Last night I watched Renaissance, an animated film from 2006. It’s one of the more visually striking films I’ve seen in a while, and worth taking a look at for that reason alone. As I watched it, though, I gradually became more and more irritated and eventually a bit offended by the message of the film.
It’s near future, dystopic science fiction set in mid-21st Century Paris. As we eventually find out, a scientist has discovered a method of maintaining life indefinitely, effectively producing immortality. The secret will be exploited by the evil cosmetics/life science corporation she works for so that the company will have power over life and death. The protagonist, a postmodern Harry Callahan from the Casbah type cop, puts an end to the threat posed by the scientist’s research by putting a bullet in her head. (She does eventually come across as arrogant, though only in a scene that’s out of character with her presentation throughout the rest of the movie, and the fact that she’s presented as someone who needs a bullet put in her head by an aggressive male cop when her main sin seems to have been being a bit arrogant was part of what disturbed me, though not the aspect of what disturbed me that I’m mainly writing about here.)
The movie confuses and conflates two messages, that a single entity monopolizing immortality would be bad (to which I’d agree), and that immortality per se would be bad. If anything, it’s the second message that’s ultimately emphasized. The key message of the movie is “Without death, life is meaningless.” That’s not my abstraction from the film, but a direct quote from a pivotal moment, which is then replayed in flashback form a bit later (right before the bullet in the head) in case anyone didn’t get the take away point.
I realize that my taking offense is probably an overreaction on my part based in the fact that I lost my own partner, Reginald, to cancer so recently. Still, that sentiment that death is what makes life meaningful seems at best to rationalize the inevitable as virtue or wisdom. Personally, I don’t want to live forever, but that’s because I don’t want to live forever without Reginald. I also wouldn’t want to live forever in pain or in an invalid state, but if I could live forever, healthily, with Reginald, I would very much like that.
(The idea that death is what makes life meaningful, in addition to being a rationalization [if we’ve got to die, then that’s a good thing] seems perhaps a misapplication of market thinking where it doesn’t really apply. Death makes life and our days scarce, and scarce things are more valuable. But that sort of supply and demand thinking only really works well for tradable items, like gold. We can’t trade our days, and supply, demand, scarcity, and so forth apply to life and death only in vague and inexact ways at best.)
In any case, if death is what gives your life meaning, that’s just sad. I certainly didn’t need death to enter the picture for life with my partner to have meaning.
Showing posts with label Reginald Shepherd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reginald Shepherd. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Thoughts on Allusion, Quotation, Remixing, and Poetry
Both on this blog and on “Reginald Shepherd’s Blog” (which I’ve been maintaining since his death), I recently posted a piece called “Reginald and the Muses” (Follow this link for the piece on this blog, or this link for the post on Reginald’s blog). The post discussed both Reginald’s views on the nature of poetic inspiration and production and a poetic fragment he had written while he was in the intensive care unit in the hospital last year.
On Reginald’s blog, a former student of his, Deanna, wrote to ask, “how do you feel about poets using the fragments in order to create new poems in dedication to him?”
I wrote the following in response to Deanna’s question. It’s fairly substantive for a simple reply, so I thought I’d post it here in addition to placing it in the discussion section of the previous post on Reginald’s blog.
It’s taken me a few days to formulate a response to this question. I was initially struck with a mix of emotions and thoughts that took me a while to disentangle. I think my feelings on the issue of others working with this particular fragment or other poetic works of Reginald’s are related to two distinct sets of issues – the quality of the work produced and the nature of what’s being done with another’s material.
Regarding quality, in general I prefer good art to mediocre. Poets and artists of other sorts draw upon, allude to, or incorporate elements of the works of others all the time – it’s a normal part of artistic production, and there are a number of perfectly legitimate ways in which this can be done. Here, too, I’d prefer that the products of the use of the work of others be good art. (What constitutes “good art” is, of course, a thoroughly complicated matter – one that I’m not addressing here, because it would take me on a long tangential trajectory in a case where it’s been difficult enough for me to disentangle and articulate what I think on the issue. It’s a topic that Reginald addressed at great length in many of his posts on his blog or in his essay collections.)
In principle, I feel that my feelings about how others might draw upon Reginald’s work in their own poetry shouldn’t be any different from my feelings regarding the use of anyone else’s poetry. Realistically, though, that’s not the case, especially regarding this issue of quality. Part of the mixed bag of emotions I initially felt upon reading this question was fear and wariness. There’s a big part of me that for purely emotional but very strongly felt reasons doesn’t want anyone mucking around with Reginald’s work. What I’ve done with this fragment was uncomfortable enough, but I’m ultimately happy with the result and the process of producing it, where what I did was to distill what was legible in his fragment, but where all the content is his. I wouldn’t be comfortable adding significant content to it, and I’m certainly not comfortable with anyone else doing so.
That said, I also recognize art isn’t always comfortable.
There are a number of ways in which poets or other artists quote, allude to, borrow from, or otherwise use or incorporate the work of others. That’s normal, natural, and one of the things that creates vibrant connections between different artists and works. While I may be uncomfortable about the idea of others drawing upon Reginald’s work – which is frankly a worry that I won’t like what’s done, or that I’ll think the result inferior or unworthy of him – I also realize that one of the ways an artist’s work continues to live is through the refractions of it in the works of others. As such and despite my wariness, I’m not opposed in principle to work that utilizes Reginald’s work, though with some important caveats, which constitute much of the rest of this reply.
One basic way in which the work of others is utilized is through artistic quotation or allusion (where quotation and allusion are not the same thing, but where quotation may be seen as a specific form of allusion). In the case of quotation, in general, I’d prefer credit be given (especially with borrowings from my Reginald). At the same time, I realize that, so long as things stay within the spirit of fair use (or for that matter the letter of fair use, for there can be intellectual property issues at stake), there are many cases of legitimate quotation or drawings upon the works of others through allusion without explicit attribution – for example, Shostakovich’s quotation of the “Lone Ranger” phrase of Rossini’s William Tell Overture in his 15th symphony, or Reginald’s drawing upon the imagery of a Manet painting in his poem “Kinds of Camouflage” (which I commented on in “Comments on ‘Kinds of Camouflage’”). There are many examples of poets borrowing a few words, a phrase, a line from another’s poem. Again, so long as it stays within the realm of fair use, the main difference I see between this and drawing upon phrases one encounters on roadside signs or that simply pop into one’s head is that the practice of drawing upon the poetry of others contributes to the intertextuality of poems.
There are instances of drawing upon another’s work that are more systematic or extensive than allusion or quotation of a small part of the work, cases where there is utilization of a whole work, or significant portions thereof, with a reworking of the material and/or incorporation alongside added material. The most obvious example of this in contemporary art is remixing of music, where for lack of a better term, I think we could speak also of remixing in other artistic genres, including poetry. My perspective here is that remixing is acceptable if credit is given and permission gotten. (Since remixing involves reworking significant portions of another’s work, “fair use” doesn’t cut it. Remixing without credit or permission is in the territory of Vanilla-Ice-ripping-off-Davd-Bowie-and-Queen-for-lack-of-decent-material-of-one’s-own.) Beyond legal or moral acceptability, remixing, of music or poetry, can be done well or badly. A good remix is both an original work of art and something that forces a rethinking and brings a new appreciation of a familiar work. At best, a bad remix reminds one of how much better the original work is and makes one want to return to it.
While I’d be fine with (or at least not opposed to) someone quoting or alluding to this or other works of Reginald (preferably with explicit credit, definitely within the framework of fair use or with permission gotten), and while I’d be fine with a “remix” (preferably well done, and definitely with credit and permission given [with a further caveat that for poems published in collections, that even as literary executor, I may not be the sole person needing to give permission]), one thing I definitely would not want to see done with this fragment is for someone to add to it in an attempt to “finish” it, and certainly not to add to it and present it as a finished Reginald Shepherd poem. The reason I’m strongly opposed to that is because even if well intentioned, it strikes me as active misrepresentation, if not a lie.
On Reginald’s blog, a former student of his, Deanna, wrote to ask, “how do you feel about poets using the fragments in order to create new poems in dedication to him?”
I wrote the following in response to Deanna’s question. It’s fairly substantive for a simple reply, so I thought I’d post it here in addition to placing it in the discussion section of the previous post on Reginald’s blog.
It’s taken me a few days to formulate a response to this question. I was initially struck with a mix of emotions and thoughts that took me a while to disentangle. I think my feelings on the issue of others working with this particular fragment or other poetic works of Reginald’s are related to two distinct sets of issues – the quality of the work produced and the nature of what’s being done with another’s material.
Regarding quality, in general I prefer good art to mediocre. Poets and artists of other sorts draw upon, allude to, or incorporate elements of the works of others all the time – it’s a normal part of artistic production, and there are a number of perfectly legitimate ways in which this can be done. Here, too, I’d prefer that the products of the use of the work of others be good art. (What constitutes “good art” is, of course, a thoroughly complicated matter – one that I’m not addressing here, because it would take me on a long tangential trajectory in a case where it’s been difficult enough for me to disentangle and articulate what I think on the issue. It’s a topic that Reginald addressed at great length in many of his posts on his blog or in his essay collections.)
In principle, I feel that my feelings about how others might draw upon Reginald’s work in their own poetry shouldn’t be any different from my feelings regarding the use of anyone else’s poetry. Realistically, though, that’s not the case, especially regarding this issue of quality. Part of the mixed bag of emotions I initially felt upon reading this question was fear and wariness. There’s a big part of me that for purely emotional but very strongly felt reasons doesn’t want anyone mucking around with Reginald’s work. What I’ve done with this fragment was uncomfortable enough, but I’m ultimately happy with the result and the process of producing it, where what I did was to distill what was legible in his fragment, but where all the content is his. I wouldn’t be comfortable adding significant content to it, and I’m certainly not comfortable with anyone else doing so.
That said, I also recognize art isn’t always comfortable.
There are a number of ways in which poets or other artists quote, allude to, borrow from, or otherwise use or incorporate the work of others. That’s normal, natural, and one of the things that creates vibrant connections between different artists and works. While I may be uncomfortable about the idea of others drawing upon Reginald’s work – which is frankly a worry that I won’t like what’s done, or that I’ll think the result inferior or unworthy of him – I also realize that one of the ways an artist’s work continues to live is through the refractions of it in the works of others. As such and despite my wariness, I’m not opposed in principle to work that utilizes Reginald’s work, though with some important caveats, which constitute much of the rest of this reply.
One basic way in which the work of others is utilized is through artistic quotation or allusion (where quotation and allusion are not the same thing, but where quotation may be seen as a specific form of allusion). In the case of quotation, in general, I’d prefer credit be given (especially with borrowings from my Reginald). At the same time, I realize that, so long as things stay within the spirit of fair use (or for that matter the letter of fair use, for there can be intellectual property issues at stake), there are many cases of legitimate quotation or drawings upon the works of others through allusion without explicit attribution – for example, Shostakovich’s quotation of the “Lone Ranger” phrase of Rossini’s William Tell Overture in his 15th symphony, or Reginald’s drawing upon the imagery of a Manet painting in his poem “Kinds of Camouflage” (which I commented on in “Comments on ‘Kinds of Camouflage’”). There are many examples of poets borrowing a few words, a phrase, a line from another’s poem. Again, so long as it stays within the realm of fair use, the main difference I see between this and drawing upon phrases one encounters on roadside signs or that simply pop into one’s head is that the practice of drawing upon the poetry of others contributes to the intertextuality of poems.
There are instances of drawing upon another’s work that are more systematic or extensive than allusion or quotation of a small part of the work, cases where there is utilization of a whole work, or significant portions thereof, with a reworking of the material and/or incorporation alongside added material. The most obvious example of this in contemporary art is remixing of music, where for lack of a better term, I think we could speak also of remixing in other artistic genres, including poetry. My perspective here is that remixing is acceptable if credit is given and permission gotten. (Since remixing involves reworking significant portions of another’s work, “fair use” doesn’t cut it. Remixing without credit or permission is in the territory of Vanilla-Ice-ripping-off-Davd-Bowie-and-Queen-for-lack-of-decent-material-of-one’s-own.) Beyond legal or moral acceptability, remixing, of music or poetry, can be done well or badly. A good remix is both an original work of art and something that forces a rethinking and brings a new appreciation of a familiar work. At best, a bad remix reminds one of how much better the original work is and makes one want to return to it.
While I’d be fine with (or at least not opposed to) someone quoting or alluding to this or other works of Reginald (preferably with explicit credit, definitely within the framework of fair use or with permission gotten), and while I’d be fine with a “remix” (preferably well done, and definitely with credit and permission given [with a further caveat that for poems published in collections, that even as literary executor, I may not be the sole person needing to give permission]), one thing I definitely would not want to see done with this fragment is for someone to add to it in an attempt to “finish” it, and certainly not to add to it and present it as a finished Reginald Shepherd poem. The reason I’m strongly opposed to that is because even if well intentioned, it strikes me as active misrepresentation, if not a lie.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Reginald and the Muses
In the few months since Reginald’s death, I’ve revisited and reread most all of his writing, poetry and prose, a time or two, mostly as a way of coping with his loss and staying in touch with his ideas, though also because in my capacity as his literary executor, I’ve also been collecting together and editing a variety of his works for publication. One piece I’ve recently returned to is his short essay, “Taking Dictation from a Martian Muse,” in which he treats the notion of poetry as derived from the muses in a variety of guises, though focusing especially on Jack Spicer’s notion of poetry as dictation.
Reginald was largely skeptical of the idea of poetry as dictation or as derived from Muses or as transmissions from the ghost radio:
“Interesting and even inspiring though Spicer’s notion of dictation is, with its promise of escaping what he calls "the big lie of the personal," I wonder if it’s not simply the mirror image of romantic inspiration. Instead of coming from deep within one, from one’s soul or innermost self, the poem comes from outside one, from the Martians or the spooks. In either case, the poet is passive, and abdicates thought and responsibility...Spicer’s Martians seem to be the Muses dressed up in space suits, another way to preserve the romantic (small “r”) notion of the poet as a specially inspired individual with access to the transcendent…”
This is not at all to say that Reginald rejected the notion of poetry as inspired through something like a muse (whether one thinks of that in terms of Martians dictating, ghost radios, the workings of the subconscious mind, or possession by muses):
“I like the idea of poetry as dictation, because writing does feel like that sometimes. I’ve had at least one poem that was literally dictated to me—I woke up and the poem was reciting itself in my head, though I had to come up with my own ending. Don't we all? In that sense Spicer conveys what it often feels like to do poetry.”
I’d say it’s more that Reginald felt that while muses may be involved in the process of writing poetry, they are not sufficient, for the poem requires the active working by the poet upon potentially poetic material, wherever that may have come from:
“The poem, when it is at its best, when we are at our best, is a kind of agon between the poet and the language, and the poet has to bring all his or her resources to bear, or it’s not a real struggle at all, just a performance.”
Reginald’s penultimate poem (if it may be called that – more on that below) is a good example of the relation between muses and poetry, both in the sense of its writing being clearly of something other than his fully conscious, cogent mind, and in the sense that it’s obviously not fully formed poetry.
