Finally Food II

When I finished the first post on food, I knew that something was wrong, was missing from it. Not to mention that I hated that upbeat ending that sits there like a fake smile on a greeter at some big box store.

I show some pictures of people that suggested something about their relationship to food, slag Michael Pollan, talk shallowly about food security, and then wrap it all up with a big shiny ribbon. This is not finally anything. The piece that's missing -- considering that this is a blog and not an op-ed, or a research paper, or even a term paper -- is a person and that person is me.

Because I'm the person who has eaten Popeye's chicken and probably will again. And I am one of the people with enough disposable income to go to Slow Food 2008 and eat fabulous hand-crafted eats. And I am the person who sometimes (but never often enough) buys food from her local farmer's market (which is about three blocks away). And I am the person who joined a coop but never makes it there on Saturday to shop. And I am the person who thinks about buying organic and will if the price differential isn't too great. And I am the person who will spend hours making something that will get eaten in fifteen (ok, twenty) minutes. And I am the person who is pretty happy with the cheapest Chinese takeout (from that place on 16th near Capp).

My relationship to food and cooking and eating is complicated, which makes me a lot like many people in the USA. But I can only make sense of food in this country by making sense of my own feelings about and actions around food.

I'm not going to make an everywoman claim here. For one thing, I like to cook. Lots of people (even ones who like to eat good food) don't necessarily like to cook. And they don't have to. One thing about living in the twenty-first (and for that matter in the middle to end of the twentieth) century, is that you can eat pretty well without having to learn to cook. Before then, unless you lived in a city, you needed to cook or have someone in your house who cooked, if you wanted to eat. If you were a woman, you were probably the cook. All women don't love cooking. My stepmother, who I mentioned in the first part, hated it. Sallie Tisdale writes about her mother who, like my stepmother, felt she had to cook and disliked it. (Tisdale writes about a lot more, it's a great food book.)

But I came from a family of women (excepting my stepmother) who mainly did like to cook and were good at it. They also cooked for a living. My grandmother on my dad's side was a live-in cook for a family near Palmyra, NY. Her mother was also a cook. My great-aunt cooked for a restaurant in a bar in Harlem (among her many different jobs). My mom's mother cooked and her mother cooked. Through their cooking I learned to love eating. I had paella for the first time at my great-aunt's apartment. I had great southern breakfasts, with eggs, grits, fried chicken, and biscuits at my mother's mother's house in Philly. I ate I don't know how many roasts and desserts over years of holidays. I have my dad's mother's recipe cards.

But I didn't learn how to cook from them. I learned to cook, really cook, once I left home.

That's also where I started to care about where food came from, how it was prepared, and how it got on my plate. I've worked in health food stores, natural food stores, and in a natural food warehouse. I've learned a lot about food production. I'm not a naif about how meat is produced or how farm workers remain the most exploited and ignored groups of hard working people in this country. How does that knowledge affect my shopping/cooking/eating? It makes me do the right thing when I can and feel guilty for the times when I go ahead and buy or eat that thing that violates my values around food.

I'm not the only one. And this is why changing the culture of food is going to be so difficult. Even those of us who know better, don't always do better because we are part of a culture that wants what it wants, when it wants it.

No matter what it costs someone else. No matter what it costs the soil. No matter what it means in the long run because we don't think in the long run.

Food Finally

That image a couple of paragraphs down is from Slow Food 2008. I took it in San Francisco. On the left is a picture I took this April in NYC. The details are a little hard to see, so let me describe it. It's a line of people standing on 145th street in Harlem. They're lined up to get the Popeye's Chicken Special. I think it was a bucket of 9 pieces, with biscuits for $2.99. The line, though you can't see it in the photo, was pretty long. There must have been fifty people waiting on a chilly, dreary day for a cheap bucket of chicken and a pile of greasy (though I have to say tasty) biscuits.

These two photos say a lot about what it means to eat in the USA.

Food is not just feeding. Food is economics. Food is culture. Food is class. Food is tradition and innovation. If you want to read about sustainable farming (and the pushback from Big Ag), then go over to Eco-Salon and read Vanessa's piece. She's great and she knows what she's talking about.

This post has been percolating in my head for more than a year. I have tried to think about how to write about the problems with food and and money and people in the USA. I talk with people. I read things. And lately I've been listening to Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (nothing better than audiobooks about food when you're cooking dinner). Maybe it was listening to Pollan that finally pushed me over the edge to writing because his book is not about to fix anything, but his attempt to fix what's wrong with food in the USA reveals a lot of the problems with even thinking about this whole mess.

At one point, Pollan is telling the reader how to eat, some specifics to follow up on the basic dictum of "eat real food, mainly fruit and vegetables, not much meat . . . " which had been repeated a number of times. After suggesting that we buy a big freezer and buy quarters of beef, he says, offhandedly, " I realize that not everyone can do this, but those of us who can should. " And there is the key obstacle to "fixing" the myriad and complicated issues of food in a nutshell. Personal, individual solutions are offered up for what are institutional, commercial problems. Not that food in America is a problem for business people, unless you seriously think that getting more people to buy poor-quality food is a legitimate sort of problem. However it is increasingly an institutional problem in a country where more and more people suffer from food insecurity, if not actual starvation and food-related illnesses and disabilities grow .

We all make individual decisions about how and what to eat. The people at Slow Food 2008 are opting for hand-crafted, scrupulously produced, and incredibly tasty food. The people in line at Popeye's are choosing uniformly manufactured, mass-produced, and kinda tasty food. There are businesses, smallish in the former case, immense in the latter, to provide them with the food they want and are willing to pay for. When the bulk of the infrastructure for food production and distribution is aimed at a mass-produced, uniform, and cheapish cuisine, our individual choices narrow, especially if we don't have the time or money to find alternatives. To eat well in the USA, the deck is stacked against all of us. If you follow Pollan (and many people do), the solution is to feed yourself and your family better, working in the interstices of a crappy system with as much of your disposable income as you can afford to spend.

But if the real problem in the USA is to get good quality, healthy food to everyone in the country, there's not much business in place to make that happen and not much institutional support for it either. There are food deserts in cities, places where there's no access to any food except what a corner store will carry (processed, shelf life measured in months, little fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and forget about fish).

But the logistics don't strike me as being the only hurdle to better eating in the USA. The hurdles are cultural and economic. And the cultural barriers might be the highest.

