Talisman #42: The Women's Occupation

When I was in college in the late 1970s I carried around a blue heavy hardcover edition of the Norton Modern anthology; that book was my education in poetry (I was a history major then). When someone told me that John Ashbery loved the work of Laura Riding, I was able to track her down in its thicket of thin print-clogged pages. That was before she renounced not just poetry, but also anthologies, refused further permission to put her work in the Norton. Or so I recall. That anthology, like so many teaching anthologies, was organized chronologically. The sense of history that emerged from its pages was like an old film-strip, a sequence of images that lurched across a tiny temporal space, and suggested the coherence that in fact eluded it. But what seemed most important about that book was that it was full of conversations. I was at the institution best known at that time for a theory of literary influence, but I'm not talking about that father-son family romance model so much as about a larger social space, where poets' words called out to each other. It was a big, messy neighborhood, that Norton. While later reading offered more neatness, tighter narratives, meaner-spirited arguments over poetics (oh, Laura Riding!), that one was the big event that drew me in, as if it were the slide show to introduce me to poetic time shares.

I thought about Laura Riding's rejection of anthologies, especially her distaste for all-women anthologies, when Lisa Bourbeau wrote to ask me for work several months back for a "women's section" in a forthcoming issue of Talisman. One of the best literary experiences I've ever had was a Russian-American poetry conference in Hoboken in the mid-90s, organized by Ed Foster in the spirit of his Talisman House Press and journal. The two or three days were full of cigarette smoke, drink, loud voices, men bonding over hearing gunfire in the streets of American and Russian cities, and poets who (in one instance) bounded over the backs of our chairs, and (in another) tried to walk out of his own reading. It featured animated arguments between Russians; I remember asking Lynn Hejinian at one point to tell me what was going on. But it almost didn't matter, there was so much energy in the room, and because so much of the poetry was performative. There was Forrest Gander standing on a desk reciting a poem, asking Michael Palmer to help him when he faltered. Looking back, this seems a model for the journal, albeit a very noisy one. Talisman has always, with a tremendous lack of assumptions, presented experimental work that matters. The plain covers, whose insides were covered with dense type, were decoys for anyone wanting flash with their poetry. Those of us happy with the pan itself got another poetry education in its pages.

But Talisman House has never published many women. In the 1990s, there was a Selected Poems by Alica Notley, which kicks a pebble in my mind, but otherwise not many. (Talisman published a chapbook version of my first Memory Cards before the full-length book came out.) I go now to their website and find, under their "new" section, a list of 20 new books. Of the books by a single author, which number 15, two are by women, one by the Turkish poet, Gulten Akm, and the other by Donna de la Perrière. Otherwise, there are books by Leonard Schwartz (his If is a terrific book, by the way), Joe Donahue, Brian Henry, John High, and the late William Bronk, among others.

So it seemed a good thing that Talisman was going to publish women. I suggested doing it without marking it as a "women's section," to see if anyone noticed. But that did not happen. Instead, the new issue (read it here) comes in several sections: a section of miscellany running from Artaud to Marjorie Perloff's fine interview of Hank Lazer, with photographs of William Bronk in the bundle; a section on gnostic poetry; "The Occupation: The First of Three Major Selections of Works by and about Women Writers Around the World"; "Poetry"; and then, finally, "Commentary." The subjects of the first section are men; the writers of the second are all men; the "Poetry" section is male, and the commentator is Thomas Fink. Islanded in the middle of this male sea is the "Occupation," a fulsome gathering of women's work from Alice Notley's introductory essay on dreams to poetry by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge . . . Anne Tardos, and many others. Just after this occupation by women poets who write in English there is a section on translation that features women poets with their both-gender translators.