As many who knew him or follow his writing know, in mid-April last year, several months before he did die in September, Reginald almost died as a result of a perforated intestine, followed by massive abdominal infection and blood poisoning. He was unconscious for ten days in the Intensive Care Unit, with a ventilator down his throat, alongside many other tubes, lines, and pieces of equipment. Even when he regained consciousness, he was completely unable to talk until the ventilator tube was removed, and barely able to talk after that because of lack of strength. For a few days after regaining consciousness and having the ventilator tube removed, he had frequent hallucinations (the result of both the sedatives he had been on and his sickness) and slipped easily in and out of fully cogent consciousness even when I don’t think he was hallucinating.
During the period of a few days during which he was in and out of consciousness but was largely unable to talk, Reginald communicated to me or to his ICU nurses by writing on a clipboard. Much of this writing is completely illegible, as he didn’t have good motor control in his arms at that point. Much of what is legible is lacking in cogency (he was frequently hallucinating at the time, after all). Most of what is legible and cogent is fairly prosaic – parts of simple conversations I remember having with him (or that he had with one of the nurses), such as a short list of food items (grapes, juice, peeled apples, plums, jello) he wanted after I had asked him if there was anything he wanted me to bring him.
But a few weeks ago, while looking through those papers (I hadn’t looked through them much before, because they were too painful), I encountered this, written sometime the day after he regained consciousness, but when he was still frequently suffering powerful hallucinations and was only fully cogent for short moments:
for month and years [,the?] […etary?] [fruits?]
[frails?]
and [to end?] her [battle?] many of other
[toward?] [b.. the?] [history?]
[into ...?]
the single step and [lags?] distance
every [curve follows, linking to above word]
between [L..mbe..g?] and [ ]
a palmful of Persian peaches
the world is[s] a work of wish and
human circumstance
this history of being rusted, being burned
rusting, being burned
the [alval?] [bag ?] of of years burned up ,not down
burned off [to?] the for night
The first part in particular is virtually impossible to decipher as a result of the quality of the handwriting, which improves over the course of the page – as if gaining strength and confidence as he wrote. (I would like to acknowledge the help of Brad Richard in attempts to fully decipher the text, to the extent that Reginald’s handwritten page can be deciphered.) Nonetheless, as fragmentary as the text is, as indecipherable as parts of it unfortunately are, the form and elements of a poem are there on the page, and if this isn’t dictation from a muse, I’m not sure what would be.
Overall, it’s clear from his body of work that Reginald was extraordinarily sensitive to potential poetic material. Some of the material of his poetry consisted of linguistic “found objects,” his noticing poetic uses of language whether they occurred in casual conversations or on roadside signs, but most of his material came to him as though from the muses, with the important notation that he constantly took note of poetic material that occurred to him, such that he was constantly jotting things down in one little notebook or another. Maybe that’s all that having a muse is – being attentive to powerful language as it occurs, or maybe Reginald was taking dictation from Martians, channeling transmissions from the ghost radio, or being periodically possessed by Muses. In any case, that was only the start. Regardless of the source of poetic material, he still had to engage in attentive work to create poems. In the process of creating his art, there really were multiple and largely distinct facets to Reginald Shepherd as poet – the medium channeling inspiration and/or careful observer of language (in some cases he had whole lines and more “dictated” from somewhere that he had to write down quickly or lose them forever; in other cases [and more with those linguistic “found objects”] he was more like a particularly astute detective of language), and the artisan or craftsman who skillfully transformed raw poetic material into finished poetry.
In any case, it’s difficult to figure out what to do with this penultimate poem of his (and as literary executor, it is something I have to figure out). It’s tempting to call it a poetic fragment and leave it as is, though with the caveat that this is a fragment in a different sense from textual fragments like Petronius’ Satyricon, a completed text of which only fragments remain, whereas these are fragments of potentiality, artifacts of a poem never made, and it’s precisely for that reason that I don’t think Reginald would ultimately want the fragment left as is. It’s also tempting to me to suppress it as an unfinished work (too late for that now, I suppose), but I don’t think Reginald would want that either. There were works of his that he had chosen not to publish. He had a file titled “Poems not suitable for publication.” Most of the poems in this file are quite good, just poems he didn’t consider his best and/or poems he intended to go back and work more with if he had time, such that it was really the case that he considered them poems not suitable for publication yet. Still, he didn’t want those poems suppressed (something I know because I asked him about this specifically and explicitly on several occasions) – only not published until such point as there was no possibility of his working on them more. This “poem,” written under such extraordinary circumstances, is more fragmentary than those other poems (which actually aren’t fragmentary at all), but I don’t think he’d want it suppressed, and in any case, I find it impossible to suppress lines like “a palmful of Persian peaches,” (hence part of the motivation for this post). Finally, it’s tempting to work these fragments, engage in the agon between poet and language – a prospect I find daunting to say the least, though at least in this case, there is a legible and coherent core to the fragmentary text that with only minor editing and excision (rather than addition coming from me rather than Reginald) functions as a poem in its own right. Something like:
A palmful of Persian peaches,
the world is a work of wish and
human circumstance,
this history of being rusted, being burned
rusting, being burned
years burned up, not down
burned off to the night
I’m not sure what Reginald would have ultimately done with his fragmentary text, given the chance, but I am confident of what his approach would have been – to have recognized it as materia from the Muses that he would have further agonized with to create a poem.
Reginald was largely skeptical of the idea of poetry as dictation or as derived from Muses or as transmissions from the ghost radio:
“Interesting and even inspiring though Spicer’s notion of dictation is, with its promise of escaping what he calls "the big lie of the personal," I wonder if it’s not simply the mirror image of romantic inspiration. Instead of coming from deep within one, from one’s soul or innermost self, the poem comes from outside one, from the Martians or the spooks. In either case, the poet is passive, and abdicates thought and responsibility...Spicer’s Martians seem to be the Muses dressed up in space suits, another way to preserve the romantic (small “r”) notion of the poet as a specially inspired individual with access to the transcendent…”
This is not at all to say that Reginald rejected the notion of poetry as inspired through something like a muse (whether one thinks of that in terms of Martians dictating, ghost radios, the workings of the subconscious mind, or possession by muses):
“I like the idea of poetry as dictation, because writing does feel like that sometimes. I’ve had at least one poem that was literally dictated to me—I woke up and the poem was reciting itself in my head, though I had to come up with my own ending. Don't we all? In that sense Spicer conveys what it often feels like to do poetry.”
I’d say it’s more that Reginald felt that while muses may be involved in the process of writing poetry, they are not sufficient, for the poem requires the active working by the poet upon potentially poetic material, wherever that may have come from:
“The poem, when it is at its best, when we are at our best, is a kind of agon between the poet and the language, and the poet has to bring all his or her resources to bear, or it’s not a real struggle at all, just a performance.”
Reginald’s penultimate poem (if it may be called that – more on that below) is a good example of the relation between muses and poetry, both in the sense of its writing being clearly of something other than his fully conscious, cogent mind, and in the sense that it’s obviously not fully formed poetry.
As many who knew him or follow his writing know, in mid-April last year, several months before he did die in September, Reginald almost died as a result of a perforated intestine, followed by massive abdominal infection and blood poisoning. He was unconscious for ten days in the Intensive Care Unit, with a ventilator down his throat, alongside many other tubes, lines, and pieces of equipment. Even when he regained consciousness, he was completely unable to talk until the ventilator tube was removed, and barely able to talk after that because of lack of strength. For a few days after regaining consciousness and having the ventilator tube removed, he had frequent hallucinations (the result of both the sedatives he had been on and his sickness) and slipped easily in and out of fully cogent consciousness even when I don’t think he was hallucinating.
During the period of a few days during which he was in and out of consciousness but was largely unable to talk, Reginald communicated to me or to his ICU nurses by writing on a clipboard. Much of this writing is completely illegible, as he didn’t have good motor control in his arms at that point. Much of what is legible is lacking in cogency (he was frequently hallucinating at the time, after all). Most of what is legible and cogent is fairly prosaic – parts of simple conversations I remember having with him (or that he had with one of the nurses), such as a short list of food items (grapes, juice, peeled apples, plums, jello) he wanted after I had asked him if there was anything he wanted me to bring him.
But a few weeks ago, while looking through those papers (I hadn’t looked through them much before, because they were too painful), I encountered this, written sometime the day after he regained consciousness, but when he was still frequently suffering powerful hallucinations and was only fully cogent for short moments:
for month and years [,the?] […etary?] [fruits?]
[frails?]
and [to end?] her [battle?] many of other
[toward?] [b.. the?] [history?]
[into ...?]
the single step and [lags?] distance
every [curve follows, linking to above word]
between [L..mbe..g?] and [ ]
a palmful of Persian peaches
the world is[s] a work of wish and
human circumstance
this history of being rusted, being burned
rusting, being burned
the [alval?] [bag ?] of of years burned up ,not down
burned off [to?] the for night
The first part in particular is virtually impossible to decipher as a result of the quality of the handwriting, which improves over the course of the page – as if gaining strength and confidence as he wrote. (I would like to acknowledge the help of Brad Richard in attempts to fully decipher the text, to the extent that Reginald’s handwritten page can be deciphered.) Nonetheless, as fragmentary as the text is, as indecipherable as parts of it unfortunately are, the form and elements of a poem are there on the page, and if this isn’t dictation from a muse, I’m not sure what would be.
Overall, it’s clear from his body of work that Reginald was extraordinarily sensitive to potential poetic material. Some of the material of his poetry consisted of linguistic “found objects,” his noticing poetic uses of language whether they occurred in casual conversations or on roadside signs, but most of his material came to him as though from the muses, with the important notation that he constantly took note of poetic material that occurred to him, such that he was constantly jotting things down in one little notebook or another. Maybe that’s all that having a muse is – being attentive to powerful language as it occurs, or maybe Reginald was taking dictation from Martians, channeling transmissions from the ghost radio, or being periodically possessed by Muses. In any case, that was only the start. Regardless of the source of poetic material, he still had to engage in attentive work to create poems. In the process of creating his art, there really were multiple and largely distinct facets to Reginald Shepherd as poet – the medium channeling inspiration and/or careful observer of language (in some cases he had whole lines and more “dictated” from somewhere that he had to write down quickly or lose them forever; in other cases [and more with those linguistic “found objects”] he was more like a particularly astute detective of language), and the artisan or craftsman who skillfully transformed raw poetic material into finished poetry.
In any case, it’s difficult to figure out what to do with this penultimate poem of his (and as literary executor, it is something I have to figure out). It’s tempting to call it a poetic fragment and leave it as is, though with the caveat that this is a fragment in a different sense from textual fragments like Petronius’ Satyricon, a completed text of which only fragments remain, whereas these are fragments of potentiality, artifacts of a poem never made, and it’s precisely for that reason that I don’t think Reginald would ultimately want the fragment left as is. It’s also tempting to me to suppress it as an unfinished work (too late for that now, I suppose), but I don’t think Reginald would want that either. There were works of his that he had chosen not to publish. He had a file titled “Poems not suitable for publication.” Most of the poems in this file are quite good, just poems he didn’t consider his best and/or poems he intended to go back and work more with if he had time, such that it was really the case that he considered them poems not suitable for publication yet. Still, he didn’t want those poems suppressed (something I know because I asked him about this specifically and explicitly on several occasions) – only not published until such point as there was no possibility of his working on them more. This “poem,” written under such extraordinary circumstances, is more fragmentary than those other poems (which actually aren’t fragmentary at all), but I don’t think he’d want it suppressed, and in any case, I find it impossible to suppress lines like “a palmful of Persian peaches,” (hence part of the motivation for this post). Finally, it’s tempting to work these fragments, engage in the agon between poet and language – a prospect I find daunting to say the least, though at least in this case, there is a legible and coherent core to the fragmentary text that with only minor editing and excision (rather than addition coming from me rather than Reginald) functions as a poem in its own right. Something like:
A palmful of Persian peaches,
the world is a work of wish and
human circumstance,
this history of being rusted, being burned
rusting, being burned
years burned up, not down
burned off to the night
I’m not sure what Reginald would have ultimately done with his fragmentary text, given the chance, but I am confident of what his approach would have been – to have recognized it as materia from the Muses that he would have further agonized with to create a poem.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Things I Miss, 8
I miss Reginald’s passion and joy in living. Despite the hard life he had (see Hard Knocks Life: Things I Miss, 7), Reginald loved life like no other person I’ve known.
A number of people who knew him well have shared their memories of him since he died. One description that has recurred in several people’s memories was that Reginald was always “on.” You couldn’t be bored around him, and you couldn’t not be continually stimulated, because Reginald was constantly engaging with the world and with the people around him in a deep way. You also couldn’t ever be lazy in your thinking around him, because he tended to presume others were deeply engaged in the topic at hand and to expect nothing less.
He really wasn’t very good at relaxing or at being “low key” (if anything, trying to relax tended to stress him out and to be unrelaxing); he constantly wanted to see what there was to see. (Given the elaborate and active quality of his dreams, I think his mind was probably “on” and going full bore even when he was asleep.)
I miss also his specific passions. He loved the arts, poetry and music most of all, though his tastes were both deep and precise. For example, while he could certainly be described as an opera fan, it wasn’t opera in general that he liked. It was a small number of specific operas that he loved, but those that he loved, he was deeply passionate about. I’ve just mentioned opera, but the same could be said about his tastes regarding a variety of musical or other art genres, with a deep interest in specific or precise works of art. I suppose in some sense the same is true for most anyone who is interested in art of other things, but the extent of his passion for those things he liked was remarkable. For example, he didn’t just like Tristan und Isolde; he had to have every distinct recording available of it. And when he listened to music, it was an all consuming experience for him, as was reading poetry, or anything else that he thought worth doing. Again, whatever he was doing, he was focused and “on.”
Further, he tended to identify very strongly with those works of art (with again this being most especially the case with music) which he did care about. Or perhaps I have that backwards. Perhaps it was those works and things that he identified that he in turn felt so passionate about.
In any case, I profoundly miss the way in which he so deeply, passionately cared about the music he listened to, the books he read, the food he ate, the conversations he had, and about living life.
A number of people who knew him well have shared their memories of him since he died. One description that has recurred in several people’s memories was that Reginald was always “on.” You couldn’t be bored around him, and you couldn’t not be continually stimulated, because Reginald was constantly engaging with the world and with the people around him in a deep way. You also couldn’t ever be lazy in your thinking around him, because he tended to presume others were deeply engaged in the topic at hand and to expect nothing less.
He really wasn’t very good at relaxing or at being “low key” (if anything, trying to relax tended to stress him out and to be unrelaxing); he constantly wanted to see what there was to see. (Given the elaborate and active quality of his dreams, I think his mind was probably “on” and going full bore even when he was asleep.)
I miss also his specific passions. He loved the arts, poetry and music most of all, though his tastes were both deep and precise. For example, while he could certainly be described as an opera fan, it wasn’t opera in general that he liked. It was a small number of specific operas that he loved, but those that he loved, he was deeply passionate about. I’ve just mentioned opera, but the same could be said about his tastes regarding a variety of musical or other art genres, with a deep interest in specific or precise works of art. I suppose in some sense the same is true for most anyone who is interested in art of other things, but the extent of his passion for those things he liked was remarkable. For example, he didn’t just like Tristan und Isolde; he had to have every distinct recording available of it. And when he listened to music, it was an all consuming experience for him, as was reading poetry, or anything else that he thought worth doing. Again, whatever he was doing, he was focused and “on.”