Although I'm not 100% with Polland, he does say one thing that I completely agree with and he hasn't thought through all the ramifications that follow it. There are different food cultures in the world and that's not just about whether your main protein is fish or chicken; whether your main starch is potatoes, rice, or cassava. Food culture is also about the preparation and consumption of food. That's something that both the people in the Popeye's line and the people at Slow Food 2008 have in common, something that marks them (and all of us) as American eaters.

As far as food goes, we expect to have what ever it is we want ready when we want it. It's obvious in the Popeye's case, but consider. At Slow Food 2208 nearly all the food (if not all of it) was prepared foods, wonderfully, artfully prepared food, but prepared food nonetheless.

To change food in the USA is a two-fold process. We've got to get real, whole food to everyone. And we've got to change our relationship to food and eating. It means more cooking, more planning, more time, and maybe more money. But the money is the least of it.

Because it will mean nothing if we got good food to people all over the country who don't know what to do with it or who see cooking as low-status drudgery (my stepmother did and she was an awful cook). Spending time choosing, buying, cooking and enjoying food is one of the most fundamental changes in our culture that I can imagine. But it could be the a key to making a lot of other things possible.

making movies I

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from M, asking me if I wanted to be part of Frameline's Generations Project. This project brings together youth (max age 23) and elders (min age 55) to learn how to make digital movies. She said they were short on elders. So I applied and I got in. This was my second weekend.

The first weekend was a potluck and a sort of get to know you session. There are a lot more elders in this group than youth. Nearly no one has any experience making films, though there are a couple of photographers (varying degrees of seriousness), a theater director, a part-time film critic for local Chinese newspapers, a couple of art students, a sound designer, a retired carpenter, and others whose work or ex-work I didn't catch.

There will be three groups of four or four groups of three making films that will be five minutes long. Unlike earlier years, the groups won't get to segregate by age. The themes for the films, the content is supposed to arise from the discussions the group has, not from any films that people have been dying to make, but have never (before now) had the chance.

I'm excited and worried.

I'm excited because I love learning new things and because this is making me think about how films are put together. Just this week we got this handout on cameras, about angles and movement and framing and how different shots have different effects. It's all about the visual conventions that enable storytelling. It's the stuff that signals and underlines and that we barely pay attention to most of the time (unless it's a really bad movie).

I'm worried because it's clearer than ever that film-making is a team effort. At this point, we're still all these individuals who are interested in making films and we're all lgbtqi, but that's about all that holds us together. The abundance of elders is a problem too because, in my experience, people don't necessarily get better about sharing as they get older. Already there's a tendency to talk over the less assertive. So I'm worried about us being able to make functional teams to make something special out of this incredible opportunity.

it's the little things and the not-so-little things

So right before the inauguration, I noticed that I was doing something I hadn't done in a long, long time. I was listening to the radio. I used to be a turn off the alarm clock, turn on the radio sort of person. I mean decades of this. I'm not a newspaper reader and I don't watch much tv. And before there was the internet, I got my news off the radio, public radio to be specific. The radio was my link to the larger world and whenever I drove cross country, I'd basically surf from one public radio domain to the next.

But by start of the Iraq War I had given up on the radio completely. I couldn't stand to hear one more piece of bad news or another equivocation out of that lying sack of shit, Scott McClellan. I didn't want to hear about yet another erosion, landslide of rights in the US. And I didn't want to hear the reporters dutifully taking notes, asking none of the hard questions that needed to be asked, that no one seemed to be asking offline.

I had had enough.

But then, I found myself listening first to the all-liberal all-the-time celebration on Sunday before the inauguration. Then I turned on the news on Monday to hear what was going on in the preparations for the inauguration and for the first steps of this administration. Then there was the inauguration, which I streamed and listened to as well. And for the last week, every morning when I get up, I turn on the radio and move it from room to room as I start the day.

I feel like a citizen again.

Then I read this. This administration is getting ready to defend John Woo against a suit from Jose Padilla. A suit brought by a man who's been tortured, held without charges, finally charged with some BS against one of men who chewed up or ignored the law, who made it possible for Padilla to basically be picked up and dropped down a dark hole. I've been finding out more and more about the enabling radical lawyers like Woo and Addington did. How their memos made it possible for the Bush administration to make a world so horrible I couldn't bear to listen to it on the radio. And I was lucky. I didn't have to live with the consequences, like the people in Iraq or Afghanistan.

If this new administration can't bring some justice to the real crimes that the Bush administration committed, maybe I won't be enjoying the radio for very long after all.

how the story works.

I'm addicted to fiction. I love stories. Any story, told any way. Tell them forward, tell them backwards, tell them inside out, tell them all braided up, I'm happy. When I was in graduate school, I hung out with philosophy majors and critical theorists (an ecologist needs distraction after all), so I started to hear a lot about narrative. At first I thought it was just a academically tarted up way of saying story. But narratives are sequences and stories aren't necessarily. Narratives inflict order and again, stories might or they might not. But the main thing I remember from hanging out, drinking beer and chatting is that narratives make sense of things.

Which is why they're so powerful. Which is why people depend on narratives to do a lot of work. Which also explains why people get upset when a narrative they're comfortable with is challenged or threatened. That's why people got so upset when a blogger suggests that maybe our Thanksgiving practices should include a moment of remembering how much the establishment of the USA, with all our wealth, cost the people who were living here when we got here.

I've been really mulling over the the story of civil rights for African Americans, because there's been a struggle about this on the blogosphere and even out away from computers. It came up in on this thread on my favorite blog a couple of days ago. There's a triumphant narrative to this piece of American history. Africans brought here in chains, the horrors of the slave trade and slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction and the backlash of Jim Crow, lynching and the anti-lynching work, then come the 50s and 60s and there seems to be a happy ending. Discrimination is illegal (though far from gone) in the USA.

There are other important struggles for rights in US history, the fight for unions, for women's suffrage, for farm workers rights, against nativist anti-immigrant laws and violence. But none of them seem to have captured the popular imagination the way that the fight for African American civil rights has done.

Maybe it's just timing. With the climatic acts and events coming early in the television age, many people could see the dogs set on peaceful demonstrators, see black kids spat at as they tried to go to school, see the huge march on DC. And then there are the speeches, the incredible speeches that King gave, that give me chills when I hear them now, not simply because I know this man is going to die, but because he's such an electrifying speaker.

But I think it's because the narrative says that ancient wrongs were righted, that justice did triumph and that right was done. The narrative suggests that since it happened once it can happen again. That things that are wrong now can be fixed, that rights that are denied now can be had sometime, some time soon. And because it's a narrative now and not the complicated stories that happened and are still happening, it looks as though it's all done, all over. It's not.

