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Showing posts with label Los Angeles Review of Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Los Angeles Review of Books. Show all posts
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Writing Sex: Garth Greenwell
WRITING SEX is a series of short interviews with contemporary writers who are breaking new ground in writing about sex and sexuality. Sometimes ribald but always smart, these writers push the limits of our ability to imagine what sex is, what it means, and what it could be.
HOST: Jonathan Alexander, Senior Editor at LARB and Chancellor’s Professor of English and Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine http://www.the-blank-page.com
FIRST SEASON
Garth Greenwell is the author, most recently, of Cleanness.
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from Los Angeles Review of Books https://bit.ly/31nyLX7
Unlearning a White American Dream: On Meredith Talusan’s “Fairest”
BORN AN ALBINO BOY in the Philippines, Meredith Talusan always had a knotty relationship with gender, race, and sexuality. Her debut memoir, Fairest, recounts her experience as white-passing and transgender in the Philippines and the United States, her movement from a turbulent family life to an arrival in the United States permeated by the power of whiteness to the unveiling of a gender-bending emotional landscape.
A founding editor of them. — Condé Nast’s LGBTQ+ publication — and an award-winning journalist, Meredith Talusan structures her memoir into loosely chronological sections: childhood, Harvard, romance, and independence. At the book’s outset, Talusan goes back to Harvard for an undergraduate reunion, an experience that makes clear the whiteness of the Harvard community and how the institutional structure of that whiteness hovered even on the outskirts of the social sphere. Now fully transitioned and comfortable in herself, Talusan engages with the people who knew her under a different name:
The words “you look the same” lingered in my mind, and I wondered whether I could imagine myself with a man’s face, knowing that for many years now, I only saw a woman’s face when I looked in the mirror, and it had taken so much sacrifice to bring that reflection into being.
She’ll come back to this mirror, and each time the mirror would tell her something new about herself. The mirror, stand-in for the gaze of others and the gaze she places onto herself, orbits Talusan’s experience of difference. The author is well versed in juggling competing feelings of sameness and difference. In her first memories of life in the Philippines, Talusan tactfully examines her experience growing up with white skin and blond hair in a place where such an appearance made her stand out as a Western ideal. “Those other kids aren’t white like you,” says her Nanay Coro. “And when she said white, puti, I could tell she also meant beautiful, intelligent, better, more special.” Born anak araw — the Tagalog word for albino, which the author translates as “sun child” — Talusan’s whiteness set her up for greatness abroad while fixing her in a comforting and unsettled displacement in her hometown. As a young boy, Talusan knew she was meant to go overseas to the United States and make a life there: “Nanay Coro told me that as soon as she held me in her arms, she was sure I was a blessing. She refused to allow anyone to talk to me any other way, especially because I was destined to live in America, the richest of countries.”
It’s this whiteness that enabled Talusan to become a child star cast on a prominent television show. She spent countless hours watching television shows where she learned to mimic white masculinity and perform a racial identity that differed from hers, but that appeared natural to the unknowing observer. Performing whiteness was a full-time job and was the form through which Talusan could imagine herself as not merely different, but as exceptional.
It took years to convince myself that I was not the aberration other people wanted me to be, but was instead practically the same as the Americans I watched on TV. […] America began to form itself on the other side of my mirror with a version of me inside it. I began to see a white American boy in my reflection, even as I was a Filipino anak araw in my daily life. […] The mirror became a bridge toward the wondrous place I was destined to inhabit, a fantasy that my white skin made real.
But it isn’t until Talusan’s family decides to make the move to the United States that the author truly realizes her place within the American imaginary she had spent years creating. When she moves to Los Angeles in 1990, Talusan begins to negotiate the gap between expectation and reality. In the city that produces the global vision of American identity, Talusan comes to understand the gap between the image of life in the United States and its reality, realizing that she’d left behind the variety of the Philippines for a place where everything was more and more the same.
I came from a place with varied shapes, patterns, and colors wherever I looked, a culture and history I knew. But this place seemed devoid of distinctiveness; everything looked so similar, a variation of the same mold, be it the roads or houses, even the cloudless sky.
Unfortunately, these are the scant moments that address Talusan’s adjustment to life in Los Angeles, as the book quickly skips over those three years. However, the author gives readers a sense of how the above complications would inform a new relationship to whiteness and sexuality at Harvard.
At university, Talusan picks up her story at her discovery, among countless other things, of the possibilities of gay and lesbian studies, the advent of queer theory in academia, and the liberatory textures of homoerotic language. In class with D. A. Miller, Talusan grapples with the stakes of coming out of the closet as a gay man. “I had promised myself I would come out of the closet as soon as I got to college,” Talusan explains, “but there was still a gigantic part of me that was invested in being seen as someone whose life was unassailable.” At the same time, Talusan sees early 1990s AIDS activism firsthand, participating in kiss-ins and protests for rights and justice. As these two realities fuel her studies, she also enjoys what her white-passing skin makes available for her in sexual encounters and friendships. “[F]or someone like me, whose whiteness was literally skin deep, who did not have any actual European ancestry, to be perceived as white could only mean that whiteness is nothing more than an illusion,” Talusan reflects.
Thinking whiteness as illusion, Talusan plays with what passing means as subversion and limit. How far can she assimilate in a white-dominated space? In a queer space? And, on the flip side, how far can she reclaim her Filipino identity? “[W]herever I was, I was only a shell of myself. I was already a shell when people thought I was white,” she observes, “but even if someone could tell I was Asian, they couldn’t see the life I led, the struggle it took to come to America and be the person I became. What they saw was a fetish in the most basic sense.” Neither at home in the white space of academia nor in her own body, Talusan must grapple with a fear of being discovered and discredited for her complexity.
I submitted myself so completely to Harvard’s norms, ones that were defined by centuries of white elitism, that over time, the distinction between who I was — a Filipino person who looked, sounded, and acted white — and a person who was actually white became more and more uncertain, even to myself. Yet my difference continued to burn inside me, as I wondered constantly whether people could tell I wasn’t white and whether they’d judge me inferior if they found out I was Filipino.
The fear of discovery propels the narrative of Talusan’s journey and her search for love and safety. It’s in Ralph Wedgwood, a British baronet-turned-philosopher who introduces her to academia’s high ranks at the time, that Talusan “finds home.” Talusan writes of their deep passion for one another, their mutual love of philosophical questions, and the experience of building an open relationship. But despite such passion, Talusan feels something else at the precipice of expression. As she develops feelings for Richard, a man who works in the building where she is taking a photography class, she realizes that these feelings came from the woman inside her; that she loves Richard as a woman even as she loves Ralph as a man. “I didn’t notice the moment when, for the first time, I fantasized about being a woman with a man who was real. I wasn’t in love with two people. I was in love as two people.”
Once Talusan realizes this, she begins to experiment with gender. As part of a photography project, she decides to only wear women’s clothes and hone her ability to pass in almost all social situations as a woman. This experiment revealed itself as the manifestation of a personal truth and beauty that she had never previously allowed to surface. She writes, “I didn’t always feel that the woman’s voice inside of me was benevolent. Released after a lifetime of hibernation, she could be selfish and rapacious, able to justify any action through the sheer enormity of her desires.” Upon realizing the force of her newfound identity, Talusan engages in an unapologetic discovery of the self that sees no limits.
As it plunges into the complexities of how race is woven into sexuality and gender, Fairest attests to an inexhaustible performativity of identity. Talusan masterfully traces the narrative of her life, from the departure from and sporadic return to her homeland to the myth of an American Dream that only requires dreamers to sustain its false reality, to the heartbreaks that let her revel in her idiosyncratic uniqueness, to the transgressive and gender-bending art practices she developed at Harvard and beyond.
I’d read that each snowflake had a crystalline pattern all its own, but to me it just looked like a delicate white circle tinted blue, in contrast to the pinkish hue of my skin. […] I felt a tinge of self-pity for being blind to the uniqueness of snowflakes but consoled myself with my singular perspective, how snow to me could only mean a gathering of entities that were all alike.
Ultimately, Fairest rejects the prescriptive qualities of the gender/sex system and functions as a rallying cry for whiteness to be rethought of as a blank canvas, as a snowflake.
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from Los Angeles Review of Books https://bit.ly/3hrS1by
Posthuman Fascism
OVER THE PAST several years, if not decades, ghosts of fascism have escaped their 20th-century crypts and come to haunt our present. With the global COVID-19 pandemic, however, we face the prospect of our “Reichstag Fire” moment. The fire was an arson attack on the German legislature exactly four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor, allegedly carried out by Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist. The Nazis immediately claimed that the fire was the result of a communist plot and it became the pretext for their seizure of power and total coordination of the state. As was recently pointed out by The Economist, close to a dozen states, from Azerbaijan to Togo, have already used the pandemic to arrogate more power to themselves. Indeed, this development has been particularly visible in Washington, Budapest, and Delhi.
Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, having previously curtailed the autonomy of the courts, has essentially suspended the legislative branch of government until he sees fit, eliminating in the process the key liberal-democratic principle of institutional limits on executive authority — he now rules by decree. The RSS in India — the quasi-fascist Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) force behind Modi — has, in a classically fascistic move, characterized its Islamic “enemy” as the abject carrier of the COVID-19 virus. The hashtags “CoronaJihad” and “BioJihad” have proliferated via Twitter, as Jason Stanley and Federico Finchelstein have recently indicated via Indian journalist Rana Ayyub. The targeting of Muslims comes in the aftermath, of course, of the unconstitutional annexation of Kashmir and changes to the Citizenship Act that explicitly and unapologetically discriminate against this oppressed and reviled minority community. And, in response to uprisings that were sparked by the executions of three Black people by the police or ex-police officers, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, Trump has responded in a characteristically heavy-handed way. Presenting himself as the law-and-order president, he has quoted late racist Miami Police Chief Walter Headley (“when the looting starts the shooting starts”) and has told state governors that protestors must be “dominated.” He has also called on the military to quell the protests, though it has, to date, demurred. Perhaps the defining photo of his presidency will be the image of him outside of St. John’s Episcopal Church holding up a Bible after tear-gassing protestors. Perhaps the ghosts of fascism are now materializing in the “land of the free.”
Be this all as it may, one must always, nevertheless, be careful when using the word “fascism.” The term is often used so indiscriminately — especially on the left — to vilify one’s political opponents that it is in continual danger of losing all meaning. In what sense, then, can we say that what we are witnessing throughout the globe is the reemergence of fascism? Writing in the pages of the New Left Review two years ago, Dylan Riley argued that if we compare 20th-century fascism with contemporary authoritarians such as Trump across four axes (geopolitical context, the relation between class and nation, economic crisis, and the character of civil society and political parties) there is no persuasive evidence that what we are confronted with today is anything approaching fascism. Yet as Samir Amin perceptively argued in 2014, fascism does not have to entirely conform to the 20th-century mold and may be simply understood as comprising two essential elements. The first is that it is the response to the crisis of capitalism. The second is that it constitutes a categorical rejection of “democracy” by way of an appeal to collective identities — often condensed in the figure of a “strong” leader — tied to a notion of the “people.”
The question of the relationship between fascisms past and present has received many different and contested answers. Yet in addressing this question, too few have considered Aimé Césaire’s theory of endocolonialism, or the idea that fascism represents the application of modern European techniques of colonial domination to Europe itself (important exceptions are Hannah Arendt and Enzo Traverso). If we look at the present through that lens, we see how contemporary fascism is grounded in extractivism, and not anti-humanism but post-humanism. Anti-humanism refers to the way in which 20th-century fascism was geared toward, among other things, rolling back the universalist legacy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Contemporary fascism, in contrast, is based on a “post-humanism” insofar as it is based upon the seeming obsolescence and disposability of entire categories of persons. The present COVID-19 pandemic makes this imminently clear and police murders of Black people drive the point home with particular force.
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Present-day fascism takes refuge in the past as such: in a supposedly “great” America before the Civil Rights Act (if not before the Civil War); in an authentic homeland of the Magyars in Hungary; and in a purified India for Hindus (Hindustan). In other words, in an era of its ecologically planned obsolescence, contemporary fascism does not even bother to make claims on the future. There is no new order to speak of, simply a tightening of the existing one ever more rooted in the extraction of resources from the earth and extraction of rent or interest from assets. Indeed, massive financial investments in oil and gas, which today have never looked so precarious, threaten to cancel the future outright by way of “locked-in climate change.” This brings us back to Césaire’s reflection on the deep connection between colonialism and fascism. Just as surplus labor time is extracted by capital from an increasingly internationalized, racialized, and precarious workforce, so too are resources forcibly extracted from the earth via continued forms of primitive accumulation (as Glen Coulthard argues in his book, Red Skin, White Masks). These processes disproportionately affect societies located in the Global South and Indigenous communities across the globe.
We see this even in the willingness of the Canadian state — that model of kumbaya “liberal multiculturalism” — to deploy the logic of the exception to permit ongoing large energy infrastructure projects (hydro, LNG, and bitumen) under conditions of a COVID-19 lockdown. Recalling the weaponization of disease in the earliest days of contact between Indigene and Colonizer, this exception puts already vulnerable Indigenous communities at serious risk of a health catastrophe. The term “endocolonialism” might appear to be inappropriate in the Canadian context which may seem, instead, more like a clear case of settler colonialism. However, what I wish to emphasize is an explicit undermining of aspects of the settler colonial state’s own legal norms — for example the use of an injunction to override the Supreme Court of Canada’s own decisions. In other words, what comes under attack is the rule of law and corresponding overreach of executive power. The same logic can be discerned in the Modi government’s resource-extraction agenda driving the war on India’s tribal peoples (Adivasis) in Chhattisgarh, as well as in Jair Bolsonaro’s iron-fisted developmental program in the Amazon basin.
Endocolonialism is evident in the militarized policing of Indigenous, anti-pipeline resistance movements at Standing Rock and in Wet’suwet’en territory, in British Columbia. As UBC Métis law professor Patricia Barkaskas has recently stated, commenting on a spate of anti-Indigenous police violence in Canada: “We have a long history as Indigenous people with the RCMP as the military arm of the Canadian state that is meant to eradicate us, and those histories don’t disappear.” Endocolonialism also, of course, becomes palpable in the complicity between the police and members of armed far-right militias out patrolling the streets during the ongoing protests against structural inequality, racism, and the over-policing of Black and Brown communities. This is another clear form of endocolonialism in which the repressive arm of the state, militarized police forces, and the national guard constitute literal armies of occupation in predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods.
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In contrast to its anti-human 20th-century form, contemporary “post-human” fascism centers on a deepening of resource extraction on the very precipice of massive deskilling of labor, and widespread automation and employment of robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence — the prospective obsolescence of humanity itself. Such a logic entails what, in Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe calls the “Becoming Black of the world,” the creation of “abandoned subjects”:
There are no more workers as such. There are only laboring nomads. If yesterday’s drama of the subject was exploitation by capital, the tragedy of the multitude today is that they are unable to be exploited at all. They are abandoned subjects, relegated to the role of a “superfluous humanity.”
This superfluousness now becomes clear as governments, by omission or commission amid the pandemic, put members of society deemed surplus, as well as workers, particularly people of color, at grave risk of contracting or even dying from the virus (a recent UCSF study conducted in San Francisco’s Mission District showed that 95 percent of positive cases were Latinx). Of course, it could be argued that human labor has never appeared more “essential” than in this historical moment. Yet, states are also showing themselves quite willing to put essential workers at such an extreme risk as to even die en masse for want of PPE, for example. MTA conductor and writer Sujatha Gidla reports her co-workers as saying “we are not essential, we are sacrificial.”
In what is taken to be a depiction of the aftermath of a nuclear war in Endgame, Samuel Beckett depicts the destruction of nature as taking a specific spatial configuration in which time itself has seemingly come to a standstill. He represents in unsentimental though often ribald terms the obsolescence of human beings, reduced as they are to mere existence, and subordinated to the inscrutable machinations of geopolitical forces beyond their understanding. The effects of the social division of labor are crippling: Hamm cannot stand; his servant, Clov, cannot sit. “Every man his specialty,” declares Hamm. Once they’ve outlived such social utility, Hamm’s parents are reduced, figuratively, to history’s dustbin, having been confined, literally, to garbage bins.
Today, this painfully calls to mind nursing homes, which have become funeral parlors for the living who await an end to the excruciating game of waiting. Amid this newest aspect of the ecological crisis, states seem prepared to sacrifice the elderly, the infirm, the poor, the indigent, Black and Brown, to the logic of the market. But its domination was always already discernible with each breathless press release from myriad corporate head offices of massive downsizings producing inevitable, dramatic rises in the prices of their shares. The Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, suggested to Tucker Carlson on Fox News that the elderly might consider sacrificing themselves for their grandchildren, which is to say for “the economy.” “Go and see is she dead,” Hamm directs Clov toward his mother. The capitalist market lives on death.
