Farewell, Octavia Butler

Even readers who don't like science fiction loved Octavia Butler's work. It was beautifully written, serious in its themes and politics, and bold in its imagination. Butler, 58, died Friday after falling on the walkway outside her house in a North Seattle suburb. She is irreplacable.

Two Cris Mazza books

Disability: A Novella

I first experienced Cris Mazza’s fiction over a decade ago when I read her novels Your Name Here and Exposed. Like much of her work from the 1990s, these gritty, explicit narratives demonstrate the intrinsic link between sex and humiliation, and I found them worthwhile reading, books that transmitted white-hot anger on behalf of women everywhere. Sexual politics continue to play a role in Mazza’s recent texts (which include the memoir Indigenous and the novel Homeland), but this is not always the dominant thematic focus. Instead, her newer work describes a fuller range of human experience, providing the reader with a richer variety of responses. Now, rather than anger, Mazza’s writing often conveys, in writer Elizabeth Searle’s words, “pitch-black compassion.” Mazza’s stunning recent novella, Disability perfectly fits this description; it is both edgy and empathic, a heartbreak with an attitude. Reading Disability is rather like watching an able-bodied caretaker bathe a debilitated person; both experiences painfully remind us of the human condition’s inherent frailty. Just published by FC2, an independent press dedicated to experimental fiction, Disability, Mazza’s 13th book, uses subtle experimentation with point of view as a conduit for its overarching theme: that all humanity is, at its essence, vulnerable and broken.

The point of view alternates between two main characters, Teri and Cleo, who work as caregivers in a state hospital for severely impaired children. Both characters’ narratives are relentlessly myopic and unflinchingly graphic, choices that could have backfired if made by a less capable writer than Mazza. In the hospital scenes, readers are given no relief from the pediatric residents’ physical helplessness, their urine, feces, and saliva, their twisted legs, seizures, and bedsores. Meanwhile, scenes outside the hospital offer no reprieve from the main characters’ emotional handicaps: Teri’s self-loathing and Cleo’s crippled self-esteem. Rather than create a claustrophobic experience for the reader, however, Mazza’s deft shifts between the characters’ thoughts, experiences and voices enable readers to understand the characters in ways the characters can’t. First, we see that both women are as deserving of the designation “disabled” as are the children in their care. Teri—a 31-year-old woman whose own child disavowed her—is so emotionally stunted that even her narrative is written in the truncated, disjointed shorthand found on medical charts. Cleo—who, at 22, desperately clings to a distant and punishing lover—has a narrative marked by self-conscious revisions, mirroring her disastrous self-image. Mazza is ever adroit in her use of dramatic irony, and the point of view also allows us to see how the women sublimate their experiences with rejection into steadfast loyalty toward the hospital’s mostly-abandoned children, a loyalty which culminates in their unpremeditated kidnap of Teri’s favorite resident.

Further, readers realize that none of the characters are more “disabled” than the systems they inhabit. The hospital’s residents are subjected to a money-seeking “therapy” program incommensurate with their needs; the caregivers make minimum-wage for maximum work; children are appropriated or abandoned, and everyone falls prey to others’ ineptitude, dishonesty, or cruelty. Within these flawed systems, the characters have two possible reactions to one another’s disabilities: they can exercise compassion or look away in disgust. Both Teri and Cleo show compassion for the children and each other, but react to their own brokenness with unmitigated disgust. One of the novella’s foremost accomplishments is its ability to enchant readers into feeling compassion for the characters that the characters don’t feel for themselves. More noteworthy still is that this novel is neither didactic nor moralizing, but a rigorously complex story whose plot ultimately reveals that compassion will sooner lead to loss than fulfillment. Naturally, Mazza fans will recognize loss as a principal outcome for many characters in her oeuvre, but Disability moves beyond the particulars of fictive characters and into a broader human context. This worldview is less grim than cathartic, however, and at the end of Disability, readers may feel more forgiving towards the pieces of us all that cannot be fixed, protected or saved.


Homeland
It's heartening to read a prolific writer whose work grows richer with each new publication. Thankfully, Mazza's customarily unsentimental characterization remains ruthlessly present in Homeland (Red Hen Press, 2004), but this novel also provides the reader with new gifts. Homeland's main character, Ronnie, evokes a reader's pathos. Her unwitting vulnerability and sexual naivete make her a rare figure among Mazza's sexually savvy main characters, rendering her psychological life even more mysterious than Mazza's usually complex protagonists. The story itself grapples brilliantly with themes of family legacy, filial obligation, and childhood guilt. On another level, the narrative also raises important metafictional questions. The novel's principal mystery involves the interface of narrative, truth, and memory, which subtly interrogates the meaning of narrative itself. Ultimately, the reader is left to question the power of narrative and its capacity to shape one's psyche. When the plot's main mystery is revealed, the reader may even wonder whether someone can really exist whose life remains unwritten.This is the rare novel. It offers both a feast of ideas and the immersing satisfaction of more "traditional" narrative elements. Mazza, however, is a terrifically talented writer whose fine work is anything but "traditional."

