Interview: Emotions and Politics

You can catch the interview here.  Scroll down to Sunday, August 28, find the line for "Maria Armoudian-The Insighters" and click away...podcast, play, or download options.

Our interview/the introduction begins at 28:30; I jump in at 40:08.

*

Thanks to David Altheide's suggestion--one of our fine contributors in Reframing 9/11: Film, Pop Culture and the "War on Terror" (co-edited with friends and colleagues, Anna Froula, East Carolina University, and Karen Randell, Southampton Solent University, UK; Continuum, 2010)--and Maria Armoudian's gracious invitation, I was part of the "Scholar's Circle" interview on her show The Insighters on KPFK 90.7 out of Los Angeles.

A real page-turner...

It was an honor to be among such esteemed scholars (also with Roger Petersen, MIT), and the half hour went too quickly.  I was just getting warmed up.

The 10th anniversary is nigh...Where were you?  Where are you?  What's changed?

*

You can catch the interview here.  Scroll down to Sunday, August 28, find the line for "Maria Armoudian-The Insighters" and click away...podcast, play, or download options.

Our interview/the introduction begins at 28:30; I jump in at 40:08.

A Postcard Revolution!

Send 2 postcards this week to 2 people who matter to you.

Like so many conversations of merit (and not) these days, it started on facebook.

I posted a link, casually, throwing it out there like so many things that interest me, but with no idea what to do with it other than say, here, look at this shit I find interesting (because that's pretty much how facebook works).  Who knows, I thought, maybe you'll find this same shit interesting, in passing if nothing else.  Here, the particular shit of interest:

The Lost Art of Postcard Writing
(Note: The postcard used for this story is a 1909 beaut from my very own Orange Co., California.)

The author, Charles Simic, writes:

Here it is already August and I have received only one postcard this summer. It was sent to me by a European friend who was traveling in Mongolia (as far as I could deduce from the postage stamp) and who simply sent me his greetings and signed his name...Until a few years ago, hardly a day would go by in the summer without the mailman bringing a postcard from a vacationing friend or acquaintance. Nowadays, you’re bound to get an email enclosing a photograph, or, if your grandchildren are the ones doing the traveling, a brief message telling you that their flight has been delayed or that they have arrived.

But this post intrigued Sharon, apparently even more than in passing.  And she had an idea:

I say let's start a revolution - a postcard revolution! Just think, if each of us sent two postcards with the message to send two postcards, well hell, we could not only revive the fine art of writing postcards, we could save the US Postal Service!

Old, young friends and students Sui Fan and Yu Chen--they call me uncle--who came from Beijing to see me in Shanghai; atop the Pearl Tower, we wrote postcards.

Shanghai; Pearl Radio Tower on the left.

Ginny-Beth also chipped in, with two "awesome" postcard stories: 

1. When I went to Europe a couple of summers ago, I decided to get all my favorite people's address (I even put an all-call out on FB) and made labels to take with me. Then instead of buying cheap souvenirs and hauling them around and back, I sent postcards to great acclaim.
2. I have family friends [whose] daughter's class (4th grade) was collecting postcards from different states. Since I travel a bunch, I decided to send her some. Now she's a few years older and I still send them to her when I travel and she loves getting them.
POSTCARDS ARE AMAZING! That's my personal opinion. :)

That's also my personal opinion.  I have been a stalwart postcard collector, defender, sender, and receiver my entire life, starting early when I would get postcards from grandparents from all over the world. I still have every one, and even Omi's collection of pre-WWII German postcards, arranged in a photo album, neat and orderly and giving no indication that soon thereafter just about every building and church in those postcards was to be destroyed.

And lest I need to further prove my postcard writing, receiving, and collection bona fides, Steve also posted: 

In the past 10 years, I have received postcards from exactly one person...Jeff Birkenstein. Sad to say, I have sent none myself. Good post, Jeff. 

Simic again:

Unlike letter writing, there never has been, and there never could be, an anthology of the best of postcard writing, because when people collect postcards, it’s usually for reasons other than their literary qualities.   

So, a revolution it is!

Here's your task, should you choose to accept it:  Send 2 postcards this week to 2 people who matter to you.  You don't need to be on vacation in an exciting place like Shanghai.  You can be in Lacey, WA.  Or Fountain Valley, CA.  Or, Beatty, NV.  They sell postcards in just about every grocery store, believe it or not.

Go.  Send them.  

And if you need a selfish and not a selfless (bringing joy to others) reason, then consider this:  you're bound to come across that postcard again, under a magnet on a fridge in the home to which you sent it.
 
Good writing to ya...

You can be sure I'll have more posts on postcards.

