Category Archives: Politics and Culture

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?

March Links Roundup: Baby Got Humpback

In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of…blowholes. “Humpback sex photographed for first time–and both whales were male,” The Guardian newspaper reported in February.

Despite decades of research on humpback whales, sightings of the male’s penis have been rare. Copulation by the species had not been documented by people – until now, when two photographers captured images of a sexual encounter between two whales off the coast of Hawaii.

The sighting, confirmed by scientists in a newly published study, occurred in January 2022 in waters west of the island of Maui, where two whales approached and circled a boat before engaging in sexual activity about three to five meters below the vessel.

Both of the whales were male, which makes the photos, taken by Lyle Krannichfeld and Brandi Romano, the first evidence of homosexual behavior in humpback whales as well as the first sighting of sex in the species.

In other queer animal news, a green honeycreeper was sighted in Colombia with a rare mutation called bilateral gynandromorphism. In plain English, that means that one half of the bird’s plumage is electric blue like a male, the other half emerald green like a female. The New York Times appreciates how fashion-forward our community is: “This Bird Is Half Male, Half Female, and Completely Stunning”. See pictures at the link.

It is not entirely clear how the condition comes about, but one leading theory is that it results from an error during the production of egg cells in female birds. Female birds have two different sex chromosomes, designated W and Z, while males have two Z chromosomes. An error during egg cell production could result in two fused or incompletely separated cells, one with a W chromosome and one with a Z chromosome.

If those fused cells are fertilized by two different sperm, each of which carries a Z chromosome, the result might be a bird with the WZ chromosomes of a female in some cells and the ZZ chromosomes of a male in others. “And so you get a bird that’s half and half,” Dr. Spencer said.

These stories remind me of a recent episode of the podcast Straight White American Jesus, where hosts Bradley Onishi and Dan Miller offered a decisive takedown of conservative Catholic “natural law” theory–the theology that (allegedly) deduces the purpose of human sexuality from observations of biology. Surprise surprise, that purpose is heterosexual procreation, only. But why is it, the podcasters asked, that such Christians’ ideas of biology are stuck in the era of Aristotle, or at the latest, Thomas Aquinas? No amount of evidence of homosexuality in the animal kingdom, let alone modern human psychology, can make a dent in their cis-hetero-patriarchal idea of “Nature”.

Let’s just keep on with the gay links a little longer. I resonated with Jarek Steele’s personal essay “The Club” at Electric Literature, subtitled “In a bathhouse meant for cis gay men, trans is transgressive”. Steele and his trans male friend decide to integrate their local bathhouse in St. Louis, a space that traditionally “wasn’t meant for my eyes, the eyes of a man who was assigned female at birth.” For the author, it wasn’t about looking for a hookup, so much as feeling present in his body, being accepted as a gay man in a place that’s been central to their culture. “What I wanted was uncomplicated. I didn’t need acrobatic sex or a million orgasms. I just wanted to be in the room.” He describes a flirtation there that didn’t end in sex but was healing nonetheless.

Before I stopped using women’s restrooms, I was used to people talking and holding the door for each other. It took practice to master the art of men’s rooms. Walk in. Stall. Hurry. Sink. Hurry. Walk out. No looking or talking, especially at Lowe’s or even the YMCA. Maybe I was just like that because I was afraid to stop moving. Maybe they were too busy trying not to be seen to notice me anyway.

But here was a place built for anonymous sex, where looking and touching was the point. It was a temporary ceasefire with rules for those desperate to be touched without consequence, and even though Steven and I hadn’t come here to hook up, I felt a crushing tenderness toward these awkward, average, strikingly beautiful middle-aged men who came to an anonymous place to stop diverting attention, to stop feeling poisonous. Just like me.

…As I followed Steven silently back through the shadowy maze toward the locker room, a stranger emerged from around a corner. We passed each other there in the dark hallway in that bathhouse in a manufacturing district in St. Louis, late morning on a Tuesday in February. This anonymous man’s friend, if he was a friend, had turned away. I slowed to let him pass. He reached up and stroked the hair on my chest, a passing glance before we walked away from each other. I wanted to take his hand. I wanted to touch his face. I wanted to be gentle. I wanted not to be gentle. Every second of my life lived in that tender stroke of my chest in the dim light of the most nakedly male place in the world, where I had trespassed and had been wanted.