 

"The Occupation": In New York City, the occupation resonates with the after-echoes of the Occupy movement of 2011, with people reclaiming public spaces, living in them, setting up tents, small villages engaging in direct democracy, places from which to speak out. That makes sense, this occupation at the center of Talisman's male space. "Wall Street" is not simply an economic hub; it's also, at least according to its name, walled off. It will keep you out. Occupying it forces you in. But as someone who's lived in Hawai`i for any length of time knows, "occupation" is primarily what colonizers do, what armies do. (In Hawai`i, the Occupy movement changed their name to "de-Occupy.") They take up space that is not their own, and they do it by force of weaponry or culture or economy. Israel occupies Palestine, we're reminded daily. The USA occupies the world's movie theaters and radio waves. The English language occupies a vast territory, across continents and oceans. And so, Thomas Fink, in the "Commentary" section of the issue, writes this about Paolo Javier's work: 

“English Is an Occupation,” the title of a poem in 60 lv bo(e)mbs, embodies a metaphor performing a metonymic linkage between the imposition of the English language on Filipinos during the nearly half-century U.S. occupation ( resulting in the devaluation of Tagalog and other local languages) and the occupation itself. However, confirming Cura’s notion of “mongrel identity,” it also reflects the job of an English teacher or professor and of the “polyglot” poet writing in English: “persevere      counter ardor mystic parables/ today Paolo occupies you, today Paolo occupies you” (7). In this poem and in the book as a whole, density of allusions and the syntactically unpredictable juxtaposition of fragmentary utterances make the critic’s “occupation” of “translation” challenging, (Fink)

Here, the poet occupies more and less than a public space; he occupies the reader himself or herself--"Paolo occupies you." Paolo is not an English word, and many of the words Javier uses are Tagalog, so the English-only reader is carted off to the margins of this public/private square (El Centro Paolo). Fink writes about Javier's as "immigrant" poetry. He's the guy from the occupied place who leaves it, only to occupy the imperial power's language, space. He's the guy who gets translated and now occupies those translations. He's the guy who causes discomfort. After all, he's living in a tent, and he might not be washing himself enough with imperial soap!

At the end of Fink's long, patient, cogent review of Forrest Gander, Paolo Javier, and Stephen Paul Miller under the concept of "(un)translatability," he makes a kind of apology. While he has written about a white guy steeped in Mexican culture, a Filipino guy who lives in Queens, and a Jewish poet who loves Meher Baba, he has not written about any women, as he admits here: 


In the early stages of developing this essay, I believed that the poems of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge would be especially suitable for it. My impression, it turned out, was based on a handful of fragmentary utterances in different poems, and each time I tried to read Berssenbrugge’s powerfully abstract yet imagistic, disjunctive yet meditative poetry in relation to (un)translatability, I found that the work’s particular flux disabled whatever generalizations I hoped to cull from it. (Fink)

In other words, her work was so untranslatable that it defeated his attempt to write about it. To critique a poem is to describe it, and if the poem cannot be described, put into context, or otherwise closely read, its "particular flux" defeats the writer. Fair enough. He notes that he has written about three male poets, notes the absence of women poets. But it's not that there are not women in the work of these three men, however: "My subjects are three men, the first of whom engages in ekphrastic conversation with the art of a woman and the second of whom deploys the persona of a woman." So he hopes for some work on "translatability" between men and women: "That fact reminds me that one possibility for future criticism in this vein is the area that psychologist Deborah Tannen has so compellingly investigated: cross-gender communication. How do men and women foreground their efforts to translate what they wish to communicate to the opposite gender? How do they think about translating the “language” of the opposite gender to themselves? And also, for transgendered poets, how are the complexities of translation enacted and absorbed?"

I want to think about the difference between "cross-gender" and "transgender." To cross genders means to move back and forth between them, for men to communicate with women and vice versa. To be transgender means a crossing over, a leaving behind, a movement from one to another place. Both posit difference as the most important feature of communication. (And who am I to disagree?) But given that most of the essays and poems in this issue where there is cross-gender communication involve men writing about women (Gander, yes, but also the gnostic critics writing about Dickinson and Notley) that's like a Chris Christie bridge. You can cross it only one way. 

Thus far, I've left the women poets out of this conversation, as I engage with the men who seem walled off from them. Does Fink's notion of Berssenbrugge's "flux" and untranslatability apply to the women's section? Is that why it's walled off, lest it flood the other more masculine boroughs? In 2013 do we still need special sections devoted to women's writing? What IS women's writing? I'm loathe to say it's got flux, while the men do not; after all, gnosticism seems to reside in brokenness, which is a non-state of flux. (What new gnosticism is is still vague to me, even after reading much of the section.) There's no sense given by Bourbeau or Ed Foster of what they mean by "women's writing," so I'm going to the first essay of the "Occupation" by Alice Notley for clues. And here I find what Fink might call a cross-gender moment, or is it trans-? The essay is about dreaming, how poems emerge from dreams, how communication occurs (about the past and the future) during dreaming. And it's also about how Alice Notley becomes Allen Ginsberg:

