Lily Salter's Blog, page 965
October 31, 2015
The war on women is not a war at all: It’s a one-sided assault by sad, insecure little men
The so-called 'war on women' is not a war; it’s a one-sided assault. It is conservative men, drunk on power, calling women sluts and then rolling up their sleeves and knocking us back into place. It is conservative men letting us know that they own our bodies and reproductive capacity, which according to the Bible have been theirs since the Iron Age. It is conservative men making damned sure women get punished for failing to keep our legs together, for daring to pursue intimacy and sexual pleasure on our own terms and without their permission. It is conservative men ignoring our pleas that we don’t want to be pregnant and denying us the ability to resist impregnation as deliberately and aggressively as if they had our arms pinned. If that’s not an assault, I don’t know what is. We need to get our language straight because words we use carry associations and implications that change the way we think. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff (Moral Politics; Don’t Think of an Elephant) popularized the term “framing” among progressive activists. He explained why the metaphors we use can be more powerful than any amount of rational argumentation or evidence—undermining or supporting our position by activating a whole neural network of ideas and images that may operate below the level of consciousness. Consider the implications of calling the right-wing assault on reproductive rights a “war”: Men aspire to be warriors. They play with toy guns as children and get addicted to fast-twitch war games as adolescents. They drive Humvees and pose in high fashion camouflage as adults. They liken the winner-takes-all competition of capitalism or elections or football to combat. They go out for drinks and tell “war stories.” In wars, both sides are armed. Soldiers are comrades whose loyalty to each other trumps all else. They are taught to dehumanize their enemies. They come home heroes. They get medals. Politicians use war to arouse nationalistic pride. Philosophy teaches us that war can be just or noble or an art form. Religion teaches that it can be righteous or even commanded by God. Onward Christian soldiers. In the quest to win a war, lives and families destroyed are mere collateral damage. Economic devastation is a means to a higher end. Any man fighting in a war thinks he is one of the good guys. To paraphrase author Chris Hedges, war is a force that gives men meaning. Assault, by contrast, is unequal and often unprovoked. One side is the clear aggressor. There’s nothing glorious about assault. In fact, perpetrators are widely reviled. Nobody organizes a victory or veterans’ parade to celebrate assailants. A man who forces his will on a child or who forces pregnancy on a woman is a repulsive villain, not a hero. Republican lawmakers and candidates who spend their days toying with women in front of the C-SPAN cameras in order to excite men who get off on female disempowerment may think of themselves as “culture warriors.” But let’s call them what they are: perpetrators of assault—the assault on women.
“I can fix Ash now”: Bruce Campbell reveals how his cult hero matures — with “dentures and a man girdle” — for “Ash vs. Evil Dead”
Exposing the climate denial lies: Bill McKibben, the truth and the fight against the fossil-fuel industry
An idea, a relationship, can go extinct, just like an animal or a plant. The idea in this case is “nature,” the separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted, under whose rules he was born and died. In the past, we spoiled and polluted parts of that nature, inflicted environmental “damage.” . . . We never thought that we had wrecked nature. Deep down, we never really thought we could. . . .Of course, as he acknowledges, “natural processes” go on. In fact, “rainfall and sunlight may become more important forces in our lives.” The point is, he writes, “the meaning of the wind, the sun, the rain—of nature—has already changed.” This realization leads him to what is perhaps the book’s central statement: “By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.” I want to come back to that last phrase—“nothing but us”—but before I do, it’s crucial to understand the impact this realization has on Bill as a person of faith. Of course, in typical fashion, he disclaims: “I am no theologian; I am not even certain what I mean by God. (Perhaps some theologians join me in this difficulty.)” But he goes on to ask, “For those of us who have tended to locate God in nature—who, say, look upon spring as a sign of his existence and a clue to his meaning—what does it mean that we have destroyed the old spring and replaced it with a new one of our own devising?” To answer that question, Bill finds himself drawn time and again to the Hebrew Bible’s story of Job. First, however, he has to deal with the often heard environmental critique of the Bible’s creation story, in Genesis, where God gives man “dominion” over the earth and commands him to “subdue” it. There in The End of Nature, Bill joins those who argue that this is far too narrow a reading, and observes that when we take the Bible as a whole, “the opposite messages resound.” Many theologians, he rightly points out, “have contended that the Bible demands a careful ‘stewardship’ of the planet instead of a careless subjugation, that immediately after giving man dominion over the earth God instructed him to ‘cultivate and keep it.’” But even this, he says, fails to really capture the depth of the Bible’s ecological message. For that, he turns to Job—“one of the most far-reaching defenses ever written of wilderness, of nature free from the hand of man.” The Job story, of course, is a staple of Western literature, but to refresh, it goes like this: Job, we are told, is a wealthy, faithful, good, and just man, yet the devil makes a bet with God that if Job is stripped of all his possessions, his children, his happiness—really made to suffer—he will turn and curse God. The Lord is confident, and accepts the wager. Soon, Bill writes, “Job is living on a dunghill on the edge of town, his flesh a mass of oozing sores, his children dead, his flock scattered, his property gone.” But Job, though he curses the day he was born, won’t curse his Maker. He simply wants an explanation for his suffering. He maintains his innocence, and can’t accept the orthodox view offered by his friends that he’s being punished for some sin. Therefore God owes him an answer. What have I done to deserve this? Job demands. Finally, God’s voice speaks to him from out of a whirlwind, and the answer—as Bill puts it in his short book on Job, The Comforting Whirlwind—is “shockingly radical.” It is God’s longest soliloquy in the Bible, and it is unsparing yet beautiful—perhaps, as Bill suggests, the foundation of Western nature writing. In Stephen Mitchell’s striking, poetic translation (the one Bill uses), God asks Job:
Where were you when I planned the earth? Tell me, if you are so wise. Do you know who took its dimensions, measuring its length with a cord? . . . Were you there when I stopped the waters, as they issued gushing from the womb? when I wrapped the ocean in clouds and swaddled the sea in shadows? when I closed it in with barriers and set its boundaries, saying, “Here you may come, but no farther; here shall your proud waves break.”Bill has called this “God’s taunt”—as if the Creator is saying, You little man, who do you think you are, demanding that I explain your suffering? Creation does not revolve around you. God asks (again in Mitchell’s translation): “Who cuts a path for the thunderstorm / and carves a road for the rain— / to water the desolate wasteland, / the land where no man lives; / to make the wilderness blossom / and cover the desert with grass?” Indeed, that is the rub. As Bill writes in The End of Nature: “God seems to be insisting that we are not the center of the universe, that he is quite happy if it rains where there are no people—that God is quite happy with the places where there are no people, a radical departure from our most ingrained notions.” To Bill, this is a profoundly comforting thought—that we are subsumed into something far larger, incomprehensibly powerful, and free of our touch. And so back to Bill’s question: What does it mean that we, or at least some of us, have altered the atmosphere, changed the weather, the storms—that, in effect, we are adding force to the whirlwind? When God asks who set the boundaries of the oceans, Bill writes, “we can now answer that it is us. Our actions will determine the level of the sea, and change the course and destination of every drop of precipitation.” There’s a word for this, Bill likes to say: “blasphemy.” We have usurped God. And considering how our power-grab has worked out, that is not a happy way to be—whether you believe in the Bible’s God or not. As Bill has said countless times in the past few years, we’ve taken creation’s, the planet’s, largest physical features—the Arctic, the oceans, the great glaciers—and we’ve broken them. We’re perhaps a decade away from an ice-free Arctic summer. The oceans are now an ungodly 30 percent more acidic, threatening the base of the marine food chain and all that depend on it. In other words, the end of nature is a pretty miserable place. So it’s not surprising that The End of Nature concludes on a dark and deeply pessimistic note. The book pulls no punches. It’s too honest for that. What we’ve set in motion cannot be undone: “Now it is too late— not too late to ameliorate some of the changes and so perhaps to avoid the most gruesome of their consequences. But the scientists agree that we have already pumped enough gas into the air so that a significant rise in temperature and a subsequent shift in weather are inevitable.” Even had the nations of the world begun “heroic efforts” in the 1980s, he writes, “it wouldn’t have been enough to prevent terrible, terrible changes.” We would still be committed, Bill informs us, to a warming far greater than humans have ever experienced. That—in 1989. And he was right. This leads him to say things like: “If industrial civilization is ending nature, it is not utter silliness to talk about ending—or, at least, transforming— industrial civilization.” That would mean an acceptance of limits, an end to human hubris. Of course it sounds impossible—but what are the alternatives? “It could be that this idea of a humbler world, or some idea like it, is both radical and necessary, in the way that cutting off a leg can be both radical and necessary.” He suggests that there are signs, however small, of such radical new thinking, as among the bio-centric “deep ecologists,” citing Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!, who drew inspiration from the writings of Edward Abbey (in particular his novel of eco-defense warriors, The Monkey Wrench Gang). But that’s about as much hope as Bill will allow himself at the end of the book. Remember that phrase: without nature as an independent force, “there is nothing but us.” Ultimately, he is overwhelmed by a deep sadness and a sense of “loneliness.” Tellingly, I think, in the book’s final pages he even asks, “If nature has already ended, what are we fighting for?” He doesn’t really have an answer. Not yet. Not in The End of Nature. Of course, the idea of nature that Bill pronounced dead is itself a product of the human mind—an artifact of our particular evolution as a species, or really, of a particular civilization. And I want to say, it’s as though Bill’s crisis, the spiritual crisis of The End of Nature, is really the struggle to let go of his own conception—you might call it the bio-centric, late-twentieth-century-environmentalist conception—of what nature means. It’s a struggle not unlike the struggle to let go of a deceased loved one. And if that is the case—if in fact it is too late to save “nature,” if there is “nothing but us”—then yes, the question Bill asks in the end demands an answer: What are we fighting for? At this point, I want to propose another way of looking at Job—the way I’ve taken to viewing the story, one I’ve known since childhood, in light of our catastrophe and in light of my own deepest fear, and despair, for the future. I see Job there on the waste, alone and naked in the dust, covered with ashes, tormented, diseased, his children dead—bereft of everything that he owned and loved. And I hear him crying out (Mitchell again):
God damn the day I was born and the night that forced me from the womb. On that day—let there be darkness; let it never have been created; let it sink back into the void. . . . On that night—let no child be born, no mother cry out with joy. . . . Let its last stars be extinguished; let it wait in terror for daylight; let its dawn never arrive.We are Job. Worse, our children are—alone on the ash heap, cursing the day they were born. Because, on our current course, Job is the vision of our future, our children’s future—and for far, far too many, from the Philippines to the Rockaways, the vision of our present. It’s not only that human beings have “ended nature” and usurped the place of God, not only that we have inflicted that death on nature, this catastrophe bearing down on us. We—and most of all the innocent, alive today and yet to be born—must suffer it. There is no comfort in the whirlwind. And so, when I get to the end of The End of Nature, I see my friend Bill as a much younger man—a young man, alone, in the throes of the spiritual crisis of our time, who has yet to come to terms with the fact that what we are fighting for, now, is not only the earth but each other. Excerpted from "What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice" by Wen Stephenson (Beacon Press, 2015). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.