Further, he tended to identify very strongly with those works of art (with again this being most especially the case with music) which he did care about. Or perhaps I have that backwards. Perhaps it was those works and things that he identified that he in turn felt so passionate about.
In any case, I profoundly miss the way in which he so deeply, passionately cared about the music he listened to, the books he read, the food he ate, the conversations he had, and about living life.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Hard Knocks Life: Things I Miss, 7
Reginald had a hard time going through this world – this world he didn’t survive, to echo a line from one of his poems.
I’m not just referring to the more apparent biographic facts of his hard knocks life (a song, by the way, that he much enjoyed both in Annie and in the Jay Z rendition), though I am in part referring to those:
Growing up as the child of a single mother in the 1960s (he told me once that he identified fiercely with the Supremes’ song “Love Child” when he was a child).
Growing up living in public housing tenements in the Bronx.
Losing his mother when he was fifteen.
Dealing with the same tribulations that most every gay man in this culture deals with in coming to terms with that gayness.
Living with HIV for well over a decade.
Living with and dying from cancer and the horrible pains it brought.
Dealing with a host of “lesser” medical issues, like the osteoporosis (possibly a side effect from HIV meds) that led to fractures in his hip and at least one rib.
None of these made it easy to walk through life.
I’m also referring, though, to the combination of innocence and a strong sense of justice with which he continually encountered this unjust world.
One thing the two of us shared was a sense of how we thought the world should be, fair and equitable, with thought and beauty in all its forms valued.
But he combined this with a sort of innocence. He kept expecting the world to be fair and just, for people to be thoughtful and to value reflection rather than ignorance, and as a result he was often disappointed about the state of the world, but one of his most charming traits, that I miss so, was that he kept on presuming the best of people.
Some who knew us, but not in depth, thought I was the optimist and he the pessimist of the couple. They were wrong. In reality, I’m much more likely to view the world through a deeply cynical and pessimistic lens, with one consequence being that I can almost always envision things being even worse than they are. I may become angry, upset, or feel loathing towards aspects of the state of the world, but rarely are my expectations disappointed when people or things are stupid, hateful, vile, or otherwise bad. It’s more that I’m pleasantly surprised when things are good and beautiful.
Though it meant he often bumped up against disjuncture between his expectations and the state of the world, his sense of justice combined with optimistic innocence was a part of his charm that I sorely miss, and that I feel unbalanced without.
I’m not just referring to the more apparent biographic facts of his hard knocks life (a song, by the way, that he much enjoyed both in Annie and in the Jay Z rendition), though I am in part referring to those:
Growing up as the child of a single mother in the 1960s (he told me once that he identified fiercely with the Supremes’ song “Love Child” when he was a child).
Growing up living in public housing tenements in the Bronx.
Losing his mother when he was fifteen.
Dealing with the same tribulations that most every gay man in this culture deals with in coming to terms with that gayness.
Living with HIV for well over a decade.
Living with and dying from cancer and the horrible pains it brought.
Dealing with a host of “lesser” medical issues, like the osteoporosis (possibly a side effect from HIV meds) that led to fractures in his hip and at least one rib.
None of these made it easy to walk through life.
I’m also referring, though, to the combination of innocence and a strong sense of justice with which he continually encountered this unjust world.
One thing the two of us shared was a sense of how we thought the world should be, fair and equitable, with thought and beauty in all its forms valued.
But he combined this with a sort of innocence. He kept expecting the world to be fair and just, for people to be thoughtful and to value reflection rather than ignorance, and as a result he was often disappointed about the state of the world, but one of his most charming traits, that I miss so, was that he kept on presuming the best of people.
Some who knew us, but not in depth, thought I was the optimist and he the pessimist of the couple. They were wrong. In reality, I’m much more likely to view the world through a deeply cynical and pessimistic lens, with one consequence being that I can almost always envision things being even worse than they are. I may become angry, upset, or feel loathing towards aspects of the state of the world, but rarely are my expectations disappointed when people or things are stupid, hateful, vile, or otherwise bad. It’s more that I’m pleasantly surprised when things are good and beautiful.
Though it meant he often bumped up against disjuncture between his expectations and the state of the world, his sense of justice combined with optimistic innocence was a part of his charm that I sorely miss, and that I feel unbalanced without.
National Book Critics Award Finalists
Reginald's essay collection, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, has just been named as a finalist for the award in criticism by the National Book Critics Circle. Although I'm obviously saddened by the fact that he didn't live to see this, I'm pleased to see the positive attention his work has received.
Follow this link for more details.
Follow this link for more details.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
A Bittersweet Happy Day
Today is a good day. It’s also a hard day for me, and I suspect for many others.
This past Thanksgiving and Christmas were tough holidays for me, being the first holiday season without my Reginald. Still, the burden was lightened a bit by the fact that I was surrounded by family those days, and I had many others wishing me well those days, because they knew those holidays would be difficult for me under the circumstances. Tougher still, on January 15, was our first anniversary since his death (not a wedding anniversary, since we couldn’t get married in this state, but our anniversary in any case). This, too, was made a bit easier because my parents made a point of taking me out to dinner, and because they made a point of trying to celebrate Reginald rather than trying to take my mind off his loss, which would have just made it worse.
Three days have been more unexpectedly hard for me since losing Reginald, as they’ve been happy days that have also underscored what I’ve lost and what he is missing: election day/night; yesterday’s Martin Luther King holiday; and today’s inauguration of Barack Obama.
Yesterday, on Martin Luther King day, I read a news article that nicely tied together that holiday with today’s inauguration of Obama.
As an aside, among other things the article reported on an interesting survey. Almost a year ago, last March, the surveyors had asked a sample of Americans whether they thought Martin Luther King’s dream (i.e. from the “I have a dream..” speech) had been fulfilled. At that point, 35% of white Americans thought it had been, while 34% of black Americans thought so. The survey was repeated sometime between the November election and now. Among white Americans, the numbers had increased to 46% now saying King’s dream had been fulfilled, while among black Americans, more than 2/3 (69%) now said so. I’m not exactly sure what to make of that, but it’s clearly interesting.
What most affected me though was a quote from an analyst, Bill Schneider, “Most blacks and whites went to bed on election night saying, 'I never thought I'd live to see the day.' That's what the nation is celebrating on this King holiday: We have lived to see the day."
When I read that, I broke down sobbing, as I did several times today watching inauguration coverage, precisely because Reginald didn’t live to see the day.
Yesterday and today have been good days. I spent part of yesterday reflecting on how Martin Luther King’s legacy has shaped my life. As a result of his efforts and the efforts of everyone else, sung or unsung, who was a part of the civil rights movement, I, as a white boy growing up in the south, was fortunate to not be deluged with (as much of) the racist garbage that poisoned the minds of earlier generations. Reginald and I were able to live openly as an interracial gay couple without ever encountering so much as a dirty look from any neighbors for seven years in Pensacola, Florida, and that as much as anything is a testament to how successful in some ways the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements have been in altering possibilities.
Still, I know how far there is to go on social issues relating to race, gender, or sexuality. If Reginald had lived to see election day, he would have been overjoyed at Obama’s election and the Democratic pick-ups in both the House and Senate, but, sensitive soul that he was, he would probably have been even more crushed than I was by the wave of anti-gay ballot initiative results across the country, from Prop 8 in California to the fact, much closer to home for us, that 2/3 of the electorate in Florida saw fit to constitutionally ban for gays something that we weren’t recognized as having rights to in the first place.
Today came terribly slow, too. Reginald should have lived to see this day – by which I mean both that it’s terribly tragic and unfair that he’s not alive right now but also that the events of today should have come much sooner. (The election of a woman as president of this country is long overdue, too, and I remember with happiness last year’s primary election when Reginald and I were faced with the wonderful dilemma of which “historic” candidate to vote for, neither of whom was or is perfect, but both of whom we felt were good candidates and far better than anything we’ve had in a long while.) Surely far too many people didn’t live to see the day.
Still, bittersweet though it is, this is a happy day.
This past Thanksgiving and Christmas were tough holidays for me, being the first holiday season without my Reginald. Still, the burden was lightened a bit by the fact that I was surrounded by family those days, and I had many others wishing me well those days, because they knew those holidays would be difficult for me under the circumstances. Tougher still, on January 15, was our first anniversary since his death (not a wedding anniversary, since we couldn’t get married in this state, but our anniversary in any case). This, too, was made a bit easier because my parents made a point of taking me out to dinner, and because they made a point of trying to celebrate Reginald rather than trying to take my mind off his loss, which would have just made it worse.
Three days have been more unexpectedly hard for me since losing Reginald, as they’ve been happy days that have also underscored what I’ve lost and what he is missing: election day/night; yesterday’s Martin Luther King holiday; and today’s inauguration of Barack Obama.
Yesterday, on Martin Luther King day, I read a news article that nicely tied together that holiday with today’s inauguration of Obama.
As an aside, among other things the article reported on an interesting survey. Almost a year ago, last March, the surveyors had asked a sample of Americans whether they thought Martin Luther King’s dream (i.e. from the “I have a dream..” speech) had been fulfilled. At that point, 35% of white Americans thought it had been, while 34% of black Americans thought so. The survey was repeated sometime between the November election and now. Among white Americans, the numbers had increased to 46% now saying King’s dream had been fulfilled, while among black Americans, more than 2/3 (69%) now said so. I’m not exactly sure what to make of that, but it’s clearly interesting.
What most affected me though was a quote from an analyst, Bill Schneider, “Most blacks and whites went to bed on election night saying, 'I never thought I'd live to see the day.' That's what the nation is celebrating on this King holiday: We have lived to see the day."
When I read that, I broke down sobbing, as I did several times today watching inauguration coverage, precisely because Reginald didn’t live to see the day.
Yesterday and today have been good days. I spent part of yesterday reflecting on how Martin Luther King’s legacy has shaped my life. As a result of his efforts and the efforts of everyone else, sung or unsung, who was a part of the civil rights movement, I, as a white boy growing up in the south, was fortunate to not be deluged with (as much of) the racist garbage that poisoned the minds of earlier generations. Reginald and I were able to live openly as an interracial gay couple without ever encountering so much as a dirty look from any neighbors for seven years in Pensacola, Florida, and that as much as anything is a testament to how successful in some ways the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements have been in altering possibilities.
Still, I know how far there is to go on social issues relating to race, gender, or sexuality. If Reginald had lived to see election day, he would have been overjoyed at Obama’s election and the Democratic pick-ups in both the House and Senate, but, sensitive soul that he was, he would probably have been even more crushed than I was by the wave of anti-gay ballot initiative results across the country, from Prop 8 in California to the fact, much closer to home for us, that 2/3 of the electorate in Florida saw fit to constitutionally ban for gays something that we weren’t recognized as having rights to in the first place.
Today came terribly slow, too. Reginald should have lived to see this day – by which I mean both that it’s terribly tragic and unfair that he’s not alive right now but also that the events of today should have come much sooner. (The election of a woman as president of this country is long overdue, too, and I remember with happiness last year’s primary election when Reginald and I were faced with the wonderful dilemma of which “historic” candidate to vote for, neither of whom was or is perfect, but both of whom we felt were good candidates and far better than anything we’ve had in a long while.) Surely far too many people didn’t live to see the day.
Still, bittersweet though it is, this is a happy day.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Disco Gets Me Down: Things I Miss, 6
I’ve long had mixed feelings about disco. Much of it’s great music that’s fun, upbeat, and uplifting, but I typically have a bittersweet feeling whenever I listen to disco, as it tends to evoke for me a generation of dead gay boys.
(Perhaps ironically, it was not the HIV that took so many of his generation but cancer that took my gay boy. Reginald was quite open about his HIV+ status from the time I met him, and so I always knew that down the road, serious health problems could be part of our relationship, especially since at the time I met him in late 1998, while protease inhibitors were a godsend for many with HIV, including Reginald, no one could say with certainty whether combination therapy would work well in the long term, as those drugs were still relatively new. As it turns out, Reginald never really had any problem with HIV. I do wonder if it contributed to some of the complications that ultimately allowed the cancer to take over after an initially good response to chemo – some of his doctors thought it probably did, others were less sure, though none of them thought it was a good idea to have HIV and cancer at the same time.)
Since Reginald died, my disco emotions have been amplified, and I’ve found it almost painful to listen to disco or most any other dance music. While it’s far from what I miss most with his loss, one thing I do miss is seeing him dance. As most who knew him well know, Reginald could dance like nobody’s business, and probably the most pleasurable thing about watching him dance was the look of sheer joy he had when dancing. Thinking about it as I write, I’m laughing with the joy of that memory and crying as I know I’ll never see him dance again.
(Perhaps ironically, it was not the HIV that took so many of his generation but cancer that took my gay boy. Reginald was quite open about his HIV+ status from the time I met him, and so I always knew that down the road, serious health problems could be part of our relationship, especially since at the time I met him in late 1998, while protease inhibitors were a godsend for many with HIV, including Reginald, no one could say with certainty whether combination therapy would work well in the long term, as those drugs were still relatively new. As it turns out, Reginald never really had any problem with HIV. I do wonder if it contributed to some of the complications that ultimately allowed the cancer to take over after an initially good response to chemo – some of his doctors thought it probably did, others were less sure, though none of them thought it was a good idea to have HIV and cancer at the same time.)
Since Reginald died, my disco emotions have been amplified, and I’ve found it almost painful to listen to disco or most any other dance music. While it’s far from what I miss most with his loss, one thing I do miss is seeing him dance. As most who knew him well know, Reginald could dance like nobody’s business, and probably the most pleasurable thing about watching him dance was the look of sheer joy he had when dancing. Thinking about it as I write, I’m laughing with the joy of that memory and crying as I know I’ll never see him dance again.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Things I Miss, 5
I miss Reginald’s physical presence: his physical touch as lover; holding hands as we watched TV, drove down the road, or in a thousand other settings; the feel of his short cropped hair on my hand; passing or lingering caresses; the feel of his lips on mine when we kissed.
I miss his distinctive smell, the result of the combination of Old Spice deodorant with his particular body chemistry. (Since part of his scent was a fairly common deodorant, when in public, I often catch hints of the smell of others who are similar in scent to him, but that are always subtly “wrong” because of the combination of the deodorant with different body chemistries.)
I miss the sounds of Reginald: his gentle breathing and small snores as he slept; the particular cadence of his steps through which I often recognized him in public places even when I couldn’t see him (e.g. if we were in a store, and he had gone to get some item and then caught up with me from behind); the sounds of his returning home – the thump of his car tires passing over the metal grate just in front of the garage, the opening and closing of his car door, his key in the door lock – that signaled to me that even if he had only been out for 15 minutes, I didn’t have to miss him anymore.
I miss his distinctive smell, the result of the combination of Old Spice deodorant with his particular body chemistry. (Since part of his scent was a fairly common deodorant, when in public, I often catch hints of the smell of others who are similar in scent to him, but that are always subtly “wrong” because of the combination of the deodorant with different body chemistries.)
I miss the sounds of Reginald: his gentle breathing and small snores as he slept; the particular cadence of his steps through which I often recognized him in public places even when I couldn’t see him (e.g. if we were in a store, and he had gone to get some item and then caught up with me from behind); the sounds of his returning home – the thump of his car tires passing over the metal grate just in front of the garage, the opening and closing of his car door, his key in the door lock – that signaled to me that even if he had only been out for 15 minutes, I didn’t have to miss him anymore.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Things I Miss, 4
I miss Reginald’s sleeping.
