C'est la fin (du terme/quartier)

The quarter has barreled towards its end and I am now in recovery mode, having felt more than a little flattened beneath it. At a certain point I had to impose mental triage and this blog, unfortunately, lay moribund on the gurney.  In addition to my usual commuting routine and a heavy traveling schedule from the very beginning of the year (classes began on January 3, and I had to attend a conference that first weekend) and to an exacting departmental committee assignment and my fulfilling and demanding graduate and undergraduate advisory and supervisory work, as well as delightful non-work-related projects, like the Roussel play, I taught two classes, the gateway introductory fiction workshop and a required course for senior creative writing majors.  Both demanded a tremendous amount of effort, mainly because of the mountain of reading (I assign multiple initial exercises, online threaded discussions on assigned texts, two short story drafts, and one revision in the intro fiction class, and in the senior class, I require a creative autobiography, weekly tweets on Twitter, a book review, a creative essay on one of six books I assign, an in-class report on one of the many articles I post, and a final paper or interview-with-analysis), but one of the immediate pleasures of both is being able to witness the development of the students' tools, artistry and confidence in the former, and the mastery of skills in the latter.  What was true for previous intro fiction classes seemed even more so for this one; a number of the students made evident imaginative and technical leaps in second drafts, which made me nearly start cheering every time I registered this as I read them. I always try to point this out in my typed comments, and sometimes I worry the students may think I'm being too enthusiastic and praiseworthy, but it is heartening to see a student whose first story tacking closely to her autobiography imagining, in her second draft, the lives of people much older, or different, or from a very different chronological period, and structuring the story with greater assurance, understanding how to create characters who come to life on the page, realizing what details will unlock the narrative in ways others would not, and so forth. As I read the final drafts this past week and weekend, what struck me repeatedly was how far some of the students had gotten, how much they had grown, how, in every case, they advanced--have advanced--beyond their earliest efforts, the tiny 1-3 page exercises, they first submitted to me in January.

With the senior majors, one of the most important things I left with was a feeling of hope for the future of literature, and hope and happiness for their own future projects and work, in and around the literary world. At various points this course left some graduating students with a mild--to serious--sense of gloom about the changing US literary landscape, but this year, perhaps because so much remains in the air--and poet and Northwestern University Press rights manager Parneshia Jones reminded our class during her wonderful visit that in the publishing industry as in life "things change every single day"--and so many tools are now available to writers, editors, potential publishers, all of us, more than one of the students told me that they felt "hopeful," that they could make a difference, that they would pursue careers as writers of every possible type and genus, as publishers and editors, as scholars and critics, and in roles perhaps not yet fully conceived or named, by anyone, as things moved forward. I am looking forward to seeing what they do, and they know they will have my support always.

For the required senior major class, "The Situation of Writing," I debuted three new books: Dunya Mikhail's Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (Elizabeth Winslow, translator; New Directions, 2009), a memoir (of sorts) in verse, of the Iraqi American poet's life during the Gulf and Iraq Wars; Judith Ortiz Cofer's Woman In Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer and (University of Georgia Press, 2000); and David Shields's Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010).  Of the three, I think the one that provoked the least discussion was Mikhail's, perhaps in part because of its form as two long poems, the first more lyric than narrative and quite abstract as opposed to documentary, which required that the students--or any reader--think about what might constitute a "diary," how trauma and personal experience might be recorded and translated into lyric form, and what war poetry, or poetry written during and in response to war, might look like, all of which were challenging, to say the least. That said, the form also proved liberating from some in the class, and led students whose usual approach might have been a prose essay or creative nonfiction to write longer poems as their response.  The formal approaches of Shields' and another book, Adrienne Kennedy's People Who Led To My Plays (Theater Communications Group, 1996), also appeared to have a liberating effect on the creative essays and final projects, so while there were quite a few to read, their inventiveness (alongside their quality) made each a pleasurable task.

I sometimes think a version of the "Situation" class ought to be offered to all MFA, MA and PhD in creative writing students since it broaches many of the topics that writers not only should be thinking about but have to consider if they want to make writing a career, but from what I can tell, such courses remain a rarity. Which is a shame, but it also underlines how unique and unusual the experience the university's writing students, especially the majors, really is, and how much they are exposed to in addition to the extensive training in writing they undergo by the time they graduate.

MFA vs. NYC vs. Third Stream? or the World of Contemporary American Writing

Next quarter I'll once again be teaching one of the undergraduate writing program's required courses, one of my favorites, "The Situation of Writing," and one central component of it involves discussing contemporary American literary publishing; the processes by which books come into print or, nowadays, e-print; the relationship between writers, agents, editors, and publishing houses; how writers do or don't make a living from publishing literary works; and so forth.

Increasingly as part of this discussion the issue of the MFA degree and MFA (and PhD in writing/poetics) programs arise, and I have tended to juxtapose lapidary overview texts on 20th century American publishing (like Jason Epstein's charming The Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future, W. W. Norton, 2002, or André Schiffrin's much more polemical The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read, Verso, 2001) with more recent journalistic articles on New York publishing's crises as part of the discussion. UCLA professor Mark McGurl's 2009 scholarly book, The Program Era: Post-War Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard), provides an excellent, thoroughgoingly historicized and theorized reading of these programs, which have become increasingly normalized as the means by which American writers become (American) writers, but Mark's remarkable book is 480 pages, and really deserves extended treatment and discussion, worthy of a semester-long graduate seminar, which I unfortunately do not have in a 10-week quarter, especially given the amount of material I must cover.

I was thus extremely pleased to read Chad Harbach's essay "MFA vs. NYC," which appears in the journal n+1 and is excerpted in the November 26, 2010 online edition of Slate.  Though it has its faults, as any such wide-ranging, systems-summarizing piece does, from being too binary and tidy to too vague and generalizing in places, it nevertheless provides one of the best overviews of I've seen of what the contemporary American publishing world, both the longstanding, commercial mainstream one (headquarted in New York, but with major nodes in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia), and the increasingly parallel one that has developed in university MFA programs. Whereas I have tended in my classes to discuss the New York one, which is, as Harbach notes, in a period of extreme economic stress and structural change, the parallel one, located in MFA programs, is now as significant and important, and as much as the literary world hasn't fully reckoned with this, I would suggest that outside of figures like McGurl and many writer-critics, the scholarly world hasn't either. Moreover, though my introduction to the writing world was primarily through the New York angle, my personal trajectory has straddled the development of the MFA world, and I am now located within it. I studied in an MFA program and have taught in several; my publishing experience bridges both too.  If it is almost impossible now to live off one's literary publications in New York or most major American cities--which was not the case 25 or 30 years ago--it is also growing more and more difficult to get creative writing jobs, because of the supply-and-demand problem and university funding crisis, which, though nowhere near as bad as in the humanities more generally, is worsening. The MFA world, consisting by its very nature of artists, and being situated in the university, is still viewed with suspicion by the scholarly world--what is it that writers do?--and yet it has, as McGurl and Harbach note to differing degrees, as institutionalized and conventionalized as the instutions of which it is a part (and less so each day, apart).

The tensions between these two worlds have played out with several of the major American awards of late, especially the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Awards for fiction, which have been awarded to MFA-produced and based writers published not published by major houses.  In the case of Paul Harding's Tinkers, it famously was rejected by countless major publishers before it found a small publisher and went on to win the Pulitzer.

What Harbach doesn't discuss or even broach (in part because the world of n+1, situated as it is at the nexus of the NYC and MFA worlds, doesn't see it), is a third American literary world-system, however, parallel to both of these, which neither NYC's official publishing hierarchy nor that of the MFA programs, at least in the official sense, takes immediate or consistent note of, but which the structural and above all technological shifts and changes over the last 25 or so years have made possible, which is the autonomous/self-publishing/minoritarian/issue-based/grass-roots writing communities. This world, which is both diminished in key ways as elements of it have been assimilated by the NYC and MFA worlds (queer writing; black writing; black queer writing; etc.) and, for non-creative work, by the institutionalization of criticism, is the world of the slams; the world of community-based minoritarian organizations; the world that produced Language poetry, the Violet Quill, the Fag Rag Collective, OutWrite, Other Countries, Seal Press, Alyson, Gay Men's Press of New York, and so on, and that was already on the wane by the early 1990s. This is a world that many writers of my generation and I also came out of. The Dark Room Writers Collective, my first post-collegiate exposure to the literary world and an autonomous entity based in but distinct from the larger literary world in Cambridge and Boston, was inspired in no small part by and developed out of the historical, social and political trends of this world, as did a great many of the writers (Essex Hemphill, Thomas Grimes, Paul Beatty, Ntozake Shange, etc.) who came through the Dark Room in its earliest days.