But, it makes perfect sense to me that when some LGBT people talk about our rights, they invoke the African American civil rights movement as a model. It's a perfect shorthand and it gives hope.

But when this happens something in me tightens up. As an African American who was a kid in the 50s, who knew that the story that was happening on tv was about me and about people like me, who was the same age as the four girls who died in that blown-up church, I feel like that story is mine.

But it can't belong to me, because once it's become narrative, it's off to do whatever work people can make it do. It's not a story any more and it really can't be mine. But doesn't stop me from feeling that I belong to it, that it owns me in a way that other people can never understand and it's that knowledge which gives me an unease about its casual and careless use that I just can't get myself over.

Another thing that that nags at me is how the narrative's been invoked about LGBT rights. I really started to hear it a lot after Prop 8 lost in California this November. This makes a sort of sense, because marriage is a right that strikes into people's hearts. It certainly struck into mine.

Still last year, when there was that struggle about a trans-inclusive ENDA, no one was writing much about the analogy with African American rights, how come? Employment protection, the right to apply for and keep jobs was an important part of the earlier struggle. But the discussion about getting the legislation pitted people who wanted the law to be inclusive even if there were little chance of the law passing (not that there was that much chance of the law passing anyway) against people who wanted a law they thought the powers that be would go for (as if).

It's this selective thing. When it came to marriage, then the narrative's invoked, But when it came to the equally basic right to work that one person might have and others don't, not a whisper. People have been surprised that many POC didn't vote for marriage rights. People should have been shocked at the number of LG people who weren't willing to fight for trans rights. Understanding that all our rights are connected and that we need to fight for every right for every person isn't something that comes automatically with your skin color or your gender or your class or any other part of your identities (or their intersections). It comes when you do the hard mental and emotional work to be a progressive. And that's more than any story alone can do.

reader, I

married her.

It's (I think) the amended beginning of the last chapter of Jane Eyre. I never thought I'd write that. For the record, I never thought I'd write,"Reader, I married him." either.

When I was straight, I could never see being that tied to anyone. Once I became a dyke, my relationships never lasted long enough or felt durable enough to be a marriage, regardless of the whole legal problem.

But today I married Laine Anne Snowman at the Alameda County Recorder's Office. I thought that it would just be a commonplace sort of thing, like getting a driver's license. The office has it all down. You fill out the paperwork on a computer, sign it when it's printed, and give them a check. Then they whisk you upstairs to a very nice room and someone in the office marries you and it's all official.

Two friends, Vanessa and Susan, came to be witnesses. They brought champagne and flowers and were the best witnesses ever.

I cried saying the vows.

If Jane Eyre had been a real person, I bet she cried a little when she wrote that line, despite her practicality and strength of will. Because this marriage thing is larger than you think and deeper than you expect.

Everyone should get a chance to choose it.

fighting words

Bill Wolfrum had post up on Shakesville this morning damning the Baby Boomers. It's been taken down, but the post is still over on his blog. I'm not going to link to either.

I weighed in on the thread a few times, but it wasn't until I went out to get lunch today that I realized that part of the problem with his post is that boomer isn't a neutral term. It's a pejorative and it's broad. There's no way to use it as a club, then say, "Oh, don't make it about you! If the shoe doesn't fit . . . " because boomer is about aperiod of time, a mythos (largely driven by commerce) around the age, and a demographic bulge. If you're born in the window, you're a boomer. It doesn't matter what your life has been like, what sort of work you have or haven't done, what sort of politics you hold, if you hold any, whether you marched for peace or beat up hippies, you're a boomer.

And just because Baby Boomer is a big, messy sack, making claims about the whole group is just wrong. And making an aggressive attack is on thei miscellaneous crowd going to piss people off.

And I am pissed off. I am pissed off at the commercials that play Classic Rock to sell luxury cars. I am pissed off that a junkie's song advertises a cruise line. I am pissed off at the concept of Classic Rock, FFS. I am pissed off that a demographic oddity, combined with advances in media, technology, and commerce has combined to form this monster called the Baby Boom.

I am annoyed at these generalizations that erase the real lives of real people.

competing narratives

When McCain's campaign announced that they'd chosen Sarah Palin for VP, most people (different flavors of lefties/progressives) that I talked with were delighted. What could be better? An inexperienced, extremely conservative, first-term governor of a small (population-wise) state.

Then the storm hit.

First there was the sexist ogling (from left, right, and center), then there was the motherhood concern trolls (from left and center, the right's supporting Palin on this one), and then there was the mass slut-shaming and mom-blaming (largely left) when it came out that Palin's daughter Bristol is pregnant. Some people think this is the way to attack Palin, to go after her for all her "failures", all the lapses, all the gaps between her life and the true womanhood rhetoric that the right has delighted in for decades.

And this will be an unmitigated disaster for the Democratic party in the fall because Palin is not running on her facts, she's running on the story that her life and her politics tell. George Lakoff describes her appeal and shows how clever the marketing around her candidacy is.

Palin is the mom in the strict father family, upholding conservative values. Palin is tough: she shoots, skins, and eats caribou. She is disciplined: raising five kids with a major career. She lives her values: she has a Downs-syndrome baby that she refused to abort. She has the image of the ideal conservative mom: pretty, perky, feminine, Bible-toting, and fitting into the ideal conservative family. And she fits the stereotype of America as small-town America. It is Reagan's morning-in-America image. Where Obama thought of capturing the West, she is running for Sweetheart of the West.

Ok, Lakoff could have done without that sweetheart. But the portrait of the working-class, hard-working, successful woman, who's not a radical (except that she is), who doesn't need feminism (even as she benefits from the last three decades of feminist work), who's even good-looking (even though that makes me puke, it's a factor) is a complete winner.


Progressives tend to like closely argued issues, well maybe we just like to argue. Still, most progressive sorts I know tend to read up on the ballot measures, look up voting records for candidates, and do some research before we vote. We have emotional reactions, but try to act rationally when it comes to voting. We are a minority.

And the Obama campaign probably understands that better than any Democratic campaign of the last twenty years, with the exception of the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary (after she ditched Penn). Obama is running on his own compelling narrative as he runs for president.

He's the bright son of a single, hard-working mother, grandson of the heartland, the biracial proof that anyone can reach for the highest office in the country. He's a loving father and husband, a pious, thoughtful, principled (decidely not radical) man.

Ok, with dueling narratives, who wins?

