tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26280271645956907522024-03-13T13:32:35.175-07:00A Skinseller's WorkshopPolitical and Literary thoughts by Joseph-Kass TomarasJosephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.comBlogger166125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-81891596798111576172023-12-18T14:57:00.000-08:002023-12-18T14:57:10.958-08:00Yiddish Literature beyond the Singer Brothers<p><i>The following was written as a letter to the </i>New Yorker<i>. Since they elected not to</i> <i>print it, I am posting it here, for anyone interested in what I have to say about Yiddish literature.</i></p><div>As a translator of Yiddish fiction, I read <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/the-forgotten-giant-of-yiddish-fiction" target="_blank">Adam Kirsch's profile of
I.J. Singer</a> with delight. Yet I finished it concerned that, since so
much of it refracts the elder Singer's work through the prism of the
works of his younger, more widely lauded brother, it would leave
English-language readers with a limited sense of the wide range of
literary achievement in the Yiddish language.</div><div><br /></div><div>Kirsch
contrasts the elder Singer's "panoramic social realism" to the "fable,"
"fantasy," and "romanticism" of the younger. A reader could be
forgiven, then, for thinking that I.J. Singer shared the disdain of some
critics for more allegorical forms of writing, and that had he survived
to witness his younger brother's bravura career, might have likewise
regarded it as a retrogression. Such an inference, however, would go
against the evidence of the elder Singer's own critical judgment, which
showed broad-minded appreciation for allegorical modes of expression.</div><div><br /></div><div>An
example: Among the writers I.J. Singer met in Kyiv was one Pinkhas
Kahanovitsh, who had taken the pen name Der Nister, a Yiddish phrase
with the portentous meaning, "the hidden one." Of Der Nister, he went on
to write that "if the writers of the world could have read him, they
would have broken their pens." In 1921, the same year that I.J. Singer
returned to Warsaw, Der Nister emigrated to Berlin, where he published <i>Gedakht</i>
("Imagined"), a two-volume collection of short stories and novellas
heavy on allegory and symbolism, complete with recondite allusions at
turns to Talmudic and Kabbalistic scholarship and to the folk-religion
of Ashkenazi shtetls. (Full disclosure: I am currently translating a
collection of all the stories published by Der Nister in the 1920s under
the title <i>Gedakht</i>, in both its Berlin and Kyiv editions.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Had
Franz Kafka, among other contemporaries, been able to read Der Nister,
perhaps he would not have broken his pens, but he would have recognized a
kindred spirit. Whereas Kafka's writing career and artistic development
were cut short in 1924 by tuberculosis, Der Nister survived until his
unjust incarceration in the Soviet gulag system in 1950, pushing his
fiction and nonfiction in new directions. His one venture into
novel-length fiction, <i>The Family Mashber</i>, published in the late
1930s, combines a study of social development that is clearly informed
by the writings of the elder Singer with a sensitivity to the
unfulfilled hopes expressed through religious belief, in this case, of
the Breslover Hasidim.</div><div><br /></div><div>So little of the corpus
of Yiddish literature has been translated into English or other Western
European languages that it remains tempting to categorize it according
to binary oppositions derived from the history of European and American
canons--realism vs. romanticism, naturalism vs. symbolism. As lesser
known writers like Der Nister, Hersh Dovid Nomberg, Fradl Shtok, and
Kadya Molodovsky, to name just a few, are more widely translated, it
will be less tenable to view the Singer brothers as isolated dwellers on
the peaks of genius, separated by an abyss of generational and
stylistic differences. Instead, they were participants, among others, in
an ongoing conversation, in which the sacred and profane, the heavenly,
earthly, and the diabolical, the historical and the allegorical, jostle
one another rapidly in a variety of men's and women's voices.</div>Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-40823424614828213182023-10-24T12:10:00.004-07:002023-10-24T12:10:58.577-07:00Goodbye, LeninA former comrade of mine recently shared with me a note that he had sent to a long-time leader of the small Trotskyist organization we had both been part of (the League for the Revolutionary Party, or LRP for short; those unfamiliar are welcome to Google them, but I am not providing a direct link so as to spare you the temptation of seeing evidence of their severe political and organizational degeneration, or their ca. 1999 web design), on the subject of Leninism, Trotskyism, and their political ineffectiveness. A brief correspondence developed, in the course of which I articulated in writing some thoughts that I had thus far kept to private conversation. I concluded therefore that it might be of broader interest than the ranks of those who might once have crossed paths with one idiosyncratic organization. The following has been edited lightly to remove some personal details about individuals who are not public figures, and to correct some minor errors of fact. The title of this post represents my perspective, not that of my correspondent.<br /><p>G. wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>While I am engaging in this political exchange of thoughts with you, I would like to make a more general comment. This is for the benefit of you and other comrades in the group, so that you may have a better overall picture of where I am at politically. Naturally a lot of what has happened to me is simple demoralization and loss of interest in politics. The Middle East conflict drags me back into political thinking not even because I want to or because I enjoy it, but because I have to think about it in order to carry on my everyday social and personal life, regardless of my personal interest in politics or lack of it in recent years. As Trotsky wrote, "You may not [still] be interested in politics, but politics may [still] be interested in you." The politics of the recent events in the Middle East seem to be interested in almost everyone, perhaps especially in the New York City area.... Nowadays in the New York metropolitan area, if you have nothing to say about political events, people think you're either a boring person or you're just an idiot. I admit that this dynamic has a lot to do with my current interest in discussing the events with somebody, with anybody. [Yes, Trump had the same effect, but it was and is easy to denounce Trump in almost any conversation in the NYC area; this did not stimulate further political discussion and thinking.]</p>
<p>But keeping in mind my demoralization and general loss of interest in politics, I do also want to share with you and comrades in the group a more general picture of where I stand politically these days. To put it in general terms, I question the correctness of Leninism as a political program. It's hard to argue with the Marxist analysis of all history as the history of class struggle; if anything, I agree with that analysis even more so now than I did before, because it holds up so well and almost any historical research confirms it, regardless of one's current interest in politics in the present day. It's also hard to deny that <i>Das Kapital</i> is a brilliant analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Further, I still recognize that Lenin's leadership of the Bolsheviks in the revolution in 1917 was simply brilliant, effective, and necessary, as were the policies and actions of the new Soviet government and the Bolshevik leadership during the Russian Civil War and for a few years thereafter until Stalin's "Soviet Thermidor". If the White Army had won the civil war, they would have committed every major crime against humanity of the 20th century rolled into one (the Holocaust, Stalin's Great Terror, and much more) and then doubled, tripled, or quadrupled. Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolshevik leadership of the Red Army stopped that catastrophe from happening. So unlike some other critics of Leninism, none of that is where my questioning of Leninism lies.</p>
<p>Here is the problem I have: It has now been a full entire century since Stalin's Thermidorian reactionary takeover of power in the Soviet Union. During that entire 100 years of history since then, Leninism or Trotskyism, which we both recognize are actually the same thing, simply hasn't worked at all. Not even once. Not anywhere. Not in any time period. I have described my crude analysis of the last 100 years of global political history as follows:</p>
<p>After Lenin's death, to put it in crude terms, the socialist movement divided into thugs on the one hand--Stalin, Mao, and all the political leaders and tendencies whom Trotskyists describe as "Stalinist"--vs. intellectuals on the other hand--Trotskyists, but also including other far left anti-Stalinists of various stripes. Over the past 100 years, the "thugs" have succeeded in seizing and holding power all over the place. The "intellectuals" have provided logical and insightful analysis of political events, including cogent political critique of the "thugs"--but they haven't been able to successfully lead mass movements and seize or hold power anywhere at any time.</p>
<p>When this state of affairs persists not just for a decade or a few decades, but for a whole entire 100 years, something is wrong. For almost the last 50 of those years, the LRP has believed that it was the only true representative of the Leninist political program in the global socialist movement. I don't disagree with this either, even now. My issue is whether Leninism itself can possibly be an effective political theory and guide to action in today's world. Think about it this way: As much time has elapsed since the founding of the LRP up to now, as had elapsed since Trotsky's exile from the Soviet Union up to the founding of the LRP. That is quite a long time period. The LRP explained the failures of the revolutionary socialist movement after Trotsky as the failures of Pabloism (primarily). This might have made sense to explain the time period from 1945 to 1976, but it is much harder to blame Pabloism for the political failures and ineffectiveness of revolutionary socialism for the past 50 years. [Note by J-KT: "Pabloism" is a political tendency within post-World War II Trotskyism, of which there are as many definitions as there have been Trotskyist organizations which have defined themselves, at one time or another, as "anti-Pabloite".]</p>
<p>In recent years the LRP felt the need to abandon its 40+ year programmatic position of rejecting support for voting for any capitalist party in elections. But this raises the question: If such a mistake can go unnoticed and uncriticized by any comrade for 40 years, how many other such mistakes may still lie lurking in the LRP / Leninist political program, which will only eventually be noticed and criticized when some other new traumatic political event (such as Trump's rise to power) forces a reexamination and reconsideration?</p>
<p>A Leninist political program is inarguably and undoubtedly effective in accomplishing at least one type of goal: maintaining the internal organizational functioning of the Leninist group itself through Leninist political discipline of the comrades of the group. But such a goal is only worthwhile, if the end result of the group's political activity has a significant positive and successful impact on the outside world, on major political events on a grand scale. Meanwhile, such internal discipline does not come without its own personal costs in myriad ways. Example: I am afraid that a certain person's very sad recent descent into an openly Zionist pro-Israel view may not be unrelated to the personal toll of many years of the physical and mental stresses of carrying out all of the tasks mandated by the political discipline of a Leninist group.</p>
<p>I'm sorry to say, after expressing all of those comments, that I don't have any good answers or solutions. Sure, I could point to some "gentler" group such as Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson's International Marxist-Humanist Organization (IMHO), but I cannot pretend to believe that it is likely that such a group has found the answer to the problem of the right form of socialist organization either.</p>
<p>Everything worked out perfectly for Lenin's Bolshevik Party: The timing of its founding was such that it had just enough time, a couple decades, to build an effective organization in preparation for the revolutionary events of 1917, but not <i>too</i> many decades, such that it would suffer internal political and organizational decay, as every Leninist tendency apparently has over the course of the past 100 years. Lenin himself was well aware of his own very good fortune in this respect. But he also did not have to contend with well-organized groups of "socialists" run by thugs (i.e., Stalinists) within the Russian social-democratic movement in the 1890s, 1900s, or in 1917 itself. Yes, the Bolsheviks had political opponents within the socialist movement, but nothing like the Stalinist groups who have emerged over the past 100 years.
</p><p>Again, I did not write all of this in order to arrive at any kind of brilliant answer or solution to the problems that I have described. I do not have any answer or solution of my own. I share these comments simply as some food for thought for any comrades who are interested in reconsidering what is still valid and what may not be valid in the LRP / Leninist political program, including Leninism itself.</p><p></p></blockquote>
<p>To which I replied:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Your letter is well-written and approximates where I was in my thinking approximately 3-6 years ago, 2017-2020.</p>
<p>My turn toward anarchism over the last three years has been gradual but ultimately decisive, and coincides--not coincidentally--with my coming out as trans. My <a href="https://skinseller.blogspot.com/2020/07/a-full-re-introduction.html">initial coming-out blog post contains a veiled critique of the LRP</a>. Frankly, my situation is a much better illustration of the personal toll argument that you make than the one you gave. The fact that, for years after that Convention, I remained convinced that I could not explore my gender identity without breaking "discipline" (and then the hangover after that, no longer under the LRP's organizational discipline but having internalized enough transphobia that I believed that I could not be politically effective in the way I wanted to be without staying in the closet), is a lasting indictment of it. I don't disclaim responsibility for my own suffering. I made the choices I made, based on my own understandings of Leninism, and based on considerations that were not at all political (e.g. the fear of what would happen to my marriage). But I learned those understandings from the members of the LRP's Central Committee, and Sy Landy is the only one of those whom I am prepared to alibi at all (and only because of his age at the time and the fact that he is now dead).</p>
<p>I am not as convinced as you are that the LRP's turn on the electoral question was right, i.e., that their old arguments against it were wrong. But it is quite clear that their analyses of "the Gay question" (and all the other questions they swept under that rug) were wrong. Having been better than the Spartacists in the 1970s is a positive historical point, but one of limited utility.</p>
<p>That crack having been made by circumstance, I was able over time to question other things. At some point recently, I think 2021, I finally actually read Paul Avrich's history of the Kronstadt rebellion. One can read it without accepting the latter-day anarchist mythology that the rebellion's success would have opened up Soviet democracy. There's clear evidence actually of there having been substantial antisemitism in the 1921 peasant revolts, of which Kronstadt was a symptom. Even passing familiarity with Russian history renders this unsurprising. But the details of how the revolt was put down, in connection with the 10th Party Congress, show pretty clearly that the seeds of Thermidorean reaction were present not only in the dominant apparatus but in its contemporaneous oppositions ("Workers Opposition") and the oppositionists yet to come (Trotsky). Inasmuch as historical events fit into dramaturgical conventions, Kronstadt fits the definition of a "tragedy". All actors were doomed.</p>
<p>So much then for Leninism and Trotskyism. More recently--and this is the topic of what I wrote in the <i>Anarchist Review of Books</i>--the arguments of <i>The Dawn of Everything</i> call into doubt some central pillars of Marxism. (Along the way, a lot of classical anarchist literature, e.g. Kropotkin, also gets pulled down.) I don't think it's accidental that what did it was something David Graeber did with a co-author. I find most of Graeber's writing annoyingly snide and sectarian toward Marxism, in ways that prevented me from appreciating moments when he might have had a point. Wengrow seems to have reigned in some of his co-author's worst rhetorical tics. The book as a whole is a masterpiece.</p>
<p>The net effect is, I am no longer looking for a theory of everything. On a practical level, also, I am less interested in politics of the spectacle (which is often what the demand to take a stand on Palestine boils down to) than in the politics of trying, as a member of a marginalized minority grouping facing the end stages of capitalist decay, to collaboratively survive.</p></blockquote>
<p>To which G. replied with a further letter asking this question: 'You mention “the politics of trying, as a member of a marginalized minority grouping....” I cannot directly relate to this political priority of yours, because I am a cis hetero middle-aged white male native-born US citizen from a middle-class background. I cannot claim to belong to any oppressed group in any way. Does this mean, according to your views, that I cannot possibly have the same political perspective or views that you do?' The following was my reply:
</p><blockquote>
<p>I think it's more a matter of praxis than of theory. For me part of setting aside Leninism--and particularly the variant of it that we learned in the LRP--was a diminution of the importance of theoretical (or, to use the term Sy preferred, methodological) agreement in favor of the importance of practical coordination. In simplified form, it doesn't matter if we agree precisely on what is the case so long as we are able to coordinate on what is to be done (ha!) about it.</p>
<p>From a practical perspective the differences of what postmodern feminist theorists would call "positionality" are important, because they condition what it is realistic for a person or a grouping to do. For example: I am always going to default into suspicion that cisgender people will not immediately understand why a particular issue that arises is a threat to me as a transgender person. This suspicion is based on personal experience both pre-dating and post-dating my coming out. It's not a foregone conclusion that particular persons or groups will not be able to overcome this suspicion. It's just that, until they do, I will be cautious about how I collaborate with them around certain issues.</p>
