Isak

Lines from Fugitive Pieces

The dead passed above me, weird halos and arcs smothering stars. The trees bent under their weight.

Sometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility.

(On Athos' desk, the night he died) ... A cup with coffee grounds trailin gthe last incline of the cup to his lips.

Their arms were into death up to the elbows, but not only into death--into music, into a memory of the way a husband or son leaned over his dinner, a wife's expression as she watched her child in the bath; into beliefs, mathematical forumlas, dreams. As they felt another man's and another's blood-soaked hair through their fingers, the diggers begged forgiveness. And those lost lives made molecular passage into their hands.
    How can one man take on the memories of even one other man, let alone five or ten or a thousand or ten thousand; how can they be sanctified each? He stops thinking. He concentrates on the whip, he feels a face in his hand, he grasps hair as if in a passion grasp, its matted thickness between his fingers, pulling, his hands full of names. His holy hands move, autonomous.

~From Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels

In Celebration of Equal Marriage

E.J. Graff revels in the wonderful news from California, where the Supreme Court declared that its unconstitutional and illegal to give different names to the legal unions of same-sex and different-sex couples (i.e. "domestic partnerships" versus "marriage").

I'm just reading the decision now so I don't have a full formed and cogent response--except wanting to cry with happiness at being declared a full citizen in a state that's more populous than Canada. Read the decision yourself, if you like. The decision mentions the fact that, in 1948, the CSC was the first to strike down its state's interracial marriage ban--19 years before the USSC did so in Loving v. Virginia. The decision links its 1948 decision in Perez to its decision today (Mildred Loving herself made the link too, although I would argue it's distinct... but that's for another day).

The news came to me yesterday afternoon via a deliriously happy text message that sets the tone for the celebration this deserves. While its true that this decision will likely move towards a state vote, Graff points out that marriage equality activists have, in brilliant anticipation, have been laying the foundation for that for years. They're ready.

And, for now, 100,000 registered domestic partners in California and their kids have full legal equality. This news numbs the sting from  Michigan's Supreme Court, which just denied same-sex partners health benefits for employees of public universities, community colleges, school districts and local and state governments. Which means hundreds of people who had health insurance two weeks ago now suddenly do not--including the couples' children, if the publicly employed partner wasn't the one that gave birth or signed the adoption papers.

This, after our state outlawed marriage for a sizable number of its citizens. You know, when anti-equal marriage folks swore up and down that they were not taking anything away from same-sex partners; they were just "protecting marriage."

But like California's LGBT and marriage equality activists, there are some smart folks in Michigan who anticipated this downward slope in humanity. The University of Michigan took the good kind of preemptive action and classed same-sex partners of at least some of its faculty and staff as an "other qualified adult"--rather than that ever so evil "domestic partner"--and it provides them with the same benefits it would to another employee's spouse. I believe Michigan State University and a few other places are also fixing to work around our new and terrible law.

What is especially interesting here is that this state bemoans the "brain drain" of its brightest and most talented young people. Why do they leave? What can we do differently that will make them want to stay?  It's a question for an interminable number of editorials, columns and conferences. Jobs, enhanced cultural life and mixed-use housing are the usual answers, and I'm all for them. Impressive steps have been taken on those fronts in a lot of cities.

But what nobody's talking about is how bright young people just might want to live in a place that is just and humane; where marriage equality is one of many matters that manifest a state's commitment to human rights. Just maybe, people want to live in a place where they or their friends can choose to marry the person they love; where they're employer will support them and their family. I know I do.

The University of Michigan and Michigan State are on to this of course--they know they will be at a loss if they want to attract the "leaders and the best" to their faculty if it is illegal for them to support same-sex couples. I'd like to see the rest of the state would set aside the "brain drain" complaints and look to the university's lead.

Until then, hats off to the folks with forethought and the folks that aren't giving in to this. California gives us a tremendous point of celebration in what is too often a disheartening struggle. Along with E.J. Graff, let's take a moment to revel in what it feels like when justice is served.

Play it again, Sam:

We therefore conclude that in view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples.

...We therefore conclude that although the provisions of the current domestic partnership legislation afford same-sex couples most of the substantive elements embodied in the constitutional right to marry, the current California statutes nonetheless must be viewed as potentially impinging upon a same-sex couple's constitutional right to marry under the California Constitution.

Furthermore, the circumstance that the current California statutes assign a different name for the official family relationship of same-sex couples as contrasted with the name for the official family relationship of opposite-sex couples raises constitutional concerns not only under the state constitutional right to marry, but also under the state constitutional equal protection clause. ... As we shall explain ... the interest in retaining the traditional and well-established definition of marriage cannot properly be viewed as a compelling state interest for purposes of the equal protection clause, or as necessary to serve such an interest.

