ABlog

Some things that have happened lately:

Last Saturday afternoon, a man rang my doorbell. He introduced himself by his first name, said he didn’t mean to bother me but he was homeless, trying to get some money, and wondered if I would pay him to sweep the leaves off my stoop and basement steps. I asked him how much he was charging. He said he would take whatever I thought was fair. Locking my door behind me, I went to round up a broom, dustpan, and garbage bag. I came back, handed over the implements, told him what I was paying (I’ll water your flowers, too! he offered; but they’d been watered already) and re-locked the door. I went back to cleaning the house, hearing the desolate rhythm of broom strokes.

He finished. I paid him. He shouldered his backpack. His arms and neck were glistening with sweat. It was terribly hot and humid, and I commented inanely that it was rough weather to be doing work like that. “You do what you gotta do to survive—anything that’s honest,” he said. He had done a thorough job.

I thought: so now we’re back in the Great Depression, when hungry men go from door to door asking housewives to let them do a few chores in exchange for a plate of beans.

I live in New York City. I interact with beggars every day. I’m not sure why this scene struck me as especially sad. Something about the terrible heat, and the emptiness of the sidewalk, and the way he swung his daypack onto his shoulder. The way the requisite cliché about “honest” work sprang to his lips in response to my own cliché.

The other day I saw a man with a begging bowl sitting on a slab of concrete near the entrance to my subway stop. He was sitting cross-legged, straight-backed, the bowl between his knees. I didn’t see anything in it. He didn’t have a sign. He was silent. He was of African descent.

The Man Who Barricades His Face, a local fixture all these years—he was around in the early 90’s, when I moved to the neighborhood, stationing himself in a single location, day after day—has faithfully haunted his current spot on Flatbush Avenue throughout this time of roaring heat. He’s always heavily dressed, bundled. I don’t see how he stays alive.

The December, 2004 Monthly Review has been lying on my desk, either because I read it and thought it was worth saving or because I haven’t gotten around to reading all of it as yet. The front cover reads: Empire of Barbarism: Review of the Month by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark: “Only the transcendence of capitalism, in the direction of socialism, offers the possibility to escape from the current state of barbarism that is paving the way to new global holocausts and a worsening ecological collapse.”

I spoke to the tree guy on the phone about the sad appearance of my backyard tree, a catalpa that was attacked last summer by a pest called the European Corn Borer. The tree guy said that older trees have been especially hard hit by the recent heat wave and drought. “You wish you could take the tree into the air conditioning.” Bowled over by the perversity of this statement, however figuratively intended, I didn’t bother to state the obvious: that if we had enough trees, we wouldn’t need the A/C.

I heard on an NPR broadcast on August 16th a report on a piece of history I’d been unaware of: on August 16, 1945, the day when the Japanese surrender was announced, San Francisco became the scene of a mammoth race riot—apparently a sort of lynching bee—engaged in by hundreds of military personnel. Several people were killed; women were raped. The report said almost nothing about the victims (for instance, I wondered to what extent the lynching parties targeted Japanese people specifically, or Asian-Americans in general). I remembered the atmosphere of my childhood in Eureka, a coastal California town considerably north of SF where I attended primary school from 1955 to 1960. The word “Jap” on the lips of little boys imitating the sounds of dive bombers embodied a world of hatred that was never spelled out--it didn't have to be. It’s a racism intimately specific to the West Coast, which, like the West’s virulent anti-Indian racism, goes largely unrecognized east of the Rocky Mountains.

Good War, huh?

Winston and I saw Bertolucci’s film The Conformist, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia about an Italian man from a wealthy background who decides to become a fascist in an effort to be “normal.’ My favorite moment is at the end, just after the fall of Mussolini, when this man’s pretty wife, whose vapid pursuit of petty bourgeois ideals has hitherto failed to dent her wistful charm, admits how frightened she initially was at the realization that her husband was implicated in the murder of an anti-fascist couple whom she’d known socially. And what does she think now? the husband urges. “Now I realize it was an important step in your career.”

As they say in the U.S. Army, the dude was “doing a job.”