Reginald didn’t snore loudly, at least not after he had a minor surgery several years ago to correct a deviated septum, but he made precious little snore-sounds, and that gentle snoring is now painfully missing from my nightscape.
I miss his falling asleep in the car. Reginald fell asleep quite easily when I was driving (though fortunately not while he was driving). His same gentle snores were a common companion on long trips, but even on drives to the mall or to Barnes and Noble 10 to 15 minutes from home, he would often nod off, trusting me to get us there safely.
I miss watching him sleep.
Many nights when I couldn’t sleep for whatever reason I took great pleasure simply watching him asleep, the slow rhythmic movement of his chest up and down. Often enough, this was enough to calm whatever anxieties or fears I was suffering at the moment.
His last several months, there were days upon days (both in the hospital and at home) when his pain, nausea, and fatigue were almost too much for any person to bear. I don’t miss that at all, but I do miss watching him in those moments when he slipped off to sleep on those days, his sufferings eased, at peace at least for the moment, but still alive.
The ten days beginning April 16 this past spring were among the worst of my life. Following the abdominal perforation that almost killed him right then, he lay sedated and unconscious for ten days. Most of that time he was clearly experiencing great pain with his body and I presume some part of his mind. His body would twitch and spasm and he would continually clench his fists. But there were times when the pain would ebb, the twitchings and spasming cease, and he would settle into the gentle rhythms of sleep. In the midst of horror, those moments watching him sleep were good times.
Reginald didn’t snore loudly, at least not after he had a minor surgery several years ago to correct a deviated septum, but he made precious little snore-sounds, and that gentle snoring is now painfully missing from my nightscape.
I miss his falling asleep in the car. Reginald fell asleep quite easily when I was driving (though fortunately not while he was driving). His same gentle snores were a common companion on long trips, but even on drives to the mall or to Barnes and Noble 10 to 15 minutes from home, he would often nod off, trusting me to get us there safely.
I miss watching him sleep.
Many nights when I couldn’t sleep for whatever reason I took great pleasure simply watching him asleep, the slow rhythmic movement of his chest up and down. Often enough, this was enough to calm whatever anxieties or fears I was suffering at the moment.
His last several months, there were days upon days (both in the hospital and at home) when his pain, nausea, and fatigue were almost too much for any person to bear. I don’t miss that at all, but I do miss watching him in those moments when he slipped off to sleep on those days, his sufferings eased, at peace at least for the moment, but still alive.
The ten days beginning April 16 this past spring were among the worst of my life. Following the abdominal perforation that almost killed him right then, he lay sedated and unconscious for ten days. Most of that time he was clearly experiencing great pain with his body and I presume some part of his mind. His body would twitch and spasm and he would continually clench his fists. But there were times when the pain would ebb, the twitchings and spasming cease, and he would settle into the gentle rhythms of sleep. In the midst of horror, those moments watching him sleep were good times.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Things I Miss, 3
It’s now been a month since my dear Reginald died, and the loss has only gotten harder as the reality of his absence and the realization that I’ll never see him again in this life has begun to fully sink in.
One of the things I miss most is his empathy and generosity.
Reginald was the most empathetic person I have ever encountered. This could bring him pain, as the suffering and sorrow of others hurt him dearly, but also great joy, as the successes and happiness of others brought him great happiness, too.
Although he kept up with the news, it was almost a burden for him, for all the news of suffering in the world depressed and saddened him almost as much as his own personal health problems. Though he loved reading history, reading about recent history was difficult for him – books about the 20th century and all the violence and atrocities therein he often had to read in small doses spread over months because they upset him so.
Obviously, it’s not this suffering that resulted from his empathy that I miss, but his kindness and generosity that were linked with his empathy. One fond memory I have (fond though wrapped within pain) is from mid-April of this year. I had been teaching all day when I got a phone call from Reginald that he had gone to the emergency room with very severe abdominal pain (pain, we soon found out, stemming from the abdominal perforation that almost killed him at that point). I rushed to the emergency room, and when I entered the waiting room I found him stooped over with pain walking as best he could across the room to give a vomit basin to another man who was getting sick. It was so typical of Reginald that of an entire roomful of people, it was he, doubled over with pain more severe than I can imagine from something that very nearly killed him, that took the trouble to perform this small act of kindness. I don’t want to knock the other people there – they were all either sick or injured themselves, or tending to a loved one in that condition – but simply to acknowledge the way in which he was almost as concerned with others as himself even in the worst of circumstances. Likewise, towards the end of his life, while he was certainly scared and didn’t want to die, he was more concerned that I and others were suffering on account of losing him.
Reginald internalized the experiences of others to a great extent, so that suffering in the world caused great pain to him, but the happier side of this was that the successes and joys of those he cared about brought him intense pleasure as well. He was always greatly pleased by the accomplishments of those around him, with so far as I could tell never a hint of the secret jealousy and envy that so frequently accompanies the success of others for many, if not most people.
The many online tributes that have been posted in the past month are full of tales of his generosity to his fellow poets and/or friends. Though he was quick to acknowledge those who had been important to his success in life generally and in poetry and other writing (see his many writings about his mother or the tributes to Alvin Feinman on his blog), he had clawed his way to success as a writer largely through his own efforts without much benefit of patronage or personal ties to bigwigs. While no one is fully the proverbial “self-made man,” he was about as close as they come.
His response to this was to do what he could to help others to success to the extent he could in a way few had done for him. Occasionally he did this when another course of action might have done more for his own career. For example, with his first poetry anthology, The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, Reginald had multiple reasons for selecting the poets he did: they’re all excellent poets, they share certain qualities in their work, making for a coherent volume. At the same time, Reginald knew that he could probably do more for his own career by selecting more established poets (i.e. most everyone likes being invited to be part of such projects, and choosing more established poets would have established or reaffirmed personal connections for Reginald with people more established in their careers and generally more powerful), but he chose to focus that anthology on less established, emerging poets, partly because he thought it would be more interesting for readers, but more importantly because he felt that in that way he could contribute to the success of their careers as writers in a way that wouldn’t have been the case with writers already more established.
One of the things I miss most is his empathy and generosity.
Reginald was the most empathetic person I have ever encountered. This could bring him pain, as the suffering and sorrow of others hurt him dearly, but also great joy, as the successes and happiness of others brought him great happiness, too.
Although he kept up with the news, it was almost a burden for him, for all the news of suffering in the world depressed and saddened him almost as much as his own personal health problems. Though he loved reading history, reading about recent history was difficult for him – books about the 20th century and all the violence and atrocities therein he often had to read in small doses spread over months because they upset him so.
Obviously, it’s not this suffering that resulted from his empathy that I miss, but his kindness and generosity that were linked with his empathy. One fond memory I have (fond though wrapped within pain) is from mid-April of this year. I had been teaching all day when I got a phone call from Reginald that he had gone to the emergency room with very severe abdominal pain (pain, we soon found out, stemming from the abdominal perforation that almost killed him at that point). I rushed to the emergency room, and when I entered the waiting room I found him stooped over with pain walking as best he could across the room to give a vomit basin to another man who was getting sick. It was so typical of Reginald that of an entire roomful of people, it was he, doubled over with pain more severe than I can imagine from something that very nearly killed him, that took the trouble to perform this small act of kindness. I don’t want to knock the other people there – they were all either sick or injured themselves, or tending to a loved one in that condition – but simply to acknowledge the way in which he was almost as concerned with others as himself even in the worst of circumstances. Likewise, towards the end of his life, while he was certainly scared and didn’t want to die, he was more concerned that I and others were suffering on account of losing him.
Reginald internalized the experiences of others to a great extent, so that suffering in the world caused great pain to him, but the happier side of this was that the successes and joys of those he cared about brought him intense pleasure as well. He was always greatly pleased by the accomplishments of those around him, with so far as I could tell never a hint of the secret jealousy and envy that so frequently accompanies the success of others for many, if not most people.
The many online tributes that have been posted in the past month are full of tales of his generosity to his fellow poets and/or friends. Though he was quick to acknowledge those who had been important to his success in life generally and in poetry and other writing (see his many writings about his mother or the tributes to Alvin Feinman on his blog), he had clawed his way to success as a writer largely through his own efforts without much benefit of patronage or personal ties to bigwigs. While no one is fully the proverbial “self-made man,” he was about as close as they come.
His response to this was to do what he could to help others to success to the extent he could in a way few had done for him. Occasionally he did this when another course of action might have done more for his own career. For example, with his first poetry anthology, The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, Reginald had multiple reasons for selecting the poets he did: they’re all excellent poets, they share certain qualities in their work, making for a coherent volume. At the same time, Reginald knew that he could probably do more for his own career by selecting more established poets (i.e. most everyone likes being invited to be part of such projects, and choosing more established poets would have established or reaffirmed personal connections for Reginald with people more established in their careers and generally more powerful), but he chose to focus that anthology on less established, emerging poets, partly because he thought it would be more interesting for readers, but more importantly because he felt that in that way he could contribute to the success of their careers as writers in a way that wouldn’t have been the case with writers already more established.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Things I Miss, 2
I miss caring for and tending to Reginald.
I miss cooking for him when he could keep some food down – always iffy, since he was on chemotherapy from last December through April, and on multiple antibiotics continuously from then on. I miss getting him cans of Ensure or Gatorade when those were the only things he could keep down.
I miss rigging up and administering IV drip medications, and changing surgical wound dressings.
I miss the rare good days in the hospital – the days when Reginald didn’t have too much pain or nausea, and I would sit reading or working on my laptop while he slept or worked on his own computer.
I miss driving him around town to doctors’ visits – over the last several months, when he wasn’t in the hospital, he saw one or another doctor almost every day.
A few days ago I was talking with someone on the phone and mentioned that there were some health care smells that I’d as soon never smell again, alcohol swabs, wound prep swabs, saline solution. That wasn’t quite right: I long to smell those smells, but while nursing him at home or being with him while nurses tend to him in the hospital. I miss the less pleasant bile and vomit smells, too, and the task of emptying and cleaning vomit basins.
To be clear: I don’t miss the bad smells and the vomit and other fluids themselves. Even less do I miss the suffering, pain, and nausea Reginald felt for so long. But much of the past year, all I could do was tend to him the best I could and show my love by doing so. I often felt miserable to not be able to do more – nursing him often felt like the least I could do when it was the most I could do – but I miss being able to at least do that.
I miss cooking for him when he could keep some food down – always iffy, since he was on chemotherapy from last December through April, and on multiple antibiotics continuously from then on. I miss getting him cans of Ensure or Gatorade when those were the only things he could keep down.
I miss rigging up and administering IV drip medications, and changing surgical wound dressings.
I miss the rare good days in the hospital – the days when Reginald didn’t have too much pain or nausea, and I would sit reading or working on my laptop while he slept or worked on his own computer.
I miss driving him around town to doctors’ visits – over the last several months, when he wasn’t in the hospital, he saw one or another doctor almost every day.
A few days ago I was talking with someone on the phone and mentioned that there were some health care smells that I’d as soon never smell again, alcohol swabs, wound prep swabs, saline solution. That wasn’t quite right: I long to smell those smells, but while nursing him at home or being with him while nurses tend to him in the hospital. I miss the less pleasant bile and vomit smells, too, and the task of emptying and cleaning vomit basins.
To be clear: I don’t miss the bad smells and the vomit and other fluids themselves. Even less do I miss the suffering, pain, and nausea Reginald felt for so long. But much of the past year, all I could do was tend to him the best I could and show my love by doing so. I often felt miserable to not be able to do more – nursing him often felt like the least I could do when it was the most I could do – but I miss being able to at least do that.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Things I Miss
It’s been a bit over two weeks since my dear Reginald passed. It hasn’t fully sunk in, I don’t think. I know he’s gone, but I find myself several times a day thinking things like, “I’ve got to tell Reginald about that…” At the same time, I miss him profoundly.
Most of all I miss our love. I miss how much he loved me and while I’ll always love him, I’ll miss being able to say it and show it to him. I’ll always treasure the time we had, or for that matter that the last thing I said to him was “I love you” and that the last thing he said was “I love you” to me – but that’s not enough, and I don’t think it ever will be.
One form our love and communion took was conversation, and on a daily level, I’ll miss that about as much as anything. We were nearly continuously together every day, and that because we wanted to be, and we talked all the time about nearly everything.
We talked about writing – about different literary forms, about the skills and experience of writing poetry, ethnography, fiction, essays, blogs, and other forms, about different forms as art or not art, about the relation between writing and society. We discussed music, something we’re both passionate about – from Britten to boy bands, the state of the music industry and music recording, why some people still seem to viscerally react to Schoenberg, what we liked or disliked about various music. We talked about politics and paleontology, generally agreeing that politics was probably more important but paleontology more interesting, finding debates about punctuated equilibrium or whether sauropods were likely endotherms, ectotherms, or homeotherms more interesting than Obama vs. McCain. We discussed race and racism, food in its many varieties and proper cooking of each, The Simpsons, the relative merits of science fiction television shows, whatever either of us was reading (which gave plenty of topics to explore), culture and history.
Not only did we share wide ranging interests, but he was always smart and knowledgeable about whatever we discussed. (Reginald’s knowledge of world history was particularly formidable. I’ve never encountered directly or indirectly anyone else as knowledgeable about history in general – and I include the writers of world histories. His many world history books are filled with marginal notes correcting the small errors of detail he found.) I don’t think I’ll ever have another conversation as interesting, challenging, or deep as the one we had the last 8 ½ years.
Our conversation, as with that of most couples I presume, was also larded with references that only made sense to the two of us. I miss already being able to say things like “No zombie turkey” or “It’s not yummy” or “Nothing Cake” or “Are you going to the thing?” and make any sense to someone, at least not without such convoluted explanation as to obviate their use as a shorthand – and a shorthand for a range of past shared experience that wouldn’t be explained anyway even with the most elaborate of explanations.
Most of all I miss our love. I miss how much he loved me and while I’ll always love him, I’ll miss being able to say it and show it to him. I’ll always treasure the time we had, or for that matter that the last thing I said to him was “I love you” and that the last thing he said was “I love you” to me – but that’s not enough, and I don’t think it ever will be.
One form our love and communion took was conversation, and on a daily level, I’ll miss that about as much as anything. We were nearly continuously together every day, and that because we wanted to be, and we talked all the time about nearly everything.
We talked about writing – about different literary forms, about the skills and experience of writing poetry, ethnography, fiction, essays, blogs, and other forms, about different forms as art or not art, about the relation between writing and society. We discussed music, something we’re both passionate about – from Britten to boy bands, the state of the music industry and music recording, why some people still seem to viscerally react to Schoenberg, what we liked or disliked about various music. We talked about politics and paleontology, generally agreeing that politics was probably more important but paleontology more interesting, finding debates about punctuated equilibrium or whether sauropods were likely endotherms, ectotherms, or homeotherms more interesting than Obama vs. McCain. We discussed race and racism, food in its many varieties and proper cooking of each, The Simpsons, the relative merits of science fiction television shows, whatever either of us was reading (which gave plenty of topics to explore), culture and history.