The Great Thing the Senate Did Yesterday

It shut down the Federal Communications Commission's effort dismantle limits on media ownership. And it did it with a near-unanimous vote. Frankly, for a government that has consolidated so much power in the last few years, I'm surprised that the Senate stepped up here.

The advocacy coalition Stop Big Media, tells more:

Last December, the FCC voted to remove the “newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership” ban that prohibits one company from owning a broadcast station and the major daily newspaper in the same market. The resolution of disapproval (Senate Joint Resolution 28), introduced by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), would nullify the FCC’s new rules if passed by Congress and signed by the president. The House version of the resolution was introduced by Reps. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Dave Reichert (R-Wash.) in March.

Today, the Bush administration issued a statement opposing the resolution and threatening to veto it. The statement called the FCC’s new rules the product of “extensive public comment and consultation” but failed to mention that only 1 percent of public comments supported the administration’s position.

Okay, so the Bush administration still has its bent towards consolidation of power in politics and meda, but I'm glad to hear that the Senate is moving away from that terrifying path.

To Be Both a Literary Giant and a Giant Procrastinator

Jessica Winter at Slate wonders about the literary legacy of Ralph Ellison and Truman Capote after they each penned their best and most successful books. While both talked about and worked on a new opus, both of them left their work uncompleted when they died decades later. In Ellison's case, he worked on his second novel for 40 years, before leaving it behind undone. Capote published only snippets of his long anticipated new work before he died in 1984, twenty years after the publication of In Cold Blood and after he began to speak publicly about the never-finished text called Answered Prayers.

So what the h-e-double hockey sticks happened? Winters talks with biographers of both men to sort it out. She comes down to considering the difference between procrastination and writer's block ... but I'm left unsatisfied with that. It seems to be what they call hair splitting, when something bigger must have been going on to undercut their creative work so thoroughly. I'd like some further consideration of what was really happening because, frankly, I'm rather terrified at the fact that two ambitious, talented writers would spend decades with their books and never finish them, particularly when public support was wildly in their favor. What happened, indeed?

Watch.

If you haven't already, you simply must watch this video of students in the South Bronx responding to Barack Obama's extraordinary speech on race ... and then go on to share their own ideas.

(If you can't bear the abbreviated borders of the video screen here, watch it on Obama's campaign site in what might be called the Internet version of widescreen)

I've supported Obama for awhile now (and I'm so pleased that his campaign chose to make the announcement of Edwards' endorsement of Obama in Michigan) But this video reminds of the stakes. Good lord, who could bear to let these teenagers down?

Obama's campaign matters, and I'm one of many who should get her act together and start being a part of it--not just among friends, not just in my media consumption habits, but by taking action.

On another note, I can only dream of having had a high school classroom dynamic anywhere close to as cool as the one these students have.

Real Hunger

From one of the neatest media models around, The Real News Network, comes this short report on the global food crisis, where two reveletory insights come from Devlin Kuyek, a GRAIN researcher:

1) The food crisis is not about  supply; it's about price.
2) Major ag corporations, such as Cargill and Monsonto, are boasting their best numbers in years. At a time when there are riots among people who need food, for example, Cargill is making $471,000 an hour just in profits.

When "What's Your Favorite Book?" Is Too Hard to Answer ...

... you can always fall back on this old stalwart: "What's your favorite obscure book?"

That, at least, is the strategy of The Village Voice. The paper invites writers to suggest unexpected,  yet well-loved titles in the intellectual's equivalent of the beach-read round-up.

I'd only heard of two of the titles that made the cut, which I suppose is part of the fun.

Literary Magazine Reviews

Over at NewPages, there's a host of new reviews on the current issues of lit journals big (The Virginia Quarterly Review) and small (Blood Lotus); print (The Sewanee Review) and online (Diode Poetry Journal); quarterly (Glimmer Train) and biannual (Big Muddy); recently launched (Earthshine) and long publishing (Manoa); and and more. This is about as thorough a look at the lit mag scene that you're going to get, folks. Definitely worth checking out.

"A Bloody Disaster"

Of all bloody disasters that I might dread experiencing someday, it's hard for me to count winning the Nobel Prize for Literature among them.

Guess that means I'm no Doris Lessing.

Lessing says the immense attention she's received since the announcement of her win as the death shot to any future full-length novel that she might've penned.

"All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed," she told the (BBC) program Front Row. "I don't have any energy anymore."

The author now says she might give up on writing novels altogether.

Well, I can empathize with that. I often find it hard to rustle up energy to write, and Lessing is aged 88, and  missed the Stockholm ceremony due to ill health. And she has kept up a healthy productivity for decades; her hybrid-novel, Alfred and Emily, comes out in August.