If we take as our definition the classic account of fascism as that revolutionary mass movement composed of an alliance between industrial capital and the petite bourgeoisie ranged against the working class and its political organizations, in the context of imperialist rivalries and capitalist crises of overproduction, then it is far from clear that what we face today can be described as “fascism.” But after the defeat and recomposition of organized labor, a certain ghost of fascism nonetheless continues to haunt our present: there remains precious little resistance to dead labor’s machinic extraction of surplus value from living. Such a defeat clears the way for redoubled colonization and endocolonization, racism, militarism, and, ultimately, war. This is the contemporary face of the ghost of fascism that seems to be quickly materializing.
Yet, as dire as the situation may be, there are hopeful signs of growing labor militancy, as was recently demonstrated by striking workers at Amazon, Instacart, Shipt, and Whole Foods on May Day, who protested what they considered to be their employers’ woefully inadequate responses to the pandemic. The recent uprisings in the United States and across the globe against inequality, systemic racism, and police brutality, particularly against Black and Indigenous people, suggest that meaningful change is afoot amid calls to defund the police. The global health emergency, moreover, has demonstrated that the integrity of societies can be indexed to the prosperity and well-being not of its most affluent but of its most indigent members. It has decisively shown that health care cannot be tied to conditions of employment but must be understood, as Bernie Sanders repeated over and over again in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, as a basic human right. It has highlighted the nihilistic illusions of the “possessive individualism” on which shifting sands of the entire neoliberal order is based. It has seriously revived, with great urgency, the discussion of the admittedly fraught and contested idea of universal basic income. The pandemic has doubtlessly constituted an opening for a further authoritarian consolidation of power built around extractivism, endocolonization, and the becoming superfluous of the human being but, at the same time, it has also opened space for imagining a very different kind of society. Which path we take will be a matter of organizing.
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To Ascend into Secrets: Speaking the Pandemic
Creation as plague of itself? / Perhaps a darkening that swallows its own darkening?
— Will Alexander
Negation is at the heart of testimony.
— Jean-François Lyotard (translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele)
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AROUND 80 DAYS after those of us who had the choice stopped leaving our homes, Larry Kramer died. It wasn’t of COVID-19, the shape-shifting malady that has spent 2020 with its foot on the throat of global humanity, but it was of pneumonia, that afflicted state in which COVID-19 finds its highest and most fatal expression. Kramer was a writer who’d gotten his break in 1969 adapting D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love for the movies. (Lawrence himself might have been alive to see it had he not died of tuberculosis decades earlier at 44.) But it was in fighting an epidemic that Kramer fully realized himself as an activist and artist.
There’s a scene in David France’s 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague that shows a 1991 meeting of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which Kramer co-founded. ACT UP, here four years into its struggle for a federal AIDS policy and access to experimental drugs, looks to be bobbing on the surface of chaos. Attendees, their faces frozen in a sadness that has survived the exhaustions of panic, call each other names, shout each other down. Suddenly, Kramer bolts upright and begins to holler. “Plague!” His voice booms and the room goes silent. “We are in the middle of a fucking plague. And you behave like this. Plague!”
Part of Kramer’s brilliance is that he understands — we see him, in this beleaguered and electric moment, understanding — the ancient power of that word. Plague. Few forces drive history by tarrying so intimately with us. Plague can hang in the air, root in our breath, run in our blood. For as strange as our lives have become, this experience, where a population hectically stays indoors to avoid a deadly illness, is in the long view a common one. We’re living a sliver of what many have lived. As others raced in a fog of confusion, we race in a fog of confusion. Now, as then, the smell of new bread wafts amid flourishing contagion.
Plague. The word comes from the Latin plaga, which can also mean “gash” or “misfortune.” Ultimately it’s from plangere, “to strike.” A Greek cognate means “sting”; in Russian, the same root becomes plakat’, “to cry.” Words are a little bit like viruses — they drift and settle and mutate, and when fed by the energy of something alive, they awaken and reproduce. “COVID-19” is a new word, and a stupid one. But “plague” knows to sting us in the soft nape of our history.
It’s not the only word that has trailed a ghostly freight of associations through our quarantine discourse. Take pandemic — “of all the people.” In ancient Greece, the goddess Aphrodite had two forms. Aphrodite Pandemos was the hot, terrestrial kind of love, and she contrasted with Aphrodite Urania, a more abstract, heavenly one. In Plato’s Symposium, Pausanias calls Aphrodite Pandemos “common and popular.” Commenting in the 15th century, Marsilio Ficino writes that she is “assigned to the World Soul […] for she proceeds from that power which is in the World Soul, and creates the power which produces all these inferior things and comes to rest in the matter of the world.”
The coincidence between the Greek name and the English word is apt. A pandemic changes the meaning of the space between people, the quality of being together or apart. Our profound connectedness is transmuted into the urgency of our staying separate, which makes some of our most powerful drives — love, affection, horniness — incoherent. Human beings don’t adjust to this easily. That’s Larry Kramer’s message as he dramatizes the strike of the plague: in a pandemic, we commingle uneasily with the matter of the world. To fight such a malady is to contest, on some level, the power of the World Soul.
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At first, I had hoped this essay would be about the writing of Will Alexander. In March 2020, it was arresting to read:
my existence now condoned by contagion
extracted from stars
from lowered luminosity
from lowered ranges of fire
Alexander’s poetry pulses with a kind of combinatorial negativism. Over and over, he sets off explosions at the synapses between thoughts, illuminating the switchboard of the unsayable that lives just under signification. It’s like the music from a dream of infinite dissensus, a politics of living with the dead and toward the eternal. In his “pointless rural fragment” The Contemporary Mind, Alexander diagnoses our current state as one of being “suffused with basic distraction due to allegiance to its own negation. […] The resulting amount being a mislaid being, bubonic, laced by curious indifference.” But when I sat down to start writing about this, I found myself completely preoccupied with the novel coronavirus that had just hit New York City.
At first, there were two books everyone seemed suddenly to be reading. One was Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which 10 youths take a staycation just outside Florence to avoid a recent spike of bubonic plague. All between 18 and 28, they meet in town, at the church of Santa Maria Novella. As many spent late March observing, the story feels surprisingly contemporary. In the plague-struck city, Boccaccio describes “how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbors was scarce found any that showed fellow-feeling for another.” The youths, meanwhile, sound Instagram-ready — seven women of “gentle manners, and a modest sprightliness” and three “debonair and chivalrous” men. When they get to the house, they even make a chore wheel, and immediately saunter through the garden threading leaves into little crowns for themselves. It’s right out of Kinfolk.
The other book everyone seemed to be reading was Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Here, too, we find flickers of what sounds surprisingly like the present. Thanks partly to “astrological conjurations,” Defoe writes, people were “overcome with delusions” in the months before the outbreak, and “they had a notion of the approach of a visitation.” Like the internet after it, Defoe’s London swells with hucksters selling “charms, philtres, exorcisms, amulets, and I know not what preparations, to fortify the body with them against the plague.” (Not that Defoe knew firsthand — he was five during the outbreak the book dramatizes.)
Defoe’s Journal also, a few times, compares London with Biblical Jerusalem. It happens first in reference to another topic that’s all too present in our contemporary conversations: population density. Defoe speculates that London was especially crowded following the end of the Civil War, much like Jerusalem during the Passover pilgrimage when the Romans came for Jesus.
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The Passover story details the Exodus, the pivotal event in the Jewish Bible. The very passingness of Defoe’s reference to it suggests its conceptual ubiquity — a primal scene for Jews of every tradition, and a controlling metaphor for much of Christianity. Modern rites of baptism reenact the ancient reenactments of it in the Jordan River; it’s the subject of Black American spirituals like “Wade in the Water” and “Go Down Moses”; in Cecil B. DeMille’s hands it offers the apotheosis of one strand in American cinema. It is, of course, also a plague narrative.
In the Biblical lore that precedes the Exodus, the Hebrews are a loose coalition of nomadic households who migrate to Egypt and become enslaved, enduring generations of servitude. Finally, a leader named Moses arises. While he’s of Hebrew descent, Moses is culturally Egyptian, as is his name — a word for “child” that occurs in other Egyptian names, like Ramesses and Thutmose. Fighting to liberate the Hebrews, Moses summons Ten Plagues in a narrative teeming with detail that takes on a stark verisimilitude in light of our present social withdrawal. Animals run wild through the streets. The weather makes people touchy. People look sick. People die. There’s blood and unrest.
Finally, the king is persuaded and the Hebrews are allowed to leave Egypt, emerging for the first time as a politically and ethnically distinct community, united by their worship of a single god named Yahweh. The first thing this god does is threaten them with more plague. He “will put none of these diseases upon you, which I have brought upon the Egyptians,” Yahweh tells his followers, only if “you will diligently hearken to the voice of your lord Yahweh, and will do that which is right in his sight.” Their god will “prove” them before finalizing the decision to spare them from plague. He then begins leading them through the desert, where, like the COVID-19 quarantees they seem to prefigure, they spend much of their time complaining about the food — for which their god punishes them with yet more plague.
