a) Gilman’s world was never the same as mine, never had the same norms, (b) Gilman must have realized that not all people in the world were the same as her closest friends, because — if that were indeed the case — there would be no need for her to write a utopia.

I didn’t ask myself about the exact shape of Gilman’s world and the “others” of that world. Yet there is more to utopia than the explicitly named. Men are just one kind of others. The rest was wiped out from the text, but you see them, if you go deeper into the world where Gilman wrote Herland. It was a world before anyone even mentioned “colorblindness.” Skin color organized life, space, and labor. However distraught at times, Gilman must have seen those hierarchies and divisions. And it’s not against them that she put down her prescription. Was it ignorance on her behalf or intended erasure?

I have no idea whether she read any literature by people of color, and if she did, where she put it within her intellectual space. Did she hate, did she turn a blind eye to whatever didn’t directly concern her? Whatever her true attitude, the fact is that the parthogenesis in Herland eliminates not only sex and all the boys but also black women, the black girls Gilman saw — not an imagined people from a distant country — the black women around her.

This is no simple elision and surely not an oversight. By comparison, Mickiewicz didn’t leave out Jews from his imagined pastoral homeland. The plot of Pan Tadeusz would collapse without Jankiel, but Herland stands proudly on its one leg. Until you rattle the music box, that is.

In the novella Péplum, Amélie Nothomb mocks utopian simplifications. She has a messenger from a glorious future elaborate on how it turned out so glorious for “mankind.” Evasive at first, the messenger confesses to the narrator/Nothomb how wealth and equality was won through blowing up the poor south. That is where the story gets going. There is no such moment of insight in Herland and though this could be put down to the different era (Nothomb wrote her book at the end of the twentieth century, Gilman in its first half), Gilman is stuck with the messenger in the simplicity of her solutions. The virgin wombs of her amazons swallow black girls.

Without ironic disclaimers, without footnotes, blackness is written out of existence. Gilman’s is not a whiteness that arrives with a thump, like in the ending of Poe’s Pym, but one that sits quietly. But only until it’s opened up. Then it becomes obvious why and how a “forgetful” utopian vision has come to create one of the many splits between feminisms. Is Herland a case of ladylike backstabbing?

Regardless of intentions and the culprit’s lucidity, there is a body in the room. Herland rattles on.

Guilt-ridden readers, shameful writers, printed pages on the couch: literature has always been a guilty pleasure. Think of boarding-school girls reading in secret, the little boys sneaking under their blankets with flashlights. Wasn’t fiction meant to blow minds?

The emergence of “therapeutic writing” has killed the pleasure. It has footnoted our experience of the text. We now have a wasteland of reading. It’s not at all like psychoanalysis with its stories of pen(is) envy, fathers, mothers, keyholes and vaginas, writing and sublimation. It’s much less funnier, much less story-bound. In fact, it’s counter-narrative. There is no story: in its place we now have a gaping whole of pointless explanation. All the articles about Coelho’s novels and poems in therapy have rendered writing ridiculous. As if it were a simple painkiller, a function of a tortured mind, a prozac pill filled with ink. This is how the text is explained away, its pleasure deflated.

But the guilt stays. Now reading and writing are not ways of turning away from violence, as romantic psychoanalysis would have us believe. Now they’ve become exercises assigned by the therapist. You read because you’ve experienced something painful, you write to put it into words, you like a piece of writing because it’s about a similar experience. These are simple, stupid lies. But don’t they make you feel guilty about reading?

Literature: a plate smashed by an angry citizen X on a Sunday morning. Literature: a winding road of frustration with no possibility of bliss.

I imagine Roland Barthes turning in his grave. Where’s the pleasure? Want to analyze this thought? After all, I’ve written about it.

Literature is always about experience of some kind. Yet the experience of the Word is by no means inferior to the experience of bare fact. People have turned to literature for advice, but also for beauty and for the flow of language. Why devalue that? A text is woven out of words. It’s not a tattooed body waiting for ointment to be put on its scars. The text is where the memory’s at, where the body’s at, where the fantasy’s at. It’s not the therapist’s office: you can’t close a deal with the text that by the time you reach the last letter you will have learned to manage your anger. You cannot get anything from it, you bring the weak flame of pleasure, it brings the dry sticks of words.

I needed this lengthy preface to introduce a piece of writing that runs the risk of being relegated to the therapy ghetto. While it does strike the reader on the level of intimate memories, it’s not literary wound-licking nor a frantic confession. It’s an essay — and the essay is, arguably, the most challenging genre — about waking up to our own and others’ sexuality and the silences around it. It talks about how these silences are learned and tries to unlearn them in the process of writing. Richard Jeffrey Newman’s “My Daughter’s Vagina” is a disciplined piece with a subtle associative logic and an intuition about words. A balancing act between the experience of the facts and the experience of the Word. Read it.

(You can also find it here along with readers’ comments.)

(Image found here)

I have wanted it for a long time now. Ever since I saw my former advisor’s fridge, covered in magnets from various places, but mostly from Amherst. I want my very own Emily Dickinson fridge magnet, even though I don’t own the fridge in my apartment. I want Emily to guard my cheese, jam, and peanut butter.

