Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

The Poet Spiel: “Iris”

The Poet Spiel, also known as the visual artist Tom Taylor, is a regular reader of this blog and kindly shares this poem with us. His most recent book is the illustrated memoir Revealing Self in Pictures and Words.

Iris

iris longs
for the lost soul
who will one day
meander
into her home
to touch
(perhaps envy)
each precisely placed
object.

thank you
god above
for the patience
it’s taken
to assemble
and position
these precious things.

yet she feels clumsy.
sees herself
as a whale
in a thimble’s sea
of mire.

and then
that perfect stranger
comes.
but she is not here
for the gentle man
with diamonds
where his eyes
should be –
pale cream velvet
for fingertips
to count all her items –
then settle
her estate.

Graphic Novels and Comics Roundup: Witches, Gods, and Ducks

The Young Master (soon to turn 7) and I have become regulars at Forbes Library’s kids’ department on Saturday mornings, listening to the ukelele band rehearse in the community room while we work our way through their extensive comics and graphic novels collection. Big-name superhero comics are the junk food of literature, stimulating but nutritionally questionable, though they’re good for his reading practice. To me, it all looks like a bunch of over-muscled white guys punching each other.

The purple melodrama of “Batman” suits my camp aesthetic, but at read-aloud time, I try to point out the mental-health ableism and inaccuracy of Arkham Asylum as a revolving door of grotesque villains. Batman and the Joker seem like two sides of self-hating homosexuality–the flamboyant predator and the Übermensch of the police state. I can’t help seeing Gotham through the lens of the other book I’m currently reading, French journalist Frédéric Martel’s new exposé In the Closet of the Vatican, which details how the Catholic Church’s most powerful and homophobic cardinals were in bed with fascist dictatorships during the day and with undocumented rent boys during the night.

But fear not, more wholesome fare is in our rotation. We’re delighted with Molly Knox Ostertag’s middle-grade graphic novel The Witch Boy, a coming-of-age story about a youth whose magical skills transgress the gender roles of his community. All the girls in Aster’s extended family are supposed to become witches, and the boys, animal shapeshifters who defend them from evil spirits. However, Aster’s passion is for witchery. With the help of Charlie, a non-magical girl from the neighboring suburb, he uses his forbidden talent to fight a monster in a way that only he can. Charlie, who has two (off-page) dads, is uniquely sympathetic to Aster’s dilemma because she’s a female athlete struggling for equal opportunities at her school. Both children are people of color, and Aster’s extended family includes a variety of ethnicities. The artwork, in cozy earth tones, is clear and expressive, and not too scary for younger readers. I promised Shane I’d pick up the sequel, The Hidden Witch, at Flame Con this summer. Book three, The Midwinter Witch, will come out in November.

We discovered George O’Connor’s Greek myth cartoons in the anthology Fable Comics, edited by Chris Duffy. (The Fairy Tale Comics and Nursery Rhyme Comics anthologies in this series are fun too.) O’Connor’s Olympians graphic novel series is a playful, stylish retelling of the tales that my generation first read in the classic D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths. (Adam and I each still have our original copy of that bright orange hardcover.) Each Olympians book is about a different god or goddess. We began with O’Connor’s Hermes: Tales of the Trickster because the messenger god and his chaotically playful son Pan suit Shane’s personality 100%. This book is both a great adventure comic and a painless introduction to classic literature. For those wishing to dig deeper, there are humorous endnotes, discussion questions, and a bibliography.

When I was a kid, I had two anthologies that I re-read countless times: The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics and The Smithsonian Collection of Comic-Book Comics. (Good thing I still own them because they seem to be out of print.) I pored over the noir adventures of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, the proto-feminist antics of Little Lulu, and the folksy satire of Pogo. Now, The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics, edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly (Abrams ComicArts, 2009), brings that experience to a new generation with 300+ pages of toons from the 1940s-50s. It looks like the editors worked hard to weed out stereotypes that wouldn’t pass muster in modern times. Check it out for such wacky gems as “Captain Marvel in the Land of Surrealism” and Uncle Scrooge McDuck’s expedition to Tralla La, a remote civilization without money, where he hopes for relief from the pressures of being a gazillionaire. Of course, human (or duck) nature is not so easy to escape…

March Links Roundup: Sacred Arts, Imperfect Mediators

Just as today we debate “separating the art from the artist” when an influential creator’s bad behavior comes to light, the early Christians were split over the standards for mediating their own sacred inspiration. A purist breakaway group in North Africa in the fourth century contended that clergy had to be morally blameless, or else their ministry, prayers, and administration of the sacraments were not effective. Because church authorities (rather conveniently) rejected this position, we know it as the “Donatist heresy”.

The official line has pragmatism to commend it: it’s bad enough when “all your faves are problematic”, but if you have to start worrying that your baptism or absolution is invalid, your eternal fate might depend on the unknown misdeeds of your priest. That’s too much stress and uncertainty for the flock. On the other hand, I think we’re seeing nowadays that the clergy abuse crisis is retroactively undermining many Christians’ experiences of God in church. The truths they thought they knew, the love they felt in the worship and sacraments–was it all a lie? When someone or something formative for us is exposed as predatory, we may even doubt the goals, beliefs, and affections that once seemed synonymous with our “self”.

In this October 2018 article from Vox, Constance Grady asks some literary critics to weigh in on “What do we do when the art we love was created by a monster?” On social media, there’s a predictable cycle of declaring that some creator is “cancelled” because of anything from an unfortunate remark to serial predation, followed by a flurry of equally simplistic rants against political correctness. Separating art from artist was the premise of early 20th century New Criticism, which has stuck with us because it makes English-class papers easier to write without historical background. Postmodern “death of the author” theory, meanwhile, can empower readers to reclaim the text from its problematic origins. I see a similarity to the way that progressive Christians claim personal authority to talk back to oppressive Bible passages and carve out a place for marginalized people in the tradition. On the other hand, New Historicists warn that the reader is also embedded in a context that may include the same vices that plagued the creator, like racism and rape culture. We need to look at ourselves as critically as the text.