<p>In his more democratic moments this is hardly a line of thought that's extraneous to Lenin. It shows up most saliently in his writings on the national question, when he differentiates between the responsibilities of socialists in oppressor and oppressed peoples. (A shame that the actual practice of the Bolsheviks with regard to non-Russian nationalities and peoples in the period 1917-1921 often fell so far short of that theoretical argument, but that's a historical question.) While I am using "postmodernist" language to express it, it's hardly incompatible with a materialist understanding of class such as would be associated with Marxism.</p>
<p>For me the question of the relative importance of class as a means toward achieving a kind of transcendent unity of practice is a matter of political prognosis rather than metaphysical theory. If, as I have been arguing for almost 10 years now, climate change imposes a limited (but not precisely calculable) time horizon for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, as opposed to its decay into new unforeseen types of barbarism, then a politics which takes proletarian unity as its aim has to have a plausible strategy for achieving that unity within a limited time, not the indefinite by-and-by. I am skeptical of that: I am aware of no one who has even articulated such a strategy, let alone is putting it into practice. (My son, bless his heart, is sometimes more optimistic. I remember what it was like to be 16.)</p>
<p>So if my political goal is no longer "the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system achieved through the practical unity of the international proletariat," but "the survival of myself and people I care most passionately about despite the likely further degeneration of the world into new forms of barbarism," then smaller units of solidarity that are achievable within a given time horizon take precedence. These need not be identity-based. It could be a matter of unionizing one's workplace (or building counterhegemonic alternatives to the union bureaucracy in workplaces that are already unionized), mutual aid projects with one's near neighbors, etc.</p></blockquote><p><i>G. is happy to see this correspondence posted here, because he believes
it is beneficial for himself, for myself, and indeed for current and
former supporters of the LRP as well as for the LRP itself. G. would
also like to make it clear to all readers that his participation in this
correspondence does not necessarily imply his endorsement of or
agreement with other statements and views expressed in other posts on
this blog about the LRP and its current and former leaders and other
supporters.</i> <br /></p><p></p>Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-70010474461762916292023-08-11T11:57:00.004-07:002023-08-11T11:57:29.962-07:00Revised Notes on How to Get in Touch With MeI gave up on Mastodon, but you can find me on Bluesky (bsky.app) as @raconteuse.<p>The fact that I am more consistently referring to myself in public as Joseph-Kass, or just Kass for short when in person, and the fact that my handle, while still French, takes a feminine ending, has implications that are consistent with my overall sense of identity.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-23114431070616641312022-12-18T14:37:00.001-08:002022-12-18T14:37:45.090-08:00Notes on How to Get in Touch with MeIf I don't blog often these days, it is partially because I microblog too much. My preferred locus for that latter mode of expression, Twitter, has however been getting less and less congenial.<p>If you would like to discuss a publishing opportunity, either for my own writing or for my translations of Der Nister, you are welcome to reach out to me at first-name-dot-last-name-at-Google's-commercial-email-utility. For the purposes of email, just the first, given part of my name (Joseph) is needed; my recent chosen hyphenated addition (-Kass) does not appear in that address.<p>If you would like to see my microblogging, and for whatever reason can't find much on the aforementioned website beginning with a T, you can check me out as <a href=https://mastodon.lol/@epateur>@epateur@mastodon.lol</a>.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-28667084536217672112022-06-08T14:50:00.002-07:002022-06-08T14:50:25.724-07:00Citational PoliticsLet's get the positivity out of the way: I loved <cite>Living a Feminist Life</cite> by Sara Ahmed. There is a different, related essay (perhaps a book?) to be written about what it is like to be a "feminist killjoy" when one's femininity is not universally recognized, when it runs orthogonal to the assignations that have been put on a person. But that is not the essay I have time for.<p>What strikes me as a weak point of the book is Ahmed's "citational policy" of not quoting white men. It ends up undermining her argument in two key ways that I could identify, one through what it ended up including, and another for what it ended up omitting. First the inclusion problem:<p>Chapter 9 of the book represents an effort on Ahmed's part to make a case for the importance of a specifically lesbian feminism, which she ends up defining as a feminism in which women relate to one another without the mediation of relationships to men. Let us leave aside, for the moment, the fraught question of whether it is even possible to fully exclude such mediations. There is a more immediate philological challenge in that, historically, manifestations of a specifically lesbian feminism have functioned as fertile soil for the trans-exclusionary ideologies which Ahmed, in this chapter, elsewhere in the book, and elsewhere in her writings, so vociferously and accurately rejects. The result is a performative contradiction that is only evident to a reader with some measure of archival knowledge. This contradiction becomes most evident on page 227, where Ahmed writes,<blockquote><cite>You have to wrap life around being. I would suggest that it is transfeminism today that most recalls the militant spirit of lesbian feminism in part because of the insistence that crafting a life is political work. Transfeminist manifestos carry the baton of carry the baton of lesbian feminist manifestos such as "Woman Identified Woman": from Sandy Stone's (2006) "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto" to Julia Serano's (2007) "Trans Woman Manifesto" and Susan Stryker's (1994) "My Words to Victor Frankenstein".</cite></blockquote><p>It is wonderful that she has cited trans women such as Sandy Stone, Julia Serano, and Susan Stryker, though each of these manifestos has a slightly different perspective on <em>how</em> best to "wrap life around being," how the crafting of a life politicizes. As a transfeminist myself, I find myself most sympathetic to the positions articulated by Stone. But what is strange, and not so wonderful, is that each of these writings is compared to an older (1970) document which Ahmed has already praised, without acknowledging the historical fact that the collective which authored "Woman Identified Woman," Radicalesbians, was explicitly trans-exclusionary.<p>It is not enough, then, to cite people's writings. When those writings are artefacts of material struggles in which the authors of certain writings opposed, oppressed, and negated the authors of others, then what does it mean to say that the latter carries on the "militant spirit" of the former? Is the militant hovering unseen over the entryway to the feminist bookshop, waiting to see who will gain admittance to a controversial event? Such passivity seems quite the opposite of militancy.<p>It would have been better, not simply to praise WIW for the things that it says that Ahmed finds congenial, but to recognize which of its formulations were quite compatible with an exclusionary approach to womanhood that Ahmed finds repellent. It is not enough to praise Stone, Serano, and Stryker for their militancy, but to highlight specific points on which they have advanced feminism, by way of transfeminism, beyond what could be achieved by Radicalesbians. As Ahmed herself writes in the "Feminist Killjoy Manifesto" conclusion to the book, "I am not willing to be included if inclusion means being included in a system that is unjust, violent, and unequal." At that point on page 227, the inclusion of transfeminists within lesbian feminism comes across--again, only to those with archival knowledge--as inclusion in something unjust, unequal, and even on occasion, violent.<p>The second problem I identified is the problem of omission. Again, this depends on archival knowledge. Ahmed is, methodologically, a phenomenologist. Some phenomenologists have been explicitly feminist (e.g. de Beauvoir) or anti-oppression (Fanon), others arguably recuperable (Judith Butler might make the case for Sartre; I would make my case for Merleau-Ponty), and still others appalling (most notably, Heidegger). Because of her previously stated citational policy, only Beauvoir and Fanon are cited, but that does not mean that the concepts developed by the others are wholly absent from the book. In particular, I was struck by how frequently she used the phrase "being thrown". Because I have read <cite>Being and Time</cite>, I could not help but hear resonances of Heidegger and <i>Geworfenheit</i>. So though I could recognize both similarities and differences in how she uses the phrase, in how she derives it from life. The notion of "wrapping life around being" is a wonderful hint at how distant Ahmed's political vision is from Heidegger's, he who would crush life under the ponderous imponderable <i>Seinsfrage</i>. But because she never cites him, she never makes precise what her differences are.<p>Resonances occur independently of the will of the speaker. As I modulate my voice through a series of pitch changes, sometimes it will hit a low point, and a listener who is predisposed to perceive me as a man will hear that rumble, the way a particular frequency of air motion makes the material of the ear drum resonate, with a cruel "A-ha!" I want to hear Ahmed's Heideggerian resonances as either accidental or parodic, critical, showing how being thrown--far from being an ineluctable trait of <i>Dasein</i>--is something that certain existences experience more often than others when they encounter forces that negate their lives and being. But because she never makes this explicit, there is too much space, in the blank white spaces of the book, to enable a reader who is differently disposed to attempt to abuse Ahmed's phenomenology in elements of a recuperative reading of Heidegger.<p>Policy and politics are both derived from the same root, the <i>polis</i>. But they have very different significations. In practice, policy is something that is used by institutions of power to try and avoid politics, to put certain ways of doing things beyond dispute, to depoliticize. "That's just how we do things around here, it's policy." Ahmed acknowledges that her citational policy is a blunt instrument. In both these cases, the blunt instrument ended up, perhaps contrary to Ahmed's intentions, depoliticizing the citations in their presence and absence--including some, excluding others, but not making explicit what is at stake in the inclusions and exclusions, and how the mere fact of inclusion is not necessarily an index of agreement or even agreeability.<p>By making this the entire topic of the blog post, I fear I may have created the impression that I think this is a bad book. On the contrary, it is a very good and necessary one. With the exception of the awkwardness of Chapter 9, and occasional dissonant resonances involving the word "thrown," I found many more moments of shared killjoy experience. That this is all I have to say in criticism of it stands as high praise.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-41111623698172205632021-06-13T08:09:00.002-07:002021-06-13T08:10:03.950-07:00Undying AdmirationBefore Anne Boyer deleted her Twitter account, she was my favorite mutual. We never met in person, but I admired her poems, and one of our interchanges on there contributed some inspiration and ideas that found their way into my story "Ruins of a Future Empire". However I hesitated to read her breakout success book, <i>The Undying</i>, as it seemed voyeuristic for a "man", as I still believed myself to be, to seek out a book about breast cancer.<p>As it happens, though, we are all implicated in breast cancer. My mother-in-law had it, and as she stubbornly works herself to exhaustion caring for my father-in-law, who is currently much more ill, my greatest fear is not that he becomes more ill, but that she has a recurrence, and suddenly worsens to a point where she can no longer insist on their capacity to manage on their own. Because my mother-in-law has had it, and because my partner inherited "dense breast tissue" down her matrilineal line, my partner is classified as being of greater risk, and gets imaged regularly. She recently had a scare. It turned out to be artefactual, a flicker of the ultrasound machine misunderstanding itself.<p>And the time will come, soon enough, for me to join the diagnostic parade. According to a presentation I attended on trans health, for trans women and nonbinary people who had previously been assigned male, the risks of breast cancer appear to reach parity with cisgender women's risks after about five years of HRT. Assuming that I remain on HRT for at least five years--and I have every intention of remaining on HRT--then I should get mammography at the same ages as women of my risk category. Fortunately, I am aware of no breast cancer history in my family, so it would not begin until 50. At the age of 50, my nonbinary gender identity will receive a peculiar sort of confirmation through the androgyny of my routine examinations: A doctor will examine my prostate, and then write a radiology prescription for me to get my tits smashed in between glass plates.<p>So I have read <i>The Undying</i>, now, and I would urge everyone to. As Anne points out, anyone with breast tissue--including men--can get breast cancer. And we all live in the capitalist carcigenosphere that she describes as no one else has or can.<p>This post is not so much about Anne Boyer or about <i>The Undying</i>, though, as it is about my own very peculiar experience of reading it. That is, imagining the possibility that the A cups which I waited so long to pursue, that I am so glad to have grown, that fill me with joy whenever they are caressed lovingly by my partner, that they could someday betray me. Having delayed my transition for so long, I want to live, if for no other reason than to have the duration of my joys outlast that of my self-suppression. If continuation of life should at some point require the sacrifice of the portion of my body that most readily symbolizes the reality of my transition, it would still be worth it, but the irony would be agonizing.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-62507257166591940502021-05-20T12:48:00.001-07:002021-05-20T12:48:33.139-07:00A Note about the Palestinian General StrikeThis post takes some scattered comments made recently in various formats on social media and attempts to synthesize them into something resembling a coherent argument. I should begin with a necessary disclaimer: It has been a decade since I made a point of routinely keeping up to date on Israel's social statistics and political events. I no longer pretend to be a researcher on Israeli society and the role therein of Palestinian workers. So this post will not contain any detailed quantitative analyses, nor will it attempt to provide a meticulously documented overview of various contending forces and trends within Israeli society. However, though my attention to Israel has waned over the last 10 years, compared to the period before, I remain interested, as a Jew who unconditionally supports the rights of the Palestinian people and therefore politically opposes the State of Israel and the Zionist movement. And the fact that I can read Hebrew sometimes gives me access to information that other such casual observers may have missed.<p>Many observers, both internationally and within Israel, were surprised at the impact of this Monday's Palestinian general strike on the Israeli economy, which hit sectors such as construction and food production and delivery particularly hard. They should not have been, though one can understand where the misperception of reality and the resulting surprise came from. Many people--myself included--have at times overstated the degree to which Palestinian workers have been excluded from participation in the economy, which is overwhelmingly controlled by Israeli employers in portions of the land under the direct military control of Israel. Palestinians suffer greatly from this exclusion, and therefore it is important to emphasize it, but one runs the risk thereby of overemphasizing it. Thus, for example, I once wrote something characterizing the response of the Israeli state and capital to the last time that Palestinians made extensive use of the strike, the first Intifada, as a "general lockout," in which the State sped up Jewish immigration from Ethiopia and the ex-USSR, while capital shoved the new migrants into the types of jobs that had hitherto been stigmatized as <i>avodah aravit</i> (Arab work). This was accurate, but only for a limited span of time. Thanks to the internationalization of racial-caste barriers the Ethiopian Jews are still largely stuck at that economic stratum, but most of the "Russians" have moved on. Internationally, Israel is running out of marginalized communities of Jews which it can import and exploit.<p>This is a problem, then, both for the Israeli state and for Israeli capital. Through dispossession of Palestinians, Israeli capital took possession, with the state as an active intermediary, of land and natural resources which were preconditions to accumulation. However land and resources are merely necessary conditions to accumulation, not sufficient. Capital requires labor, and it accumulates especially rapidly when the labor force is sharply segmented and therefore politically weakened in its resistance to accumulation. The degree and modality of this segmentation varies according to historical conditions. Israel is part of the subtype of colonial-settler states and societies. There is, however, no pure, Platonic form of colonial-settler society, and Israel is a particularly messy blend. At one end of the spectrum, one finds societies such as North America and Australia, where the native population is so thoroughly subordinated, so extensively expelled and destroyed, that the survivors of the resulting genocide can play only a relatively small role in the composition of the labor force. The extent to which the working-class of the settler population can be exploited is limited therefore by the material concessions which capital has to make in order to assure that they place their loyalty to the "white race" ahead of their loyalty to the international working class. These concessions did measurably slow the accumulation of capital in Canada and Australia at key moments in history, relative to their imperialist peers. It was less of a brake on the accumulation of capital in the U.S., for two reasons: First, the existence of an enslaved portion of the proletariat, and its demographic and temporal extension through the enforcement of a racial-caste barrier against all Black Americans, enslaved or free, which provided a model for the prolongation of superexploitation following slavery's formal abolition. Then secondly, in part through the operationalization of the racial-caste boundary, the staged and partial admittance of immigrant groups into the contingent and limited benefits of whiteness. The history of immigration and the formation of the U.S. working class is the history of the successive (but sometimes partial or revocable) admission of meticulously defined and re-defined groupings into hegemonic whiteness.