Not only did we share wide ranging interests, but he was always smart and knowledgeable about whatever we discussed. (Reginald’s knowledge of world history was particularly formidable. I’ve never encountered directly or indirectly anyone else as knowledgeable about history in general – and I include the writers of world histories. His many world history books are filled with marginal notes correcting the small errors of detail he found.) I don’t think I’ll ever have another conversation as interesting, challenging, or deep as the one we had the last 8 ½ years.
Our conversation, as with that of most couples I presume, was also larded with references that only made sense to the two of us. I miss already being able to say things like “No zombie turkey” or “It’s not yummy” or “Nothing Cake” or “Are you going to the thing?” and make any sense to someone, at least not without such convoluted explanation as to obviate their use as a shorthand – and a shorthand for a range of past shared experience that wouldn’t be explained anyway even with the most elaborate of explanations.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Reginald Shepherd, 1963 - 2008
Reginald Shepherd, who was my partner, best friend, lover, confidante, and so much more, died this past week on September 10 after a fight with cancer. The following is a short piece about Reginald I wrote for his memorial service, which was held yesterday.
Reginald Shepherd, 1963 - 2008
Reginald Shepherd was born April 10, 1963 in New York City and passed away September 10, 2008 in Pensacola, surrounded by people whom he loved and who loved him.
Reginald was the son of Blanche Berry, who was originally from Macon, Georgia. He grew up in Bronx, New York, along with a sister, Regina Graham. He moved to Macon and lived with his aunt, Mildred Swint, after the death of his mother when he was fifteen.
Reginald earned a B.A. degree from Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, and M.F.A. degrees in Creative Writing from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the University of Iowa in Iowa City. He taught literature and creative writing, most recently at Antioch University and earlier at the University of West Florida, Cornell University, and Northern Illinois University, and he was remarkably dedicated to his students and the craft of writing.
Reginald was a magnificent writer. He published five books of poetry (Some Are Drowning; Angel, Interrupted; Wrong; Otherhood; and Fata Morgana) and a book of essays (Orpheus in the Bronx), and he edited two poetry anthologies (The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries and Lyric Postmodernisms). He recently completed a sixth book of poetry and a second volume of essays that will be published posthumously. Among many awards for his writing, he most recently earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 and won the 2007 silver medal for poetry in the Florida Book Awards.
Reginald met his partner, Robert Philen, in December, 1999 in Ithaca, New York, and ever since, their relationship has grown, based in conversation, compassion, sharing, friendship, passion, and profound love. The two have lived in Pensacola since July, 2001.
Over the past year, Reginald faced tremendous adversity and continuous pain from a series of illnesses related to cancer, but he faced it all with profound strength and courage, tenacity, love of life – and gentleness, dignity, and innocence. He fought long and hard against the illness, but as one nurse who worked with him toward the end put it, “He remained a gentleman to the end.”
Any of us who knew Reginald are devastated and heartbroken at this loss, and we will miss his unique combination of verve and vivacity, wit and intelligence, tenacity and strength, gentleness, empathy, and sweetness, generosity and innocence. We will also, despite our profound sadness, remain ennobled, happy, and blessed by the time we spent with him.
Reginald Shepherd, 1963 - 2008
Reginald Shepherd was born April 10, 1963 in New York City and passed away September 10, 2008 in Pensacola, surrounded by people whom he loved and who loved him.
Reginald was the son of Blanche Berry, who was originally from Macon, Georgia. He grew up in Bronx, New York, along with a sister, Regina Graham. He moved to Macon and lived with his aunt, Mildred Swint, after the death of his mother when he was fifteen.
Reginald earned a B.A. degree from Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, and M.F.A. degrees in Creative Writing from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the University of Iowa in Iowa City. He taught literature and creative writing, most recently at Antioch University and earlier at the University of West Florida, Cornell University, and Northern Illinois University, and he was remarkably dedicated to his students and the craft of writing.
Reginald was a magnificent writer. He published five books of poetry (Some Are Drowning; Angel, Interrupted; Wrong; Otherhood; and Fata Morgana) and a book of essays (Orpheus in the Bronx), and he edited two poetry anthologies (The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries and Lyric Postmodernisms). He recently completed a sixth book of poetry and a second volume of essays that will be published posthumously. Among many awards for his writing, he most recently earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 and won the 2007 silver medal for poetry in the Florida Book Awards.
Reginald met his partner, Robert Philen, in December, 1999 in Ithaca, New York, and ever since, their relationship has grown, based in conversation, compassion, sharing, friendship, passion, and profound love. The two have lived in Pensacola since July, 2001.
Over the past year, Reginald faced tremendous adversity and continuous pain from a series of illnesses related to cancer, but he faced it all with profound strength and courage, tenacity, love of life – and gentleness, dignity, and innocence. He fought long and hard against the illness, but as one nurse who worked with him toward the end put it, “He remained a gentleman to the end.”
Any of us who knew Reginald are devastated and heartbroken at this loss, and we will miss his unique combination of verve and vivacity, wit and intelligence, tenacity and strength, gentleness, empathy, and sweetness, generosity and innocence. We will also, despite our profound sadness, remain ennobled, happy, and blessed by the time we spent with him.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Where I've Been
I’ve been a bit preoccupied lately.
In mid-April, my partner, Reginald Shepherd, suffered a serious, nearly fatal, medical crisis. For reasons still unknown, a perforation opened in his small intestine, leading to severe abdominal infection and peritonitis, blood poisoning (one of the things that nearly killed him), catastrophically low blood pressure (think in the neighborhood of 40 over 20) and a heart attack, kidney failure for a short period at the height of the crisis, about ten days on a ventilator and on hallucination-provoking sedatives, three surgeries over the course of those ten days, two weeks (that included the aforementioned ten days) in the intensive care unit, three more weeks in the hospital, and an ongoing recovery process at home. See Speech After Long Silence, Tiene Dolor?, and Long Hard Road Out Of Hell for Reginald’s account of the ordeal.
Reginald’s medical trials didn’t begin in mid-April. The whole past year has been quite rough for him, with a series of emergency room visits (in three separate states), that led in November to diagnosis with colon cancer, a successful surgery to remove the tumor, but also the discovery of the spread of the cancer to the liver, followed by many rounds of chemotherapy and a process called radiofrequency ablation to cook the two tumors on the liver. In short, the situation that began in April occurred after a very trying year and after we were beginning to think (with good reason – his cancer prognosis looked and looks pretty good) his medical condition was under control. As a result, I have mixed feelings about the timing of this crisis: after the entire past year and everything he and we have been through, especially once things were looking up, it’s frustrating, frightening, even shocking to have something else come along to make “Stage 4 Metastatic Cancer” seem like a walk in the park, while at the same time, if this was going to happen, better in mid-April than a few months earlier when the cancer was very much not under control, when even the best case recovery from the acute crisis of blood poisoning would have meant a long delay of chemotherapy at a critical juncture.
As a result of the past year, and especially the last couple months, I have a somewhat different perspective on health, illness, doctors, nurses, medical care and institutions than I did a year ago, but more on that over my next few posts.
In mid-April, my partner, Reginald Shepherd, suffered a serious, nearly fatal, medical crisis. For reasons still unknown, a perforation opened in his small intestine, leading to severe abdominal infection and peritonitis, blood poisoning (one of the things that nearly killed him), catastrophically low blood pressure (think in the neighborhood of 40 over 20) and a heart attack, kidney failure for a short period at the height of the crisis, about ten days on a ventilator and on hallucination-provoking sedatives, three surgeries over the course of those ten days, two weeks (that included the aforementioned ten days) in the intensive care unit, three more weeks in the hospital, and an ongoing recovery process at home. See Speech After Long Silence, Tiene Dolor?, and Long Hard Road Out Of Hell for Reginald’s account of the ordeal.
Reginald’s medical trials didn’t begin in mid-April. The whole past year has been quite rough for him, with a series of emergency room visits (in three separate states), that led in November to diagnosis with colon cancer, a successful surgery to remove the tumor, but also the discovery of the spread of the cancer to the liver, followed by many rounds of chemotherapy and a process called radiofrequency ablation to cook the two tumors on the liver. In short, the situation that began in April occurred after a very trying year and after we were beginning to think (with good reason – his cancer prognosis looked and looks pretty good) his medical condition was under control. As a result, I have mixed feelings about the timing of this crisis: after the entire past year and everything he and we have been through, especially once things were looking up, it’s frustrating, frightening, even shocking to have something else come along to make “Stage 4 Metastatic Cancer” seem like a walk in the park, while at the same time, if this was going to happen, better in mid-April than a few months earlier when the cancer was very much not under control, when even the best case recovery from the acute crisis of blood poisoning would have meant a long delay of chemotherapy at a critical juncture.
As a result of the past year, and especially the last couple months, I have a somewhat different perspective on health, illness, doctors, nurses, medical care and institutions than I did a year ago, but more on that over my next few posts.
Friday, January 18, 2008
My Favorite Books of 2007 (and One of 2008 So Far), Part II
11. Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos, Europa Editions.
This is my favorite of the books I’ve read in 2008 so far. It’s the first of three books in a crime/mystery series set in Marseilles. The genre is not one I usually go in for, but the writing propels one forward through the text. It also contains some of the best writing about food I’ve encountered in a work that wasn’t dedicated to food writing.
12. Etgar Keret, The Nimrod Flipout, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
One blurb writer, Gary Shteyngart, writes of this short story collection that it is “The best work of literature to come out of Israel in the last five thousand years – better than Leviticus and nearly as funny.” Probably a bit much, but this is an entertaining collection of surreal stories featuring memorable characters such as the beautiful woman who transforms into a fat, hard-drinking, male soccer fan at night.
13. Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, New York Review Books.
One of the finest and most memorable pieces of surrealist writing I’ve encountered, made the more surreal because of the fact that it’s a work of non-fiction, by the Italian journalist Malaparte writing during World War II. Two mental images from the work will always stay with me: one of German tank drivers in Ukraine swerving in panic to attempt to avoid a pack of dogs running toward them across an open plain, dogs apparently trained to run underneath armored vehicles and strapped with magnetic bombs dooming dogs and tank crews alike; the other of horses driven by forest fire into a Finnish lake in winter, frozen solid by the onset of a winter storm, and their frozen, contorted heads remaining above the frozen lake and serving occasionally as benches for occupying soldiers throughout the winter. His account of occupied Poland is heartrending, the superficial gentility of Polish nobles and occupying Germans alongside the horrors of the Jewish ghettoes.
14. Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Knopf.
This novel was highly hyped, with reviews of the novel in practically every publication that regularly reviews fiction, and with almost universally glowing reviews at that. It’s one of the few novels I’ve read that was so universally acclaimed that I felt lived up to its promise.
This was actually the first McCarthy novel I had read, and at the time I read it, it was probably the bleakest work of fiction I had ever read.
While it’s good enough to transcend genre, it can be placed into a genre of post-apocalyptic fiction.
Most post-apocalyptic fiction, whether in literature or movies, is set either just after a cataclysmic event (think The Day After Tomorrow or Alas, Babylon), with initial survivors coping with the immediate, and sometimes horrific aftermath, but without a sense of the long term consequences of cataclysm, or set long after the apocalypse in question (think about the Mad Max films, particulary The Road Warrior), with human societies having had some time to adapt to the changed circumstances (I wouldn’t want to live in the world of The Road Warrior, but it’s a world in which people could live).
The Road is different in this respect. Some major catastrophe has occurred, with nuclear winter like effects (possibly nuclear attack or major meteor impact, the latter not explicitly indicated in the text but indicated by McCarthy in a recent article in Rolling Stone). The catastrophe has occurred long enough ago that there is a sort of winding down of initially surviving society – no food will grow, there’s essentially nothing wild to forage, and all the easy pickings of grocery store canned goods are long gone – but not long enough ago for anything to have seriously begun any process of natural recovery. It’s a novel set in the lowest point for life following an earth-changing catastrophe.
The novel is also bleak in McCarthy’s pessimism about human nature. Most people in the book are vicious survivors, as ready to kill and eat other survivors (as just about the only food source left) as anything else. Still, there is a tender and redemptive quality (even without anything resembling a clearly happy ending) to the relationship between the two main characters, a man and his son on the road traveling, hoping to find a better place.
15. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Vintage.
The Road had been the bleakest piece of fiction I had read until, after reading it, I picked up this older McCarthy novel. It’s set in the American West of the 19th Century, and is a novel with little intimacy and much casual brutality and violence that still manages to be poignant and even beautiful. McCarthy’s pessimistic view of human nature is clearly on display here. Part of me wants to reject this pessimism, but I know enough of the history of human interactions of the past few centuries (for just a few highlights, think about the 19th Century Indian Wars of the American West, American slavery and the Civil War, the Armenian genocide, the trench warfare of WWI, the Holocaust, the various gulags, great leaps and cultural revolutions, and killing fields of the Soviet Union, China, or Cambodia, the Nanjing massacres, the fire bombings of WWII, Rwanda, Darfur) to realize that McCarthy’s pessimism is at least as valid a perspective as any other.
16. Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
I previously wrote about this book (see “Comments on Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane”). This is the best book about music I read last year. Not a Coltrane biography so much as a “biography” of his sound, I found this to be a “delicious” read. It was one of those books I found hard to set down, but that I forced myself to ration because I knew that I’d be sad when I finished it.
17. Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992 – 95, Fantagraphics Books.
Sacco is a journalist who works in an unconventional medium – graphic art, or more prosaically: comics. Sacco’s presentation of a community under siege in desperate circumstances is, of course, heart-rending for its content alone. His work has some of the same type of impact that good photo-journalism can have, perhaps even more so in that he is able to design and construct his imagery with even freer reign than a photographer in order to have maximum effect upon the reader.
18. Albert Sánchez Piñol, Cold Skin, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
The protagonist is dropped off on a small, lonely island in the southern ocean around Antarctica, well off normal shipping lanes, to serve as a weather observer for a year, only to be continuously besieged by sea monsters. If that sort of thing interests you, this is a great novel. Even if that sort of thing doesn’t interest you, this is a great novel, but you probably wouldn’t like it.
19. José Saramago, Blindness, Harcourt.
One of those “what if” novels I mentioned liking in the introduction to the first part of this list, in this case the premise being “What if everyone went blind at once?” The novel can, of course, be read as allegory – what screams out more for allegorical interpretation than everyone being blind (other than perhaps a plague of zombies) – but I found the novel more interesting and engaging simply as a logical exploration of its starting premise – what would likely happen if everyone (or at least nearly everyone) went blind at once, if everyone lost what is for us humans a primary sense for experiencing the world.
20. Reginald Shepherd, Fata Morgana, University of Pittsburgh Press.
I have to like this book. It’s written by my partner. It’s dedicated to me, as are many of the poems contained therein. Still, even if I weren’t required to love it, I’m confident I would have found this poetry collection to be one of my favorite books of the year. I’m always struck by and fond of the vivid imagery of Shepherd’s poetry. His poetry is lyrical and fearlessly explores feeling and sentiment, something missing from much contemporary poetry that revels in irony, while never devolving into “sentimentality.”
20 1/2. By the way, Shepherd’s most recent book, a collection of essays, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, has just been published by the University of Michigan Press. I’ve read all of the powerful essays in this essay collection, and considered adding it also to this favorite books of 2007 list. However, I realize that I’ve not yet sat down and read the essays as a collective work yet, so instead I look forward to including it a year from now on my favorite books of 2008 list.