The critics differed, however, on the question of whether it’s ever reasonable for a critic to decide not to engage with art made by a predator. There are two basic arguments here. One of those arguments…says that engaging critically with a work of art is completely different from endorsing the morality of the artist… The other argument says that our time is limited, we cannot devote equal critical attention to every work of art out there, and it’s reasonable for critics to curate their choices a little…

The issue here is not just “Is this artist monstrous?” but “Is this work of art asking me as a reader to be complicit with the artist’s monstrosity?” It’s the same argument that has come up repeatedly with R. Kelly, who writes songs about sex and consent and age differences between lovers, and who has also been accused of sexually assaulting very young women and girls.

I agree with Grady’s conclusion that there’s no one-size-fits-all theory that’ll determine when to disengage from questionable art or artists. Like a dysfunctional family where love is also possible, or a church that can be both oppressive and liberating, staying or going is a very individual decision.

Over at Into Account, a new blog for lifting up the voices of abuse survivors in church, Stephanie Krehbiel has a message for anyone who’d override that discernment process: “Godly Men, Be Quiet”. Conservative church leaders lately have been making noise about #MeToo because they can’t ignore it, but their pronouncements aren’t followed by structural change or repentance. Survivor-led reform isn’t happening. Too bad:

The vast majority of church leaders have absolutely no business trying to be leaders in the movement to end sexual abuse. Part of how church leaders mess up–particularly in strongly patriarchal traditions invested in male headship (and let’s get real, for all the change that’s happened, that’s still most of Christianity)–is in assuming that they do.

Their business is not to lead; it is to follow. Not for a designated period of penance. Not as part of a healing ritual that they can subsequently advertise. Not as a finite disciplinary sentence.

FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES.

Patriarchal Christian masculinity is a powerful drug. It makes many church men believe that the world desperately needs their perspective on everything. It makes their followers believe that asking such men to step aside from leadership is somehow tantamount to cruelty. God is always calling these men to lead someone or something, even when what they know about that thing may be approximately two cents less than nothing. Particularly in the evangelical world, the spiritual quality that seems to most define men like this is their ability to imagine that they hear God in the voice of their own ambition…

I am not asking men in church leadership positions to do nothing about sexual abuse. I’m asking them to devote themselves to the task of following people who have less social power than they do.

Which, you know, sounds a lot like what Jesus told us to do…

In the New York Times last month, Elizabeth Dias’ investigative feature on gay Catholic priests, “It Is Not a Closet. It Is a Cage,” is a heartbreaking look at scores of mostly-anonymous clergy trying to live their vocation while crushed by hypocrisy, secrecy, and loneliness. Being sexually active, apparently, is less scandalous than being honest about one’s orientation while celibate. The atmosphere is even more stifling now because church leadership is erroneously scapegoating gay clergy for the sexual abuse crisis.

Fewer than about 10 priests in the United States have dared to come out publicly. But gay men probably make up at least 30 to 40 percent of the American Catholic clergy, according to dozens of estimates from gay priests themselves and researchers. Some priests say the number is closer to 75 percent…

…The church almost always controls a priest’s housing, health insurance and retirement pension. He could lose all three if his bishop finds his sexuality disqualifying, even if he is faithful to his vows of celibacy.

This topic is in the news again because of the new book In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, an exposé by French journalist Frédéric Martel. On the Nonviolent Atonement blog, gay Catholic theologian James Alison offers a sensitive and well-thought-out analysis of the problem and the way forward. Alison’s work helped me tremendously a decade ago when I was tormented by the gay/Christian question.

Alison describes the book, for which he was interviewed, as “the first attempt of which I am aware at a properly researched answer to the question: ‘How and why is it that the principal institutional obstacle to LGBT rights at the worldwide level appears itself to be massively staffed by gay men?'” This is not a book about the child abuse crisis per se, but rather, about how a culture of duplicity and blackmail is conducive to all sorts of abuses and cover-ups. Most people in the system are not even aware of the big picture:

We’re not talking about one single big lie, where all these men butch it up in public until they get back behind the Vatican walls ― at which point all can relax together in a theatrical green room, let down their hair and call each other Monica, Morgana or Mechthilde while swapping hot takes about their respective beaux. Rather we are talking about endless small lies, defensive manoeuvres, acts of hiding of self, adoptions of positions, fear of loss of livelihood, betrayals of friends, disguises of love, hints of blackmail, bizarre alliances, coded exchanges and resilient creations of habitable bubbles. We are also talking about the ways this system of mendacity reproduces itself through newcomers joining in playing the game. All involved are lying to and about themselves and each other; and yet, at the same time, they both know and don’t know what each other knows.

Furthermore, many are tortured by their own duplicity, not yet having achieved the perfection of polished cognitive dissonance at which some of those whom Martel interviews have obviously arrived. This matches what I have myself observed: the most venomous anti-clericalism and hatred of the Vatican comes from the mouths of its own clerical employees.

Meanwhile, the cognitive dissonance is amplified as sexual diversity has become mainstream in the outside world. Honest discussion of sexuality is the norm–except in the Church. Alison notes (a point that also emerged in the New York Times article) that unlike heterosexual men, many of the gay priests took their vows of celibacy without real understanding of their sexuality or options for healthy romantic partnership.

Church authority still teaches that a young gay person cannot appropriately be socialised into the humanisation of their emotional and sexual urges while dreaming of being married to someone they love. Indeed, far too many Catholic high schools, especially in the United States, are viciously legalistic in their attempts to apply these teachings to their employees and young charges. Further the authorities teach that such a young gay person does not have freedom of choice concerning whether to opt for marriage or a single life. They have a solemn obligation to singleness, with the threat of Hell a powerful enforcer….

Yes, the authorities really do deny there to be such a thing as an emotionally and psychologically balanced openly gay person who, therefore, might make a free choice between marriage or celibacy and so become a straightforward, honest candidate for seminary.