<p>At the other extreme, we find the Apartheid model, exemplified, but never exclusive to, South Africa in the period from 1948-1994. That is, a state in which the native population is classified, segregated, and subjected to innumerable restrictions on where and how they may work, live, and even die and be laid to rest. Every colonial-settler society is, potentially and in reality, at certain moments of its history, an Apartheid state, even in the historical epoch before the Afrikaans word was coined and disseminated world-wide. For example, it can be argued that colonial society in what is now the United States pioneered Apartheid well before that name, with the establishment first of all of a category of hereditary chattel slavery to which laborers both of indigenous and African descent were subjected. It was only after indigenous labor was, in most areas of the emergent polity, genocidally destroyed that the mark of hereditary chattel slavery came to be confounded with the racial-caste mark of Blackness. Through the subsequent elaboration of an global discourse of "race," the indigenous labor of Africa came into the circuits of world capital already branded by irons that had been forged for their enslaved cousins in the Americas.<p>With this historical understanding of the range of colonial-settler societies, it becomes possible to recognize the degree to which Israel, in its treatment of the indigenous Palestinian population, has heterogeneously mixed and matched elements from both the Apartheid model of settler-colonialism (segregate and exploit) and the American/Australian model (expel, expropriate and destroy). The dynamic tension between these models has enabled Israeli capital to accumulate over the last 73 years with almost unmatched rapidity. (The document in which I argue for this is about 10 years out of date, and I would likely want to revise some of its subordinate conclusions before publishing it, but I do have back-up for these assertions.) The current working class of historic Palestine is complexly and multiply segmented. The most important division has been and remains that between Jews, on the one hand, and Palestinians, on the other, which is at least partly comparable to the Black/white division in the United States, or the African/European division in South Africa. However within each of these two major groupings there are multiple subdivisions that are at least partially recognized and reinforced by state policy, along lines of "race," ethnicity, religion, migration status, and geography. In this respect it is also comparable to both the United States and South Africa, inasmuch as both those countries were always also complex, and complexified, in ways that have been expertly turned into modalities of power. As in these predecessors, however, the complexities ought not to obscure the stark moral difference between those who are oppressed and excluded, and those whose identity depends upon participation in the mechanisms of oppression and exclusion.<p>And there are also, it must be added, groups that do not fit into the core dichotomy. These groups have proliferated especially in the thirty years since the first Intifada. I refer here primarily to groups of non-Jewish migrants, who can be put to use by Israeli capital as a source of labor comparable to Palestinian workers' in their precarity, but without the risk to profits that arise whenever Palestinians attempt to assert and defend their rights as indigenous people.<p>There have been two major categories of such migrants. The first consists of refugees and asylum seekers, mostly from various parts of Subsaharan Africa. For these migrants, Israel is more a destination of convenience than a preferred destination, because, unlike EU member states (with the partial exception of Spain, with its colonial enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the coast of Morocco), Israel has a land border with an African country, Egypt. The second consists of economic migrants, who are usually employer-sponsored--in other words, guest workers--and who mostly from non-Muslim countries and ethnicities in South Asia and Southeast Asia. The first flow is irregular and subject to militarized interdiction by both Israeli and Egyptian state forces. It was not even possible until after the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian control under the Camp David Accords and the Taba Agreement of 1989 (which coincided, helpfully for Israel, with the beginning of the subsidence of the first Intifada). The second flow is subject to tight bureaucratic supervision. This is not to say that migrants who enter via this route do not sometimes remain in irregular visa status, of course, as is the case with state-supervised economic migrants throughout the world. With both these groups of migrants--the refugees/asylum seekers and the guest workers--recruited for similar jobs to those available to Palestinian workers, there is of course some element of labor competition among these groups, and between these groups and Palestinians.<p>However, the same fact that keeps Palestinians in "48" (the original boundaries of the State of Israel) in a subordinate social position despite their Israeli citizenship, and that utterly dispossesses the Palestinians in "67" (Gaza & the West Bank)--namely, the avowedly "Jewish" nature of the state--also keeps both these categories of migrants in a very precarious position.<p>Let us consider, for example, how difficult it would be for a migrant to marry an Israeli citizen, either for love or for convenience. There is no civil marriage in Israel, due to a political power-sharing agreement with the Orthodox Jewish Rabbinate dating back to 1948, under David Ben-Gurion. Marriage must therefore be carried out by a state-recognized officiant of a state-recognized religion--Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Druze. Each of these religions have limitations or prohibitions on marriage to someone of another religion. And perhaps the most stringest such prohibitions are those observed by the Jewish authorities in Israel. I don't know the details of what it would take for a migrant to marry an Israeli citizen of Christian, Muslim, or Druze faith, but I do know this: None of those marriages will qualify that migrant for permanent residency or citizenship in Israel. They will remain precarious. To become a citizen, only marriage to a Jew will do, and that is only possible following a conversion to Judaism that has been administered according to Jewish law in its most stringently Orthodox interpretation, as rendered by the Rabbinate. This sort of conversion is no easy matter.<p>Ironically, the traditional difficulty of conversion to Judaism evolved, not as an exercise in ethnoreligious chauvinism in service to a powerful state, but as a method of Jewish communal self-defense over centuries in "exile." So long as most Jews lived in the power of state authorities that were avowedly Christian or Muslim, and those authorities defined "apostasy" (e.g. conversion to Judaism) as a crime, any desire of non-Jews to become Jews was implicitly dangerous for the community as a whole. To reassure state authorities that Judaism was not a proselytizing religion, a whole host of restrictions proliferated--based of course on Talmudic precedent, but driven largely by matters of political convenience. Since "Jewish Emancipation" (dating, in North America, largely to the American Revolution), and in Europe, to the French Revolution and the partial spread of its juridical accomplishments through the Napoleonic conquests), there have been debates among Jews about whether such stringency is even needed any more. The Reform and Conservative movements have loosened up significantly. But remember, Reform and Conservative Judaism have little legal standing in Israel.<p>Consider the case of the Lemba people. They are an ethnic group found in parts of Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Malawi, who have traditions claiming patrilineal descent from Jews. Because Orthodox Judaism, and therefore Israel's immigration laws, does not recognize the validity of patrilineal descent, a group of Lemba who had formally converted to Judaism petitioned recently for permission to migrate to Israel. They were denied, however, because their conversion had been performed by a Conservative Rabbi. That stated, the authority of the Rabbinate is not absolute, due to the complexity of the power-sharing agreement with the state and the so-called "Law of Return". There have been other groups of migrants to Israel whose Jewishness, by the terms set by the Orthodox Rabbinate, was dubious--e.g. many former Soviet Jews--but for whom the State found ways of bringing them in as citizens. Comparing the Lemba to the cases of Soviet Jews, some of whom only had patrilineal descent--and some of whom were even practicing Christians!--suggests strongly that Anti-Blackness is a factor in their treatment.<p>That stated, if this happens with a coherent grouping of people with cultural traditions linking them to Judaism, imagine then how much more difficult it would be for individual migrants, of African or Asian origins, to become Jews, either sincerely or for opportunistic reasons. The traditional religious restrictions on conversion, therefore, serve the Israeli state and Israeli capital, then, as a means of conserving and enforcing the precarity of migrant workers. Therefore, while migrants are in daily competition with Palestinian workers for labor and pay, both groups are oppressed by the same mechanisms of chauvinist exclusion. Another glaring example on this point: It is commonplace, on the part of Netanyahu, other right-wing Israeli politicians, and the media, to refer to refugees and asylum seekers from Africa as "infiltrators". The same Hebrew word, <i>mistanenim</i>, was used after 1948 to refer to Palestinian refugees who attempted to cross the "Green Line" armistice border, in most cases for reasons as innocuous as <i>trying to return home</i> or <i>trying to tend the crops they had planted</i>.<p>This chauvinist maltreatment, which treats all non-Jews <i>a priori</i> as "infiltrators" is not qualitatively different from what migrants face in most of the world's wealthy nations. But there are many ways in which migrant life in Israel is worse than in many other countries, and migrants have a grapevine of sorts.<p>Meanwhile, among the Jews of Israel, the Orthodox population is growing faster than the population as a whole. If there was ever a window of opportunity for undoing Ben Gurion's compromise with the Rabbinate, it closed long ago. Thus, so as long as Israel defines itself exclusively and primarily as a Jewish state, the Rabbinate's hold on matters such as marriage & migration is irrevocable. Thus migrant workers, Palestinians of all classes, and any Israeli Jew who chafes under the ingrained conservatism and violence of their society, has grounds to be opposed the Zionist (Jewish-chauvinist) nature of the State of Israel.<p>The comparative unpopularity of Israel as a destination country, and its internal political reasons for making itself hostile to migrants, means that migrants will never fully supplant Palestinian workers' important economic role. And this is a source of hope, because it means that Palestinian workers still have a great deal of power that has yet to be fully unleashed against the Israeli state and capital, as was shown by the one-day general strike earlier this week. I will not end this essay by pretending to have the answers to how that power can be unleashed or what those workers should fight for. But I don't see anything compatible with human dignity short of a single, democratic state, from the river to the sea. (I'd prefer no state at all, anywhere, but that's my inner Emma Goldman speaking.)Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-62155112788530879182021-04-25T08:42:00.001-07:002021-04-25T08:42:10.984-07:00A Note on the Futility of Social DemocracyA difference between political parties in (most) European countries and in the United States: In Europe, political parties are power apparatuses formed with the intentionality of exercising authority within the separate power apparatus of the State. In the United States, however, with State-controlled party registration and regulation, political parties function in effect as part of the State apparatus already. Using the Foucauldian diagram of the panopticon: In Europe, party leaders function as prison guards surveilling social movements, as practice for their hoped-for role of administering the broader surveillance of state power. (The example of Tsipras and Syriza in Greece is instructive in this respect.) In the United States, however, there is no practice period. The difference between party leadership, elected officialdom, and the state bureaucracy is rudimentary and functionalist. Different functions are often co-located in the same person. Parties both surveil and are surveilled.<p>It is this that indicates the futility of U.S. social democracy, in both its right- and left forms. Right social democracy is the “realignment” fantasy shared by the majority of the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as the CPUSA. In this fantasy, the Democratic Party would not cease to function as part of the state apparatus, but it would do so in a way that is better aligned with the desires captured by the social movements that it electorally exploits—the unionized fraction of the working class, and minoritized racial, ethnic, and gender groupings. Thus the movements must conservatize themselves in order to capture and radicalize the Democratic Party. In the process, the movements have in fact conservatized themselves, as in the case of Labor, nearly out of existence. Left social democracy is represented by those groupings who insist it is possible somehow for a “new” party to give genuine representation to the working class, on the model of European social democracy. In the current atmosphere of DSA hegemony on the left, this tendency is not as visible as it once was, but it can be seen in various DSA minority groupings, in the “left” Greens who want to make the Green Party into an explicitly socialist party (or who insist, based on tortured readings of various GP position papers, that it already is one!), and in a few small groupings, usually of Trotskyist origin, who proclaim the need for a “workers party”. Such groupings do not recognize the degree to which U.S. political parties differ in their relationship to the State apparatus from European ones, and share a utopian view of the European reality that is out of step with the experience of workers’ movements there.<p>This note is not a general statement on the “party-form.” Such a statement would require both more empirical research (e.g., on the varying relations of parties and states in Latin America and other portions of the “global South”) and theoretical rigor (describing the fundamentally carceral nature of the diagram of power on which various types of party formations are based). But it provides adequate evidence, for those with eyes to see, on the futility of continued reliance on party formations in two important geographical spaces, the U.S. and Europe. Unfortunately, it is a futility that continues to consume much of what passes for “the left.”
Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-74412649337343193602021-03-28T08:59:00.005-07:002021-03-28T08:59:37.090-07:00Notes for a Post-Foucauldian Research Program in Gender and SexualityThe Foucauldian equation of Power/Knowledge only works when those with power take responsibility. (Foucault would quibble with the idea of any identifiable grouping “having” power, so let us say, pedantically, those constituted by power as authoritative.) Ignorance can be a tool of heedless authority, a means by which it retains stability. Ignorance can be cultivated, preserved, guarded jealously.<p>From this it follows that the smooth circuit of power, knowledge, and pleasure which he postulates in Volume 1 of <cite>The History of Sexuality</cite> is invalid, even within the arbitrary (Eurocentric, Christocentric) civilizational constraints he imposes on that study. The pleasure of knowing does not exhaust the scope of pleasures that can be taken. Pleasure can be experienced in the absence not only of power but even of knowledge. By studying and naming a phenomenon, one has called it into discursive existence, but the means by which that phenomenon participates in power may come about through discursive practices other than the scientific (knowing). Ample historical evidence for each of these points exists in the generation and comprehension of minoritized genders and sexualities.<p>Further: Within that volume there is a self-contradiction, which may or may not be related to this. On the one hand, he claims that “Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations….” (Part Four, Chapter Two, “Method”, p. 94) And yet in his periodization of sexuality he argues that “sexuality is originally, historically bourgeois” and speaks of “the proletariat’s hesitancy to accept this deployment and its tendency to say that this sexuality was the business of the bourgeoisie and did not concern it” (Part Four, Chapter Four, “Periodization”, p. 127). This proletariat he describes speaks in an unusually (for Foucault, though not for vulgar Marxists) univocal manner, and does not seem to include, e.g., proletarian women who agitated for birth control technology. If we take seriously the notion that “power comes from below,” then we must consider the possibility that these women were advocating for pleasures (the least of which would be, the pleasure of not having to worry about having yet another child) regarded as unspeakable by the bourgeois knowledge of the time. They advocated for one knowledge—the recognition and regulation of one’s own menstrual cycle—against another—the demographic certainty with which the bourgeoisie hoped that the reproduction of the labor force could be regarded as a matter that “took care of itself,” part of the <i>faux frais de la production</i>.<p>Thus: A disjunction between power and pleasure, that took the temporary historical form of a quarrel between types of knowledge. One need not adhere to the repressive hypothesis which Foucault so thoroughly and effectively discredits, for the same historical evidence can show how the demands of pleasure were soon enough recuperated into the circuits of power, through the expansion and segmentation of the productive labor force and the commoditization of care work. But one can see here--and in many other places--how inadequate a framework for critical analysis Power/Knowledge is.
Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-58072634076057673912020-10-07T08:03:00.001-07:002020-10-07T08:05:05.643-07:00The Structural Antisemitism of Cuomo's New COVID MapsI want to emphasize <em>structural</em> here, because I am discussing how the methodology apparently used in formulation of <a href=https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-new-cluster-action-initiative#initiativemaps>these maps</a> would have resulted in disparate outcomes that are detrimental to Haredi Jewish communities in ways that do not benefit public health independently of whether or not there was any intention, on the part of Governor Cuomo or others, to do so. (I have reasons to believe that there was a combination of spite, arrogance, and political pandering to antisemites at play, adding up to intentionality, which time permitting I will discuss in a separate post.) For now, though, let's look at the maps.<p>Based on Cuomo's own tweets, showing how lines of the various zones relate to the residential addresses of individual recent COVID cases, the approach seems to have been to draw the lines based on the density of of residential cases. Some of the absurdities of this have already been noted on Twitter. GIS geeks have pointed out that the lines do not follow streets, meaning that residents and business owners at the boundaries of different zones have to guess where they land and what restrictions they are subject to. As a result of that oversight, I noticed that the campus of Queens College, where I used to work, falls into three zones: A slice of yellow, a chunk of orange, and a sliver of red. A spokesman for St. John's University pointed out that they were 2/3 in Yellow, and 1/3 in the clear. No doubt the administrations of these institutions will be seeking clarity from the State government. The absurdity of Queens College is especially pointed, since it is <em>not a residential institution</em>--<strong>nobody lives there!</strong> So whoever drew the lines was clearly trying to create some sort of compact-looking boundary without taking account of the fact that they were cutting through a major institution of higher education.<p>The absurdities of the line-drawing exercise impact all New Yorkers, but the <em>way</em> they went about selecting where to draw the lines, by focusing on density and residential addresses, was bound to have a disparate impact on Haredi communities, who are more likely than most contemporary Americans to live in large, intergenerational households. They are also more likely to live in apartment-like structures than other groups. This helps account for why Cuomo's methodology resulted in more stark divisions in suburban areas, such as Orange and Rockland Counties, than in Brooklyn and Queens. In New York City, the family structures and residential buildings of non-Jewish (or non-Orthodox) neighbors are more likely to be similar to those of their Haredi neighbors than out here in the suburbs. (This has accounted for some of the negative response to Kiryas Joel here in Orange County, the fear that the Satmarim bring an urban lifestyle--and urban problems--to a setting that is mostly suburban, even partly rural.) But it is when we look at the reasons <em>why</em> Haredim have these lifestyle differences that we start to uncover how the methodology is also premised on fundamental misunderstandings of how contagious diseases spread.<p>Haredim are drawn to high density housing not because they like being on top of each other more than other people do, but because religious observance makes it convenient and desirable. On Shabbos and other major holidays, one must not drive, at all. Therefore it is necessary to live within walking distance of one's synagogue and mikveh (ritual bath). This also helps account for the relatively cramped family living quarters: While part of the appeal of this area was that relatively prosperous families are able to buy rather large houses at prices that are lower than most of the NY metropolitan area, most families in KJ are not so prosperous. Women with children, as a rule, don't work outside the home after their second child. If the husband works in a religious calling, those jobs do not tend to have much in the way of monetary compensation. The relatively prosperous families tend to be those with some sort of business. Businesses that cater specifically to the community, such as selling Judaica, preparing kosher foods, or clothing that matches the idiosyncrasies of custom, can only support so many. But even those who work in outward-facing businesses try to stay relatively close to home. It stands to reason: If you and your car must be home well before sunset on Friday evening, it would not be good to get stuck in traffic on the New York State Thruway. So as a rule, Haredim tend to stay relatively close to home: School-age children, as young as 3 years old, going to religious schools, women staying home with the younger ones, men working as close to home as possible, most business needs being tended to locally, without venturing very far afield for things such as diapers, prescriptions, or banking. There are exceptions to this, of course, but the exceptions prove the rule.<p>Contrast this with how my family lives. At this point, because of COVID, my kids rarely get to go anywhere other than their school buildings. In this respect they are, for better or worse, not so different from Satmar kids. However my partner works as a librarian at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie. She works from home 2-3 days a week, but is in her office, in the library, the remaining work days. We both make trips out for household necessities and, since the restrictions were loosened, some personal care. Most of these trips are local--Monroe, Harriman--but for some things we might end up in Cornwall, Beacon, Middletown, or even New Paltz. So if I got COVID, contact tracing would not remain local to the town of Woodbury and environs, but have to reach out to the staff of my butcher in Beacon, my liquor store in Cornwall, my hairdresser in New Paltz. If my wife got it, all of her coworkers at the Marist Library, who live scattered in various locations around the Hudson Valley, would have to be tested, along with possibly some faculty or students. And our family has been relatively cautious, compared to neighbors who are enjoying sporting activities and indoor dining.<p>Therefore what I submit is that, while the density of dots, individual cases, in Kiryas Joel looks very frightening--and it is very frightening!--the lesser density of cases in the surrounding "yellow" zones of Monroe and Woodbury, or even parts of these towns and surrounding areas that are subject to no new restrictions, is no cause for complacency, given the differences in lifestyle between a Satmar and an average non-Haredi American suburbanite. Cuomo and his supporters are boasting that the zones and restrictions are based on "science" and "data," but a real science-based, data-driven approach would not have focused not on where people with new COVID infections <em>live</em> but on <em>where they likely got it</em>. To estimate that would require a robust contact tracing program. And despite Cuomo's boasts that New York State's contact tracing is the "best in the country" (which I doubt), its data is apparently not robust enough to have allowed his administration to consider that as a possibility.<p>Thus, by focusing on residential address, Cuomo and his staff ended up taking an approach that ignores the realities of infectious disease transmission, in a way that was bound to come down heavier on Orthodox Jews than on most of their neighbors. Given the latter, it is no wonder that many Haredim feel that they are being discriminated against, which in turns makes it even more likely that people will rebel against the restrictions. This is particularly the case given the strictures on schooling and religious observance, which to such a community can appear as an attempt at cultural genocide. (Time permitting, I will make a future post explaining why this description is not hyperbole.) The maps and their underlying methodology are therefore structurally antisemitic--that is to say, they are antisemitic in effect regardless of the intentions of the people who drafted them--and detrimental to the public health aims they purport to serve.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-49509191064316278792020-07-23T21:38:00.000-07:002020-07-23T21:38:24.925-07:00Gender Trouble: A First Pass at a Few Frequently Asked Questions<h4>If your pronouns are "he" or "they," does that mean you are still in some sense a man?</h4><p>I never was a man. "Man" was an identity marker that I tried to live with and up to for a quarter century, at the expense of my sense of self and well-being. Including "he" in the options is a preemptive concession: I have been called "he/him" long enough that I am used to it, and if you are used to calling me that, I am signaling that I will not fight you over it. I will fight over other things. To be fair and complete, I would welcome "she/her" as well, if someone feels moved to refer to me thus, but I will not lay claim that up front in a quick introduction. Mostly because it feels potentially trivializing to trans sisters who identify as, are unequivocally, women, and who have had to struggle through more bureaucracy, medical intervention, social opprobrium, hatred and self-hatred, to claim that for themselves. "Genderfluid" means, sometimes I am predominantly masculine, sometimes predominantly feminine, sometimes--most often, in fact--some varied and varying mixture of the two, which can also mean, neither at all. It means you would need partial differential equations to describe my gender, and PDEs are sometimes insoluble. If you must encapsulate it in the symbolic order, then I'll borrow the words of Prince Rogers Nelson:<blockquote><i>I'm not a woman, I'm not a man<br>I am something you will never understand</i></blockquote><p>Or maybe you will. The scope of human understanding is growing, I hope and believe.<h4>So, then, why aren't you changing your name?</h4><p>The reasons are varied.<p>First, pragmatic: I already have a professional track record and publication history under this name.<p>Second, emotional: The great-grandfather after whom I am proximately named is one of the few people I am related to against whom I hold no grudge, perhaps because he died before I was born. And the biblical figure who is my ultimate namesake--the Joseph of Genesis, not the one of the "New Testament"--is a character with whom I have identified since I was a child. The wearer of the coat of many colors, the interpreter of dreams, sold into bondage by his brothers and escaping through wit and foresight. Read between the lines and you'll also see that he was queer as fuck.<p>Third, my habitual formality: Some have pointed out that "Jo" could be a shortened version of the name that would be readily perceived as ambiguous with respect to gender. But some of my earliest memories are of rejecting nicknames: Someone once called me "Joey," and I wailed that I was not a baby kangaroo. "Jo(e)" with or without the "e" (or, in the case of my spouse, with a macron and a final "h") signifies a level of emotional intimacy I allow only to a few--my partner, the best man at our wedding, my brother and sister, a small number of closest friends. If you feel close enough to me to try it, do so in my presence. If I look daggers through your chest, then kindly revert to Joseph. I certainly will not allow the state or its agents that sort of counterfeit intimacy.<p>Lastly, and perhaps most potently, my stubbornness: My name has been defying expectations since I was born, thanks to my surname. Tomaras "doesn't sound Jewish," and for those in the know--mostly Greeks--it is recognizably Greek, which because of the religious construction of Greek identity around the Orthodox church also implies "not Jewish" (never mind that there have been Greek-speaking Jews in the territory known as Greece since well before Saul set out on the road to Damascus, let alone changed his name and started writing epistles). Through the stubborn fact of my existence it has become a Jewish name. This is why I won't change my surname, even though it marks a patriarchal inheritance that I loathe, or rather, precisely because it does. My <i>pappou</i>, a fascist and a wellspring of hereditary trauma, boasted of having traced the family line back 600 years to an eponymous mountain in northern Greece. For a grandchild bearing that name to be a queer, Jewish communist is like a well-placed gob of spit in his eye. If through my stubbornness (and fecundity) I have made Tomaras into a Jewish name, perhaps through similar stubbornness I can get people accustomed to thinking of "Joseph" as a name that does not necessarily imply male gender.<p>I said there would be things I would fight about.<h4>So if you're nonbinary, why are you taking hormones?</h4><p>I am taking hormones <strong>because</strong> I am nonbinary. I am thankful to a transmasculine friend who, in a conversation about my elder child, mentioned that this could even be a possibility. That got me thinking. It has been difficult for me to look into a mirror for the last decade. I have always strongly resembled my father. About ten years ago, I reached the age that he was when he started regularly abusing me, and the resemblance became uncanny, frightening. If hormone therapy has no other effect than to lessen this, then that would be sufficient. Better fit into a wider range of clothing would, over the long term, be an additional desired effect. I am already seeing psychological effects--which may be due to the hormones, or may be due to the placebo effect, but even if it's the latter, placebo effects are real and medically measurable. I had not fully anticipated these effects, such as more spontaneous demonstrative emotion with my spouse and kids, but they are desirable. The tablets cost me about 12 cents each. Given all that, why wouldn't I?<h4>You're unemployed right now. Couldn't doing this, and being so public about it, complicate your job search?</h4><p>You know what's really complicating my job search? The fact that we're heading into an overdue global depression, which in the United States has been compounded and accelerated by a completely botched public health response to COVID-19.<p>In the course of the career that I stumbled into, grant administration, I have enabled the organizations that have employed me to obtain and manage about $60 million. In that time period, my total compensation has been less than 2% of that figure. Any organization that would overlook that because a quick Google search uncovered information about my gender identity and presentation is not only bigoted, but will ultimately suffer for it. And if the economic crisis, the public health crisis, my own openness, and the foolishness of others ultimately do prevent me from securing a new job in that field, then I will not be sad to leave it behind in favor of something else.<p>I have various possibilities in mind. One would be focusing on writing. In the last week I have started work on a novel, and seem to be making interesting progress with it. To stand out from crowd among writers requires at least one of these three things: attractive youth, genius, or outrageousness. Youth is a thing of the past for me. Up to now I have not applied myself sufficiently to writing to be able to make a plausible claim for genius. So outrageousness it is.<h4>Does the novel you're working on have anything to do with gender?</h4><p>Of course it does, silly! A smart person once wrote that "race is the modality through which class is lived." Along the lines of that thought, one can say that gender is the attentional frame through which any experience at all can be said to be lived. (Yes, my vulgar-Marxist friends, that does imply that gender precedes class. Please re-read your Engels before you protest.) The novel is a genre of writing which treats lived experience as its medium. Every novel, inasmuch as it succeeds as a novel, is "about" gender, whether its jacket copy says so or not, much as epic poetry is always "about" divinity, tragedy is always "about" fate, and lyric poetry is always "about" beauty.<p>But beyond this truism, two of the three main characters are trans. It is based loosely on an unpublished short story of mine. Reflecting on why that story failed, I realized that one of its weaknesses was that its main character was too close a mimickry of the sad man I was trying and failing to be in my 30s. I have successfully written stories around characters like that, but usually only by giving them some sick twist. This character, by adhering too closely to its model, ended up being merely pathetic. Another failing was that another character had come to a sad end that was too abrupt. I realized that I could deal neatly with both these failures by making both characters trans, but that the structural changes this would entail to the story would necessitate a much longer arc. Hence, a novel.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-6709477803145026492020-07-03T10:23:00.001-07:002020-07-03T12:27:21.768-07:00A Full (Re-)IntroductionI have been out as bisexual, to most people and for most purposes, since I was 16 years old. (A salient exception to this would be my father. If he happens to stumble across this post, here is my personalized message to him: Yes, your eldest son is a faggot, a poustis, to use a word you used so often and freely in both English and Greek. If you're fine with that now, I still have many other reasons to hate you and not want you in my life, so fuck off and die.) Yet I have not identified publicly, until now, as anything other than a man. This despite the fact that my questioning of gender identity began even before my questioning of sexual identity. Yet I have heard so many of my fellow 40-something queers bemoan the fact that we have been slower to come at this than has been possible for the "kids these days," young people who have so many more ways available to question and problematize the prisonhouse of gender. The consoling truth, though, is that we simply did not have the language available to us, at least not readily. Here is my story, interlaced with some textual analysis.<p>As soon as I was grown enough to pull it off, about the age of 13, I started sneaking into my mother's clothes whenever I had the house to myself. This was not easy. My mother is a very tall woman. She's still taller than I am. If my mother reads this, I doubt that is when she finds this out: I was never as good at hiding things from her as I thought I was, so I suspect she already knew. It was along a similar timeline that I had my first sexual experiments with other boys. I will not go into details about this because people are justifiably queasy about descriptions of childhood sexuality. Suffice to say that both for me, and for the other boys involved, it was possible to mentally compartmentalize these experiences as a kind of "opportunistic homosexuality," similar to that found in prisons and on ships at sea. That is, since we were all nerds and dorks of various sorts, we could rationalize that we were just "practicing" for the girls whom we perceived as being unavailable, and thus that we were able to reassure ourselves that we were really not "that way."<p>I started college early, at the age of 15, and began my first sexual relationship with someone of the opposite sex shortly before my 16th birthday. This complicated relationship lasted the better part of an academic year and was in most ways bad for both of us, but since she was frankly bisexual herself, I owe her the debt of gratitude of helping me recognize that I was and am also bi. Within a few months of this realization I had told nearly everyone in my life, even my then-7-year-old little sister.<p>So if I was able to come out so soon as bi, why not as genderfluid, the word that I now believe best encapsulates my gender identity? A long answer would entail a detailed gloss on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's <i>Epistemology of the Closet</i>, of which I do not presently own a copy. The short answer is: The word did not exist yet. But there are historical and biographical details that help explain why I would not be the person to coin it, either. Those details are worth retelling.