Suheir Hammad. My fave poet right now. Hands down. Her book Breaking Poems is still rocking my world.
Just when you think the debacle over the Oxford Professorship couldn’t get worse…this happens. What a royal mess.
On a less literary note, at least Obama’s been doing lots of good work: trying to close Gitmo, signed bill for children’s healthcare, visited Europe and gave good speeches (First Lady also got a “hug,” which really was a pat on the back from Queen E), got a puppy for the girls, released torture memos, planted an organic garden at the white house, hosted poetry jam (which was surprising), made plans to revamp the out-dated old-fogey art collection at the WH, and perhaps the best of all — nominated Sonia Sotomayor for a seat on the Supreme Court! After eight grueling years of watching G. W. Bush fail and plunder, all so very apathetically, Obama’s dedication, intelligence, and tact thrills me to the core.
I’m hoping something will happen with “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” sometime in the near future. Looks like Prop 8’s bringing the civil rights movement back. ’bout time for a queer uprising. Speaking of which — if you haven’t seen the film Fall from Grace about Fred Phelps — it’s worth seeing. Not an uplifting film, but interesting nonetheless. Or, if you fear an hour and a half film about this very sad, sick, angry man might make you ill (which is completely understandable), here’s a 4 minute clip that offers a synopsis, not of the film but of the Topeka cult, which includes an Australian man flirting with one of Phelps hate-filled protesters. Best approach I’ve seen to dealing with these protesting terrorists yet. O, those Aussies. So clever and fun.
I’ve posted some pics of Deb Whistler’s art before but here are some images of her latest work. She’s amazing and this Alice in Wonderland project strikes me as wicked awesome. Alice’s been making quite a splash on the pop culture circuit lately, which makes these paper sculpture pieces all the more interesting. Deb’s most known for her drawing technique but as you can see here she plays with other forms. Still, her drawing background never seems to leave her work. Notice how the shadows become part of the piece itself. I love all the word play as well!
I’m lucky enough to have two of her works hanging in my home. They’re small pieces: one is a print from a much earlier period in her career while the other was extracted from her sketchbook. They look nothing like what she’s been doing in the last 5-6 years, but both were given to me by Deb and I adore having her work in my life.
My posting on this blog has been and I’m afraid must continue to be sporadic. You might want to set your RSS feeder to key in on new posts. (That’s for all 3 of my readers out there. ;P ) I am pretty content with the writing space here on wordpress and so hope to use it more regularly, but I can’t make any guarantees. Blame grad school. As for the picture above: it’s the end of the semester; my brain is fried. Deep fried. Hope everyone else out there in academia is surviving.
Keep doing that thing you do.
When I love someone, boy, I don’t hide it. Not one bit. And, most folks who know me know I have a certain affinity for work written by Carol Shields — which led me to spend this past weekend in Winnipeg at the Carol Shields Symposium on Women’s Writing: Festival of Voices.
While I won’t offer an in-depth summary of the conference events here on the blogosphere, I will say that I enjoyed going very much. Unlike conferences I’ve been to in recent years, it was non-hierarchical; sessions were open-ended, and there was a certain authenticity about the whole affair. Folks looked at my face first, rather than my chest or breasts so they can read my name tag and search for signs of recognition or prestige. Women-centered conferences have this completely different feel to them — which I like very much. While I don’t think this conference made me love Shields’ work more (although I hadn’t read her plays yet and I did get to hear bits from them — which was great), it did bring me to some questions about her work that I didn’t have before.
For instance, I was struck — really struck and puzzled — with the question: why Shields didn’t write more about class and racial relations in Canada? Why is there no attention to the aboriginal population and their struggles (particularly in Manitoba and its surrounding provinces)? What about the postcolonial question? I hate to be critical of one of my very favorite writers but I can’t get these sorts of questions out of my mind. Maybe staying in downtown Winnipeg made me overly aware of these things or maybe I’m just sensitive because I’ve become such an activist in my own work, but why ignore these very important and pressing issues?
