Mark Nowak is a labor-poet whose work is tied closely with creating an understanding of working-class culture in America. Shut Up Shut Down is a compiling of projects across the country Nowak has worked on related to layoffs in mining and steel. His work is heavily researched, quoting from personal interviews, local geography and news, labor academia, and more to produce something that is very intriguing: an enthnographic poetics. Nowak is out to find literary avenues in which people voice their own literary creation, where working-class peoples both generate and become the art and culture they engage with. Fortunately, it’s tremendous poetry as well – I envy Nowak’s sense of rhythm as he pulses between interviews with Francine, a mining mother, the newspaper, and photographs. I feel like I’ve read the first essay discussing labor and Reagan that really interested me – all it had to do was turn inside-out the idea of an essay to do so, unless headlines of air controller strikes, a biography of Reagan alongside General Electric, and a capitalization handbook welded together into poetry meets your guidelines for the essay form.

I hope to read more Nowak soon. Real soon.

Well, unfortunately the wait has meant that Cummings has faded a bit in my mind – I haven’t had much time for casual obsessive readings of poets this year as when I first became enamored with Cummings’ writing, meaning that his poetry felt distant with this book for the first in a very long time. This is, of course, exciting news for when I have more of a chance to rediscover his work, but in the meanwhile The Magic Maker provided a somewhat esoteric picture of a man who’s work I either can’t entirely recall or never knew. Cummings still cuts quite the entertaining figure, and his biography takes him from his childhood home near Harvard through Paris, New York, and much of the literary world. Something that seemed out-of-reach even in this biography about Cummings is the impact and work of his paintings, which I am still unfamiliar with. Norman synthesizes the dual role of “The Poet as Painter” that Cummings carefully balances, but I never get a sense of Cummings in his visual work alone. This is possibly because I haven’t experienced it before – I might be saying the same things about Cummings’ work as a poet had I not read it (regardless of how unfortunately my memory is already dimming of some of his oeuvre).

The Magic Maker provides insight and commentary into a man I am very interested in still, and Norman does make use of his own role as both a close friend of Cummings and as a member of literary circles – the work is peppered with asides from many others in The Dial gang. This level of proximity can never be reached again in biography work around this period and people, and for this reason as well The Magic Maker is of value.

I hope to revisit this book when I feel more prepared for it again – and hopefully this review as well.

This collection is about a decade old now, and was loaned to me by a friend who is working a similar work to be produced in relation to current inmates and Gateways volunteers and students. While it’s important to resist reducing these people’s lives to each other, many parallels creep up in the reading of these 8 stories. All of the young men (this collection is from only one of the male juvenile prisons) here talk about being lonely as children, going through periods of isolation, abuse, and frustration that ended up surfacing in larger problems ranging from drug and cutting addictions to permanently leaving their parents at 13. What surprised me was how much I was able to see some of the early issues in myself and other friends – I suppose it’s not shocking to think that some children are socially awkward at a young age, but it should be alien that that sets you on a path towards a loss of your childhood and imprisonment. There are several points where my story obviously breaks with many of these men. As they continued to express feelings of loss and a lack of support or guidance (along with a disengagement with unsupportive institutions like church, school, or even family sometimes) I saw how I moved myself into these exact categories more. Through the Eyes of the Judged was a reminder of the privilege I face in being motivated and excited in school, regardless of feelings surrounding loneliness, against the breakdown of any academic motivation on the part of some of these guys.

Again, I don’t want to be reductive. These men are fully individual, and it’s difficult to narrow each story enough to provide a universal solution or even analysis. These are immigrants, residents, drug users, pimps, urban youth, alcoholics, fathers, sons, brothers, popular kids, unpopular kids, hustlers, and young men. Society criminalized them long before they were locked up for many reasons, and Gateways remains exciting to me because of its abilities to connect with inmates in a variety of ways. These are creative, earnest young men who are being engaged through Gateways programs, and in the process describing how this allows them to give value to themselves. Gateways is an organization with varied approaches to inmate empowerment, and the results apparently show – the last stat I heard was that the recidivism rate (% of inmates who, after release, will be arrested and imprisoned again) is reversed from 75% for the larger inmate population to 25% for youth involved in Gateways.