Don't get pregnant in South Dakota!

The night Bush got "re-elected," my friend Thao and I looked up how old (and presumably close to death or retirement) all the then-sitting members of the Supreme Court were. Because she was relatively young, we didn't worry about Sandra, the conservative judge who sometimes voted with the "liberals." It seemed, then, that the worst we could expect was for a conservative Chief Justice to replace the conservative Chief Justice. What a quaint worry that seems now in the face of 2 new regressive justices who will undoubtedly rule monstrously in upcoming suits over South Dakota's abortion laws.

On the day of Bush's second inauguration, which happened days before both the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and my birthday, I wrote this very bad (i.e., it is didactic doggerel) poem, which now, too, seems quaint in its anticipatory anxiety. Once again, this administration has astounded me by besting my worst fears.


Inaugural, Unwanted, January 2005

Complaints of cold at the Capitol.
The mezzo-soprano slated to sing "Bless this House"
after the inaugural address
frets, to NPR, that the cold may spoil
the song's singular high note.
NPR is quite the confessional today.
Now, an officer's wife, giddy-to-be-there, shivering
admits to having bought her dress at JC Penney.
Then the president's voice blights NPR
and my car, my commute, a blight
like a hundred-thousand police cars.

"Protect the unwanted," the president says.
The soprano's got nothing on Chief Justice Rehnquist
whose strange new mouth, a plastic-tube throat
swore the president in, new voice whistling
with unwanted saliva.
Unwanted, the president now calls these fetuses,
the euphemism a reminder that Rehnquist
will not live out these years.
"Protect the unwanted."
As though being unwanted
hurts anyone before the inaugural moment of life.

Unwanted is a homeless child or an ugly woman;
I was the first and now the second
and we are monstrous twins
etiolated by plastic-tube veins
in which our pulse is the tumult of police cars
sirening always the fear and threat of loss.
"Protect the unwanted."
In four days, my birthday will come,
In four days, the Capitol will fill again
as Roe vs. Wade turns exactly one year my junior.
One year, one thin membrane, such small obstacles
to saving our mothers and us the dooms
of one another.

The Capitol has become a carnival-house of sanctimony.
Four days from now, the red state voters
will paint red roses like pox on their cheeks and blight
the cold with placards and the megaphoned echo
"Protect the unwanted."
As if our mothers, at fifteen,
would have disposed of us for sport,
the way Scalia and Cheney kill ducks and elk,
the way the president kills Iraqis and soldiers and the officer
whose shivering wife now sits at the inaugural
in her JC Penney best.

America's 10% poverty rate

For more on what Bush has done for America:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1712965,00.html

Site of transgression

Remember the heady fun of learning Deconstructive theory? I learned it in college, in the 1990s, and I delighted, then, in fathoming my locus as the "site of transgression" in various binarisms. The site of transgression used to be the locus of the good guys: Experimental writers and Marxists and queers and misfits of all stripes. But "degeneracy" doesn't feel quite so benign now that the "construct" of morality has brought us into a collapse of civil rights. I guess it could be argued that Bush is the "site of transgression" between morality and immorality, the thread to pull to deconstruct the construct. But no one is pulling.

I have been stunned recently by the unmistakable tone of surprise in most American MSM reports about the Hamas victory in the recent Palestinian parliamentary elections. American journalists point out that, under Hamas, violence and terrorism may escalate in Palestinian regions while civil liberties and the respect of other nations' existence may diminish. They point out that secular Palestinians may find themselves doing a lot of self-policing in the newly stringently conservative religious climate. MSM American reporters make it sound as though this situation is a curiosity (that it's "other," if you will). Haven't they been watching our own country where all of these things are happening? In fact, if you look at the context of oppression that culminated in the recent Palestinian vote, it makes a lot more sense than the this country's citizens voting for the Bush regime.

I got to hug Congressman McDermott!

Thanks, Congressman McDermott!

Therapy is strange.

There is a concept in dance (not that I dance; I don't. In fact, even social dancing brings me feelings of profound humiliation) called "spotting" whereby you find a fixed point on the wall to look for while spinning. Supposedly, it keeps you from getting dizzy and reminds you where you are in space. This, too, is how therapy feels, or how it feels for me now that, for the past eight months, I've been seeing a therapist who is filled with goodness and light. But lately, I have been wondering whether an attachment to a therapist is more malign than I'd previously thought, whether it's based on narcissism, where the boundary between healthy and unhealthy narcissism lies. As a client, you can't *do* anything for a therapist (besides paying your bill); you can't offer favors or support, and what does it mean to attach to someone who only gives?