"In 1997, after I had been informed that Allen Ginsberg had died, I became afraid for him in death. I wanted -- because he was my friend -- to be sure that in death he was safe. I dreamed that night that my stepdaughter Kate, who is deceased and in dreams is often my messenger from the world of the dead, came for me, in a rich dark blue skirt and sweater, to take me to the ‘second world.’ I gathered that this second world was an afterlife with an active artistic component, for there was a professor there who was trying to achieve an intense enough red for the second world’s mosaics. Then, my name became Ellen Goodman (yes like the columnist), so I knew that I was Allen, the good man, and I waited in a small apartment to die."

The woman poet becomes a "good man," who occupies a small apartment in his dying. Notley's dream-life is all flux, all symbol, all transformation. Dreaming reshapes the world; it is the world. Is this women's work? I don't think this "occupation" answers that question, nor do I think it really even poses it. But what it does is to open a space in a journal that has welcomed some of the best experimental writers now alive--especially those with spiritual affinities toward gnosticism--for women writers, however you define them. To define is to wall in and wall out, as Robert Frost would say, but the act of definition can also mend differences by creating a space where they can exist gently. Frost's wall was of uneven stones, not the barbed wire of many an occupation. To "disobey" is what Notley has often said she does. Next time, I hope Talisman disobeys its own categorical imperative and admits the company of men, women, transgender people, people of color, to the gathering. It might feel like the mob around security in the Madrid Airport, but things sort themselves out, we "translate" ourselves elsewhere, occupying our languages, ourselves.

A final digression that is not one. I'm about to embark on a course in small press publishing on the graduate level; it scares me, as I know so little about the subject. I collect poems, I even sometimes edit them a bit, but mostly I glory in the designs of others who are more talented than I am visually, and work the tired mill of publicity. But I do know that I will emphasize the need for a small press to have a mission, for young editors to find gaps that need to be filled, and to fill them. I will also ask them to consider that there is a difference between collecting poems and curating them. This issue of Talisman has collected some of the best poems I've seen in a long time. But the issue's curation is what troubles me. To collect marvelous poems by women, which is what Bourbeau has done, is one thing. But to organize an issue in which those women "occupy" a central and yet highly marked place, is problematic. Why is the last section, called "Poetry," composed only of poems by men? Why is the gnostic section composed only of men (even if it's based on a panel at a conference--another problem)? Why are there so few poets of color within the category of "women," and how do white women fit with international women poets with American "immigrant" poets like Eileen Tabios? This is not to say they do not, but to occupy those questions is where Talisman might move next--or we. Most of all, there's a difference between counting how many men and how many women are published (an activity that's telling, to put it mildly, as Spahr and Young have shown in "Numbers Trouble") and organizing a public/private square where they are not blocked off from one another in groups of apparent same. 

My own contribution to the new issue is here. It's a long prose poem in sections about baseball for my son on his 14th birthday. In other words, it's a long poem by a woman for a young man and about young men.


An after-thought: a diagram could at least be made of some of the crossings in this issue. Gnostic men joined by gnostic women (Notley, F. Howe, DuPlessis); gnostic women joined by members of the Talisman "poetry section," and so forth. A flow chart to suggest flux, rather than a group of isolated groups, in other words.

"Thinking like an Asian": an interview on Jee Yoon Lee's blog

The cognitive hiccup involved in seeing that title and my face (photo by Anne Kennedy) together is part of what Tinfish is about, so I'm very pleased to be here. Joon-Young's sister, J. Vera Lee, is author of 2013's second book, Diary of Use.

So have a look at the interview, and also at Jee Yoon's blog more generally.

JACK LONDON IS DEAD launch now available at PennSound

For a recording of the launch of Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry (and some stories), go to PennSound, here.

This anthology is an important intervention in Hawai`i's literary politics, and offers a fine selection of poetry, as well as statements by the writers on what it means to be a Euro-American writer in Hawai`i in the 21st century.

To buy the book, go to our website, here.

You can also buy this book along with three others published during this past year. See our website for details of the sale.