This is why Jonathan Franzen infuriates: Breaking down the suspicious intellectual loner, the mainstream writer, the despised cultural magnet
Who is Jonathan Franzen and what is the comedy of rage? The first question is easy. Franzen is perhaps the best-known American novelist of his generation, all but uniquely capable of reaching both highbrow sophisticates and less demanding mainstream readers. A visual answer to the first question is even easier. Seen by untold numbers, the image of Franzen that filled the cover of the August 23, 2010 edition of Time Magazine (“Great American Novelist” plastered on his chest) is mesmerizing. Tousle-headed, bespectacled, looking away from the camera (guarding his privacy), the fifty-year-old Franzen wears a gray shirt and three-day beard. His face and body look outdoorsy, rough-hewn, vaguely all-American. He has the look of a serious (even severe) man, and this cover announces his status as national celebrity—virtually a fetishized idol.
For more than a decade (ever since the publication of his National Book Award-winning The Corrections), Franzen has been a prominent player on the US cultural scene. His notorious flap with Oprah (2001), his frequent New Yorker pieces, and his three books of personal essays—"How to Be Alone" (2002), "The Discomfort Zone" (2006), "Farther Away" (2012)—have guaranteed that he remains emphatically visible. His second blockbuster novel, "Freedom" (2010), gained for him a readership even larger than the huge one for "The Corrections." The two novels, taken together, took on the status of a phenomenon to be reckoned with—one that Time duly acknowledged by putting him on its cover as “Great American Novelist.” Since then, Franzen’s fame has remained at a high, at times almost unbearable, pitch. A number of his peers—notably women novelists—have complained in public that the lion’s share of attention devoted to him distorts the literary picture. It conceals from public view others’ no less remarkable work. Franzen agrees. The avalanche of attention is beyond his control, and he might have been as surprised as he was gratified. How did an insecure, introspective child and morbidly suspicious young intellectual—a figure adamantly distrustful of popular culture and its blandishments—become a twenty-first-century mainstream cultural magnet? More to the point, how do the suspicious intellectual loner and the mainstream writer idolized by millions (and despised by sizable numbers) come together as one person?
The answer to the second question posed earlier—what is the comedy of rage?—emerges as a response to the first question: who is Jonathan Franzen and what gives him his extraordinary hold on contemporary readers across the globe? To work out this answer properly is the task of my book. We can begin by noting that, deeply embedded in Franzen’s sense of himself (inculcated there during his childhood, his adolescence, and his elite college experience), there lodges a skittish and corrosive skeptic. This is a “liberated” mind that looks upon much of the human drama around him—both zoom-lens specific and wide-angle general—with scorn, even rage. Why, such a mind often wonders, are people so foolishly caught up in routines that a modicum of self-awareness might save them from? Why do they seem to be sleepwalking through their lives? Before dismissing as mere misanthropy Franzen’s urge to critique and decry, we might note that it gives his work its negative energy, its edgy charge and verve. It also has ensured (less pleasantly) that Franzen’s relation to himself and to the world at large is riddled with distrust. This is a man who can take little for granted—certainly not himself—and who has had (slowly and painfully) to learn the cost of his own estrangement.
During the mid-1990s—through a process that is ultimately mysterious, though I shall do my best to unpack it—he manages to analyze the distress caused by his relentless critical energies. He becomes capable of granting that the elements of his world (including himself in it) are all right. Troubled and troublemaking, but all right: deserving to exist, even to be loved. Franzen comes to recognize that, however defective, he (like other men and women) has not only been given love by others but is capable of giving it as well. “What I came to consider [as] the money in the bank,” he told me in an October 2013 interview, “was that people loved me, and that came to seem like the key to everything. Not merely creating characters who could function as psychological objects, but making sure that love was implicit in the relationship between the author and the character.” The oppositional encounter of rage and love produces—as Franzen’s novelistic signature—the inimitable comedy of his work. Franzen’s comedy unfolds (in the writer, on the page) when the corrosive insights of rage and alienation, accommodated and made bearable by the generosity of love, grasp the human drama (his own, that of others) in its comic pathos.
His novelistic signature, yes, but an inherently unstable one. Each of the two stances toward the world that enable Franzen’s comedy—rage and love—threatens to take over the writing enterprise, to register an indiscriminate No (rage) or Yes (love). Indeed, love is a latecomer to Franzen’s sense of himself and understanding of his work. No reader of Franzen’s first two novels would identify love for his cast of characters as a driving energy. Corrosive rage (as I shall show later) holds sway. Moreover, his stance of radical critique—an inexhaustible dislike of what he finds all around him—does not simply mellow out in Franzen’s later years. "The Kraus Project" (Franzen’s last book prior to his just-appearing new novel, "Purity") is studded with Swiftian diatribes against the mindlessness of online American culture. (An instance: “The actual substance of our daily lives is total electronic distraction”: no need for nuance here.)
No less than rage, love is also susceptible to overreach, at risk of turning into an all-accepting sentimentality or problem-eluding refusal of distinctions. In his desire to reach a broader mainstream audience and have them love him, Franzen sometimes allows his later fiction—especially "Freedom"—to make reader-currying moves he would not have permitted earlier. Rage (the energy of attack and critique) and love (the energy of acceptance and embrace) drive Franzen’s work, giving it both power and instability. Let me put the point more forcefully. These impulses are as incompatible as they are constitutive: without the tension between them there would be no body of fiction to consider. Without his exceptional alertness to nastiness (what his newest novel treats as “impurities”) in all its forms, Franzen’s Yes would lose its bite and bracingness. It is a Yes that has come through countless wars of No.
"The Comedy of Rage" seeks to unpack Franzen’s developmental arc as a person and a writer. It moves from his ultrasensitive, no-one-understands-me St. Louis childhood through his spectacular ascent into today’s literary pantheon. This arc passes through Franzen’s heady years at Swarthmore College and his subsequent marriage with a gifted college classmate, Valerie Cornell. Both of them—would-be writers by the time they were twenty—committed themselves, all but religiously, to undergoing the lonely apprenticeship required to write the Great American Novel. Within a dozen years their joint project had run out of air, collapsing under the weight of its incessant and estranging idealism. Miserable, his marriage in ruins, Franzen managed to eke out two brilliantly rage-driven, critically acclaimed (though hardly best-selling) novels. By the mid-1990s, though, his most deeply held ideas about who he was—as husband, writer, and citizen—had become bankrupt. Angry and depressed by the consequences of his own life choices, he began to reassess himself: to see through the stance of superior alienation from the commonplaces of mainstream culture—a stance that he had long taken as a requirement of genius itself. In short, Franzen could no longer afford to remain the person he had worked hard to become.
