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Debating “The Book Of Matt”

The Dish featured the arguments of Steve Jimenez’s revisionist history of the tragedy of Matthew Shepard last fall. But you can watch him addressing the book’s arguments in Laramie, Wyoming, right now on CSPAN’s Booktv, starting at 3.45 pm. Check it out.

“The Great American Novel Is A Chimera”

In response to Lawrence Buell’s essay on the “Great American Novel,” David L. Ulin calls the term into question, writing that, as a concept, the GAN “misreads the fundamental function of literature, which is less about the grand defining statement than it is about empathy”:

What literature offers is not an overview; it is not a way to understand the broad movements of the world. Such aspects may be represented — we can learn a lot about what it was like to live in 19th century London by reading Dickens, or St. Petersburg under the czars by reading Gogol — but they are not the point. No, literature is a connection-making mechanism: We read about people, individuals, and inhabit their lives, their struggles, their desires. We see that they are not unlike we are. This creates both identity and identification, allowing us to step (for a moment, anyway) outside ourselves.

The Great American Novel is something different; it signifies a belief in literature as all-encompassing, as able to gather the diverse strands of an inexplicable and unruly nation, and make sense of them in a single work. That this is impossible should go without saying; it’s more than a little reductive as well. Consciousness is chaos and life has no meaning, and the stories we tell — including the big ones: faith, statehood, family, history — are just a series of dreams we make up to give shape to the shapeless, to build a firewall against the void. That it all falls to pieces is part of the point; we are alone together, after all.

Though he says he would “rather talk about a novel in any other conceivable terms,” Scott Esposito sees some significance in the concept of the GAN:

There are places out there that are both small enough and have young enough literary scenes that such-and-such an author can legitimately be considered the “Great _______ Novelist,” having written the “Great _______ Novel.” One upon a time this was what was meant by the epic, though that’s long, long over now. So in a sense it maybe was possible somewhere, although, in a completely different literary genre and back when people sacrificed bulls. … [A]t some point way, way back, the literary world was small enough that a single figure could dominate a literature for a even a large and diverse country like the U.S. in a way that’s just completely incomprehensible now.

Previous Dish on the topic here, here, and here.

A Poem For Saturday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

Today marks the assassination of Malcolm X, at age 39, on February 22, 1965. In the words of Robert Hayden, Malcolm X “became/much more than there was time for him to be,” and his death inspired many to write poems in his honor, including Gwendolyn Brooks (“He had the hawk-man’s eyes./ We gasped. We saw the maleness./ The maleness raking out and making guttural the air/ And pushing us to walls,”), and Margaret Walker, whose debut collection For My People, was selected by Stephen Vincent Benét in 1942 as winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize.

A new volume of Walker’s poetry, This is My Century: New and Selected Poems has recently been published by the University of Georgia Press, with a moving introduction by Nikky Finney, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for her collection Head Off & Split. (You can watch Finney give a stirring reading of Walker’s poetry here.) Our poem for today is Walker’s tribute to Malcolm X, included in This is My Century.

“For Malcolm X” by Margaret Walker:

All you violated ones with gentle hearts;

You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;

Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,

And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.

All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery

bums

Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie,

Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns,

Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan.

Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face!

Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!

Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds.

You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our

brains.

When and Where will another come to take your holy place?

Old man mumbling in his dotage, or crying child, unborn?

(From This is My Century: New and Collected Poems by Margaret Walker © by Margaret Walker Alexander. Reprinted by kind permission of the University of Georgia Press. Photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, March 26, 1964, from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division via Wikimedia Commons)

A Hillbilly Hemingway

Breece D’J Pancake’s short story “Trilobites” was one of the first the Dish highlighted for our Saturday feature. Jon Michaud declares that it’s “high time for a Pancake revival,” praising the writer’s depictions of hard-scrabble life in West Virginia in The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake:

While deeply tied to the details of its Appalachian setting, the book offers a broader portrait of the personal and societal wreckage left behind by mass industrialization. Grim, work-related deaths and ailments abound in Pancake’s fiction: lungs bleed from coal dust; mine gas turns a man “blue as jeans”; another is killed by fragments of metal lodged in his brain. When I heard the news, last month, of the chemical spill that left three hundred thousand West Virginians without usable water for a week, I thought immediately of this sentence from “The Scrapper”: “He could see where the wives had planted flowers, but the plants were all dead or dying from the constant shower of coal dust.” Nearly all of Pancake’s stories share a unity of time, taking place in a matter of hours or days, but they are set against an ever-present awareness of geological time, of the epochs and eras that preceded the present moment. His fictions combine the intimacy and specificity of a Vermeer portrait with the grandeur and fierceness of a Bierstadt panoramic.

