Feeling Sentimental

Apparently we pregnant types are supposed to be sentimental. Every other blogpost on the pregnancy part of Babble is about crying at the cotton commercial or something. For better or worse, I seem to be the same cynic I've always been.

Of course, there's a lot of suggestibility when it comes to talking about emotions. If I were being paid to blog about being pregnant and how I felt about being pregnant I would probably attribute a lot of things to it that I don't when I'm just going about my life. Which is why I was interested to find a link to this article, from New York magazine. Now, you might think that reading an article with the subtitle "Why Parents Hate Parenting" might be a bad idea for a 39-week pregnant lady, sentimental or otherwise. But it's a strong article because instead of falling into the normal lifestyle carping (singles are happier! no marrieds! no parents!) she sets out to solve the seeming paradox of why studies have consistently found parents less happy than those without kids although almost no parents would say this. A lot of it is what you'd expect: parents are in denial, parents expectations have become too high, etc. But the real meat comes at the end, when she demonstrates how, like always with such studies but is so rarely mentioned, it really comes down to the questions being asked. When you ask moment to moment things, like, do you have more stress, of course parents say yes. But when you look at more existential questions, like feelings of loneliness, parents come out as less depressed. One of the parents are less happy people doesn't buy it, because life is actually experience as series of moments, not as what we make it in reflection. I'm not so sure. I've always been fond of what Annie Dillard says, that good days are not hard to find, it's good lives, and that a day spent reading is not always a good day but a life spent reading is always a good life. People like to tell aspiring creative types or whoever that you have to enjoy every part of the process, the doing, not just the having done. But the process sucks lots of the time for almost everyone. So if we are not so happy moment to moment, but construct ourselves that way in retrospect, is that really such a failure? "Being in the moment" may be a balm against anxiety, but does it take us away from where the meanings are - in where we've come from and where we're going?

So I was thinking about this and thinking maybe I'm not so unsentimental after all, and then I came across Philip Levine's wonderful poem "You Can Have It" in Rita Dove's new anthology, and thought especially about these lines:

. . . We were twenty

for such a short time and always in

the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt

and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 the city of Detroit, founded

by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes

of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,

no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now

that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,

calendars, doctor's appointments, bonds

wedding certificates, diveres licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.

The ice to standing pools or rivers

racing in the gutters. Then the bright grass rose

between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948.

Like any good feminist, I'm skeptical about nostalgia. The nostalgia here totally takes me in, but mostly because it's for a time before my birth. "Purple Rose of Cairo" and "Radio Days" are my favorite Woody Allen films. It's as impossible for me to imagine commemorating 1994 the way Levine commemorates the year he turned twenty. It's as impossible as imaging my kid at twenty in 2032(!) Maybe my youth was just less textured and nostalgia-worthy than Levine's. But Levine's nostalgia goes hand in hand with its impossibility. The past as we imagine it, his 1948, his being twenty, is as if it never was, unless he wills it back, give it to us, who were never there. It's a construction, but just maybe it's not a lie, the way I always thought it was. Life may be a string of moments in which the average parent is more unhappy and stressed, but it's also the string of moments who trail behind, as equally unfixed as any vibrating present the happiness gurus could imagine.

Vanity and Despair

So I was so absorbed by Downfall, the 2004 Hitler's bunker movie and father of the father of internet memes, that I subscribed to London Review of Books just to read this amazing review by Bee Wilson of a new biography of Eva Braun.

Before watching Downfall, I hadn't thought of Braun as much more than a Woody Allen punch line. As Wilson tells it, she was a throughly apolitical person, enamored with Hitler from their initial meeting when she was seventeen. She took endless photos of their life together, and mostly wanted the same things any younger mistress of a powerful man might want: more time, more attention, nice clothes and nice parties. As Wilson notes, she didn't fit the Nazi's propaganda of the selfless self-sacrificing wife and mother, but her apparent sentimentality and complete lack of self-reflection make her very recognizable. How different is gleefully cheering for your man and clinging relentlessly to the idea of your relationship, with all the photos to prove it happened, from being any kind of functionary? Sentimentality is the ideology, just like the bureaucracy was for Arendt.

Looking at the reviews of Downfall it was funny to see echoes of the tired debates about whether or not art should "humanize" Hitler or other Nazis to help us understand "how such things happen," and whether viewers need to be reminded that the Nazis being portrayed were really, really bad people. The whole thing is particularly funny when film critics take this on, as if any three hour film could "explain" anything. Shoah is nine and a half hours and it only works because it sticks to its own dictum to describe rather than to explain. Anyways, Arendt had the last word on this a long time ago.