But even then, all these competing worlds were already in play, and some of the Dark Room's literary avatars, writers who visited and read and provided advice, like Walker, had been honored by the pinnacle of the New York publishing world, the Pulitzer Prize committee, or Shange by the Obie and Tony Awards; Derek Walcott was an internationally renowned poet teaching in a distinguished M(F)A program, and would soon win the Nobel Prize; and younger writers like Elizabeth Alexander and Carl Phillips were in doctoral humanities programs and had received MAs or MFAs; and the pull of the university was something that every single writer in the Dark Room felt, and eventually followed (or succumbed to, as it were).  The NYC publishing world, as I said, has assimilated some writers from this realm, especially the most commercial ones, the older ones of a certain level of distinction and public recognition, and those whose work could be commodified and marketed as part of a niche (a historical style, period, etc.), and academe has done the same, with the focus being on intellectual thematics, schools, critical arguments which these writers might be said to have generated or been a part of. Death and time are powerful passports to either, I hate to say.  Nevertheless, a gulf still remains between the work of this sort that continues, independent writing and publishing not attached to or located either in the publishing capitals and not part of any educational institutions (I think, for example, of a superb small press like Redbone Press and its publisher, Lisa Moore, for example), and the NYC and MFA worlds, which have their own concerns, forms and modes of socialization, interests, understandings of politics, and so forth.

One person who always reminds me of this quite thoughtfully is poet and activist Jennifer Karmin, who at the pre-Poets Theater panel discussion broached the issue of resources in relation to the sort of project that had unfolded at Oracle Theater, and who such work was for, who had access to it, what its origins were beyond the ones usually suggested (the New York School coterie, for example, the Beat Poets, and similar groupings). Amiri Baraka, Sarah Schulman, and Sonia Sanchez are other contemporary writers, activists and critics whose life and work have underlined the connections and tensions surrounding these various streams for me. All began in what we might call this alternative or grass-roots stream; all have eventually moved into the university and taught creative writing; all have been honored or recognized, and to some degree published, by the NYC world; but all retain vital connections to the aesthetic and political sites from which they emerged.

I feel this tension in my own life and work, and it lies in part at the core of my critique in the talk I gave at the Museum of Contemporary Art, at the center of what I have been trying to think through but not fully able to articulate yet, has to do with the lack of recognition of this third or alternative stream, in relation to avant-gardism, even though at this point it really the only one capable of addressing, at least in a direct way, the ongoing concerns that many of us feel about the onward march of libertarian-capitalism/neoliberalism/communicative capitalism (to use Jodi Dean's term). It comes up for me every time not just my students, but writers I know in the world, ask no longer whether they should attend an MFA (or PhD) program but take that as a given and want me to parse and rank them, but also when I think about how some of the NYC-based folks, agents, critics, etc., simply could care less about what's happening on campuses, or even more so off them, unless there's the possibility of capitalizing on and somehow effectively commodifying this work so that it can become, well, a means to money, to influence, to a livelihoood.

This brings me back to what I have labeled this alternative stream, which I strongly believe is as crucial for contemporary American art as the other two, and my ongoing wonder about how effective it can it ever be, could it ever be, in a world in which the money remains, at least for the moment in NYC and with mainstream publishing, or what's left of it, while the entropic force and power has moved towards and has now diffused throughout MFA programs is another question, but such are my imperfect and still fully unworked-through thoughts after reading and thinking about Harbach's piece.

Talk @ Writing the Future Symposium, CalArts

This past weekend I participated in a symposium, "Writing the Future," at Los Angeles's MoCa: Museum of Contemporary Art, organized by writer and professor Christine Wertheim and sponsored by the MFA Writing Program and the MA in Aesthetics and Politics at the California Institute of the Arts.

I was on the first of two afternoon panels, with Juliana Spahr, a poet, critic and activist who's published many works and a professor at Mills College, and Mark McGurl, a UCLA-based scholar who's most recent acclaim has attended his study The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard, 2009), perhaps the most authoritative study of American MFA programs you can find. The second panel comprised political scientist and media scholar Jodi Dean, and Christine Wertheim herself, spelling for Heriberto Yépez, who could not secure a visa to travel north from Tijuana. Matias Viegener moderated both sets of discussions.

Juliana spoke compellingly from a paper she'd written about her ongoing struggles with issue and experience of privatization, which was increasingly spreading like (a) Cthulhu (the indescribed-yet-described creature from horror pioneer H. P. Lovecraft's work), a figured she'd drawn from an earlier version of Mark's talk; in the symposium draft, he linked the fiction of David Foster Wallace and Lovecraft, questions of scale, the use of genre fiction, and the development of community. My talk, an improvisation from a long paper I wrote (and am still reformulating, especially after hearing what they had to say), broached the relation between neoliberalism and experimental/innovative practice, across genres and forms, asking "W(h)ither the Avant-gardes?" In it I cited Damien Hirst, the Black Eyed Peas, and the "Rethinking Poetics" conference as examples of the willing or at least creeping coexistence between avant-garde practice(s) and the sort of market-oriented, privatizing ideologies and structures that Juliana also explored.  These offered a prelude to Jodi Dean's superb talk about "communicative capitalism" (I have just withdrawn from the library her book Publicity's Secret How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Cornell, 2002), which presents an excellent walkthrough of this and related ideas) and how Net culture might be "bad" for writing. "The future is grim," she pronounced, visibly moved, at the end of her talk. The second panel concluded with Christine's exploration of the relationship between gender, language, culture, and colonialism, and included invocations of M. Nourbese Philip (yay!) and James Joyce.


Below are some images from the event and from the rest of my short trip to Los Angeles.  As I mentioned to C, we shall have to return there as soon as we can; I hadn't been in many years.

Christine Wertheim delivering her talk, with Matias Viegener and Jodi Dean at right

Mark McGurl, delivering his talk

Juliana Spahr, at right, before her talk

 Yours truly (Matias Viegener at right), photo by Juliana Spahr

The Symposium audience

The Disney Concert Hall, just down the street from MoCa

LA sky, through one of the brise-soleils at MoCa

A view from my hotel room (at the Kyoto Grand)

E. 2nd Street and Central Avenue (which I mentioned in a poem many years ago, though I hadn't been on it in at least 40 years)

One of the beautiful temples in Little Tokyo, near where I was staying


Downtown LA at dawn

Wylie's seismic venture + Writers' homes + Better writing? Start blogging

It was only a matter of time before an agent took this step, and unsurprising to anyone deeply familiar with the Anglophone publishing world is the person who's done so: Andrew Wylie. Bypassing the major publishing houses, he's established a deal with Amazon to produce and publish ebooks, under a new imprint he's founded, Odyssey Editions, by some of the 700 authors under his representation, including some of the best known in the world, like John Updike, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Salman Rushdie. Odyssey will start with 20 ebooks, including Rushdie's award-winning Midnight's Children.

Publisher Random House, part of the Bertelsmann publishing conglomerate and print publisher of some of Updike's, Roth's and Rushdie's books, is so upset at Wylie's tack that they are refusing to conduct any new business on English-language books with the Wylie Agency. Other print publishers of his authors, like Simon & Schuster (part of CBS), and Penguin (part of Pearson), remain mum.

Quoting the Huffingtonpost.com article,

"The Wylie Agency's decision to sell e-books exclusively to Amazon for titles which are subject to active Random House agreements undermines our longstanding commitments to and investments in our authors, and it establishes this Agency as our direct competitor," Random House spokesman Stuart Applebaum said in a statement.

"Therefore, regrettably, Random House on a worldwide basis will not be entering into any new English-language business agreements with the Wylie Agency until this situation is resolved."

Since this cuts print publishers out of what is increasingly the most viable and lucrative area in publishing, people in the industry are extremely worried, and, as Kenneth Li's recent article in the Financial Times notes, it could be the end of the 500-year-old publishing industry at it's evolved.  Supposedly Wylie's authors and author estates will receive 50% royalties, which would represent a windfall over the 25% royalties they now get with standard ebook contracts, and the 12%-15% they get with standard print contracts.  As Li's article notes, the threat of this sort of action has led some publishers to negotiate generous ebook royalties with other agents, like Amanda Urban.  Yet Wylie's prominence is such that other agents will likely follow suit, and this opens up possibilities not only for writers with agents, but perhaps even more so for non-agented writers who have access to proprietary software or to independent publishers, have or can create a readership, and can strike deals with the online sellers. A brave new world of publishing indeed.



