Cops Beating UC Berkeley Students. In Video. Time to Judge The Quick and The Dead.

Dear CF,

I’m watching footage of the events of the UC Berkeley strike, which culminated in a student takeover of Wheeler Hall where I teach.

KTVU does a story on the strike, with footage of police beating students.

I don’t pretend to be 100% sympathetic to the students who took over Wheeler Hall. Movements are unruly, and things can take turns that don’t seem consistent with the idealism of the day. They are young. They are frustrated. I have a lot of questions that weren’t adequately answered.

But neither the students inside nor those standing outside in the rain were criminals or spoiled brats. Let me be clear: these were not, for the most part, impassioned radicals. They were (for example) small Asian girls. They were 19-year olds in colored rain boots who couldn’t believe that their campus had been taken over by police in riot gear holding billy clubs. They were students who wanted to stand outside a building on their campus and watch because the administration gave them something to watch.

The administration escalated something small, something internal to the university, into a police action.

The claim is that all this was done on behalf of the students, 3800 of whom  were prevented from having class in the course of the day because of the occupation. If this is all really about the students’ welfare, here’s a thought experiment. You’re a student. Which will disturb you more: not being able to go to a scheduled class or watching your campus be invaded by police who proceed to push, prod, hit and even at one point gas you or your friends?

These kids had no choice but to watch because—and this is the point that gets lost in all these discussions of what happened and why—while it may be inconvenient, disruptive and just plain silly to have a group of unarmed students put bike locks on the doors of a building where you normally have class, it is quite another thing to have your building surrounded by police who are brandishing billy clubs at you.

The new President of UC, Mark Yudof, famously said in an interview with the New York Times some time ago that “being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: there are many people under you, but no one is listening. I listen to them.”

I don’t know how much listening one really has to do in a cemetery. Leaving aside what it means to liken the university community you’ve promised to serve to corpses, in practice, Yudof seems more unwilling than unable to hear. He declared “emergency powers” and has overruled most of the governing bodies within the university, including the Faculty Senate. He’s the opposite the kid from The Sixth Sense. That kid sees dead people as if they were alive; Yudof seems to see (or rather hear) live people as if they were dead.

As for listening to the community: the university administration called the Berkeley and Oakland Police without attempting to speak with the students inside. It wasn’t that no one was listening, Mr. Yudof. You made no attempt to talk. In a cemetery, a monologue might be appropriate. You do not have that luxury.*

The police were attired in riot gear. Understand that this is threatening. Understand that they were pointing guns at your students, students who had not taken over a building, students who were standing outside in the rain watching something disturbing happen on their campus.

How many of those students, many of whom were just curious spectators, do you think you disillusioned and electrified into action?

Chancellor Robert Birgeneau sent an e-mail to the university community entitled “Wheeler Hall Protest Ended Peacefully.” He narrates the events thusly:

Throughout the day, the large crowds that gathered around Wheeler Hall necessitated significant police presence to maintain safety.  It is truly regrettable, however, that a few members of our campus community may have found themselves in conflict with law enforcement officers.

A correction is in order: the large crowds did not “necessitate significant police presence.” The police were called immediately, in the morning, as soon as the 5o (or so) students took over Wheeler Hall. The police were not Plan B, they were not called in response to gathering crowds. They were the administration’s very first recourse. And it was BECAUSE THE POLICE WERE CALLED THAT THE CROWDS FORMED.

Let that be clearly understood.

The students outside were well-behaved. See photos in my previous post. These weren’t crazed activists; they were calm, puzzled, and eventually alarmed and pretty horrified students who stood in the rain as their university turned against them in riot gear.

Two faculty members in my department (the department whose home is Wheeler Hall) offered to be liaisons between the police, the administration and the students inside. Those offers were refused.

There are beatings in this story, and there are rubber bullets and tear gas in this story. None of this is okay. But I’m somewhat sympathetic to the police who, once they were called in, had to figure out how to deal with the enormous crowd of onlookers their presence generated. There is a reason the police and the university are different organizations. Once something becomes a police action, all bets are off.

And it’s the administration that exposed its most vulnerable members to city police. The fact is—and I hope they take this as a lesson, because while the events of 11/20 were bad, they could have been much, much worse—they shouldn’t have called the cops. Certainly not as a first response. They could have contacted student government. They could have contacted the unions. They could have contacted the faculty. They could have asked the faculty and staff who actually work in that building to intervene (which they offered to do).

They should have tried a few other things before unleashing the criminal justice system on their own students (or corpses, or customers).

Instead, they called the cops, who arrested and/or charged students and faculty both.

Those aren’t zombies they’re arresting, Mr. Yudof. That’s your university. Right there. And its … it’s ALIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

M

This video is disturbing: start at 1:30 or so if you’re in a rush. Watch at least through 3:45. The whole thing is well worth watching:

One of my students is actually in this video; he’s pretty heartbroken by what’s happened:

In this video a girl loses her footing and falls under the yellow police tape. here’s what happens. That’s a gun being pointed at students, even though it contained rubber bullets.

Here’s the arrest of Professor Robert Dudley, in the Department of Integrative Biology at UCB:

*To be clear, I’m referring to the opening maneuvers on both sides, not to what happened later in the day. Both Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and the Twitterfeed from inside Wheeler Hall mentioned some negotiations that started up much later (once it became clear that the standoff wouldn’t resolve quickly). It’s unfortunate that it took a fairly successful occupation of a campus building for undergraduates to make their views heard by the Provost and the Chancellor.