"Vanity and despair" was a phrase Robin Morgan once used to describe the dominant subjective conditions of patriarchy. Reading about Braun is particularly unnerving because there's so much vanity and not enough despair, at least not until the bunker. I didn't know before seeing the film that they got married 36 hours before they killed themselves together. Guess the apocalypse is one way to get a commitment. It makes me think of the end of Shaun of the Dead, when the main character laments having to kill his zombified mother, best friend and girlfriend in the same day. "What makes me think I'm taking you back?" the on-again off-again girlfriend asks. "You don't want to die single, do you?" he answers. Wilson ends her review by noting that she may have also been trying to persuade him to have children, posing him for pictures with the children who came to call. But charm and sentiment only got her so far.

Poetry Corner: Transformations

Early in my pregnancy, when the changes were subtle and undetectable, I compared the experience to music playing in the background: something you would tune into or out of many times over the course of a day, without fully realizing it. At the same time, actual music was taking on more weight: instead of having the ipod on and being half tuned in while I read, it took all my attention to keep up. Along with music, poetry seemed more interesting than anything else I was reading: against all the books and columns and blogs of deadly literal advise and polemics, nothing seemed more appropriate than the metaphoric. Not surprisingly, Plath's "Metaphors" has held on as a the ur-text through all eight syllables (and counting) so far.

Anne Sexton's classic 1971 collection Transformations is among other things a fascinating combination of the literal and the metaphoric. The back of my edition describes it use of fairy tales as "reenactments, parodies" but that doesn't seem quite right to me. True, there's a lot of humor in juxtaposing the stories to contemporary language and metaphors: the miller's daughter in Rumplestiltskin is a "poor grape with no one to pick./Luscious and round and sleek./Poor thing./To die and never see Brooklyn." Later, after she becomes queen, and tries to bargain with Rumplestiltskin for her child, she is "as persistent as a Jehovah's Witness." But the stories themselves are mostly told straight: dwarfs and Kings and death behave much as they're supposed to. It's the language and, especially, the more generalized openings of each of the poems, prior to the start of each narrative, that cast them in a their frame. Thus "Cinderella" begins: "You always read about it:/the plumber with twelve children/who wins the Irish Sweepstakes./From toilets to riches./That story," while "Rapunzel" begins with the witch Mother Gothel's apologia: "A woman/who loves a woman/is forever young." It's the sympathies and not the stories that bring in the revisionism. Interestingly, along with Gothel, Rumpelstiltskin, another child-stealer, also comes in for sympathy: "She offered him all the kingdom/but he wanted only this -/a living thing/to call his own./And being mortal/who can blame him?"

The so-called "confessional poets" have fascinated me for a long time. A lot of people seem to look at them the way a lot of people look at second-wave feminism: a necessary step, but incomplete, and certainly less sophisticated than what's come since. There are a lot of connections, of course, and Transformations especially resonates with the feminist criticism of the period, with "images of women" and the rereading of the existing canon. But for lots of contemporary readers and feminists it's all too blunt, too much about the body and babies and breasts, and did Sexton really have to write "The Ballad of he Lonely Masturbator"? But I don't think so: no social movement or body of work is perfect or even complete, but that doesn't mean that those of the recent past should be seen as relics or as stages on the way to where we are now, the way the fairly recent past is so often judged.

"A strange vocation to be a mother at all," Sexton writes in "The Maiden Without Hands." Even when children are not stolen, they are everywhere contested, made strange; they transform and are transformed. At its best, the project shares the ambition of the feminist classics of the period. The movement says, what has been is not what what will be, and the poetry says, what is is already not as it is.

Talking to Strangers

When I was a kid, I was afraid of talking to strangers, especially under certain circumstances. I was scared of picking up the phone to call someone, or of knocking on someone's door to sell Girl Scout cookies or what have you. Even recently, working on political campaigns that involve phone banking or door knocking fills me with dread. When I was in college I tried to write for our school paper. I remember interviewing a professor of mine - not a stranger, but close enough - about a new policy on student-faculty dating. I remember sitting there trembling while he said something about how student-teacher relationships were inevitably erotic, but you couldn't get such a subtle point across in an article, so please don't include that. (Yes, he was an English prof.) I didn't include it and the story went on the front page and soon after I switched to writing reviews.