It depends on who's doing the listening. There are some people who will never swallow Palin's story. There are others who will never swallow Obama's. In both camps there are people who are true believers, who trust in Palin's stasis or yearn for Obama's change. But both of them are slugging it out for the center who wants to like the person they elect, who isn't ideologically driven, who wants to trust the executive to do the right thing, who wants to feel that the things they value are important to the people who run this country.

And at this point, it's a crap shoot whether this country is going to keep looking back over its shoulder at Palin America or forward to Obama's.

[Ok, no arguments that Obama's not a true progressive. His rhetoric of change is directed to the future, just as Palin's arm of the GOP is looking at a past that never was for any of us.]

thomas disch is dead

I just found out about this, though he actually died on or about July 5th. He was 68 years old. He seems to have had a bad time over the last few years. His partner of 30+ years, poet Charles Naylor, had died after a long struggle with cancer. His home in Barryville , NY, (close to the Pennsylvania border) had suffered badly through water damage from burst pipes (an endemic problem of northeast winters) and was unlivable. He'd been fighting the eviction efforts of his landlord. From what I can tell from different blogs, his health hadn't been good either.

He shot himself.

I have been a big science fiction reader since I was 11 years old. At this point, it's probably the one genre that I read consistently. Some times it's the only thing I read. I read Disch's Camp Concentration some time back in the 70s. It wasn't much like anything I'd read then, even given that this was the height of the New Wave, when there was a real attempt at writing science fiction. Before then, scifi writers seemed most concerned about getting the ideas down on the page and let characterization and style pretty much take care of itself. Which meant cardboard characters and flat (at best) style. I know that I only have five readers, but just in case someone wanders in and wants to start up a spirited defense of writers like Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov, let me say this.

Howdy visitor! I've read and reread these guys for years. They were fountains of invention, coming up with more ideas in a single book than some scifi writers do in a lifetime, but good writers? Please.

Ok, now that that's over. Disch was a good writer. I'd say he was a great writer, but I haven't read him lately so let me get back to you on that. But the thing that impressed me back when I first read Camp Concentration and when I've read it since is his style and his literacy. His style was the style of someone who loved and cared about words. I only found out many years later that he was a poet, but it wouldn't have surprised me had I known at the time. Often when people say that an author's style is poetic, they mean flowery; they mean elaborate; they mean fussy. When I say Disch's style is poetic, I mean that he was precise and his words carried me into an oppressive, hallucinatory world. The literacy? How often do you find a genre book that has Marlow's Faust at the center (not Dr. Faustus as some blog had it) and has a character sing Gershwin's "I'll Climb a Stairway to Paradise"?

I don't think I've read much of his poetry, though for years I've treasured his Castle of Indolence, which is a acid attack on the institutionalization of poetry - the workshops, the hermetic world of public poetry - and not a few poets. His critique of Alice Walker still makes me wince, not for her, but for my own laziness as a reader. He was not lazy.

He also wrote The Brave Little Toaster and according to someone on Daily Kos, was responsible for the idea that became The Lion King. He got $5,000 for it.

He died, leaving us all a lot poorer. One person who will not be poorer though is his landlord, who had been trying to get Disch out of the rent-controlled apartment since Naylor died. The landlord had just won a decision to evict Disch because the apartment had originally been rented in Naylor's name. With Disch out of the way, this Union Square apartment that had rented for $1200 is going to be worth three times that.

You know that if they'd been a heterosexual couple, even unmarried, this would never have happened. Can you see a landlord being able to evict a 68 year old widow?

Right.

This is why we need same sex marriage, to protect the Thomas Dischs. Not because he was one of the most brilliant scifi writers ever. But because no one should feel that they have to kill themselves as a solution to having their home, their family home, taken away because their decades long relationship somehow isn't real enough.

Oh, but he was brilliant and you should read him.


Best Obits
Daily Kos
Reluctant Habits (which is where I cribbed the portrait)
The Independent

how not to talk trash

Big Tent Democrat over at TalkLeft had a post up on Thursday on how sexism and racism have been viewed, discussed, or not in this primary season. He uses a post by John Cole (an Obama supporter) over on Balloon Juice as the hook. I’m not linking to it, because I’m too annoyed, but the excerpt caught my eye

. . . I think it is not an unreasonable claim to state that many people who found themselves to be die-hard Clinton supporters identified personally with Clinton. For many of the feminists and older women who made up Hillary’s unwavering core of support, a rejection of Hillary was a rejection of themselves- they saw Hillary being subjected to the kind of abuse that they themselves have suffered, they identified with the concept of the glass ceiling and identified with much of the real and perceived sexism. . . . [T]hey saw things that I simply would not see, because of who they are and what they personally have experienced. In short, when Hillary lost, or they listened to some jackass on CNN debate whether it was appropriate to call Hillary a bitch, it was a personal loss or as if they had personally been called a bitch.

For Obama, many of the supporters identify with a movement, a need for something different, a need for change, and a sense of community. The Obama campaign recognized this difference, and masterfully used social networking to build a vibrant community. When Clinton made her fateful “white people” or “RFK assassination” remarks, it was an outright breach of community and societal norms . . . which would help to explain why Obama supporters recoiled in horror at the remarks. When Republicans tried the hackneyed old “appeaser” nonsense, it was like the folks in the community who opposed the war in 2003 and beyond were being called traitors or in league with the terrorists again. When Hillary seized upon the “bitter” remarks for political advantage, it was as if the entire community was under assault for being “elitist.”

The key point is that the reactions of women (and allies) are seen as personal, the reactions of POC (and allies) are seen as communal. BTD goes on and does a nice job on sexism (with a nice link to ‘Liss), but it seems that this excerpt also demonstrates how we think and don’t think about sex and race in our society.

Gender = personal. Race = communal.

The apothegm, “the personal is political” had a huge impact in the feminism’s second wave because women could start to see that the incessant insults, assaults, limits, and numberless experiences of misogyny on were not a matter of bad luck or individual failing. They were things common to many women. That commonality gave rise to a sense of political mission and agency. But it hasn't always been maintained and the personal being political could (and has) devolved to individualism.

For African Americans the situation has been different. Even as our parents told us to be the best we could, to achieve as much as we could, there was always an understanding that society would be biased against us as black people, not as individuals. (This has changed since I grew up, but not as much as some would think.) In fact, part of the encouragement to achieve, to shine, to excel was predicated on that understanding.

This history shapes the public discourse. Sexist criticisms of Clinton were justified as being aimed at an individual. Racist criticisms of Obama were rightly attacked, and were seen as being aimed at a group of people. Whether these factors were fundamental in affecting the primary election results, who can tell? I suspect they were, but the issue at hand is how it plays out now.