Irresistible

UC Berkeley Strike in Photos: Time-Lapse

Today, as part of the UC strike, a group of about 50 students took over Wheeler Hall on the UC Berkeley campus to protest the layoffs of 38 ASFCME workers and a 32% hike in undergraduate tuition.  The building is surrounded by police, which in turn are surrounded by protesters (UPDATE 7:20 p.m.: who are themselves now surrounded by police. There are UC Police, Oakland Police and Berkeley Police present, and police helicopters are flying over the campus.) The occupants of Wheeler Hall are tweeting here. Since I started writing this post, a SWAT team has broken in and arrests have been made.  Protesters are still outside Wheeler Hall. The police are keeping the arrested protesters inside the building; they’re hoping to wait out the students outside. (UPDATE 7:42 p.m.: They’re releasing them! Says a friend: “Came out like rock stars.”)

11:30

Here’s what it looked like prior to 11:30.

1:00-2:00

Here’s what it looked like at 1:00 p.m. (courtesy of Zunguzungu):

It was rainy from 1-2. Protesters are dressed accordingly.

The Youtube video below has live footage of what was going on when the last photo in this series was taken:

3:00-4:00 p.m.

Here’s what it looked like between 3:15 and 4:00 p.m, when I was out there with my camera. By this time the weather had cleared and the sun was out. These photos are of the South and West sides of Wheeler Hall.

South side of Wheeler Hall

Police in riot gear with barricades on south side of Wheeler Hall. Also: hundreds of protesters on the perimeter.

West side of Wheeler: the protesters are visible in the windows

People watching the protesters at the windows

Police forming a perimeter, west side of Wheeler Hall. Students forming a perimeter around police.

West side of Wheeler Hall

Throwing the protesters food

Police in riot gear on the south side of Wheeler Hall

For video footage of police violence against students, go here.

For a much better slide show than mine of the whole event, go here.

Thomas Kinkade, Artist

“Thomas Kinkade: Painter of Light” is the title of a real show. It is on my television right now. It features America’s favorite nostalgia-dauber, Thomas Kinkade, with an overgrown soulpatch that ate most of his chin. He wears a green button-down shirt and a black blazer. His hair is highlighted and slicked back.

The Painter of Light

A young woman stands next to him and sighs every time he says the word “inspiring.” She is all enthusiasm. Here is what Thomas Kinkade says while selling three paintings evocatively titled “The Spring Gate,” “Beyond the Spring Gate” and “Gardens Beyond the Spring Gate”:

If you’re one of those people who love romance novels, who dreams life just a little better than it is every day. …  I am a romantic. I make no apology for that. When we get right down to it, life is about loving others, and I try to share a little love, a little joy, for others. …

“Yes!” the lady says. “We are all romantics at heart.”

This is the most romantic gate in the world:

Spring Gate

The next painting, the lady excitedly informs us, is of a chapel. Thomas Kinkade chimes in to reveal, in a stream-of-consciousness series of non sequiturs, that “generic” is the new “classic,” that you know you’ve made it as an icon when there is a puzzle of you, and that you can stick your grubby fingers all over his “art” because it is laminated. It is also full of faith and snow. Plus which, it is cheap.

It’s a mountain chapel, and it truly suggests our faith. In fact that one is getting a little glare [waves at the camera so it hits the glass from a different angle]. Our faith is described as a mountain. … The mountain is like a symbol of faith, that solid rock on which we stand, and the light is pouring from the heavens, the snow pours down the mountain, the enduring stone. This is iconic. I am not exaggerating when I say this has been reproduced hundreds of thousands of times in puzzles, in Hallmark cards. It is a classic. It’s coated with polymer, you can touch the surface without damaging it. And look at that price; that includes the frame.

Oh Bob Ross, whither fled ye?

Fondly,

M

American Writers

“There exists a great politesse around women’s poetry,” Courtney Queeney writes, “and to write critically is, in some ways, to betray one’s feminine self (the part that’s supposed to blink a lot and sigh into the shadows when the menfolk start talking politics at the dinner table).”

In solidarity with Kamy Wicoff’ and the SheWrites call to action, I’ve already bought Francine Prose’s Gluttony and just bought Adina Hoffman’s My Happiness bears No Relation to Happiness, which looks like a historical and biographical tour de force.

That’s not enough, of course. I think it’s worth thinking long and hard about the problems, internal and external, that seem to keep women in what Adina Hoffman herself comes to call a “ghetto.” Here’s an interview with Mya Guarnieri where she talks about the problem of hybridity that plagues me daily (and Alarcon too, if a little less).

Guarnieri: So you’re an American writer? Not a Jewish writer?

Hoffman: I should probably just say that I’m a writer, no adjectives attached, but I suppose I used the term “American writer” because it’s both more neutral and expansive than any of these others; it doesn’t necessarily imply anything specific, beyond one’s place of birth and the use of an American idiom. And perhaps I also meant to say that no matter how long I live in the Middle East, I’ll never be an Israeli writer. To call yourself a “Jewish writer,” meanwhile, is to put yourself in a kind of ghetto, as if your concerns are only Jewish. The same is true of the term “woman writer,” which I also don’t use. Of course I am Jewish and I am a woman, and both of these things matter to me, but I’d like to think my imagination extends beyond such categories.