Now, that the official position is a lie is obvious to everyone, and scarcely applied anywhere. Even hard-line Bishops claim that they do not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, but instead on the basis of something they call “emotional and affective maturity.” But that effectively means that they do not believe their own teaching, for they are admitting people who their own official teaching claims not to exist. Such candidates are automatically implicated in the dishonesty of their superiors simply by being there. Furthermore, any gay candidate need only learn how to pretend not to be gay, for which many of them have had a whole adolescence-worth of training, and they will certainly find enough seminary officials who will induct them into playing “wink wink, nudge nudge,” having themselves become masters at the same game.

In short, long before any issue of a candidate’s sexual practice comes up, whether in the past, the present or the future, he finds that the one thing that is impossible is straightforward, first-person narrative honesty.

…Imitation is a much stronger force than instruction, and any gay candidate for seminary will see many others like himself already in the seminary, and will be interviewed by others like himself on the seminary staff. If in the midst of this he is presented with the instruction “You are required to be honest about being gay, and if you are gay and honest, your vocations counsellor is required to tell you that you cannot join,” he is not really being presented with a straightforward moral choice. In context, he is being presented with a hurdle, and his capacity to jump it will show whether or not he will be a suitable game player like all the others. Just in case the hurdle seems a little high, and if the vocations director likes the candidate, he may suggest that the kid is not really gay, just suffering from a transitory form of “same-sex attraction” or some other ecclesiastically convenient fiction. If the vocations director doesn’t like him, then, indeed, the fact that he is gay can be used to keep him out.

A dishonest system cannot demand honesty from its recruits, since in a dishonest system even the demand is dishonestly made and will be dishonestly received.

Alison concludes with a call for the Church to be honest with its children about God’s love for them regardless of orientation, and to bring its doctrines in line with the current evidence of science and psychology that queerness is a “regularly occurring, non-pathological minority variant in the human condition.”

I’m afraid I’m not optimistic. But if Christianity survives as anything worthwhile, it’ll be because of folks like Alison.

February Links Roundup: Birds Do It, Trees Do It

As a good queer aesthete, I don’t place much weight on “the natural” as a prescriptive concept, but I still love a quirky story about nonhuman creatures who defy our narrow social categories. This rare gynandromorph cardinal flips the bird at binary ideas of gender, as reported at the blog Towleroad: “Half-Male, Half-Female Cardinal Goes Viral, Has a Male Lover”. Since the bi-color bird’s female side is on the left, where the functioning ovary is located, the pair may be able to reproduce. Can’t you just imagine a children’s book about that future baby bird, along the lines of And Tango Makes Three?

Not only that, but the tree where they nest could be trans. At the online magazine Catapult, nature columnist Miranda Schmidt kicks off their new monthly series “Tree Talk” with the piece “How Trees Complicate Our Understanding of Gender”. In folklore and poetry, we’ve associated some species with masculinity (strong and tall) and others with femininity (slender and graceful), but in fact, over 90% of species worldwide “are alternately termed bisexual, or hermaphroditic, or ‘perfect,’ meaning they have both male and female parts on a single flower.” Reflecting on their own multi-gendered identity, Schmidt suggests a writing exercise to reveal hidden potentialities:

Describe your gender identity without using images that are stereotypically associated with masculine or feminine things. Try it. See what you find. When I do this exercise, I always think of the crabapple tree in the yard of the house I grew up in. It was split down the middle, all the way to the ground. Its two halves grew away from each other, almost as if they were two separate trees. We never knew how it had split. The crack down the middle of its trunk was old, possibly as old as the tree itself. Perhaps it was made by the weight of its branches pulling in opposite directions. Perhaps it originated from some outside source: an axe, or lightning. I would look at that tree and I would imagine its roots, those parts I couldn’t see, grown all together, tangled up and merging in a way its above-ground parts couldn’t. Underneath, I thought, the tree would be wholly undivided.

Alongside the project of unearthing the naturalness of queerness–an understandable objective, aimed at creating political safety and healing queer shame–there’s always been its opposite, the defiant un-naturalness that Susan Sontag limns in the 58 Wildean aphorisms comprising her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp”. What she finds in camp is a kind of playful generosity of spirit, a humanistic snobbery, if you will:

54. The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste. (Genet talks about this in Our Lady of the Flowers.) The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

55. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation – not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it’s not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn’t propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn’t sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

56. Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of “character.” . . . Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as “a camp,” they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.

Food 4 Thot podcast co-host Joe Osmundson a/k/a “Joe the Science Ho” explored the dark side of gay aesthetics in his 2013 Gawker article “There’s a Nerd in the Locker Room: Sex, Beauty and Self-Love”. With wit and pathos, Osmundson tracks the changes in his self-image during a month-long membership at David Barton Gym, the hot spot for Chelsea’s rich and beautiful boys.

At DBG I spend a lot of time contemplating superficiality and the NYC gays. Many assume gay men are shallow because we essentially want to be fucking ourselves. Men naturally have higher libidos, right? Attraction is more physical to us? All this seems too simplistic to me. After a few visits to DBG, I started to think that queer people often know we’re different very young. A lot of us grow up absolutely hating the gay bit of ourselves, praying it away, hoping it would die or recede so we can be normal and happy like everyone else. When you spend a large portion of your life loathing some central component of yourself, you might want to find something that you do love. Your body is something you can make better and faster and stronger. Perhaps spaces like DBG exist because there is a road map and a space for remaking your body. I wonder what a space for doing the work to love ourselves for our minds and spirits, for our ugly bits, our complicated and fucked up internal bits, would look like…

…[I]t would be a mistake to talk about gay male beauty and sex without talking about American culture at large. In America we often define men by their ability to consume emotionless sex. Gay culture exists in conversation with American culture and so if men define themselves by their ability to consume women without attachment, why should gay men be held to a different standard?

But here is the ugly truth: we are all here at DBG to get laid, even if most of us aren’t doing it upstairs in the steam room. I do feel more comfortable in my body than before I was working out. Having facile sex would probably make me feel good, and good about myself, in a lot of complicated ways that may be difficult to undo and that might make certain types of intimacy difficult.