In contemporary English, “manna from heaven” has a positive ring, but in the Bible, the Israelites hate it. The only thing they get to eat during their protracted escape, manna is a kind of whitish slime that settles on the ground each morning, and has to be painstakingly gathered, mixed with water, and cooked into little cakes, described variously as tasting like cream or honey. (At the start of the 19th century, the Swiss adventurer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt thought he’d found manna in western Sinai, when he learned that people gathered and ate what later turned out to be secretions from an insect called the tamarisk manna scale.) At one point in the Book of Numbers, the Israelites whine so loudly about missing the robust diet of the Egyptian toiling class that Yahweh promises to send them meat “until it come out at your nostrils and it be loathsome unto you.” But with “the flesh […] yet between their teeth,” Yahweh’s anger blazes forth, and he smacks the Hebrews with “a very great plague,” before renaming the place “Graves of Craving.” The Hebrew for “plague,” makah, like the Latin plaga, means literally “strike,” and plague is described as landing ba‘am, a compound word that has the same meaning as the Greek epidemios, “upon the people.”
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The early Hebrews were surrounded on two sides by larger forces of political and cultural dominance: Mesopotamians to the east and Egyptians to the west. In considering the Akkadian-language writing left behind by ancient Mesopotamian cultures, the Assyriologist Moudhy Al-Rashid notes that “in line with a worldview where events in the human sphere are shaped by what we would call supernatural forces, Akkadian medical texts make use of verbs that denote physical contact (‘to strike,’ ‘to hit,’ ‘to touch’) in describing how an agent, like a god, infects a person with an illness.” The Akkadian liptum, for instance, meaning “outbreak,” springs from the same root as the verb lapātum, “to touch” or “to attack” — not so different from the Latin plaga or the Hebrew makah. Plagues are also referred to as qat ilim, “the hand of the god,” and ukulti ilim, “the god’s devouring.” The god likeliest to do this devouring was Erra, “Lord of Plague and Carnage.”
If the attribution of a spreading disease to a god’s hunger seems primitive, this mostly reflects our own hang-ups around monotheism and the permeable membrane between metaphor and description. From an ancient perspective, the gods are indistinguishable from the natural and social phenomena they represent. Ancient languages famously tend to lack any word for “religion.” Mesopotamia’s physicians were agents of a sophisticated intellectual culture; they preserved and circulated knowledge about medical treatments, and, through language, they situated disease, making it legible as a subject of scholarly contemplation. The conceptual frames they used are no more arbitrary than our own. One thing we’re all learning lately is that a pandemic has its own personality; so do Erra, Yahweh, and countless beings like them.
Of course, if the experience of plague put Mesopotamians in mind of devouring gods, they took plenty of empirically based precautions, too. The Mari King Zimri-Lim, a contemporary of Hammurabi, wrote his wife a letter in the 18th century BCE, saying of one of her courtiers, “I have heard Nanna has a simmum.” The word can mean “contagious disease” or “abscess.” He continues:
Since she is often at the palace, it will infect the many women who are with her. Now give strict orders: No one is to drink from the cup she uses; no one is to sit on the seat she takes; no one is to lie on the bed she uses, lest it infect the many women who are with her. This is a very contagious infection.
The people on the Hebrews’ other side were no strangers to pestilence either. The paleoecologist Eva Panagiotakopulu has suggested bubonic plague may have gotten its start in Egypt; Egyptologist Wolfgang Helck found evidence there as early as the 16th century BCE. Ample other plagues are evident, too. Recently researchers found that an ancient grave in Thebes, near modern Luxor, had been opened up, nearly a millennium after claiming its primary occupants, and filled with quarantined corpses during the third-century Plague of St. Cyprian, named for the African bishop who documented it. (Cyprian’s deacon, Pontius of Carthage, would later remember the people of that city “shuddering, fleeing, shunning the contagion, impiously exposing their own friends…”)
No Egyptian plague is more fascinating than the one that followed the brief period of official monotheism established by the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV. Some scholars have speculated that this, too, may have been an early bubonic outbreak. Whatever it was, it followed one of the strangest developments in human intellectual history.
In the 14th century BCE, Amenhotep IV, a Theban king whose father had left big shoes, changed his name to Akhenaten and announced a slate of monumental reforms. He drastically altered the aesthetics of public art, abandoned his palace in Thebes to found a new desert capital called Akhetaten (near modern Amarna), and promulgated a new religion, monotheistically centered on the disk of the sun, named the Aten (the word originally means, simply, “disk”). In a radical shift that caused James Henry Breasted to declare him “the first individual in human history,” the king derived an entire religion from the sensory experience of the sun’s rays (“Your light makes eyes for everything that you create,” he wrote), jettisoning more than a thousand years of iconography and ritual. Everything we know suggests Akhenaten’s subjects experienced these reforms as a cataclysm. All that had been solid melted into air: priests defrocked, temples decommissioned, festivals — the central expressions of social and transcendent feeling in Egyptian communities — canceled. When Akhenaten died around 1336 BCE, the rollback of his reforms followed almost instantly. And as that was happening, a plague struck Egypt.
It’s possible that this pestilence represented the outbreak of a disease Akhenaten had been fighting to contain. His new religion pushed worship into open-air spaces, like unwalled platforms and roofless rooms. The Egyptologist Hans Goedicke speculated:
The departure from Thebes and the founding of a new capital at Amarna might very well be less an expression of religious zeal than of health protection. The spacious layout of Amarna, the limits of physical interaction, especially in the fancy quarters, can also be seen as a protective measure. The almost frantic desire for life and the somewhat morbid aestheticism, so dominant in the art of this period, fits well into this picture.
In his book Moses the Egyptian, Jan Assmann notes additionally the peculiar boundary markers of Akhenaten’s capital, which the king promises never to transgress, forming a kind of cordon sanitaire.
What is clear is that shortly after Akhenaten’s reign, an unchecked plague ravaged the entire region for two decades. It appears to have spread from Egyptian prisoners captured at a garrison in Mesopotamia by Hittite soldiers seeking vengeance for the disappearance of a prince named Zannanza. Egyptians called it “the Canaanite illness.” In fact the Egyptian word for Canaanite, ‘amu, may be borrowed from a Canaanite word for “people” — cousin to the Hebrew ‘am operative in the ba‘am (“upon the people”) of the Exodus passage above. In the incantations used to combat the plague, Egyptians seem to have made an effort to speak in terms the Canaanite deities afflicting them would understand. “Just as Seth fought against the sea,” one of the spells goes, “so will Seth fight against you, O Canaanite, so that you shall not enter into the son of such-and-such.” The Canaanite being addressed is, of course, not a person, but a maleficent spirit. The reference is to a legendary battle: on one side, the Canaanite god Ba’al, whom the Egyptians identified with their own chaos god Seth, and on other side Yam, the god of the sea.
In later years, when Canaan was the stronghold of another Semitic group, the Hebrews, it became commonplace to associate Yahweh with Seth. Assmann notes that, as late as the first century CE, the idea that Israelite belief constructed itself as a deliberate antipode to Egyptian paganism — a kind of negative syncretism — had grown so widely entrenched that the Roman historian Tacitus inaccurately believed Hebrews worshipped donkey statues “in ridicule of Amun,” the Egyptian god whom Akhenaten’s reforms had most violently displaced. This seems partly to reflect the frequent association of Seth, Egypt’s consummate antagonist, with donkeys. More to the point, Assmann argues, it testifies to the widespread sense that the two bodies of tradition were bound by a hostility so strong it seemed intrinsic, even definitive.
Assmann attempts to excavate the contours of the deep trauma wrought by the Canaanite illness in historical recollection. Egyptians continued to associate the entwined memories of monotheism and plague with horror and decimation, and sought to differentiate themselves sharply from their monotheist neighbors in Canaan. Noting Freud’s observation that repression is a tool by which painful memories are retained and stabilized, Assmann writes that Biblical monotheism builds “its crucial semantic elements” — which we continue to live among and fashion meaning out of today — “from a construction of the rejected other” that was Egyptian polytheism.
Paganism has a dialectical tendency to conceive of the world as a polyphonic interplay between the contrasting appetites of nature and sociality — a banquet cooked to the order of the gods’ various hungers. What prejudices may we have inherited from modes of thinking designed to stabilize and quarantine the memory of those grim feasts?
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As I write this, about how history blossoms from a wound in communal thinking, how its material surfaces — accidental as a shirtsleeve, relevant as a brick — spread the mutating legacy of an otherwise vanished catastrophe, Americans have taken to the streets, in defiance of widespread rioting by police, to demand an end to the racism enthroned at the highest levels of official power in our country. We can add to these demonstrators’ courage their willing likely exposure to the virus we’ve all been working to starve.