It’s interesting that Hoffman thinks of “American writer” as the most general label available to her. The term is not in practice “neutral” and “expansive”—we don’t need to look at the Publishers Weekly Top Ten list to establish that the American Writer has both a structure and a gender, and that the Great American Novel tends by definition to be about a boy’s life. (For a great account of why this is problematic, see Zunguzungu’s post “On Repressive Anti-Sentimalism” here.) But of the labels available, American Writer is clearly the most powerful, and she’s free to choose it. It’s hard to be the  best “American” writer if you’re “ghettoized,” as Hoffman puts it, into a subcategory.

(Ghettoization. What a word to use in this connection. Whew.)

I started this post with an excerpt from Courtney Queeney’s article “The Kings Are Boring: Some Thoughts on Women’s Poetry”, from the August 2009 issue of Bookslut, because it reminded me of prior talks we’ve had about some of the features of Jezebel and DoubleXX that make them problematic discourse communities. Queeney’s piece is honest about the risks that attend projects like She Writes and WILLA—great projects born of a moment of crisis that  offer members shelter from the storm, but which run the danger of confirming in some larger way that the only solution to a segregated society is to create a secondary one outside it. Let’s resist that, WILLA and She Writes: let’s keep women’s writing from turning into women’s sports.

(I say that, by the way, as someone who a) despises ALL sports and b) nonetheless resents the way in which women’s sports have been marginalized, except when it comes to tennis. I’m using the comparison advisedly: unlike sports, where women are statistically smaller and weaker, there is no biology limiting our ability to record-break along with the big boys.)

This may require a move away from the “politesse,” and it may involve developing a way for us to talk about aesthetics and politics in a way that doesn’t let friendship, or the good feeling that comes from uniting behind a cause, interfere with our ability to disagree.

I hope, in other words, that She Writes and WILLA don’t become another set of shelters from the storm. I hope they’re where the storm happens.

Queeney turned me onto Arielle Greenberg’s really interesting 2003 essay “On the Gurlesque,” which describes a trend in poetry written by women that involved clashing different definitions of “girl” or “grrl”-ness. Greenberg defines the “Gurlesque” as partly a response to “victim tales” or modes that are merely confessional. It’s something else, a perspective that exist at an indefinite remove from (for example) the oft-used traumatic event:

Instead, the poem mocks the very notion of victimhood in a way which is even more disturbing than a straightforward version of the same tale, because the speaker seems as taken by the melodrama of the scene as she is wounded by the pain. This honest assessment of the perverse pleasures of horror—even horror so closely associated with women’s suppression—is one of the key markers of the Gurlesque.

Other key markers include a Whitmanesque desire to contain all contradictions, to be simultaneously ungendered and all girl. Greenberg sees the Gurlesque is a very specific reaction to a time of transition—an in-between stage, in fact:

Gurlesque poetry takes its cues from all of these things: subversive and angry but flirty and sweet, owning and critiquing sexuality in candid ways. Its origins in the turbulent years after the women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s make it a poetry which documents a psychic schism; if, as John Berger wrote about depictions of women in art in Ways of Seeing, “the social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living…within such a limited space…at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two,” then the Gurlesque poet watches herself and is herself at once, both punishing and promoting what she sees, rejecting the notion of herself as object while trying it on for size.

That last bit seems like it describes something we see all the time, no?

“Can women poets really afford the luxury of writing this way, with the patriarchy still in such power?” one male audience member asked me recently. This reply came from a young woman in the audience: “Yes, but we are the first generation who can, and that’s why this is so exciting.”

I like the male audience member and the young woman who replied, but I think they’re having the wrong conversation. American Writerhood includes us. It’s a mistake to proceed defensively because it leads to bad art. Our first responsibility is to the stuff we’re writing, and it’s frankly impossible (for me, anyway) to write well when I’ve stuffed my world view into a particular aesthetic canister or find myself thinking in a merely reactive or reactionary way. It might be poetry accommodates political affiliations in a way that fiction definitively can’t. Queeney, for one, doesn’t think so: as she sits down to dutifully review a group of women poets she’d sat herself down to like, she finds that  “despite my copious notes and the hours I spent staring at pages, I was fundamentally uninspired by most of what I’d been given.”

She never writes the essay on those poets and neither should we. I’m buying books by women today because it’s the right thing to do. Dollars count. But I want to point out the difference between timing and content. These aren’t spurious purchases motivated by a desire to statement-make; they’re books I would have bought anyway that happen to be written by women. That I bought them today is where the activism happens, not that I bought them at all, and it’s vitally important that we keep that distinction healthy.

As someone who, when angry, can only think of a character named Meat Messions who meets an unsavory end, I want to note the activist impulse, mark this as a moment of crisis to which we will respond in terms to which we do not subscribe (here, the tyranny of the market and the power of the all-mighty dollar), and then note too that anger, however righteous, can’t interfere with the real work the members of She Writes and WILLA are here to do, which is to be American writers.