Throughout the later 1990s, Franzen struggled to reconceive himself. More, he sought a writerly stance that might more generously accommodate both himself and his world. Arduously correcting himself, he achieved his goal with "The Corrections" (2001). A self-corrected man, yes, but certainly no poster child for the blandishments of mainstream culture. The literature of bathos, of easy pleasures and commercial, market-driven solutions to human dilemmas, did not serve as a mirror in which he could recognize his own labor and ambition. No surprise, then, that a little later in 2001 came the misunderstanding with Oprah. Having invited him onto her TV show because of "The Corrections" (it was too winning to ignore), she swiftly disinvited him after hearing of his supposed concern about her middlebrow aura. She was not misled. He had expressed to various people his anxiety about being “Oprah-ed” (my word, not his). He was uneasy about being linked indiscriminately to other novelists she had anointed but whose work he did not respect, and she got wind of his discontent.
Notorious now as The Man Who Dissed Oprah, Franzen became public property. Without having to pass through the experience of reading his books, great numbers of Americans felt entitled to a view of him (usually astringent: he was not forgiven for crossing Oprah). From being relatively unknown, he became, almost overnight, glaringly well known: well known as a young man so self-engorged that he could not find it in himself to accept without quibbling a TV invitation from Oprah Winfrey. Franzen thus became a writer whom countless readers pegged as someone they would need to come to terms with, would have to figure out. Many assumed they would not like what they came up with, but his treatment of Oprah made him distinctive, even unique. He would spend the next decade trying to explain/explain away this flap.
Indeed, no one has abetted the journey of figuring Franzen out more than Franzen himself. Ever since 2002, he has sought to reveal his thoughts and feelings—the becoming of Jonathan Franzen—in a stream of personal essays and interviews. These revelations have been at once intimate and artful. The person on the autobiographical page does not coincide with the one in the living body. The one on the page is a persona—Franzen exposed, but also Franzen masked by Franzen’s words—as he explained to me: “And paradoxically, I really was trying to restore a sphere of privacy by writing autobiographically. Like I’m going to put the official narrative, I’m going to order it, I’m going to put it out there, and it will become a bulwark within which I can continue to have a private life."
This thoughtful remark answers one question even as it raises another. The easiest way to “continue to have a private life,” one would think, is to avoid “putting it out there” for others to read about. It follows that working out the ratio between the intimately revealing and the artfully disguising in Franzen’s nonfictional writings has been a challenge throughout the writing of this book. As mentioned earlier, I have personally known him for over two decades, ever since his returning to Swarthmore College to teach creative writing in the early 1990s. From that point on, we have communicated intermittently about his novels, and I interviewed him in late 2013. Yet the portrait of the writer and his novels that I put forth here builds largely on materials he has provided in published essays. More importantly, I make no claim that he would endorse my way of construing either his life or his art. The secrets on offer here have for the most part remained hidden in plain (and public) view.
Once more, then, who is Jonathan Franzen? He is the fifty-year-old Olympian writer on the cover of Time Magazine, sufficient to himself, needing no one. He is, no less, the “fundamentally ridiculous person” (his phrase) of his childhood: insecure, misunderstood. This little boy (and the young adult he becomes at Swarthmore) failed to “score” (his term, again)—as dramatically as the figure on the cover of Time has won all the prizes. In between is the angry young man dedicated to an emotional and artistic pathway whose elitist isolation threatens to shut it down.
He pursues these ideals as long as he can, straining and eventually ruining his marriage. He publishes two alienated, tricky novels—both premised on the idea that America is hopelessly blind to the damage wrought by its capitalist greed, its soulless culture. He brims over with frustration and discontent: why is everyone else so stupid? Then, his back to the wall, he begins to grasp the sources of his own unhappiness—that stupidity starts with himself, with his relation to the world. A new Franzen begins to surface in the 1990s, writing two magnificent novels in the first decade of the new century, revisiting—by way of intimate essays—his own life story, and (during much of 2011) revising "The Corrections" for an intended TV miniseries.
Franzen the loner has told us, in intricate detail, how he had to disable his computer so that it would stop receiving all those unwanted calls from the ambient culture: would stop so that, finally, he could remount his own imagination and find, latent there and waiting for him (once the noise died down), the two big novels that have made him famous. “I worry that the ease and incessancy of communication with electronic media short-circuits the process whereby you go into deep isolation with yourself,” he told Manjula Martin in “The Scratch Interview” (October 13, 2013); “you withdraw from the world so as to be able to hear the world better and know yourself better, and you produce something unique.” Franzen the loner is, as well, Franzen the birder (he travels the globe as a bird-watcher). Whatever else this passion signifies, it testifies to a desire to escape human company, to leave the teeming urban scene, to exit for a while from the routines of social performance. Birding may best embody his idea of “how to be alone,” as the following panegyric to unbridled selfhood suggests:
To be hungry all the time, to be mad for sex, to not believe in global warming, to be shortsighted, to live without thought of your grandchildren, to spend half your life on personal grooming, to be perpetually on guard, to be compulsive, to be habit-bound, to be avid, to be unimpressed with humanity, to prefer your own kind: these were all ways of being like a bird.
Would you please let me be my warts-and-all self, in all my creaturely (in)difference, so such a passage pleads.
Yet, Franzen the anonymous global wanderer is also a highly visible New Yorker. He writes regularly for the city’s most prestigious magazine; he gives interview after interview; he wants to be known. We possess his vignette of the disabled computer only because Franzen has chosen to pass it on to us. His desire to reach out to his limitless readership equals—if not trumps—his concern to remain invisible. That desire carries, as well, an inchoate longing to be loved for who he really is, and thus he tirelessly corrects mistaken notions of his identity. His Freedom website has an enormous number of hits. His Facebook page has untold numbers of followers and a dashing photo of himself. He has been invited to the White House and met President Obama! So willing has he been to share his intimate thoughts and feelings with his fans in mainstream culture that he has proclaimed (publicly enough for it to have been emblazoned in bold letters on his website) that “Shame made it impossible for me to write for a decade.” Shame? Or is such a proclamation of shame something closer to shameless? Or do we need another term altogether in order to characterize a reaching out to one’s public that is, if not shameless, then, say, Dickensian in its conviction that he (the writer) matters to them (his readers) so much that he must cue them in to his actual thoughts and feelings? Something like this conviction surfaced in my interview with Franzen when I asked him why he would ask his readership to take on something as esoteric and daunting as his translation of Karl Kraus’s venomous essays written a century ago. He replied: “The impulse behind it ["The Kraus Project"] is, if I have that, how can I not show it to the reader? That’s the compact with the reader. I’m not going to hide from you.” That last you is the reader: how can I not show you what “I have” in me, Franzen was claiming. In his mind, he owes it and his reader wants it.
Franzen has been immersed to the hilt in the mainstream culture he so long despised. That he was not planning to exit soon from this immersion is revealed by his having agreed to screen-write an HBO production of "The Corrections." Yet there are numerous indications that the coterie writer in him has not disappeared. He alludes, often and revealingly, to his friendship with the mandarin writer David Foster Wallace, whose suicide he has lamented in print—lamented so insistently as perhaps to imply to his host of readers: yes, I am the mainstream writer you trust, but I am also—and just as importantly—the soul-mate of David Foster Wallace, the nonpareil genius of our time. Jonathan Franzen continues to bristle with contradictory leanings, his elitist allegiances still messing with his populist desires.
Such contradictions are only underscored by HBO’s decision, in May 2012, to cancel their commitment to "The Corrections," despite a fortune already spent and a crew to die for. Even for someone with Franzen’s remarkable appeal, attempting to fuse the complexity of a postmodern novel with the mainstream transparency of a TV series carried a risk too sizable for the money-men. Freed from the TV contract, Franzen turned immediately (with huge relief) to a book-length translation of the “untranslatable” (his term) essays of the early twentieth-century Austrian intellectual Karl Kraus. Could any project—proceeding by way of gargantuan footnotes and centering on Kraus-and-Franzen’s scathing indictments of modern technology—differ more provocatively from writing a mainstream TV adaptation of "The Corrections"?
Moving back and forth among Franzen’s essays and novels, I propose to chart a single writer’s odyssey. In so doing, I broach a larger inquiry into the dilemma of the contemporary American novelist’s stance toward his audience. Does one write (affectionately, transparently, close-up) for the masses who populate mainstream culture or (critically, estrangingly, at a distance) for the elite who make up mandarin high culture? What does it mean to want to write for both audiences at the same time? Franzen’s life and career, this book argues, oscillate abidingly—and often incoherently—between the polar orientations of rage-driven highbrow critique and love-energized mainstream appeal. He continues to fascinate his immense readership—and to infuriate his considerable body of critics (Franzen-haters, it is fair to call them)—not least because he is engaged in a high-wire act of reconciling what perhaps cannot be reconciled. We might figure these orientations as a circle that, for the past two decades, he has been working hard to square.