This is my favorite of the books I’ve read in 2008 so far. It’s the first of three books in a crime/mystery series set in Marseilles. The genre is not one I usually go in for, but the writing propels one forward through the text. It also contains some of the best writing about food I’ve encountered in a work that wasn’t dedicated to food writing.
12. Etgar Keret, The Nimrod Flipout, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
One blurb writer, Gary Shteyngart, writes of this short story collection that it is “The best work of literature to come out of Israel in the last five thousand years – better than Leviticus and nearly as funny.” Probably a bit much, but this is an entertaining collection of surreal stories featuring memorable characters such as the beautiful woman who transforms into a fat, hard-drinking, male soccer fan at night.
13. Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, New York Review Books.
One of the finest and most memorable pieces of surrealist writing I’ve encountered, made the more surreal because of the fact that it’s a work of non-fiction, by the Italian journalist Malaparte writing during World War II. Two mental images from the work will always stay with me: one of German tank drivers in Ukraine swerving in panic to attempt to avoid a pack of dogs running toward them across an open plain, dogs apparently trained to run underneath armored vehicles and strapped with magnetic bombs dooming dogs and tank crews alike; the other of horses driven by forest fire into a Finnish lake in winter, frozen solid by the onset of a winter storm, and their frozen, contorted heads remaining above the frozen lake and serving occasionally as benches for occupying soldiers throughout the winter. His account of occupied Poland is heartrending, the superficial gentility of Polish nobles and occupying Germans alongside the horrors of the Jewish ghettoes.
14. Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Knopf.
This novel was highly hyped, with reviews of the novel in practically every publication that regularly reviews fiction, and with almost universally glowing reviews at that. It’s one of the few novels I’ve read that was so universally acclaimed that I felt lived up to its promise.
This was actually the first McCarthy novel I had read, and at the time I read it, it was probably the bleakest work of fiction I had ever read.
While it’s good enough to transcend genre, it can be placed into a genre of post-apocalyptic fiction.
Most post-apocalyptic fiction, whether in literature or movies, is set either just after a cataclysmic event (think The Day After Tomorrow or Alas, Babylon), with initial survivors coping with the immediate, and sometimes horrific aftermath, but without a sense of the long term consequences of cataclysm, or set long after the apocalypse in question (think about the Mad Max films, particulary The Road Warrior), with human societies having had some time to adapt to the changed circumstances (I wouldn’t want to live in the world of The Road Warrior, but it’s a world in which people could live).
The Road is different in this respect. Some major catastrophe has occurred, with nuclear winter like effects (possibly nuclear attack or major meteor impact, the latter not explicitly indicated in the text but indicated by McCarthy in a recent article in Rolling Stone). The catastrophe has occurred long enough ago that there is a sort of winding down of initially surviving society – no food will grow, there’s essentially nothing wild to forage, and all the easy pickings of grocery store canned goods are long gone – but not long enough ago for anything to have seriously begun any process of natural recovery. It’s a novel set in the lowest point for life following an earth-changing catastrophe.
The novel is also bleak in McCarthy’s pessimism about human nature. Most people in the book are vicious survivors, as ready to kill and eat other survivors (as just about the only food source left) as anything else. Still, there is a tender and redemptive quality (even without anything resembling a clearly happy ending) to the relationship between the two main characters, a man and his son on the road traveling, hoping to find a better place.
15. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Vintage.
The Road had been the bleakest piece of fiction I had read until, after reading it, I picked up this older McCarthy novel. It’s set in the American West of the 19th Century, and is a novel with little intimacy and much casual brutality and violence that still manages to be poignant and even beautiful. McCarthy’s pessimistic view of human nature is clearly on display here. Part of me wants to reject this pessimism, but I know enough of the history of human interactions of the past few centuries (for just a few highlights, think about the 19th Century Indian Wars of the American West, American slavery and the Civil War, the Armenian genocide, the trench warfare of WWI, the Holocaust, the various gulags, great leaps and cultural revolutions, and killing fields of the Soviet Union, China, or Cambodia, the Nanjing massacres, the fire bombings of WWII, Rwanda, Darfur) to realize that McCarthy’s pessimism is at least as valid a perspective as any other.
16. Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
I previously wrote about this book (see “Comments on Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane”). This is the best book about music I read last year. Not a Coltrane biography so much as a “biography” of his sound, I found this to be a “delicious” read. It was one of those books I found hard to set down, but that I forced myself to ration because I knew that I’d be sad when I finished it.
17. Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992 – 95, Fantagraphics Books.
Sacco is a journalist who works in an unconventional medium – graphic art, or more prosaically: comics. Sacco’s presentation of a community under siege in desperate circumstances is, of course, heart-rending for its content alone. His work has some of the same type of impact that good photo-journalism can have, perhaps even more so in that he is able to design and construct his imagery with even freer reign than a photographer in order to have maximum effect upon the reader.
18. Albert Sánchez Piñol, Cold Skin, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
The protagonist is dropped off on a small, lonely island in the southern ocean around Antarctica, well off normal shipping lanes, to serve as a weather observer for a year, only to be continuously besieged by sea monsters. If that sort of thing interests you, this is a great novel. Even if that sort of thing doesn’t interest you, this is a great novel, but you probably wouldn’t like it.
19. José Saramago, Blindness, Harcourt.
One of those “what if” novels I mentioned liking in the introduction to the first part of this list, in this case the premise being “What if everyone went blind at once?” The novel can, of course, be read as allegory – what screams out more for allegorical interpretation than everyone being blind (other than perhaps a plague of zombies) – but I found the novel more interesting and engaging simply as a logical exploration of its starting premise – what would likely happen if everyone (or at least nearly everyone) went blind at once, if everyone lost what is for us humans a primary sense for experiencing the world.
20. Reginald Shepherd, Fata Morgana, University of Pittsburgh Press.
I have to like this book. It’s written by my partner. It’s dedicated to me, as are many of the poems contained therein. Still, even if I weren’t required to love it, I’m confident I would have found this poetry collection to be one of my favorite books of the year. I’m always struck by and fond of the vivid imagery of Shepherd’s poetry. His poetry is lyrical and fearlessly explores feeling and sentiment, something missing from much contemporary poetry that revels in irony, while never devolving into “sentimentality.”
20 1/2. By the way, Shepherd’s most recent book, a collection of essays, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, has just been published by the University of Michigan Press. I’ve read all of the powerful essays in this essay collection, and considered adding it also to this favorite books of 2007 list. However, I realize that I’ve not yet sat down and read the essays as a collective work yet, so instead I look forward to including it a year from now on my favorite books of 2008 list.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Reginald Shepherd on Samuel R. Delany
On his blog, Reginald Shepherd has written an engaging overview of the work of science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, On Samuel R. Delany.
Here’s a quotation from Shepherd’s essay:
“Samuel R. Delany is a prolific science fiction writer, memoirist, self-described pornographer, literary critic, and social commentator. Since the publication in 1962 (when he was twenty) of his first book, The Jewels of Aptor, he has published numerous novels, short stories, essays, interviews, cultural commentary, and memoirs. What's most remarkable about this prodigious output is its consistent quality, wide range, and continual development. Delany has never been one to repeat himself or rest on his laurels. Unlike some writers who, beginning in the genre and subsequently seeking literary respectability, and despite his numerous works in other genres, Delany has always strongly identified himself as a science fiction writer. But his work has always pushed at and expanded the boundaries and conventions of the field, constantly seeking out new forms, ideas, and themes. Indeed, his work has become more challenging and complex over the course of his career.”
I’ve discussed Delany on this blog before (“Uses of Myth” and “Myth, Mythic Literacy, and Contemporary Culture”). Science fiction in general is a genre ethnographers should take seriously, given the parallel ways in which both involve the presentation in textual form of plausible worlds (though with the key difference that ethnography is ideally based on empirical fieldwork). Delany in particular is a science fiction writer worth taking seriously by anthropologists both for the consistently stimulating quality of his work and for the ways in which he takes seriously anthropological ideas and ideas from across the humanities and social sciences and incorporates them into his construction of plausible worlds.
Here is Shepherd again on a Delany novel that may be of particular interest to anthropologists:
“Babel-17 (1966), inspired by the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determnism (that our language controls our thought), centers on the efforts of the poet Rydra Wong to crack what is believed to be a military code used by an alien race with whom Earth is at war. What she finally discovers is that this code is a highly exact and analytical language which has no word for “I,” and thus no concept of individual identity. The novel examines the capacity of culture and language not only to control the way people see and act in the world but to determine who they are as persons. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein so famously wrote. Two different words imply two different worlds.”
Here’s a quotation from Shepherd’s essay:
“Samuel R. Delany is a prolific science fiction writer, memoirist, self-described pornographer, literary critic, and social commentator. Since the publication in 1962 (when he was twenty) of his first book, The Jewels of Aptor, he has published numerous novels, short stories, essays, interviews, cultural commentary, and memoirs. What's most remarkable about this prodigious output is its consistent quality, wide range, and continual development. Delany has never been one to repeat himself or rest on his laurels. Unlike some writers who, beginning in the genre and subsequently seeking literary respectability, and despite his numerous works in other genres, Delany has always strongly identified himself as a science fiction writer. But his work has always pushed at and expanded the boundaries and conventions of the field, constantly seeking out new forms, ideas, and themes. Indeed, his work has become more challenging and complex over the course of his career.”
I’ve discussed Delany on this blog before (“Uses of Myth” and “Myth, Mythic Literacy, and Contemporary Culture”). Science fiction in general is a genre ethnographers should take seriously, given the parallel ways in which both involve the presentation in textual form of plausible worlds (though with the key difference that ethnography is ideally based on empirical fieldwork). Delany in particular is a science fiction writer worth taking seriously by anthropologists both for the consistently stimulating quality of his work and for the ways in which he takes seriously anthropological ideas and ideas from across the humanities and social sciences and incorporates them into his construction of plausible worlds.
Here is Shepherd again on a Delany novel that may be of particular interest to anthropologists:
“Babel-17 (1966), inspired by the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determnism (that our language controls our thought), centers on the efforts of the poet Rydra Wong to crack what is believed to be a military code used by an alien race with whom Earth is at war. What she finally discovers is that this code is a highly exact and analytical language which has no word for “I,” and thus no concept of individual identity. The novel examines the capacity of culture and language not only to control the way people see and act in the world but to determine who they are as persons. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein so famously wrote. Two different words imply two different worlds.”
Monday, October 8, 2007
Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing
The following is a revision of an earlier blog post:
Most cultural anthropologists would agree that ethnographic and other anthropological writing should be as clear as possible. A primary goal of ethnographic writing is to communicate a sense or understanding of a particular cultural context. Clear writing facilitates this and unclear or difficult writing obstructs this. When engaging in “public anthropology” and attempting to communicate anthropological understandings to an interested lay audience, the stricture to write clearly is even stronger.
Something that anthropologists have not discussed much, though, is what exactly constitutes “clarity” or “difficulty” in writing. There is a general sense that we should avoid overly complex syntax or particular vocabulary that our intended audience might not be familiar with (or at least to clearly explain complex vocabulary when necessary), but not much consideration that there might be different types of difficulty (and hence different types of clarity) that might call for their own particular responses.
Here, I find the recent work of Reginald Shepherd illuminating. Shepherd precisely delineates types or sorts of difficulty in another genre of writing, poetry. What is difficulty in general? Shepherd argues (and I agree) that difficulty in writing involves in one way or another violating readerly expectations. This can be good or bad, a barrier to grasping meaning and/or a spur to further experience and pleasure, but difficulty in its different varieties always involves this violation of expectations (that the words used will be familiar, that its referents will be clear, that the sense of the text “makes sense,” that the text will have a recognizable and clearly interpretable form).
Shepherd discusses five types of difficulty, which he identifies as: lexical difficulty, allusive difficulty, syntactical difficulty, semantic difficulty (with two varieties – explicative and interpretive difficulties), and formal difficulty.
A major difference in poetic and ethnographic writing has to do with the goals or motivations for writing. With poetry, a primary goal is to create a unique sensuous object with its own qualities to be experienced in itself (something that happens with any text, but something that is a primary function of literary writing, including poetry). The poem may make reference to something in the world outside the poem through the sense of the words, but it need not necessarily do so, and in any case, that is not the main raison d’etre for poetry (and if you want to communicate something directly and clearly about the world, there are far better means than poetry). Ethnography at its best might have poetic or other literary qualities, but that’s not what makes it ethnography. Unlike poetry, a definite connection between the sense of the text and the context in the world outside the text which is its reference is a necessary component of ethnography – it wouldn’t be writing culture if it weren’t writing about culture.
As a result, one difference between my writing about difficulty in ethnography and Shepherd’s in relation to poetry is a difference in attitude toward difficulty. Shepherd is interested in difficulty as an aspect of poetry which is neither inherently good nor bad – since reading poetry is about experiencing the poem as an object of experience in its own right, various difficulties in grasping its meaning are not bad per se, and are often important components in the experience of pleasure from the poem. In the case of ethnography, where communication about something in the world is a key consideration, to the extent it creates a barrier to understanding, difficult writing is often simply something to be avoided – though there are interesting exceptions.
Lexical Difficulty
Lexical difficulty is straightforward – words that are unfamiliar are used, or words are used in an unfamiliar way or at variance with convention. Anthropologists of all stripes commonly use words that are not familiar to the general public; we might speak of agglutinative languages, philopatric social organization among cercopithecine primates, or the differing consequences of avunculocal versus matrilocal residence alongside matrilineality. Recently, a student, after having read a chapter from a textbook on Native North American cultures and reading that some Plateau cultures practiced the levirate, came to me to ask just what in the heck the levirate was. He had even done what I always admonish my students to do when they encounter words they don’t know and had tried to look it up in a dictionary, but unfortunately even his dictionary didn’t help.
We use technical terms all the time that are unfamiliar to most people, and often with good reason – they allow us to very efficiently communicate complex and subtle shades of meaning. The response to difficulty is not to ban the use of “difficult” words – anyone can benefit from encountering new words and learning their meaning. Not knowing the meaning of a word doesn’t prevent learning and understanding it. In the interest of clarity, this is in some ways an easy form of difficulty to deal with. We can avoid the use of technical terms when they aren’t necessary, when less technical terms will in fact suffice, or by clarifying their referent and meaning when they are needed. The difficulty for a writer is judging the potential audience. It’s annoying when reading an article in a scholarly journal to have every technical term explained, given that most anyone who’s potentially reading it is probably familiar with the terminology or at least has an interest in finding out such things for themselves. In writing for a popular audience, lexical difficulty can be overcome simply by providing clear explanations when unfamiliar terminology is useful; e.g. the textbook my student was reading really should have briefly explained what the levirate was.