Last week I blogged about how Marie Kondo’s de-cluttering philosophy helps me strengthen my intuition as a writer. Kondo has been subjected to a ridiculous amount of negative “hot takes”, which at times slide into racist disrespect for her personal style and cultural traditions. At HuffPost, Margaret Dilloway explains “What White, Western Audiences Don’t Understand About Marie Kondo’s ‘Tidying Up'”. Born to an American father and Japanese mother, Dilloway recognizes her late mother’s Shinto beliefs in many of the practices that Kondo’s critics have belittled:

Kami are Shinto spirits present everywhere — in humans, in nature, even in inanimate objects. At an early age, I understood this to mean that all creations were miracles of a sort. I could consider a spatula used to cook my eggs with the wonder and mindful appreciation you’d afford a sculpture; someone had to invent it, many human hands and earthly resources helped get it to me, and now I use it every day. According to Shinto animism, some inanimate objects could gain a soul after 100 years of service ―a concept know as tsukumogami ― so it felt natural to acknowledge them, to express my gratitude for them.

“Tell the kami-sama what you’re grateful for,” my mother would say to me, referring to God or the supreme kami, “and what you want.”

I had my mother in mind when I watched Marie Kondo’s Netflix show “Tidying Up” for the first time. In each episode, Kondo, a professional organizing consultant, instructs her clients to identify the objects in their homes that “spark joy” and devise a plan to honor those objects by cleaning and storing them properly.

She also encourages people to part ways with the objects that fail to spark joy, but not before thanking them for their service. The way Kondo pledges gratitude for the crowded houses she visits, and thanks the clothes and books and lamps that serve so much purpose for the families seeking to declutter their homes, struck me as a powerfully Shinto way of conducting life.

Full disclosure, when my Copco white plastic spatula broke after a dozen years of service, I duct-taped the handle back on and stored it in my kitchen drawer. I mean, that’s one of the longest relationships I’ve had. It’s not going in the recycling bin. Marie understands.

Facing Literary Impermanence With Marie Kondo

Tidying-up guru Marie Kondo is trending this winter since her new show started on Netflix. Thrift shops are reportedly experiencing a surge in donations of books, clothes, and household items that no longer “spark joy” for their owners. Meanwhile, social media debates are raging about Kondo’s out-of-context quote about owning only 30 books, while feminist Twitter agrees that it’s also time to de-accession men who don’t help with the housework. (Episode 1 husband, we’re looking at you.)

They say that if you want to get your house clean, start writing a novel. Well, it’s true. But I must protest that my KonMari fever is no mere procrastination tactic. Editing my life builds the same skills I need for mastering the clutter in my imagination. Am I listening to my intuition about what excites me–regardless of what I think I should own, or write, or do? Can I recognize that my relationship with something has ended, but still honor it? If I dare to prioritize my own joy, what obligations or substitute pleasures must I eliminate, while living in a way that’s sustainable and responsible toward others?

KonMari isn’t minimalism. Book Twitter’s outrage notwithstanding, she’s not prescriptive about what you should own. It’s a compassionate but decisive self-assessment of who you are now and what you want to carry forward into the future.

So, for me, “Tidying Up” came along at the perfect time for major life changes. If I’m no longer a woman, a Christian, or a size 12, what’s left is…still quite a lot of stuff, but a lot less than before.

Last month I mailed seven large boxes of literary journals to a poet who was collecting donations for prisoners in California, and gave two more crates of theology books to the used bookstore down the street in exchange for $20 and a coffee-table book about Lego sculptures for Shane. Letting go of books is unsettling for writers, because we don’t want to contemplate the undeniable fact that someone else is looking at our book, deciding it doesn’t spark joy, and chucking it into a donation box. Book Twitter’s dirty little secret: We don’t care that Marie is purging our shelves, we fear that she’s purging someone else’s shelves of us.

But here’s the thing: There is no co-dependent caretaking contract for books, just as that contract is never enforceable in personal relationships. “Go to other people’s funerals so they’ll come to yours” is a good joke but bad advice. Keeping Essays in Postfoundationalist Theology or the 2005 print run of Iowa Review, out of obligation or pity for the obscure authors therein, does not affect whether anyone reads Two Natures. (And really, that’s not why you should read it.) There’s no heavenly point system, as in “The Good Place” sitcom, where angels tally up my literary acts of compassion to reward me with posthumous fame.

My ongoing KonMari home-edit makes me face my unconscious belief in this co-dependent bargain, and repeatedly recognize its empty promises. This frees me (somewhat) to ignore the inner critic in my writing brain, who incessantly tells me that my novel-in-progress is too niche, intellectual, and sad. Binch, that’s my brand.

I can’t stress enough how gratitude is an essential piece of KonMari. My internal younger selves feel shamed by my rejection of things that were central to their identity, from radical orthodoxy to floral-print dresses. Before I can let those possessions go, I have to thank them, and by extension the psychological parts of me who owned them, and give all of us permission to change. Then I have to understand how the process triggers memories of being raised by a narcissist (and an unworn-clothes-hoarder!) who didn’t allow me to have any preferences different from hers. It would have been unthinkable, in my mother’s household, to refuse something just because I didn’t like it. I either had to endure wearing/eating/doing it, or decide if I cared enough to make a documented federal case that it was Objectively Bad.

So I fired her.

Tidying up, I’ve discovered, is always about so much more than possessions. Eminem knows how I feel:

Poems from Paul Fericano’s “Things That Go Trump in the Night”

Good News…or FAKE GOSPELS?! No classic text is safe from the Trump Effect in Paul Fericano’s satirical verse collection Things That Go Trump in the Night (Poems-for-All/YU News Service, 2019). Famous lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry Kissinger, Humphrey Bogart, Bing Crosby, and many others are reworked into zingers that reference the Cheeto-in-Chief and his felonious hangers-on. Individually, the poems and squibs are good for a chuckle or a mood-lifter when the news gets you down. Taken as a whole, the numbing repetition of “Trump” starts to feel like a warning: dictators want all culture to be flattened into their own image. Most substantial, and chilling, is the book’s closing poem, which weaves together fragments of actual Trump speeches with invented absurdities, shining a relentless light on the combination of naïveté and paranoia that makes him so dangerous.