Excerpted from "Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage" by Philip Weinstein. Published by Bloomsbury Academic. Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan Franzen. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Casualties of the vanishing West: How monied interests are forcefully evicting wild horses
***
The Bureau of Land Management is mandated by law to protect the future of the wild horses and burros of America. In 1971, in response to growing public protest over the indiscriminate capture and slaughter of wild horses by ranchers and hunters, President Richard Nixon signed the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, making harassing or killing feral horses or burros on federal land a criminal offense. The law recognized the animals as "living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” In 2004 the Act was stripped of its central purpose when Republican Senator Conrad Burns of Montana prepared what is now widely known as “the Burns Amendment.” Taking advantage of his position as chair of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, Burns slipped his bill in with complete secrecy, knowing that committee reports cannot be amended. The bill amending the 1971 Act was never introduced to Congress; it was never discussed or voted on. The amendment allows the BLM to sell older and unadoptable animals at livestock auctions. These auctions often draw ‘kill buyers’ who seek horses for slaughterhouses, as the LA Times reports. The Burns Amendment overruled critical sections of the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, and overturned 33 years of national policy. "The law was one of the few ever passed unanimously by both the House of Representatives and the Senate. To ignore the democratic will of the general public of the US in order to favor certain minority vested interests, mainly rich individuals and corporations, is a true perversion of democracy and a shameful betrayal," says wildlife ecologist and author Craig Downer. Before becoming an advocate for the wild horse and burro cause, Downer worked for the BLM. He conducted stream site inventory and assessment work in their Nevada chapter. During his time at the agency, he learned that wild horses and burros weren’t the animals that were causing stream and lakeside habitat degradation in regions where they roamed free. ”Overwhelmingly it was the livestock, chiefly cattle, that degrade the vital riparian habitats. They are post-gastric digesters while the other large North American grazers are almost exclusively ruminant digesters. Horses and burros also disperse their foraging over vaster areas and into more rugged terrain than cattle," he says. Here’s how Downer explains it further. (Excerpted from his presentation at the Wild Horse Summit in 2008):"Being much less mobile than wild horses and burros, livestock concentrate their grazing pressures in certain areas, especially in and along species-rich stream, marsh, or lake shore habitats known as riparian (which I have experience monitoring with the BLM). Cattle and sheep have destroyed these riparian habitats on a large scale by overgrazing throughout the West — as throughout the world, especially in arid and semi-arid areas, and thus are responsible for the extinction or near extinction of literally thousands of species of plants and animals. The wild horses, on the other hand, do not linger at watering sites or along riparian areas but disperse their grazing pressure much more broadly in the arid to semi-arid West; and as a consequence they greatly reduce dry parched vegetation. Their post-gastric digestive system is perfectly suited to taking advantage of this drier, usually coarser vegetation, as such does not entail as much metabolic energy involved with the more thorough breakdown of this food when compared with ruminant grazers: cattle, sheep, deer, elk, etc. Their digestion also favors the dispersal of the seeds of many native plant species that are not as degraded in passing through their digestive tracts. These involve species that have in many cases co-evolved for millions of years with horses and even burro-like Asses, developing many mutually beneficial symbioses in the process."According to the BLM, there is an overpopulation of horses on public lands. The agency states that because of federal protection and a lack of natural predators, wild horse and burro herds can double in size about every four years, which leads to habitat degradation and unhealthy herds. Yet the agency allows millions of cows to graze on the same lands where wild horses were previously removed. Cows originate from Europe and thus are adapted to riparian meadow areas. Their grazing can be devastating for dry Western ecosystems, especially in many areas wherethey outnumber wild horses 50 to 1. According to Downer, well-managed wild horse populations can contribute positively to ecosystems that they have adapted to due to their evolutionary past. "Restoring the missing ‘equid element’ with its post-gastric digestive system works wonders for the plains and prairies as well as the drier regions further west," he explains. But it is not only cattle that are granted right-of-way on public lands. In 2010, a controversial round up held in the Calico Mountain Complex of Nevada removed 2,500 horses from their habitat. The round up caused 160 horse deaths, including those of two foals who were chased on icy terrain until their hooves had sloughed off. The eradication of a healthy horse population from such a remote location raised questions. There were allegations that the removal was initiated to make way for a multi-billion dollar corporate project, the Ruby Pipeline, a natural gas pipeline that traverses through northern Nevada on its way from Wyoming to Oregon. The BLM denied any connection, but Pipeline construction began four months after the round up, and the natural gas line now runs through the mountain complex. BLM spokesperson Greg Fuhs says the agency does not give away rights-of-way to companies. “The BLM authorizes specific pieces of public land for certain projects and charges rent for such use,” he says. “The BLM collects forage fees for livestock grazing, conducts oil and gas lease sales, and requires payment of an annual maintenance fee (unless labor is performed or improvements are made) on mining claims.” The BLM’s management of wild horses has long been under scrutiny. In 1994 Jim Baca, then director of the BLM, started an internal investigation into illegal practices within the agency. He found that BLM employees were selling wild horses to contractors for slaughter. The scheme involved the use of satellite ranches and so-called horse sanctuaries set up to hide the horses. The US Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Texas wanted to bring criminal indictments against BLM officials, but the case was closed in the summer of 1997 after federal officials in Washington DC, including officials not involved in the investigation, intervened. "I believe that my investigation was obstructed all along by persons within the BLM because they did not want to be embarrassed,'' the prosecutor, Mrs. Alia Ludlum, wrote in a memo that year, a copy of which, along with thousands of other grand jury documents, was obtained by the Associated Press. “I think there is a terrible problem with the program and with government agents placing themselves above the law,” Ludlum wrote. According to Baca during the investigation, Bruce Babbitt, then Secretary of the Interior, told him to back off. Baca left office the same year. "The wild horse and burro program has always been answerable to only the livestock industry and their political power over Western Senators and Congressmen. All of the administrations bow to that power, ” Baca says. According to Baca, in failing to understand the importance of western public lands, administrations continue sacrificing them for special interests. "They don’t see any gain to their political careers by rocking the boat.” Baca believes the horse numbers should be controlled, but they should not be on a slow course to extinction. "Every horse not on the range means another cow and calf that will be. BLM has always been a step child to the whims of the oil, gas, coal, mining and livestock industries.” Baca believes the idea of special sanctuaries on the range is promising. "The wild horses should be allowed to exist for future generations to appreciate. A wild horse crammed into a corral is nothing more than a life sentence to misery.” The BLM’s annual wild horse and burro round up is already underway this year (see reports here and here). Wild horse and burro advocates say if the animals are not rounded up, but instead have their numbers managed via fertility control methods, maintaining them would cost virtually nothing – providing a solution for the program’s inefficiency and high cost. About 60 to 70 percent of the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program budget is spent on roundups and holding facilities, while only 6 percent is spent on fertility control and keeping horses on the range. (In 2014, holding horses in off-range facilities cost more than $43 million, which accounted for 63 percent of the Wild Horse and Burro Program’s annual budget. The total lifetime cost for caring for a captured animal that’s not adopted is nearly $50,000.) Redirecting federal funds from costly and traumatic round-ups to in-the-wild fertility management could save taxpayers millions. That, however, would require the BLM to stand up to the industries it is supposed to regulate, Baca says. Historically, the BLM and the Department of Interior have had deep ties to the industries they administer. Former Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar, for instance, comes from one of the oldest cattle families of Colorado. The current director of BLM, Neil Kornze, has ties to the mining industry. Son of a Barrick Gold Corporation employee, Kornze worked as a natural resources staffer for Harry Reid, a politician supported in part by mining industries. An article in the Las Vegas Sun also alleges Harry Reid gave his approval for the Burns Amendment before it passed. Recently the agency has been making efforts to chart a new course for managing wild horses and burros. In a July statement, the bureau said it would “initiate 21 research projects aimed at developing new tools for managing healthy horses and burros on healthy rangelands, including safe and effective ways to slow the population growth rate of the animals and reduce the need to remove animals from the public lands.” BLM spokesperson Greg Fuhs says the bureau is looking into fertility-control vaccines and spaying to help slow the wild horse population growth. “Research projects will begin with “pen trials” to evaluate methods, such as spaying, on a small number of animals in a controlled corral or pasture setting. If a pen trial yields promising results, then a “field trial” will further evaluate some methods in the natural setting of a Herd Area,” he says.
