A Novel Called Crawl Space

Bush, ports, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and vetos

2006-02-22T06:30:00.000-08:00

My big question about Bush has been this: what are the inner workings of his mind? How does he justify the ways of Bush to Bush? (Perhaps one should say bush to Bush.) If you were to be inside his mind, let's say, and it was lined with shelves of books, and you were there roaming around with George Walker Bush Jr., able to take down any book, when facing any decision, what book might he be taking down right now? Would he be taking down the Nicomachean Ethics? a book promoting social Darwinism, all strength to the strong-loined man on the white horse ignoring the ludicrous cries of the lesser beings? would he be perverting the messianic aspect of the New Testament so as to justify this social Darwinism?

He is alone on Air Force One, let's say, jumpy from too much caffeine that morning; aware that his reign is on its downward spiral; wanting to be remembered well in the annals of history.
A neural sequence, deeply grooved, fires: Got to call in the reporters and don't forget, son, be charming!

Later, he is alone, showering after his golf session. Another message from the neocortex: George, don't be afraid to keep your promises to people who helped daddy's work way back when.

What is the absolute template to which he turns? Is it Family or (his interpretation of) God's word? Do we see in him the triumph of a narrowly defined tribe? Were we all still cavepeople on a great open plain, would his small tribe, Cheney, Condi, Poppy and all the rest, be flourishing in the most elite cave, replete with nuts and berries and bison?

I wish I could track the neural synapses of his brain, making a decision: how far is it from the most-studied neurons, e.g., those in a bird's eye, waiting to detect motion so as to impel a motor sequence ensuring the bird gets the fattest, juiciest worm?

a vlog from a reading -- not a Transylvanian

2005-09-14T15:22:00.000-07:00

A great filmmaker named Enric filmed two Bay Area readings -- in San Francisco and Berkeley. Below is what he says about his vlog, and the link to the video:

http://www.cirne.com/vlog/ (vlogging is like blogging, but with video.) It’s a 51 mb quicktime file, so you’ll need a broadband connection or be willing to let it download for a long time

the movie CRASH

2005-08-02T07:40:00.000-07:00

It has been a long time since I've seen race in America treated in a manner beyond latterday minstrelsy or tin-heart melodrama -- this movie (written by Paul Haggis) while as neat in its wrap-up as any Ian McKuen novel, is so satisfying in its desire to create complex characters, characters who are not wholly any one thing even as they push against or accept or reinvent the terms of their birthright tribe. Transgression aplenty. Plus, the central role gives Don Cheadle room to be the strong actor I always felt he would be if given something beyond the comic drug dealer slaphappy friend type. It is also nice to see a movie which has the quality of 1930s dramas -- i.e., people speaking fast and with intelligence -- here played out in our 2005 street-cred time. See CRASH. See what you think.

Here are some recent reviews of CRAWL SPACE which came out, prior to its publication date on August 16: a really kind one by Thomas Keneally, whom I've long admired, confirming my sense of the literary world as some kind of cocktail party of affinities accepted or rejected (Keneally wrote SCHINDLER'S LIST and A TYRANT'S NOVEL) in the Washington Post of July 31, 2005; other warm-toned ones in Library Journal, Readers' Guild (by Harriet Klausner, who is apparently the #1 reviewer at Amazon, a distinction which fascinates me), and Publisher's Weekly. That's all I can remember for now.

I was also happy to review a book recently for the San Francisco Chronicle called WOMAN IN BERLIN (will come out around August 7 or so), about a late, anonymous German reporter who withstood the Russian army's rapes in Berlin of 1945 -- it was so modern in its intimacy, so candid and unstinting -- okay, just see the review. WOMAN IN BERLIN = worth your time as well.

revised list of readings near you on the West Coast

2005-06-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

To all of these readings, if it suits your fancy, bring some object you consider to be quintessentially French for display and discussion.

June 26: 3 pm, Albany Backyard Series (CA) (623 Evelyn)
August 18: San Francisco, A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books: 6:15 wine and cheese reception, 7 pm reading
August 20: Los Angeles: Duttons of BEVERLY HILLS, 2 pm
August 25: Portland, OR: Powell's Books
August 27: Gualala, CA: Four-Eyed Frog, 4 pm; party after
September 9: Cody's Books (7:30 at 4th Street, near Hearst; 8:30 party to follow in another locale)

cutting cucumbers and xenos

2005-06-24T10:23:00.000-07:00

Last night, I was cutting cucumbers for a salad and overcame my usual sous-chef laziness, peeling them, making them into tiny fairy-size cubes. We all have certain voices which emerge when we prepare certain dishes, the digestive tract linked to the deepest psychological tracts, which may be why Zen practitioners emphasize meal preparation as one of the more useful mind-sharpening devices.

