Cummington Fair Blue Ribbon!

They’re strawberries. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Best in show! My poem “Vita Sackville-West Wins the Golden Wedding Award at the Cummington Fair” won first prize in the 2024 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award for LGBTQ Poetry. You can read this poem and my finalist poem “Why the Sunrise Is Trans” in their online journal ArLiJo, Issue #201.

The Cummington Fair is a real event held the weekend before Labor Day in the Western Massachusetts town of Cummington, also home to the Cummington Creamery, I kid you not. It’s a great old-fashioned country fair with an amateur art exhibit, antique cars, midway rides, a petting zoo, and great Polish food. One year they had an acrobat who took breathtaking dives from a tall metal pole, telling the story of his sobriety journey between feats. Lest I be accused of smuttifying this family event, the Japanese dumpling vendors at the Nom Nom Hut this year had to wear shirts saying “Put our balls in your mouth”.

I wrote this poem after the 2023 fair, where they did hold a Golden Wedding Award contest for couples (presumably straight) married 50+ years. The country singer covering “Gentle on My Mind” was also real, though I can’t recall her band’s name. Around this time, my mom’s lesbian movie club was on a Bloomsbury Group kick. We saw the 2018 film “Vita and Virginia” followed by the 1990 miniseries “Portrait of a Marriage”, which was based on Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson’s book of the same name. For those who don’t know, chaotic bisexual novelist Vita was married to British diplomat and moderately discreet homosexual Harold Nicolson. Apparently they were deeply devoted to each other and found a way to express their sexual complexity while maintaining a strong partnership. I was yearning to make some space for this kind of marriage to be recognized as praiseworthy, or at least possible.

Vita Sackville-West Wins the Golden Wedding Award at the Cummington Fair

An optimistic alto covers Gentle on My Mind

in the bandshell by the chicken barn.
Her calves chunk-chunk in floral-stitched boots.
Is the idea of a woman less demanding than her pussy?
Twinned oxen yoked to concrete

blocks pull through dust
to cheers. Desire anything

because it’s in front of you,
soap, mortgages, and dyed quartz flowers
sold from white wooden stalls

at the bottom of the hill. Ideas don’t tire,
rub themselves to rash, or bleed like roast beef dinner
that’s promised as a prize over the loudspeaker

to the best couple fifty-plus years wed.
Man and woman is understood
by the burlap-faced leaders of the two-step, gently
resting their chins on their wives’ tucked curls.

Slow, slow. The alto swings
long molasses hair back from her cheeky face
singing that not-like-other-girls song.

The oxen win a ribbon. The boy who hits
the bell with the hammer wins a ticket to do it again.
His mother sticks her face into a cream puff
the way Vita would have

tongued Virginia Woolf’s cunt. To be pleasant
memory, to be covered in art,
don’t cry at leavings. Blame

is a trash barrel of single-use knives.
Ideas are insatiable. Vita and Harold died

one anniversary short of golden,
she with her tea cakes, he with his Persian boys.

And Virginia, when she weighed down her pockets
with tickets for the final carousel,

what vows held her up so long?

“Not So Sorry”: Christian Journalist Probes the Limits of Forgiveness

Do I forgive my abusive mother? No, but I don’t spend any significant time being angry at her either. A dozen years into conscious recovery, my focus in on noticing and extracting what my old psychoanalyst called my mother’s “introjects” and my trauma therapist called “false beliefs”. They feel like psychic shrapnel. They’re leftover bits of programming from things she said and did to me, or from my own survival adaptations to those assaults. They interfere with my ability to accept love, feel safe in my home, and be satisfied that my creative work isn’t futile. The point is that de-worming myself from these mental parasites has very little to do with her as an individual, anymore.

When she dies, I’ll feel sad, but I feel sad anyway. And all of this can coexist with my telling affectionate jokes about her malapropisms (she insisted that “six of one, half a dozen of the other” should be “half a dozen of one or the other”) and remembering her well-stocked bookshelves of Golden Age mysteries and Native American activist memoirs.

I don’t need “revenge” because (through her own choices, and despite many chances to do better) she’s alone and miserable in a nursing home that I will never visit. Nobody really denies what happened to me or how bad it was.

Vindication by events is key here. I don’t need to ruminate on how she tried to sabotage my adoption home study, because I have a kid now and she’s never going to meet him. But I do entertain vengeful impulses toward the social workers who gaslit me into thinking I had a “personality disorder” instead of PTSD, because I have to look at their agency’s shingle on the building at the end of my street. I can’t go to my favorite movie theater without flashbacks of taking compulsory psychological tests in the building next door. There’s no mechanism, except perhaps hexing, to hold them accountable for causing my nervous breakdown.

I slowly dis-identified with Christianity for a lot of reasons I’ve chronicled here. One of them was that it hadn’t prepared me to recognize when I was being abused. Another was Christian communities’ discomfort with family stories that don’t end in reconciliation or forgiveness.

Liberal Catholic journalist Kaya Oakes‘ brand-new book, Not So Sorry: Abusers, False Apologies, and the Limits of Forgiveness (Broadleaf Books, 2024) critiques popular Christian beliefs about the duty to forgive. It’s a really important addition to the conversation because it doesn’t stop at recommendations for better pastoral care. Oakes actually spends most of the book discussing institutional failures such as clergy sexual abuse, colonialism, rape, and abortion access. American Christianity and popular psychology have blended to promote a shallow, individualistic theology of forgiveness that unfairly puts the onus on survivors to be peacemakers in a broken institution. When abusive clergy and community leaders are quietly shuffled around from one institution to another, leaving survivors with a lifetime of damage, “forcing someone to forgive can become a form of spiritual abuse.” (pg.xix)

“[T]he problem with the idea that Jesus was asking people to forgive those who abuse them is that it is not necessarily a correct interpretation of Scripture. Jesus asked us to forgive those who know not what they do. But what do we do about the people who knew exactly what they were doing?” (pg.xvii)

Oakes sees our cultural appetite for revenge-fantasy entertainment as the flip side of sentimental religious redemption stories. Neither track teaches us much about accountability and communal healing, which is what Oakes thinks Jesus really intended. In America, “we fetishize forgiveness to the point of insisting on it–yet in many concrete ways, we are among the least forgiving societies in the world,” Oakes observes (pg.19), pointing to our high incarceration rate, torn social safety net, deadly border-control policies, and insufficient abortion access for rape and incest victims. Preachers love anecdotes about murderers who become Christians and accept God’s forgiveness–but their victims aren’t around to give their opinion. (The book’s epigraph is a quote from Bonhoeffer about cheap grace.) Mass incarceration and the death penalty meanwhile do nothing to heal the community’s wounds.

“Restorative justice and prison abolition movements go even further, encouraging criminals to speak to the families of victims, work on atonement, and bring the community into the process rather than over-relying on often-biased courts. In this scenario, for a person to be forgiven by their community or the families of victims, it’s more than a one-on-one conversation between a person and God.” (pg.28)

Moreover, Oakes emphasizes that this peacemaking process doesn’t require victims to offer a forgiveness that is unhealthy for them or unearned by the perpetrators. The work of death penalty opponent Sister Helen Prejean, for example, is not about mandatory absolution, but about bringing killers back into “reconciliation with themselves” as complete human beings who can face what they did and repent. When Jesus spoke about forgiveness, Oakes notes, he was using a Hebrew word that described people who’d already atoned for their sins and now sought to be brought back into right relationship with God. Notably, Judas tried to do this by giving back the 30 pieces of silver, and was refused. Forgiveness is not infinite nor automatically granted. One can forgive and still refuse further relationship. And one can withhold forgiveness without being vengeful.

Subsequent chapters delve into institutional failures that enabled sexual abuse by leaders in the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and L’Arche, the intentional community where Christians live alongside people with intellectual disabilities. In all these situations, demands for reconciliation put too much responsibility on victims to excuse egregious failures of pastoral care. Oakes is a journalist rather than a theologian but she has certainly begun an important conversation that should be taken up by Christians in other disciplines.