Paul has kindly permitted me to reprint an excerpt below. For more work by this prolific author, check out his bio at Poets & Writers and his online journal Poetry Hotel.

THE NRA REMINDS YOU TO DEFEND THE SECOND AMENDMENT

1. Treat every loaded trump as if it were empty.

2. Always point your trump at anyone
you plan to intimidate.

3. Keep your trump cocked and ready
for any crisis you create.

4. Sleep with your trump at all times.

5. Trumps don’t kill. People do.

****

SAINT PAUL STUMPS FOR TRUMP
BEFORE BEING STONED BY THE CORINTHIANS

1 What if he could not speak
in salty tongues of fast food beef,
and diet drinks or pork chops on a stick?
And what of his illegal rapists
for whom there is no dreaming?

2 If he could not praise himself,
be nothing more than a chimney sweep
or the smoking gun at the bottom
of his father’s safe deposit box.

3 Veracity is an empty cell in his brain,
for all he says is true in his name.
He sets his watch to howdy doody time
where dossiers and liars
are watergate under the bridge.

4 For he is never too proud or boastful
to consort with leakers and colluders.
And if he cavorts with concubines
who relieve themselves on hotel beds,
his complicity is the grey wool of old goats.

5 What if he could reinvent his words
and reshape all reality?
What if he could do these things
while his people are encouraged
to gaze elsewhere?
Look at the grouse! Look at the grouse!

6 And what if he could wear bows
and push buttons that would decimate nations?
Would he not still be revered?
Would he not still be adored?
The pellet with the poison’s in the flagon
with the dragon, and the vessel with the pestle
has the brew that is true.

7 For it is written in the law of Supposes,
You shall not muzzle the mouth of the sham
that spills forth its corn,
lest you become all that and a bag of chips,
or as a toilet that runs all night.

8 And if he is obstructive, inflated,
paranoid and suspicious,
These faults are surely exalted in your eyes.

9 Verily, I say unto you
that all who consume with him
shall ensure a sizeable profit justly returned.
For I am he, as you are he, as you are me
and we are all together.

10 Yea, though his fingers be like long ties,
You know not what he is up to.

11 And denial shall be his greatest pleasure.
For the hoax perpetrated in bad faith
is more than payment due.

12 Be not disturbed by troubled times.
They are as common as the normal spin
of outrageous rent hikes.
For soon the shore of certainty will vanish
and strange odors will fill your nostrils.

13 When he was a president,
he thought not as a president
and reasoned not as presidents do.
But when he grew a tail
and fumbled and groped many girly bits,
and they let him do it,
he embraced his presidential ways.

14 Now he wears the blackface of his birthright.
And faith in desperation kneels
where once it stood defiant in his name:
Mueller, Mueller
why has thou forsaken him?

15 Later, he shall envision a darker stain
and wear the mask
of batmen, beetroots and bucketheads.

16 He spends no time swinging a club,
spray painting his skin or sleeping in a tree.
FAKE GOSPELS!

17 Yea, verily, yea.
Chaos, confusion and catastrophe
shall mark each tweet with impunity.
But of these three,
the greatest of these is Muhammad Ali.

January Links Roundup: No White Knights

Welcome to 2019! Will this be the year I finish the Endless Sequel? Somewhere between crushing my son at Pokémon and looking at medieval dildos on Twitter, I am determined to GET ‘ER DONE.

Lest you think social media is a waste of time, though, I have discovered some spiritual wisdom therein. Jessica Dore, a teacher of “Tarot for mental health”, shares daily card draws with profound insights about working with our shadow parts and difficult feelings. On the Death card, for instance, she muses: “Because death is not deterred by ego attachments, it’s in some ways deeply trustworthy. We can cope w/ loss by meaning-making or finding silver linings, but it will likely still hurt. Death requires that we be OK w/ hurting. & With going where we least want to go.”

It takes a lot to give me a new perspective on trauma. By this point I’ve read, written, and held space for more tales of psychological wounding than perhaps I should. But I learned something new from Dore’s latest blog post: we make ourselves susceptible to predators by seeking someone to rescue us from the hard work of personal growth. Trauma disrupts our intuition; that gut feeling of rightness about a new person or situation could just be re-enactment of familiar wounded patterns. Our unhappy ego, like the Knight of Swords, is always in a hurry for the quick fix, so we ignore the red flags and hidden conditions on love.

It is this aspect of the human psyche that gave birth to the mythic knight in shining armor; a rescue fantasy so embedded in the collective consciousness that none among us are immune to projecting it onto any person, place or thing. It is a part in all of us that is ever lurking, waiting for that fast ride out of what a meaningful and fulfilling life requires: work, comfort, pain, change, repeat...

The ego may rush to say “yes!” to that thing, eager to relinquish the steadfast and true to be relieved at last from the burden of saving one’s own life. It is the part that so badly wants the predator to be a permanent waiver from doing the work, that it is willing to believe just about anything.

Defending the Soul from predators and traps (Seven of Wands) is a dirty job, but those who want a life of meaning must do it. It takes a certain tenacity to commit to the long game instead of doing the quick back alley deal where too much is given for too little.

Fruits torn from a tree before the branch is ready to release them never taste as sweet. Fruits hurried are downright sour. Do not give up on your slow route to success so quickly. If you have been doing the long, honest work, if you have felt the promise of things taking shape (Ace of Pentacles), try to trust it for one more day. And then another, and another.

I’ve been thinking about making The Devil the centerpiece card of my Wheel of the Year spread for 2019. I feel that I’ve been in self-created bondage to my fear of the unknown. The Devil speaks to me of the vitality of the Id, a force of untamed creativity, like Orc in William Blake’s mythology.

Gay spirituality blogger Stephen Bradford Long is a former evangelical whose journey to accept his sexuality brought about a deep crisis and ongoing reformation of his faith. He has also written about the healing power of Tarot and its compatibility with Christianity. In this post from November, “I Have Always Been an Abomination: On Homosexuality, Satan, and the Church,” he speaks frankly about the trauma of being brought up to believe that his basic nature was broken, and why that now leads him to identify with the rebel in the Biblical drama of good and evil:

No matter how kind, generous, or welcoming my Christian friends were, that never erased the horrific consequences of their theology.