I've always looked at this as a kind of political as well as a personal failing, as if a little timidity was all that stood between me and becoming Studs Terkel or Anna Deveare Smith, two folks whose work fascinates me probably partially because the thought of doing what they do is so terrifying to me.

One thing about being pregnant is that it involves a good deal of talking to strangers. I haven't had the experience people talk about where strangers try to touch you, but lots of strangers and casual acquaintances will engage short conversations with the standard questions - the answers are easy enough, and it's not like you had to initiate - but there's something about it that takes me back to that fear.

Miranda July is no Terkel or Deveare Smith. Like other indie filmmakers, her work is apolitical in a specific way - it's a world where people exist in the thinnest of social environments. In her collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More than You, this isolation works to brilliant psychological and existential ends, but it feels like a fun house mirror version of the world, where everyone's ultimate unknowability becomes literal. They can't really connect - ok, fine who can - but they also can't have a normal conversation.

So perhaps the high concept premise of her new book It Chooses You - interviewing people who place ads in the Penny Saver while procrastinating endlessly over the completion of her new screenplay - isn't so odd or surprising. It's exactly what you'd expect when a performance artist tries to force herself to overcome social phobias and normal taboos and make herself into an existential Studs Terkel. At first glance it's an odd book even for her - she describes her own struggles with the screenplay in the same elliptical, beautiful, searing weirdness as we get in No One Belongs Here. Except that fictional characters have a reason to speak in heightened metaphors; it's odd to hear a somewhat public figure use this for her own state of mind. Except, you realize, it's not a literary conceit: she actually thinks things like: "it was as if he'd just thrown some confetti in the air and called it words."

July says at the beginning that it's a book in part about L.A., which makes a lot of sense. A lot of the obsession with atomization in indie films might have something to do with that city. There you have to seek out strangers to talk to; here in N.Y. you have to dodge them. And not only when you're pregnant. It's also in part about older people in a younger world - the people who sell things in the penny saver don't have computers. July seems to think they exist in a different emotional space than the rest of us - I'm not so sure. If nothing else it reminds us that the internet sure as fuck didn't invent shut-ins. July works hard at being her best Terkel-like populist self. When she interviews Andrew, a seventeen year old trying to sell tadpoles, she seethes when he tells her how he was shunted into special ed classes for no reason he understands and encourages him to see his obvious gift with animals as something he can use, test scores be damned. But then she runs up against Ron, also known as the kind of person who makes you think you're right not to talk to strangers:

Ron was exactly the kind of man you spent your whole life being careful not to end up in the apartment of. And since I was raised to go out of my way to make such men feel understood, I took extra-special care with his interview. But as he talked on and on (the original transcript was more than fifty pages), I realized that I don't actually want to understand this kind of man - I just want them to feel understood, because I fear what will happen if I am thought of as yet another person who doesn't believe them. I want to be the one they spare on the day of reckoning.

Later she notes how much more willing to run from the situation she is than she was at sixteen, when she corresponded with a prisoner. But it would be too glib to say, ah yes, well, there's talking to strangers and then there's going to the houses of strangers when you're a woman and when it's the latter you know where the fear comes from, and that it may be a gift, like the self-help books say. What is being an artist or a creative person if not the fantasy that we will be something other than another person who doesn't understand, and that the understanding may spare us? Ron may not deserve it, but we do.

More Gaitskill

When I was about eleven, I wrote a story for English class about a teenager who wanted to be a model. Which was kind of crazy: around then I wanted to be a dancer, a writer, a therapist or a lawyer. Of course a few years later the topic would seem like the most ridiculous and embarrassing thing, the sort of thing written by an eleven year old reading certain magazines, the worst possible topic for a young girl who understandably wants to write about the only thing young girls can write about, which is wanting. But having just finished Veronica - and with it, having read all of Gaitskill's books, the first time I'm managed that with an author for a while - I have a little more compassion for my younger self. Who knew modeling could be a theme for a great novel? Well, not modeling exactly, but all that goes along with it. As Allison, the novel's narrator, puts it, "I said I had not gone to New York to be a model, and I hadn't. I'd gone there for life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college." Beauty, Dorothy Allison wrote, tells an ugly story, and it is the thing that teaches Allison life and sex and cruelty. Beauty and the things that go with it - youth and sophistication, or at least the appearance of it- separate Allison from Veronica, a woman with whom she forms an unlikely friendship. Beauty and the power imbalance that it creates and embodies challenge our sense of ourselves as good and kind people, and of our world as one where empathy is possible. Good liberals who reject the cruelty of winner-take-all ideologies hesitate - and with good reason - when it comes to beauty and sex. It's no good for the rich to say more and more is never enough - not everyone agrees on this, of course, but the imperative is clear enough for many of us. But if the beautiful and talented want more experience, more sex, more life - who are those of us with less beauty and talent to stand in their way? Certain strains of feminism have challenged women on this point - perhaps this is why its ideals seem so particularly arduous. Allison's friends tell her how good she is for standing by Veronica as she struggles with AIDS and her other friends abandon her. Allison knows better. She understands the cruelty of pity. In less extreme circumstances, I've had friendships where I was close to each of these roles, and her brilliant evocation of the dynamic is devastating.