The dream course I neglected to send: Literature of Alzheimer's

Curious that I hadn't heard a verdict on the graduate course proposal I thought I'd put in several months ago, I was told that I'd not sent it in.  Found it in my "drafts" folder, unsent.  The course is on Alzheimer's and literature. Might re-tool it for an honors course next year, or simply frame it. Posting it here, in case anyone might want to cannibalize it for their own purposes. Courses like this one are needed, at every level and in many departments.

Graduate Course Proposal

Prof. Susan M. Schultz

October, 2013

Literature of Alzheimer's

According to the Alzheimer's Association, five million Americans are living with Alzheimer's disease or other dementia. One in three seniors dies with the disease. By 2050, the disease will cost the USA (alone) over one trillion dollars a year. Recognition of Alzheimer's as a disease has inspired a literature of and about it, including novels, poetry, and memoirs. But it also provokes the reader of Modernist and Postmodernist literature to reconsider works of literature by Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett and other writers whose use of language often resembles that of someone suffering early to mid-Alzheimer's. It asks readers to consider how different cultures approach the disease. It provokes the consumer of popular culture to take a close look at television shows, movies, and advertising that engages with Alzheimer's. It demands that the citizen look at parallels between the ways in which Alzheimer's sufferers and “illegal aliens” are described in similar terms, and similarly (in some ways, if not others) are put in “homes” for their and society's “safety,” and to prevent them from “wandering” across “borders.” It asks questions of the scholar of life writing about how best to write about the illness. And it asks questions of all of us about identity issues: what makes us human? Is there a point beyond which we are no longer ourselves? Why are most of us so afraid of acquiring Alzheimer's? Are we the sum total of our memories, or are there another bases to our being human?

This course will address these issues by engaging with literature (and film) of and about Alzheimer's. Students of literary history and creative writing will be invited either to work toward a final critical project on literary works, or toward a creative project (poetry, fiction, memoir) that uses Alzheimer's either as content, as theme, or as manifested in language use. We will have visitors from Gerontology and Disability Studies, as well as a field trip to an Alzheimer's home. There will be a final project of 20 pages of writing, as well as blog posts every week, and a significant amount of reading. Students will be asked to lead discussions and to report on Alzheimer's related writing they find in the mainstream media and on-line.

Readings will include books (or selections) by Daniel Schacter on how memory works and files; Jesse Ballenger on the history of Alzheimer's in the United States; Gertrude Stein (and an essay on her work by Michael D. Snediker); Samuel Beckett's Rockaby; Don DeLillo's Falling Man; Thomas DeBaggio's Losing My Mind (a rare memoir by a journalist who had Alzheimer's); David Chariandy's Soucouyant; Lawrence Cohen's No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things; Poetry/Shi (Korean film with Alzheimer's theme) and other video projects; B. S. Johnson's experimental novel, House Mother Normal; Catherine Malabou's philosophical projects, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage and What Should We Do With Our Brain? While, as a rule I do not teach my own work, I would consider asking students to read one of the volumes of my two volume mixed genre series, Dementia Blog.

Rancière's questionnaire

In my last post about education, I said I wanted to ask my students why they're in college. I intended only to ask my freshmen and to lead from that to a discussion of intellectual honesty, as there's been an outbreak of plagiarism in that class. But I ended up asking all of my students yesterday, using the prompt: "I am in college in order to ______________." The overwhelming answer was "to get a job." Other answers included, "to get the piece of paper"; "to find a husband"; "to make a stable life for myself"; "to appease my parents"; "I don't want to be here"; "to learn about the universe . . . student debt is putting my life into a box," and so forth. While completing a sentence like this only tells me so much--my students are, after all, interesting, talented people--I was struck by the level of instrumentality in their answers. One of my freshmen erupted with a counter-argument that only proved the point he was arguing against: "Everyone here has it wrong," he declaimed. "You don't need to go to college to get a good job--my father has one--nor do you need money to be happy." I was hoping for the idealistic follow-up, "but you go to school for other reasons."  That was not forthcoming. "It's the economy, stupid," I could hear someone stage-whisper to me, and there's no time or money for mental luxury.