In other words, my deep sexual desires and impulses were in themselves profane, blasphemous, and contrary to God. I have always been an abomination, no matter how hard I worked to be otherwise. Is it any wonder, then, that Satan is the more appealing figure to me, now? The father of all abominations and outsiders, the father of those who dare to challenge, question, and rebel?

In popular culture children of Satan are often portrayed as having a deep, self-destroying hatred of holy objects. Crucifixes, churches, bibles and priests all send the infernal into a triggered conniption. That’s true, but not true for the reasons popular mythology put forth.

The damned are eviscerated by religious symbolism because it was under that symbolism that we were raped, abused, tortured into another orientation, scalded by good intentions. Those of us outside the traditional kingdom of God are tortured by the presence of holy icons and talismans not because we are so very evil, but because the religious systems of abuse are. I still love church, Christianity, and the Bible, but too many of the Church’s symbols and practices send me into a tailspin. They just hurt too much.

I therefore claim blasphemy and Satan, not as the icon for all that is evil, but as an unapologetic embrace of being outsider. It’s the acknowledgement that it isn’t I who was wrong, but the Church.

Over at Brain Pickings, a literary newsletter/blog by Maria Popova that can happily occupy hours of your time, she reviews philosopher Adam Phillips’ essay collection Unforbidden Pleasures, which challenges us to stop the addictive cycle of criticizing ourselves and others. In her 2016 post “Against Self-Criticism: Adam Phillips on How Our Internal Critics Enslave Us, the Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations”, she lays out his contention that we are in a kind of trauma-bonded relationship with our inner critic (or superego). We’re fused with it, to the extent that we can hardly know ourselves; the judgment comes before the perception. But if we met this carping critic, as a person outside ourselves, we’d actually think his monomania was ridiculous and tragic. “The tyranny of the superego, Phillips argues, lies in its tendency to reduce the complexity of our conscience to a single, limiting interpretation, and to convincingly sell us on that interpretation as an accurate and complete representation of reality.” By cultivating skepticism about any totalizing dogma, we can develop a more spacious, accurate, and compassionate mind.

At The Guardian Online, check out this witty and hard-hitting conversation between two queer feminist icons, bestselling author Roxane Gay and Australian stand-up comedian Hannah Gadsby. Among other topics, they cover fat stigma and the hard work of holding space for traumatic stories, both their own and those of their fans.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the 12th-century mystic, artist, and playwright Hildegard of Bingen, but did you know she painted a map of the universe based on the vulva? Dr. Eleanor Janega at the fascinating blog Going Medieval will tell you all about it. See, you can learn a lot from medieval dildo Twitter.

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2018

2018 was an eventful year for me as a creative artist. Behold, my debut short story collection from Sunshot Press/New Millennium Writings:

I successfully avoided finishing my second novel by writing a poetry chapbook instead. American Eclipse, currently making the rounds of contests, was composed during this year’s “30 Poems in November” fundraiser for the Center for New Americans, Northampton’s immigrant services and advocacy organization. You can still donate here. American Eclipse was inspired by the confluence of last year’s solar eclipse, the NecronomiCon conference, and the dystopian forces of climate change and resurgent right-wing hate groups. It also includes amusing and inappropriate poems about gender transition, amusement parks, Pokémon, and New Jersey Turnpike bathrooms. Read a sample poem, “Of Mice and Women”, at Poetry Hotel.

The Young Master started first grade, where he is learning to read, memorize poems, distinguish fiction from nonfiction, and study the great cosmic story from the Big Bang to human evolution. Pokémon battles help him channel his aggression at the tyranny of his parents.

A surprise Xmas present from Mommy: a fleece Pikachu bathrobe!

Adam and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary with a trip to NYC, the place where it all began.

I attended one day of my 25th college reunion at Harvard, which was quite enough to remind me how this dazzling, heartless place can make the most privileged people feel poor and insecure. But I bought the souvenir baseball cap because I’ve decided to be proud that I survived the experience, instead of dwelling on everything that was going nuclear in my life at that time.

I read a lot more comics and graphic novels this year, by myself and with Shane. Hat tip to Forbes Library for maintaining an excellent collection for children and young adults. Some new releases in this genre that I’m looking forward to reading in 2019 include Jarrett K. Krosoczka’s memoir Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction (Graphix/Scholastic) and We’re Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology edited by Tara Avery and Jeanne Thornton (Stacked Deck Press).

Favorite Posts of 2018:

Problems of Lineage and Magic

…[I] feel long-suppressed grief that our family story is so full of gaps, or worse. I’ve been running away from the pain by declaring that these people are nothing to me. But really, is there anything more Jewish than a legacy of lacunae? I am part of a long tradition of diaspora, fragmentation, and self-reinvention.

The Binding of Isaac and the Sacrifice of the False Child

…What if the son that Abraham has to kill is not his real son? What if he’s being asked to kill his agenda for Isaac–the mindset in which Abraham values his child not because of who Isaac is, but because of the role he’s expected to play in securing Abraham’s worldly importance? Narcissistic parenting is the idol that Abraham lays on the altar.

Daily Bible Study Is My Problematic Fave

…Perhaps it’s trite to snark at the suppressed homoeroticism of prayers like “invade me with your burning fire”, but heteronormative evangelicalism’s refusal to admit the pleasures of abjection leaves no other way for this imagery to be read except as rapey. It’s as though, like chaste ladies in an old-fashioned romance novel, they can only allow themselves to bottom for Jehovah if it’s cast as a painful punishment against their will.

Could We Be God’s Alternate Personalities?

…I wonder if the entire way that Western philosophy privileges monism is bound up with our besetting sins of imperialism, exclusionary religion, and totalitarian ideology. All these failures of empathy share the presumption that singularity is saner, purer, and holier than diversity.

“Le Génie du Mal” pin via Kate Sheridan Art

Emo Lucifer wishes you a hot 2019!

Erasure and Swag: My Life in Pins

I could depict the timeline of my passions in swag. Pins, keychains, and pendants that proclaimed my shifting special interests, my fervent niche identities, to a world that usually ignored or mocked but occasionally extended the brief warmth of tribal recognition.