This is a historic moment.

This is a critical moment.

It’s critical because people seem to see Obama as representative of what this country can do, rather than an actual man and politician. Part of the love of his candidacy seems born of this feeling that if he can be elected, then the long nightmare of black and white relations in this country is officially over.

And this is a stupid, dangerous idea.

It’s stupid because race in America has never been just about blacks and whites, though that has been the dominant narrative. So even if that brutal relationship could be “fixed” what about the complex lives of all of the other “others” here? What about the unending mistreatment of Native Americans? What about anti-Latin@ bias? What about anti-Asian, Middle Eastern, South-East Asian, “you’re not from here” prejudice? What about multiracial people, what they face?

This idea is dangerous because leads straight to complacency. Once we’ve “elected the black guy” as Chris Bowers wrote a few weeks ago, what’s left to do? Once a black man is the Commander in Chief, once it’s clear that a black man can achieve the highest office in the country, then you black people got nothing more to whine about. The barriers and struggles of the last four centuries will have been wiped away and we’ll be in the New Jerusalem. (/sarcasm)

A further unintended consequence of seeing Obama as “the black guy”, as an “other” rather than the charismatic junior senator from Illinois is how it simultaneously fuels illegitimate and stifles legitimate criticism of his positions and policies. The illegitimate stuff has run from trying to paint him as a Muslim (because his names! Barack! Hussein! Obama!!!! He was at a madrassa!!!) to trying to paint him as a radical (because black liberation theology is radical!!! his ex-pastor!!!!). The stifling of legitimate criticism, well how do you see stifling? I guess you look for it in absences. What I haven’t seen in the primary season is a close critical look at Obama’s policies, though there are handwaves towards his (inadequate, imo) health care plan and (fairly mainstream) energy proposals. More troublesome are his advisors such as Austan Goolsbee (his senior economics advisor) who “said that one of the things that distinguished Obama from Clinton was his skepticism about standard Keynesian prescriptions, such as relying on tax policy to stimulate investment and saving” and wrote “Obama rejects heavy-handed regulation and insists above all on disclosure, so that consumers will know exactly what they are getting.” (citation, NYRB 55:10) This suggest a more laissez-faire relationship to both business and the economy than we need right now. I don’t know that disclosure does any good when consumers have no choice and no legal remedies for abuses. We need better.

We need to think seriously about what our country needs to recover from the last eight years, years that have seen the abandonment of the poorest and most vulnerable in this country, a war that we were lied into; a war that’s devastated a country, ruined our military, sucked away millions of dollars, and fucked our foreign policy for decades. Eight years that has seen Homeland Security, the FISA debacles, a looming recession, NCLB … well, you know.

So Obama will need to be called on his proposals to deal with all of this and as progressives, it’s our job to do that critique. But as progressives, we also need to beat back the (just starting) tide of illegitimate criticism that is not criticism; that is scarcely veiled racism. He is a black man, not The Black Man.

Oh, and expect that misogyny to get trotted out for Michelle Obama, not because she’s a black woman, though. It’s just because she’s [fill in the blank].

Of course.

political dreams and dreads

I have been meaning to write something about the primary for a while, but I am just too tired of it all. I am tired of what is reveals about the underside, or maybe not so underside of this country's psyche.

A couple of weeks ago I commented on some blog or other how Clinton and Obama seem to be taking on these mythic qualities. The candidates have just about disappeared as individuals, become these avatars of gender and race.

This pretty much guarantees that lots of people have pretty much stopped thinking. This is true of both Clinton and Obama camps. I think I had been bothered a little more by the Obama supporters than the Clinton ones for a couple of reasons.

First, the misogyny has really been making me crazy. A couple of years ago when someone or other raised the possibility of HRC running for president, I thought "Oh fuck, no!" This was because I knew that the right wing that had been on both Clinton's case while they were in the Whitehouse, would be out in force against her. And I've been right. But all over the liberal fauxgressive blogosphere are the bitch jokes and the complaints about her clothes, her voice, her demeanor.

But now Clinton is wearing me out, too. The appeal to "hard-working Americans, white Americans" jeez. I hope that it was exhaustion taking her there because I don't really believe that she's a holds some weird racist notions about who in this country is hard working and who is not.

There's a post over on one of the big progressive blogs, Hullabaloo, that suggests that Obama is
attempting to build a different Democratic Party from under the DLC. In some ways that would be a good thing.

If.

If it were a progressive move. But there's really not much in Obama's policies or public speaking that makes me think he's anything of a progressive. His stand on abortion is pro-choice, but framed in language that bows to the anti-choice side. (i.e. that an abortions is something that a woman decides after consulting with her pastor? oh really?) His excuses for the McClurkin mess back in the fall, i.e. that he believes in communicating with both sides, troubles me because I believe he has little to offer the lgbt community but patronizing rhetoric. Finally there's his tossing Reverend Wright under the bus. Because Wright - with all his cracked notions about HIV and right and left sides of the brain - is a real working progressive, with an acute critique of US social, political, economic, and foreign policy. This is what Obama is stepping away from, as he assuages the nerves of white people who are ignorant about African American experience in this country and who want to stay that way.

And to tell the truth, I cannot stand white Obama supporters who, for some reason, think that we will have entered the New Jerusalem in this country if we just elect a black guy.

As though this one act will wipe out all the bad stuff, as though we can finally forget about slavery, about Reconstruction, about Jim Crow, about the Tulsa Riots, about little girls getting bombed, about segregation north, south, east, and west, about the way that poverty in this country is still color-coded, about driving while black, about all the tiny, tiny insults that pile up day after day, until . . . . Well, I'm really not shocked that many of the crazy people wailing on the street corners in San Francisco are black. We should all scream.

But, some think that having those nice black people in the Whitehouse is really all we need.

looking at pictures

There's been another train wreck in the feminist blogosphere. Ico and a pal went and took pictures of the interior of Amanda Marcotte's book and it ain't pretty.

There's been a lot of shouting and yelling about this, how it's racist, why it is beyond fucked up that anyone would have used this imagery in a book by someone who even halfway thinks of herself as progressive. It took me a while to get my chin off the desk to even read the many, many, many comments on this on many, many different blogs.

But as I was riding home on BART, I was thinking, "How would I explain why this image is so damaging?" I mean, simply saying it's racist isn't quite enough for me right now. I'm trying to think about what the image says and why that is a problem.