Great Pattern Changes

Daniel Alarcón Pirated My Life

Dear CF,

Just got back from hearing Daniel Alarcón—author of War by Candlelight (which I’ve read) and Lost City Radio (which I haven’t, for reasons that will become apparent)—talk about book piracy in Peru. You’ve seen the stands, you’ve read your Calvino: the subject is the fast cheap reproduction of original books and the readers and nonreaders who buy and sell ‘em. Trafficking in translations: it’s a darker and more sordid world than you’d guess.

Alarcón’s got big hair, a reading voice more interested in its subject than itself, and great stage presence, especially when not reading directly from the ms. He’s good at making a monologue delivered at a room feel conversational and offhand. He seems like your cousin’s friend.

Tonight he read from a long and refreshingly wayward essay on how overground and underground publishing works in Lima, and the special role books occupy in a culture whose relationship to the literary vacillates between worshipful and mercenary. It was good.

But there was a moment when the problem of being Daniel Alarcón came up. Come question-time, a Peruvian man in the audience raised his hand and said, with some irritation: “Peruvians know all about this. What’s the point of writing it?”

My jaw dropped metaphorically and I just as metaphorically picked it up because this is the key question, the life question, the question I ask myself every time I write and a variant of the question I get asked every Wednesday afternoon when I ritualistically try to convince my peers that there really is a way to reconcile contemporary neuroscience with readings of Milton.

The question is this: how do you write for two audiences?

Corollaries to the question: Can it be competently done? And what happens when they talk back?

I’m coming clean: my feelings about Alarcón are complex. He’s good. But I fault and envy him for occupying a position I’ve been too inhibited to inhabit: the role of a Latino writer raised in the US whose writing language is English, who resists the flatness that results from an overeager commitment to identity politics (Cisneros, Sapphire), who harbors intense interest toward and an anxious relation to his parents’ mother country (the language of which he speaks fluently), a country to which he does not and will never quite belong.

It’s a bizarre headspace to occupy for any period of time, and God knows it’s a textbook American problem and territory many—Lahiri, Diaz, for instance—have explored well.

But the Southern Cone? That was MINE.

(The South too, though Alarcón was raised in Birmingham, so I’ll grudgingly admit that, where Alabama’s concerned, he has the prior claim.)

I’m sort of joking! But not really! The fact is I’ve buried most of the stuff I’ve written about Chile. There are lots of reasons for that, one being that it wasn’t awfully good. But the main reason was practical: when you start writing about the country you want to belong to, it starts to talk back. And it hurts to be told that you’ve gotten it wrong. Or that the issue you’ve chosen to spend several thousand words on is unimportant. Or that your entire extended family has somehow translated and read the piece you published in an obscure little magazine no one in the US has even heard of, the piece about your eccentric great-uncle, who even now is making calls and taking down names.

Which is more or less what happened to Alarcón tonight. (Not the uncle bit, though.) And he acknowledged the validity of the objection with grace, and it was clear he’s done some serious thinking about the question. But it was equally clear that he couldn’t really answer it.

Alarcón’s problem—besides having a fabulous career at a young age—is that he’s trying to do the impossible by writing for both an American and a Peruvian audience. As the outsider he is, he sees angles to the story that make it interesting (and let’s face it, exotic) to an American audience that strike the Peruvian as commonplace and blase. And vice versa.

In his first project he explicitly adopted a Peruvian viewpoint, understanding that the book would be bought by American audiences. When the book became a success and got translated, I’d bet he felt more than a twinge of discomfort because as a whatever-he-is, he’s never an insider; he’s something else. And so, when he writes stories about Peru (which not all of them are) from a Peruvian perspective in English, there’s an almost automatic question of authenticity. It would be easier all-round if his book were translated to English rather than written in it. In the piece he read tonight I detect an overcorrection. It seemed like he was writing from a definitively American perspective. (Of course, he might have solved this by writing two different versions.)

It’s a problem with no solution since there isn’t one authentic place from which he can write. He isn’t Peruvian. Neither can his voice be exclusively American. Both postures are subtly wrong. I don’t know what it takes to occupy hybridity authentically and write it well. It’s like the idea of seamless code-switching; it’s appealing to think about an honest and utopian in-betweenness, but the best you can do is achieve an equitable average.

The Peruvian man’s question points to a larger issue, though: there’s something disingenuous about adopting an anthropological stance toward a country you want to document and understand. Sometimes it can’t be helped. Isabel Allende gets away with it in Mi Pais Inventado because it’s partly memoir and is intended for an American audience. The Chileans who like it—and they’re likely to be ex-pats themselves—enjoy it precisely because they understand it as a guidebook for foreigners that manages incidentally to get quite a few things right. They’re pretty hungry for something that even partially mirrors their memories and experience.

Alarcón’s piece was great, but it was good because it assumed ignorance of something Peruvians already know, and discussed it in stakes Americans understand. I’m honestly stumped by the Peruvian man’s question, and I think he might have been too. In the meantime, I hereby declare friendly war by candlelight on Alarcón and humbly ask that he leave me a corner of the cone to cut my teeth on. Daniel, you know those signs on the lawns of public parks—Prohibido Pisar El Cesped? Hands off Patagonia and Santiago! And Valparaiso. Dejate de piratear! Dejame mi pastito interior! In exchange, I’ll read Lost City Radio to see whether the novel I’ve been working has, in fact, been scooped. Deal? Deal? (No, really. Can we shake on it? Please?)

