R was Beyond Him

"Qualities that would have saved a ship's company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water--endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then--what is R?

"A shutter like a leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying--he was a failure--that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R----"

From "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is like a late but precious discovery. I covet her ability to name things from the subconscious, to name the dark into the light, to capture those moments of life, of thought, of despair and of joy, that I have yet been unable to elucidate. She is doing it for me.

...Manifesto #1

Can you live in a world without creativity? Art, music, words, etc? No. Why? Because within these forms, you are allowed to transcend the drudgerous reality of being human. Through a combination of words, letters, images, notes, harmonies, movement, flashing, toe-tapping, you are able to become as fluid as nature, or ghosts, or heaven, or hell, those things that move in realms outside of your own breathing, shitting, working, bill-paying self.

Double-Consciousness

"Then it dawned on me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart life and longing, but shut out from the world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempts, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows."

From "Our Spiritual Strivings"
by W.E.B. Dubois

What's Hardcore?

Democracy Now played "What's Hardcore?" this past Tuesday, after a segment on Somalia. Amy Goodman said the artist's name so fast that she left me wondering who wrote this fucking rad song. Later, while listening to a forum about the San Francisco 8, host Mos Def referred to a rapper named K'Naan. After a bit of google searching, I put two and two together and was stoked to discover that Somali Rapper K'Naan was my mystery artist. He has an album out called "The Dustyfoot Philosopher" which I am going to purchase as soon as I can get myself over the Last Record Store on Mendocino Avenue.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Truly a book for the 21st century. Junot Diaz writes history, diasphora, post-colonial life in America, science fiction nerds, love and violence like the world is on fire (which it is) I recently read a quote about how the sign of genius is being able to hold two completely opposing idea in one's head without going mad and that is what Diaz is able to do in this story of Oscar Wao, the world's biggest Dominican nerd who just wants to be a writer and be in love. He writes of love, sex and all those glorious things that make up life on earth, while incorporating layers of history, politics and seriously ripe dirty language. Yeah!