Looking down from the glass floor in the Pearl Tower.

Alice Munro and Short Story Community

As some of you already know, I'm on sabbatical leave from my school, Saint Martin's University, in Lacey, WA.  It's a rare opportunity and I want to take full advantage of it.

Though I know this will afford me no sympathy (more on this in another post), I have to be back in the classroom on January 17, 2011, a little less than 5 months.

And I'm feeling the heat...so back to work...

Friend and mentor Charles E. May (and my MA thesis adviser at Cal State Long Beach in 1996; here's his blog on the short story) has graciously asked me for an essay on Alice Munro for his upcoming collection on the excellent and prolific Canadian author. Charles knows I worked with Munro for my dissertation on short story and community; he also listened to me present a version of this paper at the Int'l Conference on the Short Story in English in Cork, Ireland (2008).  Needless to say, I was thrilled to be asked.

Currently 80, this short video of Munro was uploaded by BookLounge to youtube in 2006:

I'm currently at one of my Northern California sabbatical HQs: my Mom and step-dad's house in Kings Beach, CA. The folks are in Hawaii visiting my brother, Jon, and his wife Megu, who live outside of Tokyo, in Mito (Ibareki Prefecture).  Hawaii, then, is convenient middle ground. In any case, I have the Kings Beach house to myself, which means writing in the morning, a swim in Lake Tahoe around lunch, then reading and a nap, and more writing in the evening. Or, that's the theory anyway. It's a rare opportunity, and I need to take advantage of it.

Testing the clarity of Lake Tahoe

 The deadline for this essay is September 15, no extensions possible, which has gotten my attention. But, finally, I have the fortune to have uninterrupted time to work, so very different than during the semester.

So, now, to work! But, you know, Virginia City, where Mark Twain got his newspaper start, is pretty close by...

My essay:

The Houses that Alice Munro Built: Community in
The Love of a Good Woman

Then I bought another notebook and started the whole process once more. The same cycle—excitement and despair, excitement and despair. It was like having a secret pregnancy and miscarriage every week.

—Alice Munro(1)

. . . [O]wing to the shape and the scope of Munro’s art—story following upon story, reconnecting, redefining—the critical monograph is not really up to Munro at all. Rather, individual articles on individual stories or connected groups of them now seem, to me at least, to offer the better critical course.

—Robert Thacker(2)

Taking up Thacker’s advice, I argue that reading Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman (1998) as what Sandra A. Zagarell terms a “narrative of community” illuminates the repetitive, stultifying demands which rural, middle class Canadian society makes of its women. From story to story, Munro’s women are ritually and repeatedly required to nurse the broken bodies and lives of the families around them, thus leaving them with a choice. They must decide between the community (in which they take on the role of nurse and nurturer) and the wilderness (wherein they might pursue their own desires of autonomy and self-knowledge, although usually at the expense of family). It is an ugly choice, made more difficult to negotiate because the terms of the decision are rarely explicit, mentionable, or even wholly knowable, though they underlie every action and every choice the characters make. Reading Munro’s book as a whole, wherein each story represents one space in a larger community, allows the reader to both celebrate the uniqueness and independence of each story and explore inter-story connections and themes that, because of their varied repetition, take on a greater, book-length significance. If each story in Good Woman represents what Frank O’Connor calls the “unearthly glow” of the light of the short story, then to approach the book as a narrative of community is to witness multiple lights amidst the darkness of the Canadian prairie. Thus, O’Connor’s “submerged population groups” emerge right before our eyes in the form of white, middle-of-the-road Canadian women, women who try to negotiate the difficult line between the claustrophobic sanctuary of the home and the possibility of the vast prairie.
___
1 In “Cortes Island,” The Love of a Good Woman (New York: Vintage): 124.
2 In “Alice Munro, Writing ‘Home’: ‘Seeing This Trickle in Time,’” Essays on Canadian Writing 66 (Winter 1998): 5.

Revisionist History...Might Just Be a Good Thing.

I was going to avoid speaking about George W. Bush on this blog for awhile because, though still very much alive, he's essentially dead to American politics.  True, his disastrous presidency will be with us for many years into the future, but he's toxic to everyone but those who still support him behind closed doors.

But I'm only 3 posts in to my blog, and I find I need him. 

As you probably remember, GWB was famous for decrying revisionist history.  He said this:

"This nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq," Bush said. "Now there are some who would like to rewrite history -- revisionist historians is what I like to call them...Saddam Hussein was a threat to America and the free world in '91, in '98, in 2003. He continually ignored the demands of the free world, so the United States and friends and allies acted."