Throughout the novel Gaitskill uses variation on a haunting image: after she describes a scene, Allison says, "Imagine ten pictures of this conversation. In nine of them, she's the fool and I'm the person who has something. But in the tenth, I'm the fool and it's her show now. For just a second, that's the picture I saw." It's the possibility of the tenth picture which brings Allison back, and that makes ten pages of the seemingly "personal" or "apolitical" Gaitskill more worthwhile than a dozen thick tomes of so-called voice of a generation authors whose lukewarm, smoothed over sociology of the middle class somehow passes for "realism."

Me, Elsewhere

I have a review of Vivian Gornick's short biography of Emma Goldman up at the November issue of Open Letters Monthly.

In the same issue, be sure to catch Rohan Maitzen's great takedown of Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot. It does sound pretty dreary - really, deconstruction-bashing, how novel! There's nothing worse than a novel editorializing and theorizing to you about the superiority of art to editorializing and theorizing. Well, yes, then, why don't you get on with it? Even Roth is completely dreadful when he gives in to this. Because I'm a masochist, I recently caught Sam Tanenhaus on his podcast bitching about Eugenides not being nominated for a National Book Award: as with Franzen, supposedly it's a conspiracy against "major" or "popular" authors by judges who don't recognize that books that sell can also be good. It's a clever way (well, not that clever really) to give a populist spin to a standard lament for the eclipse of your pet white males, who by definition have something big to say, no matter how parochial their subject matter. Can't it ever be that sometimes they're just not that good?

Poetry Corner: Dedication

Right now I'm working on a review of Vivian Gornick's new biography of Emma Goldman for Open Letters Monthly. Over at The New Inquiry, The Jacobin's Bhaskar Sunkara takes issue with Gornick for spending too much time on her romantic life and failing to present an adequate analysis and critique of the limits of Goldman's brand of radicalism, deeming the book "a trite celebration of the 'good fight' and some parlor gossip."

But what does it actually mean to fight the good fight? Are the contours of a life of struggle really so familiar to us? Of course, from a certain radical perspective, this is besides the point: one struggles to change the world, not to live a meaningful life. Yet given the precariousness of radical victories, part of the story is always the lives left behind across decades of difficult and sacrifice, and, often, seeming failures. By aiming for more than a meaningful life for oneself, meaningful lives are constructed: this is one of the central tensions at the heart of Benjamin Balthaser's wonderful new collection of poems, Dedication, (you can get it here.)

Drawing on experiences and interviews with relatives who were activists and members of the American Communist Party, the book meditates on the lines of blood and memory that extend from the long-ago epiphanies, cherished books, and conversations across decades that erode their power, both through the active repression of HUAC and named names and the less deliberate but no less intolerable diminishments of age, separations, and silences. "Dedication for Arrival" implicitly rebukes all those who have seen American repression as somehow insignificant because it lacks the familiar icons of state repression:

When they came, they did not come,

in darkness, as they did,

they did come with greased faces,

black with smoke, as they did,

_________________________

They came in the middle of the day,

they came in suits, they knocked on the door,

and read from a warrant, signed by a judge,

and when the children wept, they patted them on the head,

and gave them sweets, and the neighbors

peered from darkened windows

not knowing and prayer but silence, and rumor.

Finally, though, it is in the construction of meaningful lives that the losses and gains are measured. In "Dedication 4 for Sid Grossman: Service," we see a captain ridicule his commitment - ("we know what your background is"),

to run their logistics, the Lieutenant called on you.

Grossman will talk to those niggers, and when

you walked through the tropical darkness,

and onto the other side, and you spoke

with the ease and directness one grants to men,

it was obvious you had not learned this in the Army.

I don't buy or recommend poetry that often, but do yourself a favor and pick up Dedication here.