***
Neda DeMayo, the president of Return to Freedom Wild Horse Sanctuary, says the public is generally unaware of the wild horses and burros, and of how the public lands are managed. She believes education to be the key in the survival of the wild equines. Some still believe the wild horse to be an invasive species in North America, brought to the New World by Conquistadors from Spain. But a 1992 study conducted by Helsinki University Zoological Institute estimates E. Caballus, the modern horse, originated from the North American continent 1.7 million years ago. The finding, based on molecular and paleontological evidence, has been further supported by Michael Hfreiter, of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany. Chief, the stallion captured years ago by the BLM who now lives in DeMayo’s sanctuary, is a Kiger mustang and as such a carrier of the ancient Iberian Sorraia horse’s bloodline. There is evidence that the BLM is managing the horses at such a low level their genetic viability might be compromised. According to The BLM’s lead equine geneticist, Dr. Gus Cothran’s DNA analysis, a healthy population size should consist of 150-200 animals to prevent inbreeding. Currently only 25 percent federally managed wild horses herds meet that demand. DeMayo is committed to preserving the wild horse with its diverse bloodlines for future generations. Working with the issue for almost 20 years, she has learned that the real fight is about economics. The problem, she says, is that the wild horse doesn’t make any money. "As long as the only value put on wildlife is money, nothing will change."Chief, a Kiger mustang born in the remote wilderness of Utah, lives with 400 other rescued wild horses and burros in a 1,500 acre sanctuary, hundreds of miles from his original home. Years ago the stallion was captured in a round up led by the Bureau of Land Management. After a long helicopter chase, he ended up in a government-run holding facility for years before being adopted by Return to Freedom Wild Horse Sanctuary in Lompoc, CA. Not all horses rounded up by the BLM are as lucky. The majority of captured equines remain stuck for years, if not for the rest of their lives, in cramped holding facilities that are quickly running out of space. As of July 2015 the facilities held 47,000 wild horses, and the BLM’s holding capacity is set at 50,929. Yet the agency is planning to remove another 2,739 wild horses and burros this year at a taxpayer cost of $78 million. An example of an emergency holding facility for excess mustangs is a cattle feedlot in Scott City, Kansas. In 2014, a BLM contractor leased the feedlot, owned by Beef Belt LLC, to hold 1,900 mares. The horses were transported from pasture to corrals designed for fattening up cattle. Within the first few weeks of their arrival, at least 75 mares died. Mortality reports acquired from the BLM through the Freedom of Information Act show that as of June 2015, 143 more horses had died. The facility is closed to the public. BLM’s management of American wild horses and burros has several tales of mismanagement and animal neglect like the one above. Since 1971, the BLM has removed more than 270,000 wild horses and burros from public lands, in what it says is an effort to avoid overpopulation and “to protect animal and land health.” Ideally the rounded up animals should be adopted or shipped to long-term pastures, but in the past several years the number of horses being adopted have fallen dramatically. As a result, every year, more and more of these animals end up languishing in what are supposed to be temporary holding facilities. Over the past four decades the BLM has eradicated or moved to holding facilities more than 70 percent of the country’s wild horse population. According to BLM’s current estimates, there are only about 48,000 horses remaining in the wild.***
The Bureau of Land Management is mandated by law to protect the future of the wild horses and burros of America. In 1971, in response to growing public protest over the indiscriminate capture and slaughter of wild horses by ranchers and hunters, President Richard Nixon signed the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, making harassing or killing feral horses or burros on federal land a criminal offense. The law recognized the animals as "living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” In 2004 the Act was stripped of its central purpose when Republican Senator Conrad Burns of Montana prepared what is now widely known as “the Burns Amendment.” Taking advantage of his position as chair of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, Burns slipped his bill in with complete secrecy, knowing that committee reports cannot be amended. The bill amending the 1971 Act was never introduced to Congress; it was never discussed or voted on. The amendment allows the BLM to sell older and unadoptable animals at livestock auctions. These auctions often draw ‘kill buyers’ who seek horses for slaughterhouses, as the LA Times reports. The Burns Amendment overruled critical sections of the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, and overturned 33 years of national policy. "The law was one of the few ever passed unanimously by both the House of Representatives and the Senate. To ignore the democratic will of the general public of the US in order to favor certain minority vested interests, mainly rich individuals and corporations, is a true perversion of democracy and a shameful betrayal," says wildlife ecologist and author Craig Downer. Before becoming an advocate for the wild horse and burro cause, Downer worked for the BLM. He conducted stream site inventory and assessment work in their Nevada chapter. During his time at the agency, he learned that wild horses and burros weren’t the animals that were causing stream and lakeside habitat degradation in regions where they roamed free. ”Overwhelmingly it was the livestock, chiefly cattle, that degrade the vital riparian habitats. They are post-gastric digesters while the other large North American grazers are almost exclusively ruminant digesters. Horses and burros also disperse their foraging over vaster areas and into more rugged terrain than cattle," he says. Here’s how Downer explains it further. (Excerpted from his presentation at the Wild Horse Summit in 2008):"Being much less mobile than wild horses and burros, livestock concentrate their grazing pressures in certain areas, especially in and along species-rich stream, marsh, or lake shore habitats known as riparian (which I have experience monitoring with the BLM). Cattle and sheep have destroyed these riparian habitats on a large scale by overgrazing throughout the West — as throughout the world, especially in arid and semi-arid areas, and thus are responsible for the extinction or near extinction of literally thousands of species of plants and animals. The wild horses, on the other hand, do not linger at watering sites or along riparian areas but disperse their grazing pressure much more broadly in the arid to semi-arid West; and as a consequence they greatly reduce dry parched vegetation. Their post-gastric digestive system is perfectly suited to taking advantage of this drier, usually coarser vegetation, as such does not entail as much metabolic energy involved with the more thorough breakdown of this food when compared with ruminant grazers: cattle, sheep, deer, elk, etc. Their digestion also favors the dispersal of the seeds of many native plant species that are not as degraded in passing through their digestive tracts. These involve species that have in many cases co-evolved for millions of years with horses and even burro-like Asses, developing many mutually beneficial symbioses in the process."According to the BLM, there is an overpopulation of horses on public lands. The agency states that because of federal protection and a lack of natural predators, wild horse and burro herds can double in size about every four years, which leads to habitat degradation and unhealthy herds. Yet the agency allows millions of cows to graze on the same lands where wild horses were previously removed. Cows originate from Europe and thus are adapted to riparian meadow areas. Their grazing can be devastating for dry Western ecosystems, especially in many areas wherethey outnumber wild horses 50 to 1. According to Downer, well-managed wild horse populations can contribute positively to ecosystems that they have adapted to due to their evolutionary past. "Restoring the missing ‘equid element’ with its post-gastric digestive system works wonders for the plains and prairies as well as the drier regions further west," he explains. But it is not only cattle that are granted right-of-way on public lands. In 2010, a controversial round up held in the Calico Mountain Complex of Nevada removed 2,500 horses from their habitat. The round up caused 160 horse deaths, including those of two foals who were chased on icy terrain until their hooves had sloughed off. The eradication of a healthy horse population from such a remote location raised questions. There were allegations that the removal was initiated to make way for a multi-billion dollar corporate project, the Ruby Pipeline, a natural gas pipeline that traverses through northern Nevada on its way from Wyoming to Oregon. The BLM denied any connection, but Pipeline construction began four months after the round up, and the natural gas line now runs through the mountain complex. BLM spokesperson Greg Fuhs says the agency does not give away rights-of-way to companies. “The BLM authorizes specific pieces of public land for certain projects and charges rent for such use,” he says. “The BLM collects forage fees for livestock grazing, conducts oil and gas lease sales, and requires payment of an annual maintenance fee (unless labor is performed or improvements are made) on mining claims.” The BLM’s management of wild horses has long been under scrutiny. In 1994 Jim Baca, then director of the BLM, started an internal investigation into illegal practices within the agency. He found that BLM employees were selling wild horses to contractors for slaughter. The scheme involved the use of satellite ranches and so-called horse sanctuaries set up to hide the horses. The US Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Texas wanted to bring criminal indictments against BLM officials, but the case was closed in the summer of 1997 after federal officials in Washington DC, including officials not involved in the investigation, intervened. "I believe that my investigation was obstructed all along by persons within the BLM because they did not want to be embarrassed,'' the prosecutor, Mrs. Alia Ludlum, wrote in a memo that year, a copy of which, along with thousands of other grand jury documents, was obtained by the Associated Press. “I think there is a terrible problem with the program and with government agents placing themselves above the law,” Ludlum wrote. According to Baca during the investigation, Bruce Babbitt, then Secretary of the Interior, told him to back off. Baca left office the same year. "The wild horse and burro program has always been answerable to only the livestock industry and their political power over Western Senators and Congressmen. All of the administrations bow to that power, ” Baca says. According to Baca, in failing to understand the importance of western public lands, administrations continue sacrificing them for special interests. "They don’t see any gain to their political careers by rocking the boat.” Baca believes the horse numbers should be controlled, but they should not be on a slow course to extinction. "Every horse not on the range means another cow and calf that will be. BLM has always been a step child to the whims of the oil, gas, coal, mining and livestock industries.” Baca believes the idea of special sanctuaries on the range is promising. "The wild horses should be allowed to exist for future generations to appreciate. A wild horse crammed into a corral is nothing more than a life sentence to misery.” The BLM’s annual wild horse and burro round up is already underway this year (see reports here and here). Wild horse and burro advocates say if the animals are not rounded up, but instead have their numbers managed via fertility control methods, maintaining them would cost virtually nothing – providing a solution for the program’s inefficiency and high cost. About 60 to 70 percent of the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program budget is spent on roundups and holding facilities, while only 6 percent is spent on fertility control and keeping horses on the range. (In 2014, holding horses in off-range facilities cost more than $43 million, which accounted for 63 percent of the Wild Horse and Burro Program’s annual budget. The total lifetime cost for caring for a captured animal that’s not adopted is nearly $50,000.) Redirecting federal funds from costly and traumatic round-ups to in-the-wild fertility management could save taxpayers millions. That, however, would require the BLM to stand up to the industries it is supposed to regulate, Baca says. Historically, the BLM and the Department of Interior have had deep ties to the industries they administer. Former Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar, for instance, comes from one of the oldest cattle families of Colorado. The current director of BLM, Neil Kornze, has ties to the mining industry. Son of a Barrick Gold Corporation employee, Kornze worked as a natural resources staffer for Harry Reid, a politician supported in part by mining industries. An article in the Las Vegas Sun also alleges Harry Reid gave his approval for the Burns Amendment before it passed. Recently the agency has been making efforts to chart a new course for managing wild horses and burros. In a July statement, the bureau said it would “initiate 21 research projects aimed at developing new tools for managing healthy horses and burros on healthy rangelands, including safe and effective ways to slow the population growth rate of the animals and reduce the need to remove animals from the public lands.” BLM spokesperson Greg Fuhs says the bureau is looking into fertility-control vaccines and spaying to help slow the wild horse population growth. “Research projects will begin with “pen trials” to evaluate methods, such as spaying, on a small number of animals in a controlled corral or pasture setting. If a pen trial yields promising results, then a “field trial” will further evaluate some methods in the natural setting of a Herd Area,” he says.
