9/11 ten years later

I have not spoken much about 9/11/01, and in general I feel that decision was right. The mistakes that have been made in speaking of the catastrophe are to braid it into some existing personal or political narrative, to say the terrorist attacks of that day made one feel differently politically or made one take new steps in one's personal life, when most of these things were already somehow on the boards. I do not doubt that some people's lives and views were genuinely changed by 9/11, but I am chary of making much of this sort of change outside of the victims, their immediate families, and those in the serving military and other government officials involved in the response to the calamity. In addition, I think 9/11, as an event, should be isolated from whatever debates about whether what the US government did in response was right or not, or what the causes and preconditions of the attacks were. That's in the realm of ideology and history, a relatively normal continuum; the day itself was catapulted out of that continuum.

The closest I came to these events was..what? I cannot claim any sort of privileged or special relationship. I was almost on the jury for Ramzi Yousef, accused architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. (I got out by saying I had to teach Andrew Marvell). I live about thirty-five blocks away, and some dust from the aftermath is no doubt still scattered on some of the books on my bookshelves. I knew, slightly, siblings or spouses of those who died in the World Trade Center and who were on Flight 93. I suspect the emphysema of my late friend, the poet Samuel Menashe, may have been exacerbated by breathing fumes from the disaster--he lived only fifteen or so blocks away.

Menashe wrote a poem that imagined, long before the event, the emotional scale of the calamity:

Must smiles subside in a sigh
   And sobs underlie laughter
   Shall we always leap high
   With flames leaping after?

9/11 reminded us of how much tragedy and suffering lurks beneath our merited--and even at times--valiant attempts to find happiness. We must try to vault further than the flames, exceed their killing grasp, live out what joy we can and should have,  but my reaction to the anniversary is dominated by a sense of gravity and of persistent mourning. 

Saving ESQ and Poe Studies

As I prepare to teach a new course on Emerson and Thoreau (and other figures in their Transcendentalist milieu) the news of  the impending closure of EEmerson Studies Quarterly (ESQ) and Poe Studies, which I already knew about in my capacity with the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, gains new pertinence. In prepping the course, I am turning again and again to articles published over the last few decades in ESQ, and it leaves me wondering if a future teacher, like me someone not an Transcendentalist scholar by training, takes up such a course as part of their university's offerings in twenty years, where will the scholarship be? Blogs, wikis, and open-source archives are not the utopian solution to everything. A scholarly journal, with the continuity provided by an editor and editorial and/or advisory board, by referees, reviewers, and the sense of an ongoing record, is irreplaceable.

Though celebrated and rewarded handsomely for writing and publishing my own books, I have never been given any reward by any university for which I have worked for editing a journal. I used to think this was because of fiscal stresses at my university and the faraway nature of the field in which I edit, but in talking with colleagues at far plushier institutions working in far more accepted and canonical areas, for the most part I get the same impression. Universities rely on learned journals to assess scholarship weighed in tenure and promotion, but the journals themselves, and their personnel, are, paradoxically, not deemed essential. Washington State University, in hiring a full-time editor for both journals and maintaining a well-staffed office to keep them running, was one of the few standouts here. This made, as far as I am concerned, a notable difference at raising the institutions; national profile and defining it as a genuine center of excellence. Whatever the dire budgetary situation--and I am aware it is dire, though even in a dire situation education should be a priority--I am surprised WSU would squander a platform in which it has achieved notable eminence. 

Please sign the petition here and help save Poe Studies and ESQ. 

Bachmann's submission

Ironically, Michele Bachmann, in submitting to her husband, is (since "Islam" means submission) being a 'muslim' with I assume a very small m. 

Vargas Llosa's Victory

Mario Vargas Llosa's biggest win in the past twelve months may not have been garnering the 2010 Nobel prize for literature. It instead may well be his unexpected and, we may conclude, pivotal support for Ollanta Humala in the 2011 Peruvian Presidential election. As of * PM EST SUnday June 5, Humala is widely reported to have eked out a narrow win.