Will Alexander writes later in The Contemporary Mind, after noting “the very shadow of colonized regression that hangs over the populace,” that “poetry by its very nature destabilizes these particular externalities by delving into the instantaneous through blinding salvo from the un-nameable.”
Jack D. Forbes has written about “the disease of aggression against other living things” partly in Ojibwe terms: “I call it cannibalism […] But whatever we call it, this disease, this wétiko (cannibal) psychosis, is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man.” Forbes foregrounds the concrete, literal reality of this traditional American diagnosis, demonstrating that the tendency to sequester its implications in the realm of metaphor is in fact a symptom of the disease itself. Only very sick people, he explains, would defend a way of life premised on the immiseration, the disposability, even the ingestion of so many others.
The liberation of metaphor seems to have been among Akhenaten’s crimes, too. Assmann shows in considerable detail that Akhenaten’s short-lived religion took rational perception as its starting point: “Mythical imagery is replaced by visible reality; the mythical concept of meaning is replaced by a physical concept of function and causality.”
If there is any cause for hope during the current quarantine — in which American elites have doubled down on their view of medical care as a luxury good to be purchased by the rich, and prominent reactionaries have rallied behind a caricature of viral containment as political cowardice — it may be in tracing the surprising, powerful change that can be driven by a crisis of human proximities.
In the news, President Symptom caterwauls about “the Chinese virus” and the need for soldiers to “dominate the streets.” What will be COVID-19’s Decameron, if we’re lucky enough to emerge with Decamerons? Will Alexander writes in A Cannibal Explains Himself to Himself, “Something eats us, something spontaneously de-ignites us and spirals us to the grave.” Later in the same piece, Alexander speaks of “a leakage only provisionally questioned at individual levels, and only once, within my reading recollection, remember having seen a few words that spoke of Egyptian national effort poised at transmuting the very nature of death.” Trapped as we are in a civilization that impels us to root for our own disposability, there can be no overstating the urgency of our finding another way to do language — one that seizes the power holding us at depraved angles from life and death, perhaps allowing us to “slip into the ellipsis of being in order to transmute forces so as to ascend into secrets that invigorate the beyond.”
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Ian Dreiblatt is a poet, translator, and musician who lives in Brooklyn. His book forget thee is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse next year.
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from Los Angeles Review of Books https://bit.ly/3hjMALS
Commerce and Politics at Sea
HOW CENTRAL IS SHIPPING to contemporary capitalism and trade? The introduction to Laleh Khalili’s new book, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, makes clear why focusing on maritime trade is no mere niche pursuit: 90 percent of the world’s goods travel by ship. Also, at the very outset, Khalili shows that, on the map of global trade today, it is China that takes center-stage as the factory of the world — and the oil that fuels China’s manufacturing derives primarily from the Arabian Peninsula.
Khalili focuses on the huge maritime infrastructures that have evolved in response to the internationalization of capital and the commodification of oil, with a specific focus on the Arabian Peninsula. The central thesis of her book is that “maritime transportation is not simply an enabling adjunct of trade but is central to the very fabric of global capitalism.” As she powerfully argues:
Maritime trade, logistics, and hydrocarbon transport are the clearest distillation of how global capitalism operates today. The maritime transport enterprise displays this tendency through its engineering of the lived environment: transforming “natural” features of the world into juridical ones, creating new spaces, structures and infrastructures that aim at (though rarely achieve) frictionless accumulation and circulation of capital; creating fictive commodities, financial fetishes, and ever more innovative forms of speculation; and creating racialised hierarchies of labour.
Reading the book certainly feels like an adventure at times. Khalili draws on sources as diverse as the India Office Records, the UK Maritime Museum archives, and the British Petroleum archives, among others, as well as newspapers, trade magazines, memoirs, and novels. She has visited most of the main cargo points of the Arabian Peninsula and has traveled on two different container ships. The book does drag at times — such as when Khalili describes the technical aspects of ship routes or procedures — but even those occasional dull passages are enlivened by Khalili’s sharp, clear prose.
The book is filled with interesting insights. Consider, for example, Khalili’s concise exposition of the fraught history of the Suez Canal, which was constructed by Egyptian peasants pressed into corvée labor, and which allowed Britain to consolidate power over its Asian colonies. The canal became the preferred route for Europeans regularly traveling to India, among them British colonial officials and military officers. Moreover, the Suez Canal also gave Britain the upper hand when it came to Egypt. For example, when the loans borrowed to finance the construction of the canal came due, “the British used the Egyptian debt along with the ‘threat’ of [a] Urabi revolt to occupy the country militarily. In so doing, Britain secured its hold over the entirety of the route to India.”
Khalili highlights the widespread incursion of financial imperatives. Alongside the possibility of speculating on agricultural or energy commodities, traders also speculate on the future price of sea routes, using an index that tracks the specific costs of freight on a given route. Another fascinating discussion deals with the weaponization of “legal apparatuses, doctrines, and rules” and the associated strategic maneuvering involved in the protection of alien property overseas — a discussion that serves as a backdrop for an analysis of maritime arbitration cases. As Khalili argues:
The expropriations of foreign property that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Mexican nationalization of foreign petroleum companies in 1938 provided the impetus in Western Europe and North America to develop complex legal apparatuses, doctrines and rules to protect the alien property of North American and European investors and firms.
The postwar wave of decolonization intensified this imperative, as newly decolonized states staked claims to their usurped national possessions. A lesson was clearly learned from Mexico’s nationalization of oil, since many of the attempts to alter the terms of existing contracts were obstructed by “stabilization clauses,” which were designed precisely to prevent future modifications.
An excellent and eye-opening discussion has to do with the calculated use of flags on ships, which confer what Khalili calls a “quantum of sovereignty.” Flying the flag of a particular country, however, is by no means a guarantee that the ship actually comes from that country. Using particular flags has often been motivated by strategic or economic considerations, some of them more profoundly dishonorable than others. For example, in the Indian Ocean in the 18th and 19th centuries, vessels of the British East India Company, in order to avoid confrontation with French privateers, flew the red Arab flag. In return, the Company allowed local merchants to sail under its own flag to lend them prestige and power. In another example, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, slaving ships from the Arabian Peninsula sometimes flew French flags in order to circumvent British maritime inspections.
Yet another shrewd discussion, unfortunately far too short, considers the effect of regional wars on maritime commerce in the Arabian Peninsula. Khalili shows, for example, how the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) effected a spatial transformation after the Beirut docks were burned down by the Phalange militia in 1975. Following this event, “each warlord set up his own port along the coast,” and the Beirut docks were replaced with “fifteen or so private ports.” This new arrangement had detrimental knock-on effects for the war-torn country, with shipping moving to ports in Syria, Greece, Cyprus, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Sinews of War and Trade offers an accessible yet sophisticated introduction to the historical, sociopolitical, and economic context of maritime trade in the Arabian Peninsula. Though the book is rather brief — just under 300 pages, excluding references — it nonetheless packs a powerful punch. It will be of value to readers and scholars interested in the field of maritime trade, the Arabian Peninsula, capitalism, labor relations, the interplay of war and commerce, and colonialism, among other topics.
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from Los Angeles Review of Books https://bit.ly/3gigT4g
French Connections: Hirokazu Kore-eda on The Truth; Joyce Zonana on Henri Bosco’s Malicroix
This week, Medaya speaks with acclaimed filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda about his new film, The Truth (La Vérité), starring French film screen legends Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche. Kore-eda discusses complicated family dynamics, the relationship between art and truth-telling and what brought him to France. In our second interview, Kate and Medaya are joined by scholar and translator Joyce Zonana, who discusses her translation of Henri Bosco’s 1946 novel Malicroix. This is the first time the French novel has been translated into English.
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from Los Angeles Review of Books https://bit.ly/2ZjH6Ke
Changing the Conversation: Laverne Cox and Sam Feder on Trans Representation
The new documentary Disclosure captures the history of trans representation in Hollywood and mainstream media, with particular attention to the ways in which racism and misogyny influence the portrayal of those who transgress society’s gender norms in order to live their truth. In a wide-ranging discussion, Director Sam Feder and Laverne Cox, star of Orange is the New Black, talk with Medaya and Eric about what has been gained in recent years as well as the challenges ahead as transgender stories, writers, directors, and performers take center stage.
Also, Percival Everett, author of Telephone, returns to recommend Laurence Sterne’s classic Tristam Shandy, as well as Michael Winterbottom’s recent film adaptation: Tristam Shady: A Cock and Bull Story.