***
Neda DeMayo, the president of Return to Freedom Wild Horse Sanctuary, says the public is generally unaware of the wild horses and burros, and of how the public lands are managed. She believes education to be the key in the survival of the wild equines. Some still believe the wild horse to be an invasive species in North America, brought to the New World by Conquistadors from Spain. But a 1992 study conducted by Helsinki University Zoological Institute estimates E. Caballus, the modern horse, originated from the North American continent 1.7 million years ago. The finding, based on molecular and paleontological evidence, has been further supported by Michael Hfreiter, of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany. Chief, the stallion captured years ago by the BLM who now lives in DeMayo’s sanctuary, is a Kiger mustang and as such a carrier of the ancient Iberian Sorraia horse’s bloodline. There is evidence that the BLM is managing the horses at such a low level their genetic viability might be compromised. According to The BLM’s lead equine geneticist, Dr. Gus Cothran’s DNA analysis, a healthy population size should consist of 150-200 animals to prevent inbreeding. Currently only 25 percent federally managed wild horses herds meet that demand. DeMayo is committed to preserving the wild horse with its diverse bloodlines for future generations. Working with the issue for almost 20 years, she has learned that the real fight is about economics. The problem, she says, is that the wild horse doesn’t make any money. "As long as the only value put on wildlife is money, nothing will change."
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October 30, 2015
I wanted to go as Daenerys Targaryen or The Bride — but, apparently, badass costumes are not for fat girls.
I wanted to saunter through the party in the Bride’s iconic yellow-with-the-black-stripe jumpsuit, pointing my plastic katana at the boys who struck my fancy and—emboldened by portraying such a beautiful badass (if only for a night)—playfully taunt them with her most poetic threat: “Those of you lucky enough to have your lives, take them with you. However, leave the limbs you've lost. They belong to me now.” This was Halloween 2003: "Kill Bill Volume One" had only been in theaters for a few weeks, but I could already count my viewings on two hands. The sword-swinging heroine didn’t just resonate with me, she echoed through my bones: Nobody has ever put a cap in my crown, but I have been beaten up and bullied, and as I watched her cut her way through the people who hurt her, the pale embers inside me were stoked into a blade of flame. So, when my friends decided to spend All Hallow’s Eve as The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad—or, rather, when I, the woman has always called Halloween her High Holy Day, the one who starts sniffing out parties in early September--decided that we would go as the DiVAS, it was only right that I should wield the Hattori Hanzo steel. Or, it seemed only right until a friend of a friend asked me if I really thought I could pull off that skin-tight yellow tracksuit. I should have lobbed back a sharp, “you know, for a second there, I kinda did.”
But she’d poked her fingertip into a spot that was already purpled and tender: Sojourns to the Halloween store yielded nothing except my sword and a blond wig; though the Bride was a popular costume that year, there were no versions of it in my size at the time, an 18-20. And the pickings online for a simple yellow jumpsuit in plus-sizes were similarly slim. On Halloween, a day where we’re told to become our fantasies, however glossy or lewd, in fabric and grease-paint, I was left to rat up some old clothes and rub kohl around my eyes as a zombie—a far cry from the deadliest woman in the world. For years, the shapeless undead would be my go-to Halloween look, even as pop culture grew more fertile with heroines to channel via costume: from Harley Quinn to the Black Widow, Daenerys Targaryen to Katniss Everdeen, Hermione Granger to Imperator Furiosa. But no matter how much I related to these characters for their ferocity and vulnerability, and no matter how much I aspired to be as cunning and brave as they were, I would never look like them, I could never wear their clothes. None of these roles had ever, or would ever, be played out by the fat girl.
My very real love for, and desire to pay tribute to, these fictional women, birthed a casual interest in cosplay, or “costume play,” dressing up like favorite characters (though I’m truly a tourist in the land of geekdom; I’ve only been to one convention)—but there seemed to be no room for me in this kind of make-believe. A quick perusal of the Spirit Halloween website’s plus-size section yields only six pages of options for women, mostly variations of pirate wench, busty fortune teller, and naughty witch. The “regular-size” section boasts eight separate categories for costumes, and within those categories, there can be up to 15 pages of lithe cuties modeling everything from the Bride of Frankenstein’s elegantly tattered bridal-wear to short dresses ornately patterned to look like a Monarch butterfly wing. The film and TV-inspired costumes offer anyone (below a size large that is) the chance to be Daenerys, Wonder Woman and Maleficent. The message is as clear as one of the rhinestones glittering on Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s platform high-heels: Fat women can dream it, but we can’t be it.
“I couldn't find anything decent in my size, at all. If I even found it in my size that is,” says Katt Martin, a plus-size cosplayer with an affinity for the gonzo voluptuosity of Harley Quinn’s approach to life. But fully embodying that affinity has been challenging: “The only item I found that fit me were the shoes … It really frustrated me. I'm pretty sure I became so stressed that I cried.” The cosplayers in her acquaintance told Martin that her only option was to make her own costume, and though she feared she “lacked the talent or creativity to do it,” her passion for the character prompted her to try. “I like looking at my costume and knowing that … I made that awesome outfit,” she says. Martin has turned a work-around into a new creative outlet, but the shadow of size-based stigma still falls long and cold: “A lot of people think that you should have the same exact body of the character you're cosplaying,” Martin says. “But that just isn’t so.”
Heina Dadabhoy, who has cosplayed as Carmen Sandiego, has a life-long love of costume and “over the top make-up” but, as a plus-sized woman, struggled to find “affordable, quality ready-made costumes.” Since she has not yet learned to sew, Dadabhoy must pick characters “whose signature looks can be assembled out of streetwear with minimal fuss.” Still, for fat women with a fashion sense, “minimal fuss” isn’t rich irony, it’s a mouthful of curdled milk. Certainly, learning to put an ensemble together piecemeal, or make it from scratch—whether you want to be the Bride, taking down a yakuza syndicate, or just yourself, dazzling in the boardroom—can be an exercise in ingenuity. But when that ingenuity becomes mandatory, it starts to feel like a scavenger hunt through a dark maze: We can hope each turn will take us to the exit, instead, it leads us to bargain racks filled with coats we can’t button, rows of boots that won’t zip around our calves, and skirts that might fit in the waist but ride up the ass.