<p>In college, I continued dressing from time to time. (In the first year, I was particularly blessed that that first girlfriend and I were the same size!) But I was fairly certain--and grew more certain as I entered my 20s--that I was not trans. That is, according to the cultural codes & definitions still prevalent in the mid 1990s, I was not "a woman in a man's body." I felt no dysphoria in relation to primary sexual characteristics (though some in relation to secondary sexual characteristics). So I thought of my forays into femininity as being "drag."<p>This way of conceptualizing things was helped, once I declared a major in philosophy, by the popularity of Judith Butler's <i>Gender Trouble</i>, which had been published a few years before in 1990, and her conceptualization of gender as performativity. I still find this conceptual framing quite useful, and most objections I have seen to it are based on misunderstandings of the meaning of "performative." (I will not discourse on that at length, as it would take us too far into the realm of philosophical nerdery and in ways that Butler herself has already answered better than I can.) In retrospect, however, my ventures in "drag" differed from most of what is understood as drag in the absence of "camp". The object was not to portray an exaggerated notion of femininity, but to express a feminine dimension of myself, to be related to publicly & sociably as femme. Yet since I did not always wish to be such, since there was also a masculine dimension of self which I was often quite comfortable expressing publicly and sociably, it did not seem, by the lights of what I understood at the time, that I could be "trans" in any way.<p>I am certainly not saying that such an understanding was absolutely impossible at the time: I had contemporaries in college who were transmasculine or transfeminine in ways that differed from the popular understanding of transsexuality, and that I did not fully understand at the time. I only mean to say that it was not in me to be a pioneer of a term that had not yet been coined. The first written usage of the word "genderqueer" that I can find via Google Books is from <a href=https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_New_Significance/dIjmCwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22genderqueer%22&pg=PA285&printsec=frontcover>an academic book published in 1996</a>, when I would have been a junior or senior in college, and may actually not be an intentional coinage of the author but an artifact of hyphenation. Even if I had been searching for such a concept, it is unlikely I would have encountered it.<p>However, 1996 was the year when I would have been least likely to be searching for such a term. I had just begun a serious, apparently heterosexual relationship, with the woman who would become my spouse. She now understands herself to be bi, and fairly butch. But she was not aware of either when we were both in college, and so she had not been involved with the LGBT student milieu on campus. Thus, by involving myself with her, I ended up getting exiled from that milieu. Let me say, it was just lovely hearing through the grapevine about friends saying, "Just watch, he'll be gay again within a year."<p>I had never claimed to be anything other than bi, and I was not claiming anything different. However, this adverse social pressure left me with the sense that, if I was to make the relationship work, I would need to distance myself from the queer "subculture" of which I had formerly been part. Honesty compels me to note, also, that while my wife is perfectly supportive now--we had a detailed conversation about my gender identity a couple of days ago, and as a result I am literally the happiest I've been in years--allowing her to get herself there took some work, time and patience on my part. She felt insecure about my sexuality for many years, and as we shall see, at times I gave her causes for insecurity.<p>I did not dress again for about ten years.<p>In that time, a few other things happened.<ol><li>After some episodic activism during college, in my senior year I began sustained, organized involvement in socialist politics.</li><li>I entered and quickly quit graduate school.</li><li>After leaving graduate school, I got my first full-time office job, as a data-entry clerk at an insurance company in North Carolina.</li></ol><p>All of these facts, including the socialist politics, contributed to the reconstruction of the closet.<p>Let me first talk about the job. My boss there was a good old boy. He was racist and sexist in casual ways from which I slightly benefited (e.g. with a quick promotion). He wore suspenders every day, and would do his Foghorn Leghorn strut around the office every morning as if inspecting his property. Even before my first interview, I knew I would no longer be in an environment where people read Judith Butler. As soon as he shook my hand, though, I knew I would have to "butch up". That is, the gender that I would have to perform to my fullest was the gender which I presented in my pressed, white, Oxford collared, buttoned-down shirt. It was time to be a man, and particularly, a "professional" and white man. I returned his firm grip, and negotiated what I thought would be a decent starting salary.<p>My subsequent jobs were in what, to a casual observer would seem to be more supportive environments, but I entered each alert. For example, my next boss, in a law library, was a gay man. But after my collegiate experiences of biphobia, I was careful not to let on anything about my identity to him or other coworkers until I was sure that none of them would take it amiss. Later on, my first job in academia was a mixed experience. The "big boss" was a physics professor who was notorious for his racism, sexism, and general abusiveness to subordinates. However, my immediate supervisor was a woman who was involved in local Green Party politics. I still was cautious. Here is what caution and "butching up" got me at that job: A series of raises and promotions that nearly tripled my personal income in the span of six years, and moved me from the secretarial/clerical ranks to the lower layers of the managerial class. White male privilege is real.<p>Perhaps if my political life had been more of a refuge, the continual performance of masculinity would have seemed to be less of a necessity. It was not much of a refuge. My political home for just over a decade was a small Trotskyist group that most people reading this have no reason to know about. At the time of its formation in the 1970s, the group in question had had, by the standards of small Trotskyist groups at the time, relatively advanced positions on what was referred to back then as "the gay question." This was part of what had attracted me to it, since similar such groups were worse. Nonetheless, I did push gently to update its positions. For example, at a membership convention--the only one that was held in my years of membership--I had proposed updating our nomenclature from "the gay question" to "the LGBT question" and including some acknowledgement of the importance of trans rights in a "perspectives" document. (Apologies to readers unexperienced in far-left politics for the jargon. Those with some experience of democratic centralist groupings in general and Trotskyist ones in particular may have some sense of the internal significance of both a convention and a perspectives document; describing this to other people would take us too far afield.) I was not prepared for the ferocity of the response. For my efforts, one of the founding leaders of the group denounced my amendment, and by extension me, as "petty-bourgeois". Because of my academic background, this was a sore point that resonated even with some people whom I thought might be inclined to support me. My amendment was voted down by an overwhelming majority. The absurd irony that the denunciation was directed from a straight, retired professor to a young, queer secretary is only apparent to me in retrospect. (Also absurd: The fact that I can't "show receipts" because there were never any official minutes of that convention, because the person who was "National Organizer" at the time lost all the notes. But that's too far off the point, and the grouping in question is too politically insignificant to merit a retrospective polemic. Someday, I'll write a satirical novel and get it all out of my system.) What matters for the purposes of this essay is that, by the standards of "democratic centralism" to which I held myself at the time, any particular attention to trans rights had been held by a majority vote of the membership of my organization to be petty-bourgeois.<p>Nonetheless, I was not in a state of total epistemic closure. Around this time, I was fairly active on LiveJournal. My presence there was totally pseudonymous, and kept on the DL from my organization, which tended to be suspicious of the internet as a forum for political discussion. Thus my LiveJournal functioned as an outlet for practicing writing techniques too experimental, or working out ideas too heterodox, to be of use in either my work or my political organization. In effect, it was a lengthy rehearsal for my fictional writing "career," such as it has been.<p>It was on LiveJournal that I first encountered the word "genderqueer." And when I first encountered it, and explanations of what it meant, something about it sounded mostly right, but not quite right, for me.<p>Even so, "democratic centralism" had just decreed that innovations in terminology relating to sexuality and gender were "petty bourgeois". And so my initial response was mockery. My apologies in retrospect for anyone whom I may have hurt with that mockery: Know, then, that I was hurting myself as well.<p>Another irony: I am still friends with some members and former members of that group, and they are more vocally supportive of trans rights than they were back then. But I note that their changes of heart followed, rather than led, shifts in liberal public opinion (at least in the U.S., as opposed to the U.K., where much of liberal opinion, and a significant portion of the left as well, is virulently "trans-exclusive"). I have already written on <a href=https://skinseller.blogspot.com/2020/06/against-ism.html>why I no longer consider myself a Leninist</a>, but Lenin did coin an excellent word for that type of political behavior: "tail-ism". Who's petty-bourgeois now, comrades?<p>So with my work life and political life framing our perspective, let us look at my gender expression in my mid-to-late 20s. I was in an apparently "straight" marriage. I was getting increasingly prosperous, in ways I had not expected. I was getting frustrated with but remained loyal to my political group. My partner was expecting that we would start working on having our first kid soon. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Therapy helped. After a lot of work, I realized that the major stressor was the issue of kids. I was afraid I would be like my father, and ironically, some of the destructive behaviors through which I expressed this fear mirrored his. One way to deal with the stress: I was fucking around with guys on the DL. Another way: Drinking too much, smoking too much pot, and getting in fights with people. With friends, family, and comrades, the fights were verbal, but because of my history of physical abuse, I was far too slow to recognize that <strong>verbal abuse is also abuse</strong>. (And my outbursts were not solely verbal: I got into public fights with strangers, sometimes in ways that were considered acceptable within a political framework, e.g. antifa work, and sometimes just because I was being an asshole. I was very careful never to be the one to throw the first punch, but I was good at dodging, albeit less effective at landing retaliatory hits. In retrospect, one thing I wish I had had during this time period were friends who shared my taste in punk and hardcore: I could have gotten this out of my system with some slam dancing at concerts, the way I used to as a teenager. But for the long term, therapy was more effective.)<p>In short, I was having my first major mental health crisis since grad school, and I had a lot to work on with my therapist. My biggest challenge was the issue of abusiveness and kids. If my marriage was to survive, I had to address it. I had to stop abusing others and myself. If I could achieve that, then I could assess honestly whether I did, in fact, want a child. That is where we focused our efforts. So while we did discuss sexuality some, I did not discuss gender much with her. (In fact, though I have had five therapists--two who were excellent, and three who ranged from mediocre to disastrous--gender has been the topic I've discussed least with any of them.) I am still married, and I have two kids, so apparently that worked out.<p>Another thing that helped, though, even though I did not discuss it much with my therapist, was dressing again. I went out to t-girl nights at bars in Manhattan, though not the kind (increasingly rare thanks to Giuliani's and Bloomberg's crackdowns) where sex workers congregated. Of course, there were chasers present, but mostly I succeeded in avoiding them, and hung out with the other ladies. It was through conversation that I realized that I was one of them to some extent, but not entirely, and not always. The question of "going full-time" would come up, and that didn't seem like what I wanted. Maybe there was something to that "genderqueer" neologism?<p>So why did I not continue dressing regularly? Here's what is impossible to anticipate before you have kids: Just how much time, energy, and money they take. I stopped publicly expressing my femme moments, for no more substantive reason than this. I hadn't the time, energy, or money. Take, for example, hair removal: It's expensive if someone is doing it for you, and it takes a while if doing yourself. And yes, I know it's not an absolute necessity--women and non-binary people have body hair. But I'm Greek, and if I'm wearing a low-cut dress and mountains of chest hair are peeking out? It's not a good look. It's a dysphoria trigger. And if I had gained weight--as I did, heading into my mid-to-late thirties--and no longer fit the clothes I had bought before, should I buy more?<p>Here's where we get back, by a circuitous route, to my Daddy issues: My father was not just abusive, he was neglectful. He would spend on himself and his whims even when my family couldn't afford it. This would put my mother into the position of scrambling to make sure that bills were paid and food was on the table. This was another pattern of behavior I did not want to repeat. His whims were drugs, hookers, fast cars, and cockamamie business ventures. Some dresses, blouses and skirts would hardly be on that order of money wasting (though shoes might be another story--get me in a good shoe store, men's or women's, and it's dangerous for my credit rating), but this is psychological reasoning, not economic. Why spend money on clothes I couldn't wear to work, when the kids needed clothes of their own all the time as they kept growing?<p>Could I have worn such clothes to work after all?<p>Let's consider: By 2012, I had moved to Maine. I was working at a liberal arts college. I was no longer in the group I once was in. Was I in a welcoming environment? Yes and no.<p>Portland, Maine is the sort of place where someone could walk down the street with a full beard and wearing a summer dress, and people wouldn't look twice. They'd look once, to make sure they saw what they saw, but wouldn't look again--that would be rude. But I did not live in Portland; I lived in one of the affluent suburbs to its north, what I called "Country Club Land." Nor was the college where I worked in Portland, but in a former mill town that had fallen on hard times. As for the College itself, let us consider a few anecdotes:<blockquote>Scene #1: A faculty conference on "inclusive pedagogy." There is a student panel on various forms of difference. One of the panelists is a physics major, an international student who is nonbinary. This student is the only one to include pronouns (they/them) in their introduction. None of the other students add their pronouns, nor do audience speakers during the discussion period.<br>In the discussion period, the chair of the Physics department praises the student effusively--but consistently misgenders them.</blockquote><p><blockquote>Scene #2: I am at a small-town bakery with a faculty member whom, at the time, I considered a friend, a cis gay male. He teaches Gender & Sexuality Studies.<br>He says: "I don't get the whole 'trans' thing."<br>I say: "What's not to get?"<br>Realizing he has messed up, he backtracks hastily.</blockquote><p><blockquote>Scene #3: A fairly well-known nonbinary BIPOC scientist is on campus for a job talk. They, an outspoken lesbian staff member, and I, are in a large room waiting for everyone else to show up. They are discussing lipstick shades. I <i>love</i> lipstick, so I join in.<br>Staff member: I've never seen you wear lipstick on campus.<br>Me: Well, I know this place, it would be the talk of the campus if I did. But I promise, if I ever leave here, after I give notice, I'll wear lipstick (and nail polish) whenever the mood takes me.<br>Some months later, after I have given notice because of my pending return to New York, I come to campus wearing lipstick and nail polish. That day, I have a meeting with the Dean, my boss, to go over a few things for the work transition. When I arrive, he says in a tone of voice that is somewhere between shock and a conspiratorial leer: "So it's true!" So, yes, I was right, even though I had been alone in my office for most of the day before then, it had been the talk of the campus.</blockquote><p>To be fair to the institution, shortly after I left they hired a new VP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, and I have reason to believe, based on how faculty and staff with whom I am still friends discuss gender diversity, that they have been somewhat successful in changing the atmosphere on campus. However, a VP is better positioned to be a pioneer than a staff member in middle management, let alone an international student.<p>So whence the recent shift in my own attitude? First, I credit my elder child. For coming forward as nonbinary before they had even become a teenager. For telling off their grandfather when he said some particularly hurtful things (even if we, their parents, wish they hadn't screamed quite so much at him). And also for demonstrating, through my mother's much better reaction to their coming out than to my own, that my mother had evolved. There have been none of the microaggressions that I got from her after I came out as bi. Having already cut off my father, I think part of me was subconsciously worried that if I came any further out of my butched-up closet, that I might end up a <i>de facto</i> orphan. (So, thanks Mom; please don't disappoint me.)<p>I also want to credit the students of my most recent, former employer, Sarah Lawrence College. Unlike my prior institution, it is genuinely open to gender and sexual diversity, and the credit for that goes more to the students than to the faculty and staff. In my short tenure there, I only had a few opportunities to attend meetings with students present. Every single time, the students (including cis students) took the initiative in making introductions with pronouns. Faculty went along, some more comfortably than others. Discussions about this topic with administrative staff were variable, depending on who was in the room. But on campus at least, students set the tone, and a good one. In those meetings with students present, I started introducing myself as he/they, not 100% sure what I meant by that, but knowing that it felt right.<p>My breakthrough came last week while I was in isolation due to a possible case of COVID-19. I had been feeling some dysphoria (focused mostly on body hair) for some time. With plenty of spare time and the master bathroom to myself, I shaved legs, arms, armpits, chest and belly.