Rancière writes about people who don't think they're worthy of knowledge, which reminds me that Booker T. Washington thought nothing so sad as a poor black person studying French. The sense that we ought to do something practical is very strong in my students, and that "ought to" includes job, financial security, and--in many cases--seemingly little else. There was an allusion in one student's response to courses that "aren't necessary," with a smiley face after it, by which I gathered that s/he considers Freshman Composition to be an unnecessary course. This belief seems to me wrong in two very different ways. First, if you want a job, English 100 will provide you the skills to communicate and do the job that's out there, if there is one in this "post-employment economy." It will help you go through the interviews, organize your thoughts, analyze data, and it will even help you write memos, the coin of our realm if there ever was one. If you need to invent your own job--create a website to offer services, for example--this course will help you do that, even if each assigned essay does not. If you need funding for your website, you'll have to write grant proposals. And second, if we want to have any pleasure in this life, thinking is surely primary among them, as we spend more time with our thoughts than with anything, or anyone, else. I look at their tired faces and realize that pleasure is far from their minds. The frequent in-class exercise, geared toward activity and, yes, fun, seems a blip in their otherwise grim days of attending classes, working a job or two, and then getting up to do it again.

Getting pedantic about joy seems backwards, too. But Rancière's "emancipation" narrative requires a field of possibility before it can take place, before "stultification" cedes to movement and ignorance to learning. This is what is at stake in Rancière, the how-to of teaching someone to teach herself. His notion that the teacher should also be ignorant seems helpful in some classrooms, if not others (Calculus, anyone?). But the university system enforces hierarchies, just as it currently enforces the ideology of practicality. That my department is cutting poetry courses only makes us complicit in this reduction to the god of non-fiction that seems to be occurring more generally in literary studies. Give them facts, contemporary Gradgrinds ordain. The playfulness of language is an ornament. Insofar as we listen, it's to poetry that tries hard to make something happen. That's good, but surely not all there is. Sometimes something has happened: a death, a loss, a work of art. Our responses to those stimuli need time, too.

And time is the biggest problem. My students don't have it. What they have of it they spend trying desperately to relax, by way of iPods and iPads and iPhones (the I might seem lyrical if it did not encourage passivity). These are instruments of liberation, too, with immediate access to knowledge--Google as godsend--but they aren't often enough used as such. "I'm looking something up," is a rare moment in my classroom, when I chide a student for appearing to send a text message. As a teacher, I can offer students 50 minutes or an hour of creative time, but I cannot give them more time than that. Once they leave the classroom, they're back in the world where what matters is the "piece of paper," as one student put it. I'm tempted to ask, "what else can you do with a piece of paper?" Here's a xeroxed diploma, now write or draw all over it!

The head of my son's school for dyslexic kids, Paul Singer, recently wrote an essay in the Huffington Post about making learning "relevant" to children. He added, "The great educational philosopher John Dewey believed that the school curriculum should grow out of the needs and interests of the learner." This may work best when college students don't have such fixed notions of what their "needs" are. When "needs" revolve around stability, income, job, and nothing else (though one student wrote that he "just wants to study music," with the "just" hanging out there to dry). I can't tell them they don't need to pay off their student loans, don't need to be employed, don't need to get that degree as a step along the way to adulthood, but perhaps I can suggest that there are adventures to be had beyond the job, that there are forms of insecurity to court, too, those that are not financial but artistic. It's a hard sell, I know.

That metaphor (that of "the hard sell") gives away the store, doesn't it?

_______________________

My son's school is Assets in Honolulu.  Have a look at their website. 

Eric Parker, via facebook, sends a good link for students to consider, both in terms of job prospects and the relevance of their liberal arts courses.

"There is nothing to understand": Jacques Rancière & November's weary pedagogue

It's the time of year, as one Michael Nye writes, when teachers and students are sick of one another, and are mostly just tired (often also sick). It's also the time of year when, especially in my lower-level classes, I wonder if I've done any good work at all. Writing problems begin to seem intractable, and what to do in each next class starts to become more of a mystery. Time speeds up, but the mind slows. And it's not just in classes that these effects occur. Department meetings seem pre-scripted, the silences in the halls all too predictable, and the work to be done in navigating the academic life too difficult. But Jacques Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation arrived in the mail this week. After I posted several links to articles about adjunct labor in the academy, John Bloomberg-Rissman recommended the book to me. Then UHM philosophy professor, Joseph Tanke, spoke about Rancière's work, and my colleague John Zuern, responded to him, at a International Cultural Studies talk I couldn't attend, but listened to via podcast.The series is organized by another colleague, Ruth Hsu.