Well one thing it says loud and clear to me is that WOC are not the audience for this book. Because I suspect that most WOC of color seeing the dark savages would find it hard to take seriously much that the author had to say.

But it's deeper and more personal than that.

I used to joke that I wanted to be a rich, white man. I mean who wouldn't want all the privilege, all the ease that would go with living in a world that is shaped around your ideas, your desires, your values, your very language? But if I look at that joke for a minute, I have to ask, "Where did that come from?"

It came from just about everything I read, saw, or heard through most of my childhood.

When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to live in a still largely segregated town in north New Jersey (and no, I don't have the accent any more). I say I was lucky, because in those still segregated times, everyone I saw doing work, from the most menial to the most professional, was black. That meant that as well as the garbage man being black, so was my doctor, my dentist, the guy who ran the funeral parlor, and the people who drove the buses, who were the lawyers. The only exceptions were shopkeepers who tended to be Jewish or Italian and teachers, who were all white women until I went to middle school, when I had a few men (all white though).

The point is, I could see that black people did, and could do, all the important work in the world. I had a pretty big horizon for what I thought I could be as a grownup and that is, sadly, not so obviously true for a kid in a mainly black neighborhood now. Black achievement tends to be treated as exceptionalism (look at what's going on with Obama, for example) than the norm.

So if this is true, where does the rich, white man thing come from? The media.

I don't just mean the tv or newspapers. I mean the books I read, the movies I saw. In none of these places were black people the heroes/heroines. We were always the other, the savage, the native, the ignorant, the criminal, the promiscuous, the poor, the addicted, the stupid, the servants.

Why should this matter when there were all these great role models walking around in front of me? (My own family included.) It matters because regardless of what I saw around me, the media, in all its manifestations, is what teaches us to dream. And if I wanted to dream though the books, through the movies, through the tv, I had to do some substitution. I had to take on the face of white, mainly men, to be the one who did things.

You don't think this matters? You don't think it does something to you to have to translate yourself in order to be the paladin, the knight, the king? Well, given how I felt when I started to learn about black people who were heroic - Truth, L'Ouverture, the Maroons, - I'd have to say you were wrong.

One of the most touching poems in Shange's For Colored Girls, is the piece on Toussaint L'Ouverture, where a little girl projects herself into this heroic form. It's a form that fits (well aside from the whole time and gender thing), but at least it's not friggin' Robin Hood. It's not an ocean and a race and a history away.

So to see these pictures, where again, after all this time we're reduced to caricature as the evil that has to be overcome is just toxic. And again we are not the agents, we are not the heroes. Hell, we don't even have faces.

this is a test

They say you can put polls on these pages now. Over there to your right is a poll.

So, take it already.

living in small places

A couple of weeks ago I was driving home south along Sixth Street in Berkeley. Parked on the left hand side of the street was a large van, the size of a UPS delivery van. I couldn't see into the back of the truck because there was curtain or large piece of fabric hanging behind the driver's seat. As I drove past, it reminded me of a van much like it that a friend of mine name Lamar lived in years ago, up in Seattle.

There was room in it for a narrow bed, a chair, a workbench, a stereo (well a boombox), and a cooler. There might have been a hot plate, but probably not. I thought it was wonderful, to have your life in a tiny space that you could take around with you. When I was about twenty, I lived in a tepee for a summer. Everything I owned could be put in a backpack (and I did when I finally went out to California).

There was something lovely and light about having so few possessions and needing so little space to live in.

Now I share a house with my partner and I'm in the process of unpacking 30+ boxes that have been in storage for a couple of years. The contents are mainly books and the unpacking gets slowed down because I find myself going, "I forgot I had that!" then sitting down and reading for a half hour. I have a lot more stuff than I had when I did when I was twenty. My life is a lot more complex and undeniably richer, though moving probably means a real moving van by this point.

I was thinking about this during the flamefest around an appropriation of a WOC's work by a prominent (whatever that means online) white feminist blogger. Aside from the sadly predictable, shamefully feeble defense put on by blogger X and her posse, the thing that struck me was what a tiny space she lives in.

I don't know what her physical space is like, but her mental space is incredibly impoverished. Her response is only about her reputation, her career, her feelings. There's not a whisper of awareness that anyone else in the world exists. This sort of solipsism is like living out of a backpack - limited perspectives, limited resources, limited options. It might feel unencumbered and it's easy to move around, but how poor, how thin, how shabby.

The van Lamar lived in wasn't shabby, and she moved on to get a house to contain all the art she does and all the people she knows. I moved out of the tepee to acquire an unnerving number of books, but I think X is never going to move. I think she's going to cover the windows of the truck with aluminum foil and park it in some friend's backyard and there she'll stay.

who knew?

I am a Canna What Flower Are You?

At least that's what they say.

Something a little more serious later today.

Costa Rica

We went to Costa Rica a few weeks ago.

It was the first time that I'd ever been out of the country. Or at least out enough to need a passport to leave and come back.

Going to Costa Rica was an afterthought. Staying for a whole week was a fall back option.

It was amazing.

Neither of us has much Spanish, so we asked the managers of the hotel where we stayed for a bilingual driver to take us to Volcano Poas and the Butterfly Waterfall. These are both pretty standard tourist stops for the Central Highlands. We expected to get a driver who could understand us, would take us to the sights, wait for us and take us back.

Who we got was Wilson Rojas, who had decided that he was our guide to his country and took us places we would never have thought to have gone by ourselves.

Costa Rica is an astonishing country. Ticans are truly nice people with time for the most ignorant of Northern tourists. The landscape is wildly varied and beautiful, We had the best time and plan to go back again, when we can afford it.

But

Costa Rica is a poor country. In the Central Highlands, where we stayed, people live in shacks made of wood scraps and metal sheets right up against the side of the road. Some of the shacks on the road up to Sarchi (where ornamental ox carts are made) are probably less than 225 sq. ft. We saw clothes drying on the roofs of house that had nowhere to put a clothes line. People walk everywhere and, according to Wilson, there's pretty good bus service. There aren't many cars, compared to the Bay Area for example, and most of the ones I saw on the road are older models, Korean or Japanese.

In Costa Rica, we were the rich. We woke up every day to beautiful views at the edge of a canyon overlooking the Rio Grande. We walked through carefully tended gardens, around koi ponds to have breakfast in a gazebo suspended high over the river below. Men in white shirts and black pants brought us fresh juice and hot breakfasts, if we wanted something other than granola and fresh fruit. These same men brought us dinner at night.