After attending this conference I also know now that other ideas I’ve had about her work for some time now (and that I still haven’t addressed in my own writing) absolutely need to be discussed and addressed on a larger scale. I’m mainly referring to the problem of her ghettoization as a white Western woman writer (which I’m now afraid is a peg-hole she in part made for herself by ignoring Canadian indigenous cultures). White woman writer or not, though, Shields’ ghettoization still remains a serious issue, if we find her work valuable enough to read and continue studying for centuries to come. Here are the problems: a.) only women tend to read her work b.) it’s described in tandem with domestic literature c.) she’s not read enough in the U.S. even though she was born in Chicago d.) she’s not anthologized enough — not nearly enough e.) most folks only read The Stone Diaries and very little else; true, it’s her best but she’s not a one-hitter by any means f.) she needs to be contextualized in reference to the larger picture of Canadian literature. I’m not sure how experts in this field define it, but all I’m going to say is: if both indigenous, colonialist, and post-colonialist literatures aren’t included in that category there’s some serious problems with our understanding of Canadian Lit.
The ethical reality of academia I’ve arrived at is this: regardless of what subject position(s) we inhabit, we must, must, push our ourselves and our consciousnesses beyond what we know or that knowledge with which we feel comfortable. If you inhabit a position of power, which you automatically do if you work inside the white towers of academia, you must begin to speak — even if you get it wrong at first — for those who can not yet do so for themselves. In part (for there are many reasons) this reflects part (as I’ve already said) of my affection for feminists labeled in alliance with the 2nd wave. I’m thinking of Gilbert and Gubar specifically here, though given more time I’m sure I could name others. G & G were accused of something similar to what I’m laying at Shields’ feet here. And, they got some serious criticism for it. I mean serious. I’d be a cave-woman in the Alps if I had to endure what they did. But, instead of curling up and dying, becoming a cave-woman, or a contemplative hermit cloistered away in an anchorhold (another one of my fantasies derived from my affection and admiration for Julian of Norwich) — no, instead of these alternatives — they kept on writing. And, if you pay close attention, which few have noticed, they DO address and try to correct those things they might have overlooked or not been conscious of in previous scholarly studies. They’re seriously engaged intellectuals. But returning my quandary about Shields — when I politely and sheepishly asked around about “the aboriginal question” in reference to Shields, well, the answers I got a.) seemed to be something that had never occurred to them before or b.) got dismissed because she’s a “white woman’s author” who didn’t want to stir up controversy. I never had the privilege of meeting Shields, but I’m 90% certain that wouldn’t have been her response. Like G & G, though certainly not the same, Shields also seemed, to me, to be a seriously engaged woman while she was living. To mimic Daisy Stone Goodwill Flett’s words “I am not at peace” at the end of The Stone Diaries — “I am not yet satisfied.”
There is always more to say, but I’ll stop there for now.
Below are some pics from the Carol Shields labyrinth memorial in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The labyrinth idea, for those of you not familiar with Sheilds’ work, comes from her exquisite novel Larry’s Party.
To prepare some notes on Adorno’s famous injunction “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” for teaching I went to Susan Gubar’s book Poetry After Auschwitz. I knew she derived her title in response to Adorno’s injunction so I was certain I could find at least a brief discussion of it in her introduction. After reading the intro I thumbed through the rest of this book and ended up re-reading her preface. Her obsession (her description, not mine) with quilting caught my attention more than it had before. While trekking through literature about the Shoah that no doubt must have conjured up thoughts about her family’s history with the Holocaust she found relief in the material handiwork of stitching together swatches of cloth into patterns. (See Gubar’s recent article in the Georgia Review for more on her family lineage and the Final Solution’s impact on Jewish women both before witnessing the Holocaust and after surviving it. It’s an excellent and exquisitely beautiful essay.) Puzzled by how quilting might relate to her writing about the Shoah and the collective trauma that it caused (and continues to cause) for not only Jewish victims, but also for family members witnessing the psychological pain that haunts survivors, Gubar asks herself:
“Did the innocence of fabric, the prettiness of color, and mindlessness of stitchery offer a kind of antidote to the shocking cruelty of the material I was handling as a scholar? Certainly, on the many nights when I understood myself to be falling into a nightmare about starving inmates shivering under surveillance towers, I would struggle in my sleep to instruct myself to think about quilts instead” (xvi).