Most often, when it comes to dealing with cucumbers or tomatos, my inner voice takes the form of only one person: the husband of my Israeli cousin, DK, who, like most Israelis, is disgusted by the sloppy leaf-ridden salads of America and perhaps Europe. There is no backbone to such salads, they flop all over the place. A salad to DK and to many other Israelis is only this: cucumbers cut metrical and tiny, tomatos managed in similar suit, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. If one is adventurous, one adds parsley, but already that begins to overstep certain frontiers. Walls must be built. I have seen DK get a bit hysterical at an American barbecue when the tomatos in a particular salad bowl began to appear too generously sliced. Life itself can hang on the angle of the slice.

What fascinates me about DK, who may be a former air force fellow, if I remember correctly, is the extent of the control which he must exercise over the small territories in his life. Existing in such a state of contestation and siege, he cleaves to the known. There must be no deviation, otherwise hysteria ensues. "Ma, hishtagat?" he will say to the errant tomato-slicer. (What, have you gone crazy? which is actually a standard Hebrew locution.)

Counterphobia: this is the same man, I've heard, who against his family's protests, will drive visitors through disputed lands, calmly carrying a gun, riding shotgun.

If I could, right here I'd insert a beautiful painting by the artist Adelie Landis Bischoff, called Men and Guns. Areas of the canvas are left abstract, a site for one's worst metaphysical imaginings. A pair of legs, a profile of a gun.

A few years back, I had a very distant relative whose case made the headlines as a metaphor for the situation among Arabs and Israelis. He was a teenager, one of those crazed ultra-Orthodox who does not see carrying a gun as being antithetical to the teachings of the Torah and Talmud. He took his schoolchildren on a wildflower tour of the West Bank (!) and along the way, he was stoned by some Arab village kids. He went crazy, began to shoot, ended up killing one of the young Israeli girls on his tour. One of the Arab villagers took him in, protected him from the others. But to no great end; my relative wound up losing all his proto-adult memory. His yeshiva bochers were the ones who retaught him everything he could be said to know, giving him a different history regarding the origins of his disability. Whitewashed clean of guilt, he became a small child again, answering his mother obediently, while also having lost all the defining coloration of hatred.

My long-term fantasy has been to learn Arabic and then go to Israel/Palestinian territories and work in one of those Seeds of Peace projects, wherein Palestinian and Israeli kids could develop friendships which would withstand the hatred, mistrust and acculturated fear which are laid in so young -- but is this a foolish, Fulbright-like, Enlightenment-based dream of bridging gaps, akin to the dreams writ into the universal rights of man and ambassadorship? Or is such foolishness necessary?

The tomato sliced a bit too large.

At the cafe near New College, where I teach, there is a picture of a young Lebanese boy who cannot be much older than two, wearing a full army uniform. To admit that I have Israeli heritage becomes an admission of vulnerability, a site of political incorrectness in the radical environment of New College. To say the word Israel already marks me as incorrect.

Origin myths are odd. I saw this firsthand in Sri Lanka among the Sinhalese and Tamils, with their competing myths about Hanuman, kings mating with the wrong wives, monkey gods, and the crazed devils who inhabited the historical Lanka/Illangai. Perhaps in a similar vein, my family traces its ancestry back through the diaspora's Maharal of Prague to second-century Palestine, to a man named Yohanan the sandal-maker in Jerusalem. Had my father's family not left Poland when he was three for Israel, escaping pogroms, I would not be here writing: all my extended family was exterminated.

What happens on both sides is that complexity and nuance and ambivalence themselves become the enemy. Amos Oz is wonderful at articulating this, as would be Joan Didion, archdeacon of complexity. Could the New York Review of Books send Didion abroad?

Another bit to the salad: some years ago, a wonderful documentary about Palestinian and Israeli children came out called, I believe, PROMISES. What was insidious in this documentary was watching the friendships between Muslim and Jewish kids disappear under a pile of adultlike sanctities. (For fun and oddity, contrast this movie with the great Belgian movie about destitute children, LA PROMESSE).

To bring this full circle: last month I had Belgian friends visit who insisted on making the dressing in the bottom of a bowl and then piling salad leaves on top. We won't even begin to enter the psychology of Belgium. If only xenophobia could be as simple a subject as sequencing a salad, or a tail-biting blog.

France refusing to ratify the constitution

2005-06-07T15:08:00.000-07:00

One of my beliefs, which I'd love to be challenged on, is that many French locate themselves the most in the act of saying NO. (E.g., to the recent European constitution proposal.) It is interesting that two countries which have a somewhat exalted, somewhat difficult WWII history are those that negated the proposal (France and the Netherlands both.) And what is the reason for the no in France's case?

