Aversions

I met the apartment handy man after I turned on the oven and then couldn't get it to turn off.  The technician from the gas company who came over to turn off the gas said that he had never before seen an oven that wouldn't turn off.  This technician also met the apartment handy man as he was leaving the apartment.  I was then berated for calling in someone who "doesn't know anything."

"Didn't I tell you I was coming over?" the handy man practically yelled at me.

While he was working on the oven he would periodically start screaming:  "HELLO?  HELLO? HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO?" Which made the "girls"come out of their rooms to see if he was hurt and to find that in fact he just needed a piece of tape, a paper clip . . .

"Thanks, sweetheart.  You're the best." 

Yeah, right. 

Of course, even though everyone, minus one person, in this apartment just moved in, one of us was certainly responsible for breaking the oven knob by running into it--maybe it was an accident.  The handy man's story of how one of the "girls" in the apartment broke the oven kept changing.  His final conclusion was that the "girls" (his term for the Chinese girls who don't know anything along with the American girl who probably also doesn't know anything but who can at least speak English well enough) tried forcing the knob to be turned in the wrong direction.

"You need to tell these girls how to turn on the oven," the handy man said to me as the "girls" shifted their eyes from him to me.

"They know how to turn on an oven.  And they speak English and know what you're saying."

Needless to say, he was standing by the assignment he gave to me.  He preceded to then show me how to use the entire stove.  When he showed me how all of the hot plates ignited he acted as if he was doing a magic show.  Showing a cave man fire.  

"Look--they all work!"  

"Congratulations!" I wanted to say. "You fixed something that wasn't broken to begin with!"

He then made me get down on my hands and knees and watch how the oven ignited--as if I hadn't discovered the "mysteries" of the oven when I was trying to get the stupid thing to turn off. 

He didn't make us pay for the repair of the oven--"It was only $35 and it took me 20 minutes to do it for you girls" (but, actually, it took over an hour).  However, we definitely paid a price by having to put up with such a brute.  The man wasn't capable of talking--only shouting.  He also wasn't capable of being anything but condescending to the "girls." 

On another note, on a different aversion:  I sparked a Wordsworth hate-fest in one of my classes (not "in" class, but on the internet--on a Black Board type forum).  In having to read the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, I wrote a response about how Wordsworth is an elitist who, in trying to use the language of "ordinary men" in his poetry, succeeds in arrogantly assuming a voice for women, Native Americans, and other horribly contrived characters  whom he exploits in order to make a point about powerful feelings in poetry.  I wanted to be intentionally polemical--a fellow student and I wanted to "shake things up" a bit to lessen the mental strain of talking about things like the Poet, Beauty, and Truth for three hour seminars (as if any of these things are exempt from politics).  Most people responded by saying that they agree with me.  A few said they agree, BUT we have to look at this from a New Historicist perspective--putting the work in its historical context. 

Of course I know Wordsworth wasn't thinking about what I am thinking about when I read his works.  Of course I took "historical context" into consideration.  I had to add an appendage to my original post: 

I was tuned into Wordsworth's Utilitarian language: quantifying pleasure, aiming for an "overabundance" of pleasure. I was tuned into the way he used the words "genus" and "species" and can understand that Wordsworth was interested in distinguishing the poet from the scientist and the way in which each handles "truth." I also can feel WW's anxiety about industrialization, people moving to the cities, becoming indolent and turning to the dreaded Gothic novel (often penned by women, I want to point out) for entertainment instead of to poetry for knowledge and pleasure. I realize that WW doesn't want to really discover and use the language of "ordinary men" as much as he wants to get away from an idea of poetic diction that is, what he considers, gaudy and ostentatious. I can understand how WW's Preface adds to a trajectory of criticism that is slowly shaping how different cultures at different times view and value art (and, of course, WW is personally left out from Marxist, deconstructionist, feminist, etc. discourse). I mean, do I really think that WW would utilize the current methodologies of cultural anthro to go out and conduct a compelling ethnography of the rustic people he is so fascinated by? Absolutely not.

I get all of this and I still do not like WW.

My real last name must truly be tied to the word "pugnacious."

Parliaments Are White People Cigarettes

Friends want to know:  is graduate school a continuation of undergraduate school?  The answer:  no.  No in terms of the amount of reading and writing one does.  The focus on theory and methodology.  And yes.  Yes in terms of people.  In terms of people who are burgeoning addicts/alcoholics.  Which is a vague, unhelpful answer to the question.  