***

A work of art? Sort of. A bit disturbing, nevertheless, wouldn't you say? Actually, it's an image of a piece in Edward Gorey's house (aha--now it makes sense), one of many in A. N. Devers' Writers' Houses, an online collection of images and texts about writers' dwellings.  According to Madeleine Schwartz at The New Yorker's book blog, which is where I learned about the database, the featured homes include Edgar Allen Poe's, Pearl S. Buck's, Emily Dickinson's, John Steinbeck's, James Merrill's, and yes, Edward Gorey's.

Devers is deeply interested in writers' living spaces (that is, more than the particular rooms in which they write, which Susannah Raab has photographed, and Diana Fuss, among others, has written critically about) and encourages visitors' images and accounts of pilgrimages to them.  (I'm assuming she means writers no longer with us.)

Almost everywhere I visit I associate with the writers and artists who've lived there, but I only occasionally seek out the homes--especially if they're not house or apartment-museums--of these figures. I did visit Poe's room during my years down at the University of Virginia, and like many a schoolchild in St. Louis, I was taken to Eugene Field's house, which is a famous museum. Last year when I was in Cuba I did try to visit José Lezama Lima's house, which I was told was a museum (I also thought of the Havana homes of Reinaldo Arenas, Severo Sarduy and Virgilio Piñera, neither of which I imagine the government would be happy to have on maps), but I wasn't able to find it, though it turned out that I was staying only a few blocks from it. On the other hand, one of the hotels where I stayed was the home-in-exile, for some years, of the great Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, and I did photograph the commemorative plaque in the lobby, though I wasn't able to find out what rooms he'd stayed in.

If you could visit the homes of 2-3 non-living authors you admire, who and where would they be?

***

Someone is always slagging off on blogging and online writing, but not everyone thinks it's such a bad idea. Blogger and online writer Mary Jaksch, for example, solicited ideas to improve her writing, and the common aspect of the responses she received was, no surprise to anyone who writes regularly or teaches writing, was that practice makes perfect. At the top of her list of 73 helpful responses and suggestions on becoming a better writer was one that will probably make Andrew Keen (no relation) and Lee Siegel explode: to blog. Blogging, and regularly doing so (as I once used to do!), was, she thought, a surefire "winner." I agree, though I think it's probably best if it doesn't crowd out other projects (fictional, poetic, dramaturgical, essayistic, a mélange of all of these, etc.) that you're working on. Some other commonsense suggestions from Jaksch:

13. Write in different genres: blog posts, poems, short stories, essays.
14. Read grammar books.
15. Write without distractions.
16. Challenge yourself: write in a crowded cafe, write on the toilet, write for 24 hours straight.
17. Take a trip. Road trips, beach trips, bus trips, plane trips.
18. Watch movies. Can you write the story better?
19. Write. And then write some more.
20. Read, think, read, write, ponder, write - and read some more.
21. Read your stuff aloud to anyone who can stand it - including the cat.
22. Go back and cut 10% from your word count.

One small note about this last point: anyone who's ever submitted her work to an editor knows that cutting can be one of the most difficult things to experience, but my personal experience has been that editorially suggested brevity almost always produces a better final piece--except twice, when an editor thought that commas I'd been using (in part in homage to John Edgar Wideman's style, which I adulated when I was in my early 20s) should be converted to periods, transforming a story into near-gibberish, and another time, when a review of Gary Fisher In Your Pocket was hacked down so much that it verged on nonense. When the writing program's 2010 visiting fiction and creative nonfiction writers--George Saunders and JoAnn Beard, respectively--were discussing their experiences with The New Yorker, both noted the sometimes brutal editorial cuts they'd suffered and battled over. In the case of both authors, I don't think there's any question that the resulting works, published in the magazine, weren't at least somewhat stronger than originally submitted. Of course editing doesn't always work out so well, but if you do it enough, on your own work as well as others', it can often prove fortuitous.

Writing in Flight + More on Haiti + Congrats to Jeffery Renard Allen

I'm beginning this blog post with a little test: using GoGoinflight.com's service, I'm connecting to the Net while on my flight. I learned about this from tech guru @karsh (many thanks!), and signed up as soon as I could. From what I can tell, it's available only on certain airlines and certain flights. The American Airlines one I'm on had "Wi-fi on board" signs running along the length of the overheard storage area, alerting me that it was available, but most of the ones I've been on have not had Wi-fi service. It's not cheap, so I probably won't be using it that often, but I wanted to try it out. Given the costs of flights these days, Wi-fi should be free. But that's another matter.

+++

Speaking of Twitter, I have incorporated tweeting into one of my undergraduate classes, and so the brilliant seniors in the required "Situation of Writing" class now have a wonderful feed going at @GetItWrite392 . They are tweeting on various aspects of the writing world and life, publishing, literary culture, and so forth, and have so far linked to some great material, including a witty piece by Colson Whitehead and an article on MFA programs. If you're at all interested or amenable, please follow their tweets, and if you have suggestions for articles, let them know by tweeting to @GetItWrite392 . We're landing soon, so I'll post more later.

+++

Rays of good news amid the ongoing tragedy in Haiti: Chelsey Kivland, the sister (and in-law) of friends of mine, had not been heard from since the earthquake had leveled most of Port-au-Prince. Chelsey is a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Chicago, and has been studying and living in Haiti for several years now. Her family in suburban Chicago was terribly worried about her. According to the Consular Section of the US Embassy, she has contacted her family to say that she's alive and okay. I know they are hoping to see her at home very soon. Another friend, Philippe, wrote to say that his grandmother in Jacmel, which was also hit by the earthquake, has been located and alive, and our neighbors, who have an extensive family network in Haiti, have also said that their family members have been reached and are okay.

Philippe also sent this link to Tracy Kidder's very thoughtful New York Times Op-Ed piece on Haiti, "Country Without a Net," which focuses on supporting organizations in Haiti run by Haitians.

In the Daily Beast, Tunku Varadarajan drops some serious science on France's particularly brutal and venal history involving Ayiti/Haiti. A pretty picture it ain't.

Back in 2008 in the New York Review of Books, Madison Smartt Bell offered an overview of Haiti and Haitian culture via its literature, one of its great gifts to the world.

Foreign Policy offers this rundown of Haitian history, from the French colonial period to today. (Note, FP's slant is right of center, but it's still informative).

We shouldn't ever forget that part of that history includes 750 Haitian troops under French General Lafayette helping the American revolutionary forces to defeat the British at the Siege of Savannah, in 1779.

+++

The most recent news from Haiti, however, is still extremely dire. Estimates of the dead there range from 50,000 to 200,000, with many hundreds of thousands more injured, which would make this one of the most destructive natural disasters ever to have occurred, and one of the worst in the Western Hemisphere as well. Nevertheless, Haitians themselves, along with the search and rescue teams, have continued to pull people from the rubble and debris that now covers Port-au-Prince. Some of these rescues verge on the miraculous, and the more people and equipment that are in place the more possible they are. Another immediate necessity is getting water and food, medical care, clothing, and various forms of mobile shelter, to the living, and according to the reports I've read, this is occurring, though slowly.

In addition to short term medical, financial, rescue, logistical, administrative, resource, and other kinds of aid, the country will need longer-term assistance to help rebuild its infrastructure, its economy, and its civil society, all of which were already severely stressed. It has been very encouraging to see the commitment that other countries, and millions of people in the US and across the globe, have made to help the people of Haiti out, and I hope that the funds and resources reach the people instead of flowing into the pockets of middlemen, crooks and others. If you are unsure about where or whom to donate to, pick one of the traditional organizations, like the Nobel Prize-winning organization Doctors Without Borders/Médicins sans frontières, who have a proven track record of excellent work. Every little bit counts!

+++

To end on a better note, let me congratulate a friend, Jeffery Renard Allen, whose collection of stories, Holding Pattern, was awarded the 2010 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence! Allen, a Chicago native, sets these sometimes impressionistic, vernacularly grounded stories in play through his poet's ear for language and eye for place, giving them a linguistic texture and richness that's unlike a great deal of what constitutes contemporary American short story writing. (This collection and others of Jeffery's have been among the J's Theater monthly Book picks.) It's wonderful to see that this collection and Jeffery, who teaches at Queens College-CUNY and New School University, being honored in this way, and in the name of one of the important living 20th century African-American fiction writers, whose best known works might be the 1971 novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and the 1993 National Book Critics Circle winner A Lesson Before Dying. Congratulations to Jeff, who will be honored in Baton Rouge on January 28, 2010, and do pick up this volume and his other work when you can!