And just recently I asked myself, as I picked out more queer nerd tank tops on Redbubble: What have I been driving at, in my lifelong quest for visibility–or more often, my battle against a crushing feeling of erasure? What deeper wounds are reopened when, for example, someone refuses to make waves in a conservative environment by using my nonbinary pronouns–or when I make the same pragmatic choice myself? Why, as an adolescent, did I feel compelled to add to my social awkwardness by literally wearing my heart on my sleeve?

I had a thing for tragically murderous dudes.

When I was 13, for example, I read British mystery novelist Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, in which her series detective re-examines the historical evidence for King Richard III’s alleged murder of his young nephews who stood in his path to the throne. The conclusion: He wuz framed, yer Honor. No topic is too obscure to inspire a fan club somewhere in the world, so (impressively in the pre-Internet 1980s) I connected with the Richard III Society in England and bought this lovely pin (figure left) that I wore every day in 9th grade, to the ridicule of my classmates. Yes, my main political activity during the era of AIDS and apartheid divestment was lobbying to reopen a 500-year-old cold case.

In college, I saw the musical “The Phantom of the Opera” and, like many a lonely young woman-adjacent person who liked black capes, fell in love with the title character. This pin (figure right) was my lucky amulet through the ill-advised adventure of law school. Perhaps all that Erik needed was a good real estate lawyer to help him claim title to his underground lair via adverse possession.

At right: St. Dymphna, patron saint of mental illness.

My late 20s-early 30s was my peak Christian phase, so I bought keychains like this one saying “YIELD your heart to Jesus” and wore a little diamond cross pendant on the commuter train in hopes that cute guys would strike up a conversation with me about the Trinity. (Reader, they did not. But if you begin an M/M romance that way, I will buy it.)

I don’t have any relevant swag from my “trauma theory explains everything” period, 2008-2015. You mean there’s no market for “emotional incest survivor” keychains? What a surprise!

This just screams “Etsy shop”, no?

I rediscovered H.P. Lovecraft around the time that I was becoming disillusioned with Christianity’s abuse apologism. The Elder Gods “religion” is great for mystically-minded cynics because it is simultaneously a genuine apophatic theology and a light-hearted parody of church ritual. We can get our Monty Python kicks from dressing up in tentacled headgear, but we’re also bracing ourselves to confront the cold reality of a non-human-centered cosmos–a bittersweet passage out of father-idealizing religion, into spiritual adulthood.

Central pendant and pin courtesy of NecronomiCon Providence 2017.

Which brings us into the wonderful world of queer signifying apparel. In case the boy-band haircut, Eddie Bauer fleece vest, and dozen slightly different blue pin-striped button-down shirts don’t give me away, I have begun collecting pronoun pins, necklaces, and tank tops with Pokemon characters in the colors of the trans flag.

So what does all this mean? Apart from the observation, so routine and widespread as to be cliché (but like many clichés, also true), that Americans are groomed to create brand identities for ourselves through consumption?

A thread that runs throughout my life is the need to struggle against misinterpretation. But it is interwoven with the contradictory thread of ceaselessly seeking an identity that resists definition. Show me what’s the opposite of who I am, and I will try to include it. And then I’ll complain that I’m still being mistaken for another, easier-to-understand category–as though it wasn’t my own choice to become something that has no name.

Dr. Freud, up there, would say this is about my engulfment trauma from being raised by a narcissist. Wherever I am, I have to carry some pocket talisman of resistance, an assertion (even if only secretly to myself) that a piece of me remains outside the agenda of the people around me. A crucifix at a radical feminist conference, a Cthulhu necklace in church.

When I was That Kind of Christian, I wore swag to evangelize. I wasn’t concerned with saving people from Hell; I agreed with C.S. Lewis in The Last Battle that all good and loving deeds were counted as worship of the true God, whatever you called your religion. I was desperate to rescue people from shame, perfectionism, and codependence in this life. Because a certain rather idiosyncratic brand of Christianity had done that for me, at that point in time, I hoped it would do the same for everyone. In my non-Christian family and my secular big-city workplaces, and in progressive churches where we glossed over theology instead of wrestling with its historical difficulties, I felt a similar burden of erasure as a conservative Christian in America that I now feel as a genuine sexual minority. Which is why I asked the question that led to this post: is this my psychological pattern, regardless of content?

If so, I am optimistic that the pattern is shifting. At NecronomiCon and Flame Con (the LGBTQ comics convention), I wore my rainbow octopus gear to signal membership in the tribe, to ask for welcome, not to undermine it. And it really worked. I felt energized, relaxed, and appreciated as the current version of my true self–however long a shelf-life it may have.

This nonbinary Russian Blue is one of many cute color-coded animals available from @GayBreakfast on Storenvy. 

December Links Roundup: We’ve Always Been Here

Happy Advent and Hanukkah to my readers! This year, to honor my ancestors and the victims of anti-Semitic violence in Pittsburgh (and elsewhere), I’ve begun lighting Hanukkah candles again. As I did at his age, the Young Master loves the ritual of selecting the colors for each night, and seeing the little flames cheer up the early darkness of these winter evenings. Pro tip, this grapefruit peeler is great for extracting the wax stubs from those tiny candle holder cups.

I’ve been thinking a lot about visibility of minority identities, and the compromises involved in translating one’s self into an alien discourse. “They” is a grammatically awkward pronoun precisely because life outside the gender binary is supposed to be unthinkable. Then, too, there is the question of why recognition matters. Who is our audience? Are we signaling solidarity to others in the tribe, or are we seeking public validation of an identity that we ourselves are insecure about?