It was important to me to read these stories, and I only wish I had more energy and time to provide more of the support I think Gateways and incarcerated youth deserve.

I’ve been reading Agustín Gómez-Arcos’ novel The Carnivorous Lamb on-off for most of this quarter. It parallels much of the thematic work encountered in my readings for class this quarter, though in a different vein. The novel is set in ’70s Spain, in the midst of the Franco regime. It follows a Republican family who remains silent and fragmented by the collapse of their dreams after the Civil War – the youngest son, our protagonist and narrator Ignacio, does not even venture from their home for much of his childhood. The book focuses on the romance between Ignacio and his older brother Antonio, and the intersections their incest has alongside the church, the family name, and society.

The book, written by Gómez-Arcos in exile in France (and originally in French), is bitterly humorous, creating and skewering hypocritical representations of Spanish institutions like the priesthood. The erotic tension and deep passion between brothers remains the only unmocked activity in the work, and produces a well of hope, that the brothers, a younger generation, are not lost to the despair their parents slowly drown in. The Carnivorous Lamb is about as brutal and elegantly written (and translated!) as coming-of-age stories can be, but the destination is much brighter than the journey.

The Inferno, by Luz Arce, is an account of her time during Chile’s dictatorship, in transition from acting as a militant leftist during the Allende years to being captured after the coup. Arce, after rape, torture, and threats to her family, chooses to collaborate and provide names, eventually working for both CNI and DINE (secret intelligence and police under the dictatorship in Chile). The Inferno acts as a testimonial to these experiences, and is witness to the fear, brutality, isolation, and degradation Arce experiences. The book is scattered, yet precise – it is set as a series of vignettes, which draw on the scars of memory Arce holds to produce something unnervingly lucid almost twenty years after many of the events.

I’ve emerged from the book in a fair bit of conflict. I know I can’t condone what has occurred (and fortunately it’s not my place to), and yet I don’t know if I can’t see Arce as a culprit. She was a collaborator, an informant, and, eventually, an employee of organizations that sought to disappear, murder, censor and repress Chile. Yes, Arce is someone who has directly experienced the brutality and alienation of these groups, these people, but she also went on to do so herself. I guess, as a reader, I left the book unable to forgive Arce for her actions, yet still sickened and horrified by the situations she found herself confronted with. I am touched most by the moments she is able to find some humanity, whether in her first shower, or in seeing her son again; I rage most as she first sets down to write names on paper.

Death permeates everything in The Inferno. My hope is that in writing and exhuming this past, Arce is able to publicly confront the atmosphere of death in Chile under Pinochet.

Death and the Maiden, by Ariel Dorfman, is, to start with, part of my assigned reading over the break for my class “Literature and the Cultural Politics of Democracy in Chile and Brazil”. The play is set in an unnamed country (though presumably Chile) during a transition out of a long period of military dictatorship (in Chile, Augusto Pinochet) towards the first democratically elected president (Patricio Aylwin) in decades. The president has pushed for a commission to produce a report (the Rettig Report) “to investigate human rights violations that ended in death or the presumption of death”. There are three characters – a judge, Gerardo, assigned to the commission, his wife Paulina, who experienced kidnapping, torture, and rape under the regime (none of which fall under the domain of the commission), and Roberto, a doctor who is potentially the primary rapist and torturer of Paulina. The play follows an intense night and day the three share, with several unnerving turns.

I think there is much to compare and discuss here in relation to the other work of Dorfman’s we’re working with, Widows. Both are concerned with gaps, silences, and truth under dictatorship. The fortunate step Death and the Maiden is able to take Widows never can is to present all of its characters – there is a distinction Dorfman’s work makes between disappearance and torture, and the memories and tensions that these acts produce.

I’m sorry that these comments are fairly brief and initial. But hey, when you’re reading 9 books and trying to relax, developing an essay doesn’t sound like the most exciting thing, sorry. Next up on the list is my other reading for LCPD, Luz Arce’s The Inferno, which is already raising difficult questions for me.

I’ve planned out a slight challenge. This spring break (20 – 28 March), I’ll try to read a book a day, and put up a short blurb about it as well. For example, later today I’ll hopefully have an initial reaction written up to Death and the Maiden.