August Links Roundup: Plastic World

Hello August! Like a closeted Republican politician, I have acquired a comprehensive knowledge of airport men’s rooms this summer, having traveled to the Bay Area for a family vacation. The San Francisco airport was actually a highlight of the trip. I was impressed not only with the food selections but the thorough commitment to recycling, composting, and phasing out single-use plastics. Water is sold in aluminum cans, and when you have to spill out your liquids to go through security, there’s a bottle refill station right at the other end so you don’t have to buy another one.

This NPR feature by Michael Copley, “Creating a throw-away culture: How companies ingrained plastics in modern life”, delves into the failed promise of consumer recycling and how plastics manufacturers always knew it wouldn’t solve the pollution problem. Even now, manufacturers are fighting regulations that would require sustainable packaging.

Synthetic plastic was patented in the early 1900s. It was known as Bakelite, and it sparked a boom in durable and affordable consumer goods. Soon, companies started selling different kinds of plastic. At first, most of it was marketed as sturdy and reusable. One television ad from 1955 — about a made-up homemaker named Jane in a made-up place called Plasticstown, USA — touts how plastic containers are ideal for families because they won’t break if kids accidentally drop them.

But soon, the messaging started to change. In 1956, the industry learned about a new way to boost sales — and profits. At the plastics industry’s annual conference in New York, Lloyd Stouffer, the editor of an influential trade magazine, urged executives to stop emphasizing plastics’ durability. Stouffer told the companies to focus instead on making a lot of inexpensive, expendable material. Their future, he said, was in the trash can.

Companies got the message. They realized they could sell more plastic if people threw more of it away…

…“It was a really difficult sell to the American public in the post-war period, to inculcate people into a throwaway living,” she says. “That is not what people were used to.”

A solution companies came up with was emphasizing that plastic was a low-cost, abundant material.

A 1960 marketing study for Scott Cup said the containers were “almost indestructible,” but that the manufacturer could still convince people to discard them after a few uses. To counter any “pangs of conscience” consumers might feel about throwing them away, the researchers suggested a “direct attack”: Tell people the cups are cheap, they said, and that “there are more where these came from.”

Barbie begs to differ: “Life in plastic, it’s fantastic”. Now she’s available in more inclusive styles. CBS News reports that “Mattel introduces its first blind Barbie, new Barbie with Down syndrome”.

The company worked closely with the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) to ensure the blind Barbie doll accurately depicted individuals with blindness or low vision, while making sure that the doll was still accessible…

To that end, the doll’s fashions are tactile with a satiny pink blouse and a textured ruffle skirt with a brightly colored hook and loop fasteners for closure on the back of the doll’s top. The new doll even has accessible packaging with “Barbie” in Braille.

Accessories include a white-and-red cane with an identifiable marshmallow tip and includes stylish and functional sunglasses. The doll also reflects the sometimes-distinct eye gaze of a blind individual: facing slightly up and out.

In partnership with the National Down Syndrome Society, Mattel created a white Barbie with common physical characteristics of this genetic condition: “a rounder [face] shape, smaller ears, and a flat nasal bridge with her body also featuring a shorter frame with a longer torso and a single line on her palm”. This year they’ve added a Black version with “braided hair texture, one of the key features requested by the Black Down syndrome community.” She’s really charming!

Do you speak whale? Project CETI, a novel interdisciplinary collaboration among engineers, linguists, biologists, and machine learning experts, is discovering complex language patterns in the click vocalizations of sperm whales. Harvard Magazine reports:

In the past, sperm whale codas have been analyzed principally in terms of the number of clicks and the intervals between them. A representative discovery, for example, deemed in shorthand by the researchers as the discovery of a “whale phonetic alphabet,” as reported last September by a team at MIT, detailed detection of “fine-grained modulation of inter-click intervals relative to preceding codas,” as well as the addition of an extra click to existing codas, that changed depending on the context in which the whales were vocalizing. The researchers also documented independent changes in rhythm and tempo. When combined, these elements suggested complexity of the click communication that is an order of magnitude greater than previously suspected.

The paper generated tremendous excitement among the scientists because simultaneous work by Shafi Goldwasser had suggested that the more complex a system of animal communication, the more likely that a machine learning algorithm might succeed in translating the clicks into something humans could understand.

Then, in December, Project CETI’s linguist, Gašper Beguš, Ph.D. ’18, took the understanding of click complexity further, revealing the presence of acoustic properties in codas that are analogous to the vowels and diphthongs in human speech. Beguš, whose studies under professor of linguistics Kevin Ryan focused on animal communication, argued that the number of clicks and their timing correspond to human vowel duration and pitch, and that properties such as click timbre and harmonics correspond to the resonant frequencies formed by the human vocal tract in speech and song. These previously unobserved qualities and characteristics of click sounds, in the context of associated patterns of whale behaviors, Beguš wrote, appear not to be artifacts, but rather are under the whales’ control.

Read the whole piece to find out about the creative technologies they’re developing to monitor the communications and try to translate them.

In January, the humor magazine Cracked interviewed magician Penn Jillette about comedy, politics, and leaving Libertarianism behind. The Right’s turn toward conspiracy thinking, suggests Jillette, is a product of our craving for quick fixes and constant entertainment:

So much of trying to live our lives to do it right is tedious. And truth is very tedious…

Einstein comes up with this idea E = mc² — a profound, powerful, mind-blowing idea — and he has to work forever to make people understand that and to share that reality. Woodward and Bernstein are pretty sure the president of the United States committed crimes, and they work their asses off to try to prove that. But if you’re deep in the MAGA movement, you can just type that Biden went to China and set up a secret nuclear arsenal, and you get this incredible amount of praise with seven-minutes work.

…I don’t think we’ve ever experienced a time in human history where there wasn’t a shared reality, even if that reality was false. I’d rather everyone believed in Christianity than what it’s turned into.

We should always be striving to agree on what reality is. A bunch of people have decided that it’s easier and more fun to not worry about that part of it.

…What we do in live magic, it’s constantly dealing with that subject. Recreational epistemology is what stage magic is — we play around with that. And if you want to get heavy about it, you can say that every magic show is an exploration of how we determine what’s true.

When you do a live magic show, (lying) does not enter into it. A live magic show in Vegas cannot include deepfakes. It cannot include false news. Everybody in our theater must agree on the reality — it’s the reality they’ve been agreeing on since they were in the crib. Gravity, time, objects, persistence — it’s all we deal with.

In the March/April 2024 issue of Mother Jones, Madison Pauly reports how “independent” sexual abuse investigation firms prioritize damage control for the organizations that hire them, instead of justice for survivors. It’s painful but essential reading. The feature focuses on Tania Culver Humphrey, the daughter of a prominent missionary who co-founded Mercy Corps, a Christian humanitarian aid organization. She claimed that Mercy Corps knew and did nothing as he molested and violently abused her for many years. Then, when she sued them as an adult, bringing up additional evidence that he was part of a child-trafficking ring with others in the Mercy Corps network, the group commissioned a so-called independent probe as part of their settlement with her.

Mercy Corps hired Freeh Group International Solutions, a risk management firm run by former FBI Director Louis Freeh, to conduct a probe. Over the summer of 2020, the firm’s investigators grilled Humphrey, sometimes in full-day interviews, for about 100 hours, leaving her distraught and suicidal. Yet when the report was released the following year, it concentrated on the mishandling of her claims in the 1990s—something the ­organization had already acknowledged and apologized for. If the hired sleuths had uncovered any new information about the circumstances under which the abuse took place, Humphrey says she was never informed of it.

In September 2022, Humphrey, then a 51-year-old art teacher and mother of two, sued Mercy Corps. The lawsuit calls the probe a “whitewash” and alleges the ­organization used the process to gather information about potential threats to itself—of which she was one. Mercy Corps had “manipulated and deceived [her] to gain exclusive access to her explosive information,” and had used “systematic intimidation and bullying” and “the guise of an independent investigation” to control reputational damage, her lawsuit says.