At the English Department reception, everyone was smoking, talking about nothing, being alternately self-deprecating, ingratiating and self-congratulating, and drinking freely from bottomless cups of free wine.

Mingle, mingle.  Apparently academics thrive on conversation.  The lively ones eluded me.

"Have you started the readings for Literary Methods?  Have you read Poetics?"

"No."

"It's boring."

"I hate cats, but I am not a misogynist."

"My mother made me buy these shoes."

At one point the head of the department and I were discussing New York City.  He admitted that he had never visited the places where I briefly worked and lived (Harlem and the Bronx).  He stuck mainly to the Village.  When I started talking about the interesting things you find in the Bronx, he was more amenable to my enthusiasm since, recently, the NY Times published a piece about the Grand Concourse.    

If I ever was a famous author, people would probably enjoy my descriptions about them as much as people enjoy it when Jamaica Kincaid writes about people she knows.  However, this isn't truly about other people and how pompous or ugly I find them.  It is about me, as evident in my participation in the self-involved rigmarole of journaling.

I left the reception with a sore throat from secondhand smoke and a little damp from all of the white wine doused on me during an emphatic conversation about Tori Amos' decline since Scarlet's Walk.  I also left having perhaps cemented myself in the position of "Mama Hen," the one who will cluck about how everyone is destroying their health and who may herself acquire chronic stress from this choice of profession, but who will not develop any bad habits she doesn't already have (and which she keeps avidly concealed).   

I probably would take up smoking and binge drinking if I felt I needed to escape--if I was exceedingly overwhelmed by the dogmatism of hurtful ideologies.  Currently, I am exactly where I want to be.  Postcolonialism and gender studies are fields that challenge academia and want to transform epistemology.  If I was the age I am now but the year was 1950 or so, I would definitely be writing this with a cigarette in my hand.  I'd probably take up hard drugs.  (I say this after indeed having been on a binge--a binge of Mad Men).

Do you want to kill it?

A mouse ran around frantically as I was brushing my teeth. I choked on the minty froth in my mouth and stifled a scream as I jumped into the sink. It was a ridiculous scene. Actually, I am not afraid of mice--I was in a small, enclosed space with bare feet. A sudden fear of it biting into my big toe overcame me. Big deal.  I've seen rats in NYC that eat a plate of mice like that for dinner.  (But, uh, yeah, I was a little shaken.  The speed that thing had!  Rats plod in comparison.  But mice still beat the hell out of cockroaches!).

I knocked on my roommates door to tell her about the sighting. She said, "Do you want to kill it?"

"No--I just want it to live somewhere else."

"The landlord will come and spray chemicals."

"You should ask her to bring humane traps."

"Yes--she brings traps."

"But humane traps--like a cage that catches the mouse.  I will go set it free in the park."

I tiptoed into the bathroom--as if afraid to rouse a blood-thirsty giant--and snatched my towel and toothbrush.

"You have to be brave," my roommate said, balling her fist to add emphasis to her rallying speech before an important battle.  "The mouse won't come out now."

"I'm not scared, but I am going to finish brushing my teeth in the kitchen."

I turned on the light and noticed that someone had a pot of tea eggs sitting on the stove.  Perks of living with women from China.  Perhaps the rodents agree.

First Day Jitters

Hablo espanol.

Soy estudiante graduada.  That’s what I learned to say my first day of intermediate Spanish class as I was sweating bullets (being on the other side of the foreign language class experience—as a student, not a teacher—sucks).  This class made me more nervous than any of my graduate-level seminars.  An archaeologist and the only other grad student in the undergrad class, locked eyes with me as the professor put a huge “X” through “English” on the white board.   

Dios mio. 

Later I went to ask the professor a logistical question about the class text, and she insisted that we continue to speak in Spanish.  I struggled to express myself. 

“Soy nervosa—” 

“NerVIosa.”

“—nerviosa porque tomo clase de espanol cinco anos pasado . . .”

I later typed what I was trying to say to her in Google Translator.  Not even close.  The instructor was nice not correct my every error.

Standing Out

This week of long orientations and the start of classes has not been much of a shock in terms of disrupting my habitual way of life considering that I am lacking a habitual way of life.    Explaining my interest in the field also hasn’t been as tedious as expected.  I’ve settled on saying that I am into postcolonialism because, well, I am, and it distinguishes me from the handful that are into 20^th-cent. Lit. (although, one person tried to stand out by persistently saying post-WWII).  Other people’s names and interests slip from my mind too quickly.  I do, however, always remember the names and interests of the people for whom I immediately have an aversion.