<p>Then on Wednesday, after Spouse and I had the good conversation in which, for the first time, I used the word "genderfluid" out loud to describe myself, I went to a consignment shop for a small treat. I now have a lovely dress--scoop-necked sleeveless black sheath, with a lightly ruffled sheer outer layer in a floral pattern and half sleeves, that I can wear whenever the mood takes me. (I need more clothes, "men's" and "women's" alike, but I'm still a parent, still inclined to put my kids' needs before my own. And I am unemployed at the moment, thus cautious about money. But it was less than $10, so one delightful item isn't going to break our bank account.)<p>If you search the Google Books N-gram viewer, which cuts off at 2012, the word "genderfluid" does not appear. If anyone has ideas of when and where it may have first appeared, I would be grateful for your leads. Since it does seem to be the word that best describes how I see myself, I would love to know who coined it and when.<p>If my career-path shows the reality of white, male privilege--the privilege for which I felt I had to butch up and construct a new closet in order to be able enjoy it fully--my layoff and present unemployment also show that, in the face of capitalist crisis, it is transient. After several years of being the "breadwinner," advancing in my "career," I am unsure of what is next. And now, thanks to this essay (and the Twitter thread that gave rise to it), the closet is over and done with, exploded into a million pieces. Wherever my next job is, even if I could rebuild it, I won't.<p>I am genderfluid and bi, devoted to my bi, butch wife, amazed with both my nonbinary elder child and my younger one who hasn't quite figured such things out yet. We are out, proud, and fighting. My name is Joseph, and my pronouns are he/him or they/them.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-40362001460844553092020-06-21T03:08:00.001-07:002020-06-21T03:08:34.428-07:00Against IsmIs there anything more frustrating than to live to see what one has been waiting for one's whole life, only to be mostly sidelined by circumstance? The event I had been waiting for, apparently, was a nationwide uprising against racist police terror. And circumstance refers here to COVID-19, my own asthma, and thus my mortal fear of the former in relation to the latter.<p>More frustrating could be this: To recognize, through discourse tangentially related to such events, how one has left behind what once was an important component of one's political identity, and to have no better outlet for that recognition than a mere blog.<p>In occasional correspondence with friends, I have for the better part of this year been referring to myself as "no longer a Leninist." This after a lengthy period of simply keeping silent on my relationship to Leninism, in recognition of the fact that it was too much in flux for me to say anything meaningful about it; when in doubt, I follow Wittgenstein's maxim, "whereof one cannot speak, one is obliged to remain silent."<p>At first the motivation for my change of attitude was largely negative. All too many who profess "Leninism" do so as a means to justify support, against mass uprisings, of some of the world's most hideously repressive regimes. But I have always been aware enough of the diversity of political currents to recognize that these were not the sole representatives. Yet even among more humane representatives of the current, one can find more than a few examples of those who engage in selective readings of sanctified texts and dubious historical analogies to sanction doing, in the present moment, whatever it is they happen to wish to do. This is antithetical to the principled approach to politics that I thought, for most of my adult, politically active life, was represented by the term "Leninism," but I now see it as the sort of thing one ought to expect when one attempts to transform a person with a contradictory life into an Ism.<p>It is only now--literally, in the last few hours--that I can begin to articulate a positive rationale for my rejection of the Ism. One thing that is striking about the current political moment is how consistently protestors have refrained from putting forward a charismatic leadership. This seems not to be a mere lack, but a conscious resistance, a result of a lesson collectively learned from the last such outbreak, the 2014 events associated with names like "Ferguson" and "BLM". Put bluntly, every person who came forward in that moment as a leadership figure of some sort has either been not-so-mysteriously found dead, or has since exposed themselves as some sort of grifter. The apparent absence of charismatic leadership is better understood, then, as an expression of collective will, a determination not to expose oneself or others to repression or selective buying off. It is an expression, therefore, of the creativity of revolutionary movements so often seen historically, in which lessons learned from prior events take the form of novel means of organizing struggles.<p>You cannot have Leninism, or any other name-based Ism, without charismatic leadership. And given a choice between allegiance to a name-based Ism, or learning from the creativity of the present movement, I choose the latter. Ironically, it is a willingness to do that which Lenin the historical figure, in contrast to Lenin the Icon, showed at his best moments. Even his closest Bolshevik party comrades were perplexed at times with his enthusiasm for such innovations as the mass political strike or the workers' council (Soviet). Historians better equipped than I am with Russian-language ability have documented how rarely the caricature of lockstep discipline projected back onto the Bolshevik party by opponents and would-be disciples alike was borne out in evidence.<p>So what to make, then, of the historical figure, rather than the icon? I see him as neither beatific nor demonic, but tragic, in the strict Aristotelian sense of tragedy. His success at intermediate aims--the overthrow of the autocracy and taking of state power--overwhelmed his ultimate aims of the liberation of peoples and worldwide achievement of communism. I recognize that in this reading I am making a choice to read his more democratically inclined writings, such as <i>The Right of Nations to Self-Determination</i> and <i>State and Revolution</i>, as sincerely meant, rather than gestures whose cynicism is "revealed" by the actual practice of Bolshevism in power. That the latter was not a pure emanation of the famous bald pate is, I believe, shown by his final, failed attempts from his deathbed to undo some of the worst abuses of the machine he had helped to create: The sallies against bureaucratization of the state and party, the reminders of the importance of self-determination, the so-called "Testament". (And lest the reader think I am engaged in a certain kind of Trotskyist demonology, let me point out that in the context of civil war, violations of the rights of nations to self-determination were at least as much the responsibility of the Commissar of War and Architect of the Red Army as they were of the Commissar of Nationalities.)<p>The tragic hero is meant as a warning, an exhibition of flaws for the viewer to recognize and avoid in themselves, not a Christ whose letter-perfect imitation in word, deed, and gesture can usher in a second coming. You don't become a communist by swapping the "J" for an "L" in "WWJD?" The tragic flaw, in this case, was to attempt to harness a relatively new political formation, whose counterrevolutionary and bureaucratizing tendencies had only just begun to be apparent--the mass political party--to a revolutionary aim. To generalize more, the same appreciation for novelty that he showed with regard to the council or the mass strike enabled him to regard the party as a tool that could be used as well in one way as another. In contrast to the standard "Leninist" gloss on Luxemburg, which argues that she was "too late" to recognize the importance of the party, I would argue that both Lenin and Luxemburg were too late to recognize that the ways in which political parties are inimical to their stated emancipatory aims are intrinsic, rather than accidental.<p>So, to borrow a question which had already been borrowed, what is to be done? I am no longer so arrogant as to think that I know. To borrow another phrase that seems a bit more current, I guess we'll keep fucking around and finding out.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-61607693860878100672019-07-16T17:45:00.000-07:002019-07-16T17:51:15.132-07:00Human Dignity and the Law of the LandRabbi Marcus Rubenstein is the rabbi of Temple Sinai, an egalitarian Conservative synagogue about half an hour from where I live. We came to each other's attention when he organized the first <a href=https://twitter.com/search?q=%23NeverAgainIsNow&src=typeahead_click&f=live>Never Again Is Now</a> action in our area--which I unfortunately found out about too late to attend. He has been hosting a series of iyyunim (roughly translatable as, lecture and discussion on topics of Judaic interest) at his synagogue, which fortunately for me one need not be a congregation member to attend. Monday's iyyun was <a href=https://www.sefaria.org/Berakhot.19b?lang=bi>Talmud Berakhot 19b</a> through 20a, in which the rabbis discuss situations where strict adherence to certain commandments might conflict with showing respect for the dignity of other people. I missed it; the traffic on Route 6 was terrible, giving me ample opportunity to observe <a href=http://skinseller.blogspot.com/2019/07/thoughts-on-surveillance-and-narcissism.html>the texting habits of my fellow drivers</a>. But after the iyyun, R. Marcus posted some thoughts on Facebook <a href=https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10105507031291994&id=5313400>prompted by his own presentation</a>. And I was with him until his last paragraph, when he attempted to derive its practical application by trying to draw conclusions about how DHS or ICE agents should act in their efforts to enforce, not divine law, but the all-too-human law of who may cross borders and abide within them.<p>This did not sit well with me. But rather than fire off a glib response, as Facebook's interface encourages people to do, to the detriment of their relationships and thoughts, I decided to sit with that discomfort for the day and see if anything came to mind that would account for it.<p>This is where I arrived in my thoughts: The rabbanim were not giving guidance to agents of state power, but to a dispersed, minority people scattered through the Sassanian and Byzantine Empires and beyond. And their words live inasmuch as they have meaning to persons--Jews, yes, but any who can read and understand their words, and apply them with intelligence--persons who are striving to act ethically. Not those who are enforcing the laws of earthly power, but those who are trying to do what is right by others. (Yes, my operating definition of "ethics" here borrows heavily from Emmanuel Levinas.) That is not to say that Jews, or any other would-be ethical actor, is under no obligation to the laws of the state in which they live. As the rabbanim dictate, <a href=https://www.sefaria.org/Bava_Kamma.113a?lang=bi><i>dina de-malkhuta dina</i></a>, that is, the laws of the land are binding upon the ethical subject inasmuch as they do not conflict directly with Torah. How, then, could adherence to the law of the land in this country come into conflict with human dignity? Consider the case of <a href=https://theintercept.com/2019/06/12/felony-trial-of-no-more-deaths-volunteer-scott-warren-ends-in-mistrial/>Scott Warren</a>, against whom the Federal government brought felony charges for leaving water in places where immigrants could find it in the desert, and against whom they could still elect to attempt a retrial. If someone is presented with an opportunity to protect the dignity of an immigrant by offering food, water, or shelter, should they shy away from that ethical obligation, for fear of transgressing <i>dina de-malkhuta</i>, the law of the land?<p>Referring back to Berakhot, then, and Rabbi Marcus's iyyun, how might the conclusion reached by the rabbanim apply, that human dignity takes precedence over positive ("thou shalt") commandments and rabbinical ones (those derived by the rabbanim in the course of building series of "fences around the Torah"), but not over negative ("thou shalt not") commandments? <i>Dina de-malkhuta</i> is a rabbinical commandment, an adaptation to the loss of temporal power by Jewish communal institutions under Roman and Persian rule, and an injunction that no individual Jew should jeopardize the security of the community as a whole by claiming that the superiority of divine law gives license for all forms of rebellion. It is not absolute and for all time: Had it been, the Bar Kokhba rebellion would have been heretical, but Mar Samuel, the rabbi on whose authority it is given, was born more than forty years after that rebellion's defeat. As a rabbinical commandment, <i>dina de-malkhuta</i> is of a lower order than the defense of human dignity. Fear of breaking the law is no excuse for failure to come to the aid of immigrants, but rather, pusillanimity and moral cowardice.<p>So what does this have to do, then, with DHS or ICE? Rabbi Marcus may be more sanguine than I about the possibility that there remain, within those organizations, people still capable of behaving as ethical subjects. I find any such hope <a href=https://www.napalminthemorning.com/ice-cbp-detainee-abuses-historical-atrocity/>doubtful on its face</a>. At this point, the actions of those agencies do not only transgress against human dignity, but also against certain basic, negative commandments that should be known to all: "Thou shalt not kill," "thou shalt not steal," and these more than suffice for critique of its actions. Ethical behavior within these organizations would require consistent and organized defiance of orders that not only transgress basic moral law, but also international treaty obligations. An employee of DHS or ICE, if they are not to risk being cast out from humankind as an agent of depravity, would have to take specific actions by which they would risk their job, or quit the filthy job entirely.<p>Longtime readers are probably perplexed that an atheist of known communistic sympathies is engaging in such Talmudic analysis, but as I already wrote <a href=http://skinseller.blogspot.com/2013/05/end-of-epoch.html>six years ago when my worldview started to shift</a>, "the main tasks of the moment are neither political nor economic, but ethical or moral." When one speculates on what the agents of a state ought to do--or, if one has given up hope that they might do otherwise than they are doing, how to frustrate their intent--one is engaged in political reasoning, and in that domain my training, the conceptual and analytic tools which I have most readily to hand, can be grouped under the broad heading of "Marxism." When one is discussing what persons ought to do, not necessarily with an eye toward the transformation of power relations but simply to demonstrate respect for others, one is engaged in ethical reasoning, and there, the earliest training I was given, the vocabulary to which I default, and the dialectical methods through which I attempt to navigate my way through contradictions, these all remain Jewish.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-41720988302846470462019-07-15T16:35:00.001-07:002019-07-15T16:35:16.329-07:00Thoughts on Surveillance and NarcissismIf you have been reading my fiction, you know that surveillance often figures into it. I would count it as having a central or plot-determining role in more than half of the stories I have published to date, a good 11 out of 17, in fact. More than the mere fact of surveillance, though, each such story poses the implicit question of why the characters would invite surveillance into their lives? I do not claim that the answers implied by the stories are all good, that is, convincing answers. The advantage, though, of writing fiction rather than non-fiction is that a single can offer or suggest multiple answers to any one question: If you don't like the first answer I seem to have given, try your best to uncover another through interpretation!<p>There are many situations, though, where the potential answers are so obvious, so trite, that the questions they pose are not interesting enough to support a story, but none the less they occur in life, with depressing frequency. Consider, for example, the matter of texting while driving. As of now, in the United States at least, it seems as though the only ways for someone engaging in the practice to be caught are direct observation by a police officer, or to have it uncovered through an insurance investigation subsequent to a resulting accident. With such sporadic enforcement, it appears to have become as rampant a practice as speeding, and far more dangerous. Today, I observed, through my rear view mirror, someone in the car immediately behind me with his iPhone propped against the top of his steering wheel for a distance of more than four miles, including at speeds approaching 60 miles an hour.<p>Technologically, it would not be much of a challenge for the phones, with existing capabilities and installed apps, to begin telling on us. GPS can tell whether the vehicle is in motion or not. If the car is at all internet enabled, as a growing number are, then it's just a matter of a few nested IF statements determining whether the phone is at a distance and in a direction from the car's own receiver or transmitter corresponding to active use by the driver, at a time that the car is in motion. All one needs is for that possibility condition to trigger an automatic notification to someone. This is so easy, that one need not be overly paranoid to suspect that it already exists, awaiting only the legal or market conditions for it to be activated.<p>What would those legal and market conditions be? It is easy to anticipate China imposing it as a requirement on all smartphone providers in a top-down manner. <a href=https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3007650/chinese-media-call-crackdown-motorists-using-mobile-phones-after>The media outcry calling for it is already in place.</a> In the U.S. it seems more likely that it would come about through a combined rollout of varied approaches. A luxury surveillance item marketed to the parents of driving teenagers first--<a href=https://www.hellotech.com/blog/5-of-the-best-teen-driving-apps-for-parents/>that already exists</a>. Then a requirement imposed on commercial drivers by their employers, or on drivers with a history of violations as a condition of retaining their licenses. Then insurance companies start offering discounts to every customer who downloads their proprietary snitch apps. Then the undiscounted cost of insurance is allowed by state insurance commissioners to rise so high that it becomes prohibitively expensive for most people not to download the snitch apps. After all, if you don't install it, then clearly you must have something to hide. It might never attain 100% penetration, but 90% is good enough for most practical purposes.<p>And then, since the same "sniffing" technology could be used, e.g. to identify every cell phone within a certain radius of a police body camera and oriented in such a way as to suggest that the phone might be used to record the actions of the officer wearing that camera, and install a little virus that temporarily makes it impossible to record or livestream video. Of course, I could just be imaginatively paranoid, as near-future science fiction writers so often are.<p>"But, Joseph! You just gave away a potential story idea! Don't waste it on a blog post!" I am getting bored with writing that sort of story, however. Everyone recognizes someone they know in it, but never recognizes themselves. The characters are so foolish, so implausible, right?