Back to Classes

It's January 4, which means the first day of classes at the university. And so my micro-sabbatical is over and I'm back; we flew in a few days ago, set up the new apartment, which is bigger and not so far from the previous ones, I finished my syllabi, posted the first one (for today) online, and met the 24 very smart and talented souls I'll be teaching in one of the three classes I'll have in my "Situation of Writing" class this quarter. A required course for all writing majors (poets, fiction writers and creative nonfictioners, some of them dramaturges and budding journalists, all in the same class!), it looks at various aspects of writing, literary history and culture, the publishing industries, and so much more. It should be fun. As part of the course the students will be tweeting, so I'll post a link to their feeds when that's up and running.

On Wednesday evening I'll have my first meeting with my graduate fiction writing (MA/MFA) students, at the Chicago campus, so this will be another winter of racing from Evanston downtown after the sun disappears and the truly frigid temperatures appear. Lake Shore Drive is always a challenge between 5-6 pm, but the drive home, especially if snowless, is especially serene. And Michigan Avenue is just down the street and around the corner, so I'll have incentive to get downtown early and while away an hour or so if I can. As with the "Situation" class, I have taught some of these students before, but many are new faces, so I'm looking forward to meeting them and becoming acquainted with their work.

My third class doesn't begin until mid-quarter, as it--and its mirror classes in the undergraduate program's other tracked two genres, poetry and creative nonfiction--is the only one in the college that's still on the (old?) semester system; it's the second half of the advanced theory and practice of fiction class that all fiction majors and minors must take, and the students will be transitioning from writing short stories to writing a novella, to be revised several times before they submit a final version at the end of the school year (the spring quarter, or the semester), in June. Given the extremely heavy reading load--two parallel fiction classes, which I often carry--I may not be blogging as much as I'd like, though I've made a vow to try to be more regular, and break the law of diminishing returns that anyone viewing this blog's yearly tallies could quickly identify.

There is of course all the rest of the university business that needs attending to, which is to say, a lot of reading and advising and so forth. I intend, to the best of my ability, to continue the writing progress I was able to make during my short respite from June to about late November. It was a bit of spring after so much winter; so many creative buds began to blossom, and one of the things I hope to do is to continue to nurture them, so that by the end of this year I will have several more complete drafts of projects, i.e., books, my books, ready to go. That's only a part of what I'm hoping and striving for in 2010.

Advancing Feminist Poetics & Activism Conference

The Advancing Feminist Poetics & Activism: A Gathering -- Conference begins today at CUNY Graduate Center!

The lineup:

Thursday, September 24, 2009

3:00PM-4:00PM
Registration
Location: English Department Lounge


4:00PM-5:00PM
Opening Plenary I: Why You Talk Like That? Between Orature and Literature
Chair: Tonya Foster
Panelists: Meta DuEwa Jones, John Keene, Julie Patton, Evie Shockley
Location: English Department Lounge
Description: One aspect of “black aesthetics” involves two ostensibly dissonant strands of poetics the oral and the literary (which may include the visual). Their challenging of visual and oral groundings of identity markers translates Black female iconography from its historical depiction within a “So Black and Blues” matrix into a “So Black and Beautiful”. One aspect of “black aesthetics” isn’t merely the transcription of the oral onto the page but an attempt to transfigure the page in such a way that it creates/suggests an alternate space which demands that the literary engage the oral, re-inscribes the literary nature of the oral and rejects the clearly articulated boundary between the two, and, in so doing, suggests a different sense of time: look at Mackey and Brathwaite’s A History of the Voice.


5:00PM-6:00PM
Opening Plenary II: Wedge & Suture: Critical Language Practices & the Imperialist Event
Chair: Laura Elrick
Panelists: Ammiel Alcalay, Cathy Park Hong, Anne Waldman, Rachel Zolf
Location: English Department Lounge
Description: On the “here and now” continuum, on the radically material cusp that articulates past and future, what methods of political thought can poetry uniquely perform? How can poetry (as radical anathema to imperialist language use, and as intellectual hope) resist the dead-end traps of reification and teleological thinking? Our discussion will center on the complexities and difficulties (and therefore importance) of radical language practices within our unevenly-developed but globalized relations.


6:00PM-6:30PM
Discussion
Location: English Department Lounge


6:30PM-7:00PM
Reception
Location: English Department Lounge
Wine and light fare will be served.


7:30PM-9:00PM
Opening Keynote Performance
Kathleen Fraser, Erica Hunt, & Eileen Myles



Friday, September 25, 2009

9:30AM-10:00AM
Registration
Location: English Department Lounge


10:00AM-11:45AM — SESSION I

Room 1 [Panel 1]:
Is Ground as to Figure as Ambience is to Body? Ec(h)opoetics of the Disfigured Landscape
Chair: Jennifer Scappettone
Panelists: Marcella Durand, Brenda Iijima, Linda Sormin, Kathy Westwater, Rita Wong
Description: Ranging across writing, visual arts, dance, installation, and epistolary exchange of ephemera, this discussion will sound reciprocal interference between the environment and marked (raced/gendered/polluted) corporeality in the face of landscape’s harm—mediation—digitization—withdrawal. Presentations will address a poetics of systemic crisis, stalking solutions, obliging recognition of ambient relations of authority and compromise as compass through a stupefying enormity of damage: Marcella Durand on race and ecological disaster; Brenda Iijima on Agnes Denes’s reclamation art; Kathy Westwater on bodily organization within transmogrifying ‘nature’; Rita Wong and Linda Sormin on ongoing toxicities.

Room 2 [Panel 2]:
Lacrimae of the Medusa; or, Cixous (33 years later) and Cruci-Fictions: Let’s Talk about Sex (Again)
Chair: Laura Jaramillo
Panelists: Dodie Bellamy, Kass Fleisher, Bhanu Kapil, Laura Mullen
Description: This panel will explore how womens' experimental writing re-inscribes female subjectivity and desire, how we ride the boundaries, borders, inter-species-genre crossings, body spaces through Cixous' Laugh of the Medusa.

Room 3 [Panel 3]:
Textual Migrations: Language, Media, Space
Chair: Corey Frost
Panelists: Caroline Bergvall, Latasha N. Nevada Diggs, Majena Mafe, Mendi Lewis Obadike, Kaia Sand
Description: As writers and readers, we are all affected by the multimedia functioning of communication technologies, their presence it our daily activities. As the concept of literacy changes, our understanding of poetics and our perceptions of identity also change. What does the specific role of language and of writing become? Should we envisage tomorrow's literature as a relay of processes, a combination of forms, of platforms, of environments, of media as well as discourses? What is the textual specifically in charge of recording, transmitting, transmediating? This panel invites 4 writers to present some of the methods and questions they explore when working with specific media and performative environments.

Room 4 [Panel 4]:
Conceptual Writings
Chair: Mónica de la Torre
Panelists: Nada Gordon, Vanessa Place, Sina Queyras, Kim Rosenfield, Christine Wertheim
Description: Conceptual writing, still under construction as a 21st century literary form, includes various kinds of work and techniques, such as appropriation, documentation, constraint, process, performance, polyvocality, collapsing search engines and the baroque. Panelists Mónica de la Torre, Nada Gordon, Sina Queyras, Kim Rosenfield, Christine Wertheim, and Vanessa Place will present/perform/comment on critical/creative work on conceptualism.

Room 5 [Panel 5]:
8 Minute Monographs, Part 1
Chair: Susan Briante
Panelists: David Buuck, CAConrad, Tom Orange, Rodrigo Toscano, Simone White
Description: David Buuck on “Bioperversity: on the gendered animal-body”; CAConrad will give a talk entitled “A Poetry of No Apologies” about Hilde Domin and Charlotte Delbo; Tom Orange will present “Recovering our Elders: The Case of Carole Korzeniowsky”; Rodrigo Toscano “On Duriel Harris”; and Simone White on Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs of a dutiful daughter, "my accomplice, my subject, my creature: hypermasculinity effects".

Room 6 [Panel 6]:
The Event in the Image: Poetry and Cinema
Curated by: Angela Joosse
Films and poetry by: Peggy Ahwesh, Lise Beaudry, Abigail Child, Margaret Christakos, Moyra Davey, Kelly Egan, Laura Elrick, Su Friedrich, Amy Greenfield, Shana MacDonald, Bridget Meeds, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Selene Savarie, Joel Schlemowitz, Nathalie Stephens, Souvankham Thammavongsa,Gariné Torossian, Cat Tyc
Description: This program of recent experimental film and video examines the productive impact to be found at the intersection of feminism, poetry, and the moving image. Sharing common concerns with rhythm, duration, and the slippage and condensation of meaning, experimental cinema and poetry have had rich relations since cinema's inception. Yet the avant-garde edge of these art forms does not rest with medium-specific concerns, but rather with the capacity to install the audience in a situation that enables a potent shift in one's very perceptions of embodied, social, geographical, gendered, political, and cultural locatedness in the world. Through poetic approaches to cinema and cinematic approaches to poetry, this program explores varying possibilities of the image as an event situation.


