Make Use of Us

I just read a heavily foot-noted blog post on theory, and have the strong urge to bill the author. Or maybe I should bill my colleague who recommended the blog. Yes, as the post suggests, life can be ambiguous. Some ambiguity comes from shifting cultural barriers, some of it from changing vantage points. Yup. Got it.

Some of it comes from writing something so opaque that when people got to a passage like the following quote, they didn't notice the typo: 

What distinguishes images (including motion pictures) from language and from other modes of communication is the fact that images reproduce many of the informational cues that people make us of in their perception of physical and social reality.

Or maybe I'm the first person to ever read that far. Yes, many of "us" have been made constructs, and many of "us" have been made to see something, but if we have resistant spectators, aren't social realities up for debate? 

My point here is that although spellchecker did not differentiate between "make us" and "make use," the ultimate theory renders writers passive. The typo at least granted "images" some immediacy. The problem, however, is that the audience shares most of the responsibility for how images work in their imaginations, not how artists shape them, how writers collaborate with images or audiences.  

In a moment of despair, Solomon Northrup appears to look directly into the lens, as if looking through and past production to the audience, challenging us.

I think it's great that Christian Metz theorized about a gaze beyond a particular character's, but John Gardner's modulation of psychic distance already had writers on notice. Gardner's writings on fiction technique are the smoking gun. But "the author's dead," and ballistics can't match the bullet in his brain to the semi-auto fire on screen or in theory.

But who am I to dis a colleague who landed on the wrong side of auto-correct's double-edged tech? If you've read my blog, you know syntax will occasionally suffer friendly fire.

So I wanted to say three things, not because there are only three to say, but because three is an easy number to start with after melting one's brains in a vat of semiotics:

1) Although people are more important than movies, people can use movies to give a sense of their lives; nevertheless, curve back around in person whenever possible to check out the verisimilitude of a movie, book, radio report, corrido, etc.
2) Beside noticing the gaze and asking whom it belongs to, be honest when it approximates your perspective and be just as honest when you have to resist it (Diawara).
3) Keep track of the diegetic shifts. Sometimes they will bring you far from yourself; when that happens, make a note to circle around and listen to The Other (person). Does ze confirm & reject a movie's details. Rinse & repeat.

In short: distinguish cues that make people us from those not-us. And spellchecker can be an evil genius.

A Poem from minerva for Day 24 of Poetry Month 2019

Gail "minerva" Hawkins 4/12/19

For Day 24 of Poetry Month, we have a new poem from Gail "minerva" Hawkins.

minerva read "Friendly Fire Forgiving Spirits" at the San Diego Art Institute earlier this poetry-month. The first Patsy mentioned in the poem was the wife of Joe Milosch with whom minerva taught in California Poets in the Schools (CPITS). The second Patsy was minerva's sister.

After long careers as a researcher and then as a poet teacher, minerva has turned to television writing. Her series is called "Those Ebony Girls," and is a comedy about a black family in 1970s Philadelphia, the matriarch being a member of the 30's intelligentsia and her granddaughter being a new post-graduate who has come to the edges of answers that don't match the new questions.

The story also includes the post-grad's sister, not unlike the one mentioned in the poem below. "Friendly Fire Forgiving Spirits" is the voice of a woman writing her way through life's Act III, paying attention and respect.

Gail "minerva" Hawkins will perform at The Victory Theater on May 19 as part of Backstory's "The Kids Are Alright" reading at 7 p.m. The Victory Theater is located at 3326 Victory Boulevard in Burbank, California.

Friendly Fire Forgiving Spirits

--for Patsy's husband Joe and for my late sister Patricia

Burning bright years after their friendly fires

Were said to have gone out forever

Patsy and Patsy passed away from a same-named illness.

Cancer separated them from their loved ones.

Spirits times two. Linked bright eternal.

Both help me fight fire with fire each God-given day

Like the outdoor California nature job of a wife named Patsy

And the cold indoor bookkeeper’s bed-for-a-desk of my sister Patricia.

The Patsys worked for years and retired with accumulated ER visits and sick days.

Laughter-laced warm conversations roamed their sick rooms from time to time

Answered by friends’ slips of tongues and lips outside hospital doors, metal and shivering

Conversations after ablaze, thundering with thoughts of what likely comes next.

I’m alone again and again; gone are a friend, my mother-sister and yet another sibling-sister!

California husband Joe, me and the rest of us went down a few pegs when they all passed.

Poet Joe was back, I know, when he translated the alphabet, letter by letter

Each page a poetic matrix of poems by himself, on his own with his wife for life.

Our Patsys were Frida Kahlo spirits of female forests.

They climbed Mount Everest like broken-bodied super hikers

Crossing a summit of earthly chasms between fullness of life and wholeness of pain

Morphed into a crescent moon of death, a cradle for a comfortable departure.

Thank you Patsy and Patsy for allowing me to be human, right, and wrong.

To be one’s sister and the other’s friend, and forgiving me when I was neither.

My sister Patricia leaves off. The other Patsy remains in her husband’s care.

Friendly fires extinguished. Bright smoke wafting.  

Lori Davis "The Same Story Without the Weapon" from White Dime

For Day 23 of Poetry Month, here's a poem from Lori Davis' book White Dime. 

When it came out, White Dime was one of my hard-edged favorites for a hard-edged year.  The poem "Caring for Your Spider Plant" was a classic about the toxic romanticism of parenting. The epigraph about Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children, sets the context for a culture with policies that burdens future generations with environmental disaster, a huge national debt and multilateral destruction as a cultural values. Well worth the read if you can find a copy.