Territorially, but in the nicest, most debonair way,

M

Dear CF,

Just got back from hearing Daniel Alarcón—author of War by Candlelight (which I’ve read) and Lost City Radio (which I haven’t, for reasons that will become apparent)—talk about book piracy in Peru. You’ve seen the stands, you’ve read your Calvino: the subject is the promiscuous repackaging and reproducing of books.Trafficking in translations. It’s apparently a darker world than one would think.

Alarcón’s got big hair, a reading voice more interested in its subject than itself, and great stage presence when unglued from the manuscript. He’s good at making a monologue delivered at a room feel conversational and offhand. He seems like your cousin’s friend.

Tonight he read from a pretty exhaustive essay on how overground and underground publishing works in Lima and the special role books occupy in a culture whose relationship to the literary vacillates between the worshipful and the mercenary. It was good.

But there was a moment when the problem of being Daniel Alarcón came up: come question-time, a Peruvian man in the audience raised his hand and said, with some irritation: “Peruvians know all about this. What’s the point of writing it?”

My jaw dropped metaphorically and I metaphorically picked it up because this is the key question, the life question, the question I ask myself every day when I try to write something and a variant of the question I get asked every Wednesday afternoon when I try to convince my peers that there really is a way to reconcile contemporary neuroscience with readings of Milton.

The question is this: how do you write for two audiences?

I’m coming clean. My feelings about Alarcón are complex. He’s damned good and I’m trying to forgive him for occupying a niche that I’ve never overcome some nervousness about inhabiting: the role of a Latino writer raised in the US whose writing language is English, who resists the flatness that can result from an overeager commitment to identity politics (Cisneros, Sapphire), who harbors intense interest toward and an anxious relation to his parents’ mother country (the language of which he speaks fluently), a country to which he does not and will never quite belong.

It’s a bizarre headspace to occupy for any period of time, and it’s certainly not unique. This is territory many—Lahiri and Diaz, for instance—have explored well.

But the Southern Cone? That was MINE.

(The South too, though Alarcón was raised in Birmingham, so I’ll grudgingly admit his claim to Alabama is better than mine.)

I’m sort of joking but not really. I buried most of the stuff I’ve written for the simple reason that when you start writing about the country you want to belong to, it talks back to you.

Which is what happened to Alarcón tonight. And I could see in his face

too, so I can’t help but resent thte as I am jealous and I feel cheated. e’s managed to exploit the wormholes I’

Why Don’t Fetuses Get Free Health Care?

It’s a curious feature of the Republican approach to reproduction that the fetus has the right to life but not to medical care*. The life belongs to the fetus, so the money required to bring that fetus to term—including the cost of the birth—should be calculated not as part of the “expense” of being a woman in the health care system but rather as a Fetal Birthday Gift From America.

Women are more costly, the prevailing Republican wisdom goes, because of their child-bearing years. Pete Sessions will be greatly relieved to learn that this has all been a mistake over in in Accounting. The cost of an entire pregnancy (and any in vitro treatments that led to the conception) redounds on the fetus’ unborn head.  Luckily insurance rates will be low—no preexisting conditions as it is not yet technically a smoker, an adolescent male driver or a woman. America’s gift will be both moral and cost-effective.

Back in the day, England introduced the idea of a “window tax” which amounted to a tax that was (it was felt) roughly proportionate to income. Wikipedia informs me that “it was designed to impose tax relative to the prosperity of the taxpayer, but without the controversy that then surrounded the idea of income tax.”

Replace “income tax” with “abortion” and “window tax” with “health care reform” and you’ll get a window into the way reproduction gets mentioned and evaded during the depressing dance that is US health care reform. Uteruses are the new windows. It’s the having them that matters, and it’s a luxury for which women have to pay.

Republicans: Being a Woman is a Preexisting Condition. Pregnancies Cost Money. So Does Birth Control. No You Cannot Abort.

First, thanks to the Stupak Amendment (which has led apolitical me to write not only my representatives but those in Georgia as well), insurers are to be instructed that the plans the vast majority of the population will be using Shall Not include abortion. Abortion is already seldom taught in medical schools—a change from the time my own father received his training.  Now there will be a stranglehold on market demand. Abortion will become a subspecialty, an “elective procedure” that has, in many discussions raging on this issue, been lumped in with breast augmentations. (That is a subject for another time.) It seems a foolish comparison until one realizes that as abortion becomes more and more divorced from the standard repertoire of obstetrics and gynecology, it may be priced accordingly.

It’s popular to talk about Republican stupidity, but I want to take a moment to applaud the tacticians behind this move. It was nothing short of brilliant for the Republicans, coming from a position of numerical weakness, to pen the Democratic party so that they squabble over whether to sacrifice one major issue in order to achieve nominal victory in another.

They are, however, in need of some additional help which I am in a position to provide.

I learned, courtesy of Politico and Courthouse News, that Pete Sessions believes women to be in the same class as smokers, and that both groups should pay more (or nothing) accordingly:

In promoting the House health bill, New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone made reference to discrimination by insurance companies, citing their reluctance to insure people with preexisting conditions and differences in costs based on gender. “But that’s not against the law,” Texas Republican Pete Sessions said.

Pallone replied, “No, but we would make it against the law. Why do you have a problem with that?” he asked. “Why should a woman pay more than a man?”