For decades, Vargas Llosa has been the scourge of the Left. If not quite the paladin of the Right--he has never been a supporter of organized religion and is pro-gay rights and pro-choice on abortion--he was a ferocious opponent of governmental intervention in the economy and an acrid critic of Leftist illusions about the "Third World." His endorsement of Humala was a striking swerve from that tendency True, he did not exactly deliver a ringing accolade, having earlier said that choosing between Keiko Fujimori and Humala was like choosing between cancer and AIDS. Nor, as somebody who found even the presidential candidacy of General Wesley Clark faintly praetorian, am I myself inclined towards occasionally demagogic former army officers as political candidates. But I can see, and support, Vargas Llosa's logic, and it has to be understood on a deeper level than commentators so far have,

To see his support for the left-wing, populist Humala as just a visceral grievance against Keiko Fujimori's father, Alberto, to whom Vargas Llosa himself unexpectedly lost in the 1990 election, is to miss the point. Yes, no doubt there is an element of personal vendetta here. But, as a novelist, Vargas Llosa is fully aware that political actors always are tinged with personal emotions, and that this presence of personal affect does not invalidate or delegitimize the grounds of their choice. Humala may, for Vargas Llosa, be wrong and unwise on all manner of issues; Fujimori promised corruption and the rehabilitation of corruption, all the more painful for Vargas Llosa as Fujimori's platform--Keiko Fujimori's, that is--subscribes to the same neoliberal mantras as does Vargas Llosa, and her support came from the beneficiaries of the neoliberal trends of the past generation. Peruvian public figures previously in line with Vargas Llosa's positions, such as the TV personality and novelist Jaime Bayly, have parted company from the Master on this issue. Vargas Llosa is now sundered from many of his former acolytes,

In my article in Vargas Llosa's novel La guerra del fin del mundo in the co-edited collection for Palgrave I coordinated along with Juan E. De Castro, I asked, rhetorically, if Vargas Llosa's critique of utopianism and millennarianism was meant only for the Left, whether or not there were enemies to the Right as well. SO many intellectuals have accused the Left of these 'sins' while not saying a word when the same syndromes manifest themselves on the Right. Even if Vargas Llosa was letting personal spite prevail over ideological conviction in supporting Humala, this can be seen in a way as a salutary brake on the ideological purism of neoliberalism, which--as seen in the US Tea Party movement--has as dangerous a tendency towards unanimity and intellectual conformity as any leftist equivalent. Moreover one can see in Vargas Llosa's latest novel, El Sueñõ del Celta, a critique of colonialism and of unfettered capitalism that shows that the very late Vargas Llosa might be swinging a little bit back to the left after his well-chronicled turn to the Right of the past thirty years.

It will be interesting to see what kind of President Ollanta Humala makes. Peru's national interests--and its curiously right-wing media sphere and intelligentsia-- will not permit him to depart too drastically from many of the policies of his predecessor, Alan Garcia Pérez. Humala has pitched himself as an emulator of Lula in Brazil, and the strong Peruvian economy may permit him to be both redistributionist but also reassure the capitalist powers that be. Of course, Humala may also be a disaster.  History will tell whether Vargas Llosa, and I, were right or wrong in supporting him. But this episode, if nothing else, represents an interesting turn in the fate of the neoliberal consensus which a few years ago thought itself unchallengeable. And it reaffirms Mario Vargas Llosa's stature as a writer of conscience unafraid to challenge--when they are wrong--even those ideological platforms of which he has so visibly been an active supporter...

Derek Jacobi's LEAR

The Jacobi LEAR was great--riveting, grimly funny at times, conveying Shakespeare's most unrelieved tragedy, something so dark MACBETH seems like a dry run by comparison. Jacobi projected anger, sadness, bewilderment in just the right places.  At the end of the production, birds twittered, as if to portend a new day after the worst had happened. I thought I could get my parakeets Actors Equity cards. 

Millicent Dillon, In The Atomic City

Millicent Dillon came to fiction and literary writing only in midlife, yet in a series of books, fiction, nonfiction, and in-between, she has addressed more than any writer of our age  the overt ideologies of our time, the latent demands they make on our selves and our senses of agencies, and the art that can function as both resistance to these ideologies an, alas,  confirmation of their hold. Her current work is a memoir of her years as a junior physicist in the 1940s, which is both an essay in memory and the resistant pastness of the past, and an examinationof the forces of destruction that still, in different shapes, threaten us today. The Believer has published this excerpt of Dillon's work and I would recommend it for readers of this blog not only for its quality and insight but for the way it traces certain issues which  are also evident preoccupations of my own.