11:45AM-12:45PM LUNCH BREAK


12:45PM-2:30PM SESSION II

Room 1 [Panel 7]:
What Counts: Everyday Practices and Exceptional Practices in the Life of the Mind and in the Street
Chair: Jen Hofer
Panelists: Pamela Booker, Marilou Esguerra, Jill Magi, Metta Sama
Description: The politics of the everyday entails inventing exceptions to the rules in a range of contexts, from our bedrooms, kitchens, studies and gardens to our jobs, gathering spaces, and the streets of the cities where we live. The participants in this panel are all on the faculty at Goddard College, where a radical social justice pedagogy encompassing Thoughtful Action is a foundation of our teaching, learning and artistic practices. How do small-scale autonomous publishing, politically-inflected performance, objects and texts built to be functional as well as thought-provoking, public instances of poetic interaction and other externally-directed creative acts constitute Thoughtful Action—that is, how do we practice what we teach, and teach what we practice?

Room 2 [Panel 8]:
Body as Discourse
Chair: Kate Eichhorn
Panelists: Joan Retallack, Trish Salah, Laura Smith, Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël), Ronaldo V. Wilson
Description: This panel explores questions of the body, referentiality, remapping bodies and borders, intertextuality, narrativity, aesthetics, and the challenges of de-essentialization as we scrutinize “female,” “queer,” “raced” and “othered” bodies.

Room 3 [Panel 9]:
Multilingual Poetics, Feminist Implications
Chair: Sarah Dowling
Panelists: Julia Bloch, Angela Carr, Zhang Er, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Janet Neigh
Description: This panel will explore the ways women poets use multilingualism to engage in critiques of dominant language practices, and the ways in which such poetics evoke diverse publics and invite new possibilities for building community.

Room 4 [Panel 10]:
Disrupting the Page: Hybridity and Asian American Poetics
Chair: Tamiko Beyer
Panelists: Cythia Arrieu-King, Ching-In Chen, Sarah Gambito, Sohan Patel, Margaret Rhee
Description: This roundtable discussion by a group of emerging APIA women poets/critics/performers will open up discussion about how hybridities in current APIA poetry resist the notion of a homogenous feminist and APIA poetry and community. Speakers will address a range of contemporary formal and social concerns: mapping, the cyber avatar, queer, experimental and lyric poetry, “deterriorialized” writing, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's video poems, traditional Japanese zuihitsu. The goal is to provide a collaborative space in which to investigate the avant-garde poetic strategies of APIA women who write for social justice and against inequalities.

Room 5 [Panel 11]:
8 Minute Monographs, Part II: Inhabiting the Forms of An/Other
Chair: Emily Beall
Panelists: Louis Bury, Jeanne Heuving, Michelle Naka Pierce, Tim Peterson, Chris Tysh
Description: Each monographer will take up questions of form, form’s body, and how form can generate (instead of delimit) substantive, complex, productively unstable embodiments and identities. Tracing possibilities such as the “libidinized open field,” Oulipian exercises in style, Deleuzian sheets of time, the protean and the nomadic, panelists might themselves swerve importantly from the ‘monadic’ form of the monograph: Michelle Naka Pierce, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Migratory Identities in Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: A Space for Monsters” / Jeanne Heuving, “What's Love Got To Do With It?” / Tim Peterson, “Protean Bodies, Volatile Selves: The Transgender Poetics of Claude Cahun and kari edwards” / Chris Tysh, “Sheets of Time in Poetic Practice” / Louis Bury, “Embodied Constraints.”

Room 6 [Panel 12]:
The Event in the Image: Poetry and Cinema
Curated by: Angela Joosse
Films and poetry by: Peggy Ahwesh, Lise Beaudry, Abigail Child, Margaret Christakos, Moyra Davey, Kelly Egan, Laura Elrick, Su Friedrich, Amy Greenfield, Shana MacDonald, Bridget Meeds, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Selene Savarie, Joel Schlemowitz, Nathalie Stephens, Souvankham Thammavongsa,Gariné Torossian, Cat Tyc
Description: This program of recent experimental film and video examines the productive impact to be found at the intersection of feminism, poetry, and the moving image. Sharing common concerns with rhythm, duration, and the slippage and condensation of meaning, experimental cinema and poetry have had rich relations since cinema's inception. Yet the avant-garde edge of these art forms does not rest with medium-specific concerns, but rather with the capacity to install the audience in a situation that enables a potent shift in one's very perceptions of embodied, social, geographical, gendered, political, and cultural locatedness in the world. Through poetic approaches to cinema and cinematic approaches to poetry, this program explores varying possibilities of the image as an event situation.


2:30PM-4:00PM SESSION III

Room 1 [Panel 13]:
Writing from the Margins
Chair: erica kaufman
Panelists: Jennifer Russo, Tyler Schmidt, Jane Sprague
Description: This panel will explore the feminist politics and poetic experimentation of poets from earlier generations in order to better understand (and complicate) the activism and avant-garde aesthetics of our current moment. Collectively our papers aim to investigate the work of marginal, forgotten, erased, absent or orphan/overlooked poets and writers whose poetics embody a kind of “activism,” though our panel also seeks to trouble or assert ideas of activist poetics. In particular, our critical analysis will highlight the way these poets both engage and enact political critique through formal innovation; avant-garde writing strategies; polyvocal texts; and/or hybrid forms and genres.

Room 2 [Panel 14]:
Feminist Utopias
Chair: Margaret Carson
Panelists: Justin Parks, Divya Victor, danielle vogel, Steve Zultanski
Description: This panel will be exploring the possibility of a Utopian promise in contemporary poetry. We will be looking at the work of Renee Gladman, Lisa Robertson, Melissa Buzzeo, and Jewel in an effort to explore these authors' formal and political relationships to urban space, and to their readers. We don’t assume these writers share a vision, but rather that their poetics and poetry are in some ways at odds — suggesting that any recognizable Utopian impulse is not a fully-realized imaginative portrait of a better world, but a fractured and incomplete projection of a time yet to come.

Room 3 [Panel 15]:
Exile and Language
Chair: Anna Moschovakis
Panelists: Jennifer Firestone, Dana Greene, Dulcinea Lara, Jill Magi, Evelyn Reilly
Description: What are the challenges facing a writer who for one reason or another finds herself “exiled” from the generative artistic and cultural communities that sustain much of a writer’s activities? This panel brings together the diverse concerns of writers thinking from spaces of remove: motherhood amidst the event-heavy poetry community; activist pedagogy in small-town America; experimental poetics in workers’ education; and a genealogy and performance of Vulcan Poetics.

Room 4 [Panel 16]:
Visuality and the Image:
A Reading and Discussion with Ann Lauterbach, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Laura Hinton
Chair: Laura Hinton
Panelists: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Ann Lauterbach
Description: This session takes the form of readings by and conversation with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Ann Lauterbach, and Laura Hinton. Framed as a performative inquiry into women’s particular use of the image, both in feminist and activist contexts, we'll consider the stakes in image-making for a gender that Mary Ann Doane has suggested bears a socialized “close proximity” to the image itself.

Room 5 [Panel 17]:
Speed Youth Mourning
Chair: Rachel Levitsky
Panelists: Emily Abendroth, Tonya Foster, Kythe Heller, Kristin Prevallet, Michelle Taransky, Jennifer Scappettone
Description: The presenters, mixing performance, conversation and reading, will consider how the expansion of the prison, disaster capitalism, and the vertigo of speed culture implode the ambit of community. Can we as writers and actors-in-concert re-imagine the contours and relieved duration of a 'commons' in which we dwell despite our increased mobility, that is sustainable within our current spatiotemporal condition? Are there new opportunities for meaning, mutual succor, and collective action across identity/location/generation in these “liquid times”?

Room 6 [Panel 18]:
Performing a Poetics of Motherhood
Chair: Leah Souffrant
Panelists: Lee Ann Brown, Laynie Browne, Christine Hume, Hoa Nguyen
Description: Poets Hoa Nguyen, Christine Hume, Laynie Browne, Lee Ann Brown, and Leah Souffrant will present their work as performance, followed by a round-table discussion of the work and the significance of the intersection of motherhood, performance, and poetics. Christine Hume will perform “Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense”, an essay-poem with a soundtrack. Laynie Browne reads from The Desires of Letters, a long prose-poetry work. Lee Ann Brown will perform new and signature poetic works relating to the subject of motherhood. Hoa Nguyen will read new works and from Hecate Loche. Leah Souffrant will read from “Essay for Elsa”, a series accompanied by visual projections.


4:00PM-4:20PM
An interactive and performative healing ritual with Kythe Heller.