“Well, we’re all different,” Sessions explained. “Why should a smoker pay more,” he said before getting interrupted by a burst of chatter throughout the room.

Why indeed? It’s an interesting parallel: smokers weigh the system down by jeopardizing their own health through the voluntary ingestion of known carcinogens. Women weigh down the system by having the potential to reproduce. Being a woman is a preexisting condition. Like having diabetes. In fact, being a woman is functionally identical to a disease.

(How smokers should be treated by our health-care system is an important subject for another time; what interests me here is the rhetorical move of equating the two.)

“Oh please,” a commenter on Glenn Thrush’s post on this in Politico writes, “young men have to pay more for car insurance than young women, it’s the way the world works…no need to cry about it.”

In this argument (which crops up more than you might expect) the logic goes thusly: women are statistically more expensive than men, just as young male drivers are statistically more expensive than female drivers. Therefore it is perfectly reasonable for women to pay more for basic medical care. Q.E.D.

I nod. This makes excellent sense. But there’s a tickle somewhere around my left uterine syllogism-maker that suggests that something important is being missed. Ah! I have it. It is this: I don’t necessarily have to drive.

Yes, that’s it. I can opt out of the unequal pricing of car insurance by not owning a car.  The higher cost of which exists, incidentally, because of patterns of irresponsible behavior, not irresponsible uterus ownership. My uterus is harder to opt out of, as it was not of my choosing. It is (at least in principle) a harder thing to reject.

My fallopian fallacy-feeler tells me something else about this is not 100% absolutely accurate. Here it is. Health insurance is arguably more important than car insurance in that the latter deals mainly with what happens to a chunk of metal in case of an accident, whereas the former addresses whether you will live or whether you will die.

In both cases, though, the analogies correlate irresponsible behaviors with actually being a particular sex.

My cervix has some questions as it contemplates possible methods of payment:

Does infertility earn you a tax break?

(Oh good! But wait—might taxing women for their reproductive function not be the best way to solve the problem of the declining birth rate in the US?)

(Never mind—someone will support us when we get old and Social Security is bankrupt.)

All this is luckily only a problem for pro-choice people. The pro-life champions can sleep easy. Stupak will take Sessions gently by the hand tonight and explain to him that while he agrees In Principle that women are just like smokers (and like bad teenage drivers too), fetuses have done nothing wrong and deserve to have the cost of their arrival fall squarely on the nation’s shoulders. It’s an unfortunate side effect that the smoker-driver carrying the fetus will receive care too, but that is one of those biological injustices to which we need pay no mind.

God Bless America. May we all someday be rich enough to have luxury windows and convertible uteruses of our very own.

*This is in some ways the opposite of the fungibility argument, which Aimai addresses nicely here.

Why Women Don’t Make Top Ten Lists: Prose on Prose

Dear CF,

Laura Miller’s article on Publishers Weekly’s top ten list led me to Francine Prose’s article, “Scent of a Woman’s Ink,” which was published in Harper’s Magazine in 1998.  It’s not available to nonsubscribers but it’s a formidable piece and relevant still, though it’s equally interesting to think about the ways in which some things have changed. I want to rescue it from the archives and reproduce some parts of it here for consideration as we pound our way through the month of November. My summaries are in brackets and italics.

[Prose notes that all in all, sales are up for women writers and there are more women readers than men. Taking the broad view, all's well.]

“So only a few paranoids (readers with a genuine interest in good writing by either gender) may feel that the literary playing field is still off by a few degrees. Who else would even notice that in this past year–which saw the publication of important books by Deborah Eisenberg, Mary Gaitskill, Lydia Davis, and Diane Johnson–most of the book-award contests had the aura of literary High Noons, publicized shoot-outs among the guys: Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, a sort of Civil War Platoon? Of course, not even the most curmudgeonly feminist believes that accolades or sales should be handed out in a strict fifty-fifty split, or that equal-opportunity concessions should be made to vile novels by women. But some of us can’t help noting how comparatively rarely stories by women seem to appear in the few major magazines that publish fiction, how rarely fiction by women is reviewed in serious literary journals, and how rarely work by women dominates short lists and year-end ten-best lists.”

[Prose meditates on why this might be:]

“How to explain this disparity? Is fiction by women really worse? Perhaps we simply haven’t learned how to read what women write ? Diane Johnson–herself a novelist of enormous range, elegance, wit, and energy–observes that male readers at least “have not learned to make a connection between the images, metaphors, and situations employed by women (house, garden, madness), and universal experience, although women, trained from childhood to read books by people of both sexes, know the metaphorical significance of the battlefield, the sailing ship, the voyage, and so on.” Perhaps the problem is that women writers tell us things we don’t want to hear–especially not from women. Or is the difficulty, fundamentally, that all readers (male and female, for it must be pointed out that many editors, critics, and prize-committee members are women) approach works by men and women with different expectations? It’s not at all clear what it means to write “like a man” or “like a woman,” but perhaps it’s still taken for granted, often unconsciously and thus insidiously, that men write like men and women like women–or at least that they should. And perhaps it’s assumed that women writers will not write anything important—anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise.”