Re-reading Gubar’s preface made me realize: it’s no accident that the last two posts that I’ve allowed myself to publish on this blog involve cooking and gardening instead of scholarly activity. It’s not because I haven’t been actively writing, reading, and thinking. I certainly have. But, the difficulty of the material with which I’ve been engaging has caused me to shrink away from public discourse about it. A few weeks ago while scanning through articles on the MLA bibliography I scarcely could keep my eyes from swelling up with tears. Reading about genocides, rape, incest, child abuse, physical torture, and other catastrophes, both national and personal, takes its toll. Studying theories about trauma oddly and simultaneously has been an intellectual comfort — a way to find a logical path to recovery beyond the senseless hatred, violence, and human desecration that I’ve been encountering day after day in my reading. Even with the comfort that intellectualizing trauma provides, it has taken me some time to come to write about experiences which I do not yet understand. Luckily (or perhaps unluckily) — I can’t decide which — incomprehensibility remains a key characteristic of trauma. It is shrouded in mystery, ghosts, vague recollections, flashbacks, night sweats, disembodied sensations, sleep paralysis, paralysis, and perhaps most devastatingly — unrepresentability.
How does one speak about the unspeakable? How does one write it down and make it known?
This conundrum that lies at the center of trauma studies begs us to delve into the unknown — to stretch our awareness of what it means to be human and to live in pain. Theologians and philosophers often argue: to be human is to live with pain. Yet when the pain of mere existence becomes so palatable that it can not slip into the unconscious or be ignored — how can we inscribe that experience? In The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry notes that pain has an unspeakable quality; it can not be expressed adequately in language. Torturers, in fact, have this goal in mind: “the ‘it’ in ‘Get it out of him’ refers not just to a piece of information but to the capacity for speech itself” (49). Time and time again, however, victims of a wide variety of traumas do retain their ability to speak about their experiences — but not without some affect on their authorship and the ability to articulate their own traumatic narrative.
Studying trauma means thinking about the edges of authorship; the things that cannot or will not be authored and why. Even when narratives do get inscribed they very well may be riddled with anxiety, uncertainty, apologies, censorship, and omissions. Are these effacements an unconscious effort to eradicate the self? From the page first then later life itself? Is it an act of suicide and if so how do victims of trauma find ways to put words down on paper instead of wrapping them around their necks? Furthermore, how might traumas linked to specific identities — like queer, lesbian, or woman, for example — impact authorship differently?
Yes, I have a garden now. Nothing fancy but I am enjoying it very much. Hello, Spring!
A few pictures of the quiche I made last week:
This easily wins out as the best quiche I’ve ever made. Like my grandma, I’ve taken to making up my own recipes:
-Use frozen pie crust (I’ve not yet mastered the art of making breads)
-Thaw the crust, then puncture the bottom gently with a fork so it won’t puff up, brush lightly with an egg wash, and bake until the crust is cooked (takes about 5 minutes)
-cook chopped bacon then remove from the pan when crisp (afraid I can’t resist the saltiness, but you can easily leave this out to meet particular dietary needs.)
-after draining the bacon fat out of the pan saute a thinly chopped yellow onion, garlic, and fresh locally grown spinach until everything cooks thoroughly. Add garlic late so it won’t burn or brown.
-beat 6 eggs with half a cup of heavy cream in a separate bowl
-season everything with kosher salt and black pepper
-add bacon, onions, garlic, spinach, and about 8oz of grated swiss cheese into the custard mixture
-pour into the pie shell and bake for 35-40 minutes at 350 degrees.
Viola!