What is barbarism? Barbarism is any system that relies on coercion, cruelty, torture, bullets, bombings (etc.) to hold groups of people in subjection to other groups. Isn’t ideology amazing? Thanks to its magic, most Americans believe that there is a completely benign explanation for the unrelenting barrage of coercion, cruelty, torture, bullets, bombings (etc.) which their country has unleashed upon a largely defenseless planet. We wouldn’t do it if others weren’t barbaric.

Winston and I are having almost the whole inside of the house painted for the first time since we moved to Maple Street 12 years ago. Everything’s topsy turvy, deep in plaster dust. Minute scrutiny of surfaces over which one’s eyes ordinarily skim only leads to the realization of more work to be done. This is unfortunate. I’ve come up with a joke on the subject. Q: Why is home improvement like an imperial quaqmire? A: Because for even the most gung ho, there comes a time when the only recourse is to declare victory and pull out.

I heard on NPR that the Atlanta City Council is discussing a measure to have panhandling banned in a core downtown business area. Proponents say the ban is required for tourism. There’s a big new aquarium that will be in trouble if visitors have to wade through all that misery. The legal debate, apparently, has to do with a question as to whether asking for money is an “act” or a form of “speech.” If it is taken to express a social condition or to articulate a political stance, it is “speech,” and protected. As “action,” it can be banned.

I’m reading Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote. It’s the first time I’ve read anything by her. I can’t believe I let her whole life go by without tasting her wares. In the first hundred pages, I had the odd thought: she’s dead and I’m reading her…I think she might be interested in my newer stuff, too. (It didn’t seem like her death ought to be a barrier to our enjoying that exchange.) In the early 90’s I taught a very smart Lang undergraduate, a gay guy who enrolled in a freshman writing course I taught called Desire and Its Consquences, who was nuts about Kathy Acker. Much as I liked him, I found this fandom irritating. It was so adulatory that it made me not want to read her. The truth is I usually resent it when students insist I read certain authors. Isn’t it enough that I lavish my attention on the students’ own work? That’s my professional obligation, and I gladly accept it, but shouldn’t I have control over what I read on my own time?

In any event, the Kathy Acker fan expressed his affection for me by giving me a used paperback copy of Don Quixote and it sat on the shelf unread for quite a few years. Then this summer I taught at Goddard with Douglas Martin, who’s doing his dissertation on Acker. That got me more into the idea. I picked up Don Quixote, hoping it might be “queer” and I could use it for a class I’m teaching in the spring called Reading the Queer Renaissance.

Don Quixote, while perverse, is somewhat heterosexual (insofar as the stated preoccupation of the heroine, Don Quixote, is with the difficulty/impossibility of love relationships with men), so it won’t do for the class. But it does seem to me to speak directly to our “eschatological” moment in precisely the ways that non-fiction is supposedly better at than current novels (see last week’s post for a discussion of this debate). It (a) talks—blathers—rants about a range of political topics; (b) names names (Nixon, Kissinger, Reagan); (c) takes a chainsaw to the classics of European culture, while (d) paying a sort of warped homage to them, yet (e) dramatizes the absurdity of a woman’s attempt to make herself at home inside the dominant narratives (which are in some sense the only narratives in existence). I love—feel very close to—Acker’s daring in going deep into the experience of physical abjection while simultaneously attacking the most abstruse philosophical concepts with a blunt-edged literalness that is hilarious and alarming. This is “postmodernism” (an aesthetic of fragmentation and recycling) from below, and as such, it’s seen to be a necessary strategy, not the simple matter of indulgent consumerism that we’ve been led to expect when the “postmodern” is invoked.

I have to say that I’ve found fairly lengthy stretches of Acker’s novel to be boring, but that’s okay with me. Just the chance to watch a frontal assault on historical and literary icons—a sort of cultural demolition derby—would be worth the price of admission; but that isn’t all. Don Quixote is emerging (or so I think—I’m only two-thirds of the way through the book) as a touching if nutty heroine, quite like her namesake. The novel talks about the end of the world, in connection with nuclear weapons and nuclear power; at a deeper level, though, the deconstructive formal tack heightens the reader’s sense of urgency more than any literal forecast of doom. “The sun was no more than a degree or so above the horizon, where it stays when it is the end of the world,” reads one descriptive passage. Such a sun seems to hover over the book’s structure and rhetoric. If no-world is a possibility, then all formal bets are off.