Meanwhile, Anastassia Gliadkovskaya, at the website Fierce Healthcare, reports on a potentially deadly form of exclusion: “Denied care: Trans men struggle for inclusive gynecologic healthcare”. She interviewed a patient who was turned away from several OB/GYN offices in New York City because he identified as male, which meant that his ovarian cancer was not diagnosed until he had gender-affirming surgery. Although such discrimination is technically prohibited, many medical programs still give insufficient training in gender-inclusive care, causing doctors to feel ill-equipped for such cases.

Noah Communoah’s blog Communotes, which I discovered via Daniel Lavery’s Substack, posted an article about his deconversion from Christianity that struck a chord with me. “On the Christian Question” talks about Noah’s journey into, and out of, an attraction to a hardcore faith that promised justice for his trauma.

My best friend at Simon’s Rock was Wren (pseudonymized as usual), a transmasc MCR fan and fellow fledgling anarchist. We were both survivors, and vocally so: we were not doing well. Wren was Catholic, raised in a secular family but committed to a feminist veneration of Mary— and to the transcendence of soul over body. (I’ve since learned that the latter is a gnostic heresy). At the time, neither of our bodies were a particularly hospitable place to be. We were both coping with dysphoria and rape trauma, and had turned towards Tumblr communities that were proudly sex-negative. So I experimented with the religion of Simone Weil and Catherine of Siena, of which Wren had long been a disciple. And I tried out Christianity too…

…I had serious misgivings about the basic Lutheran doctrine of solo fide, justification by faith alone. I thought that non-Christians should get to go to heaven, of course. But more than that, I thought that evil Christians should be damned to hell.

My dad is a miserable, controlling man, prone to outbursts of rage and deeply averse to any kind of therapy. He has two coping skills— exercise and prayer—and relates to both of them in excess. One of my last memories of him, right after he beat up my sister, involves him praying for forgiveness and then going for a run. He didn’t bother apologizing to us.

I found it hard to believe in a god that could forgive him.  I fantasized about hellfire for him and the other men who’d hurt me, recited Psalms for the destruction of my enemies. At the same time, on this mortal coil, I had recently embraced abolitionist politics. It made intuitive sense to me; the court system facilitated my dad’s abuse, and the cops abused my girlfriend for trying to escape her own violent home. But just because I knew policing hurt survivors doesn’t mean I was ready to give up on punishment. Hell was an eternal prison sentence, but one administered by a perfectly fair and wise judge. I secretly believed in a kind of purgatory, where thoroughly rehabilitated offenders could someday access heaven. But I knew my dad never would…

…My theology changed when my politics did, which changed with my relationship to trauma. I saw the survivor advocates I trusted, who encouraged me to see my abusers as monstrous, get outed as interpersonally violent themselves. I saw autistic and mad trans women accused of spurious abuses, then “held accountable” by removing every resource they had to survive. I read Against Innocence by Jackie Wang; I did EMDR. I just didn’t want to torture my abusers anymore.

So Christianity became something new. By this point, I had lived on my own for about four years, then returned to my mom’s house for disability care. I joined a local ELCA congregation that advertised as progressive and affirming. I made friends with the pastor, an incredibly sweet woman who I still think of fondly. And I started reading about queer theology: Jesus as dissolving the human/deity binary, the God character as a BDSM top, Paul as a sex-repulsed asexual. I loved the possibilities of textual interpretation, but I was still terrified of getting it wrong. After all, the Bible had to mean something specific, right? Otherwise what’s the point?

I quit Christianity without much fanfare. I just started HRT, moved to New York, and for the first time really felt comfortable in my skin. It just didn’t make much sense to go to church anymore. There was nothing I needed there.

I look forward to a future post where Noah explains his conversion to Judaism!