It arrived at a moment of crisis, if feeling fed up can live up to that word. I don't know if I'll have time, but tomorrow I'd like to present my students--at least those in English 100--with the following prompt: "I am in college because . . . " There's been a rash of plagiarism in that one class, some of it involving ideas borrowed but not cited, some the "total recall" method of cut-and-paste from the internet. Students in my honors class ask me every week what they should write about on the class blog, until yesterday I told them I hoped they would find something that interested them in the reading, or in the course more generally, and write about that! My middle class, which suffers both my indulgence and sometimes my neglect, is full of bright, creative students who never google anything they don't know. So, opening up Rancière to Chapter One's title, "An Intellectual Adventure," feels like a step back into that before-time of wanting to teach because you could have intellectual conversations all the time and enjoy "the life of the mind." Ha!

Rancière is telling me what I already know, but what the ordeal of a long semester causes me to forget: that learning is an activity; that I am not a conveyor belt of knowledge but a goad to it; that my job is to create the possibilities for knowledge, rather than offer neat packages of knowledge as fact. There is no before and after in Rancière, no moment before you learn and no moment after I have have taught you something. There is no sequel, in which you now know something I've taught you, but still lack the knowledge to know that next thing I will spring on you later!  His ideas, by way of Joseph Jacotot, whose intellectual biography he writes, remind me why I love to teach writing more than almost anything else. It's an activity, not a pit stop.

And it's an activity that depends not on "understanding" (as in, "I don't understand poetry," or "I don't understand how to analyze") but on letting go of that word in favor of other words, like "enjoyment" or "thinking" or "attention." Rancière is especially good on that last word, one that I find myself using more and more. "Power cannot be divided up," he notes; "There is only one power, that of saying and speaking, of paying attention to what one sees and says." The good teacher does not interrogate, like Socrates, asking questions that lead to an inevitable answer; instead, she points to a text, asks students to read it (even if it's in a language that she herself does not know). The teacher models the search, not the discovery. "Whoever looks always finds. He doesn't necessarily find what he is looking for, and even less what he was supposed to find. But he finds something new to relate to that thing he already knows." Finding relation is the intelligence he celebrates, and anyone can do that.

Those who embark on what he and his subject, Jacotot, call "universal teaching" realize that "it is a question of observing, comparing, and combining, of making and noticing how one has done it. What is possible is reflection." The other day I entered my Introduction to Creative Writing class and talked to the students about how to make a chapbook, since their final project is to make one for their semester's work. Then I handed out pieces of paper and stacks of newspapers, a few scissors, and some glue sticks. They formed teams of two and began immediately to cut and paste and arrange bits of paper on the table. I hadn't given them directions; had simply provided the means for an exercise that they recognized as they started to do it. "We've been well trained," laughed one student when I remarked on my own lack of directions. I take that as a pleasant irony, that training toward taking command of the exercise at hand.

So on the good days, I see the voyaging happening in my classrooms, that eager combination of social event with intellectual or creative activity. The sense of "I can't understand" gets replaced with "I am making something." But it's a struggle. As I get older, I'm inclined to talk more in my classes, to try to convey knowledge rather than feed the hunger that demands it. I get more impatient with what I see as pedagogy that demands affiliation rather than opening unexpected connections. I grow more doctrinaire in my desire to rid my department of doctrine. I get more frustrated with my students' apparent passivity, forgetting that I once let assignments drop, plugged myself in (in an awkward 1970s way). If only "an emancipated person" can be "an emancipator," then self-emancipation is not an easy task.

It's been valuable then, on a day away from teaching, to indulge in this book, and to be reminded of the truth of Rancière's perception that we are the "being" who "examines what he sees," and that the real question to ask is "what do you think about it?" Or, "what do you notice?" Or, "how can you make something of this, whatever 'this' might be?"