Before arriving on campus, some of the students introduced themselves via email.  This precursory activity made me nervous—everyone circulating tidbits about their academic accomplishments made me think that I was in an aquarium of bubble-brain goldfish.  A particular character in this correspondence came across as so completely egotistical that I picked him out of the group of newbies before we introduced ourselves and put names to faces.    He might serve as my nemesis for the next couple of years.  We will see if this first, strong impression I have makes a fool of me later.  Until then, I will have to inform the PhD student, with an interest in heroes and villains, about these live subjects of study.  (I think I am the villain).  (I hope so).  (It is, in turn, egotistical for me to assume the part of the villain because we all know, especially after seeing the Dark Knight, that the villain is a million times more interesting than the husky-voiced hero).

Discourse on Aesthetics

Discussing the liaisons between philosophy and literature made for a muddled conversation that I struggled to comprehend.  My notes reflect a confusion for me to sort through:  “productive in historicism and moving to politics/social justice . . . to domesticate the pleasure of art in order to moderate it and lead people to reason . . . objectifies aesthetics . . .”  The instructor noted that the focus of this class looked at intellectual history and it was up to us, the students, depending on our interests, to bring in issues of justice and power.  We were then overwhelmed by a concise but dense array of excerpts ranging from Parmenides to Sontag.  Altieri:  “We are what we will most intensely, whether that be our investment in reason or our investments in what provides material for reason to work upon.”  Nietzche:  “Art reminds us of states of animal vigor; it’s on the one hand a surplus and overflow of flourishing corporeality into the world of images and wishes . . .”  This course was a publicly admitted mess that will, apparently, be worthwhile and fun to put into some kind of order. 

Postcolonial theory, in a different class, actually made more sense.  The definition of postcolonial we were given glowed in its brevity:  colonialism still matters.  “Yes,” I kept saying in my head to the brilliant moderator, “yes.  This is what I wanted—what I have been waiting for.”  An effort will be made in this class to talk coherently about the theory and to apply it to the world around us.  It was noted that a different way of talking about aesthetics would take place:  one that is necessarily political (no need to make an effort to bring this aspect to class and help fill in the gaps).  Beauty is not just beauty:  it is a scorching alloy of contentions that will be cooled by the relishing in differences.            

 

Residential Neighborhoods

Beginning my graduate student career. 

This topic is the background information for the next "n" posts.

Moving to a new place always inspires me to fire up my blog again.  It is a clean slate to leave behind all of the disappointments and messes that have been muddling my attempts to live with passion and a sense of purpose.  Of course, our messes always follow us.  First comes the unpacking, the cleaning, the organizing . . . as if my "new" life will maintain this state of sparkling.  Then comes the wallowing in those things impossible to run away from:  memory, boredom, relationships, bodies . . .

Leaving NYC to come to what I presumed to be a quiet neighborhood outside of Boston meant, again, presumably, leaving behind blaring meringue and foul-mouthed toddlers in exchange for the occasional dog barking or bird chirping.  After hearing drunken, spontaneous outbursts of a capella renditions of karaoke favorites, however, I'll take the toddler on his scooter yelling, "Damn dog!" at cops ANY DAY.  A particular performance of "Can You Feel the Love Tonight," had me wishing for the "good ole days" of kids screaming out to each other about where they had spotted a rat in the trash heap outside of my window.

 
After moving to five different places in the past six years (and, now, to a sixth place in what will be the seventh year of this selective time line), I have indeed become better at finding my way around new places which includes effectively using public transit systems.  However, I have never entirely given up the ability to get lost.  Usually when I get lost it is because my neurotic impulses take me to unfamiliar territory and distract me from noting the key landmarks I need to recognize in order to successfully back track.  Neuroticism is what got me lost on this very evening.   

I was enjoying the residential facade of bliss I had been hoping for:  walking by huge houses with well-manicured lawns with the occasional un-curtained window framing a scene of delectable domesticity--people cooking, cleaning, or an unoccupied room with homey furnishings and the impression of activity.  An old man wildly waved at me so I took out my headphones to hear him say, "Oh, you had your thing in!  Well, it's nice to see you again."  I waved and smiled pretending I was whomever he supposed me to be and put my "thing" back in.  Another old man demanded I take out my head phones so that he could tell me to pet his dog.  I petted a miniature version of Lassie obediently. 