It raised a discomfort that I still feel more than a month later. I kept saying, "Thank you" or "Muchas gracias" after every service and received a quiet "Mucho gusto" from each waiter. But that acknowledgment, doesn't mask the fact that he's waiting on me, that he can pretty much only make a living by waiting on me and people like me, and that he's probably fortunate to work where the owners seem conscientious about their workers.

It's easy to ignore the fact Costa Rica is hostage to our policies. All over the highlands I saw graffiti about the TLC. When I asked Wilson about this, he explained that this was about the free trade zone (NAFTA to us) and that it was a good thing for the country. And most of the graffiti I saw near Alajuela was pro TLC. After a few days of riding around together, he admitted that he'd voted against it. The further north we went, the more anti-TLC graffiti we saw, especially in San Ramon, which seemed a more industrial town.

And it's easy to miss the fact that Costa Rica has its own internal problems. We had stopped at a coffee plantation somewhere south of Fraijanes. I can't remember the name of the plantation, but it sells 80% of it's produce to Starbucks. We walked down and looked at the plants and Wilson pointed out the cabins where the pickers lived. These pickers are migrant workers from Nicaragua. He said that Ticans don't want to pick coffee, that it's hard, poorly paid work, that it's dangerous on the steep hills, with the snakes in the groves. It's a depressingly familiar argument. When we had walked back to the van to head back to the hotel, Wilson asked the boy whose picture is at the top of this post if we could take his picture. He was carrying a basket when we came up to him, but put it down after Wilson told him that we wanted to take a picture of him because he was, "muy guapo."

He is of course. But he looks way older than then ten years old that I estimate he was. He makes maybe 1,483 colones (three dollars) a day for his family by picking coffee beans. And from what we heard, they depend on the help too. This isn't an after school job. The Nicaraguans are the poorest in a poor country. They're many of the people who are walking the narrow, twisting roads.

We saw a woman who had been hit by a car as she was walking home from work. People crouched around her, looking panicked as they waited for the ambulance to show up. (It came soon after and the woman was ok. No one knew anything about the driver.) They were, according to Wilson, probably Nicaraguan, probably coffee pickers.

So even though most of my memories of Costa Rica are of beautiful birds, days with four or five different types of weather in them, cloud forests, ceviche in a no-tourist-in-sight restaurant, passiflora, pejibaye, and waterfalls dropping into the deepest green forests, I am more than a little haunted by a serious, slightly worried smile.

burning up the thread, online political discourse

Recently I was participating in a thread on ally-work on a blog I like and respect. The discussion grew out of the incredibly poor interactions that followed the call for submissions for a new book by Seal Press. I'm not making any links to the firefight. Anyone who stumbles across this site and wants to find out about it can go look it up themselves. What I want to think through here is how online discourse helps and hinders political work.

To be honest I haven't been involved in the down and dirty business of political work, the attempts at coalition building, the interminable meetings, the small but real accomplishments, for years. My work like that pretty much stopped once I went off to graduate school in 1989. And even though I work for a lgbt advocacy organization these days, I don't think of myself as a political activist any more. I'm more of a problem solver and analyst, occasional writer.

Before that though, I lived in Seattle and was an active member of the lgbt (mainly lesbian) community. I served on non-profit boards. I worked with the local black nationalist caucus as a tutor and helped to produce a couple of radio shows. I was a member of Tilth, involved with the natural foods movement in the Pacific Northwest largely because of my job in a owner-operated natural foods warehouse. That latter also meant that for years I spent every Thursday afternoon in management meetings with the whole staff. That could mean more than 15 women. That meant really bad and really good meetings and I learned a lot from doing all of this.

So how does this relate to the recent online incidents?

The same dynamics are in play. The same engaged and creative energies. The same self-regarding, destructive bullshit. How does this all change when we're individuals typing away at keyboards scattered across the globe rather than staring at each other across a too-small or too-large room?

One important factor is the nature of web-reading. Most people read blogs for entertaining content. I know, I know. There are a number of studies that show that many people, especially those under forty or so, are getting their news from the internet. But tell me that they don't read it as entertaining information. There are lots of people proud to get their news from John Stewart. He's a funny, clever man, but he's no journalist and would be the first to tell you so. People reading different websites, especially blogs, are looking for information, but they are also looking for something to distract them at work, during their commute, at home. That has meant, and continues to mean, that performance is more highly regarded than content.

Also, in the interactive comments of blog threads, participants are also rewarded for their performances. This is why trolls cause blogs to rack up huge comment counts, even though everyone (except the terminally naive) knows that trolls are not about to change their minds about anything. But a snappy, cogent, or brutal put-down of a troll will get a writer a whole chorus of virtual, verbal pats on the back.

And those pats feel good.

I've gotten the same nice glow when I've posted a comment and someone noticed it. It's human. We want to be noticed. We want to be liked. And one of the easiest ways to do this online is to savage someone. Another way to be noticed is to write a post full of emotion. It's as though a nakedly emotional post will get adherents because the emotional current makes the content feel "realer" to a reader.

Put three posts side by side. Make A a calmly argued, logically structured, even beautiful essay. Make B a full on emotional diatribe, making sure to keep it somewhat coherent. It can't read as flat-out insane. Make C a sardonic, clever piece of wordplay that manages to make any opponents look like fools. How will they rank? Well based on my experience C will get the most attention, B next and A will come in a sorry last.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I don't think I'm wrong.

What does this have to do with online political work? Well, take an audience that's predisposed to regard the medium as entertainment and primed with the dynamics I've described and it's a recipe for disaster. The behaviors that lead to the worst real-world meetings are the following:

• Rigidity
• Insecurity
• Loud, Obstinate Ignorance
• Concealed Motives
• Poor Faith Arguments
• Unexamined Motives
  

In the online environment (and out here in the world too) all of these are lethal to progress, but the last three are especially guaranteed to derail and destroy useful discussions. It's easier to construct snappy comebacks when you don't believe in what you're writing (poor faith arguments) It's easier to pour out an enraged rant when you're reacting and typing first, without thinking about why a particular post is making you crazy (unexamined or concealed motives).

But thinking through your own reactions takes training and it takes time. And time is at a premium in a online discussion. This is another factor that can make online collaborative work so difficult, if not impossible. In the real world, it takes ages to work out a coalition, especially if you're bringing together people who haven't worked together before, who have reason to distrust each other. But in an online discussion, you have to hit it quick or the moment will have passed you by. That wonderful thing you were going to say loses its context and relevance. It will disappear without an answer, without an echo, without a sound. So there's every incentive to type fast, to type first thing that comes to mind, to type the words that will have the greatest impact.