Allusive Difficulty
Shepherd writes of poetry, “The poem that alludes frequently eludes. The poet refers to something we’ve not heard of, assumes a piece of knowledge we don’t have.” Returning to the previous category, much lexical difficulty in ethnography can be seen as a variety of such allusive difficulty, insofar as the main problem is generally knowledge (of the meaning of a term) which it is assumed the reader has when in fact they may not. As a distinct form of difficulty, though, for ethnography what is meant is allusion to a set of facts or discussions which the reader is assumed to be familiar with. As with lexicon, for the writer this is often a matter of mastering the art of gauging one’s audience. In a scholarly anthropological publication, one could allude to the kula ring, or Geertz’s Balinese cockfight, or potlatching, or Coming of Age in Samoa and generally assume at least a passing familiarity with the allusion on the part of the reader, whereas in works for a popular audience the same assumption can’t be made. As with lexicon, the difficulty for the writer is not so much in being aware that one should write “clearly,” but in successfully gauging an audience, whether popular, scholarly, or specialist scholarly, in order to strike a balance between not assuming readers know something that they in fact don’t (and leaving them lost) and not assuming that readers know less than they in fact do (and leaving them annoyed or bored).
Syntactical Difficulty
Shepherd describes syntactical difficulty as “the obstacle of complex, unfamiliar, dislocated, broken, or incomplete syntax: one cannot discern or reconstruct the relations between the grammatical units.” In poetry, moving away from conventional prose syntax has often been put to creative and innovative use, but in ethnographic prose, syntactical difficulty is generally the result of plain bad writing. Also, we generally encounter only one subset of syntactical difficulty in ethnography. Except in cases of truly bad editing, dislocated, broken, or incomplete syntax, which can be used creatively in poetry, are not typically encountered in published ethnographic writing, even while they are increasingly encountered in more informal communication, such as email. And blogs. Overly complex, unfamiliar, or convoluted syntax, though, is all too common in ethnography and culture theory.
Semantic Difficulty
Shepherd writes of semantic difficulty in poetry: “We have trouble determining or deciding what a poem means, we cannot immediately interpret it. (It is important here to remember that sense and reference are distinct: sense is internal to the poem, as it is to language itself. As linguist David Crystal elucidates in How Language Works, ‘Sense is the meaning of a word within a language. Reference is what a word refers to in the world outside language.’ From this perspective, it’s more useful to think of the poem as a field of meanings than as a thing that means something else, a container for a vehicle of meaning.)” He writes also, “It is semantic difficulty which readers are usually experiencing when they say, ‘I don’t understand this poem.’” Shepherd further subdivides semantic difficulty into explicative and interpretive difficulty. “In the case of explicative difficulty, the reader cannot decipher the literal sense of the poem.” “In the case of interpretive difficulty, one grasps what is being said on the literal level, but doesn’t know what it means, what it is meant to do.”
Explicative Difficulty in Ethnography
In ethnographic and other anthropological writing, this sort of semantic difficulty, where someone looks at a passage of text and simply cannot make heads or tails of it, often involves in part a concatenation of all the previous forms of difficulty. Take the following sentence from Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (p. 72, emphasis in original):
“The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.”
I often emphasize this particular passage when teaching this text because once all the elements are carefully unpacked, you have created a good starting point for understanding Bourdieu’s practice theory. This passage certainly has plenty of lexical, allusive, and syntactical difficulty, but even once its individual elements are carefully considered, the sense of the whole still escapes many a student forced to read Bourdieu for the first time. Even when understanding each individual word, the syntax, and the ethnographic traditions being alluded to, it’s still difficult to grasp the total meaning. Some of that difficulty could be clarified with more careful attention to lexicon, allusion, and syntax, but some ideas we wish to express are in fact subtle and complex aside from any difficulties we might add because of bad writing, and there will always be a certain amount of difficulty resulting from attempting to communicate complex ideas.
Interpretive Difficulty in Ethnography
Shepherd writes, “In the case of interpretive difficulty, one grasps what is being said on the literal level, but doesn’t know what it means, what it is meant to do. John Ashberry’s poems, usually syntactically and explicationally clear, often present this interpretive difficulty. To say that one doesn’t know what a poem means, if one understands its literal sense, is to say that one doesn’t know why it’s saying what it’s saying. The reader asks, ‘Why am I being told/shown this?’” There really aren’t many examples of this sort of difficulty in ethnographic writing. If the sense of the text is clear, the reference and reason for saying what has been said are generally clear also. There are some examples, though, and one that I find often confuses students is the ethnographic treatment of magic.
The convention in writing about magic in ethnography is to write about it as if magic has all the effects that its adherents claim and believe. Sometimes, the ethnographer indicates that people of a particular context believe or claim this or that, or do this or that, but as often as not, magic and its results are presented not as matters of belief and practice but as straightforward elements of natural reality. Students, not previously privy to the convention, are often confused, not knowing how to interpret such accounts, “Do (anthropologists think that) Trobriand witches really fly through the night? Do (anthropologists think that) muisak souls can really take vengeance by causing trees to fall on their killers?” What is often confusing here is a broader convention that encompasses the ethnographic treatment of magic, where cultural contexts are represented in terms of their own underlying premises and arguments.
Formal Difficulty
Formal difficulty involves the lack of recognition or the failure to accept the form of the expression. For a long time, free verse didn’t seem like poetry to a lot of readers, any more than Duchamp’s urinal seemed like art or the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, or Albert Ayler seemed like music. As Shepherd writes, many of today’s readers, raised on the free verse that has long been standard, now have trouble recognizing and appreciating aspects of the form of metrical or rhyming poetry. They have trouble recognizing and hearing the rhythms; they are turned off by or simply miss the rhyme schemes.
Formal difficulty in ethnography involves simply not recognizing some writing as ethnography. This sometimes involves writing that fits into another genre of writing, but which might also be ethnography. Other times, this involves writing that intends to be ethnography, but in an experimental way which violates or plays with the conventions of the genre in some way.
Writing Culture and the Writing of Culture
At least since Writing Culture, there has been widespread recognition that ethnography is “writing culture.” But is all writing of culture ethnography? Some texts that clearly fit into another genre are also writing of culture. Novels such as Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, or Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, all evoke a particular cultural setting in detailed ways, yet we wouldn’t normally recognize these or other novels as ethnography (and at the same time, most wouldn’t normally recognize Oscar Lewis’ The Children of Sanchez, which claimed to be both an autobiography of a Mexican family and a novel, as anything other than an ethnography).
Experimental Ethnography
Experimentation with form in ethnography has a long history in anthropology, with an intensification in such experimentation since the mid 1980s. As with atonal music, modern art or free jazz when they were new (or even now when they’re not new at all), many experience difficulty in interpreting how or to what extent some experimental writing is ethnography or why it should be written. Many experimental ethnographies, particularly those experimenting with the form of the genre, have been perennially among the most interesting and thought provoking ethnographic texts, but they are also among the most difficult to come to terms with, to understand, or to evaluate (and it is often largely these qualities which makes them interesting).
Without claiming at the moment to have any clear sense of what precisely defines the form of the ethnography in contrast to other genres and even other genres of writing culture, the presence of such “formal difficulty” spells out a need to more intensively investigate the importance of form for ethnography and other genres. We cannot glibly fall back on something like fictionality, at least not in a simple sense, to define the difference between ethnography and some novels – some “fiction” tells great truths; as Geertz pointed out long ago, ethnography is always a crafted writing; and we should keep in mind the many “fictional” aspects of much ethnography, including pseudonyms for people and places, composite persons, confabulations of place and story, etc. Perhaps an important difference is that ethnography is “writing culture” which has as a primary motivation the understanding of a particular context via a correspondence between the sense of the text and the reference in the world, a sort of iconicity between text and world that need not be adhered to for even the most “ethnographic” of “fiction.”
Most cultural anthropologists would agree that ethnographic and other anthropological writing should be as clear as possible. A primary goal of ethnographic writing is to communicate a sense or understanding of a particular cultural context. Clear writing facilitates this and unclear or difficult writing obstructs this. When engaging in “public anthropology” and attempting to communicate anthropological understandings to an interested lay audience, the stricture to write clearly is even stronger.
Something that anthropologists have not discussed much, though, is what exactly constitutes “clarity” or “difficulty” in writing. There is a general sense that we should avoid overly complex syntax or particular vocabulary that our intended audience might not be familiar with (or at least to clearly explain complex vocabulary when necessary), but not much consideration that there might be different types of difficulty (and hence different types of clarity) that might call for their own particular responses.
Here, I find the recent work of Reginald Shepherd illuminating. Shepherd precisely delineates types or sorts of difficulty in another genre of writing, poetry. What is difficulty in general? Shepherd argues (and I agree) that difficulty in writing involves in one way or another violating readerly expectations. This can be good or bad, a barrier to grasping meaning and/or a spur to further experience and pleasure, but difficulty in its different varieties always involves this violation of expectations (that the words used will be familiar, that its referents will be clear, that the sense of the text “makes sense,” that the text will have a recognizable and clearly interpretable form).
Shepherd discusses five types of difficulty, which he identifies as: lexical difficulty, allusive difficulty, syntactical difficulty, semantic difficulty (with two varieties – explicative and interpretive difficulties), and formal difficulty.
A major difference in poetic and ethnographic writing has to do with the goals or motivations for writing. With poetry, a primary goal is to create a unique sensuous object with its own qualities to be experienced in itself (something that happens with any text, but something that is a primary function of literary writing, including poetry). The poem may make reference to something in the world outside the poem through the sense of the words, but it need not necessarily do so, and in any case, that is not the main raison d’etre for poetry (and if you want to communicate something directly and clearly about the world, there are far better means than poetry). Ethnography at its best might have poetic or other literary qualities, but that’s not what makes it ethnography. Unlike poetry, a definite connection between the sense of the text and the context in the world outside the text which is its reference is a necessary component of ethnography – it wouldn’t be writing culture if it weren’t writing about culture.
As a result, one difference between my writing about difficulty in ethnography and Shepherd’s in relation to poetry is a difference in attitude toward difficulty. Shepherd is interested in difficulty as an aspect of poetry which is neither inherently good nor bad – since reading poetry is about experiencing the poem as an object of experience in its own right, various difficulties in grasping its meaning are not bad per se, and are often important components in the experience of pleasure from the poem. In the case of ethnography, where communication about something in the world is a key consideration, to the extent it creates a barrier to understanding, difficult writing is often simply something to be avoided – though there are interesting exceptions.
Lexical Difficulty
Lexical difficulty is straightforward – words that are unfamiliar are used, or words are used in an unfamiliar way or at variance with convention. Anthropologists of all stripes commonly use words that are not familiar to the general public; we might speak of agglutinative languages, philopatric social organization among cercopithecine primates, or the differing consequences of avunculocal versus matrilocal residence alongside matrilineality. Recently, a student, after having read a chapter from a textbook on Native North American cultures and reading that some Plateau cultures practiced the levirate, came to me to ask just what in the heck the levirate was. He had even done what I always admonish my students to do when they encounter words they don’t know and had tried to look it up in a dictionary, but unfortunately even his dictionary didn’t help.
We use technical terms all the time that are unfamiliar to most people, and often with good reason – they allow us to very efficiently communicate complex and subtle shades of meaning. The response to difficulty is not to ban the use of “difficult” words – anyone can benefit from encountering new words and learning their meaning. Not knowing the meaning of a word doesn’t prevent learning and understanding it. In the interest of clarity, this is in some ways an easy form of difficulty to deal with. We can avoid the use of technical terms when they aren’t necessary, when less technical terms will in fact suffice, or by clarifying their referent and meaning when they are needed. The difficulty for a writer is judging the potential audience. It’s annoying when reading an article in a scholarly journal to have every technical term explained, given that most anyone who’s potentially reading it is probably familiar with the terminology or at least has an interest in finding out such things for themselves. In writing for a popular audience, lexical difficulty can be overcome simply by providing clear explanations when unfamiliar terminology is useful; e.g. the textbook my student was reading really should have briefly explained what the levirate was.
Allusive Difficulty
Shepherd writes of poetry, “The poem that alludes frequently eludes. The poet refers to something we’ve not heard of, assumes a piece of knowledge we don’t have.” Returning to the previous category, much lexical difficulty in ethnography can be seen as a variety of such allusive difficulty, insofar as the main problem is generally knowledge (of the meaning of a term) which it is assumed the reader has when in fact they may not. As a distinct form of difficulty, though, for ethnography what is meant is allusion to a set of facts or discussions which the reader is assumed to be familiar with. As with lexicon, for the writer this is often a matter of mastering the art of gauging one’s audience. In a scholarly anthropological publication, one could allude to the kula ring, or Geertz’s Balinese cockfight, or potlatching, or Coming of Age in Samoa and generally assume at least a passing familiarity with the allusion on the part of the reader, whereas in works for a popular audience the same assumption can’t be made. As with lexicon, the difficulty for the writer is not so much in being aware that one should write “clearly,” but in successfully gauging an audience, whether popular, scholarly, or specialist scholarly, in order to strike a balance between not assuming readers know something that they in fact don’t (and leaving them lost) and not assuming that readers know less than they in fact do (and leaving them annoyed or bored).
Syntactical Difficulty
Shepherd describes syntactical difficulty as “the obstacle of complex, unfamiliar, dislocated, broken, or incomplete syntax: one cannot discern or reconstruct the relations between the grammatical units.” In poetry, moving away from conventional prose syntax has often been put to creative and innovative use, but in ethnographic prose, syntactical difficulty is generally the result of plain bad writing. Also, we generally encounter only one subset of syntactical difficulty in ethnography. Except in cases of truly bad editing, dislocated, broken, or incomplete syntax, which can be used creatively in poetry, are not typically encountered in published ethnographic writing, even while they are increasingly encountered in more informal communication, such as email. And blogs. Overly complex, unfamiliar, or convoluted syntax, though, is all too common in ethnography and culture theory.
Semantic Difficulty
Shepherd writes of semantic difficulty in poetry: “We have trouble determining or deciding what a poem means, we cannot immediately interpret it. (It is important here to remember that sense and reference are distinct: sense is internal to the poem, as it is to language itself. As linguist David Crystal elucidates in How Language Works, ‘Sense is the meaning of a word within a language. Reference is what a word refers to in the world outside language.’ From this perspective, it’s more useful to think of the poem as a field of meanings than as a thing that means something else, a container for a vehicle of meaning.)” He writes also, “It is semantic difficulty which readers are usually experiencing when they say, ‘I don’t understand this poem.’” Shepherd further subdivides semantic difficulty into explicative and interpretive difficulty. “In the case of explicative difficulty, the reader cannot decipher the literal sense of the poem.” “In the case of interpretive difficulty, one grasps what is being said on the literal level, but doesn’t know what it means, what it is meant to do.”
Explicative Difficulty in Ethnography
In ethnographic and other anthropological writing, this sort of semantic difficulty, where someone looks at a passage of text and simply cannot make heads or tails of it, often involves in part a concatenation of all the previous forms of difficulty. Take the following sentence from Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (p. 72, emphasis in original):
“The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.”
I often emphasize this particular passage when teaching this text because once all the elements are carefully unpacked, you have created a good starting point for understanding Bourdieu’s practice theory. This passage certainly has plenty of lexical, allusive, and syntactical difficulty, but even once its individual elements are carefully considered, the sense of the whole still escapes many a student forced to read Bourdieu for the first time. Even when understanding each individual word, the syntax, and the ethnographic traditions being alluded to, it’s still difficult to grasp the total meaning. Some of that difficulty could be clarified with more careful attention to lexicon, allusion, and syntax, but some ideas we wish to express are in fact subtle and complex aside from any difficulties we might add because of bad writing, and there will always be a certain amount of difficulty resulting from attempting to communicate complex ideas.