Reza Abdoh's pocket epic theater

There are an overwhelming amount of things to do in New York; indeed, even if one restricts matters to what is going on in my university, certainly not the largest or busiest in the city, there are so many events put on each week that to attend even a third of them taxes one; stamina. Nonetheless, I try to make nearly every one of my Lang theatrical colleague Zishan Ugurlu's productions because of the eclecticism and cutting-edge nature of her material and as she has exceptional ability to motivate students to go to the very limit of their abilities. I was also interested in the work that was being put on, The Law of Remains by the Iranian-born American playwright Reza Abdoh. I knew his name, and that he had died far too young of AIDS, but was unfamiliar with the work. 




The appalling murders perpetrate by Jeffrey Dahmer, against the tableau of the institutionalized racism and homophobia that made his crimes possible, is at the heart of the play--not pathologized, though (they are already pathological enough) but seen in a social context, as an index of the cruel place America had become in the 1980s. Having just reread Prometheus Bound earlier in the day, it seemed very 'Greek' to me--the way in which drama was precisely what was unrepresentable in normal life and discourse, that it was the realm of the abject, the scapegoated, the sacred profane..also the son-contraptions were like choral odes, of course satiric or ironically deployed choral odes, but had the same sense of emotional release....the very idea of remains, the taboo of cannibalism, the association of sex with other appetites, the Greek idea of sparagmos or fragmentation (as in the Bacchae), were all very pertinent I think....also the element of satyr play in the tragedy, the feeling of celebration amid suffering and critique....

It was also though a very American play, a very national play. One thought of Tony Kushner's subtitle for Angels in America, "A gay fantasia on national themes', and that could apply to Abdoh's play (written maybe slightly earlier  as well, although Abdoh's vision is far more searing and radical, it makes Kushner look bourgeois while, far more economically, making many of the same points not only about racism and homophobia but about their cultural matrix and mythic valence. I am teaching Kushner this summer and will definitely let my students know of Abdoh as a complementary, yet more radical, counterpoint. The subject of the course is epic drama, and Abdoh's work, in its raw, intense, lyricism, can be seen as a sort of pocket epic, packing the punch of panoramic social critique without the discursive mega-pretensions of Kushner that, despite himself (and for all their moving and vision), can be seen as tying his vision back into Reaganite grandiosity. And indeed the figure of President Ronald Reagan is pertinent here. The cathartic moment of the play was the revelation of a prone, wax-like figure of  Reagan, gazing mindlessly on the action; this theatrical touch expressed all the polemical fervor of Kushner's anti-Reaganism while making it more visceral and more profoundly accusatory to the audience: You, hypocrite lecteur, mon sembable, mon frère. 

 I felt totally repelled the first ten minutes, mesmerized for the rest. It was the same feeling that had been transmuted from a curse into a blessing. This is so much more a bass for theatrical exultation than a stance of bland, polite acceptance ab initio. The stage, an oblong rectangle that a spectator directly confronting the stage could not see entirely,  was fascinating as not seeing it all put the spectator in an unaccustomed position. Usually as a viewer you have the perspectival advantage over the actors. But here it was more like being in a real place having to look around.

Of course  none of these students were anything but babies or perhaps even alive at the time of the events and attitudes the play describes. They showed astonishing facility in immediately adapting themselves to the play, adhering to roles so quickly and reflexively--and the roles were not traditional roles but speakers, stances, perspectives. And their rendition of a very topical play made it not just an adaptation but a regeneration, a reanimation, an appropriation.....Abdoh's family and loved ones were represented in the audience and apparently approved of the work precisely in its sense of adaptation, that the work was not just archivally tied to the living body of its author but could be shifted, redeployed, had what textual scholars call mouvance. This adaptability being the essence of practice is, to me, what theatre and literary criticism, as acts, have most in common....