I admit it, I’m one of those bad people who can never remember the difference between Naomi Wolf (second-wave feminist author of The Beauty Myth turned alt-right conspiracy theorist) and Naomi Klein, the Canadian filmmaker and progressive political analyst who had to write a whole-ass book about repeatedly being mistaken for Naomi Wolf! In response to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, Klein has generously shared two chapters from Doppelganger on her website about “trauma-forged identity politics”. These chapters discuss “how the Nazis were influenced by European colonial and racial segregation in the Americas—and how a failure to reckon with those connections shaped and misshaped Israeli history, and contributed to exiling Palestinians into an unbearable purgatory.” It seems to be human nature to mirror our enemies instead of reflecting on ourselves.

February Links Roundup: Do You Know You’re a Rat?

The groundhog may have seen his shadow today, but did he recognize it as himself?

You may have noticed the cute “rat selfies” making the rounds on social media last month. CBC Radio has the backstory about Canadian artist Augustin Lignier, who built a photo booth for his rats Arthur and Augustin to make a point about the addictiveness of social media. The critters were rewarded with food for pressing the camera lever, but soon took pleasure in the action for its own sake.

Arthur and Augustin produced dozens upon dozens of selfies, trying out different angles like real social media pros. But Lignier says they didn’t seem to get any fulfilment from the images themselves.

“I try to show them the images on the screen, so directly after they took the picture, they can see their own selfie,” he said. “But they don’t recognize themselves, you know.”

Philosophers might well debate whether this is a cognitive limitation or a form of enlightenment. The joy is wholly in the act of creation, not the judging and self-promoting ego. For us human artists, that kind of present-moment focus would be a relief, at least some of the time!

I upgraded to the paid subscription to the Straight White American Jesus podcast because I’m obsessed with their lively combo of theological and political analysis of the Christian Right. But their cult-busting mission also extends to the left-wing wellness culture whose paranoid views end up converging with QAnon on topics like vaccines and gender-affirming care. I recommend their July 2023 crossover episode with Conspirituality podcast hosts Julian Walker and Matthew Remski.

I thought of that episode when reading this Alexandra Middleton essay in Electric Literature on Jacqueline Alnes’ memoir The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour. “When so much seems unknowable about the very body you live in, it feels nice to stand on a firm platform made from rights rather than wrongs, even if the very platform itself is a false reality,” Alnes writes about how she fell for extreme diet fads after being struck with a mysterious neurological illness. “Thinking about how many people are failed on a regular basis by U.S. health care systems, it feels totally valid that someone would click on a link to fast for 30 days to cure their diabetes, which I react viscerally to on surface level. But on a human desperation, I want to feel well and these systems are failing me, charging me thousands of dollars a month for very little care, level? 100% get it.”

Ky Schevers writes about a similar example of the horseshoe effect–radical feminists adopting reactionary views on gender–at her trans rights blog Health Liberation Now! Schevers has had an unusual life path, first identifying as a trans man, then becoming a detransition activist, and finally breaking with that community and denouncing their cult-like practices. She now identifies as transmasculine and genderqueer, with she/her pronouns, according to her Wikipedia page. Her longform article “‘A spiritual war in a way’: How Detrans Radical Feminists Influenced WPATH” goes into great detail about how her former community helped introduce stricter gatekeeping into transgender healthcare. Some money quotes if you don’t want to read the whole thing:

Though many [detrans radical feminists] are disillusioned and distrustful towards therapists and other medical professionals and may view the medical system as a whole as part of the larger patriarchy, they’re still very willing to influence it in whatever way they can, especially if they think it will lead to less people transitioning. Many did had negative experiences with medical providers during their transitions but instead of working to improve care they believe that medical transition or even the whole medical system is irredeemable and needs to be shut down and replaced with some kind of alternative healthcare. They’re similar to other people who had negative experiences with healthcare who end up in alt-health cults, who also often end up believing in conspiracy theories and/or reactionary ideologies…

…Gatekeeping only makes sense if you think you can reliably develop a process that will correctly sort out “real” trans people from people confused about their gender. But what if trans people, even those with intense dysphoria, can be psychologically manipulated just as much as any other group of people? Why would trans people be immune to conversion practices or cults?