Davis has a dark sense of humor in some of her best poems like "How To Relax While Making Love" or  "The Same Story Without the Weapon" from White Dime

Pretend for the moment there is no knife in his hand.
This way you won't worry when he compliments
her necklace or suggests they go walking together, 

down a stairway, into an alcove she can't see into.
Even if without the knife, he gets right to the point.
Holds out his fist, as if to appropriate something. 

He tells her to take off her pants. Is he kidding?
She never learned alleys are like rickety bridges.
She giggles and says no. but senses something 

mandatory about this man. He takes his words
and pushes them up against the pale of her neck.
From a distance, they look like two old friends, 

reuniting, but if you stood closer you'd hear him
hiss quiet bitch in her ear. No, she says. Period.
That she has her period. And like so many men, 

he believes her, immediately. She wonders why
he hasn't leaned how to hug without crushing
a girl's toes or how to look a woman in the eye 

without liquefying her insides. Ok, let's pretend
for a moment, the knife has been here all along.
Unforgiving and lethal. This time it's in her hand.

Good Reads Review of The Princess Bride 25th Anniversary Edition

The Princess Bride by William Goldman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I look forward to the day when education has at last established good manners and literary studies can truly become inclusive.

Take my own university, for example. Every Thursday, we get together for lunch to discuss books on the balcony of the faculty club on the 5th floor of Flitzshtien Hall. One of our faculty had the good fortune to study under Professor Shog Bongiorno at Columbia. So last week when the movie adaptation of S. Morgenstern’s book was named to the U.S. National Film Registry, I asked my colleague Dr. Annette Oleander what her fellow Florin literature professors thought.

“No big deal,” she said. She was having the vegetarian pita plate, so there was plenty of time to chat while spreading the squash baba ghanoush and hummus. “Florin inducted Princess Bride into its film registry two years ago.”

“I didn’t even know they had a Florin Film Registry,” said Dr. Nicola MacMuster, not even bothering to look up from his chicken shawarma. “I mean, isn’t the whole Florin thing a put on?” Dr. MacMuster specialized in cyborg literature. Most of his work was with the robotics department, but the university president insisted he be kept in the literature department for funding purposes. He had a huge pedagogical grant for silicon chip implants designed to trigger meta-cognitive ruptures during lectures. Basically, he kept students from falling asleep. It was the opposite of a screensaver.

Dr. Oleander paused mid pita. “Why would you think Florin was a put on?”

Dr. MacMuster shrugged. “I’ve never met anyone who’s been there.”

“Well now you have,” Dr. Oleander said and took a bite. “Why would you say something so demeaning?”

“When I read it years ago, I took the book to be a satirical-reflexive-memoir, all very Tomas Borges in a Florin mensch sort of way,” Dr. MacMuster said, still not looking up from his food.

“I assure you the book is all too real.” Dr. Oleander paused here for a sip of wine. “The sexism, for example, makes it difficult to teach Morgenstern today.” She lifted her hands to point to an imaginary PowerPoint and quoted, “‘Not that her best thinking ever expanded horizons….so long as she kept her thoughts to herself, well, where was the harm.’ That’s a direct translation. Classic silencing.”

Dr. MacMuster nodded and chewed.

“I suppose you could see the Buttercup’s Baby sequel as a satire on Goldman’s own Adventures in the Screen Trade,” Dr. Oleander said, diplomatically giving Dr. MacMuster a way out. “I mean all that stuff about securing the rights from Stephen King. The battling patriarchy. And don’t even get me started on Fezzik’s latent pediatric instincts.”

“Isn’t Fezzik twice de-privileged, first by a hyper-pituitary and second by being a migrant laborer from Greenland?” Dr. MacMuster asked.

At this point, Dr. Hortense Sriracha-Smith broke in because she had chaired enough department meetings to know that Dr. Oleander’s don’t-even-get-me-started comment was not hyperbole but a legitimate cry for help.

“I have to say that despite the sexism,” Dr. Sriracha-Smith began, “I too appreciated the reflexivity of the storytelling and how it goes on and on.” Here she lifted her coffee cup, a cue for the rest of us to pick up that point. “Satirical or not.”

“It’s not so much reflexivity, but a pilfering of Morgenstern,” Dr. Oleander said through a bite of ginger and hummus. “It’s very telling that Westley and Inigo’s verbal sparring while literally fighting was something Goldman had Butch Cassidy do with Logan decades before.” Dr. Oleander was having that moment every academic has when we get passionately on the topic that made us pursue our degrees. “One could effectively argue that S. Morgenstern deserves screen credit for Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.” On the word “Butch,” a purple shred of ginger arced so gently that it didn’t land in Dr. MacMuster’s shawarma until the word “Kid.” Dr. Oleander continued, “I mean Fezzik and Inigo are clearly the source for Butch and Sundance.”

“So are you fond of Goldman’s work or not?” Dr. Sriracha-Smith asked.

“Oh”—Dr. Oleander took a sip to purge any remaining stray ginger—“his transgressions have given me my job security. In the next academic year my sabbatical project will be to have Morgenstern’s work on Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid recognized and inducted into the Florin Film Registry, and next semester Humperdinck University Press is bringing out my translation of Morgenstern’s work without Goldman’s omissions. It’s going to be required reading for all my courses.”


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