Humphrey’s experience of betrayal is not an anomaly, according to the article:

Freeh helped define this line of work in 2011, when a task force of Pennsylvania State University trustees had hired him as a “special investigative counsel” amid the explosive revelations that former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky had sexually abused young children for more than a decade. Many of the victims were participants in a charity for troubled youth that Sandusky had personally founded. Sandusky was charged with dozens of felonies, and two administrators were indicted for failing to report him.

Freeh’s mandate was to determine who at Penn State had been aware of Sandusky’s abuse, and when. The probe took eight months, included 430 interviews, and cost more than $8 million. When it was done, the task force waived attorney-­client privilege, allowing Freeh’s team to publish its “essential findings.” Their report concluded that legendary head football coach Joe Paterno, university President Graham Spanier, and the two indicted administrators had concealed Sandusky’s child abuse, acting with “total disregard” for the victims amid a “culture of reverence for the football program.”

The report was widely seen as vindicating the board’s decision to fire Paterno. But it also generated endless debate about whether Freeh’s investigation was truly independent. In 2013, Spanier sued the Freeh Group and its founder for defamation, arguing the report had served the trustees’ interest by making him a scapegoat. Freeh had “developed a lucrative business model—predicated on Freeh’s name recognition and FBI credentials—that depends on conducting so-called ‘independent investigations’ and producing ‘investigative reports’ custom tailored with preconceived storylines to meet his clients’ objectives,” Spanier’s lawsuit claimed. The suit was ultimately dismissed, but the controversy continued…

Even as the field grows, there are few rules governing how independent investigators carry out their work…And there are virtually no resources available to help survivors understand what they’re signing up for when they agree to participate in a probe, making it hard for them to spot potential pitfalls—especially if they don’t have an attorney.

…Timothy Lytton, a Georgia State University law professor who has authored books on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the dynamics of self-policing industries, is mindful of the ways that companies can exert influence on a seemingly independent investigation, for reasons other than getting to the facts. Not only do institutions set the scope of the probes, they control what evidence they disclose to investigators. Lacking any subpoena power, he adds, investigators are “dependent on the information that they’re provided, which they don’t have any particular legal or economic muscle to ferret out.”

As Freud’s incest survivor patients could tell you, the person who pays the bills determines the narrative. I’m not sure what the answer is, but industry self-policing never works.

July Links Roundup: Surviving Without Heroes

Summertime, and the living is…not easy.

Many book-lovers are heartbroken over new revelations that the recently deceased fiction writer Alice Munro, a Nobel Prize for Literature winner, covered up her husband’s sexual abuse of her daughter. Andrea Robin Skinner’s July 7 essay in the Toronto Star describes how her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, began molesting her when she was nine. When her PTSD started taking over her life in her 20s, she attempted to tell Munro. It didn’t go well:

One day, during that period, while I was visiting my mother, she told me about a short story she had just read. In the piece, a girl dies by suicide after her stepfather sexually abuses her. “Why didn’t she tell her mother?” she asked me. A month later, inspired by her reaction to the story, I wrote her a letter finally telling her what had happened to me.

As it turned out, in spite of her sympathy for a fictional character, my mother had no similar feelings for me. She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity.

She called my sister Sheila, told her she was leaving Fremlin, and flew to her condo in Comox, B.C. I visited her there and was overwhelmed by her sense of injury to herself. She believed my father had made us keep the secret in order to humiliate her. She then told me about other children Fremlin had “friendships” with, emphasizing her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed.

Did she realize she was speaking to a victim, and that I was her child? If she did, I couldn’t feel it. When I tried to tell her how her husband’s abuse had hurt me, she was incredulous. “But you were such a happy child,” she said.

…My mother went back to Fremlin, and stayed with him until he died in 2013. She said that she had been “told too late,” she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.

“Alice Munro Was Hiding in Plain Sight,” Michelle Dean writes in The Cut, observing that Munro’s fiction about repressed Canadian families takes on a new resonance now. “All the stories, every last one, are about secrets the people in them keep because they are constrained by personality or, more often, by their ‘quiet’ social order from expressing any kind of inner life.”

This story feels like a gut punch to a lot of readers because Munro wrote so insightfully about the psychology of families other than her own, and because she wasn’t a typical literary bad boy. (For instance, the sexual assault accusations against Neil Gaiman don’t seem inconsistent with the porny misogyny of some of his comic-book scripts.) If she could have a secret like this, anyone could be next. I remember my disillusionment on learning about similar behavior by Marion Zimmer Bradley, whose novel The Mists of Avalon was revered in my childhood home for its positive model of feminist and pagan spirituality.

But human beings can be willfully ignorant a lot of the time–just look at “What Were We Thinking? The Top Ten Most Dangerous Ads” from Collectors Weekly, reprinted on Pocket Worthy. Did we really believe that women should douche with Lysol, or that children should eat Vitamin Donuts? I’m guessing that the “Vi-Rex Violet Rays” self-shock machine was a tactfully disguised sex toy, like the Relax-a-Cizor weight loss belt that Peggy Olson tested on “Mad Men”. You’ll love the way it makes you feel!

Ijeoma Oluo, author of the NY Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race, has a bracing but optimistic post on her Substack called “How We Get Through This”—this being the rise of fascism entailed by end-stage capitalism. The government’s not going to save us. Oluo says, “start supporting real, revolutionary work happening outside of our systems…Build friendships and connections based on community care.” Meditate, get therapy, make art, and give yourself permission to stop doom-scrolling. Hobbies are a survival skill, not frivolity.

You’re going to need something you enjoy doing, something that is accessible and affordable, that can really take up your time and attention when you need it, and is completely unrelated to organizing work. You need that thing that you can do while your internal systems regulate and recover from the near constant state of panic and attack that these external systems want to keep us in. This is not escapism, this is crucial to our survival. We absolutely cannot survive in constant states of fight or flight. You need to be deliberate about cultivating activities that you can always access that will allow you brief moments of rest.

Charlie J. Stephens’ exquisite novel A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest, released this spring by Torrey House Press, is about that kind of survival. A nonbinary tween in 1980s rural Oregon, abused and neglected at home, takes refuge in their mystical connection with nature. Orion Magazine interviewed them in this piece, “Beyond Binaries in Ecological Writing”. Stephens says:

I particularly love the work that queer ecology does in questioning our human assumptions about what is “natural” and what is “normal.” I wrote a recent personal essay specifically on the binary, and I appreciate how queer ecologists/thinkers have made links between that mindset and climate collapse. I’ve been particularly interested in the past few years in studying and practicing animism, which overlaps with queer ecologies in terms of envisioning a world where human and non-human beings are given equal consideration and where, ideally, one day, our mutual interdependence is made clear to the masses…

…I have long found it uncomfortable that the earth is so often depicted as female, and as a mother. I’m not familiar enough with the ways other cultures hold this, but in the specific, largely white middle-class, American environmental movement of the 1970s it was a strange (but unfortunately, completely predictable) decision to feminize the earth as a strategy for its salvation in a country that is thoroughly misogynist and systematically punishes women. If the leadership of that movement had been in the hands of other cultures here, I believe we would be in a much different place now.

One of my animist teachers, Daniel Foor, talks about the importance of not continuing to unconsciously project our societal ideas about gender onto the planet, and in having historically done so, we can see where this has led us. He also talks about the problem of seeing Earth as a woman who needs to be protected and saved, and how that opens the door to patriarchal chivalrousness—and savior mentalities—instead of just seeing our mutual interconnectedness.