These bleak qualities may make Pancake’s stories timely, but it is their compressed artistry and distilled feeling that make them timeless. I read the book with no foreknowledge of Pancake’s work or life—always a welcome experience. On my first pass through, I was reminded of an astonishing variety of other writers. Thematically and structurally, the book owed a lot to “Dubliners” and “Winesburg, Ohio,” but, stylistically, Pancake was fully formed, an uncanny hybrid of dirty realism and Southern gothic. A whole world I didn’t know about was opened up for me. After finishing the book, I would have happily gone spelunking in the library basement for more of Pancake’s work, but there was none. This is Pancake’s only book, originally published in 1979, three years after his death, at the age of twenty-seven, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Like the pedestalled feet of a ruined statue, these twelve stories can only hint at the body of work that might have been produced had he lived.

Faces Of The Day

Canadian photographer J.J. Levine explores gender through domestic photographs of “couples”—really, just one person dressed as a man and a woman:

For the series “Alone Time,” Levine recreated and photographed typical domestic environments that play with gender stereotypes. As a twist, he used only one model to play both the male and female characters in the image. The result, Levine said, “challenges the normative idea that gender presentation is stable or constant. Rather, gender expression can be fluid and multiple.”

Each image was shot at the home of the model, often one of Levine’s friends. Levine set up lights, rearranged furniture, and styled the model as both male and female. Each shot took upward of a day to finish and was shot on film. Negatives were then processed and scanned, followed by a lengthy layering and collage process.

More photos from the series here.

(Photo by J.J. Levine)

A Short Story For Saturday

The intriguing opening lines of George Saunders’s “Sea Oak“:

At Six Mr. Frendt comes on the P.A. and shouts, “Welcome to Joysticks!” Then he announces Shirts Off. We take off our flightjackets and fold them up. We take off our shirts and fold them up. Our scarves we leave on. Thomas Kirster’s our beautiful boy. He’s got long muscles and bright-blue eyes. The minute his shirt comes off two fat ladies hustle up the aisle and stick some money in his pants and ask will he be their Pilot. He says sure. He brings their salads. He brings their soups. My phone rings and the caller tells me to come see her in the Spitfire mock-up. Does she want me to be her Pilot? I’m hoping. Inside the Spitfire is Margie, who says she’s been diagnosed with Chronic Shyness Syndrome, then hands me an Instamatic and offers me ten bucks for a close-up of Thomas’s tush.

Do I do it? Yes I do.

Keep reading here. For more, check out Saunders’s latest collection of stories, Tenth of December. Previous SSFSs here.

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts.  Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

How Do The Blind See Race?

After seeing the movie Ray, Professor Osagie K. Obasogie found himself “struck by the way in which Mr. Charles’s lack of vision did not seem to diminish his racial sensibilities” that Obasogie researched racial awareness in the blind community. In an interview, he discusses the resulting book, Blinded By Sight:

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Your research has revealed some of the ways in which blind white people and blind black people first learn how to “see” race conceptually. What were some of the major differences you found in how these two groups experienced race?

Osagie K. Obasogie: The differences track rather closely to the different way that race is experienced by sighted whites and blacks. For example, both sighted and blind White respondents tend to see race as something that other people have, i.e. race is something that minorities experience while being White is thought to be “raceless” and remains the default norm. On the other hand, sighted and blind minorities tend to have a much deeper personal connection to issues of race.