4:00PM-4:30PM BREAK


4:30PM-6:30PM
Closing Plenary: The Ongoing Event: An Open Discussion
Moderators: Rachel Levitsky, erica kaufman, Gail Scott
Description: Do we and how do we, continue the work we have done here? An open discussion tightly moderated.


6:30 PM-8:30 PM
Performance & Collaboration
Performers: Carla Harryman, The Institute for Domestic Research (Catriona Strang, Christine Stewart & Jacqueline Leggat), Sally Silvers, Lila Zemborain, Torino Collective



Click here for participant bios



All events will be held at The CUNY Graduate Center: 365 Fifth Avenue (between 34th & 35th Streets); New York, NY

phone: 212-817-2005...|...email: adfempo@gmail.com

Registration is free, on-going, on-site, and we will be asking for your generous donations.

Sponsorship and Organization
Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism: A Gathering was collaboratively organized and sponsored by the Belladonna Collective Committee*, CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for the Humanities, Center for the Study of Women and Society, Ph. D. Program in English, and Poetics Group.

*Members of this Collective include: Rachel Levitsky, Erica Kaufman, Laura Elrick, Tonya Foster, Laura Jaramillo, Akilah Oliver, Jen Scappettone, Kate Eichhorn, Emily Beall, and Anna Moschovakis. Other members of the General Belladonna Collective include HR Hegnauer (www.hrhegnauer.com) whose fantastic design can be seen at our website and on our books and Adah Gorton, Meghan Johnson, Elizabeth Crawford, Katy Jones, Austin Publicover, (ETC) all of whose labor with the project makes the project.




925 Bergen Street; Suite 405

Brooklyn, New York 11238

orders@belladonnaseries.org





Website designed by HR Hegnauer

All events will be held at
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
(between 34th & 35th Streets)
New York, New York
phone: 212-817-2005
email: adfempo@gmail.com

Registration is free, on-going,
on-site, and we will be asking for
your generous donations.

Cuba's Gay Rights March + Writers' Collaboration & Resistance in Vichy

Slowly and assuredly the academic year clanks to its end. I'm pretty much dragging myself around at this point, which is one of the reasons for the absence of posts. The other has been my bouncing around between cities; that too will end when mid-June rolls around. But back to academe, so far I've learned that both of my seniors honors project advisees, fiction writer and foodie Taylor Dearr, and literature student, singer and poet Harris Sockel, were both approved for departmental honors, and pending the college's decision, both will receive them when they graduate in a few short weeks. So congratulations to Taylor and Harris! Congratulations as well to all of the university's creative writing (all of whom I worked with this fall as honors director) and literature honors students who will be receiving departmental honors this year. (Once the school year's complete, I'll be posting congratulatory sentiments for all the undergraduate and graduate students.)

***

Often I'll come across something in one of the papers I regularly scan and note it for a future blog post on here, only to not get around to it because of one thing or another, but I can always count on Reggie to buzz me with an email that gets me thinking. He recently sent links to two articles I'd seen, on Cuba's first Gay Pride March, which Cuban National Assembly head Ricardo Alarcón opened with a welcoming addressed. The event was organized and staged last Saturday under the aegis of the National Center for Sex Education [Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual (CENESEX)], headed by Mariela Castro, the visionary daughter of President Raúl Castro. Mariela Castro, who led a conga line at the event, has become a leading force for LGBTQ equality in Cuba, and has been pressing the Cuban National Assembly to pass one of the most far-reaching LGBTQ rights bills in the world; it would recognize same-sex unions, including inheritance rights, and also allow easy gender changes on the government's ID cards whether or not trans people underwent trans surgery, which became free after a 2008 law that she championed. It does not, however, allow same-sex couples or gay people to adopt children, nor does it use the word "marriage" in relation to same-sex unions. Currently Cuba does not permit any national LGBTQ organizations, and as recently as 2004 the police were still conducting raids on and harassing gay venues, though this has abated of late. (Historically, in a number of Communist states homosexuality has been viewed as a bourgeois activity and counter-revolutionary, and in the post-Revolutionary period not only did Raúl Castro and others allegedly kill gays, but the government under Fidel instituted a policy of "re-education" camps, which were disbanded by the late 1960s.) The bill will be considered later this year and possibility of its passage is unclear, but Mariela Castro does have her father's ear and support and apparently Alarcón's as well.

Here's an interview she gave to a Russian TV station. I still mean to post my fourth set of notes about Cuba, which will include my thoughts and experiences concerning LGBTQ issues during my trip.

***

A week ago I went to see the "Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation," at the New York Public Library," which Edward Rothstein reviewed last month in the New York Times, and it got me thinking about the other notion of collaboration, the perjorative one, which this exhibit presented in vivid material form. I found myself mulling not only the trajectories of the many figures who belonged to or participated in the official Resistance or engaged in unofficial resistances, but also reflecting on odious figures like Maurice Barrès and Robert Brasillach, who openly embraced the Germans, fascism and anti-Semitic, and tragic cases like that of Irène Nemirovsky, a brilliant Russian-French Jewish writer whose work not only included notorious pre-War anti-Semitic portraits but who attempted to save herself by publishing her work in anti-Semitic magazines and pleading her case to Marshall Henri Pétain himself (both she and her husband died at Auschwitz). One of the most remarkable pieces in the exhibit is the original manuscript of her two novellas that constitute Suite Française, which her daughter did not find stored in a trunk until many years later; its publication met with almost universal praise.

What the exhibit demonstrates is that the reality was not black-and-white; there were writers who actively fought not only the French regime but the German one; figures whose perspective shifted during the war years; writers who worked clandestinely while overtly giving little to no sense of their opposition; and others, like Jean Cocteau, who accommodated the Vichy regime and were able to work productively without great censure (during the Vichy years Cocteau produced two books of poetry, a novel, a screenplay, three plays, and a book of criticism on El Greco, giving lie to his reputation as the "Frivolous Prince"). A bit surprising and upsetting were the expressions of excitement, by otherwise non-right-wing figures like Paul Valéry, at France's defeat, and the possibility of "something new," mirroring the belief in an awakening and renewal that some notorious German figures (Martin Heidegger comes to mind) felt upon the Nazi takeover of the German government. My thoughts echo Rothstein's; as I walked through the exhibit I found myself thinking especially about when the valences and ethics of silence in the face of the world's horrors, and when silence could not be chalked up as anything but a form of collaboration, which is to say; how writers and other creative figures have subverted officialdom and registered resistance and protest, sometimes in very subtle ways; the dangers of ever allying fully with any politicians (as opposed to being skeptical and critical even when they share ideological affinities) or political movements; and how the events of of this period, and the lessons we might draw from them, are still applicable today.

The entrance exhibit

The exhibit (one of Valéry's daybooks is on the left)

Christian Dotrement, "Postcard to Paul Eluard"

El Mundo Alucinante: Notes on Cuba, Part 3

I was all set to post yesterday's new poem with commentary and my Obamatude post today, but after two meetings this afternoon my eyes started to give out (so much stuff to read these last few days), then a headache entered the mix, and I ended up by the early evening lying down and listening to "Brother President," as Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell described him recently, work his magic with the press corps. So perhaps some Obamatude tomorrow. Overall, as I said on Monday, concerning Mr. President Obama, todo chévere (and don't think I've ever uttered this word even once in a Spanish-speaking country. Excelente or chido always come to mind first...).

***
El Mundo Alucinante: Notes on Cuba, Part 3

Another post on the still energizing and unforgettable Cuba trip.

CONNECTIVITY/THE NET/TELEPHONY

Let me mention one point that I forgot in the initial post, which concerns connectivity. I consider myself a reasonably hyperconnected person. I don't talk on the phone all that much, but I do use my cell phone, an iPhone, to text, check and send email, listen to music, and use numerous applications/apps. I almost always carry my laptop with me and often check my various email accounts several times a day, except when I'm teaching or writing; I visit a number of news and blog sites, forums, social networking sites, and so on every day, and as is clear here, I blog when I can; I often read magazines online; and I frequently either listen to or download podcasts and radio programs from the Web. While I imagined that things would be different in Cuba, and that I would not be able to access the net as readily as I can in the US, I was a bit surprised and chastened by how limited the options were. In 2 of the 3 hotels we stayed at, the only net access was via very slow PCs, at the rate of $7-8 CuCs per hour (about $10). [If you are in Havana, I recommend going to the business center at the Havana Libre Hotel, 2nd floor, where the computers are a lot cheaper and a little faster. I was able to upload some university work using a flash drive without any problem.] I had this fantasy that I was going to upload pictures every day with microblogposts, but the reality was that in the first hotel, and sometimes use emailing and Skype as ways to chat with C, but there was barely even an adequate outlet to keep my computer charged, let alone my phone (+camera); in the second hotel, in Pinar del Río, I was able to charge my computer and phone, and the hotel not only didn't have net access. In the third hotel, there were several outlets, but only a two net-ready computers, and they moved at a glacial pace. In the various schools we visited, we learned that internet access was mostly nonexistent, though various Cuban intranets did access. Our guide Tati explained that one of the problems was a lack of broadband wiring and an updated grid, which cost lots of money, financed here in the US both by governmental and private funds. Let me also add that Bernardo suggested I go to the International Press Center, which he was pretty sure had computers, phone access and cards, and so on. So I dropped by there on a particularly muggy day, and was shooed away by an officious official who promptly went back to chatting on the phone with who knows. I stood my ground and said I was a visitor, blah blah blah, and he kindly sent me on a wild goose chase for net access and a phone card (see below) that I described that evening to C as "Kafkaesque." Oh well--at least I did get to walk through the sweltering streets of Havana. One of the things I imagine that will happen over the next 10 years in Cuba will be the development of its data and communications networks, especially if any sources of private funding are allowed in.