Following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, there’s been a disturbing amount of groupthink among Jews and those who claim to be our allies. The state of Israel is assumed to represent the values and interests of the Jewish people, and criticism of the former is deemed prejudice toward the latter. I welcomed this contrary perspective from Seth Sanders at Religion Dispatches: “Despite Conflation of Israel with Judaism, Anti-Zionism Is More Kosher Than You Think”.

For 2000 years Jewish prayer has hoped ardently that the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) would soon be redeemed by God and led by His Messiah; some even made pilgrimage to visit or dwell with others in the Holy Land. But there is surprisingly little evidence that Jews also always longed for a sovereign State of Israel (Medinat Yisrael) or to be a Middle Eastern political power. It turns out the idea may be shockingly recent, but its novelty is hard to see because we stand on the other side of such a radical transformation in thought. The shift from Holy Land to sovereign secular state has been rendered almost invisible.

…[T]he greatest Jewish philosopher of the Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, wrote in 1770 that “The Talmud forbids us to even think of a return to Palestine by force. Without the miracles and signs mentioned in the Scripture, we must not take the smallest step in the direction of forcing a return and a restoration of our nation.”

It turns out that opposition to a Jewish state isn’t an isolated theological quirk but a central conviction among Jews for most of the history of Rabbinic thought. It’s contained in the Talmud itself, expounded by Rashi (the most important Jewish Bible interpreter, whose interpretation every Jewish Day School student learns first), and detailed by Maimonides, arguably Jewish tradition’s single most influential thinker…

This Messianic view is anchored in the Talmud, which says that the Jewish people must swear to keep faith in God’s plan for the world. The messianic end, when God will redeem all of reality, is a goal so desirable as to be like a bride in waiting for marriage. Thus it is in a mystical commentary on the Song of Songs that Israel is first commanded to swear three oaths: not to “ascend the wall” to where the Messiah (the Bride) waits, not to “rebel against the nations of the world,” and not to “force the End [times].”

Meanwhile, in our nation of so-called Judeo-Christian values, a lot of our food suppliers (including brands with “progressive” vibes like Whole Foods) are taking advantage of modern-day slave labor. AP News reports: “Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands”.

Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.

They are among America’s most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement. They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job.

The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice. They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.

Many of the companies buying directly from prisons are violating their own policies against the use of such labor. But it’s completely legal, dating back largely to the need for labor to help rebuild the South’s shattered economy after the Civil War. Enshrined in the Constitution by the 13th Amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude are banned – except as punishment for a crime.

That clause is currently being challenged on the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to reach the ballot in about a dozen states this year.

Some prisoners work on the same plantation soil where slaves harvested cotton, tobacco and sugarcane more than 150 years ago, with some present-day images looking eerily similar to the past.

Discovered via poet [sarah] Cavar’s newsletter, this essay by Rachael Allen in the journal Too Little/Too Hard challenges the association of “Difficult and Bad” in how we critique writing. Allen talks about dual consciousness as a person of working-class background in literary academia, and argues that ideals of “accessible” writing may underestimate the self-taught intelligence of housecleaners and laborers like her father. When such voices do make it into mainstream publishing, they’re pressured to perform a simplified and traumatic life story that will flatter the benevolence of upper-class readers. “There is a pervading, top-down and patronising mythos of the ‘general public’ or ‘general reader’ – an idea peddled about who can tolerate what under the premise that general audiences aren’t able to manage complicated concepts, formally or linguistically innovative books, or other challenging works, precedents for what is deemed to be accessible set by the middle-class anti-intellectuals that decide it.”

Also on the topic of literary gatekeeping, I recommend this piece in Chicago Review, “Small Press Economies: A Dialogue” by Hilary Plum and Matvei Yankelevich. They call on indie bookstores, review outlets, and distributors to stop disadvantaging small press books in their economic models and attention. I can attest that these barriers are very real.