[While many little boys staunchly refuse to read stories about girls and will own up to their reasons for doing so, it's difficult, of course, to find any adults writing on the subject. The assumption that women writers might have less to contribute to great literature than men seems to tacitly exist but is rarely articulated. Luckily, there's always Norman Mailer:]

“If Norman Mailer didn’t exist, we might have had to invent the man who could utter, in Advertisements for Myself, history’s most heartfelt, expansive confession of gynobibliophobia:

I have a terrible confession to make—I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. Since I’ve never been able to read Virginia Woolf, and am some. rimes willing to believe that it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict may be taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure–that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.”

“Few critics have so boldly advanced this testicular definition of talent. More often, a male writer’s true opinion must be extracted from the terms he uses to describe his female colleagues, from Walpole’s calling Mary Wollstonecraft a ‘hyena in petticoats’ to Southey’s dismissing the enraged Charlotte Bronte as a daydreamer. In our century, Edmund Wilson complained that ‘this continual complaining and having to be comforted is one of the most annoying traits of women writers….’ More recently, a piece by Bernard Bergonzi in The New York Review of Books began, ‘Women novelists, we have learned to assume, like to keep their focus narrow,’ and in an essay on Katherine Anne Porter, Theodore Solotaroff referred to Porter’s ‘bitchiness’ and ‘relentless cattiness,’ terms used, perhaps too rarely, to scold mean-spirited male writers.

But why should we trouble ourselves about unfeeling, brutish critics when we have gallant defenders like Theodore Roethke, who in 1961 praised Louise Bogan’s poetry by reassuring readers that she is not a typical female poet, handicapped by ‘lack of range–in subject matter, in emotional tone–and lack of a sense of humor…. the embroidering of trivial themes; a concern with the mere surfaces of life . . . hiding from the real agonies of the spirit; refusing to face up to what existence is; Iyric or religious posturing; running between the boudoir and the altar, stamping a tiny foot against God….’

[Speculating that Mailer's "balls" refer to ambition and scope, here is Prose on the critical reception of Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead in 1991, which weighs in at 750 pages and which I haven't read, though now I will:]

“From the horror that greeted Silko’s book, published in 1991, one might have concluded that she herself was plotting insurrection or confessing to all the bloody crimes committed in her novel. How upset reviewers were by this ‘very angry author’ seething with ‘half-digested revulsion,’ by her inability to create ‘a single likable, or even bearable, character,’ her ‘bad judgement and inadequate craft,’ the ‘nonexistent plot,’ and, worst of all, her ‘emphatic view of sex as dirty, together with a ceaseless focus on the male sex organ, suggest[ing] that more than the novel itself needs remedial help.’

“In USA Today, Alan Ryan lamented that Silko’s book had neither plot nor characters. The normally astute Paul West had similar troubles, which he shared with his L.A. Times readers: ‘I found myself peering back, wondering who was who, only to remember fragments that, while vivid and energetic, didn’t help me in my belated quest for a family tree…. Silko does not interest herself much in psychology, in the unsaid word, the thought uncompleted, the murmur lost.’ The San Francisco Chronicle critic, praising the novel, makes this unintentionally hilarious understatement of the scope of its achievement: ‘At more than 750 pages, Almanac of the Dead is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious novels ever written by an American Indian.’ And Charles Larson concludes his Washington Post review by saying, ‘So many stories have been crammed into Almanac of the Dead it’s often impossible to know when to take Silko seriously.’

“Readers unfamiliar with the novel will have to take my word for it–or that of the few critics who, like Alan Cheuse, recognized the novel as ‘a book that must be dealt with’–that one can follow the story line. Anyway, what’s at issue here is not the dismal spectacle of bad reviews happening to good books but rather the rarity with which major male writers are criticized in the same terms as women. No one seems to be counting David Foster Wallace’s characters, or complaining that DeLillo’s Underworld has too many subplots, or faulting the male authors of doorstop novels for an insufficient interest in psychology. When Thomas Pynchon’s plots spin off into the ozone, we’re quite ready to consider the chance that it’s an intentional part of his method and not the feeble mistake of what Paul West, in his review of Silko, called the ’shattered mind of an atavist.’”

[Throughout the essay, Prose provides several passages of writing and asks us to identify the gender of the writer. Her point is usually that the qualities ascribed to "female writing" are equally present in the prose male writers. But the most effective example, in my opinion, is the one that troubles this premise of interchangeability:]

“But despite the Skinnerian system of rewards and punishments to which they are subjected, women writers seem to be getting tougher in their insistence on saying the last things men (and even women) want to hear–unwelcome observations about everything from our national attitudes to our self-delusions. Although guys such as Nicholson Baker get the credit for smudging the line between high lit and soft core, women have been increasingly open on the subject of sex, and specifically on the difference between the bedroom and the wet dream. Here, then, one final pair of quotes, on the theme of how power and control shift under the most intense and intimate pressures:

I was dealing, it seemed, with some kind of masochist, or bully, or combination…. To me belonged, as big as a thumb held up to the eye, her pallid moistened body with its thousand jigales and many membranous apertures. … I love the passive position, the silken heavy sway above me of pendulous breasts, the tent of female hair formed when her Olmec face lowered majestically to mine, the earnest and increasingly self-absorbed grind of an ass too big for my hands. Being our second time, it took longer, giving me ample opportunity to keep moaning her name. “Ann Ann! God, Ann. Oh Ann, Ann. Annnn”–the “n”s, the “a.” She took it in stride by now, making no comment; she had slept with enough men to know we’re all, one way or another, kinky.