The post Changing the Conversation: Laverne Cox and Sam Feder on Trans Representation appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
from Los Angeles Review of Books https://bit.ly/382hIf0
Wayne Koestenbaum’s Whirlwind of Wit & Wisdom
One surefire way to lift yourself out of the shelter-in-place doldrums is to engage with someone whose enthusiasm for life and literature is more infectious than any coronavirus. Wayne Koestenbaum joins Kate, Eric, and Daya to discuss his new collection of essays Figure it Out; what ensues is a conversation with exuberant inspirations at every turn. Share this one with your friends, it will renew their faith in living the literary life.
Also, Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings, returns to recommend two foreboding works of recent literature (as if to counterbalance Wayne’s optimism): C Pam Zhang’s novel How Much of These Hills is Gold; and Joyelle McSweeney’s new book of poetry Toxicon and Ariadne.
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from Los Angeles Review of Books https://bit.ly/2LGiEer
A Time Capsule of Queer LA: Tom of Finland & Circus of Books
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This week we bring you two tales of lore from the olden days of Queer LA. First, Kate, Daya, and Eric are joined by Sharp and Durk Dehner from the Tom of Finland Foundation to tell the story of the legendary gay artist Touko Valio Laaksonen, who immigrated to Los Angeles, on the occasion of Tom’s 100th birthday. Then, Rachel Mason drops by to talk about her documentary Circus of Books, which recently debuted on Netflix, about the legendary porn bookstore in Southern California that was owned and operated by Rachel’s parents.
This is the ninth episode in our series on LA and Southern California writers, artists and filmmakers. This episode of the LARB Radio Hour is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov. Any findings, opinions, or conclusions contained herein are not necessarily those of the California Arts Council.
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from Los Angeles Review of Books https://bit.ly/2Wl2Oep
It Was A Good Day: Talking the Rise of Gangsta Rap with Felicia Angeja Viator
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This week, we’re joined by Felicia Angeja Viator, author of To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America. Eric, Kate and Medaya talk with Felicia about the rise of gangsta rap in Los Angeles, the sounds and culture that defined the era, the artists and performers who rose to stardom, and how we still see the effects of that sound in music today.
Also, artist Harry Dodge, author of My Meteorite, returns to recommend Crudo A Novel by Olivia Laing
LISTEN TO LIVE AND DEFY PLAYLIST BELOW
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from Los Angeles Review of Books https://bit.ly/2RyXGBD
Here’s to Life with Tori Reid, Episode 02: Phylicia Rashad – What Makes Phylicia, Phylicia?
Here’s to Life with Tori Reid
Episode 02: Phylicia Rashad – What Makes Phylicia, Phylicia?
I am reunited with an icon, mentor and source of personal inspiration. In an unforgettable conversation, we explore what makes Phylicia, Phylicia, the sweetness of her childhood, love and marriage, self care with 40 years of meditation, what she’s grappled with, those special years on the Cosby Show, her film debut in Tim Reid’s Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored along with Al Freeman, Jr, and Paula Kelly, completing her narrating Academy Award–winning storyteller Kobe Bryant’s, the Wizenard Series, her directorial Broadway debut with “Blue”, a jazz play by playwright Charles Randolph-Wright, and so much more! Here’s to America’s Mom, Phylicia Rashad.
– Tori Reid
Credits:
Executive Producer: Patrick A. Howell
Producer: Tori Reid
Co-Producer and Head Audio Engineer: Will Broughton
Intro/Outro Recorded by Brian K. Jackson at Maven Soundz
Music:
Intro – “Consumer” from “The Year of 11 Project”
Outro – Produced by Stereo Mixtrumental
Logo Photography: © Bobby Holland / MPTV Images
Listen to Episode 1 Here
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from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2SMqsi8
Perseverance of Love: On Irvin Yalom’s “Becoming Myself”
[I]t followed me and made everything seem dark and dreary. My feeling of horror, instead of leaving me, was increasing.
“What nonsense!” I said to myself. “Why am I so dejected? What am I afraid of?” “You are afraid of me” — I heard the voice of Death — “I am here.”
— Leo Tolstoy
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ONE NIGHT, when Irvin Yalom was 14, his 46-year-old father suddenly developed such a severe chest pain that the family feared a heart attack. In her despair, young Irvin’s mother accused him of killing his father by being such a disobedient son. Yalom remembers waiting for a doctor, his 14-year-old self filled with horror, guilt, and anger. When, at 3:00 a.m., the doctor finally came, he let young Irvin listen through a stethoscope to his father’s strong heartbeat and assured the panicked boy that everything was going to be alright.
“Then and there I decided to be like him,” writes Yalom in his memoir Becoming Myself. He would dedicate his life to comforting those who, like his father, and like himself that night, were gripped by the anxiety of death and of guilt, overwhelmed by anger and incomprehension.
It was in medical school that Yalom started gravitating toward psychology among other medical fields. The study of the soul, he felt, could profit not only from a purely scientific approach, but also from the centuries-old (as well as contemporary) insights of writers and thinkers who, in their work, grappled with the same problems as any human being, except that they do it more intensely and more single-mindedly. Yalom came to combine his passion for therapy with an abiding interest in literature, particularly in those authors whose main preoccupation were existential problems. (This led him to the creation of his own approach often dubbed “existential therapy.”)
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In the place where I come from — Eastern Europe — people don’t hold much with psychotherapy. This is a consequence, most probably, of the intrusive, oppressive political regimes that reigned in that part of the world for most of the 20th century. To such a brutal intrusion, people responded by hiding their intimate thoughts and feelings from all except perhaps their closest friends. On top of that, the psychoanalytic schools in the region were squashed early on. Even though they’ve been revived over the last few decades, they are still not very popular: the infantilizing Freudian approach does not sit well with people who are unwilling to blame early life traumas for their present behavior. Their childhood, difficult as it may have been, often represents a tiny oasis of sanity in the midst of a crazed society. The home, unlike school, was free of ideology; it was the place where sometimes hard truths were spoken, such as the memories of Stalin’s terror. Many Russians have a tendency to idealize their parents, and many parents in Russia tend to never quite relinquish control over their adult children’s life. This proximity was often reinforced by a scarcity of housing, forcing two (often three) generations to live together in a small apartment. Psychotherapists — virtually strangers — would have a hard time making their patients trust them enough to voice complaints about the wounds inflicted on them by their parents.
Still, I have heard the name “Irvin Yalom” spoken by my Russian friends with admiration. Yalom, they say, looks to death, and not to infancy, as the main source of our inner troubles. He looks forward, not backward. We have to live bearing in mind our death, that “unfocused blur on the edge of vision,” that inevitable extinction that, in the words of Tolstoy, should not come, yet will always come. It intrigued me. Yet there is a second component of Yalom’s approach that is no less intriguing: his emphasis on authentically relating to others and on self-disclosure. On love, that is.
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For those less familiar with Irvin Yalom’s work, it should be noted that he is famous for two therapeutic breakthroughs. One is the realization that many problems in our life come from our inability to form authentic interpersonal relationships. This insight led Yalom to pioneer group therapy, in which participants analyze their relationships with, and their reaction to, other people in the group. Such groups thus become “laboratories” or “training grounds” where patients learn how to relate to those around them.
On one occasion, while leading such a group, Yalom stumbled upon what he would term “therapeutic self-disclosure,” as opposed to the traditional psychoanalytic stand of minimal self-disclosure, in which the analyst usually remains a blank for the duration of therapy, without even meeting the gaze of the patient on the couch. Yalom is still firmly convinced that the therapist’s openness and authenticity is of much greater help to the patient than a “correct” psychoanalytical interpretation.
For many years, Yalom led groups that consisted of people suffering from terminal cancer. This helped him make his second big breakthrough, which was the realization that the majority of our inner problems come from our unacknowledged dread of death. Sometimes he would ask a patient to draw a line symbolizing their life and then indicate the spot on the “line of life” where the present moment would be situated. This exercise helped the patient visualize the shortness of life and confront the horror that this realization inevitably triggers.
Yet even though the thought of death terrifies us, says Yalom, the consciousness of it also liberates us. Once we become aware of the finality of death and the fleetingness of life, we are stimulated to try to live our lives without regret. The thing that frightens us most, in Yalom’s opinion, is the impression that we haven’t lived our lives to the fullest, or that we have somehow wasted the time allotted to us. But it is never too late to turn one’s life around and live authentically, not even on the brink of death, as his work with terminally ill patients taught him.
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In Becoming Myself, Dr. Yalom admits:
[C]onfrontation with death would have to be the major focus of an existential approach to therapy. I believed this was because of the intensity and universality of our dread of death but […] I can’t dismiss the possibility that my view may have been unbalanced because of my own personal angst about death.