HP: There’s a failure to understand small press and indie status as a political status and responsibility. For example, look at IndieBound, an organization that represents independent booksellers across the US. They promote a short list of new books every month, selected by indie bookstore staff—a coveted honor that can help launch a book nationally. Understandably, indie bookstores and sites like IndieBound emphasize the importance of independence: you should buy from the brick-and-mortar, rather than from Amazon, and support local community and economy. You should make a little sacrifice on price to protect something you’d miss if it were gone.

But the vast majority of the books IndieBound promotes and celebrates are published by the Big Five. The same is true at too many indie brick-and-mortars. Their uplift of independent, noncorporate business stops at the door—they ask you to buy indie and pay more, but that’s largely not what they do.

MY: So how is that store serving its readers? If you’re a reader and small press books aren’t on the shelf, you’re going to buy what’s on offer. But let’s say you’re into locally and responsibly farmed food and your co-op only carries Cal-Organic, wouldn’t you be concerned?

HP: If you don’t support local farmers, they disappear. People understand that and get why they should buy produce at the farmers market. What’s keeping readers from supporting small presses, and the diverse communities they serve, in similar terms?

MY: It seems to me they can’t see it that way because those presses are hidden from view by structural and economic barriers. On either side of the barriers, institutions, corporations, and small presses themselves often pretend these barriers don’t exist—they’re normalized by the market. Very few literary consumers know that their beloved local indie bookstore is (with very few exceptions) beholden to corporate distributors. Few can imagine what’s missing from those shelves and therefore from their potential reading lives. What’s missing is countless titles from 400 SPD presses, and who knows how many others that don’t have distribution at all.

Two Poems by Perry Brass

Prolific gay novelist Perry Brass’s books include Trial by Night, King of Angels, and the self-help volume The Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love. This spring, he will be collaborating with my friend John Ollom on a poetry and dance performance entitled “Threads” at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. (Stay tuned for ticketing info.) Perry has kindly allowed me to reprint two of his new poems below.

I Will Ask Mike Pence to Kiss Me

I know it. I know it. That face
blank as the moon excites me,
makes me feel all hard
inside. He is such an Eagle Scout,
such a serious contender for
the face of crime control.
He looks so grave, so sober,
like Daddy as an undertaker
that somebody needs to juice him up,
lighten his loafers, make him glow,
make him show a little pulse,
make him show he’s got jism
at his fingertips. So,
I will volunteer my time,
just to get Mike off his pedestal,
that one eons lower than his
former boss’s,
the one whitewashed in Indiana, the
one presented to him by the American
Legion, the Kiwanis Club, the Rotarians,
and the K. of C. The one
he’s glued to by Alien tape. OK,
I will unglue him. Undo him
perhaps. Just you wait, Mike.
Just you wait. Kiss me!

****

O’Shae

You were killed barechested at
at a gas station
in Brooklyn by a kid who didn’t
like tall black men dancing
at night, with the light stark

and cutting around them, making
deadly halos out of the silence
surrounding Beyoncé’s songs, that
blasted through time that stopped,
and confronted
an anger that had nothing to do
with your dance.

But with you, tall
and beautiful, articulate of body,
wise of eye, soft of mouth, long
fingers, wide shoulders, black chest,
and there you were
with the kid shooting you on his phone,
and you stepped up
into that void of hot summertime
while others watched until you
fell—
stuck, bleeding—and your friend
Otis held you and pressed the blood
with his hand until the ambulance
arrived—and we were all crying,
all of us there, all of us seeing,
your friends and ten siblings
and family and rows and rows
of marching people crying.

Only knowing when you died
at Maimonides Hospital that
a real part of us had known
death too, had felt it deep
in the rolling rivers
of your life
with strong hands carrying your body.

For O’Shae Sibley, murdered the night of July 29, 2023. His friend Otis Pena tried to stop the bleeding with his hand. 

January Bonus Links: Israel-Palestine

I have nothing to say about President Claudine Gay’s resignation except that Harvard is a terrible place and I feel sorry for anyone who works there.

Writer, AIDS activist, and historian Sarah Schulman was interviewed last month by Sally Tamarkin in the queer magazine THEM. Among other points, Schulman discussed what supporters of Palestinian human rights can learn from ACT UP about allowing differences of opinion in liberation movements. Schulman’s books include Israel/Palestine and the Queer International and Conflict Is Not Abuse.