Crossing the Arid “I”: A Study of Annie Ernaux's Feminist Autobiography Shame

In her essay, “The Universal Subject, Female Embodiment, and the Consolidation of Autobiography,” Sidonie Smith uses the Isak Dinesen short story “The Blank Page” to illustrate the notion that female autobiography can interrupt the expectations of traditional normative masculinity in (western) autobiographical practice. The setting of the Dinesen story is a Spanish convent. Stained with the shed blood of lost virginity, framed wedding night sheets from aristocratic marriages, line the corridors of the convent. Row after row of the sheets tells the same story until one framed sheet appears that is missing blood-it is blank and white. Smith explains the scene thus, “one autobiographical sheet breaks the narrative pattern in its silence in its refusal to be framed the same way.” (3) The sheet, in its silence, interrupts the narrative of female embodiment by not telling the expected story of the wedding night.
Annie Ernaux's Shame, an autobiographical exploration of her childhood and the effect of one traumatic event on her perception of self, interrupts the assumptions of (western) autobiographical practice in the same way as the blank, white sheet interrupts the narrative of female embodiment on the convent walls. Ernaux resists the assumption of an individual self unshaped by environment as well as the elevation of the disembodied 'I' in favor of an “ethnological study of the self” (33) that acknowledges female embodiment as well as the role of societal influence on the formation of self-identity.
The tyranny of the arid “I” is a phrase coined by Sidonie Smith who-inspired by a passage from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own- describes the way the encompassing assumptions of the “I” in (western )autobiographical practice leaves no room for those who do not fit the normative masculinity of that “I.” The tyranny is in the assumption of what and who the “I” is that leaves no room for anyone outside of the normative masculine individuality. The arid “I” is derived from the concept of the disembodied “I,” a notion that began in the Renaissance when the concepts of the individual and of a universal human subject grew in stature. The dominance of the idea of the self-defining individual expanded with the 18th and 19th centuries, until a standing universal subject became a common assumption of intellectual and philosophical discourse
The assumption of a disembodied “I” rests on the belief that the self is an independent entity that develops from an ahistorical or transcendent site of knowledge. It is a self that is rational and unswayed by the influences of race, culture or class status.
Ernaux challenges the idea of the “disembodied I” as well as the dream of “unimbedded selfhood,” in the very structure of her autobiography Shame. In fact, much of the autobiography centers on the way Ernaux was shaped by her environment, class status, material desires and familial/social issues. and how this shaping led to the way she dealt with the traumatic instance when her father tried to kill her mother. She describes Shame as an “ethnological study of the myself.”(33) Ernaux states that she is not going to write a traditional narrative in which certain aspects of reality are assumed to be true.
Naturally I shall not opt for narrative, which would mean inventing reality instead
of searching for it. Neither shall I content myself with merely picking out and
transcribing the images I remember; I shall process them like documents, examining
them from different angles to give them meaning. In other words, I shall carry out
an ethnological study of myself. (33)
The author completes a study of the self by documenting and listing the rules and behavior expectations by which she lived in a small Normandy town. The lists are detailed and distanced, written in a vaguely scientific tone. She explicates painfully tiny details concerning how a twelve year old girl in 1952 was expected to behave at home, in public, in the workplace and at school. She describes the songs that formed her yearnings and the clothing that stoked her material desires. Ernaux looks to these daily informers as the definition of self, saying “At the age of twelve I was living by the rules and codes of this world; it never occurred to me that there might be others.” (51) It is clear that Ernaux resists the idea of the disembodied “I” because sees her twelve-year old self as completely formed by her gender, societal and class status.
To convey what my life was like in those days, the only reliable method I have
is to explore the laws, rites, beliefs and references that defined the circles in
which I was caught up-school, family, small-town life-and which governed my
existence. (32)
Ernaux resists, contradicts and outright rejects the idea of a free and autonomous soul, able to exist above and outside of the demands of society. Rather, she takes it down to the minutest levels of society to explain her reactions to the traumatic events that occurred and from which she was not able to recover. From the rules of the church (No holding the handrail, no chapel during recess) to the successive stages of existence (Do one's military service, get married and have kids), Ernaux leaves little ground uncovered.
The act of crossing and doublecrossing the line of the “I” occurs when Ernaux challenges the assumption of a self with a hard core at the center, a core that is able to access some pure idea of truth. She does this by questioning what she has learned from the experience of writing about her own life. Instead of winding down her autobiographical study with a pat explanation of what she learned from her experiences, Ernaux instead questions her own thought processes and even her own capabililty of learning anything from the examination.
After evoking the images I have of that summer, I feel inclined to write “then I discovered
that” or “then I realized that,” words implying a clear perception of the events one
has lived through. But in my case there is no understanding, only this feeling of shame
that has fossilized the images and stripped them of meaning.” (104)
By refusing to make meaning from the experience, Ernaux resists the assumption that the goal of autobiography is to travel to that true center of self where the stable referent lies. In doing so, she creates a space for the idea that there is no stable referent. The self is constructed of so many different influence that it is impossible to strip an experience down to a core meaning. It is the images, material possessions and random experiences of life that defines one, not a solid core from whence identity arises like a tall building out of the fog. The author does not see the act of writing down the journey of the self as a way to find a solid answer about her identity. In fact, Ernaux would not describe the act of autobiography as a journey at all. She would more likely describe it as a series of images that add up to only one emotion: Shame.
Smith argues that the assumption of a Universal subject, of unimbedded selfhood “obscures through a gray and shapeless mist everything colorful that lies within it's vision,” (4) meaning that the assumption of a Universal subject is only defined by those things that lie outside of the accepted definition of self. In order to have a concept of self, there must be something that is identified as not the self. In this case, traditional normative masculinity is what has been defined as the stable referent since the Renaissance, meaning that certain groups such as women, people of color and homosexuals are identified as the other, and in turn marginalized and forced to live in the shadow of the looming black line of the Universal I. Smith argues, “Founded on exclusionary practices, this democratic self positions on its border all that is termed the “colorful,” that is, that which becomes identified culturally as other, exotic, unruly, irrational, uncivilized, regional, or paradoxically unnatural.” (9) In other words, in order to be a disembodied “I,”there must be something that is considered embodied. Something identified as unruly and irrational.
The act of crossing and double-crossing the “I” continues as Ernaux creates a space in her autobiography for those who are deemed “colorful” in the definition of the democratic self. She identifies herself and her family as those who live on the margins, who are not considered part of upstanding French society. One scene in particular illustrates this point. The twelve-year old Ernaux and her father are in a restaurant during a bus trip to Lourdes. The author watches as a wealthy father and daughter eat at a table near them. She cannot help but compare herself and her father to the others. It is during this comparison that Ernaux realizes her “otherness” as a working-class person.
The restaurant scene in Tours is by far the most vivid. When I was writing a book
about my father's life and roots, it would haunt me relentlessly, proof that
there existed two separate worlds and that we would always belong to the
one down below. (105)
The text acts as a reversal of accepted historical autobiographical practice in that Ernaux represents the other traditionally excluded from the narrative. Ernaux is clear that she is the other. She is the colorful force that must interrupt the accepted narrative to make space for her own version of the story. Her story is representative of the “colorful,” the other, and documents the story of those who are forced to live in the shadow of the “tyranny of the arid I.” Through her fragmented tale, Ernaux brings the colorful out of the shadows and into the light of historical narrative.
In challenging the assumptions of (western) autobiographical practice, Annie Ernaux creates a space of resistance wherein the accepted narrative is questioned, and in its place a space for those who have traditionally been “embodied” or assigned the definition of “colorful.” Like the blank white sheet on the wall of the convent, Ernaux resists the tale told before. By implicity resisting the idea of a disembodied “I,”Ernaux defeats the tyranny as described by Sidonie Smith and Virginia Woolf, creating a space of illumination within shadow, and a way to tell a story of self that is authentic while still being fragmented and non-conclusive. Ironically, though Ernaux doesn't feel that she is able to discover a core identity, her interruption of accepted narratives manages to seem to be even more authentic and truthful than those written from the location of a stable, Universal self.