One thing of interest that came out of the interviews is that several blind White people that I spoke with used their physical disability to analogize to the social disabilities associated with being a racial minority. These respondents would describe experiences in which other people discriminated against them because of their blindness and then assert that these experiences gave them insight into what it is like to be Black or any other minority. It’s interesting how some blind White respondents were able to see connections between their discriminatory experiences and other marginalized groups to create a sense of solidarity in how society can develop stereotypes and treat people unfairly. But it’s also interesting to note that none of the blind respondents of color analogized between race and disability in this manner; they viewed their discriminatory experiences connected to race and disability as being largely distinct. So, this perception that being blind provides insight to what it’s like to be Black may very well be a unique way in which Whiteness plays out in the White blind community.

In an excerpt from his book, Obasogie elaborates:

After conducting over a hundred interviews with blind individuals—people who have never seen anything, let alone the physical traits that typically serve as visual markers for racial difference—one consistent theme resonates throughout the data. Blind people understand and experience race like everyone else: visually. That is, when asked what race is, blind respondents largely define race by visually salient physical cues such as skin color, facial features, and other visual characteristics. But what stands out in particular is not only blind people’s visual understanding of race, but that this visual understanding shapes how they live their lives; daily choices, experiences, and interactions such as where to live and whom to date are meditated by visual understandings of race in the blind community as much as they are among those who are sighted. Despite their physical inability to engage with race on the very visual terms that are thought to define its salience and social significance, blind people’s understanding and experience with race is not unlike that of sighted individuals.

Going Greek

As part of a lengthy investigation into fraternity culture, Caitlin Flanagan talked to Douglas Fierberg, “the best plaintiff’s attorney in the country when it comes to fraternity-related litigation”:

“Until proven otherwise,” Fierberg told me in April of fraternities, “they all are very risky organizations for young people to be involved in.” He maintains that fraternities “are part of an industry that has tremendous risk and a tremendous history of rape, serious injury, and death, and the vast majority share common risk-management policies that are fundamentally flawed. Most of them are awash in alcohol. And most if not all of them are bereft of any meaningful adult supervision.” As for the risk-management policies themselves: “They are primarily designed to take the nationals’ fingerprints off the injury and deaths, and I don’t believe that they offer any meaningful provisions.” The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.

Flanagan also consulted Fierberg’s adversary, Peter Smithhisler, the CEO of the North-American Interfraternity Conference and “senior fraternity man ne plus ultra“:

One way you become a man, Smithhisler suggests, is by taking responsibility for your own mistakes, no matter how small or how large they might be. If a young man wants to join a fraternity to gain extensive drinking experience, he’s making a very bad choice. “A policy is a policy is a policy,” he said of the six-beer rule: either follow it, get out of the fraternity, or prepare to face the consequences if you get caught. Unspoken but inherent in this larger philosophy is the idea that it is in a young man’s nature to court danger and to behave in a foolhardy manner; the fraternity experience is intended to help tame the baser passions, to channel protean energies into productive endeavors such as service, sport, and career preparation.

Crystal Myth

Sullum flags a new report debunking some drug-war hyperbole about methamphetamine:

Despite all the talk of a “meth epidemic,” the drug has never been very popular. “At the height of methamphetamine’s popularity,” [Columbia neuropsychopharmacologist Carl] Hart et al. write, “there were never more than a million current users of the drug in the United States. This number is considerably lower than the 2.5 million cocaine users, the 4.4 million illegal prescription opioid users, or the 15 million marijuana smokers during the same period.” Furthermore, illicit methamphetamine use had been waning for years at the point when Newsweek identified “The Meth Epidemic” as “America’s New Drug Crisis.”

Although methamphetamine is commonly portrayed as irresistible and inescapable, it does not look that way when you examine data on patterns of use. Of the 12.3 million or so Americans who have tried it, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), about 1.2 million (9.4 percent) have consumed it in the last year, while less than half a million (3.6 percent) have consumed it in the last month (the standard definition of “current” use). In other words, more than 96 percent of the people who have tried “the most addictive drug known to mankind” are not currently using it even as often as once a month. A 2009 study based on NSDUH data found that 5 percent of nonmedical methamphetamine consumers become “dependent” within two years. Over a lifetime, Hart et al. say, “less than 15 percent” do.