For more fresh perspectives on healing, I recently discovered the site Mad in America: Science, Psychiatry and Social Justice. Leah Warren’s June 19 article “Madness, Utopia and Revolt: An Interview With Sasha Warren” talks with the founder of the project Of Unsound Mind, which examines the links between the mental health industry and the carceral state. Warren recounts excavating the archives of old asylums for inmate-produced publications that reveal not only suffering but self-advocacy, humor, and even appreciation for their treatments. From these surprising findings, Warren concluded that both psychiatry and anti-psychiatry movements trade in oversimplified binaries and false promises of cure-alls for the evils of the past. “In a sense, every founding gesture of psychiatry is also an anti-psychiatric gesture. Psychiatry requires anti-psychiatry so that it doesn’t get stilted and stuck and frozen in place. It needs this negative gesture to break it up and allow it to flow more freely into other spaces.”

Against Literary Heresy-Hunting

Progressives rightly finger-point at Christian universities’ doctrinal litmus tests that end teachers’ careers for any hint of solidarity with LGBTQ folks or nonbelievers. But it feels as though purity culture is having a moment in left-leaning academic and literary circles too. Just because “wokeness” and “cancel culture” have become anti-diversity buzzwords, it doesn’t mean that we are always fighting the right symbolic battles.

Becky Tuch’s Lit Mag News Substack this week asked, “What should writers make of guidelines that promise to monitor writer behavior?” She quotes a guidelines page, not named in her article but revealed by commenters to be Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, which asserts the right to un-publish authors’ work retroactively if the author later acts contrary to the journal’s values. (Note that Grist Journal, a publication of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, is no relation to Grist.org, another literary publication that runs contests about envisioning climate justice. Someone’s trademark lawyer didn’t do the work.)

The guidelines paragraph in question reads:

Grist is committed to diversity, inclusivity, cultural interchange, and respect for all individuals. In the case of all submitted and/or accepted work, if an author behaves or speaks publicly—or is revealed or accused to have behaved or spoken, even in private—in ways that contradict these expressed values of the journal, then we reserve the right to disqualify an author’s submission, release the author from any contract, and/or remove their work from our archives.

Grist Journal seems to be trying to head off a Guernica situation: A few months ago, that esteemed journal published what I thought was a nuanced essay by Joanna Chen about her work as an Israeli-Palestinian peace activist and the difficulties of that work after October 7. Guernica soon disavowed the essay and pulled it from their website, because some of their staff were outraged by any sympathetic portrayal of Israelis in light of the genocidal bombing of Gaza. Then, Jina Moore, the editor-in-chief who had accepted the piece, quit Guernica in protest of their failure to stand by their editorial decisions. You can read about the whole mess on Moore’s website. Needless to say, right-wing and centrist publications like Washington Monthly and The Atlantic have made hay about this battle of sensitivities.

How does any of this materially help the Palestinians, or whatever group Grist is worried about at the moment? I don’t think Biden or Netanyahu is monitoring staff turnover at university literary journals as a factor in geopolitics.

I’m not at all dismissing the importance of art to move societies away from human rights abuses. Poems by Mosab Abu Toha and the late Refaat Alareer have gone viral as cries from a suffering people. Such works are inspiring protests around the world.

What seems counterproductive is scrutinizing the creedal purity of writers or the institutions who publish them. I’m glad that our business, Winning Writers, has so far not been pressured to put out a “statement” about current events. We’re not big players like Harvard or the Poetry Foundation. We only have two full-time employees and 10 freelancers, but I can’t imagine presuming to speak for everyone’s political views. Still less should the editor-in-chief, governing board, president, or any other top brass believe they represent the hundreds of people who teach or write for them. An institution’s values should be expressed through their actions, not empty manifestos.

The Lit Mag News post and the 100+ comments thoroughly break down what’s problematic about Grist Journal’s pre-emptive cancellation policy for writers. In lawyer terms, it’s vague and overbroad, and doesn’t provide writers with notice or an opportunity to be heard.

Perhaps this all sounds ridiculous. But if I am putting my work, and my career, into these editors’ hands, do I not have the right to know how these matters will be handled? As a submitting writer, what kinds of things might get me disqualified, other than the work itself? Under what circumstances might my work be taken down?

For that matter, are these editors saying that my acceptance here is conditional, that my work will remain on the site only so long as I behave in a way they find acceptable? Am I an employee of this magazine? A representative? An ambassador? Do they have the right to monitor my actions and speech, both in private and in public, because once my work appears in their journal, I am forever and always a reflection of that journal?

Does the same apply to them? If they act in a way that I do not like, if they say something in private that offends me, do I have the same right to nullify my contract? Can I pull my work from their archives because their managing editor has announced their political support for a candidate I despise? Is every publication here in fact conditional, precarious, viable only so long as neither party offends the other?

Funny not funny: When Adam and I read Tuch’s exposé, we decided to tell Grist they could no longer advertise in the Winning Writers newsletter unless they took out this paragraph. That’s how we discovered that there were two Grists, and our actual advertiser, Grist.org, was not the one that Tuch wrote about!

I’m telling this story because it shows the danger of acting unilaterally on accusations, as Grist Journal’s submission policy asserts the right to do. (“If an author…is revealed or accused to have behaved or spoken, even in private…”! Emphasis mine.) What if we’d cancelled the wrong Grist’s ads and refunded their money without querying first? How unfair and confusing for everyone.

Last point: I think this attitude infantilizes writers. We don’t want or need some random editorial board to be our Jiminy Cricket. We should educate ourselves, write as responsibly as we can, take in feedback from sources we respect, admit our mistakes and “fail better” next time. Similarly, as publishers, we should stand by our authors and explain our judgments even if we wouldn’t do it again in retrospect.

June Links Roundup: Speaking for the Trees

Happy Pride Month! Or, if you prefer one of the other so-called deadly sins, how about Rainbow Sloth Month?

“Diversity leads to resilience, and it is the reason we, and every other living thing on the planet exist,” says Ames Reeder at the Sloth Conservation Foundation.

At the ecology-minded literary journal Terrain, Ana Maria Spagna’s essay “Yes, and… Talking Wings, Queer Ecologies, and the Rights of Rivers” profiles a pair of queer environmental activists who are attempting to give legal rights to some rivers in upstate New York. They belong to a growing global movement to assign “standing”–the right to sue for injuries, or to be recognized more generally as a rights-holding entity under the law–to nonhuman natural phenomena. The movement traces its rationale back to Christopher Stone’s 1972 Southern California Law Review article “Should Trees Have Standing”, which is quite readable for the non-specialist and veers into poetic and spiritual territory by its conclusion.

Essentially, the argument is that our legal system should value trees, rivers, and ecosystems for their own sake, not merely for their economic or recreational use to humans. Their well-being would then have to be balanced against proposed developments that cause pollution or habitat destruction, just the same as any other stakeholder’s property rights or their right to be free from injury. Spagna quotes one of the activists in Talking Wings:

How can we give rights to a nonhuman entity? We do it all the time, they said, with a hint of incredulity. We give rights to states and municipalities, to estates, to infants (who know less than, say, a chimpanzee), and most damningly, if you consider real damage to humans and nonhumans alike, to corporations.

Stone eloquently questions the whole impulse behind our cramped and anthropocentric notions of property rights toward the end of his law review article:

A radical new conception of man’s relationship to the rest of nature would not only be a step towards solving the material planetary problems; there are strong reasons for such a changed consciousness from the point of making us far better humans. If we only stop for a moment and look at the underlying human qualities that our present attitudes toward property and nature draw upon and reinforce, we have to be struck by how stultifying of our own personal growth and satisfaction they can become when they take rein of us. Hegel, in “justifying” private property, unwittingly reflects the tone and quality of some of the needs that are played upon:

‘A person has as his substantive end the right of putting his will into any and every thing and thereby making it his, because it has no such end in itself and derives its destiny and soul from his will. This is the absolute right of appropriation which man has over all “things.”‘

What is it within us that gives us this need not just to satisfy basic biological wants, but to extend our wills over things, to object-ify them, to make them ours, to manipulate them, to keep them at a psychic distance? Can it all be explained on “rational” bases? Should we not be suspect of such needs within us, cautious as to why we wish to gratify them?

