ABlog

I open the newspaper:

Harvesting of the face was complicated by the convergence of several teams to remove other organs from the donor, but the operation was complete by 5 a.m. Sunday. Before the donor’s funeral, a separate team of doctors reconstructed her face with a silicone prosthesis made from a cast taken before the dissection.

“The restoration was remarkable,” Corine Camby, the director of the French Biomedicine Agency, said of the prosthesis. Dr. Devauchelle rushed to Amiens with the patch of face, chilled in a saline solution to 39 degrees Fahrenheit, and began the transplant….
—New York Times, December 3, 2005, p. A8



What could be more outlandish than the preparation of this prosthetic face for burial? Fantastic as ancient Egyptian funerary rites with organs pickled in canopic jars; or the plucking out of the living hearts of human sacrifices; the fiery suicides of devoted widows; the preparation of delicacies for feeding to dead ancestors; the vision of the slain arising on judgment day.

***

What the writers are saying:

Writer A: I went to a bookstore to see an old friend read. This is someone who finally managed to get his latest novel published. He’d had a respectable career when he was younger but lately it’s been rough. So, now he’s finally got his book out. The place was packed—friends of the author. It just made me think, more than ever, about the absurdity of what we’re involved with. These books aren’t going anywhere…Anyway, I’ve finished my novel revision. I’m sending it off to my agent.

Writer B: I applied for a couple of full-time teaching jobs at different places around the country. You’re right, I wasn’t even thinking about it. But then I got a publication nibble, and that semester-long visiting teaching gig. It makes me feel like I’m not out of the running after all.

Writer C: I’ll let you know if I anything happens with the book proposal…which I definitely do not expect.

Writer D: I’m not entering any more $25 poetry contests. Maybe $20 contests, or $15 contests….

Writer E: I’ve developed a cataract. I have to have an operation. But I can’t afford to do anything about it at the moment. My cat got sick and the vet’s bill was over $2000.

Who was it that said you can tell the artists at a party by the fact that they’re all talking about money, whereas the dilettantes are talking about art?

Writer F: I’ve been telling my class: now that literary writers have abandoned writing about social issues, genre writing has become the only place where you can do that stuff. You get these cable series where the writers have really radical politics, and they’re doing amazing things in a commercial venue.

***

The semester is drawing to an end—usually a moment of weary exhilaration—and this time around I’m feeling extraordinarily lucky. We got our New School union contract and now here I am with two unionized writing teaching jobs. Both are part-time, and maybe you could call it making a virtue of necessity, but I’m so happy that I get to work with other people’s creative writing and have union protection and I don’t have to kowtow and lie and suck up to the people who run things, or at least not nearly as much as I would if I had a real academic job. I don’t have to pretend to respect the provost whose first act when he came to the New School was to stand shoulder to shoulder with the president in trying to smash the union. I don’t have to act like I think it’s okay that some mid-level New School administrators threatened an international student with a disciplinary action and referral to the Department of Homeland Security because (they said) she had provided incorrect information on a form reserving university space for a public event about Black radical organizing in the wake of hurricane Katrina—an event that they had unsuccessfully attempted to cancel when they got wind of its oppositional orientation. I probably don’t even have to refrain (as in fact I have thus far) from yielding to my impulse to scotch tape a sign beside a display of large photographs of anti-war protests that hangs in the exhibit space occupying the corridor between the third floor of Eugene Lang College and the New School’s West 12th Street headquarters—a sign that would read: THIS IS THE WAR THAT WAS PROMOTED BY NEW SCHOOL PRESIDENT BOB KERREY THROUGH HIS MEMBERSHIP IN THE COMMITTEE FOR THE LIBERATION OF IRAQ.

I get to be with people who are finding out what it is to be in the world in and through their creative writing. At Lang, the people are quite young; at my other job, in the Goddard MFA program, they are usually some years or even many years past the age at which most people get their BA’s. Most of them, in both categories, are very serious. The things they are writing about matter to them, and usually the medium matters to them, as well. They have talent, which is another name for caring about the medium, having a feel for it. It is often wonderful to be along for the ride as they discover what they’re capable of.

If I had a real academic job, I would have to be on committees, and these committees would be concerned with deciding what students need to know and when and how best to get them to know it, topics about which you would think I could offer useful input given all the time I actually spend with the students’ work and the students’ minds. In fact, though, these committees tend not to concern themselves with what and how students actually learn, but rather with what the provost wants and what the president is planning for the college. Meetings involve a mantra-like repetition of words like “standards” and “excellence.” I say that I am lucky not to have to go through all that.

When I think in this happy vein, I am actually able to forget for a time the routine lamentations of my writing friends and myself about the impossibility of publication, the indifference of the cultural marketplace, the cutthroat careerism that surrounds us. I am capable of deciding that we impoverished artist-adjuncts, we marginal toilers in a literary-academic Grub Street, are actually very smart, lucky people.

We’re free. We spend our time on things that are full of meaning for us. Compared to this, what’s being heard, published, recognized, paid, having an impact?

To have an impact, we would probably have to adjust our procedures so as to communicate only that which is already understood. Then, we would be eligible to “appear” (as Guy Debord puts it in The Society of the Spectacle). Obviously, we’re much better off not appearing.

But then an MFA student of mine compares a writing workshop he recently taught with the Freirean practice of the literacy brigades that radically reduced Nicaragua’s illiteracy rate in the period immediately following the Sandinista revolution. And I find myself arguing the other side of it: what we’re doing in these sheltered creative spaces, I bitterly maintain, is merely providing a safety valve, a vacation from the regimentation, hierarchy, and relentless utilitarianism of the corporate universe.

Bracketing these discussions, though mostly out of earshot: the fathomless cruelty of the hegemon we call home.

Running Tab

From Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, The Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to U.S. foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, conscious, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.