It got dark.  It got darker.  I stumbled onto a poorly-lit street with a shadowy figure walking along it.  As I got closer I discovered another man walking another dog.  The man froze when he saw me and looked at me questionably.  He seemed unnerved, maybe scared.  Cautiously, he walked past me.  Soon I discovered I was at a dead end.  I had to turn around, and I found myself inadvertently following this fearful man.  I tried to weave a path for myself that would make our re-encounter impossible, and, well, that is how I got lost. 

I did, however, manage to find my way home.  Also, I ran into the man with the mini Lassie, and he did not seem to recognize me.  How familiar I am at one moment and unfamiliar the next--just like the places I tread.    

 

Flurry of Trainings

Disclaimer: this will me scrambled. A sketchbook of reflections and recent memories.

I find myself in a place where few people give me their real, birth-given names.

“Call me Z,” someone says.

This statement means: you cannot pronounce my real name because it is too exotic for your tongue.

But I find myself meeting more numbers than people.

Statistics, statistics, statistics. Over fifty percent of the women in the US who are infected with HIV/AIDS are African American Women. Thirteen percent of the US population identifies itself as African American. The leading mode of transmission for HIV in African American men is sex with other men, followed by drug injection. For African American women, the virus is most often transmitted during heterosexual activity.

The ability to conceptualize and think abstractly develops, for most of us, in late adolescence. How are you piecing together this information? How do demographics occupy a visual space in your head? Do you see a pie graph? Do you see circles with stems sprouting more circles, extending into a web to limn the idea of epidemic?

Men having sex with men and then having sex with their wives—women who think they are in a safe, monogamous relationship with no reason to protect themselves. Men raving at those wives who dare to pull out a condom, to imply that they’re—the husbands—are cheating. A wall of blackness because the complexity of human behavior perplexes in its resistance to generality.

In a video I watched at the UN Women’s Tribunal on Poverty (hosted by the Feminist Task Force and the Global Campaign Against Poverty), a young activist painted a grim portrait of the future where a museum exhibit consists of wax figures of people of African descent. “What’s that?” Someone will ask. “Oh. That’s a black person. They went extinct thousands of years ago from AIDS.”

This is the first time I have seriously contemplated HIV/AIDS since I was a kid—since being approached with heavy-handed anti-drug messages. This is the first time I have been exposed to the first-hand anger and frustration of women of color who are fighting to teach prevention to high-risk communities (NYC is above the national average for people infected with the virus); a simultaneous battle with racism and violence against women.

At the Public Health Library on 1^st Ave, an elderly woman who reminded us that she is not an expert, showed pictures of communities she has visited all over the world. During the question and answer session, litanies of misdirected hostility paradoxically united the theater of people. A black woman acknowledged the good intentions of the presenter before berating her for not stepping aside to let women of color help women of color, to research women of color, to explicate and unpack the correlations, to highlight the ways in which we must tackle and abolish racism, poverty, sexism . . .

Yes. The white women nodded their heads. We agree. Why do we get the funding? Why do we get jobs in Brooklyn and the Bronx? Why do we travel the world and give other communities the tools they need to tackle the problems they have largely because we created those very problems for them?

Yes. From behind the podium, the woman, whose signs of age were seemingly vaporized under the stage lights, nodded. This woman, a contemporary Mary Henrietta Kingsley.

I am spending a year of relative privilege by serving a community I am not yet familiar with and that did not previously and directly contribute to my growth and development. I have multiple justifications for my decision: it is important to embrace diversity, it is important to stand up for the disenfranchised who represent no part of my personal identity, but contain the same palpitating viscera . . .

It is important to constantly question my motivations. It is important to defend myself against an existential crisis and the crushing carapace of cynicism.

Another training. Another cheesy certificate in a cheap, plastic frame.

“Latin American and African American men are the least likely to get liver transplants.”

“Why?”

Wide, dark-circled, intimidating eyes steer my way, “Racism.”

This word is said with an intonation of condescension: “Racism, of course. I know you want to cover your face from this issue, but you cannot ignore it.”

However, in the midst of discussing public health, breaking it down into specific demographics, confronting racism as a major cause of gross disparities in health care, there are intersperses of another kind of fear of confrontation, one that is not immediately recognized.

“Our young women today don’t know how to stand up for themselves. To be independent. To believe that they can be happy without a man constantly in their lives. They have a problem saying, ‘no’—articulating precisely what they want when they want it. We need to counsel them in better self-esteem.”

Another consensus. The nodding of heads.

“A woman needs to know when to be subservient to a man. She has to let him be the provider. She needs to take care of herself—to be the source of her own happiness—but she needs to know when to say when. She needs to be the woman and she needs to let the man be the man. Only then can she be a True Woman.”