Interpretive Difficulty in Ethnography
Shepherd writes, “In the case of interpretive difficulty, one grasps what is being said on the literal level, but doesn’t know what it means, what it is meant to do. John Ashberry’s poems, usually syntactically and explicationally clear, often present this interpretive difficulty. To say that one doesn’t know what a poem means, if one understands its literal sense, is to say that one doesn’t know why it’s saying what it’s saying. The reader asks, ‘Why am I being told/shown this?’” There really aren’t many examples of this sort of difficulty in ethnographic writing. If the sense of the text is clear, the reference and reason for saying what has been said are generally clear also. There are some examples, though, and one that I find often confuses students is the ethnographic treatment of magic.
The convention in writing about magic in ethnography is to write about it as if magic has all the effects that its adherents claim and believe. Sometimes, the ethnographer indicates that people of a particular context believe or claim this or that, or do this or that, but as often as not, magic and its results are presented not as matters of belief and practice but as straightforward elements of natural reality. Students, not previously privy to the convention, are often confused, not knowing how to interpret such accounts, “Do (anthropologists think that) Trobriand witches really fly through the night? Do (anthropologists think that) muisak souls can really take vengeance by causing trees to fall on their killers?” What is often confusing here is a broader convention that encompasses the ethnographic treatment of magic, where cultural contexts are represented in terms of their own underlying premises and arguments.
Formal Difficulty
Formal difficulty involves the lack of recognition or the failure to accept the form of the expression. For a long time, free verse didn’t seem like poetry to a lot of readers, any more than Duchamp’s urinal seemed like art or the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, or Albert Ayler seemed like music. As Shepherd writes, many of today’s readers, raised on the free verse that has long been standard, now have trouble recognizing and appreciating aspects of the form of metrical or rhyming poetry. They have trouble recognizing and hearing the rhythms; they are turned off by or simply miss the rhyme schemes.
Formal difficulty in ethnography involves simply not recognizing some writing as ethnography. This sometimes involves writing that fits into another genre of writing, but which might also be ethnography. Other times, this involves writing that intends to be ethnography, but in an experimental way which violates or plays with the conventions of the genre in some way.
Writing Culture and the Writing of Culture
At least since Writing Culture, there has been widespread recognition that ethnography is “writing culture.” But is all writing of culture ethnography? Some texts that clearly fit into another genre are also writing of culture. Novels such as Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, or Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, all evoke a particular cultural setting in detailed ways, yet we wouldn’t normally recognize these or other novels as ethnography (and at the same time, most wouldn’t normally recognize Oscar Lewis’ The Children of Sanchez, which claimed to be both an autobiography of a Mexican family and a novel, as anything other than an ethnography).
Experimental Ethnography
Experimentation with form in ethnography has a long history in anthropology, with an intensification in such experimentation since the mid 1980s. As with atonal music, modern art or free jazz when they were new (or even now when they’re not new at all), many experience difficulty in interpreting how or to what extent some experimental writing is ethnography or why it should be written. Many experimental ethnographies, particularly those experimenting with the form of the genre, have been perennially among the most interesting and thought provoking ethnographic texts, but they are also among the most difficult to come to terms with, to understand, or to evaluate (and it is often largely these qualities which makes them interesting).
Without claiming at the moment to have any clear sense of what precisely defines the form of the ethnography in contrast to other genres and even other genres of writing culture, the presence of such “formal difficulty” spells out a need to more intensively investigate the importance of form for ethnography and other genres. We cannot glibly fall back on something like fictionality, at least not in a simple sense, to define the difference between ethnography and some novels – some “fiction” tells great truths; as Geertz pointed out long ago, ethnography is always a crafted writing; and we should keep in mind the many “fictional” aspects of much ethnography, including pseudonyms for people and places, composite persons, confabulations of place and story, etc. Perhaps an important difference is that ethnography is “writing culture” which has as a primary motivation the understanding of a particular context via a correspondence between the sense of the text and the reference in the world, a sort of iconicity between text and world that need not be adhered to for even the most “ethnographic” of “fiction.”
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Identity Poetics, Culture and the Individual
On his blog, Reginald Shepherd has written an incisive comment on what he terms identity poetics, "Against Identity Poetry, For Possibility." His post primarily concerns identity politics in poetry, but would be of interest to an anthropological audience or anyone else interested in the relationship between culture and individuals.
The following is an excerpt from Shepherd's work:
"Ideally, one writes poetry as an act of exploration, as a venture into the unknown. (As Yeats wrote, out of what one knows, one makes rhetoric; out of what one doesn’t know, one makes poetry.) Too often today, though, writers want simply to “express” the selves they have decided that they are or have, and readers demand to see themselves (or what they imagine as themselves) reflected back to them. In Ann Lauterbach's incisive words, “The idea that the act of reading expands and extends knowledge to orders of unfamiliar experience has been replaced by acts of reading in order to substantiate and authorize claims and positions which often mirror the identity bearings of the reader.” Identity poetics is boring, giving back the already known in an endless and endlessly self-righteous confirmation of things as they are. It is also constraining, limiting the imaginative options of the very people it seeks to liberate or speak for. If one follows the assumptions of identity poetics through, saying “Here are the gay poets, here are the black poets, here are the straight white male poets, and everyone just reads the poets who match their demographic classification,” not only could a white person have nothing to say to a black person, or a straight person to a gay person, but a black person could have nothing to say to a white person, or a woman to a man. So there would be no reason for a white person to read anything written by a black person."
The following is an excerpt from Shepherd's work:
"Ideally, one writes poetry as an act of exploration, as a venture into the unknown. (As Yeats wrote, out of what one knows, one makes rhetoric; out of what one doesn’t know, one makes poetry.) Too often today, though, writers want simply to “express” the selves they have decided that they are or have, and readers demand to see themselves (or what they imagine as themselves) reflected back to them. In Ann Lauterbach's incisive words, “The idea that the act of reading expands and extends knowledge to orders of unfamiliar experience has been replaced by acts of reading in order to substantiate and authorize claims and positions which often mirror the identity bearings of the reader.” Identity poetics is boring, giving back the already known in an endless and endlessly self-righteous confirmation of things as they are. It is also constraining, limiting the imaginative options of the very people it seeks to liberate or speak for. If one follows the assumptions of identity poetics through, saying “Here are the gay poets, here are the black poets, here are the straight white male poets, and everyone just reads the poets who match their demographic classification,” not only could a white person have nothing to say to a black person, or a straight person to a gay person, but a black person could have nothing to say to a white person, or a woman to a man. So there would be no reason for a white person to read anything written by a black person."
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Myth, Mythic Literacy, and Contemporary Culture
I recently posted a piece, “Uses of Myth,” in which I discussed a recent essay on Reginald Shepherd’s Blog, “Mythology in Poetry.” I mentioned Shepherd’s discussion of different modes of utilizing mythology in poetry, and I also discussed ways in which myth is used in examples of other sorts of literary writing.
A key consideration in all this is the relationship between myth and contemporary culture, especially contemporary discourse and shared cultural models or knowledge. Consider again a key paragraph I previously quoted from Shepherd’s essay:
“Mythology can serve several functions in poetry. Myths are interesting in their own right as culturally resonant, compelling, amusing, frightening, or just intriguing stories, an engaging realm to explore. They are a reservoir of cultural knowledge, hopes, fears, and passions, of archetypal figures and situations, an inexhaustibly rich lode of charged materials that each poetic generation can mine and remake. Much of Western literature is built on allusions to mythology, particularly to Classical mythology and to Judaeo-Christian mythology, and much of it doesn’t make sense without knowledge of those myths. Myth can also be used to place one’s own experiences, thoughts, and feelings in a larger context, opening them up to realms beyond the individual, making them less purely personal and idiosyncratic, as Louise Glück does in Meadowlands, in which she treats her own divorce in the terms of the myth of Odysseus. One may not have access to Glück’s personal experience, or even care about it, but anyone has access to the stories in which she couches that experience in that book, and the myth opens up beyond the merely private.”
I received an email from a reader of my previous post that essentially raised the question of whether a lack of religious literacy (and I’d expand that more broadly to "mythic literacy") is a problem here.
Certainly for the sorts of literature Shepherd or I were discussing, lack of literacy in or awareness of the myth being alluded to, relived, or revised, can present problems of comprehension, though to varying degrees. Again, “Much of Western literature is built on allusions to mythology, particularly to Classical mythology and to Judaeo-Christian mythology, and much of it doesn’t make sense without knowledge of those myths.”
Take the four prose examples I presented. Even without prior knowledge of The Epic of Gilgamesh or The Iliad, Mitchell’s and Baricco’s texts should make sense to any reader, as they present new versions of those tales. Prior knowledge enriches the experience, but isn’t necessary – I’d even say that anyone unfamiliar with the originals would be well served by Mitchell’s Gilgamesh and Baricco’s An Iliad as jumping off points.
I said that parts of Delaney’s Tales of Neveryon present a complex instance of using myth turned scholarly theory turned back to myth. The section of the book in question is certainly most fully experienced with awareness of the Freudian/Lacanian and Malinowskian allusions, but it probably makes for an interesting narrative even without.
Atwood’s Penelopiad is, I think, a different story – it’s presented in a way that I don’t think any intelligent reader would be too troubled following the story, but at virtually every turn, the narrative’s impact largely depends on simultaneous awareness of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca in The Odyssey.
This is, of course, an issue for allusion in general. Any creative activity utilizing allusion, whether it be poetry, prose, ethnography or other scholarly writing, visual art, or music, by definition relies on prior knowledge of what’s being alluded to for the full experience to register. Shostakovich’s Symphony #15, with its musical allusions to Rossini and Wagner, depends upon a listener familiar with the canon of classical music in order to register the full experience of the music (though a listener not familiar with the allusions would still experience something – perhaps something quite enjoyable or profound to them).
Is there a problem of “mythic illiteracy” in contemporary culture?
In one way yes. There’s broad awareness in the U.S. of a de-emphasis in public education on topics like the arts, religion, myth, and the classics, or increasingly any number of topics not emphasized on standardized tests. (See this news article. This is simply one article focusing on “religious literacy,” but it’s common to encounter accounts of the alleged ignorance or lack of literacy of Americans on a wide variety of topics.)
It’s possible to overdo this, though. I’d say that it’s not that Americans are less literate or knowledgeable with regard to myth, religion, the arts, etc. It’s more that highly educated individuals are less literate in such fields than highly educated individuals in the past, and moderately educated individuals are less literate about such topics than their corresponding peers of the past – and that’s something to be concerned about.
At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that now and in the recent past, a much higher percentage of people in the U.S. and in many other parts of the world have the opportunity to become at least moderately well educated – so that aggregate awareness of mythic, artistic, or other allusion may be at an all time high. Throughout the 19th century and through much of the 20th century, many people in the U.S. were either not served at all or were ill-served by public education, something more strikingly the case for some sub-sets of the population if you take into account social factors like race, gender, or class. Public libraries were unheard of until the late 19th century, and as an interesting study by Paul Sturges, “The Public Library and Reading by the Masses,” makes clear, for much of their early history served mainly a very small, highly literate and highly educated elite.
A key consideration in all this is the relationship between myth and contemporary culture, especially contemporary discourse and shared cultural models or knowledge. Consider again a key paragraph I previously quoted from Shepherd’s essay:
“Mythology can serve several functions in poetry. Myths are interesting in their own right as culturally resonant, compelling, amusing, frightening, or just intriguing stories, an engaging realm to explore. They are a reservoir of cultural knowledge, hopes, fears, and passions, of archetypal figures and situations, an inexhaustibly rich lode of charged materials that each poetic generation can mine and remake. Much of Western literature is built on allusions to mythology, particularly to Classical mythology and to Judaeo-Christian mythology, and much of it doesn’t make sense without knowledge of those myths. Myth can also be used to place one’s own experiences, thoughts, and feelings in a larger context, opening them up to realms beyond the individual, making them less purely personal and idiosyncratic, as Louise Glück does in Meadowlands, in which she treats her own divorce in the terms of the myth of Odysseus. One may not have access to Glück’s personal experience, or even care about it, but anyone has access to the stories in which she couches that experience in that book, and the myth opens up beyond the merely private.”
I received an email from a reader of my previous post that essentially raised the question of whether a lack of religious literacy (and I’d expand that more broadly to "mythic literacy") is a problem here.
Certainly for the sorts of literature Shepherd or I were discussing, lack of literacy in or awareness of the myth being alluded to, relived, or revised, can present problems of comprehension, though to varying degrees. Again, “Much of Western literature is built on allusions to mythology, particularly to Classical mythology and to Judaeo-Christian mythology, and much of it doesn’t make sense without knowledge of those myths.”
Take the four prose examples I presented. Even without prior knowledge of The Epic of Gilgamesh or The Iliad, Mitchell’s and Baricco’s texts should make sense to any reader, as they present new versions of those tales. Prior knowledge enriches the experience, but isn’t necessary – I’d even say that anyone unfamiliar with the originals would be well served by Mitchell’s Gilgamesh and Baricco’s An Iliad as jumping off points.
I said that parts of Delaney’s Tales of Neveryon present a complex instance of using myth turned scholarly theory turned back to myth. The section of the book in question is certainly most fully experienced with awareness of the Freudian/Lacanian and Malinowskian allusions, but it probably makes for an interesting narrative even without.
Atwood’s Penelopiad is, I think, a different story – it’s presented in a way that I don’t think any intelligent reader would be too troubled following the story, but at virtually every turn, the narrative’s impact largely depends on simultaneous awareness of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca in The Odyssey.
This is, of course, an issue for allusion in general. Any creative activity utilizing allusion, whether it be poetry, prose, ethnography or other scholarly writing, visual art, or music, by definition relies on prior knowledge of what’s being alluded to for the full experience to register. Shostakovich’s Symphony #15, with its musical allusions to Rossini and Wagner, depends upon a listener familiar with the canon of classical music in order to register the full experience of the music (though a listener not familiar with the allusions would still experience something – perhaps something quite enjoyable or profound to them).
Is there a problem of “mythic illiteracy” in contemporary culture?
In one way yes. There’s broad awareness in the U.S. of a de-emphasis in public education on topics like the arts, religion, myth, and the classics, or increasingly any number of topics not emphasized on standardized tests. (See this news article. This is simply one article focusing on “religious literacy,” but it’s common to encounter accounts of the alleged ignorance or lack of literacy of Americans on a wide variety of topics.)
It’s possible to overdo this, though. I’d say that it’s not that Americans are less literate or knowledgeable with regard to myth, religion, the arts, etc. It’s more that highly educated individuals are less literate in such fields than highly educated individuals in the past, and moderately educated individuals are less literate about such topics than their corresponding peers of the past – and that’s something to be concerned about.
At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that now and in the recent past, a much higher percentage of people in the U.S. and in many other parts of the world have the opportunity to become at least moderately well educated – so that aggregate awareness of mythic, artistic, or other allusion may be at an all time high. Throughout the 19th century and through much of the 20th century, many people in the U.S. were either not served at all or were ill-served by public education, something more strikingly the case for some sub-sets of the population if you take into account social factors like race, gender, or class. Public libraries were unheard of until the late 19th century, and as an interesting study by Paul Sturges, “The Public Library and Reading by the Masses,” makes clear, for much of their early history served mainly a very small, highly literate and highly educated elite.
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