As a fat child who became an even fatter woman, my life was defined by limitations. Whenever I walked out of a department store with only earrings or (yet another) scarf, I was acutely, minutely aware of everything I couldn’t be (until I lost 20 pounds) and shouldn’t feel (until I lost 10 more pounds after that): glamorous and powerful, sweet and cute, punkish and raw—able to define and express myself in clothing and make-up. For too long a time, I only knew these joys of ornamentation in the weeks before my crash diets inevitably crashed and burned. I took diet pills that turned my pulse into a tap dance, binged and purged and went hungry until my stomach felt hollowed and slack like an old balloon, and ground away at exercise that made me feel awkward and estranged from my own body—until I wearied of waking up with the taste of ash in my mouth.
I discovered “fatshion,” tumblrs and blogs and instagrams (oh my!) run by women who share my wide, unwieldly ass and eye for color and form. These women aren’t interested in slimming their hips or covering their arms, they wear dresses that caress their bellies in bold patterns and bright color, and they share the names of/links to the places where you too, sister in size 24, 26, size 30, can find that ’50s-style swing dress. So, now a size 24/26, I play with a matte red lip and a chic black trenchcoat, purple bangs and Pepto-pink motorcycle jackets, kimono tops and dresses patterned with sugar skulls—and I feel, for the first time in a long time (maybe ever), beautiful, but more than beautiful; I find power and purpose in extending the creativity I’ve always applied to my writing and visual art to ornamenting—and truly owning—my body.
In having choices, I can be just like every other woman, and yet indistinguishably myself. Even though most stores have limited plus-size options (rarely going above a 14/16), or have relegated their plus sizes to an online boneyard (here’s lookin’ at you, Old Navy), I’ve seen the options for plus-size clothing expand dramatically since I was that college girl who had to forgo visions of epic badassery and spend her Halloween in a dirt-smeared tent-dress: I’m usually only a Google search away from a particular garment, and several local malls house Torrid and Lane Bryant (which has finally caught up with the trends); I have even seen Tess Holliday, who shares my doughy belly and dimpled thighs, on the cover of People magazine as the first “size 22 supermodel.” And yet there is still one place where fat folks aren’t allowed to flex their imaginations—back at the Spirit Halloween and the Party City and the Target (anywhere mainstream, really, where costumes are sold).
The only alternative seems to be getting acquainted with a Singer sewing machine, or learning the fine art of hand-stitching—but what if you’re all thumbs with a needle? “There's not a lot of good midrange cosplay that comes in plus sizes, so you have to either make your own or shell out for something dead-on accurate,” explains Kitty Stryker, a cosplayer who counts Tank Girl, the glitzy-punk warrior queen of a comic dystopia, as one of her favorite costumes. Stryker, who describes her style as “high femme,” was inspired to play with make-up and fashion as a young Ren Faire attendee enthralled with her favorite performer, “the fierce and devious Captain of the Guard.” Her girlhood love of “Halloween and theater and dressing up” survived the inevitable lurch toward adulthood, kept lit and dancing on its wick by fitting “colors and patterns” together with a painterly flourish. Still, she concedes that the work “can feel disheartening sometimes, especially if, like me, you're not a great sewer or pattern maker.”
I am not a great sewer, or even, honestly, a competent one (the kindly neighbor who helps me fix loose buttons on my favorite black trench coat can attest to my ineptitude); I have, however, become an amateur expert in all kinds of make-up: from putting on a nude eye for day-to-day, to using liquid latex and brown powder to make rotting decay. Over the years, my zombie looks became more intricate and sculptural, but they did not reflect what I wanted to be—and, in time, who I knew I really was: a woman who was intelligent and self-contained, dynamic and, yes, beautiful. So, last Halloween, I put away the fake blood and resurrected myself (my real self) in a white-blond wig: I went out as Daenerys Targaryen. I stood taller, walked with a longer, more imperial stride; I waved my hand and (with each drink) bellowed words of Dothraki; and I felt, for the most part, more connected to one of my onscreen inspirations and all the power and glamor she embodies. For the most part, but not all the way: The wig was iconic enough to make me recognizable; still, I couldn’t find any of Dany’s most famous outfits, like that midriff-bearing halter-dress from her days with the Dothraki or the royal blue cape and gown she wore when acquiring her army, in my size, and the plain-Jane maxi-dress I settled for could never approximate their billowy grandeur. For the most part will never be enough.
This Halloween, I will suit up in Katniss Everdeen’s Mockingjay costume—but only because I’ve luckily reconnected with a friend who is a great sewer and pattern-maker and employed her kind of witchery to fashion a black breastplate and shoulder armor out of an old leather jacket. Though I’m grateful for the help in getting beyond “for the most part,” I know how close I came, yet again, to relying on a wig to carry me. When I debut my Mockingjay in public at a few “Halloweekend Spooktaculars,” I know that I’ll give many a three-fingered salute, and attempt (badly) the Mockingjay whistle. Most importantly, I will move with a steeliness, a purpose and poise that our culture doesn’t believe that fat women are capable of. Sometimes, now, if I have a day that makes me ache like an old fracture, haunted by the cold, I find myself slipping on the armor and standing in front of the mirror. I see a woman who did not get to be the Bride, but who still wears the clothing of a heroine.
Living the Halloween dream: The fragile beauty of trick-or-treating, the last of our great compulsory community acts
Look, Halloween isn’t about a bunch of Imagineers spending a bunch of money. It’s about the one day a year where you can lose yourself and create a whole new identity. It’s a chance to forget that we’re a lower middle-class neighborhood living under the flight path of the Orlando airport and trick people—haha, trick. People.—into thinking we’re a scary upper middle-class neighborhood that people would want to visit and get candy from! Ladies, if we build it, they will come. If we build it, they will come.(Yes, the last line is from “Field Of Dreams.” But because that movie is about “ghost baseball players,” Louis classifies it as a Halloween movie.) Louis’ ultimately successful speech is very funny, as is “Fresh Off The Boat,” an homage-filled rap-music driven sitcom set in the ’90. But Louis’ comical struggle to make Halloween mean something for his Taiwanese-American family strikes a timeless and universal chord. Trick-or-treating is part of Halloween, but it’s a much more complex and delicate tradition than just dressing up as Kanye and Kim and going to a costume party. It takes place in our neighborhoods, on our streets, literally in our backyards — making questions of who is “one of us” and who is an “outsider” particularly relevant, as neighborhoods either turn their lights off early to shoo away strangers or hire “safety officers” to keep the peace. Louis yearns for a regular Halloween that is the suburban birthright — even as his moving to the suburbs complicates that sense of community for the neighbors, those power-walking women who have never been able to befriend his wife Jessica (Constance Wu). What strikes me about the “Fresh Off The Boat” Halloween episode — which is echoed in Halloween episodes throughout sitcom history, but especially several that aired this past week — is how one of the most perplexing things about the modern era is not so much that Halloween upends the status quo of who’s in charge, but also that the holiday upends the status quo of our very American social fragmentation. As was observed most famously (and also controversially) in Robert D. Putnam’s “Bowling Alone,” civil society in America shows evidence of significant decline, especially when it comes to voter apathy. And while the rise of the Internet has probably moved a lot of community building to cyberspace, you can’t exactly trick-or-treat on the information superhighway. Perhaps it is no surprise at all that Putnam’s first article on bowling alone and the first season of “Fresh Off The Boat” both date back to 1995. Unlike her husband Louis, Jessica Huang (Constance Wu) hates Halloween. (If you’ve seen the show, you probably would not be surprised to hear that Jessica dislikes any day where rules become optional.) And in “Halloween On Dead Street,” this takes the form of guarding her investment property — just listed! — from a group of loitering, laconic teenagers with skateboards, who through total disdain manage to terrorize everyone around them. When Jessica runs afoul of them, they threaten to egg her house. Jessica can’t get into the fun spirit of the evening because she’s too busy grappling with the chaotic element that’s threatening her livelihood — she has hundreds of thousands of dollars sunk in that house, and repairing an egging would put her in debt. It’s a delicate note to strike: The day opens up this potentially incredibly enriching public space, but that space can be leveraged all too easily by bullies. Jessica’s fear is the least campy, least gory fear of all; she’s afraid of crushing debt that would ruin her children’s lives. It’s hardly the kind of controlled Halloween fear of spooky monsters in the dark that you might expect. But the implication of the show’s comedy around Hollywood is a little disturbing — that which makes the day so wonderful for Louis is exactly what makes it so terrible for Jessica. That same act of throwing open the doors and engaging with the community can let in both really wonderful and really terrible things.