…To be able to get away from the view that Nature is a collection of useful senseless objects is…deeply involved in the development of our abilities to love–or, if that is putting it too strongly, to be able to reach a heightened awareness of our own, and others’ capacities in their mutual interplay. To do so, we have to give up some psychic investment in our sense of separateness and specialness in the universe. And this, in turn, is hard giving indeed, because it involves us in a flight backwards, into earlier stages of civilization and childhood in which we had to trust (and perhaps fear) our environment, for we had not then the power to master it. Yet, in doing so, we–as persons–gradually free ourselves of needs for supportive illusions. Is not this one of the triumphs for “us” of our giving legal rights to (or acknowledging the legal rights of) the Blacks and women?

This invitation to shift our consciousness is also expressed in Claire Kohda’s beautiful, disorienting story “An End” in Electric Literature, which is told from the viewpoint of a river observing species extinction and human interventions therein. A sense of foreboding, as in a horror story, is created by the gaps in the river’s knowledge and the alien-ness of its ethical code.

The poet Richard Siken has become a beloved Twitter oracle of late, creating a collective call-and-response poem with his aphoristic answers to people’s advice questions. You can ask him if you should call that guy back, what is the meaning of life, or how to spend less money on groceries. I think the secret of his success is his combination of compassionate acceptance and bluntness. There’s always hope in his answers but it’s not cheap. And he treats every type of question or questioner with equal importance.

@FernandaHofm: @richardsiken how do I make it stop hurting for good?

@richardsiken: You don’t make feelings do anything. You feel them as long as you need to. They go away when you’re done.

****

@h3ll0t17ty2: richard siken how do I stop being so afraid all the time?

@richardsiken: Some things are scary. Some things only seem scary. Practice distinguishing between them.

In the Spring 2024 issue of BOMB Magazine, Z.L. Nickels interviewed Siken about his forthcoming poetry collection, I Do Know Some Things, a book that came out of his recovery from a severe stroke four years ago. As he does on Twitter, he comes across as a person who is willing to feel deeply and investigate his experiences even when they are devastating. Maybe that’s why he’s become a beacon for others trying to cope with sudden unwanted changes, i.e., life.

On readers’ insistence on conflating the author and the speaker of poems:

People would still ask, “Is this true?” I think they were asking, “Can this happen to me?” and the answer to that is “Yes.”

On his new book’s primary concerns:

In the first poem I wrote, which is the first poem of the book, I considered my death. Other themes arose naturally: What do I know? When is now? Am I a liar, and is that why no one believes me? What belongs to me? How do I make this leg move? What if I can’t make that leg move? And what parts of me died? Truly, a version of me did die, and I had no baseline for the old me or the new me who was writing these poems.

In this exchange, his humility is expressed with such dry wit that it comes all the way round to supreme confidence, like something a British aristocrat would say:

Nickels: This is a selfish thing to say, but I am so grateful you’re doing this. As someone who has closely followed your work, this book really matters. My first thought when I heard about the stroke was, My god, I hope he’s okay. My second was, Oh no. Because there aren’t many writers who are capable of achieving what you have in this book, much less your previous collections. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have your work, and thankfully I don’t have to. But you haven’t published a whole lot of poetry.

Siken: About sixty pages every ten years. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time.

But I think he really means it, because this book was written for himself, out of gratitude and a need to piece his mind back together. I admire that attitude so much.

My neurologist said the fact that I am a painter and a poet is why I recovered. Because of the building of pathways—I already had such weird pathways built on lateral thinking, that continuing to paint and write poetry would help with the neuroplasticity. I made an amazing recovery. I’m lucid, and I can walk, and when I’m rested you can’t really tell I have a limp. I can use my right arm pretty well. So I can make a pretty good recommendation for the power of language and the need for poetry and painting. And maybe I do need to write, but I don’t need to publish and I don’t need to share—and that’s a different thing.

…I needed to write the book so I could figure out who I was. But the idea of having a publication date? That’s weird.

Read some poems from his books Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets, 2004), War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015), and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, forthcoming 2025) on his website.

May Links Roundup: Have a Good Time with Bad Art

Happy May, readers! I have been traveling a lot, writing a little, and gluing things together. Remember how, during the pandemic, those of us stuck at home went through a Little House on the Prairie phase of cooking and handicrafts to stay grounded in our bodies in our suddenly virtual social world? My Instant Pot is gathering dust, but my collage habit remains. The pleasure and challenge of amateur art-making is defending a space where self-evaluation doesn’t enter into the process. Though trying to refine my craft in terms of composition and editing, I’m working hard to keep ambition and comparison out of it. Save that for my literary career!

Caroline Osella, an anthropologist turned freelance writer and novelist, shares similar sentiments in her tongue-in-cheek Substack post “Make Shitty Crafts”. In elementary school, everyone’s encouraged to try painting, singing, and writing poems. But soon this democracy of creativity gives way to the academic Sorting Hat of “talent” and competitive testing that narrows students’ access to the creative professions. Social media threatens to recreate this joy-killing dynamic once we start comparing our quilts and apple pies to perfect photos online. Osella describes how her experiments with fabric dyeing and crochet made her happy no matter how irregularly they turned out.

There was a good slice of humour involved for us all in our house, especially at the beginning, as a kind of transitional mood over the period when everyone’s hopes for gorgeous outcomes to my studio time transmuted into pure and indifferent absorption in activity for me and into a sorrowful letting-go for everyone else. But, unlike those ironic millennials, deliberately setting out to do horrible stuff was never the initial goal. Product – satisfactory or disappointing as it might be – quickly faded out of any reckoning altogether, as I found myself completely taken up in process and flow and gradually developing a kindness towards myself, towards my lack of skill and towards everything that resulted. There’s no archness or camp irony at work here.

On his literary Substack, The Common Reader, Henry Oliver (Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Reinventing Your Life) takes up the question “Is Mary Oliver a good poet?” (And does it matter?) Like Stephen King or Rupi Kaur, Mary Oliver–presumably no relation to Henry?–is a frequent focus of the eternal rivalry between popular, accessible writers and obscure niche weirdos like yours truly. Henry quite convincingly argues why Mary’s work should not be reduced to the quotable platitudes that make the rounds online. She dares to be sincere and straightforward, to such an extent that her work has a transcendent quality, becoming a clear window through which we view the nonhuman world. Citing her “wild and precious life” poem, Henry notes:

If you only quote the last two lines, as happens so often, then you are taking this poem out of context. We do this to Kipling too, another victim of the “middlebrow” label. But he’s still a great poet. If is still a great poem. Just because lots of people turn a poem, or a quote, into the poetic equivalent of muzak doesn’t mean the poem is in fact muzak. Read this poem again. Mary Oliver is asking that final question in a very different manner to the way it is usually asked out of context.

I suppose it’s a special and rare irony to have your work be so popular that it’s underestimated. This past week, visiting the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, I was in the actual presence of paintings that have become so widely reproduced that it’s hard to see them with fresh eyes: Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, for instance, or Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon”. It takes real self-discipline to sit down in front of these paintings, empty the mind of what you think you know about them, and let them speak to you. I couldn’t do that very well with the Van Gogh because it’s quite small and was surrounded by fans taking iPhone pictures of it, but its juxtaposition with Georges Méliès’ goofy 1902 silent film “A Trip to the Moon” brought out the painting’s previously unnoticed resonances with early science fiction.

The Summer 2023 issue of online lit mag Tyger Quarterly includes poet S. Yarberry’s imagined “interview” with William Blake. Both the questions and the answers are playful and visionary in a manner befitting the author of “Tyger! Tyger!”

Would wings be an improvement for the human body?

Flying is very fun although it’s not bad to save some fun things for the afterlife.

…

What two historical characters would you like to bring together?

God is a funny historical character and not one I’ve always liked. If everyone who believes in God (“God,“ of course, can and should be interpreted broadly, creatively) could meet God (which to me means to meet themselves more truly, more ardently), they might have a new outlook on the way things could be. That might be nice.