One of the letters thanking Fidel for the literacy campaign, Museum of Literacy

Then there was the issue of telephony. I am not a telephone person, let me state that at the beginning. I have always found using telephones in foreign countries baffling, and Cuba was no different. We were told that we could rent cell phones, but I was unable to find any spot that would rent them. From my experiences in other countries (cf. DR, France, Brazil, etc.), I knew I could use phone cards. Hah! The first problem was getting a phone card. Bernardo, knowing such things, urged me to go to an outlet of ECTESA, which is the state phone company. He specifically told me to ask for a phone card priced using the national currency, and not CuCs. So I went to do so, and lo, she requested far more CuCs, not the national currency, than Bernardo had said. Then she and the other people in the little kiosk-sized office proceeded to have a good laugh at my expense in Spanish, until she realized that I was staring at her and listening intently, and then asked, "Me entiendes?" and I said yes, which immediately provoked more professional behavior, and a nice(r) send-off. Truthfully there were speaking so fast I had no idea what they were saying, but I've learned that it's best to appear as though you have half a clue if you want to preserve any dignity. I got the phone card, which was 15 CuCs ($17), and tried several times to call C and several Cubans for whom I'd brought books from a friend, finally getting through briefly before it canceled out. The next day we headed to Pinar del Río, so I couldn't go back to ECTESA for another card, but Bernardo sold me his. I tried repeatedly to use it at the hotel we were staying out, but it wouldn't work, so I tried to use the hotel's main phone to call the US. They told me they couldn't do it, so that led to a late evening attempt to find a phone in the town at which I could use the card. I ended up taking one of the bike taxis, pedaled by a man who might have been 100 years old but huffingly did manage to get us into Pinar del Río's downtown, but I couldn't find a single public phone, including the one used by the "foreign students," that would go through to the US. So finally I walked another 10 blocks and found a charming, small hotel to make even a short call to C. When we returned to Havana, I experienced the encounter at the International Press office that I mentioned above, which included my trolling every hotel and store in the area for a "tarjeta telefónica" before I returned to the ECTESA office (which sits right across the street from the famous ice cream stand Coppélia), and they were completely out of phone cards. The woman whom I'd encountered a few days before was taking cash for people to call at the phones in the office, and I thought I was encountering a scam, so when I protested, I received a nice "mi amol" and was told that, no, they didn't have any cards. And was promptly sent off to one of the many hotels that of course did not have them. I never got to inquire at the Hotel Nacional, which is the largest and grandest hotel in Havana, but I'm told they had everything, including the best cuba libres in the city, so I'll have to try them out next time. At any rate, my expectations for connectivity dropped radically, and I felt that this was excellent preparation for any potential future trips into the rain forest, the desert, or some other spot where the webs of communication I've become so used to, to dependent upon, do not exist.

Entering Casa Fuster (Alex Fuster at bottom left)

EDUCATION

The main reason for the trip, of course, was educational research. Both groups visited a range of educational institutions, from elementary schools (in Havana and the rural district of Pinar del Río, quite comparable in many ways to public elementary schools in the US) to college and university-level institutions (such as the Institute of Higher Arts [Institute de Artes Superiores] built on what was once the largest private golf course of one of the most exclusive country clubs in the Americas, in Havana). Given that, as I said before, the tour was listed as a "research" trip, the terms of our license--the visa which all Americans are required to acquire to visit Cuba legally--mandated that we spend a sizable portion (somewhere around 60-70% of every weekday) visiting institutions or organizations for research purposes, and we did. We even went to meet with a retired teacher who volunteered at the Cuban Pedagogy Association, which seeks to disseminate best teaching practices (primarily via DVD and TV) to teachers throughout the country. I was put in mind of MIT's open-courseware efforts, which include online classes and materials, and other online-based pedagogy projects aimed at elementary and secondary school teachers in the US, and thought about how useful such efforts are, at all levels, to teachers anywhere.


Performance by children at school in Pinar del Río

As part of the tour, we also met with education-related organizations and groups, such as the Cuban Student Union (FEU), a union structured as a quasi-parliament, with members participating in and linked to the government, for university students; and we heard from Cuban social work students and officials. The tour took us to governmental spaces, like Revolutionary Square, constructed originally during the Batista dictatorship in Fascist style, but since the Revolution reformulated as the site of major governmental institutions; the government-focused institutions, like the Museum of the Revolution, which was housed in the former presidential building; the Museum of Literacy, which celebrated the Revolution's striking early and swift success at overcoming the problem of illiteracy, and which featured one of the most moving artifacts I saw all trip, a book of letters written to Fidel by former illiterate people, many of them from the countryside, many women, many mixed-race or black (we learned that the oldest person who learned to read [alfabetizado] during the literacy campaign was 106 years old, and the youngest reading teacher [alfabetizador] was 8); cultural institutions like the national Museum of Fine Arts, whose "Cuban" exhibit sections we saw, including a room dedicated to the marvelous Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam, and a privately established social service organization in Pinar del Río, run by artist Jesús Carrete that provides structure and arts opportunities for people with Down Syndrome.

The focus on the arts encompassed several other community-focused projects, such as the Callejón de Hamel project in Havana's Centro district, in which artist Salvador González Escalona, whose sculptures, paintings, installations, and multiplatform works were the first murals in Cuba to celebrate and synthesize Cuba's four-major Afro-Cuban religions (Abakuá; Arará; Reglas de Palomonte; and the best known, Santería--and all the orixás were present in various forms throughout the space), created an expanding, open-air workshop along an important side street in Havana's cultural history; we were unable to attend the all-day Sunday rhumba parties that are acclaimed across the city, but we did get a brief taste of the opportunities that the space provided for people in the neighborhood and city. A different analogous site we visited was Casa Fuster, a fantastical estate developed the internationally renowned artist José Fuster, who we learned created workshops and projects for the people in the surrounding neighborhood, Jaimanitas. But then, as one of the deans at the Institute of Higher Arts put it quite succinctly, in Cuba "every artist is a teacher," and it became clear to us that this was more than a mere statement--if artists were not teaching in schools (at any level), the societal expectation was and is that they somehow will and must interact with their surrounding communities, a very different approach from the generally cloistered, market-based focus and perspective in the US.

Tati showing us a blackboard damaged by machine gun fire during the Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón) Invasion in 1962, Museum of Literacy

I could write quite a bit about the primary schools we visited, basing most of it on my notes, but I'll only say that I was quite impressed both by the teachers we encountered and by the students, who were incredibly adorable and sharp. We witnessed 5th grade students not only describing with great sophistication why José Martí was a favorite historical figure, but also very diplomatically breaking down for us one of the few Americans who'd supported Cuba's early attempt at liberal, in the late 19th century. A fifth grader. As I said in an earlier post, I did and still do wonder whether we were taken only to model schools and what other schools are really like, but seeing how these institutions operated, particularly given the economic constraints we witnessed, I was impressed. To give one example, since the state cannot afford laboratory equipment, students learn chemistry via videotapes and the intranet. To give another, primary through secondary level teachers earn only about 300-500 Cuban pesos, not CuCs, per month. (Remember, 1 CuC = $1.08/$1.20 with taxes, and there are about 25 Cuban pesos = $1/CuC.) I and others were quite curious about Cuba's secondary schools; education is compulsory through the 9th grade, after which Cubans have several choices. For 10-12th grades, they can either try go find jobs, or select from several educational options. There are technical schools focused on the sciences; there are military schools; there are vocational schools; and then there are schools in the countryside, where students devote a portion of each day to agricultural work. As there are no private schools and as the admittances to the other schools listed above are limited, the majority of 10-12 level students, including all who live in and around cities, either attend these country boarding schools or attend schools in the city where they have to dedicate a portion of their time working in city gardens and the like. As one Cuban told me, the education is very good, but the farmwork immersion and related chores are far less appealing, to put it in nice terms. Naturally, I really wanted to see one of these schools, but we didn't have the opportunity to do so. We did, however, see students in Pinar del Río who appeared to be heading back from vacation (it was around the time of Easter) to their schools, but we (I) didn't get an opportunity to chat with them.