Reading his memoir is in itself therapeutic. By describing a life in relentless pursuit of learning and creativity — indeed, a life spent in the service of others — Yalom gives hope to the rest of us that life can be lived meaningfully and happily.
His book reads like the bittersweet meditation of a self-made man on a life well-lived. There is a photograph of his young parents, the immigrants who arrived to Ellis Island without any knowledge of English. They didn’t speak much of their life in the “old country,” and their son recognizes, with a tinge of melancholy, that most of his family history would remain forever unknown to him. There was the inevitable conflict: on the one hand, the embarrassment of the young, bookish son at his parents’ “ignorance,” and on the other, the parents’ inability to understand their son’s interests and ambitions, while supporting his education. Yalom talks about how much his mother’s demands and incomprehension both alienated and shaped him, and regrets not being closer with his father — a Jewish immigrant from a shtetl in the Russian Empire (now in Poland) who wrote poetry in his youth but resigned himself to the life of a shop-keeper in his new homeland. “Perhaps we failed one another,” writes Yalom, “he never inquired about my life or my work, and I never told him that I loved him.” Yet some of the most poetic pages of the memoir are dedicated to the memory of his father’s gentleness and beauty.
Early on, Yalom was drawn to frequenting the Washington Central Library (which became, as he puts it, his “second home”). His reading pattern was haphazard, and he regrets not having had a mentor. Yet he was exceptionally lucky in meeting his future wife, Marilyn, so early in his youth and learning so much from her. Marilyn, who became a famous scholar herself, was a passionate promoter of French language and culture and was responsible in part for Yalom’s turning to writers and philosophers of the past in order to deepen and expand his domain of psychology.
He describes the successive stages in his development as a therapist and as a writer, the author of not only what he calls “teaching novels,” but also of brilliant case studies in the tradition of Dr. Freud (brilliantly illustrated, in the field of neurology, by Dr. Sacks). This is not unlike Sherlock Holmes’s technique of uncovering mysteries. The genesis of the first collection of these stories from therapy, however, was far from cerebral. The inspiration for it came in the most unusual place, as Yalom relates in his memoir. While visiting Shanghai, he accidentally wandered into a beautiful, yet abandoned church. He saw a confessional booth:
After making certain I was alone, I did something I had always wanted to do: I slipped in and sat down in the priest’s seat! I thought of the generations of priests who had listened to confessions in this box and imagined all that they have heard — so much remorse, so much shame, so much guilt.
Sitting in the booth, Yalom felt envious of these priest’s therapeutic power inherent in their ability to give absolution and to make the sufferers feel forgiven. And then, he says, he slipped into a reverie and an entire plot of a story formed in his subconscious mind (“revealed itself”). He did not have any writing utensils on him, but this didn’t stop him: he found a stub of pencil in the church and recorded the plot on the blank pages of his own passport. The story would be the first in his Love’s Executioner case study collection. But the circumstances of that story’s birth — the author alone, in an abandoned church, in a confessional booth, thinking about forgiveness as a way to alleviate suffering — give a spiritual dimension to Yalom’s writing.
Why has the son of immigrants who wanted him to succeed in the new country, the supremely talented young man who could have chosen any field, dedicated his life to helping people confront death, the ultimate horror, and relate to each other with compassion? The silence of his parents on the subject of the old country, and what happened there, may have played a role. “[N]ever once did [my father] speak to me of the Holocaust,” says Yalom in his memoir, “or, for that matter, of anything else from the old country.” That silence was deafening considering that his father’s older sister perished in the Shoah along with her children, and so did the wife and the four children of Yalom’s Uncle Abe.
In the imaginary dialogue between young Irvin and older doctor Yalom, Irvin explains his parents’ silence by their desire to spare him the horror. The horror hit him later, however, when he saw a documentary on Nazi atrocities, and it never left him. The realization of the uniqueness and preciousness of human life, of its fragility and fleetingness, of the urgent imperative to talk to each other, to relate to each other, and to love each other before it is too late, has spurred Irvin Yalom into the creation of a distinctive body of work and of new paths in psychotherapy that help us persevere in love and work in the midst of loneliness and despair.
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Maria Rybakova is a Russian writer.
The post Perseverance of Love: On Irvin Yalom’s “Becoming Myself” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2Xr5UgX
Natasha Stagg’s Fashionworld Phantasmagoria
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Kate Wolf talks with “It Girl” Natasha Stagg about her new essay collection from Semiotexte: Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media 2011-19. Natasha explains overcoming her reluctance to move to NYC, how she landed in the fashion world – simultaneously at its center and on the periphery – and what she discovered there. This most-priveleged sphere in the capital of the world is just part of the scenery: where the old is new again until the moment of re-interpretation passes; the thrill of creativity is tangible, yet nothing to get excited about; and it’s most definitely post-Post-Modern yet pastiche, nostalgia, and appropriation remain the order of day. Telling tales of Late Capitalism in its interminable phase. The conversation also inspires Medaya Ocher, LARB’s Managing Editor, to reveal details of her previous life as a Parisian fashion photographer.
Also, Ariana Reines, author of the A Sand Book, returns to recommend two exceptional works of poetry, one old, one new: James Merrill’s National Book Award winning epic from the late 70s, The Changing Light at Sandover; and Edgar Garcia’s Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography.
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from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2WB0K1u
Susan Straight In the Country of Women
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The redemptive power of oral history is at the heart of Susan Straight’s new memoir, In The Country Of Women; and also in this installment of the LARB Radio Hour, the first in a special series featuring Los Angeles authors. As Susan relates the amazing stories of the women in her family from across many generations to host Kate Wolf, the spirit and character of these women is conjured back to life. Our troubled times are presaged in the tragedies and violence encountered by Susan’s ancestors; but the promise, not yet extinguished, of this blood-stained land shines through from these women of the past to their sisters in the present.
Also, filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, whose latest film is American Factory, return to recommend four books: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead; The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson; and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.
This is the first episode in our series on LA and Southern California writers, artists and filmmakers. This episode of the LARB Radio Hour is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov. Any findings, opinions, or conclusions contained herein are not necessarily those of the California Arts Council.
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from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2ZJpfhZ
Among the Believers: Ammon Bundy and America’s Armed Libertarian Right-Wing
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One of the most pressing issues facing American society is the rise of a radical anti-government right wing movement over the past few decades; and now, in particular, its relationship to President Trump. Author Anthony McCann goes right to heart of this movement in his new book Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff, the product of his first hand experience covering the Ammon Bundy-led occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in early 2016. In this illuminating conversation with co-hosts Kate Wolf, Eric Newman, and Medaya Ocher, McCann’s observations about the array of characters at the heart of this dramatic stand off in isolated rural America both confirm and dramatically deny expectations. What is clear is that this movement, for worse not for better, now has deep roots in our country. Yet McCann’s unflinching reporting points a way forward: nothing is to be gained by further isolation and vilification versus direct engagement with people, including with this troubled-but-fascinating lot. Also, Lyra Kilston returns to recommend Laila Lalami’s heralded 2014 novel, The Moor’s Account.
The post Among the Believers: Ammon Bundy and America’s Armed Libertarian Right-Wing appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2P1GuG9
Cabaret Dancer in Paris
BEHIND ITS UNASSUMING facade, Paradis Latin feels both as snug as a jewel box and as spacious as a cathedral. Red velvet hangings conceal a metal carcass that narrows toward the ceiling, creating an impression of infinite space. The theater, located a stone’s throw from Notre Dame, was designed by Gustave Eiffel, and its sublime proportions are reminiscent of his Tower. A few years ago, every major hotel and airport in Paris was dotted with colorful posters advertising this quintessential Parisian attraction, the world’s oldest cabaret theater. The posters featured a cancan dancer in a red feather headdress smiling beatifically over the raised ruffles of her skirt.
The dancer greeting the foreign visitors on the poster is a foreigner herself, and, at 40, she is the cabaret’s oldest serving troupe member. Kira has appeared on the stage of this art deco theater nearly every night for the past 19 years. On April 20 of this year, she took her last bow, marking the end of an era for her and for Paradis. Last August, in advance of her imminent departure, I tagged after Kira, hoping to get a peek into the clandestine life, both glamorous and squalid, of a Parisian cabaret dancer.