Is it mere garden-variety existential dread, a great intimacy with existential holes, which leads to this no? The no being an oral act which some might say is the equivalent of the two-year-old's linkage of self-identity with an act of defiance. Who has already written a theory of nations which assigns various chronological ages to each nation? I'm sure someone has. The U.S. as a brawling baby? France as a two-year-old and a worldly eighty-year-old, simultaneously? Which nation among the convocation of all the world remains a sage? Some would say Tibet, is my guess, but are there others?

Worthwhile magazines on a newsstand near you

2005-06-03T14:33:00.000-07:00

For you literary types: check out www.kitchensink.mag;

for you radical innovator types: check out the great www.lipmagazine.org;

for you feminists interested in comments on pop culture: check out www.bitchmagazine.com

All run by noble people, all worthy of your time . . .

- Edie

the bravery of writing students

2005-06-02T11:59:00.000-07:00

When I began teaching writing in New York at some point in my twenties, I used to wear eyeglasses as a kind of inner-schoolmarm prop, to create a certain boundary between me and the students, and formed my own policy against too much fraternizing -- sororitizing? -- outside of regular class and advising hours with graduate students. Others with more defended personalities probably don't need to do this as much, and are able to have the occasional outing with a group of students. But I have maintained this policy for this reason: I'm often not much older than they are, and occasionally they're much older than I am. But probably the real reason: I have something of a permeable consciousness and it has seemed useful to find all the boundaries I can invent, even while I feel great simpatico with their missions.
Last night there was a faculty reading at New College at which Kate Braverman, Judy Grahn, Kris Brandenburger, Margo Perin, Sarah Stone, Brian Teare, Zaid Shlah and I read -- I felt honored to be on the same bill with others writing such risk-taking and accomplished work. I know that as a child, growing up in Oakland, Judy Grahn had represented a certain important part of the universe to me, and I was blown away by so many passages read by the other readers.
Afterward, I defied my usual policy and went out with some of the students to a dive called Casanova on Valencia Street, struck all over again by this next generation of writers: their astral hopes, the 3-card monte game they play with their talent, their intelligence and humor. If I had an evangelism, it would be about unleashing others' creative potential, and so it has been fulfilling to see several generations of students going out in the world and finding a cultural niche, some happy bridge.
Oddly, as I was writing this, a reporter from the SF Chronicle who is doing a piece on MFA programs in the Bay Area just called to set up an interview, leading me to reflect more on the worth and oddness of this phenomenon called the MFA.
More later . . .

pink, and raising a girl + a dance song by way of explanation (archive)

2005-06-01T11:45:00.000-07:00

These are the beginnings of the BLOG THAT ATE CRAWL SPACE when it was birthed on AOL -- I'm just pasting in a couple here for your reading delectation and comments.

I. Wednesday, May 25, 20054:29:55 PM EDT
a dance song by way of explanation

AOL suggests certain moods which should preface this blog, including: happy, mischievous, anxious, sad, ecstatic, loopy, flirtatious, chillin'. The function of the blog thus starts to seem like a substitute for a village dance, where so much used to be communicated by the gaze or palms of the person high-stepping next to you. Once, some years ago, I got off a train in Barcelona. A few stops before Barcelona, the police had thrown off an illegal friend of mine, who'd come from Sierra Leone to Spain seeking amnesty, some civil peace. The police had used surprise in their favor: the capture and throwing-off had all happened too quickly for me to comprehend it. Stunned, going back to pick up our bags from our compartment, I wondered who the traitor had been, and whether or not the closed-face man across from us had been the racist informant. Of course, I cursed myself for my slow wits. I may have never felt quite so helpless as that moment of looking at the retreating figure of my friend, isolated between two policemen on the station platform, our train starting to chug away. I almost jumped, but didn't. In Barcelona, I registered in a cheap pension and went to the main square where the African diaspora tended to gather. Ended up leaving a note with two cafe denizens who might, I thought, get word to my friend about my whereabouts. Back at the pension, demoralized, I took out my contact lenses and found myself blinded suddenly, so painfully, so surprisingly, that I unwittingly pulled the sink out of the thin plaster walls. The proprietor came, calmly and kindly reassured me, probably thinking something along the lines of "la americana loca", but ushered me into a taxi with 16th-century civility. I ended up with my eyes washed out in some cool, dusty clinic, and finally returned to the center of Barcelona with one eye bandaged like an old-style pilgrim. There in the town square, a group of colorful characters, mostly elderly, gathered to dance a centuries-old dance, the sardana, and they took me into their circle, a bandaged girl. One step left, two steps right. Forget Kundera's fear of nationalist, dancing circles: I think what underwrites so much of our life -- including the idea of the blog -- is this tradition and habit of groups of people dancing in a circle, which has kept the flame long before there lived any ideas about national origin, citizenship, police codes, hotel bathrooms, dusty clinics, contact lenses, the Web.I felt I'd been given the blindwoman's gift of true sight. Two steps left, one step right, the stranger included in the circle, some redemption promised.I thought this today because I saw written down an anonymous Provencal dance song which seemed as fresh as any lyrics I have heard on any new CD -- it is always the big deal in art, this making new of the old. Here's the beginning of the anonymous song with its shock of freshness, copied from a book called A MEDIEVAL MISCELLANY (selected by Judith Herrin for Viking Studio):I'll tell you why I'm someone else's lover: (I'm lovely but miserable)I'm fresh and young, I've a dainty body, (I'm lovely but miserable) Reading completely differently: I felt the above could serve as a concise literary summation of much of Jorie Graham's early poetry, though the anonymous dance song mainlines it straight to the vein. Because of its clarity, really, a value almost worth dying for: life and sight are almost impossible to separate, which may be why those who have died and come back report that sight is the last sense to leave, whether or not your lifelong village dance has been predominantly happy, mischievous, anxious, sad, ecstatic, loopy, flirtatious, or just plain chillin.