Speaking of visibility in unlikely places, if you grew up in a progressive household in the 1970s, you probably remember Dr. Bronner’s liquid Castile soap. I spent many hours soaking in the bathtub, puzzling over the philosophical tracts that covered every inch of the bottle label in tiny print. These quirky paeans to the “All-One-God-Faith” included quotes from Thomas Paine, the lyrics of “To Dream the Impossible Dream”, and the timeless advice: “Don’t drink soap! Dilute! Dilute! OK!” At the social justice blog The Establishment, Casey Kleczek gives a thumbnail history of the still family-owned brand in “A Soap Label to Save the World from Future Hitlers”:

Bronner’s Moral ABCs first developed in the Heilbronner home in the Jewish quarter of Laupheim, Germany where for 70 years Emanuel and his family tirelessly fine-tuned the first-ever liquid castile soap, and held the prevailing belief that “You don’t mix politics and soap.”

This stalwart rejection of incorporating Bronner’s then Zionist ideology into the family business by his strict orthodox father and uncles inspired him to emigrate to America in 1929, where he would be free to create a company of his own ideation, and mix politics and soap as he wanted.

In America, he dropped the “Heil” from his last name and became a successful consultant for American cosmetic companies. He fell in love, got married and had three children. But his life came screeching to a halt with a postcard in his father’s largely censored scrawl:  “You were right.”

For years he had been trying to convince his parents to follow him to the United States amidst Hitler’s rise to power. He managed to securely help his sisters out of Germany but was unable to convince his parents, who held the prevailing belief of the time that “Hitler would be a thing of the past.”

Within the next year, the Heilbronner soap company was nationalized by the Nazis, and the family was deported and killed in Auschwitz and Theriesenstadt. Not long after, Bronner’s wife passed away.

After the death of his parents and wife, a switch flipped. His very aliveness was a burden, a reminder of the fact that his parents died while he was living the American dream. He carried the weight of their deaths like a talisman with a gnawing question, “What are you going to do about it?”

The guilt and sorrow frothed into a frenetic madness. Rather than slip into mourning, he was seized by a singular charge: teach the world the Moral ABCs. All the sources of unwelcome philosophy from his youth were channeled into this hodgepodge Talmud. Mohammed, Rabbi Hillel, Jesus, Buddha, and even Thomas Paine were some of its more notable players. And while the particulars may have been unintelligible, the guiding principle was a call to rise above religious and ethnic differences and unite on “spaceship earth.”

The article goes on to give an even-handed account of the impact of Bronner’s zeal on his family, whom he neglected in his quest to spread his message. After much financial and medical turmoil, things turned around for the Bronners during the natural-products craze of the 1960s, and the rest is history.

At the Huffington Post, writer and theater performer Travis Alabanza argues that white supremacy plays a role in erasing gender diversity, in the article “Non-Binary People Aren’t a New Phenomenon”. Since the mainstream media has taken notice of trans issues only recently, there’s the implication that these identities are a new trend, and therefore shallow and insubstantial. But gender-bending identities have been named and given space in a variety of cultures, from South Asian hijra to the bakla of the Philippines. “I do not think it is a coincidence that things are often seen as ‘just beginning to exist’ when they are placed within frames of the West and/or whiteness. Did we mean to say ‘non-binary was new’, or did we just mean to say ‘non-binary is now something I see more white, western, middle class people talking about’.” Alabanza worries that this new framing will lead to a narrowing of possibilities, so that nonbinary becomes a cloned look: “skinny, able-bodied, white, and masculine of centre.”

A welcome variety of literary personalities, including Northampton’s own Andrea Lawlor and Jordy Rosenberg, are on view in Peter Haldeman’s NY Times profle “The Coming of Age of Transgender Literature”. These authors, along with other rising stars like Akwaeke Emezi and Kai Cheng Thom, discuss how genderqueer literature lends itself to a “magpie” approach to genre, with narratives that incorporate fables, poetic devices, faux-scholarly footnotes, and other postmodern techniques.

While literary innovation may be flourishing in the Pioneer Valley, traditional test-driven education is doing its best to stamp it out, writes Ryan Boyd in his LA Review of Books article “Students Want to Write Well; We Don’t Let Them” , reviewing John Warner’s new book Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). Students’ lack of competence or passion for writing can be blamed on “how we have tried to industrialize and centralize education since the Reagan era while simultaneously withdrawing the resources that allow teachers to create environments where students can thrive.” Teaching to the test–the formulaic composition assignments on topics no one cares about–stifles students’ curiosity and burdens them with economic anxiety from a young age. Students are unmotivated, not because they’re lazy and coddled, but because they intuitively understand that these assignments are merely grooming them to become corporate cogs and neoliberal consumers.

The five-paragraph essay, bête noire of writing professors, encapsulates this: a straitjacket format never seen in the wild, where actual writers have to be flexible, creative, and intuitive based on genre and audience, the five-paragraph model is wholly artificial. And since the only person who reads it is an adult who holds a grade over the writer’s head, this example of “education folklore” (Warner’s term) socializes students to obsess about grades (which research shows are detrimental to learning and merely increase anxiety) and view The Teacher as the only arbiter of quality, who judges everything according to a strict rubric. All that matters is the final score, which can be standardized, rather than the kind of rich, in-depth, guiding feedback that only experienced teachers can provide their students. In overcrowded, over-tested classrooms, students come to see every assignment as just another flaming hoop to jump through.

No wonder I did poorly on the AP English exams!

Just for fun, check out humorist Daniel Ortberg’s “Potential Names For My Short-Lived Queer Suiting Company That Will Fold Under Mysterious Circumstances Eight Months After Launching”:

If there’s one thing I know to be true in this world, it’s that anytime I click on an article that says something like “Five AWESOME Companies Making Androgynous/Non-Binary/Genderfluid/Queer-Bodied Suits for the Butch/Masc-of-Center/TenderBlenderBabyBoi In Your Life,” if said article is more than half a year old, fully half of those links will be dead and the companies in question will be decisively, yet mysteriously, out of existence. (With the exception of Bindle and Keep, it would seem; may their doors never close.) I don’t quite know why this is! My guess is that it’s a relatively small client base, suits are generally kind of expensive, especially if you want a custom fit, and the butch/stud/transmasculine/et al market covers a lot of different body types. But that doesn’t stop us from launching another round every couple of years, because hope and ignorance of markets spring eternal (see The Toast).

Create your own company name from your birth month and day! Mine is “Wolf & Ranger”. We make cowboi hats…