In Israel/Palestine you talk about the “absurdities and promise” of politics of solidarity. What are your observations about solidarity politics today, in the 10-plus years since you wrote the book?

I think there’s a fake fantasy of solidarity that is like the rainbow: one of you, and one of you, and we’re all happy and we all look alike and we’re all together, and that’s really not what it is. It’s a fraught and constantly shifting series of relationships. And as much as it is a fantasy, it is also an absolute necessity because at least in the United States, change only comes from coalition, and if you’re out there on your own, you cannot transform the society…

I’m wondering if you think about this balance between being able to have plurality and connect around where we differ, but also making sure that we’re not sliding back into, “well, just some reforms would be okay,” if what we really want is liberation.

ACT UP had a radical democracy structure in which people were allowed to disagree and they could function in separate spheres as long as they adhered to the one-sentence statement of unity, which was “direct action to end the AIDS crisis.” If you were doing direct action to end the AIDS crisis, really you could do anything. And the key to ACT UP was that they did not try to force homogeneity of analysis or strategy. Instead, there was simultaneity. So it’s not about compromise, it’s about coexistence — or as the Palestinians call it, co-resistance.

Right now, there are people who want a ceasefire, and then there are people who want to end U.S. funding, and then there are people who want a one-state [solution], and then there are people who want a return to the Palestinian state. There are a lot of different wants, and you have to figure out where you are in this moment and go with what makes sense to you. It’s not about telling people who want to ceasefire that they’re wrong; that is not helpful because we do need to ceasefire. Nothing can happen as long as people continue to be murdered.

There are those of us who want to end the occupation and siege, and we do everything we can toward that goal. But it’s not about trying to take down the other positions that are on your spectrum. This is the great error of the left. And this is where a lot of people make a mistake about what they think activism is; they think that activism is about taking people down if you don’t have full agreement, and that is wrong. Activism is about opening a door that makes it possible for people to be effective where they’re at.

Lesbian-feminist playwright Carolyn Gage’s blog post “A Note To My Friends Who Are Frustrated With My Political Process” applies her expertise in trauma recovery to the heated debate about Gaza and the feelings of powerlessness it inspires. Everyone, from the richest university in America to the most obscure poetry journal, faces political pressure to make a public statement immediately, which is hardly conducive to what Buddhists call right speech–true, timely, compassionate, and beneficial.

In her concluding remarks in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe took up the question regarding abolition that was on so many white people’s lips, “What can I do?” This is what she wrote:

“But what can any individual do? Of that, every individual can judge. There is one thing that every individual can do—they can see to it that they feel right.” [her emphasis]

I find myself thinking about this challenge, and her emphasis, during the bombing and invasion of Gaza…

…the first thing that comes to me is to search out a wide range of perspectives on the situation. For me, that means to read the Arab world press and the Israeli press, and to read these publications across the right wing, moderate, and liberal spectrum. It means to seek out the opinions of the political leaders in my own country who have earned my respect for decades—and, sadly, they are a precious few.

It also means listening to my friends who are often expressing themselves with unfiltered rage, grief, and alarm and from every conceivable point of view. It means listening to friends who are triggered, who are in post-traumatic states. It means listening to friends who are absorbing and responding to horrific propaganda. It means listening to dissociation, demonization, dehumanization, projection, denial, and selective amnesia. It means maintaining compassion in the face of verbal abuse.  It means being wildly misunderstood and developing the algorithms for determining where, when, and how it might be productive to attempt to make myself understood.

Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is a social justice organizer and a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he teaches anthropology, urban education, and Middle Eastern studies. He has a very engaging YouTube channel where he gives pithy analysis of the Palestinian situation, as well as videos on current events and Black popular culture. I learned a lot from this 11-minute video on “5 Myths About Israel and Palestine”.

Karim Kattan, a Jerusalem-born French novelist, wrote about the silencing of Palestinian voices in an October 2023 essay in The Baffler, “At the Threshold of Humanity”.