Gender and race issues have been colliding in inextricable ways all around me. The main point: inextricability. These things cannot be prioritized; they must be addressed simultaneously.

Audre Lorde walked to the neighborhood in Harlem where I currently live to buy comic books with her sisters. She tasted women in the Lower East Side. She pondered the layers of oppression that accompany blackness, a body-quivering love for women, as well as being generally female. She thought about her blackness in lesbian bars in the Village.

We continue to have these conversations over half a century later—conversations about intersecting, complex identities. But, it seems to me, most people don’t have these conversations: it crosses their mind, their eyes glaze, they are afraid to be caught in a snare . . .

A transgendered woman, male to female, handed out a survey.

How long have you known that you are heterosexual? Would you like to seek therapy to change that?

“How can people expect me not to judge them, when they are confused about their own sexuality?”

“Men who have sex with men are gay. How could they be anything else?”

If the transgendered woman, male to female, loved women, she would be a lesbian.

“Things are just so complicated now.”

But, really, things have always been like this.

In the training on adolescent sexuality, the quick sand topic was sexual orientation. Three men sat in the audience—the largest number ever recorded. Three men dominated the conversation; interrupted the presentations.

In the training about HIV/AIDS education and prevention, the focus became spirituality

“He had a plan. He made us in a particular way. There is no reason for a baby to be born HIV positive. A baby sheds its mother’s immune system. Someone is looking out for us.”

In the training that wasn’t about older women and sexuality:

The grandmother, the Corinthians love-message pusher:

“The condom was stuck inside me. I couldn’t get it out. I tugged and pulled. I cried. And then, the next night, I was lying in my bed and it just shot out—without me having to do anything.”

Art and Text

My time has been split between attending literary events and public health workshops. I’m trying to catch up my blog with all of these happenings. One thing at a time. Written installments that try frantically to keep pace with my life. Always writing in past tense. Always speaking in fragments when the objective is to make connections; create holistic meaning.

Recently I traipsed through the American Folk Art Museum to catch the last day of a Henry Darger exhibit. The exhibit showcased the work of Darger and a handful of artists he has influenced. Amy Cutler’s paintings corralled the majority of my attention (I had seen one of her paintings over a year ago at the Brooklyn Museum, but had forgotten about her until this recent rediscovery).

From far away the girls in Cutler’s pieces look nearly identical, but upon closer scrutiny, each face and expression denotes distinct personality. I appreciated Cutler’s prompt to look closely and to ponder the little mysteries of her work. Domestic spaces and quaintly attired female figures provoke curiosity through absurdities such as people being rolled into Persian rugs, girls’ hair seamlessly braided together, and/or strange crafts being conducted with women’s hair. The coils of hair providing a life line between and providing a resource for the arts and crafts of these depicted characters offers a nesting doll dialogue about folk art that comments on itself, that captures the act of crafting in a landscape of folk costumes with a heavy dose of surrealist, fairy tale intrigue. Adding to the quiet, wintry provocation of the paintings is the negative space: white consumes much of the work, sometimes providing little, if any, sense of space and horizon. Cutler also demonstrates a fascination with private, small spaces—a child-like whimsy akin to setting up a personal headquarters in a closet or investigating and cherishing all of the components and compartments of a doll house (as in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Doll House,” and Kezia’s love of the little lamp).

A contemporary Chinese-American artist was also featured in the exhibit: Yun-Fei Ji. His cramped and interesting work can be viewed here. Exploring the juxtaposition of text and image (Darger provided illustrations for his novels), the exhibit nodded to traditional Chinese art--fusing word and image in flowing, thick, black-tipped brushstrokes.

Earlier, I was reading an interview with Lynda Barry (a self-taught artist, and in many ways, connected to this idea of American “folk arts”) who discussed the link between text and picture, as well as its roots in Chinese art. For Barry, art is a response to compulsion and necessity, and thought projects images into the theater of the mind. Barry would have been a nice addition to this exhibit, adding to the discourse with contributions by graphic novelists—as “outsider” artists, as celebrating the marriage of illustration and written language, etc.

However, it is clear that the marriage of text and the visual arts is not to explicate. Despite Darger’s outpour of narrative, ambiguity chokes his precise message and vision. Little girls infest battlegrounds with flaccid penises . . . What more can be said? It is a worthy image of analytical debate that leaves me pensive and fearful of loquacity. It is a jolting mascot for an adolescent-like awkwardness that never fully departs after crossing the hazy threshold into adulthood.