A Few Bad Apples?

When the media first published photos of prisoner abuse from Abu Gharib, mandarins characterized the complicit troops as "a few bad apples." Now that recent photos implicate CIA officials, perhaps the criticism will go where it belongs: On the tree. Prisoner abuse isn't the work of a few renegades; it's the natural extension of the tortuous culture of the Bush administration and America's new position as an "isolationist" Christian Military State.

Valentines in Jesusland

I work in a conservative town. You can almost feel the ideological Red State/Blue State divide once you reach its edges. In the parking lot at the school where I teach, many cars sport bumper stickers with slogans like, "Legalize Babies" and "Marriage= 1 Man + 1 Woman."

There is, however, a liberal contingent at my school and, for Valentine's Day, they'd decided to sponsor a domestic violence awareness program which, in part, would feature portions of Eve Ensler's play "The Vagina Monologues." As soon as flyers advertising this program had been hung, conservative students responded with their own posters which protested: "Boycott the Vagina Monologues" or "'V' is for 'valentine.'" Both shibboleths were underscored by the very strange sub-slogan: "Because men aren't monsters and REAL WOMEN look UP." Up? This is mystifying. Looking up in confidence and optimism? Looking up in admiration of men? Or could this protest against the Vagina Monologues possibly mean that real women look up, i.e., instead of down at their vaginas?

About a week before Valentine's Day, all the posters disappeared; presumably, the event got canceled.

He shoots people, too?

Much has been made of Vice President Dick Cheney's lack of military service during wartime and its paradoxical relationship to his ideological orientation as this country's biggest war-mongering hawk. Maybe if he'd actually served his time, he'd be a better shot today! Yesterday, while hunting with friends, Cheney "accidentally" shot attorney Harry Whittington.

Update: 2/15: Like other casulaties of this administration (the poor, the soldiers, civil rights, the environment, the US's international reputation), it is uncertain whether Whittington will recover.

Oprah and James Frey

Tim O'Brien's narrator in "How to Tell a True War Story" explains, "Someone tells a story, let's say, and, afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer." For millions of James Frey's readers, the answer mattered. By O'Brien's math, however, readers should have doubted the veracity of A Million Little Pieces from the start. Now readers from Oprah Winfrey to my students at the community college where I teach are crying foul. "Duped," they say.

Meanwhile, others are trying to make sense of the grandscale public furor. Arguments range from the political to the ethical to the literary. Here are a few questions percolating to the tops of blogs, book reviews and news shows: Why are people outraged about this but not about more egregious lies with higher stakes? Why has the publishing industry sacrificed honesty in the service of sales? Why should we, in a nihilistic culture that values "perception" above "truth," be surprised by the fictive memoir as a new development? What does this new controversy signify about Oprah’s cultural clout? Even when jumping into the infinite regress of these unanswerable questions, I can’t find a satisfactory explanation why, Oprah’s wrath notwithstanding, so many people are so very angry at one small, shy man who wrote a book with tall tales and bad prose.

Sure. No one likes to be fooled. But if it’s really about truth and lies, why aren’t people screaming in the streets every day about Diebold and Enron and WMDs? If it’s really about the mercenary nature of big publishing houses, why aren’t independent media outposts now the sudden beneficiaries of a windfall? The causal connection between nihilism and lying seems, at best, quaint. If we call for an end to the consciousness of perception and relativism, what are we asking for? Empiricism and essentialism? Haven’t decades, if not centuries, of critical thought exposed those views as even graver lies than any that could be constructed by a single human’s perception? And Oprah. Is it really about Oprah? I know that many of my students, for example, know more about Jennifer Aniston’s divorce than they do about our government, but no single item of celebrity gossip—not even Martha Stewart’s incarceration—has ever instigated their indignation to this extent. Indeed, this is only the second time in my eight years of teaching that students have brought up a current event for discussion before I could. The first time was 9/11.

My best analysis is that the outrage isn’t about truth. It isn’t about politics or publishing or the nature of perception. Anyone who’s read even a page of Frey’s book knows it sure as hell isn’t about literature, either. It isn’t even about Oprah. James Frey’s lies garner widespread and widely publicized outrage because, in Frey’s lies, we recognize ourselves. His behavior reminds us of our own insecurities. Who among us has never tried to make ourselves look better than we are, even if we haven’t done so in "memoir" form? Maybe Frey lied for the same reasons many people do: because he didn’t believe that he was good enough or interesting enough as he was. Maybe even those of us who don’t lie use other questionable tactics to try and make people like or even love us. Maybe we do favors we don’t have time to do or give money that we don’t have to give. And maybe we want to loudly punish James Frey because he reminds us of something we’d like to forget: That we all make dubious ethical choices when compensating for our own feelings of inadequacy.