<p>I am not convinced of that. What the characters in the baroque surveillance regimes I have postulated in various stories have in common with the people who balance their cell phones on their steering wheels within our present, mundane surveillance regime is psychological narcissism, the inability to imagine that their own actions could be wrong or that they could be responsible for any harms to others that result from them. The obverse of the common unwisdom, "if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to hide," is not that the people who say that believe they have never done anything wrong, but that they are unable to recognize the wrongness of their own wrongdoing.<p>One can certainly tell stories about characters like that. I have. I do not think, though, that I need to tell many more. To tell such stories in a fiction register might even be a distraction from the non-fictional damage being done, not by characters, but by living caricatures.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-35862110345477803412019-04-06T19:16:00.001-07:002019-04-06T19:19:13.312-07:00Meta-Anthology 2018Repeating myself from last year, with slight modifications: I make no pretense to this representing the best short stories of the year 2018. First of all, because they are not of that year, having all first appeared in 2017. But also, since I could not possibly keep up with all short fiction publications of interest, I have culled them from four key anthologies, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's <i>Best American</i> series, in its Short Story, Mystery Story, and Science Fiction and Fantasy instances, and the Pushcart Prize. Despite the names of those anthologies, it represents not the best of the best, but a selection of what was deemed "best" by others that I found nonetheless to be worth reading. This version of the meta-anthology, my sixth, comes the latest of any, due to my having completed an interstate move. Why do I keep doing it? I find that it brings or renews good authors to my attention, and also brings or renews to my attention strong publications, the sorts of venues in which I might be honored to have my own work appear. Was 2017 a good year for short fiction? Let me answer a question with a question: Was it a good year for anything?<p><b>Charlie Jane Anders, "Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue," from <i>The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018</i>. First appeared in <i>Boston Review: Global Dystopias</i>.</b><p>Anders is not the most politically insightful of contemporary speculative fiction writers, but what she brings to her work far more reliably than most is <i>style</i>.<p><b>Michael Bracken, "Smoked," from <i>The Best American Mystery Stories 2018</i>. First published in <i>Noir at the Salad Bar: Culinary Tales with a Bite</i>.</b><p>I can't resist barbecue, or shoot-'em-ups.<p><b>Yoon Choi, "The Art of Losing," from <i>The Best American Short Stories 2018</i>. First published in <i>New England Review</i>, vol. 38, no. 2.</b><p>Love and care can survive the loss of memory and mind, just barely. Somehow, a pair of Korean immigrant grandparents call to mind my own first-generation Jewish-American ones.<p><b>Gwendolyn Clare, "Tasting Notes on the Varietals of the Southern Coast," from <i>The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018</i>. First appeared in <i>The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction</i>, September/October 2017.</b><p>I suspect this transcends the author's intention, but this story is a perfect illustration of Walter Benjamin's dictum that "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."<p><b>Olabajo Dada, "The Bar Beach Show" from <i>2019 Pushcart Prize XLIII</i>. First appeared in <i>The Southamption Review</i>.</b><p>Military cynicism mastered the politics of the spectacle long before practitioners of mass politics recognized it as a thing in the world.<p><b>Samuel R. Delany, "The Hermit of Houston," from <i>The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018</i>. First appeared in <i>The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction</i>, September/October 2017.</b><p>This was my favorite science fiction story to appear in 2017, and it holds up. Not because it was perfectly realized--it wasn't--but because it was one of the few that I read that was not averse to the risk of failure.<p><b>Alicia Elliott, "Unearth" from <i>The Best American Short Stories 2018</i>. First published in <i>Grain</i> vol. 44.3.</b><p>I was in tears by the end of my reading, and glad in this case that the word "American" is used, by the series editor, in a sense that includes anglophone Canada.<p><b>Jaymee Goh, "The Last Cheng Beng Gift," from <i>The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018</i>. First appeared in <a href=http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/last-cheng-beng-gift/><i>Lightspeed</i></a>.</b><p>Some day human beings will outgrow the need for stories about parents needing, and failing, to unlearn a proprietary attitude toward their adult children. Until that day, this was one of the more imaginative examples of such a story that I have seen.<p><b>Jacob Guajardo, "What Got into Us," from <i>The Best American Short Stories 2018</i>. First published in <i>Passages North</i> no. 38.</b><p>A well-imagined scenario that any queer boy can relate to, strong characterization, and precise control of language that allows the writer to do test the limits of English with past, present, and future tenses.<p><b>Maria Dahvana Headley, "The Orange Tree," from <i>The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018</i>. First appeared in <i>The Weight of Words</i>.</b><p>With more brilliant sentences in its few pages than in many of the rest of the stories published in that year, this sexual, intertextual piece immerses the reader in Mediterranean brine and the juice of bitter oranges.<p><b>Cristina Henríquez, "Everything Is Far from Here," from <i>The Best American Short Stories 2018</i>. First published in <a href=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/24/everything-is-far-from-here><i>The New Yorker</i>, July 24, 2017</a>.</b><p>I somehow don't remember having read this earlier, even though I am a <i>New Yorker</i> subscriber. A horrifying story that is both weakened and made more horrifying by the knowledge that its horrors are already being outstripped by reality. Read it before it is made so far out of date that its horrors seem quaint.<p><b>Micah Dean Hicks, "Church of Birds," from <i>The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018</i>. First appeared in <i>Kenyon Review</i> March/April 2017.</b><p>The greatest curse is a malformed wish.<p><b>J. M. Holmes, "What's Wrong with You? What's Wrong with Me?" from <i>2019 Pushcart Prize XLIII</i>. First appeared in <i>The Paris Review</i>.</b><p>A story that left me smelling the funk of weed smoke and testosterone-charged man sweat.<p><b>Victor LaValle, "Spectral Evidence," from <i>2019 Pushcart Prize XLIII</i>. First appeared in <i>Ploughshares</i>.</b><p>This felt to me like the way Raymond Carver would tell a ghost story if he ever allowed himself to tell a ghost story, which he did not, so that leaves space for LaValle to do his thing.<p><b>David Naimon, "Acceptance Speech," from <i>2019 Pushcart Prize XLIII</i>. First appeared in <i>Boulevard</i>.</b><p>Human consciousness as the fever-dream of a rampant microbiome trying to think itself out of existence.<p><b>Alan Orloff, "Rule Number One," from <i>The Best American Mystery Stories 2018</i>. First appeared in <i>Snowbound</i>.</b><p>I thought I saw the end coming, and then I saw the end coming, and then I didn't.<p><b>Lettie Prell, "Justice Systems in Quantum Parallel Probabilities," from <i>The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018</i>. First appeared in <a href=http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prell_01_17/><i>Clarkesworld</i> Issue 124</a>.</b><p>To be frank, when it comes to science fiction stories about alternate legal systems that appeared in 2017, I prefer my own "Menistaria...", which appeared in the Fall 2017 issue of <i>Lackington's</i>. But that had been rejected by <i>Clarkesworld</i> years before, and CW has a larger audience than <i>Lackington's</i>. What I do like about this story are the things that it shares with my own: The willingness to imagine that things could be better, and recognition of the moral stunting of those who cannot imagine things being other than they are.<p><b>Karen Russell, "The Tornado Auction," from <i>2019 Pushcart Prize XLIII</i>. First appeared in <i>Zoetrope: All Story</i>.</b><p>Sometimes the bravest thing to do is the least destructive.<p><b>Amy Silverberg, "Suburbia!" from <i>The Best American Short Stories 2018</i>. First published in <i>The Southern Review</i>, vol. 53, no. 2.</b><p>You can never go home again because why on earth would you want to? A good example of fiction as literalized metaphor.<p><b>Curtis Sittenfeld, "The Prairie Wife," from <i>The Best American Short Stories 2018</i>. First published in <a href=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/13/the-prairie-wife><i>The New Yorker</i>, February 13 & 20, 2017</a>.</b><p>This one I remember consciously deciding not to read when it was first published. The confessed Twitter addiction of both the author and the main character interacted poorly with my own; often when I am reading <i>The New Yorker</i>, I am logged into Twitter, and reading about a Twitter-obsessed character while being on Twitter seemed a bit too--as the main character in Silverberg's story would say--"meta". The presence of this story on the list shows how arbitrary this list really is. My reception of a story varies in part depending on the medium in which I am trying to read it. I am least receptive to fiction when it is on a screen, and stories that work in a fat volume may turn me off on a three-column page.<p>Turning to the story itself: It has some manipulative tricks, like not stating the gender of the main character's spouse until more than midway through. Though anyone who ends up surprised at that reveal, only reveals themselves, as a clueless hetero. Nonetheless, I am glad of its all-too-relatable depiction of having-kids-in-one's-forties, of getting nostalgic for the erotic abandon of one's teenage self, and its frank descriptions of vigorous scromping. A more ambiguous story might have ended up more cynical, perhaps too much so for <i>The New Yorker</i>, so perhaps I ought to write that more ambiguous story.<p><b>Rivers Solomon, "Whose Heart I Long to Stop with the Click of a Revolver," from <i>The Best American Short Stories 2018</i>. First published in <i>Emrys Journal</i> vol. 34.</b><p>A story that aims high, higher, more ambitious, than most stories published today, so that even if it does not quite hit its target, one savors the miss, the kickback, the smell of powder.<p><b>Cadwell Turnbull, "Loneliness Is in Your Blood," from <i>The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018</i>. First appeared in <a href=http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/loneliness-is-in-your-blood/><i>Nightmare Magazine</i> issue 52</a>.</b><p>The first literary treatment I have seen of a soucouyant (I know there are more, but this is the first that <i>I've</i> read), which more than makes up for the single-sentence opening paragraph.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-62503041505993104662019-03-31T07:32:00.000-07:002019-03-31T07:32:53.428-07:002018 Nebula Ballot<h4>Novel</h4><p>My vote goes to: <i>Blackfish City</i> by Sam J. Miller. A sexy and urbane thriller set in the aftermath of climate catastrophe, which deftly handles multiple viewpoints, including technologically mediated shared human-animal consciousnesses. I would say that it was the best novel that I read of any genre that was published in 2018, but I fear that, because my reading list over the last year has been lighter than usual on contemporary fiction, that might seem like faint praise. Let me say then that it is arguably one of the best novels of this decade.<p><h4>Novella</h4><p><i>The Black God's Drums</i> by Phenderson Djèlí Clark wins my vote through having the most original setting of this year's nominees.<p><h4>"Novelette"</h4><p>I will never not put this category name in scare quotes, as this term that as far as I can tell is current only among science fiction and fantasy fandoms too often ends up encompassing two disparate literary phenomena: long-ish short stories, sometimes overly long; and brief novellas, sometimes too brief to be fully realized. I have read and enjoyed pieces that fit the boundaries of this category, but none of this year's nominees have won my vote. (To be fair, for some of them it was only because interlibrary loan has been too slow for me to receive and read them before the deadline for ballot submission.) Abstention / no preference.<p><h4>Short Story</h4><p>Phenderson Djèlí Clark wins my vote again, this time with a story that tests the limits of fantasy at the levels of concept, narrative, and stylistics, "The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington." While I am disappointed at the entirely anglophone nature of the nominee list in a year when a number of brilliant stories in translation found their way into science fiction and fantasy publications, this story is head and shoulders above almost anything else the genre brought us in 2018.<p> Abstention / No Preference for the Bradbury Award (dramatic presentation--my media consumption habits are dominated by print), Norton (YA; as it is--too much of what was nominated for the "adult" Nebulas reads like YA for my taste); or Game Writing (also not my bag). I would be tempted to vote for <i>Black Panther</i> for the Bradbury, as I did actually see it in the theater, but to do so without having yet seen <i>Sorry to Bother You</i> seems unfair to the latter.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-28974078088992976072019-02-01T14:16:00.000-08:002019-02-01T14:20:33.601-08:00Introducing: Just Outside the EruvIn our return to New York State my family ended up living in one of the towns adjacent to the village of Kiryas Yoel. When I share this information with fellow New Yorkers and fellow Jews it triggers nods of recognition, and often furious warnings and denunciations, but it means little to anyone else, so let me explain. Kiryas Yoel was founded in the 1970s by the Satmar Hasidic Rebbe Yoel Teitelbaum, as a place where his followers could live in a more rural setting yet still be surrounded by fellow members of their sect. Though the Satmar Hasidim are the largest such group today, they are much less well-known, to either non-Hasidic Jews or to non-Jews, than Chabad-Lubavitch, so explaining who they are I might as well contrast them to Chabad. Whereas Chabad aggressively proselytizes their variety of orthodoxy to other Jews, the Satmarim grew after the Holocaust through a more restrained method of ingathering, in which they welcomed other ultra-orthodox Jews who had lost their religious and community leaders. This is not to say that there was never any chicanery: In Israel, there were some scandals provoked by the Satmarim adopting the children of impoverished Yemeni Jews from state-run orphanages. But for the most part, they focus their outreach most on those who are adult and already ideologically proximate to them. Whereas Chabad is Zionist--supporting the State of Israel, participating in its elections, and accepting its material support--the Satmarim are known for being anti-Zionist. Though it would be a mistake to presume that such opposition to Zionism as a political movement is motivated by humanitarian concern for the indigenous Palestinians. Rather, they regard Zionism as being a sin against the Jewish religion, arguments for which Rebbe Yoel Teitelbaum was known for publishing in lengthy tracts in the postwar period. Whereas Chabad will speak English, Hebrew, any language needed to proselytize, the Satmarim promoted the use of Yiddish as a means of asserting and promoting Jewish religiosity and identity--and in an effort to keep the <i>loshen ha-kodesh</i> of the Torah and Talmud pure of the muck of commerce and statecraft. And while Chabad-Lubavitch has become infamous for a growing messianic cult around their late Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, the Satmarim keep the veneration of their rebbes within the traditionally Judaic bounds of a cult of personality. Thus, for example, while there have been disputes over rabbinical succession in the forty years since Yoel Teitelbaum's death, to the best of my knowledge no fraction of the Satmarim have ever entertained the thought that he might return from the dead and reveal himself as the Messiah.<p>"Just Outside the Eruv" will be my name and tag for an occasional series of posts to this blog about experiences I have living in such close proximity to these fellow Jews, interacting with them, or with others in the area when the interactions are inflected by their presence. ("Eruv" is a Talmudic term referring to the boundaries of an area which, on the Sabbath, an orthodox Jew can treat as an extension of his or her house. To live within Kiryas Yoel is to live within an Eruv. I am just outside the Eruv--close enough that some of the more prosperous members of the Satmar community can own or rent houses and walk the short distance to services on Friday nights and Saturday mornings, but far enough that they cannot carry their keys with them.) This is the first entry in that series.<p>Today, my son and I paid our first visit to the Monroe Bakery. While it is not within Kiryas Yoel, it is Hasidic-owned, <i>shomer shabbos</i>, and has a good reputation for the quality of its challah and other baked goods. I entered the bakery a bit nervous.<p>Today was my first full day back home after a week-long trip to Florida, in which I briefly visited the bedside of my grandfather before his death, and comforted my mother and other relatives after it. My grandfather would have had no love and little sympathy for the Satmarim. His beliefs were no less atheistic and strongly held than my own, though not sharing the Marxist integument that holds my world view together. My grandfather was someone who through his life demonstrated that one could be ethical, upright, and consistent without any belief in a creator, though the ethics on which he acted were, too often, patriarchal and chauvinistic. His mother, whom he loved even to the point of cutting off all contact with his elder sister for what he regarded as her inadequate filial piety, was on the other hand the only one of my great-grandparents on the Jewish side of my family who adhered to any measure of orthodoxy. Thus I never met her, because she treated the day of my mother's marriage to my father as the day of her death. Given this background, it is not surprising that my grandfather had a greater impact on the beliefs of his descendants than his mother did, and so all the relatives present to remember him were about as secular as I am, and it showed in their attitudes toward my Satmar neighbors.<p>The attitudes of secular American Jews to the ultra-Orthodox (collectively referred to as <i>haredim</i>--all hasidim are haredi but not all haredim are hasidic) resemble the attitudes of elite, assimilated German Jews to the <i>Ostjuden</i> before the war, or of more Americanized cohorts to fresh-off-the-boat newcomers in generations past. Thus I had spent all week being the recipient of unsolicited warnings--"they're horrible people;" "they hate anyone who isn't one of them;" "they're the rudest people around, even worse than Israelis;" "greedy bastards;" "they stink;" and of course "they'll destroy the public schools around you once they get a chance."<p>Even if I know that these statements range from slanderously false to only partly true, having this be a recurrent coda for the week prior meant that I was on guard as I entered the bakery. I will report that the bakery smells like a bakery--delicious. The price on the chocolate babka was a bit high, but based on the smell it emitted as I cut slices for each of the kids, it is probably worth it. The challah we are saving for tonight's dinner, so I don't yet know if it is good, but the price is reasonable. The service could have been a bit nicer, but the conversation with the clerk changed tenor slightly when I took one of the three Yiddish newspapers in stock--from <i>Der Blat</i>, <i>Di Tsaytung</i>, and <i>Der Yid</i>, this time I decided to try <i>Der Yid</i>.