But while age and health hasn't slowed her, it looks like interviews might. So leave the lady alone already!

Here's a Secret:

Back at Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers, Matthew Simmons wrote some of my favorite stories. I'd read his submission to the infamous worksheets, whether I was obliged to for workshop or not. Call me fangirl.

So I'm quite pleased to see Simmons and his collection, Creation Stories, featured at The Elegant Variation, with a full guest review and interview. It seems that Jim Ruland discovered Creation Stories--which is available to you as a free pdf download from Happy Cobra Books--via Goodreads, which feeds my hope for the good purposes of the participatory culture revolution.

Yeah, I said it.

Simmons doubles as the interviews editor at Hobart. And if you go by commenters on the TEV feature, he's also ascending to "literary priesthood." So, like, get on the boat now.

Blues, Music

It's funny when the blues becomes entertainment, when little tales of suffering carry a beat of joy. Tonight, I could use that gift of the blues.

One January, a friend and I drove south looking for the blues. We slept shivering in a van that we didn't exactly have on honest grounds. (Though neither of us were enrolled at the University of Michigan that semester, we made up a student group that we called the Mississippi Delta Music Project, and used it to check out a university van for a 'research trip.')

Ben and I visited the places that spurred the songs we listened to on cassettes on the drive through the night: Friar's Point and Vicksburg in the Delta, the Angola state prison in rural Louisiana, Preservation Hall in New Orleans. We sipped free coffee from visitor's centers, were surprised by a police officer in the middle of the night, and we did a good deal of walking and a good deal of dancing.

Our last night before we drove north was spent in Clarksdale, Mississippi--which, we discovered, is one of at least three cities that lays claim to being the home of the Crossroads. Clarksdale's also where you can find the Ground Zero Blues Club; it's at the obvious address of "0 Blues Alley" and it brings live music to the stage nearly every evening.

It was a shockingly lucky night for Ben and I

After dozing in the van, waiting for the club to open with its live music, we stepped into the emphatically local club. We were greeted by a tall silver-haired man who ushered us in--Bill, it turned out, was the co-owner of Ground Zero along with Morgan Freeman (yes, that Freeman). Bill invited Ben and I to his table, where his family was celebrating with his niece before she studied abroad. Splendid enough. We were quite grateful. But then Bill further told us that all our food, all our drinks, and our cover was free.

Oh. All right.

This was no small news to Ben and I. That night, we weren't entirely sure we had enough money for gasoline to take us back home.

So we've got friendly Southern company (Bill's brother-in-law laughed at Ben and I for talking yankee fast; more than once we heard "Too bad you weren't here last night; Morgan would've joined us."). We have full stomachs and and bottomless glasses of gin. And when Ben and I  told our story to the family--us grubby twentysomething blues fans sleeping in a university van--they offered us their pool house for the evening. So we might have a real bed to sleep in. Showers in the morning. Heat.

Then the band plays, and we've got your music too. Ben and I had a great time unsoberly dancing and when it got to be closing time--shucks, time to head off to the pool house--a stranger approaches Ben and gives him $40 in cash. Because he liked our dancing. Our fuel cost worries vanish in an uproarious instant (hey, this was 2004).

That night, under warm covers, we reveled in our good fortune ("how did we get here?"). We reveled again as we ate our generous breakfast. And we promised these wonderful Southerners to spread the word about them and Ground Zero and the free bigtime blues fest that comes to Clarksdale every summer. Here, I suppose I'm making good on that promise.

I haven't been in very good spirits this evening. Nothing tragic. No melancholy. But there's that tight shouldered frustration, a chaotic panic sitting high in the chest, a strain rooted in money woes and paper-ocracy and other life facts that settle in me tense and weary. I don't feel like talking about it, and nobody feels like hearing about it. What to do, then, with this ... well, with this blues that sits on me this evening?

I could do worse then spend it with Albert Collins who performed "If trouble was money" on a 1990 stage.

The catharsis continues with Son House performing "Death Letter" live on a television show in, I think, 1967.

The thing about blues music is that it's peculiarly plain about its dual nature. It exists out of both human sorrow and of human pleasure. That's not unique at all--all music, to some extent, has those same roots--but the difference is blues music's bluntness. It puts joy and sorrow so close together. We choose it and we need it. And it's the dissonance there that, for me, hits viscerally.

At the same time, I love how communal the blues is, even as it's so basically a first-person form of music. The vast number of songs come in the "I" voice; a vast number of those are direct address to "you." And yet, these songs roll over from one blues master to another, hardly owned by any individual but rather, shared over the decades with thousands.