This is a note to Gretchen before she goes home for Thanksgiving, so that she knows she’s dealing with an obsession

Bad poetry announces it’s about combat, a major battle in vaguely affiliated with hip-hop where cannons shoot out enormous words like Love, Trust, Honesty, and Innocence. The poet – or, more precisely, Poet – in a failing voice, with a dry throat, staggering from line to line, keeping in mind the unheard tune, thinking about the unmade video of him or herself reciting this, or of the blinding light, or of the crowd they are facing, a crowd lazily sipping alcoholic beverages, a crowd of fighters who had fought over the scarcity of chairs in the room – the Poet then (the hero of this lengthy sentence) solemnly declares that he or she is a Fighter.

Bad poetry has its allure. Its willingness to fight against the great roaring Something is truly endearing. All those declarations of love and manifestoes of disappointment with the world want to be revelatory. And somehow they manage to scratch out their bit of tenderness from the listeners’ drunken hearts. They are like grandmothers’ coffee tables with one leg shorter, those clumsy poems written by Fighters for Innocence, World Peace, Her Attention. You listen and clap with sympathy, like you would slide an unused dictionary under the table’s shorter leg.

What is good poetry then? Performed poetry, is must be added, none of the stuff that comes in ink on a page. Something that is shouted, whispered, half-sung on stage, that wakes you from the beer-induced nap. The Dionysian recitation that stands on its feet bravely and doesn’t remind you of flea market furniture. It might falter on paper but here it lives for the six minutes of the competition entry.

At the poetry slam I’m referring to it seemed that the better poems came from followers of Billy Collins. It’s, of course, one of those sweeping generalizations, it’s a drawer I put those poet performers into, although it’s possible that none of them had ever read Collins. Their poems were in German and one of them even dedicated his to students of German literature present in the room, so their performances may well have been a homage to a tradition I am completely unaware of (thus for a second I hang my head in shame). But the thought behind their poetry reminded me of Collins or Pope in that they aimed at lightness in their meditations without capital letters: on how one may couch attraction in commercial slogans, on the fate of mother-related cusswords in German, on the fate of rhyme, on the delays of Deutsche Bahn, and on the advantages of being a man from Eastern Europe.

Was it poetry what happened on that stage? I do not mean to dismiss performed verse by asking. My doubt relates to the magic of the moment. The poet chanting the lines, the audience responding to his or her skill… and suddenly the listener is swept under the wave of connection, not knowing whether it is expressiveness he or she is applauding, or the words. I certainly cannot recall any line in particular, any intriguing conceit or simile from any of the poems I heard that night, hence my question. If it was poetry, then its simple subjects did very well without the protection of cannons and bullets of Love and Capital Letters. If it wasn’t, it still did what poems should do.

I think that poems today ought to stick to objects. They should wrap themselves around bread knives and light bulbs, and come out from those places where only dust rules. And dust, as is widely known, is no fighter, but what each fighter eventually bites.

PS: I don’t know who won that night, I had to catch the tram back home. But if anyone knows who triumphed at the poetry slam in Heidelberg’s DAI on October 20, please let me know.

PPS: There was wine but it was ridiculously expensive.

I want to thank Asia, Anja, and Mika for making this a wonderful evening.

But first of all, before buying dresses, typing as quietly as I can, not to wake Asia, who does not even know I slipped her into my scribbling. Sneaking in friends’ names is a bit like using charms or pretending to be spiritually related to Frank O’Hara. Or showing off that one has read Barthes’ “The Reality Effect” and knows what Flaubert was thinking with the piano or whatever instrument was the bit of unchewed reality. But, above all, showing off that I remember a poem by Denise Duhamel where she says it more neatly.

Once again I find myself object-struck. Not with German milk cartons (which are modestly European in their sizes) but with cheap clothes and cheap Ikea stuff. Our little trip to Ikea with Asia and Dan was slightly epic in its mission of conjuring home in dorm rooms and rented apartments. Among my various purchases there was one I am particularly proud of: the cheap bamboo blinds I had always liked but never had a good reason to get. I put them up today after getting a set of curtain hooks at a big, confusing hardware store, where the assistant couldn’t help me although I put a lot of effort into explaining my intentions towards the curtain rail in German.

To this stream of non sequiturs let me add that I catch myself looking at gray clothes. I even bought a gray coat for my walks in autumn frost.

Sometimes, despite the blissful effect of the early autumn sun, I let slip in conversation a bit of my bitterness. And it goes like a snake in the grass or lead in a lipstick (a haunting factoid Asia scared me with), making me sound like a tragic recluse. As if I were just a step away from announcing how I enjoy to sit by the dead.

Yet since my apartment is in the basement I can neither jump out the window nor send notes to children in a small basket. What I can do is keep Asia’s fashion advice in mind and consider white dresses next time I think of buying another gray sweater. They would certainly go well with Rhine wine and the refrigerator magnet Gretchen promised to get me from Amherst. A homemade Emily Dickinson lurking in suggestions and objects… Because I’m back to Dickinson just like I’m back to drinking coffee.

She never had Rhine wines, but they are there among the buzzing bees. I saw a bumblebee today, like a last speck of dying summer, just when I was thinking of Emily Dickinson as a good excuse for my wine obsession. I have not tried the local wines yet, I was just staring at a vineyard on the other side of the Neckar. Come slowly, Eden.