My coda to Tony's coda to the Spirit & World Series conversation

Aloha Tony--

As I begin to write my coda to our Spirit & Series dialogue, it feels as if the statue of limitations has run out. Or, perhaps not: my life's time-line includes many years that I don't remember well (at least not as themselves), but those years during which the Cardinals won or lost the World Series seem better punctuated than most. The punctuation I'm now most deeply immersed in, as a teacher of English composition, is the semi-colon, but there's also the exclamation point (the one I'm reminded was a single quote, backspace, period on a manual typewriter). The Cards were in the series twice in the late 60s, when I was a child, three times in the 1980s, when I was in graduate school, then four times again since I've lived in Hawai`i. These Series gather other memories together, like snowballs (though where I live there's a snowball's chance in hell that there are snowballs), fleshing out my various lives, re-casting me in places where I watched games, re-joining me to friends from each era. I'm reminded of the ways in which my emotional lives have changed; the intensity of the losses and the wins is lesser now than it was, though I do confess to losing a couple of days to this most recent loss, catching up on needed sleep while luxuriating in my grump. Insofar as there are real continuities to our emotional lives, I've carried these emotions, attached to this team, to every place I've lived since I was an 8 year old in Virginia. When the emotions revive I'm in a restaurant in Charlottesville watching one of those old projection televisions, or I'm in my car asking my son to call the game for me, or I'm in the living room sharing the joy and sadness with my family.

While the Series was going on, I was teaching a unit in my Honors class on the Khmer Rouge. We read Chanrithy Him's memoir, When Broken Glass Floats, and had a guest speaker, Hongly Khuy, come talk to us about his own experiences during the genocide of the 1970s in Cambodia. One of my students in that class is also a Cardinals fan--by way of his grandfather--and we would attend to the grim task of talking about genocide until class ended. Then, in ritual fashion, I (sans smart phone) would ask him quickly what the score was. After the Series ended, we talked briefly about how odd it was to move between these two subjects, their relative weights so utterly different in our minds. He noted that part of the reason he got over the loss so quickly was the comparison he made between these two events.

Something moves me to look up a poem I remember reading, though the content escapes my memory. It's William Carlos Williams's "At the Ballgame." Written in the late 1930s, this poem directly addresses the conflict between game and genocide. But Williams doesn't address it as opposition, rather as part and parcel of the same phenomenon, that of the crowd.  His poem can be found here, but I'll quote some of it now. After describing the baseball crowd, its "spirit of uselessness," its attention to detail, its excitement, Williams makes a horrifying turn:

The crowd at the ball game

is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness

which delights them—

He warns against the very beauty he sees before him, not as he sees it, but as it reminds him of 

another crowd.

The Jew gets it straight— it

is deadly, terrifying— 

It is the Inquisition, the

Revolution

It is beauty itself

that lives

day by day in them

idly—  

Like the Adrienne Rich poem we read in class on Friday, "Eastern War Time," Williams juxtaposes two scenes, the one in the United States (where a girl goes to school, a crowd to the ball game), with one of genocide, holocaust. He isn't interested in evil--the evil our guest Hongly said was in all of us--but  in spectatorship as a lack of thought:

It is summer, it is the solstice

the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing

in detail

permanently, seriously

without thought 

The ballgame might take an afternoon, but the crowd is permanent. Just as our emotional lives are permanent in their own ways, the human tendency to look on, even to look for beauty (what is purity

but a perfect totalitarian desire), to look on as others suffer and die.

This is getting far more grim than I'd intended. So let me, for now, suggest that while Williams noticed a permanence across the continuum from sporting event to totalitarianism, we can also imagine a disjunction between them. We are discontinuous, as well as consistent, characters. If we know, or can imagine, the differences between these polar similarities, we can create lives for ourselves that combine joy with ethical fitness. In whatever small way, our discussion of the Series has struck me as an extended reading of this poem I'm ending with. We choose the beauty, even the 

grief, of the Series, but we also aim to refuse the apparent beauty of ideological purity. Baseball is not an ideological sport, but one that depends on chance events, on knowing that identities are not bound up in your last action on the field, that a loss can be as good for you as a win, no matter how awful that feels.

 I'm now back to watching the off-season news.  What can the Cards do about the shortstop position?  Will Matt Carpenter play third, while Kolten Wong plays second? Does that mean that 2011's hero, David Freese, will be moving elsewhere? What pitcher can we do without? Which must we hold onto? These are not rhetorical questions; they're real ones that members of my Cardinals hui are mulling over, just as we once thought hard about the Albert Pujols question.

So, Tony, good luck to your Sox next year, but watch out for the Cardinals!  Young pitching, lots of talent in the field, and we might just have another contender.