II. pink, or, raising a Girl

The landscape of one's intentions before any child actually arrives is a fruited plane, rosy as a Monet, while the landscape afterward is like a scorched eternity of desert sands, constantly shifting. For example, I thought I'd be able, without too much sanctimony, to have our two-year-old daughter bystep much of the media age's worst excesses and, by extension, its ideas about gender. We don't have a working TV in our house, we believe ourselves not wholly penetrated by mass culture, and we tend to have warm, fuzzy thoughts about nature and our place in it.
In general, I have tended toward the Nurture side of the long-standing argument on child development, a stance which got me called naive by all seasoned parents. They'd look at me and sigh: Get yourself a kid, you'll see the truth of Nature. Just wait. Get yourself two kids, you'll be a huge believer in Nature.
Was a belief in Nature a necessary girding of the loins one did? Was it the war-seasoned veterans' way of apologizing to themselves for whatever had happened differently from their best intentions for their kids or for themselves?
Add this into the mix: at one point after the birth of wee E.E.Z. (call her Eez), I read somewhere the question to which some scientists may be devoting themselves. Not: is there a cure for cancer, or are gay men more sensitive to certain pheromones? But this: is the love of the color pink a genetic trait?
In our family, we had ample opportunity to investigate the color pink: Eez quickly turned toward tutus, tulle, all princess and fairy apparitions, an adulation of Cinderella and her mice, the fetishistic pleasure of Snow White band-aids, with butterflies following far behind, a distant second. At the family's house where Eez weathers a few hours a week, she was quickly dolled up with glitter nail polish (guess which color), her hair festooned with little barrettes. Cupcakes with frosting in the anointed hue began to look irresistible to her. And any favored doll or item now gets the accolade name of Pinkie.
I teach in a somewhat radical graduate school in San Francisco where my students viewed a months-old Eez, shocked that she was attired not in, say, the new black, but rather in the pink which she already, at a young age, preferred.
Not to mention that so many of the tales Eez seemed to favor, from long before socialization should have set in, tended to have the happily-ever-after scenario of the long-beloved prince hoisting the rosy-clothed maiden away to eternal bliss. We tried to limit these tales, include them among tales of fancy female explorers, but she preferred the passive-girl stories. Not to jump to conclusions, but does this mean that Eez will have to go the way of all the gold-decal-t-shirt girls who, in my Berkeley public school, seemed to peak right about in the eighth grade? These were girls whose pink attire suggested imminent sexual arousal or defiance, their snapping gum a way of marking time while annoyed but awaiting the prince? Never mind that no real prince could ever fulfill all the pink happiness their Hello Kitty notebooks suggested, these girls had CLAIMED pink, lived in it as their monopoly, wafted its perfume.
So my question to those of you who stand on either side of the nature-nurture question is this: why would the love of such a color be useful in any evolutionary sense? Why does pink speak of sexual socialization? What were the first aesthetic or historic linkages of women with pink? Love poetry and the blushing, coy bride? Or, in the neurobiological sense, is the love of pink partially a vestigial tic, left over from, say, a time when the preference for a rosy, fire-warmed cave helped ensure a girl's survival? Your thoughts on this much appreciated by one mother of a pink-lover.