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Underneath Paradis Latin’s shiny semicircular portico, two portly gentlemen take perfunctory looks into ladies’ purses — a tribute to the citywide security alert. All dancers are supposed to arrive at 8:30 in the evening, but Kira sashays in at nine, with only 30 minutes left for makeup, warmup, and wardrobe. In person, Kira isn’t conventionally pretty. Her face, so radiant on the photograph, is drawn with tiredness. With a stretch of her neck, she meets the cabaret’s height requirement, though only barely, and for that reason rarely graces the front line, called glamour, which requires a taller stature and fuller breasts. But she possesses two qualities essential to an artiste: intelligent charm, which she can turn on and off on demand, and the ability to transform with makeup. When Kira emerges from the dressing room after seven minutes of frantic face-painting, she is unrecognizable. Her pearly smile lifts her tired face, exposing playful dimples; her smoky makeup lends color to her pale eyes, while fake eyelashes and eyeliner make them enormous; a push-up bra creates the illusion of cleavage. Alone among the dancers, Kira makes eye contact with individual guests during the show, eliciting grateful smiles. She appears to be no older than her much younger colleagues.
After an equally slapdash warmup — the rehearsal room with mirrors and barre has been claimed by the owner for private karate lessons, and the dancers look for nooks and corners where they can hold on to the wall — comes the call, “Tout le monde dans la scene,” and the dancers stampede onto the stage, while Kira runs in the opposite direction, back to the dressing room, to throw on the first costume of the night.
By the time the program begins and the lights go out, the guests are mostly done with their preordered meal and are attacking bottles of champagne. The champagne, no doubt, helps them to appreciate the revue, Paradis à la Folies, which, without a buzz, might disappoint; it is a mishmash of recycled numbers, and not the best ones. The clown drags his feet; the male dancers look jaded; the girls are of varying heights and not especially attractive. The trademark look for a showgirl is a blonde with a small nose and full mouth — the Brigitte Bardot type, very rare for France — but most of the dancers here have aquiline noses and thin lips. Ironically, the closest to the show’s ideal is Kira, whose upturned Slavic nose looks coquettish and doll-like from the seats. The best number, the cancan, requires cartwheels that half the troupe are too weary to perform — Kira’s feet don’t even leave the floor. Everyone, and Kira more than the others, appears to be in need of a vacation.
But she doesn’t get a vacation — she gets a second job. After the show, Kira quickly replaces her extra-long eyelashes with shorter ones, more suitable for smaller spaces, slips out of Paradis as inconspicuously as possible, and marches over to Aux Trois Mailletz — a famous subterranean cabaret, located five blocks away in the heart of the Latin Quarter. Her subdued manner is due to the fact that after 19 years of faithful service — 16 of them on a coveted permanent contract — she and Paradis Latin are at odds, to put it mildly, and her only contact with the theater’s director, whom she used to address as “my second father,” now occurs via lawyers and certified mail. Kira’s dream is to leave Paradis with a substantial severance package — theoretically possible, but, in practice, hardly achievable. This slow-boiling conflict, plus Kira’s additional income, are the cause of unpleasantness and jealousy among the dancers, toxic for such a cramped environment.
Kira’s second job isn’t just a financial necessity, although it certainly is that, given that her €60-per-night salary at Paradis hasn’t changed in all her years at the theater. (Indeed, in terms of pay, too little has changed since hungry prostitutes performed the first cancan for pennies nearly two centuries ago.) To survive the physical toll of this work, a performer requires some degree of professional satisfaction, some sense of camaraderie, some connection with the audience — something to help her crawl out of bed the next day and return to the snake pit of the dressing room. Kira’s second job, which is just as poorly paid, helps her to survive the first, at least emotionally.
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Until recently, the corner opposite Aux Trois Mailletz featured an authentic guillotine, a memento from the revolutionary days and part of a rival nightclub’s decor. Now it’s gone, along with the nightclub, to the Mailletz’s owner’s delight. Across the narrow street stands one of the oldest churches in Paris, Saint-Séverin, squat and ancient. Underneath it stretches a catacomb that houses the little cabaret. The aboveground part of the Mailletz is conventional enough: a cramped piano bar with rows of chairs under a canopy and a few mismatched tables inside. An upright piano in the back is circled at all times by mincing customers waiting to use the indescribably filthy bathrooms. A security guard doubles as a busboy, while a waiter serves as extra security; there is also a singer and a permanently positioned DEA agent. Downstairs, in the restaurant, is a different universe. There is a miniature bar, two kitchens, and a narrow room with low arched ceilings — originally a chapel, where criminals from the lower dungeon were dragged in for their last prayers. The room accommodates a small stage, a long common table strutting out like a runway, and a dozen tables along the roughhewn walls. The kitchen door bears a faded notice: “Performers are forbidden to pinch fruit!” — a response to an innocent tradition started years ago by Kira, who was famished after her performance at Paradis Latin.
The lower catacomb, officially used only by the personnel, is reachable by a spiral staircase of the most murderous design: no railings, slippery stone steps, and an extremely low ceiling that dips lower at unexpected places. The danger is enhanced by the rivulets of water that flow out of the faulty refrigerator. (Sometimes they are joined by leakage from the regularly clogged bathrooms.) Kira, who has to run up and down the steps in high heels all night, cheerfully lists the injuries she has sustained there. The steps lead to the dressing rooms: to the left, a doorless hole for women; to the right, former dungeon cells for men. The women’s dressing room is equipped with lockers, a tiny makeup table, two chairs, and a massive ash tray. Kira and the two singers, one African and one French, talk excitedly about the improvements made over the past 10 years. When they first came on, their dressing room had a cellophane drop ceiling to catch the leaking water, and, directly underneath it, a single bare light bulb. They used to wonder what would kill them first: flooding or electrocution. Complaining about work conditions didn’t help — whiners were fired mercilessly — so no one knows what induced the thrifty owner, M. Jacques, to introduce the life-saving changes. The local fauna, on the other hand, haven’t changed: rats and gigantic roaches with sharp teeth continue to proliferate. One such miniature crocodile crawled into Kira’s dance shoe and bit her during a performance; she didn’t know whether to faint or to scream, and was advised, coolly, that she didn’t need to worry about the infection unless “the little one” had been chewing on something HIV-infected.
Kira quickly exchanges kisses with the head waitress, who is also deputy director, the falsetto singer who was hired when the previous one got into a fistfight with the alto and several guests, and makes arrangements for her food and, more importantly, wine for the night. The house is two-thirds full — it’s August. The usual trio of tables — prostitutes, drug dealers, and narcos — is empty, and the feared M. Jacques is on vacation. The performers are wondering, sadly, whether they will get paid tonight. Kira makes her way downstairs to prepare mentally for the next six hours of work. In the owner’s absence, she can permit herself to skip a few numbers, but not to relax: the biggest curse of the catacomb is its thick limestone ceilings and walls that block sound — originally, the prisoners’ tortured screams. Kira’s ears have learned to identify the coming number from subtle vibrations, although sometimes she guesses wrong and has to scramble back to change costume after the song has already begun.
Over the course of the night, Kira makes 10 to 15 entrances with half a dozen costume changes. The numbers range from French to African to Israeli to Moroccan, depending on who is singing that night and what kind of special guests they have in the audience. Kira dances on the tiny stage, winding her way around the musicians, and on the common table, loudly tapping out the Russian standard “Kalinka” amid glasses and plates. On special nights — when the owner is watching, or the house is full, or the French Minister of Culture is in attendance — she makes an extra effort and performs her best numbers: the gypsy dance that features a spectacular back bend on the narrow table or the Russian dance with 180-degree leg swings over the guests’ heads. On regular nights, however, Kira keeps her performance minimal, being mindful of her torn ligaments and muscles. Around four in the morning, when the guests are beginning to leave, she dons her shiniest costume, sprinkles herself with gold powder, refreshes her makeup, and exerts her greatest effort of the night — to keep the party going. At full sparkle, she is irresistible, and when the guests return to their tables and continue to order, Kira gives a sigh of relief: her work is done. At half past five, having received her €120, she shuffles out, blinking at the pre-dawn light like a vampire, to wait for an overcrowded Uber pool.
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At home, in a studio so small that she has to open the door in order to lean over the bathroom sink, Kira tries to calm her adrenaline-addled nerves and contemplate the coming change: life without dancing. The backstage intrigues, the roaches, the adoring audience, the costumes, the makeup, the injuries, the argot of the dressing room, being on stage every night — everything that made her life what it was for the past 25 years is about to end, slip into the past, and what this means Kira cannot yet fully comprehend. For now, however, it is more important to catch a few hours of fitful sleep, rest her aching body, gain enough strength to survive the next night and all the nights that remain.
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The post Cabaret Dancer in Paris appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2WbC8PQ
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Does It Mean to Save a Neighborhood?’
By BY JACK D’ISIDORO, AARON ESPOSITO, JOHN WOO AND COREY SCHREPPEL from NYT Podcasts https://nyti.ms/3E5bF7T
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