She unzipped his pants. “Stop,” he said. “Wait.” . . . This was not what he had in mind, but to refuse would make him seem somehow less virile than she. Queasily, he stripped off her clothes and put their bodies in a viable position. He fastened his teeth on her breast and bit her…. He could tell that she was trying to like being bitten, but that she did not. He gnawed her breast. She screamed sharply. They screwed. They broke apart and regarded each other warily…. He realized what had been disturbing him about her. With other women whom he had been with in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that had made it easy for him to get inside them and, once there, smear himself all over their innermost territory until it was no longer theirs but his. His wife did not have this empty quality, yet the gracious way in which she emptied herself for him made her submission, as far as it went, all the more poignant. This exasperating girl, on the other hand, contained a tangible somethingness that she not only refused to expunge, but that seemed to willfully expand itself so that he banged into it with every attempt to invade her.

“No one will be fooled this time. The author of the first passage is inarguably a man, since women rarely think of the female body in terms of its ‘many membranous apertures.’ And few women, I imagine, define ‘kinky’ widely enough to include a male taking the bottom position and engaging in some spontaneous, if not exactly erotic, verbalization. The second passage goes a bit further. A breast is bitten, it’s not clear who is calling the shots, and the male character has a truly nasty moment of realization about the nature of sex. This realization so closely resembles female paranoia about male sexuality that we may suspect the writer is a woman. But that hardly matters, since in its extreme acuity it attains a shocking verisimilitude. We recognize the man’s perception not only as true of a few men, or of many men on a few occasions, but as a truth we have always known or suspected and have never before seen, quite so crisply and boldly, in print.

The author of the first passage is John Updike, known for his lyrical-ribald, celebratory, and honest depictions of sex. The second is Mary Gaitskill, a gifted younger writer who, one can’t help noticing, is rarely invited to give her opinion on quite the range of subjects that the media routinely solicits from John Updike. Indeed, Updike is considered a pillar of our literary culture, whereas Gaitskill–whose talent is widely admired–is perceived as slightly transgressive, even slightly nutty, on the subject of sex.

As should be clear by now from the passages and reviews quoted above, fiction by women is still being read differently, with the usual prejudices and preconceptions. Male writers are rarely criticized for their anger; Philip Roth is beloved for his rage, and rightly so. Few reviewers warn Robert Stone against mucking about in parts of the world where CIA operatives masquerade as businessmen. No one dares propose that William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice is in many ways as kitschy, manipulative, and inauthentic a historical novel as, say, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. And, with its forays into the maudlin, it’s hard to believe that A Fan’s Notes by Ms. Frederika Exley would be called, by a Newsday reviewer, ‘the best novel written in the English language since The Great Gatsby.’”

Prose suggests that good writing manages to transcend the accident of gender; I don’t know if that’s quite true, nor do I think people are as forgiving of Styron (for example) as she thinks. But her main point stands: I think it is the case that when a man with a way with words produces a convoluted mess with literary and transcendent aspects, it’s greeted with an assumption of readerly inadequacy. The mess is intentional and artful unless strenuously shown to be otherwise. The burden of proof is on the reader. The converse is true for women, for whom stridency and expansiveness (firecrackerness, too) are undesirably marked qualities. Not bad in themselves, but noticed and questioned. The fact that Beloved tops the Best American Novels list the NYT published some years ago only proves my point. Morrison’s book is a mess that only pretends to be messy: it’s actually obsessively neat, neat to the point of compulsiveness. Every symbol, every apparently stray word, every unpunctuation is part of an overdetermined attempt to create the illusion of mess while betraying an absolute and frankly (to me, anyway) exhausting penchant for authorial control.  Not surprising: the burden of proof is on Morrison: she needed to be able and ready to show her work.

One of the most interesting things about writing a novel (as opposed to a short story) and writing it so quickly is that one has a rather Pynchonian or Silkoian right to mess. And mess is fun. I’m taking the month to write it.

Fondly,

M

The Incarnation

A lizard, Carla Fran?!! Is this your novel’s spirit animal, your word made flesh? I confess I find the idea of him terribly nice, although I’m sure it’s less poetic to have large lizards actually in a space that’s shared by your feet.

I have no lizards in my house. Some respectable spiders, an ailing basil plant, two dry-bottomed pumpkins, but no lizards. Novelwise, I find I’m averaging 500 words a day or so. I’m a little disappointed but not really. The feeling reminds me of this aquarium when I was a kid that had 32 fish in it. My Uncle Gerald got it for me when he visited from Germany; he got me the aquarium and my mom a blue topaz ring. It was a wonderful present because he bought all 32 fish at once. They did not accrue. It felt really good to pour too much fish food in and watch them go crazy. That’s how this feels. And now I have a blue topaz ring too.

In the creative connection I thought it might be useful to jot down what we are reading (for fun, I mean), in addition to what we are listening to:

Fun Books I Just Read:

• Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
• Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams

Fun Books I Am Reading:

• I Am Not Sidney Poitier, by Percival Everett
• The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, George Saunders

Fun Book I Intend To Read:

• Gluttony, by Francine Prose

Loaves and fishes, fishes and loaves,

M