You could type something perfect, but the odds are against it.

You'll probably type what you feel not what you could have thought if you had a day or so. You'll probably type out of your reactions rather than your principles. And you'll type for your audience, wanting to please, instruct, anger, enlighten, and entertain.

You're going to give a performance.

But a lot of political activism is not performance (though you'll hardly know it in an election year). Coalitions depend on discussions to make decisions that everyone can live with (and this doesn't have to mean concessions). It's carrying out the tasks that have to get done. It's doing all of this because something real is at stake.

Online, the stakes are not so clear. The stakeholders are a shifting, amorphous crowd of mainly strangers. Maybe we do such a poor job of this because, really, there's nothing to lose.

the place for thinking

I've been a rotten blogger for months now.

I kept meaning to post something, but somehow never got around to it.

I was going to write something about my great-aunt (who's doing fine* now and my sister is living with her, an arrangement that seems to be working out for both of them).

I was going to write something about commuting, now that I take BART to work every morning.

I was going to write something about observing more black women with straightened and colored hair recently than I've seen (or noticed) for years.

But the thing that got me to open up the old Blogger account is Errol Morris' set of essays on Fenton's two photos of an empty road in the Crimea. He starts out trying to establish in what order a pair of photographs were taken and goes on into thoughts about war, about intention, about how you figure things out. Nikita Khrushchev even shows up (so to speak) in the second section. It's fascinating reading and I've taken to reading some of his other essays in his Zoom columns on the NYT website. It's a lot of food for thought and so it's getting late and even though I'm getting over an awful cold and should be in bed, I keep reading.

Because it's fun to think about this stuff.

I am rediscovering the pleasure of thinking about things that have no immediate use. I have always loved this. But I had sort of stopped for quite a while. Somehow having a job that, though it uses a lot of mental energy sometimes, is not overly intellectual has freed me up for the not-so-simple pleasures of thinking.

You would have thought being in academia would have done that. I think it does it for a lot of people. But it didn't do it for me. In part, I think it was because that was what I expected university life to be like (too many movies, probably). But I think it's also because this thinking thing has always been about fun for me and once something gets past the fun part to the work part, I don't so so well.

I'd say that mentally, I'm a sprinter rather than a marathoner. I have to trick myself to do things that take longer than 20 minutes** to complete. I have a lot of tricks now, switching between tasks, promising myself some sort of treat if I stick to it for another ten minutes, and so on to get things done. Often enough the tricks work and I end up spending an extended period of time working without feeling bored or trapped, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

So for me thinking is, at it's best, a ludic activity.

Which also might explain why I haven't blogged in months. It's felt too much like work and I hate working. But maybe it's going to feel like play again.

* well, as fine as you can be at 93+ years old.

** ok, I exaggerate, longer than a half hour.

thinking in black and white

I don't usually think about writing about race. For one thing, I wouldn't know where to start. Part of that is because I've been a progressive (and an academic manqué) and therefore my impulse is to place race among the array of power dynamics facing all of us. Throw in the multiplicity of race prejudice and I can't really think of anything to say.

But sometimes, things break through. The second thing was this post from Lower Manhattanite. I'd heard, read about the Jena 6 awhile back, but I hadn't heard about the sentencing. The chilling thing about LM's story is that 14 years ago is nothing, nothing at all.

The first thing though came completely out of the blue. I pay about as much attention to professional tennis as I do to professional golf, which is a little more than absolutely nothing. I'm guessing it's a big tournament and a little Googling uncovers that it's the U.S. Open. I was riding the BART into work a couple of days ago, something I'm still getting a kick out of, when I glanced over some one's shoulder and saw the sports page. On the page a headline that read something like "Henin beats Serena" something like that, I may have the verb wrong. I probably do. But the thing that has been bugging me for days is that Henin and Serena. The white player gets her last name, as is usual for athletes, unless they have some nickname thing going on. Serena, hell, they can just call her by her first name. There's this nearly ubiquitous use of women's names rather than their surnames in this culture that's bad enough. But it's the casualness of this racism, this seemingly completely unconscious condescension that floors me.

And you can bet that the writer would completely deny any racist intent if I called him on it too.

again and again

Yesterday I was watching Seven Samurai. I don't remember why I got it from Netflix. I've probably watched it about six times by now. It just keeps getting better and better. Once I'd finished watching it, I started to re-read "The Last Samurai" by Helen DeWitt. It's a wonderful book and reading it made me think about two things, the pleasures of rereading and why some books are so satisfying and others aren't.

For the latter, I'm not going to make some argument about high art. This summer I"ve been compulsively re-reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and Charles DeLint's Newford novels. You could probably make the argument that Pratchett's a genius, but I don't think the same could be said for DeLint. But re-reading both of them gives me a lot of pleasure. Part of the fun is they're both good at constructing plots. But once you get past the what-is-going-to-happen-next stage of reading, what is there?

In their cases and in DeWitt's too, it's making a world that's so fully realized that a reader enters it like Alice (or Death) going through a mirror. It's not a matter of spelling everything out. That makes for tedious reading and gets in the way of the effect that I'm trying to describe. Theodore Sturgeon once wrote something about description to the effect that a writer needed to imagine every detail in a room, everything, but then she needed to leave out everything except what the character (or pov) would notice. Who knows how many writers can actually do that? But the point, I guess, is that the world (country, neighborhood, street, house, or room) that's written so so well imagined, even if not explicitly, that it's all there, ready. A reader is held in the imaginative world of the book.

When that doesn't happen, there has to be high style, great plotting, or something to make a book worth reading. Recently a friend recommended The Shadow of the Wind. The cover blurbs compared it to Eco, Borges, Garcia-Marquez. Do reviewers just pull this shit out of the air? Ok, there was a library in it and a mysterious character is a writer, but there the resemblance stops. A worse conceived book I can't imagine reading. I started to make notes on all the lapses of logic, failures of character development, and just plain stupid writing, but had to give up after half a chapter. It's the sort of thing that can embitter a reader.

But the worst thing about it (aside from being pretty tone-deaf though that could have been a translation issue) was that it was supposed to take place in Barcelona and I could never see the city. It's as though all the action took place in feebly illuminated corners of rooms or dark streets, surrounded by an impenetrable fog. Characters pop up in one spot, then merged into the fog to pop up at another. This is pretty bizarre when you remember that this is Gaudi's city. It's famous for it's beauty. And according to Google, it doesn't rain all that much there either. If a writer can't make a living place palpable, then reading them is going to be a chore.

This summer, no more chores.