* * *
There are a lot of Halloween episodes in the world, and a lot that aired just this past week; many, not just "Fresh Off The Boat"'s, tackle the complicated interplay between property, family and safety. "Black-ish" did a brilliant episode this Wednesday on the Johnsons' poorer cousins from Compton — on how alienated both families feel from each other even as they both attempt to engage with the communal group activity of trick-or-treating. "The Goldbergs" depicted mom Bev (Wendy McLendon-Covey) struggling to adapt to doing Halloween without her grown-up kids — and then leaping to their aid when a haunted house gets a little too scary. "Bob's Burgers" Halloween episode last Sunday is entirely about the family trying to scare Louise (Kristen Schaal) for the first time by giving her a fright that is real but not too real, and in order to do so, they have to pull in the neighbors, a few random acquaintances and someone else's house. The politics of trick-or-treating are built in the subtext of the holiday, because it's about the bait-and-switch of fear and fun.
But this Halloween, "Fresh Off The Boat"'s delicate treatment of both the joys and perils of investing in a community seemed to mirror some of my own current lines of thought. This week, bullies in a different neighborhood disrupted two panels at Austin’s major tech and music festival, SXSW. SXSW canceled the panels because of undisclosed threats against both panels, and has now offered up another type of event in their stead, and this is the topic of much important discussion.
The conference's problem is, like Jessica's egging teens in "Fresh Off The Boat," both rather niche concerns, for specific denizens of a specific community. But they are both part of the same universal concern, which is about what it means to have a public space, and what it means to make it safe. In this country in just the past few years, we have struggled with safety in airports, on campuses and now online, because the actions of a very small minority can destroy those spaces for everyone else.“Lone gunmen” attack our schools and universities; anonymous threat-makers get public events canceled and send forums for open discussion into hiding. In the extreme and hopefully never repeated example described here by Kevin Roose, two victims were harassed with hundreds and hundreds of pizzas being delivered to their door, or SWAT teams that are sent to their houses because of phony calls to 911. Neighborhood trick-or-treating, to my mind, is both a beautiful expression of the joys of public space and a reminder of how those spaces can be made vulnerable, too. There's a real fear underneath the costumes of grim reapers and vampires, about what it means to have and celebrate community. Yes, in “Fresh Off The Boat,” the Halloween-ruiners are just a few bullies on skateboards, dispatched with some help from a squad of shit-talking girls wearing glow-in-the-dark lipstick. But the ruiners are out there, the show observes, and you have to figure out what to do with them.
“Fresh Off The Boat”’s first Halloween episode, “Halloween On Dead Street,” focuses on the Huang family’s first Halloween in the suburbs, after years of living in Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown. Louis (Randall Park), the dad of the family, is even more excited for Halloween than the kids. The kids have drawn out a map so they can hit the best candy streets, but Louis has bought matching Mr. and Mrs. T costumes for he and his wife—because while the kids are out getting candy, he’ll be at home giving out candy, and for him, this is a dream. In D.C., he threw candy out of his third story window to passersby below, with mixed results. Now that they live in the suburbs and own a home, he can fulfill his particular version of the American dream. But the Homeowners’ Association wants to go lights-out for the holiday. Two blocks down, on Highland, the Disney Imagineers (remember, this is Orlando) go all-out for Halloween — as one neighbor puts it, “It’s their Super Bowl.” Louis is nearly stymied. In an impassioned speech to his neighbors, he argues:Look, Halloween isn’t about a bunch of Imagineers spending a bunch of money. It’s about the one day a year where you can lose yourself and create a whole new identity. It’s a chance to forget that we’re a lower middle-class neighborhood living under the flight path of the Orlando airport and trick people—haha, trick. People.—into thinking we’re a scary upper middle-class neighborhood that people would want to visit and get candy from! Ladies, if we build it, they will come. If we build it, they will come.(Yes, the last line is from “Field Of Dreams.” But because that movie is about “ghost baseball players,” Louis classifies it as a Halloween movie.) Louis’ ultimately successful speech is very funny, as is “Fresh Off The Boat,” an homage-filled rap-music driven sitcom set in the ’90. But Louis’ comical struggle to make Halloween mean something for his Taiwanese-American family strikes a timeless and universal chord. Trick-or-treating is part of Halloween, but it’s a much more complex and delicate tradition than just dressing up as Kanye and Kim and going to a costume party. It takes place in our neighborhoods, on our streets, literally in our backyards — making questions of who is “one of us” and who is an “outsider” particularly relevant, as neighborhoods either turn their lights off early to shoo away strangers or hire “safety officers” to keep the peace. Louis yearns for a regular Halloween that is the suburban birthright — even as his moving to the suburbs complicates that sense of community for the neighbors, those power-walking women who have never been able to befriend his wife Jessica (Constance Wu). What strikes me about the “Fresh Off The Boat” Halloween episode — which is echoed in Halloween episodes throughout sitcom history, but especially several that aired this past week — is how one of the most perplexing things about the modern era is not so much that Halloween upends the status quo of who’s in charge, but also that the holiday upends the status quo of our very American social fragmentation. As was observed most famously (and also controversially) in Robert D. Putnam’s “Bowling Alone,” civil society in America shows evidence of significant decline, especially when it comes to voter apathy. And while the rise of the Internet has probably moved a lot of community building to cyberspace, you can’t exactly trick-or-treat on the information superhighway. Perhaps it is no surprise at all that Putnam’s first article on bowling alone and the first season of “Fresh Off The Boat” both date back to 1995. Unlike her husband Louis, Jessica Huang (Constance Wu) hates Halloween. (If you’ve seen the show, you probably would not be surprised to hear that Jessica dislikes any day where rules become optional.) And in “Halloween On Dead Street,” this takes the form of guarding her investment property — just listed! — from a group of loitering, laconic teenagers with skateboards, who through total disdain manage to terrorize everyone around them. When Jessica runs afoul of them, they threaten to egg her house. Jessica can’t get into the fun spirit of the evening because she’s too busy grappling with the chaotic element that’s threatening her livelihood — she has hundreds of thousands of dollars sunk in that house, and repairing an egging would put her in debt. It’s a delicate note to strike: The day opens up this potentially incredibly enriching public space, but that space can be leveraged all too easily by bullies. Jessica’s fear is the least campy, least gory fear of all; she’s afraid of crushing debt that would ruin her children’s lives. It’s hardly the kind of controlled Halloween fear of spooky monsters in the dark that you might expect. But the implication of the show’s comedy around Hollywood is a little disturbing — that which makes the day so wonderful for Louis is exactly what makes it so terrible for Jessica. That same act of throwing open the doors and engaging with the community can let in both really wonderful and really terrible things.
* * *
There are a lot of Halloween episodes in the world, and a lot that aired just this past week; many, not just "Fresh Off The Boat"'s, tackle the complicated interplay between property, family and safety. "Black-ish" did a brilliant episode this Wednesday on the Johnsons' poorer cousins from Compton — on how alienated both families feel from each other even as they both attempt to engage with the communal group activity of trick-or-treating. "The Goldbergs" depicted mom Bev (Wendy McLendon-Covey) struggling to adapt to doing Halloween without her grown-up kids — and then leaping to their aid when a haunted house gets a little too scary. "Bob's Burgers" Halloween episode last Sunday is entirely about the family trying to scare Louise (Kristen Schaal) for the first time by giving her a fright that is real but not too real, and in order to do so, they have to pull in the neighbors, a few random acquaintances and someone else's house. The politics of trick-or-treating are built in the subtext of the holiday, because it's about the bait-and-switch of fear and fun.
But this Halloween, "Fresh Off The Boat"'s delicate treatment of both the joys and perils of investing in a community seemed to mirror some of my own current lines of thought. This week, bullies in a different neighborhood disrupted two panels at Austin’s major tech and music festival, SXSW. SXSW canceled the panels because of undisclosed threats against both panels, and has now offered up another type of event in their stead, and this is the topic of much important discussion.
The conference's problem is, like Jessica's egging teens in "Fresh Off The Boat," both rather niche concerns, for specific denizens of a specific community. But they are both part of the same universal concern, which is about what it means to have a public space, and what it means to make it safe. In this country in just the past few years, we have struggled with safety in airports, on campuses and now online, because the actions of a very small minority can destroy those spaces for everyone else.“Lone gunmen” attack our schools and universities; anonymous threat-makers get public events canceled and send forums for open discussion into hiding. In the extreme and hopefully never repeated example described here by Kevin Roose, two victims were harassed with hundreds and hundreds of pizzas being delivered to their door, or SWAT teams that are sent to their houses because of phony calls to 911. Neighborhood trick-or-treating, to my mind, is both a beautiful expression of the joys of public space and a reminder of how those spaces can be made vulnerable, too. There's a real fear underneath the costumes of grim reapers and vampires, about what it means to have and celebrate community. Yes, in “Fresh Off The Boat,” the Halloween-ruiners are just a few bullies on skateboards, dispatched with some help from a squad of shit-talking girls wearing glow-in-the-dark lipstick. But the ruiners are out there, the show observes, and you have to figure out what to do with them.