<blockquote><p>"You're interested in Jewish newspapers?"<p>"<i>Ikh kon leyenen af yidish.</i> I'm Jewish and I'm trying to keep my Yiddish up so I can translate things."<p>"That's good!"</blockquote><p>Then I meandered into some apologetic, grammatically dubious statement in Yiddish downplaying my Jewishness, and he replied with a rabbinical saying in Hebrew that I did not recognize at first. Then he gave an English translation summing it up as, from God's standpoint, all his children are on the same level. And I thought that was a pretty decent thing to say, and not at all reflective of "hating anyone who isn't one of them."<p>So I left the bakery feeling pretty well disposed toward the Satmarim... until the drive home. From the bakery, the quickest way home takes me through the fringes of Kiryas Yoel. And on a Friday afternoon, drivers around there get a little frantic. After all, one must arrive home and turn off the ignition of the car before sunset, preferably well before sunset. So the driver behind me seemed a bit hurried. Let me be frank: He was riding up my ass. And then, as I approached a crosswalk where a teenage boy--still beardless--waited to cross, and where State law and basic decency dictated that I should stop to allow him to cross and finish his walk home before sunset, I did in fact stop--and the driver behind me honked, directly at me and implicitly at the pedestrian.<p>It left me wondering, which was the greater respect to the Sabbath? To rush home frantically honking one's horn at anyone who gets in the way? Or to yield to others in deference to their eagerness to perform a mitzvah in which one does not believe? Another way to ask this question might be: Who was the better Jew, the great-grandmother who never met or spoke to me, or the grandfather who loved me always, through all our differences?Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-74632081086416866832019-01-06T09:06:00.001-08:002019-01-06T09:06:33.674-08:00O Maine, addioIn the last week, I ended my seven-year sojourn in the State of Maine, a period that had, until now, been coterminous with my literary career. After several years of unemployment and underemployment, my spouse was offered a good position in her field at an institution in Poughkeepsie. This also opened the possibility of living much closer to her parents, that is, two of the beloved grandparents of my two children. (The third beloved grandparent, my mother, is in Florida, a state I avoid as much as possible.) Since my spouse's field is librarianship, I still need to find work in order to make the finances of this move work, but I have some prospects, and so, overall, it seemed worth the risk. Maine has inspired many, but not all, of my stories, and the corner of New York State in which we find ourselves has inspirations of its own. For example: right now, over my laptop screen I can look through the kitchen window, over the deck of the rental house in which we are living, and see the height of land known as Storm King. So I think we made the right choice.<p>In the chaos of the move, however, I lost track of publication schedules, and thus overlooked that <a href=https://qommunicatepublishing.com/dd-product/geek-out-queer-pop-lit-art-ideas/>the book <i>Geek Out: Queer Pop Lit, Art & Ideas</i>, ed. Sage Kalmus, is now available as an ebook or a paperback</a>. In this book one can find my short story "O terra, addio" (quotation marks are part of the title, as it is an allusion to Verdi's <i>Aïda</i>). Much of the story takes place at Lincoln Center in the City, a place I will be able to visit more often now than I did during my Maine exile. I encourage you to order the book. I will, as soon as we are done unpacking our existing library.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-54712061547956926042018-12-15T15:23:00.001-08:002018-12-15T15:24:53.504-08:002018 Nebula NominationsMy literary income this year was good enough (mostly from translations) to justify rejoining SFWA, which means I can nominate things for the Nebula award. But I have not read quite as much contemporary science fiction and fantasy this year as in some recent years, and with my upcoming move I do not have much time for catch up reading, so my nomination slate is full in only one category, Short Story. Here we go:<p><h4>Novel</h4><ol><li><i>Blackfish City</i> by Sam J. Miller</li><li><i>The Mere Wife</i> by Maria Dahvana Headley</li><li><i>The Emissary</i> by Yoko Tawada: I should note that this one, I am not 100% sure whether to classify it as a novel or a novella. It is 138 densely packed pages long.</li></ol><h4>Novella: None (unless I'm wrong about the Tawada)</h4><p><h4>Novelette</h4><ol><li>"Widdam" by Vandana Singh</li><li>"The Department of Happiness and Reimbursement" by Karen E. Bender</li></ol><h4>Short Story</h4><ol><li><a href=http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/1923/03/26/walking-%D7%92%D7%B2%D7%A2%D7%A0%D7%93%D7%99%D7%A7/>"Walking" by Der Nister</a>: The only entry in which I have a hand, albeit as translator rather than author</li><li><a href=https://firesidefiction.com/the-secret-lives-of-the-nine-negro-teeth-of-george-washington>"The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington" by Phenderson Djèli Clark</a></li><li><a href=https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/domestic-violence-a-new-short-story-from-madeline-ashby.html>"Domestic Violence" by Madeline Ashby</a></li><li><a href=https://www.apex-magazine.com/a-night-out-at-a-nice-place/>"A Night Out at a Nice Place" by Nick Mamatas</a></li><li>"Hainted" by Ashley Blooms</li></ol>Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-4247316333511891862018-12-14T17:24:00.000-08:002018-12-14T17:47:38.302-08:00A Paean to Bureaucracy<i>For the last not-quite-seven years at Bates College. The following text was composed and delivered as an address at a farewell party organized on my behalf, somewhat against my will. I ended up surprised and pleased by what I wrote, and so I share it.</i><p>I decided to prepare remarks because while, as you all know, I have no trouble with improvised public speaking, sometimes others have trouble with what I end up saying when there’s no script to guide me. I would have preferred to individually thank and praise each person in this room, and some who are not here but apologetically warned me of their inability to make it, but since I wasn’t exactly sure who would be here, that would have entailed improvisation, dangerous improvisation, in which what I intend as thanks and praise to one might be construed as cutting satire of another.<p>Earlier today, one of you sent me a quote from David Foster Wallace’s <i>The Pale King</i> that I believe perfectly encapsulates this strange job of mine, whatever one chooses to call it, whether “grants officer,” “sponsored programs professional,” “research administrator,” what have you. I’m not a fan of Wallace’s style, which I find bloated, so on the page, I’ve put ellipses where I think there should be cuts, over which I will elide in reading it out.<blockquote>“I learned that the world … as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth … the ignorance of which causes great suffering…. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities…. The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom…. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable…. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”</blockquote><p>To become immune to boredom requires the disposition (thank you, Lauren Ashwell, for that word) to find the fascinating, the novel, the thing you did not understand before about nature, history, or the given ensemble of social relationships, within the absurd origami of statute, regulation, policy, and procedure. Most academics despise bureaucracy and yet every academic organization, as far as I can tell--and I have worked in and with a good few--is one. Provided with powers and responsibilities of self-governance that are the envy of most American workers, you build infernal machines of your own devising. Then, realizing that you need more resources, you go to foundations, corporations, and yes, especially, government agencies, bureaucracies of greater refinement and power which impose further elaborations on your own native convolutions, with gestures, and paperwork, mirroring their own. You hate bureaucracy, but you need bureaucrats, and here I am, at your service.<p>Usually at these sorts of events, we are celebrating someone venturing forth to something that, within the careerist and meritocratic system of values common to bureaucratic organizations of all types, can be regarded as “something better.” As it stands, though, I am the proverbial “trailing spouse,” for while my wife is pursuing an opportunity at Marist College to be and, perhaps more importantly, be recognized as, one of the best damned cataloging librarians on the North American continent, no sane mind sets out with the ambition to be and be recognized as a master bureaucrat. Things are not yet settled, but the most probable outcome is that, within a month or so, I will be doing a very similar job at a very similar institution. In other words, I will be called upon, in the next few years, to do much the same sorts of things that I have accomplished at Bates over the last seven: To establish policies and procedures, identify strengths, opportunities, threats, and weaknesses, align institutional priorities and faculty expertise with sponsor missions and guidelines, design budgets ranging from four figures to seven, and to have the arrogance necessary to polish the prose of certified geniuses.<p>(I did imply earlier that I’ve improved David Foster Wallace’s prose, so why not yours as well?)<p>Don’t pity me, though, because if things work out that way, I will love it every bit as much as I have loved it here, and if I succeed, it will be as a result of all I have learned from working with--or in some cases, around and through--each of you. And if it doesn’t work out quite like that, well, there are plans B and C. Because the bureaucratic mind always has at least two backup plans.<p>Since the announcement went out about my departure, a number of people have said variations on, “What will Bates do without you?” And my response has always been, “Bates will be just fine.” And that is not only because Theresa is excellent at what she does and will grow into new responsibilities, or that Malcolm will put together a great job description and a search committee that will select an excellent replacement. They will. But a bureaucrat’s greatest virtue, unlisted by Wallace and which derives from the key disposition of unborability, is to be replaceable. Here I’ll quote more fully, from someone whose style and insight I like better than Wallace’s, the sociologist Max Weber, for whom “bureaucratic leadership” created a tendency toward “formalistic <i>impersonality</i>: … without hatred or suffering, and therefore without love or enthusiasm … ‘without regard for personality,’ formally the same for ‘everyone,’ and therefore in the same <i>practical</i> manner despite various given interests, the ideal [bureaucrat] carries out their duty.” (Yes, that is my own translation from the German, so it may vary a bit from what the sociologists in this room recall from their graduate seminars.) The Weber seems to be in contradiction to the Wallace, just as it may seem to contradict how I have carried out my duties at Bates. Here is my synthesis:<p>The ideal bureaucrat creates the conditions necessary for impersonality, for the work to be carried on one way or the other, with or without love or enthusiasm. The love or enthusiasm described by Wallace describes merely the conditions for the <i>survivability</i> of bureaucracy by any one individual human organism. For example, the ability to discover a neat trick for streamlining the issuance of subawards, and for one’s response to that discovery to be life-affirming excitement rather than grinding ennui. Bureaucracy as such is indifferent to whether the individual bureaucrat experiences excitement rather than boredom. What matters is that the subawards are issued, in conformity with the Uniform Guidance, on a timeline that can be defined as timely, not whether or not the individual bureaucrat enjoys or even appreciates the process; with the utterance of that statement I have divided the sheep from the goats, the bureaucrats from those who merely live through bureaucracy, based on whether or not you rolled your eyes.<p>So if you miss me, what you may miss will be my love or enthusiasm, whether it is for the research or teaching that animates your spirit, or for the behind-the-scenes processes that attempt, not always successfully, to minimize your administrative burdens. But if I have succeeded in what I set out to accomplish, that love and enthusiasm, whether it is replicated in a new Director of Sponsored Programs or not, will become progressively less important, as the processes take on lives of their own, shaping the office in the image of the formal, instrumental rationality that is the necessary and sufficient condition for its existence.<p>And so, with <i>amore ac studio</i>, I hope to have undone the necessity over the long term for both. And that is why I say, Bates will be just fine. Thank you all for your help over the years in making it so.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-25262004747945918642018-11-16T15:30:00.001-08:002018-11-16T15:30:09.697-08:00A Newly Published Story, and a Note about Awards EligibilityMy story "Simple Present" has been published at <a href=https://humandecencyiskey.com/becoming-an-anthology/>"Igxante: An Ontology / Becoming: An Anthology" (scroll down for my piece)</a> by Kate Morgan / Human Decency Is Key. Though fictionalized, this is also the most personal piece I have published yet. It also serves as a <i>reductio ad absurdam</i> against Orhan Pamuk's rape-apologia in the form of a philosophical novel, <i>The Museum of Innocence</i>. And the person who inspired it is now 11 years old.<p>This is the time of year when writers of science fiction and fantasy start doing "awards eligibility" posts, with an eye toward nominations for the Nebula and Hugo prizes. "Simple Present," while it is "speculative" in the philosophical sense of the word, is not part of either of those genres of fiction, and so, even if you like it, this is not an awards eligibility post for that story, which is the only piece of my own fiction to be published to date in 2018. Another story of mine has been accepted for publication in the <i>Geek Out!</i> anthology forthcoming from <a href=https://qommunicatepublishing.com/>Qommunicate Publishing</a>, but I am not certain when it will appear, and thus do not know whether that story will be out in time for 2018 awards eligibility.<p>Something I did have a bit to do with, that would be eligible for awards, is the story <a href=http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/1923/03/26/walking-%D7%92%D7%B2%D7%A2%D7%A0%D7%93%D7%99%D7%A7/>"Walking" by Der Nister</a>, which I translated from the Yiddish. The translation was first published in March 2018. I loved it enough to translate it; perhaps a few readers might love it enough to nominate it for some honor or another.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-14426741389974794822018-08-26T08:46:00.002-07:002018-08-26T08:46:31.635-07:00A Note in Favor of Polemical VignettesOpposed to the philosophical novel--the bloated doorstop of prose in which two thousand years of patriarchal clichés take on the lyrical weight of a dubious story--is the polemical vignette, which peers into a corner of the universe that the novelist has deemed unworthy or uninteresting and finds there a probative counterexample to one or another grotesque generalization. Like Hamlet to Horatio, it says, here is something, from heaven or on earth, not dreamt of in your philosophy, take account! I have written a few such things, and I want to write more, but I find that they tend to be a bit hard to sell.<p>In any case, one such piece of writing, "Simple Present," has been accepted for publication in the project <a href=https://humandecencyiskey.com/becoming-an-anthology/><i>Becoming: An Anthology</i></a>. As a tenacious Hegelian, I had to submit something to a project with that title! The anthology is scheduled to be published in November of this year, and if you who are reading this happen to be the sort of person who thinks and writes and thinks about writing and thinks by way of writing, then you might want to look at it carefully.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-55385119484046295802018-03-31T13:25:00.001-07:002018-03-31T13:26:23.234-07:00Catching Up: Der Nister, and more books<p>Illness, family obligations, and miscellaneous dramas have limited my time and energy for writing. Here are some quick updates:</p><h4>Der Nister</h4><p>The first of my Der Nister translations to be published is "Walking," my translation of the story "Geyendik." I've been able to trace the story's bibliography to the 1929 Kiev edition of <i>Gedakht</i>; if anyone knows of earlier appearances, please share the bibliographic information. Its appearance is thanks to the excellent <a href=http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/><i>Samovar</i></a> project by <i>Strange Horizons</i>. You can read <a href=http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/1923/03/26/walking-%D7%92%D7%B2%D7%A2%D7%A0%D7%93%D7%99%D7%A7/>my translation</a> here, and if you have Yiddish, <a href=http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/2018/03/26/%D7%92%D7%B2%D7%A2%D7%A0%D7%93%D7%99%D7%A7-walking/>here is the original text</a>.<p>There is even more exciting Der Nister publication news pending, but I have to keep it embargoed for now.<p><hr><h4>Other People's Books</h4><p>I have continued my project of reading books off my shelves that are as-yet-unread by me. (Some days, it was all I had the energy for.) These are the ones that I consider worth commenting on, for reasons good or bad:<p>Michael Chabon, <i>The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay</i>. Chabon did not come to my attention until <i>The Yiddish Policeman's Union</i>, which I loved. Since I read it, I have made a point of buying any copy I encounter of one of his books, even if I do not immediately have time to read it. So this is one of those books that I did not read until well after seemingly all my friends--the Jews, the lefties, the queers, the comic book nerds, and the overlapping intersections of those sets--had read it and loved it. If you are a member of any of those sets, then you will probably like it, though the strongest correlation for loving it appears to be an appreciation for comic books, which are not my thing. Chabon's loving descriptions of its evolution as an art form, through the actions of his fictional characters and the cameos of their historical counterparts, left me with more appreciation for it. The fictional comics penned by the characters that I wish were real, so I could read them, are <i>Luna Moth</i>, the <i>Citizen Kane</i>-inspired pre-war editions of <i>The Escapist</i>, and various works by Rose Saxon.<p>Paulo Coelho, <i>The Witch of Portobello</i>. Coelho is an author who, when I hear third-party descriptions of his works, I think, "I should read him." Fabulist, literate, etc. My delay had largely to do with the fact that Portuguese is one of my languages, and I tend to be undecided about reading works in translation when it is theoretically possible for me to read the book in the original. Apparently, I should not have worried about it, since if his other novels are anything like this one, he is a waste of time, in English or Portuguese. I'll sum up why in two words: Mystical gypsies. (Yes, that is the word he uses.)<p>Charles Dickens, <i>Hard Times</i>. Forced high school readings of Dickens' most popular books--<i>Great Expectations</i>, <i>Tale of Two Cities</i>, and, egad, <i>Oliver Twist</i>--ruined him for me well into my twenties. We have a fair amount of Dickens on our shelves because my wife, at an earlier time of her life, aspired to become a scholar of Victorian literature. So from time to time, I resolve to give his lesser known works a chance. Previously, with his collected short fiction, and with <i>Bleak House</i>, the resolution has been worth it. <i>Bleak House</i>, in particular, I suspect may be one of the best English-language novels of the 19th century. But <i>Hard Times</i>, though worth reading for its almost Engelsian depiction of "the condition of the working class in England," is not, overall, a good novel. It has a message, and every character interaction must bend before its implacability. And that message is awful. It boils down to, "Hey, um, fellow rich people--maybe we should teach the poor some feeble sentimentalism, because if they get as calculating as we are, they might decide to eat us."<p>Nawal El Saadawi, <i>Woman at Point Zero</i>. This is a painfully sharp, fact-based novella by one Egypt's best known feminists. Content warnings: FGM, CSA, rape, sex work, and murder, but the murder is the least offensive part because it's a pimp who gets killed.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2628027164595690752.post-34780130722916921462018-03-08T13:35:00.005-08:002018-03-08T13:35:42.448-08:00Seeing RamallahCan poets be great prose writers? Can a writer's quality be judged in translation? After having read <i>I Saw Ramallah</i> by the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, my answer to the first question is, "Why not?" And to the second, it is clearly yes if one is fortunate to have Ahdaf Soueif as one's translator.<p>The experience Barghouti describes--a displaced person is allowed to return to the hometown from which he was forcibly separated, not in conditions of freedom, but in an awkward power-sharing arrangement wherein the conquerors retain power--is not unique to Palestinians. And it is far from universal among Palestinians, being a privilege reserved to a minority of the displaced, and now effectively closed to nearly all. Prolonged statelessness is now a condition of being for Syrians, Rohingya, Somalis, Sri Lankan Tamils.... It does not seem likely that the now growing list of groupings will begin to diminish any time soon. Worldwide, there are more refugees and other displaced persons than there are Britons.<p>Nor is Israel the only agent of oppression. It was the police of Anwar Sadat who saw to it that Barghouti would be separated from his wife, the Egyptian novelist and literary scholar Radwa Ashour, and their son Tamim for most of the latter's childhood. In another generation, Ashour might have dutifully followed her husband in his wanderings, but Barghouti's feminism leaves traces throughout his narrative and seems sincerely felt--better to let her have a career, and for their child to grow up in a place that is at least partially home, than to make her into a camp-follower. He is critical throughout, not only of states and powers, but of political parties, social movements, and not least of all, himself--his old poems, his fateful choices, his rages, and his responses to feelings of loss.<p>The memoir is powerful, but leaves one with a desire to read him in his preferred medium, and that is something I should do soon.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10668769955695821646noreply@blogger.com0