"Walking Blues," for example, moves among Robert Johnson, Son House, Eric Clapton, The Grateful Dead, Guy Davis, Rory Gallagher, John Hammond, Joe Bonamassa, Paul Butterfield, and far beyond. It's a tic of mine to make playlists of songs like "Walking Blues," so I can hear how the songs speak to one another, pushing through familiar chord progressions while indulging tangents and variations that put the song strictly in the musical voice of the person playing it. Every one of them sings of waking up this morning, of looking 'round for his shoes, of his baby's lowdown ways, and every one of their voices carries the song of the collective. It's beautiful.

And it can pull a gal out of her nighttime slump. Like thousands of others, I've got the blues. But to keep things in a truthful perspective, there's Blind Willie Johnson with "Dark was the night, Cold was the ground." A slow haunting sorrow song that thrills.

Literary Medicine

When she poured the second cup I saw the flames shooting out of the black liquid as it steamed from the pot. I got up and left without saying good-bye. To this day she tells how Lamartine saw her house was burning in the pour of her coffee.

~Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich

VQR and the Unsolicited Submission

After the Virginia Quarterly Review ran a series of blog entries that featured anonymous excerpts of submissions alongside  comments made by the magazine's readers, editor Ted Genoways offers an apology. While the blog posts were intended to communicate what's "inappropriate for VQR" while calling for the best writing possible, it seems lots of readers took the posts as belittling. I don't blame them. If I had a submission out to VQR right now, I'd be in frigid fear that it would be my anonymous excerpt that appeared on the website, complete with mocking comments by the reader and blogger alike.

At the same time that he makes the apology, Genoways holds on to VQR's contention that the  majority of the submissions they receive are ultimately lazy. And here's the part where, now that I've had something of an epiphany about taking a stance in fiction writing, I see it everywhere:

Writes Genoways:

However, I do think that the comments, if not their public airing, are a fair response to many of the submissions we receive and accurately reflect the righteous indignation that we often feel as readers. Too much of what we see these days strikes us as merely competent—well-crafted but passionless in its execution or, just as often, passionate only about the minor travails of the world of its author. No editor nor writer feels more strongly about the possibility of finding the universal in the small, but we also ravenously crave great writing that takes on big issues. Gutsy, fearless, hard-nosed writing. Writing that matters. Its absence makes us ill-tempered; it makes us question our enterprise. We work hard and want to see evidence of equal effort from writers.

Fair enough. While shaming passionless submissions on a public stage isn't the answer, Genoways is right on that too many would-be writers are satisfied with small pickings. Reach further, is what I'm hearing from him,  and how can that not be right?

While I get back to work on my stories, it looks like the VQR team is putting more thought in the matter; they're pounding out a "call to arms, our mini-manifesto," which they'll post soon. And the ever-awesome Ross White (who first tipped me to this) lays the matter, finally, to bed:

I don’t see what all the fuss is about since 99% of VQR submitters have never seen the magazine. Hell, 99% of all submitters anywhere have never read the magazine.

A Change of Clothes, If You Will ...

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be editing the "Isak Loves" listing of favorite titles that you'll find in the left sidebar. Not because my affection has dwindled for them any, but it's time to give  retail space to other books I'm in love with. And there's only so long I can make that left column while still sitting in polite society.

The point is that you should check out what's listed there now while you still can.

I didn't mean to say that as threateningly as it sounded. Still, though. Peruse. Read. Be happy. (Think those last three commands will ever transcend "Eat, drink, and be merry?")

Meh.

I don't always agree with Katha Pollitt's columns in The Nation, but I often do. Her most recent one--"Backlash Spectacular"--is one of the solid ones, albeit distressing.

From Phyllis Schlafly getting an honorary degree from Washington U (she fought the Equal Rights Ammendment and declared that  married women can't say no to sex: "by getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don't think you can call it rape") to sexed up photos of 15-year-old Hannah Montana in Vanity Fair; from Caitlin Flanagan shenanigans to the Supreme Court's disheartening ruling against Lilly Ledbetter in an equal pay lawsuit; from the "the Pill kills" protest to the Botox industry--Pollitt does an amazing survey in just a few hundred pithy words of exactly how bleak our modern moment is. For those of us who value  feminine types as human beings, that is.

Few people are connecting the seemingly disparate stories into a larger narrative. Pollitt's got it. (And I seem to be having great times with rhymes. What can I say? It makes the backlash go down easier ...)

New on NewPages

There's a slew of new book reviews and literary magazine commentary
over at NewPages, an online  heaven for lovers of independent bookstores and record labels, alternative periodicals and newsweeklies, unexpected books, and small lit publishers. Matt Bell is the new book review editor over there, which is happy news for all.

Go find something thrilling.