Billy Lezra’s visceral personal essay at Electric Lit, “I Don’t Know How to Live If My Anorexia Dies”, resists a predictable recovery arc in favor of examining how our strengths may be intertwined with a mental illness or addiction that people tell us to overcome. A self without this fundamental trait can feel too hard to imagine. I resonated with this passage in particular:

In her essay “Writing Shame,” Elspeth Probyn draws a connection between the act of writing and the experience of shame. She suggests that writing and shame go hand in hand because there is “a shame in being highly interested in something and unable to convey it to others.” As writers, we are required to wrestle with the question:what if no one cares about what we care to uncover? Or worse, what if people reduce and reject what we disclose?

Yes–my self-hating voice doesn’t say I’m a bad writer, it says “Nobody cares about what you care about.” It’s not imposter syndrome but weirdo syndrome.

Lezra’s author bio took me to Rough Cut Press, the queer lit mag where they are editor-in-chief, and this interview with inspirational nonbinary author and social media influencer Jeffrey Marsh. Marsh’s Buddhist-inspired advice helped me get through some difficult family conversations this week.

In an interview with PBS, you invited the interviewer to describe you in a word, and he said “light.” And then you said: “Well, you just described yourself.” I was curious about how you came to this understanding–that you are a mirror.

I realized quite a long time ago that my mission in life is to draw out what needs to be healed in people. Sometimes that is a great thing if they are in a place where that is what they want. But sometimes it gets ugly: I draw out their bigotry or whatever they need to get over in order to have peace in their lives. And they rebel, which is understandable. But my mission doesn’t change. What I’m here to do doesn’t change. And what I hope to be is a bookmark for unconditional love and acceptance until people realize that unconditional love is actually within them and has been the whole time. I’m always pointing people toward the realization that whatever they see in me is because they have it already.

…

I would like to ask you about anger. You write: “At its best, anger is a call to fairness and a hand stretched out in your direction, an invitation to honor how much you care.” How do you distinguish between generative anger and destructive anger?

Yes–what we might call righteous anger versus run-of-the-mill hate. To me, I think they’re one and the same. I’m going to give you a very non-binary answer: constructive and destructive anger both spring out of a sense of injustice. I would imagine that someone hateful hates me because there is some sense that my freedom is not available to them, which is an injustice: that I’m getting attention, that I deeply love myself, and that they’re not allowed to. And that sense of injustice creates a lot of anger, just from what I’ve observed. But anger can be a source for good because there’s a lot of injustice that ought to be overturned in this world. Anger is a friend. Anger is trying to tell you something. Jesus got very angry in the Bible, famously. And that story, as far as I understand it, is about injustice. So anger is human. Anger is a kindness. For so many of us who have been traumatized, the worst thing we can think of is inflicting trauma on other people. We tend to associate anger with one or both of our parents being very traumatic, violent,  hateful, mean, being the chaos. And if you break anger away from those associations, it really is a story of injustice and sensations in your body. So anger can really be an invitation.

A word I’ve seen surface in your work is “nonviolence.” What does this idea mean to you? 

I’m committed to nonviolence both internally and externally. And as we were discussing before, you almost can’t have one without the other. You can’t do activism to end the violence in the world without ending the internal violence as well.

What does it look like to be nonviolent with yourself?

Unconditional love. These phrases get thrown around and I’m guessing some people reading may be rolling their eyes. But what I mean is: even if something happens that doesn’t go well, even if you have feelings, you have trauma, you have things that are coming up…can you love yourself in every single situation? To me, judging yourself, hating yourself, those voices inside your head saying, “Why’d you do that?”, “They’re going to laugh at you,” “You’re so stupid”– that’s internal violence. And if you’re going to commit yourself to nonviolence and commit yourself to be nonviolent in every possible situation, that is a wide-open invitation for life to bring in things that may challenge you because you’ve committed to facing challenges.

Marsh’s latest book is called Take Your Own Advice. It’s about learning to honor your own needs as an empath or trauma survivor. Added to my long wishlist!

Also from Electric Lit, I recommend Laura M. Martin’s salty essay, “Fake Authenticity Is Toxic, and So Are Iowa-Style Writing Workshops”. In it she slams the encounter-group model of writing workshops where the author stays silent while their classmates gang up on them with feedback. She compares it to a meet-up series she tried, Connection Games, whose social norms ended up pressuring participants to share vulnerable feelings more quickly than wanted to. “Unnerving people by oversharing and demanding reciprocal vulnerability” is at best untrained group therapy, at worst a technique for pick-up artists to neg women.

The game assumes honesty from others; it requires trusting what they say over your own impressions…

In both writing workshops and Authentic Relating, participants are expected to share deeply personal information with people they don’t know and may not even like or be comfortable with. Both spaces require vulnerability without providing the room to acknowledge discomfort or push back against assumptions…

“Authenticity” has become code for ignoring the impact of our behavior on the people around us, being unattuned to their responses. Others will be freer, the guidelines state, if they don’t have to worry about your “unspoken needs.”  But a lack of concern about the feelings of other people isn’t authenticity, it’s immaturity…

…

I hated writing workshops, but I also believed they were necessary. How could a method used by dozens of universities for over seventy years be wrong? Once, I voiced concern to other members of my cohort. They said they found the criticism valuable, but after graduation, most of them stopped writing entirely.

If we make people feel unsafe, we aren’t seeing their true selves; we are seeing their responses to threat. Forcing personal disclosures and giving unsolicited “feedback” puts us in a state where self-reflection is impossible. Who can work on self-improvement when they’re under attack? Safety is a necessary prerequisite for connection and growth. It must come first.

American Eclipse

We had a fine view of the total solar eclipse on April 8 from the terrace of my best friend’s house in Buffalo. The clouds came and went, giving us hints of the drama behind them. Watching the sun’s disc shrink to a crescent through our eclipse glasses was awe-inspiring enough, but then when the cloud cover was just right, we could see the phenomenon in context with the naked eye. Here’s the sun coming back:

In an age when one can instantly retrieve high-resolution images of nature’s most dramatic sights, one can underestimate the power of being physically present. Sure, there are clearer photos on the Internet, but nothing compares to experiencing a historic moment with the people you love. The energetic resonance of sudden darkness at mid-day, or of the waters thundering over Niagara Falls at the golden hour, can’t be captured by our eyes alone.

Political analyst Sarah Kendzior expressed this eloquently in her latest Substack post, “The Path of Totality”. Sarah’s work is remarkable because she chronicles the ancient and imperiled beauty of the American landscape alongside our slide toward totalitarianism, holding the terrible alongside the sublime, not to cancel each other out, but to give us reasons to keep fighting.

We look to the skies because everyone on earth is lying. We look to an eclipse because it shows deception clearly. Here are how the pieces fit together, here is how fast darkness can come, and here is how fast it can depart. The world is not changed when it is over — but you are.

Sometimes, when people talk about the apocalypse, I wonder if we are already in hell, and days like this are glimpses of the heaven we squandered. That we had everything we needed and lost it in lust for lesser things. And I wonder how to get heaven back.

Subscribe to Sarah’s Substack. It’s free!

The confluence of the celestial and the political was on my mind in 2017, the last time we had a solar eclipse visible in the U.S., when I got the idea for the poem below. We had just returned from NecronomiCon, the cosmic horror fan convention. The indifference of the Elder Gods seemed less scary than the hatred brought into the open by a Trump presidency. The poem is reprinted from my book Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022).

93 Minutes of Darkness

Do not call up that which you cannot put down.
— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”

I

In Liberty, Greenville, Idaho Falls,
on summer-sprinkled lawns, in toolsheds
fumed with engine tinkering,
fathers hold nails in their mouths
building a viewing box.

In Leavenworth, Sweet Home, the other Cleveland,
in flour and mayonnaise kitchens,
when the moon is new
as a dark neighbor, when the radio
predicts the bodies’ line-up,
mothers clip out eye-holes.

From Excelsior Springs to Independence,
schoolchildren cover their faces
with official sunshades,
crayon the textbook pathway
by which their allotment of day
will soon be occluded.