Of course, that's misinformation on just about every level, but what so interests me is W's disdain for revisionist historians.  In this case, he means not really historians but anyone who questioned his war in Iraq.  Bush wanted desperately to pretend the case was closed on his war and we should just all move on.  Silly, yes, but we know he's not a serious man.

Nevertheless, Bush was tapping into a common charge: namely, that historical revisionism is bad.  And often it is, especially when it relates to the (attempted) elimination of grave historical incidents from the record, such as David Irving denying the Holocaust (here's his website, so you can get it from the horse's mouth).  But this is just one example.  The Armenian genocide is another that comes quickly to mind.  Sadly, there are no shortages of such examples, big and small.

But is revisionism always bad?  Of course not.  Not, that is, when the "revisionism" actually updates/corrects the record in a way that more closely gets at an objective truth.  This is what W was so afraid of, that the US and the world would call him on his invented reasons for going to war in Iraq.

But, really, this post is not about that old news.

In the early '90s, the Duke University History Department spoke to this issue when it adopted a resolution responding to a Holocaust-denying advertisement that was famously placed (or, an effort was made to place it) in multiple campus newspapers.  In part, the adoption says (see page 194):

"That historians are constantly engaged in historical revision is certainly
correct; however, what historians do is very different from this advertisement.
Historical revision of major events is not concerned with the actuality of these
events; rather it concerns their historical interpretation--their causes and
consequences generally." ( 82 )

But this post is not about that long ago incident.

No, enough of the big issues.  On to a small issue (with big implications) that I've been thinking about for 10 years, when Jeff Osborne first gave me this photo:

   
I have long loved historical signs and was immediately fascinated with the obvious one-sidedness of this one.  "Indian Outrages"?!  OK, not knowing (or even really caring) anything about the specifics of the history behind this sign, I am more interested in the frame.  For argument's sake, let's accept the 1929 version of history.  This would then necessitate an historical sign somewhere (ok, hundreds, no, thousands) in this country marked "White Outrages."

And I can just about guarantee you that those signs do not exist.   After all, we know who writes the history....

But fortunately we don't live with the racism of the 1920s.  Oh, we still have racism of course, but it's evolving, which we can discuss later.  In any case, thanks to Jeff (who I went to grad school with at the University of Kentucky; he now teaches at Murray State University and believes that every class is potentially a "mini-revolution"), I tracked down the new sign that has been erected in place of the one above.

It is clearly an example of historical revisionism, but a very good and necessary one, just like those who pointed out how wrong GWB was.

Here's what the new sign says, located on Virginia Business Route 19, 2 miles west of Tazewell (also near the fine town of Frog Level):

"Indian-Settler Conflicts

During Dunmore's War (1774) and the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) conflicts between Indians and colonists often intensified as European powers encouraged Indians from the Ohio region to attack frontier settlers.  Tensions also sometimes increased when settlers moved into lands that were once Indian territory.  Nearby to the south, an early conflict occurred in the upper Clinch Valley, when Indians attacked and killed John Henry, his wife and their children on 8 Sept. 1774.  Additional conflicts took place during this period, including a March 1782, Indian attack on the house of James Maxwell that killed two of his daughters."

This text is from sign X-16, as found on p. 313 of A Guidebook to Virginia's Historical Markers, 3rd ed. (compiled by Scott David Arnold; Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 2007).

Wow!

That's quite a different--yes, revised--version of history.  Much more balanced, especially the title.

Oh, it's still sexist (why is John Henry listed by name and not his wife?) and still racist (what outrages did which whites perpetrate against which Indians in the same area?), but it's an attempt to improve our understanding of history.  Maybe the next replacement historical sign (though I won't hold my breath) will get even closer to a truer truth.

Why am I interested in this sign?

Because the original sign got me interested in the language of the historical signs in my very own Lexington, Kentucky, but that's for another post, though here's a sneak peak of that future discussion...

Stir-Fried Gift

Nothing fancy tonight.  In Shanghai for a month of teaching, and surrounded by wonderful and affordable restaurants, I’m craving street food again.  Over there, my favorite stand, right where it is every night.  As I ponder what to have for dinner tonight, I talk to the proprietor about my choices.  

“Which noodles do you want today?  Or maybe the rice again?” she asks.  She has four or five different types of noodles and white rice.  

I consider the possibilities.  I think I’ll have the glass noodles tonight.  “I think I’ll have the glass noodles, tonight,” I say, pointing.  

“Great choice.  So far you have had almost all my choices, but not those.”  As she says this, she taps each bowl of pasta with her serving chopsticks, pausing on the bowl of the noodles I haven’t yet had.  “You’ll like them,” she says, laughing.  She laughs a lot.  So do I. 