Three weeks ago, in a world that was significantly different from today, I was preparing a keynote speech. I had been invited to talk about my work in Innsbruck, in Austria, at a conference on the French language across borders. Following the Hamas attack on October 7, I received a message from the organizers demanding that I share the title of my speech and that I “refrain from mentioning the current situation and leave the political dimension out of [my] talk to avoid any eruption.” I responded that I could not participate under these conditions, my whole practice and life being at stake in what is unfolding in my country. The organizer insisted on calling me so that she could explain that “the current situation”—a euphemism—seemed very confusing and complicated to her, possibly a minefield, and therefore they just wanted to make sure that what I said was appropriate. “I realize,” she added, “that you wouldn’t say anything horrific. I just want to make sure.”

I have been thinking about this conversation in the weeks since, about what it says of the way we Palestinians are considered as living, breathing, writing, political beings. That I did not go to a literary event is a minor, ridiculous consequence of what is happening. But it may suggest a frame, a shape, for that which I still struggle to name for fear it will come true—which is happening now in Gaza and in the West Bank.

“Let us,” the organizer suggested over the phone, “find a positive solution.” Yet the quandary she created was unsolvable. All possible solutions entailed my silence. The only positive solution available was for me not to exist as I am; to go to Innsbruck and pretend that my country was not being bombed, starved, and devastated. To go and pretend that my life is not defined, as it always has been, by apartheid and colonization. Even if I had wanted to comply with what she demanded, I had no idea how to do it: not only because I am personally affected, as is the very existence of my family and nation, but also because the novel I was to discuss takes place in Palestine…

…The organizer didn’t exactly reject my humanity. It was simply a very inconvenient fact for her that I was a human; she had to contend with it and was very uncomfortable. She suggested that we could talk about things such as “exile, memory, transmission, borders,” but, please, without mentioning Palestine. I wondered how I could talk about exile without mentioning the material cause of this exile, which is a history of occupation. I wondered what “memory” consisted of in this context, if not survival in spite of a concerted, century-long campaign to erase all our histories. I wondered, also, if she imagined that it was great fun for me to talk about depressing subjects. Believe me, I would rather talk about anything else if I could. But I cannot.

What she was requiring of me was to render every single complication of my political and intimate being palatable and harmless, to stop being a liability to her. These are the contradictions that we are expected, as Palestinians, to solve within ourselves: to exist without talking about why we exist. In a way, she wished, very politely, that I could, very politely, cease to exist. What was I supposed to utter, then, at Innsbruck, if not the consent of my own vanishing?

So what is happening in Gaza? According to Business Insider, summarizing a New York Times investigation, “AI discovered satellite images of craters in Gaza, evidence that Israel is bombing civilian areas it said would be safe” (Dec. 22): “The investigation found evidence that Israel bombed the area it said would be safe for civilians with devastating 2,000-pound bombs at least 200 times.”

Human Rights Watch says, “Starvation Used as Weapon of War in Gaza; Evidence Indicates Civilians Deliberately Denied Access to Food, Water”.

The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the occupied Gaza Strip, which is a war crime, Human Rights Watch said today. Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food, and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.

Since Hamas-led fighters attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, high-ranking Israeli officials, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Energy Minister Israel Katz have made public statements expressing their aim to deprive civilians in Gaza of food, water and fuel – statements reflecting a policy being carried out by Israeli forces. Other Israeli officials have publicly stated that humanitarian aid to Gaza would be conditioned either on the release of hostages unlawfully held by Hamas or Hamas’ destruction…

Prior to the current hostilities, 1.2 million of Gaza’s 2.2 million people were estimated to be facing acute food insecurity, and over 80 percent were reliant on humanitarian aid. Israel maintains overarching control over Gaza, including over the movement of people and goods, territorial waters, airspace, the infrastructure upon which Gaza relies, as well as the registry of the population. This leaves Gaza’s population, which Israel has subjected to an unlawful closure for 16 years, almost entirely dependent on Israel for access to fuel, electricity, medicine, food, and other essential commodities.

What are the Palestinians supposed to do?