YOU MUST BE IN THE SHADED BAND
(the “Path of Totality”)
TO SEE TOTALITY FROM SOUTH CAROLINA!

Nine in Charleston
will not see,
above the brooding steeple
of Mother Emanuel, the moon
drape a black veil over the sun’s church hat.

Marse Robert, the Marble Man,
will not see
the daytime shadow graze
his cracked-off pedestal
like a misfired Union minié ball.

And the lost cause’s buzz-cut acolytes
will not see,
in Charlottesville, any natural darkness
in the heavens
their torches smoke across.

You want to be somewhere in the dark band
on eclipse day!

II

Howard you thirsty boy
fascinated by the crumbling
foundations of Providence
the despised intertwining
of suckered flesh
through your dreams’ merciless orbits

Howard through the night rubbing
gravestones to reconstruct
origin and fall
scratching tales of the old man’s portrait
that possesses his weak-willed bloodchild
what a privilege to be horrified
by knowing your ancestors

Howard when the stars are right
will the earth be flooded
like a bursting mind
with memories of what oozed, invaded, flopped
in the infant darkness
will the slattern’s offspring with a god
colored invisible to human eyes
cry for its father on Federal Hill?

III

We’re kind of prepared
for the end of days here in Providence:
wearing lobsters on our hats,
cracking jokes about the democratic
maw of omnivorous Dagon.
It’s the birthday of the creator
of our universe, who is dead,
his stomach eaten
by its own cells, eighty years past.

South of us, starched ghosts
peering out through the masks
of great-grandfathers’ wars
scream “You will not replace us” to the sea
of earth-dark faces
who turned the soil without owning it,
as the rain does.

We’re north-northeast from the shadow
that will slice the map tomorrow,
what the news is calling
American eclipse. City of hills,
city where a role-play gamer’s dice
could tumble miles before hitting the tidal river
once laden with trade ships
of oysters, rum, and slaves.

What the news is calling
a rise in temperature.

We’re eating breakfast
in a grand ballroom, plasma of powdered eggs
on every plate while a black-hooded choir
sings monster parodies of tunes
our bodies still half believe,
about being rescued when we’re gone.

What the news is calling
our president. White headlights sweep the crowd.
A praying woman crumples
under aimed wheels, as a coastline slips
beneath lapping warmth.
The moon sweeps closer to the sun.

April Links Roundup: Contested Histories

Happy cruelest poetry month, April, etc.

Speculative fiction pioneer Samuel R. Delany, who is still going to gay sex parties at age 80, wants you to stop treating the terms “literary fiction” and “high art” as synonymous. One is a genre description, the other is a value judgment. He explains in this 2019 interview with John Plotz at Public Books:

SD: …There’s a reason why the term “science fiction” jelled around 1922.

JP: So that makes Frankenstein not science fiction?

SD: No.

JP: Making The Time Machine not science fiction.

SD: With all due respect, I think that’s a crock of shit. They’re gothic novels. And the gothic novel is a perfectly good and reasonable genre. There’s no point in snatching it out of one genre. The gothic novel has enough problems maintaining its own dignity.

JP: You use the word paraliterary a lot.

SD: The paraliterary genres in the mid-20th century were specifically those that if you asked someone on the street, they would say: That’s not literature. That’s science fiction, westerns, mysteries, comic books, pornography, for example. Now, I think any of those can rise to very high art. The fact that it is a separate genre means that it has its own way of becoming. That there are people who can do something with it, and then there are people who don’t do very much with it.

JP: But the point of the classification would be that, even if someone becomes great in that field, it’s not like they earned the title of literary.

SD: Yes, although there are some writers who have—Theodore Sturgeon, for example, who I think is just one of the great writers of the mid-20th century and whose collected stories create one of the best portraits we have of the world from that time through to the end of the century. And some of it was science fiction, some of it was very borderline science fiction, but it’s a great art. I would much prefer to see him in a Library of America edition than Ursula Le Guin: whom I liked personally very much, but don’t think was anywhere near as interesting a writer.

I agree, it’s weird that no one talks about Sturgeon these days, because he was such a big deal when I was devouring every book in my high school library’s sci-fi section in the 1980s. I recommend his novel More Than Human, about a found-family of people with various paranormal abilities and cognitive impairments who together make up a superhuman gestalt consciousness.

A historian friend sent me this provocative long read from the London Review of Books, “The Shoah after Gaza” by Pankaj Mishra. According to Mishra’s account of post-WWII Jewish identity formation, the first generation after the Holocaust did not want to make this great trauma and humiliation central to their self-understanding as Jews. It was only in the 1970s that Zionists within and outside Israel started to emphasize the Holocaust as a moral trump card to silence criticism of how the Palestinians were treated.

[Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin, who had organised the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people were killed, was the first of the frank exponents of Jewish supremacism who continue to rule Israel. He was also the first routinely to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust and the Bible while assaulting Arabs and building settlements in the Occupied Territories. In its early years the state of Israel had an ambivalent relationship with the Shoah and its victims. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, initially saw Shoah survivors as ‘human debris’, claiming that they had survived only because they had been ‘bad, harsh, egotistic’. It was Ben-Gurion’s rival Begin, a demagogue from Poland, who turned the murder of six million Jews into an intense national preoccupation, and a new basis for Israel’s identity. The Israeli establishment began to produce and disseminate a very particular version of the Shoah that could be used to legitimise a militant and expansionist Zionism.

…Primo Levi, who had known the horrors of Auschwitz…and also felt an emotional affinity to the new Jewish state, quickly organised an open letter of protest and gave an interview in which he said that ‘Israel is rapidly falling into total isolation... We must choke off the impulses towards emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class.’ In several works of fiction and non-fiction, Levi had meditated not only on his time in the death camp and its anguished and insoluble legacy, but also on the ever present threats to human decency and dignity. He was especially incensed by Begin’s exploitation of the Shoah. Two years later, he argued that ‘the centre of gravity of the Jewish world must turn back, must move out of Israel and back into the diaspora.’

Current rhetoric about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Mishra writes, prevents us from calling the genocide in Gaza by its true name. This is not to deny the unspeakable suffering of the Jews under Nazism, but to question the political uses to which it’s been put. In fact, this very point was made by Jewish critics of ethnic cleansing in Palestine in the 1960s-80s.

In 2024, many more people can see that, when compared with the Jewish victims of Nazism, the countless millions consumed by slavery, the numerous late Victorian holocausts in Asia and Africa, and the nuclear assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are barely remembered. Billions of non-Westerners have been furiously politicised in recent years by the West’s calamitous war on terror, ‘vaccine apartheid’ during the pandemic, and the barefaced hypocrisy over the plight of Ukrainians and Palestinians; they can hardly fail to notice a belligerent version of ‘Holocaust denial’ among the elites of former imperialist countries, who refuse to address their countries’ past of genocidal brutality and plunder and try hard to delegitimise any discussion of this as unhinged ‘wokeness’. Popular West-is-best accounts of totalitarianism continue to ignore the acute descriptions of Nazism (by Jawaharlal Nehru and Aimé Césaire, among other imperial subjects) as the radical ‘twin’ of Western imperialism; they shy away from exploring the obvious connection between the imperial slaughter of natives in the colonies and the genocidal terrors perpetrated against Jews inside Europe.

One of the great dangers today is the hardening of the colour line into a new Maginot Line. For most people outside the West, whose primordial experience of European civilisation was to be brutally colonised by its representatives, the Shoah did not appear as an unprecedented atrocity. Recovering from the ravages of imperialism in their own countries, most non-Western people were in no position to appreciate the magnitude of the horror the radical twin of that imperialism inflicted on Jews in Europe. So when Israel’s leaders compare Hamas to Nazis, and Israeli diplomats wear yellow stars at the UN, their audience is almost exclusively Western. Most of the world doesn’t carry the burden of Christian European guilt over the Shoah, and does not regard the creation of Israel as a moral necessity to absolve the sins of 20th-century Europeans. For more than seven decades now, the argument among the ‘darker peoples’ has remained the same: why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit? And they can only recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right to slaughter 13,000 children not only as a matter of self-defence but because it is a state born out of the Shoah.