Pants on Fire

"The surburbanization of Southern California's remaining wild landscapes has only accelerated... As middle and upper-class families flee, they seek sanctuaries ever deeper in the rugged contours of the chaparral firebelt. The population, for example, of the Thousand Oaks-Agoura Hills corridor-the crucible of almost all Malibu firestorms-has tripled since 1970, with hundreds of new homes scattered like so much kindling across isolated hilltops and bridges."

"The Case for Letting Malibu Burn"
by Mike Davis from The Ecology of Fear (Metropolitan Books, 1998)

Rampant development leads to rampant fires. I lived in San Diego county for eleven years. I watched developers raze hill after hill, building track home where once was nature--the chaparral firebelt. Now, the desert flames fueled by the Santa Ana winds raze ill-planned middle-class hideaways and we wonder how this could happen.

The Shock Doctrine

White Chalk

White Chalk, P.J. Harvey's first studio album in three years, is quite a marvel. I've been listening to it on repeat for the past two days and can't get the title song out of my head. The album is rife with stark piano lines and high register singing reminiscent of a child ghost singing haunting lullabies. One particular song, "When Under Ether," conjures images of a Victorian woman ala the main character in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, who is going under ether and possibly dying as she holds the hand of a woman by the side of her bed. I imagine a woman much like the Harvey on the cover of the album, wearing a long white dress, dying in the throes of childbirth or dementia. White Chalk is the perfect soundtrack to my attempts to write a lesson plan for a class in Gothic literature. Not to sound trite, but it is so much about ghosts, yearning, transgression and sexual awakening, which all happen to be major tropes of the gothic. There is also pirate cabaret sound to songs like "The Devil" and a couple of others. What a fucking fantastic album.

Katrina

While it's tempting to look at the world through a distanced and critical eye, it is when the individual stories are digested and imprinted on to the consciousness that one can truly begin to understand a situation. The anniversary of Hurricane Katrina came and went this week and this particular story about the Danziger Bridge killings, posted on Democracy Now, encapsulated the mind-blowing injustice that occurred after the disaster. I can look at the events on the bridge critically and say, "This is the result of racism and classism-this is what the police do when the overarching mandate is to protect private property." But I cannot help but think of the true implications of those moments on the Danzinger bridge as a terrified forty year old man attempted to escape the rising floodwaters only to end up shot in the back by the cops. One second running and the next lying in a pool of his own blood like Alice drowning in her own salty tears.