As many (most?) decent jobs require a secondary school diploma, a sizable portion of students pursue this three-year option. I picked up that there was a problem, however, in terms of some students not continuing in school after 9th grade, and so the government and educational authorities were trying to improve the rates of continued school and graduation. At a certain age, all men must serve a period (depending) in the military, 2 years if not attending college or 1 year before college, while all women must participate in a 2-year public service project. To attend college, educational officials look at students' grades and test scores, and depending upon where they fall, they are given an option to attend certain universities or colleges. All education at all levels is free. (The state has also opened an array of what we might consider community colleges that provide people with the option of studying towards a high-school degree, vocational training, what would amount to associate and bachelors degrees, and even professional study.) Studying certain fields, such as the arts, was more difficult than others because of the limited amount of spaces. We also heard that one pending issue was the large number of students studying the journalism, humanities and social sciences (especially psychology) versus the hard sciences (and agronomy, I would add), and how the government was trying to nudge students towards the latter. In the US, of course, parents, the marketplace, colleges' and universities' course offerings and faculties, and our culture in general have a determinative effect, whereas in Cuba, personal choice (to a degree) combined with the government's (and society's) needs control what people study. As someone working in the arts and humanities, I thought about this quite a bit, particularly in relation to the constant and growing discourse about the "uselesness" or lack of utility of not only the arts, which has manifested itself in the stripping away of arts programs in many K-12 systems and the concern of some students with parental approval for taking arts and writing classes, etc., but also of the humanities. Even some very famous humanities scholars have advanced such arguments, to our national and international detriment, I would argue. Ignorance is not bliss, and scholarship is important both on its own terms but also because it often has profound effects in the world, in ways scholars might or might not imagine.

But back to the arts. One of the highlights for me was visiting Havana's Institute of Higher Arts (ISA), which would be equivalent to a state version of most of the US's top art schools combined. Admission is selective, and follows prior study in artistic fields at other institutions. It is the only higher arts school in Cuba, and students from across the country attend to receive a more humanistic training, that is, to receive grounding in aesthetics, philosophy (including Cuban Marxist-Leninism), art history, psychology, and cultural studies and appreciation, and to "experiment." The institute representative told us that students at the Institute could study music; visual and plastic arts; theater (including playwriting) and dance (as is the case at many US arts schools, i.e., NYU's Tisch School of the Arts); and audiovisual communication arts (which I imagine would include photography, film and video production). When we walked up to the spot where we were going to meet our rep from the school, we saw students strolling about the grounds playing instruments, memorizing their parts in plays, and just enjoying themselves by thinking. When we reached the little patio area, we received an impromptu jazz performance by several student musicians. At this point we were able to ask questions, and I had to inquire about creative writing, or the formal study of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, including journalism. (Playwriting and screenwriting, as well as cross-genre writing, should be part of this mix, but in most institutions are not.). The representative told me that there was no such thing as a creative writing program. Quoth she: "People write who are called to write." No MFA (and now PhD) as the stepping stone for literary projects or production. Nada. She went on to say that people who wanted to become writers usually but not always studied "artes y letras" (arts and letters) at the University of Havana, which was only steps from our first hotel, and then practiced and refined their art. Of course this is how writing training and as a career unfolds in most countries outside the US and Anglophone world; although some countries in other parts of Europe (like Norway and the Netherlands, I think) have writing programs, it is really only the USA, Canada, the UK, and Australia for the most part that people can and do study and get degrees in writing. And of all these countries, the USA far away has the most writing programs, in no small part because of the large market for them.

José, an artist at the Callejón de Hamel

There were several writers on the trip, and we discussed this a little; it also brought to mind a discussion Harvard scholar Marjorie Garber led a few years ago concerning her study of the role of arts at Harvard, which became a fascinating little book. One question she posed was whether the arts ought to be together in one school devoted primarily to the arts--as at Pratt Institute or RISD--or one division of a major institution--as is the case at Columbia, for example--or distributed throughout a university, as is the case at Stanford, say--or linked to certain schools and departments, as is the case at the university (where undergraduate creative writing study in poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction is part of the English department of the College of Arts and Sciences; graduate creative writing in those fields is housed in the School of Continuing Studies and formerly in the Graduate School; undergraduate and graduate journalism is in the Medill School of Journalism; and playwriting is in the Theater department, and screenwriting is in Radio/TV/Film (RTVF)); or present only in a limited sense (with a department of Visual and Environment Studies, i.e., studio art, and a few creative writers on the English faculty or teaching writing and composition more broadly), as at Harvard. Personally, I believe that all the arts, including computer and online arts, gaming, architecture, graphic design, fashion, and performance arts, should be together, but also part of a larger institution in which the humanities, social sciences, natural and applied sciences, and professional-level studies are present. The divisions strike me as artificial and problematic, but that's for another discussion.

One of the International Arts Biennal outdoor installations (giant roaches crawling up the side of the building!) at the Museum of Fine Arts

I will say that the experience also got me thinking personally about the formal study of creative writing and its usefulness, whether and to what extent writing can be taught, what my and others' real aims are in the classroom, and so on. My experiences at the university and other institutions has proved year and year out that students can and do learn to write better than they did before they began, in no small part because of the focused emphasis on practice, on the technical aspects of writing, on learning to edit their own and others' work, on offering critiques and thinking about how critical reading opens up how works of art function, on modeling based on reading--on reading itself, and its role in changing and enriching one's writing. I see the results in undergraduate and graduate students' work, so I know the programs justify themselves, and yet I worry about the increasing notion that you must have an MFA or even PhD to write and teach writing, or that they're even necessary to be a writer at all. The question to the Institute rep about creative writing led to a lovely moment, however. The dean of the Institute, Jorge Braulio Rodríguez, presented two of us writers with copies of his book of translations of Richard Wright's haikus! It was an extraordinarily thoughtful gift, and for me took on great importance because it was Wright's work, I'd only read a few of his haikus, and I wasn't able, as per my usual fashion, to buy any other books during the trip (the main and famous bookstore in Havana had been closed, and I didn't pick up any books at the outdoor book market or used bookstores as I'd wanted to.)


Ana Laura's visual diary

We later had the opportunity to view some student art exhibits, which were very promising, and chat with some of the students. I also peeked in at a print studio and some classrooms, and snapped a few pictures. In preparation for the trip, I'd made up Spanish versions of my Emotional Outreach cards, and I handed them out to students and faculty. This led to one student who was there to view the art exhibit to assume, based on the Spanish on the card, that I was fluent, and a conversation with another, first-year student Wilber Aguilera, whose powerful ceramic wall sculpture, based on Edvard Munch's "The Scream" I featured several posts ago. I and another person in the first group chatted with student artist Ana Laura Tamburini, who had created a visual diary, comprising months' (a year's) worth of drawings, paintings and mixed-media works, which covered several walls, as well as a diary book that she was displaying. Along with Callejón de Hamel and the Museum of Fine Arts, is one of the places that I really would have loved to spend more time at, and I also would love to return and spend a quarter or term, or some length of time, teaching and learning there myself. One final thing I'll say about the Institute of Higher Arts is that its architecture is worth seeing. The visual art exhibit was in one of the main buildings that had been designed, we were told, by avant-garde and Revolutionary supporters Cuban architect Ricardo Porro and Italian architects Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi in the 1970s, after Fidel Castro created the institution in 1976 by consolidating and expanding several higher arts schools, including the original post-Revolutionary National Arts School of 1962. The buildings are quite futuristic, in an almost Star Trek-ish style, though using distinctive local red bricks and tiles. Among the more interesting architectural effects they created was an open plaza designed to appear if viewed from the air as a clitoris. (I kid you not.) I heard that while many of the structures were completed, there were a few that had not been built, though this wasn't apparent from a walkthrough. The overall effect was of striking, futuristic buildings that probably do have a beneficial effect on the creation of works of art.

ISA buildings, from a distance

I've written a lot, so I'll stop here. I still have not said anything about discussions with Cubans about politics vis-à-vis the US, gender issues and homo/sexuality, and a few other topics, including those that remained a mystery, like the prison system, so I'll aim for those in my next posts.