You laugh a lot, I know she is also thinking about me.  We crack each other up.

The man I assume to be her husband also laughs.  And concurs:  “Good choice.” The man, dressed always in green slacks and a green army tunic, gets up from his crate-seat, turns up the gas on the burner and cracks an egg into the wok.  He stirs it around, adds some cooking oil, then garlic, and finally the pasta.  With one hand he agitates the wok vigorously over the open flame and with the other he keeps a spatula moving, flipping and stirring the pasta. 

From colorful serving bowls arranged in a row, the woman deftly uses her oversize chopsticks to gather my dinner’s ingredients into a mixing bowl.  Pieces of sausage cut into slices, some kind of pickle (daikon?), green onions, a spinach-like, leafy green, chili flakes in chili oil.  She uses the chopsticks to mix up my chosen combination and dumps all of it into the wok.  The man nods in my direction and talks to the three or four men who have stopped to watch our transaction.  There are few, if any, tourists in this neighborhood, though there are some foreign English and business teachers around.  “Look, he’s come back again for some more food,” he says to the onlookers. 

They all laugh together, amazed that I can or will eat their food, especially when there are many sit-down restaurants nearby and a grocery store behind them. 

I laugh, too, and tell them not to worry, that I am a street food eater from way back, back in the days of under-age drinking in Tijuana.  “Some of the best food around,” I tell all of them.  They all laugh and point.  This is a good moment for all of us, I sense.  

“Do you want more or less spice today?” the woman asks.

“I think more than last time,” I say, holding up thumb and forefinger to indicate the proper amount.

“Would you like to eat at one of our tables,” she asks, “or get it to go again?  I’ve got an open table over there.”  She points, chopsticks still in hand.

H’mmm.  Actually, I do want to eat here, but if I do I will be stared at intensely the entire time I’m eating.  “I think I’ll get it to go,” I say, a bit reluctantly.  I wish I was up to eating at her table.

She laughs. “OK, to go it is.  Are you enjoying the weather?”

“Man, it’s bloody hot,” I say, “even if that storm did cool things off a bit.  I’m always sweating like a dog.”  I realize that’s a tough phrase to translate, and say, “Well, I mean that I never stop sweating, even when I’m teaching.  For instance, in class even the backs of my knees sweat.”    I jerk my head backwards and over my left shoulder to indicate the university behind me.

“Yeah, but we’re used to it.  And, of course, it’s not even summer yet,” she says.  She is laughing because her husband is wearing a light sweater.  “My husband is cool after that storm,” she says, pointing at him with her head.  Her hands are already preparing the next customer’s dinner.

The man finishes stir-frying and pours my steaming dinner into a Styrofoam container. The Styrofoam is so cheap that my chopsticks peel away little pieces when I get to the bottom.  Who knows how much petroleum I am getting in my diet with each scrape.  She puts a few more green onions on top because she knows I like those, places the container into a plastic bag, ties it, and presents it to me with two hands and no laughing, an offering of the highest seriousness.  In turn, I reach for the bag in the way that I have learned: with both hands.  And this time, as if on cue, we each hold our side of the bag for a moment longer than necessary.  I look her in the eyes and say, “I am grateful.”

“Have a wonderful dinner.  Thank you very much and we’ll see you next time.”

“Yes,” I reply, “thanks to both of you for your hard work and a great dinner.”  I nod to all the bystanders.  We all laugh together for both our own reasons and some common ones.

 “Hsyeh-Hsyeh” (thank you), I say, smiling.  One of the few words I know in Chinese.

Returning the smile, broadly, they both say “Hsyeh-Hsyeh” many times.  The men behind them laugh, point, and say “Hsyeh-hyseh.” 

*

Of course, my conversation with the stir-frying couple took place without a common verbal language.  But I am convinced that it happened.  Every word of it.  I know my part of the conversation has been transcribed verbatim, even the part that I didn’t actually say, but merely indicated by smiling, laughing and gesticulating wildly.  I’m a teacher, after all, so I can be quite the gesticulator.  I know also that she and he and the bystanders said exactly what I have written here.  Or, if not, then something similar.

I head off into the darkness, stares and good-natured laughter guiding my way, the promise of another good meal ahead of me.

Note: This is an old 2008 piece that has never seen the light of day.  I've dusted it off and posted it for my first "real" blog post.

Day 1 of the rest of my life

I've been gearing up to start a blog for awhile.  More on that later.  For now, I'm testing things.  3...2...1...go.

I hope you'll follow my blog, add a comment if the spirit moves you, and enjoy the content.  Thanks.