Jewish Currents had an interesting article last month about Israel’s dependence on underpaid Palestinian labor. Jonathan Shamir’s “Between Exclusion and Exploitation” details how the state is balancing competing pressures from security hardliners and Israeli businesses. Give them just enough work permits to keep the economic frustration from boiling over into violence, but not so many that they become an organized labor force who want equal rights. Meanwhile the BBC reports that enterprising Israelis are already planning beachfront resorts in Gaza once it’s cleared of its pesky inhabitants.

For some in the Israeli cabinet, the Palestinian territory – now drenched in blood – is ripe for resettlement. That includes Israel’s hard-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir – a settler himself.

In late January, he made his way through a packed conference hall, slowed by embraces and handshakes. He was among friends – about 1,000 ultranationalists pushing for a return to Gaza at the event entitled Settlement Brings Security.

Mr Ben Gvir, who favours “encouraging emigration”, was among a dozen cabinet ministers in attendance.

“It’s time to go back home,” he said from the stage, to loud applause. “It’s time to return to the land of Israel. If we don’t want another 7 October, we need to return home and control the land.”

At the Yale Review, Paisley Currah surveyed two new books about the anti-trans backlash from notable queer theory writers: Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? and Jules Gill-Peterson’s A Short History of Trans Misogyny. Butler focuses on the intellectual incoherence of arguments for an immutable binary, while Gill-Peterson takes a materialist approach, looking at how gender and racial classifications are invented to subordinate certain populations.
Gill-Peterson finds the psychological approach, which Butler exemplifies, useful but partial. It might explain violence against individual trans women, but it cannot account for why trans misogyny initially arose as a violent instrument of governing. Trans panic began with an assault in colonial and settler states on what was perceived as sexualized femininity in male-bodied people. The psychological phenomenon that motivates individual violence did not precede state violence but followed it…
As scholars have demonstrated from a variety of angles, it has been politically and economically expedient throughout history to deem certain populations improperly gendered and sexually corrupt. These designations provided chattel slavery and vulner­able mobile labor for capital and granted states the opportunity to consolidate their sovereignty by unleashing immense violence on these groups. Sylvia Federici’s work, for example, recounts the social, political, and economic losses women experienced with the emergence of early capitalism, which relegated women to unpaid domestic labor. In a similar fashion, Gill-Peterson outlines how the dispossession wrought by slavery and colonialism shunted trans-feminized people of color into cities, where they monetized trans femininity through the service economy and sex work.
Something that stood out to me from this article was the link between transphobia and hatred of personal freedom. This is our supposedly liberal Pope Francis: “Releasing identity from the grip of the body leads to a ‘radically autonomous’ conception of the individual as one ‘who can choose a gender not correspond­ing to his or her biological sex,’ as the Vatican explained in its 2019 document ‘Male and Female He Created Them.'” Stop and think about that. Why is autonomy such a dirty word? Is God a narcissistic parent? The issue isn’t even what we do with our freedom, but the affrontery of having freedom at all.
Besides which, choosing to actualize our queerness is not this caricatured break from all communal accountability or formative interpersonal influences. That’s not humanly possible. What we’re doing is leaving communities that don’t let us grow, and joining different ones. That’s what the church can’t tolerate.

March Bonus Links: Notable Poems and Short Fiction Around the Web

So much good stuff from the online journals I’ve been reading lately, I had to make a separate links post!

At Frontier Poetry, Chris Watkins queers George Herbert’s tradition of Christ-haunted sonnets in “Prayer (II)”.

Prayer—even now, secular,
every poem you write, a knees-bent child
leaning on their mattress. The mouth molecular.
The porno of your guilt. A Girls Gone Wild
of the soul. …

Sara Fetherolf’s “On Renting”, the Feb. 26 Poem of the Week at the Missouri Review, is a modern-day psalm that swerves rapidly between faith and doubt, compassion and cursing, and back again. The landlord, like a jealous God, offers shelter, for which the narrator is supposed be grateful, but the price is petty surveillance and a feeling of humiliation.

…Once, I was taught the Lord
owns my life, spreads the sky
like a ceiling over my head, grants money

to those he favors, lightning otherwise.
I suppose the landlord is
a small, frumpy incarnation of that
Lord, taking it upon himself
to trudge past my window

and inspect the meter, talk
to the lime-vested employee
who is calculating our bill
and not his. In the last days
of my faith, I came to think of the Lord

as an enormous grub,
pillowy & pale as curdled milk.
He eats rot into this earth
like a maggot into a potato
but it is human meat

He craves. He wants to make us
in His image by consuming
us down to the bone. …

Also from the Missouri Review, Robert Long Foreman’s “Song Night” is a hilarious and touching story about a guy who decides to be honest with his teenage daughter about their shared enjoyment of marijuana.

What was I feeling? Shame? It was something like shame, but I also knew this wasn’t such a big deal. Teenagers get high. They’ve been doing it since at least the 1960s. They probably did it in the 1860s. And why shouldn’t they? Sure, they should take care of their internal organs, but then, everything causes cancer, now that the world is a trash heap. Even the water we drink causes cancer, as does the air we have no choice but to breathe. And it’s not like teenagers have urgent business to attend to that being stoned would prevent them from addressing properly. They should probably be high all the time, since in the years ahead, there’s nothing but dullness awaiting them and people they won’t like having to deal with but who are somehow in charge of whether they keep their jobs and how much money they’ll make.

Abigail F. Taylor’s “Snagging Blanket”, a flash fiction finalist at Fractured Lit, is like a ballad by The Highwaymen, in that it captures an entire life story of love, loss, and bittersweet wisdom in just a few minutes.

Sundance Lee draped his old snagging blanket around his shoulders. It hadn’t snagged anyone for many years. His legs were too skinny, and there was too much silver in his thin braids. Still, it was powwow season. He had plenty of opportunities. During the Grand Entry the day before, he caught a white woman whispering “aho” in quiet fascination to herself, trying to mimic the emcee’s cadence. Her eyes flitted nervously in Lee’s direction; he was standing so close, and he almost snagged her with a smile. It would have been that easy.

Except there was something churchy about her, like she’d become frightened by him once they were alone and naked in his camper. The equal parts of fear and desire in the so-called ‘exotic’ reminded him of his first wife. So, he left the woman alone to her muttering. …

I’m excited about poet Phillip B. Williams’ debut novel, Ours (Viking, 2024). In this installment of their “Ten Questions for…” author interview series, Poets & Writers Magazine describes the book thus:

In this historical narrative with a supernatural twist, the plantations of 1830s Arkansas are overtaken and liberated by a heroic woman named Saint, who wields immense, otherworldly power. Under Saint’s aegis, the formerly enslaved people travel to a hidden town where they are able to build lives for themselves and their families.

Williams’ response to one question shows a refreshing equanimity:

If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Ours, what would you say?
Nothing. I’m not about to change the trajectory of what I’ve created. If I encourage younger me, I might get cocky. If I warn younger me, I might take fewer risks. I’m not saying a thing.

At Jewish Currents, Solomon Brager’s graphic narrative “Put Up, Take Down” even-handedly depicts the rhetorical battle between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel posters since Oct. 7, and how these campaigns have been both amplified and distorted by media outlets with their own agendas.

It’s March Xness time again! This year, the editors of DIAGRAM are staging playoffs among 64 iconic dance songs from the early 2000’s. My problematic fave from this playlist, which hasn’t come up in the bracket yet, is definitely “Get Low” by Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz. I’ve been replaying it on Spotify till the sweat drop down my balls (my balls!). Which is saying a lot, since my balls are made of silicone.

Never fear, Chris Rock is here to absolve us, in this clip from his 2004 HBO special Never Scared. If the beat is good, who cares what it says?