Sat. March 20
Ariel Dorfman, Death and The Maiden

Sun. March 21
Luz Arce, The Inferno

Mon. March 22
Agustin Gomez-Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

Tues. March 23
Various, Through the Eyes of the Judged

Wed. March 24
Charles Norman, E.E. Cummings – Magic Maker

Thur. March 25
Mark Nowak & Amiri Baraka, Shut Up Shut Down

Fri. March 26
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded

Sat. March 27
Carter Wilson, Crazy February

Sun., March 28
Woody Allen, Mere Anarchy

It was repulsive to see it there, affixed to her, the liquid dribbling down its chin,
coming from her breast which before had been pink and beautiful and was now
excessively dark and swollen… Then the sucking infant, satisfied, would sleep
without detaching itself from her.” – Pía Barros, Artemisia
Artemisia begins in image and history. A woman, possibly the Artemisia of the title, in a Borgesian reflection, overcome by the sight and caresses of her self. Away from the flat belly – dark heavy breasts and a choking, desperate child whose birth and creation has fully overturned Artemisia, a “shattering experience that disrupts or even threatens to destroy experience in the sense of an integrated or at least viably articulated life” (LaCapra, 206). Artemisia is a story of fragmented pasts and their reflections in a total present.
Artemisia is a new mother who tears away from her child. Her mood is most intense when nursing her child, bringing on “repulsion” that makes “her want to hit, break and dismember this voracious and dominating creature”. Artemisia experiences a disfiguring that she attributes to him, once being beautiful and desirable in another’s eyes: his father. The mirror, displaying a physique seemingly unaltered by childbirth, has become her new consolation, a monument towards a historically reenacted self. Reflection and self-image allow a forgetting of Artemisia’s “creature”; there is a narcissism acting as caretaker for her and child that will transform and eventually starve both.
Memory is acting as a displacer of the present in Artemisia with ramifications for our titular character.

Artemisia is experiencing three displacements by memory: (a) a gendered conception of womanhood as emphasized through the body; (b) the gendered process of motherhood; and (c) sexual expression eroded and constrained by (a) and (b). She speaks of a “vigilant gaze” and the “stern look” that expect her to care for her baby that sparks nausea and depression around socializations and memories of (b). Artemisia instead desires “her satisfaction before the envious glances of other women”, to live life within her memory of (a) in order to once again give rise to (c), “her skin brushed by other hands” than the lonely, hungry child before her. The internal inconsistencies of Artemisia, to forget and worship sight; to be held and adored, but never by her boy; create an inability to voice her self. She lives in paradoxes she seeks to forget, and the repressed manifestation of these contradictions is violent. I point to the “interaction between violence and violation, the breaking of some custom or some dignity” that Williams discusses in Keywords here – an unruly violation of Artemisia’s self-governed laws for socialized identities that seeks to maintain and enforce them.

We are left as Artemisia returns to image. “The child cried next to her. As she turned her back to avoid thinking about him, her body made a sloshing sound. Bit by bit, the mirror reflected her fractured and vaporous figure.” In many ways, we are given a parallel between gender and age relations here, as the child wails in desperation next to a woman driven powerless – both defined in their needs and desires, though fulfilled most when living for another (the mother for the son, the son for the father – the drama lying in a desire to reverse this triangle). Perhaps one can recall Fanon’s description that “the settler makes history” (Fanon, 83), the colonizer and outsider creating the narrative and identity of the mother country (or in this case, mother). (a) (b) and (c) are all displacements that contribute to the narrative of the mother as breast, as an object upon which one can act. Trauma, and traumatic displacement then, is a reduction in agency; trauma makes the subject an object by creating a present history.

A woman, standing tall in front of a mirror where a thousand eyes scream her into existence; she is to be seen, never held.

Works Cited
Barros, Pía. Artemisia, collected in Astride. Translator unknown.
Fanon, Frantz. Concerning Violence from Wretched of the Earth collected in On Violence – A
Reader. trans. Constance Farrington
LaCapra, Dominick. History in Transit collected in Theories of Memory – A Reader.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords collected in On Violence – A Reader.

This list is exciting for me – it was a new year’s resolution on my part to keep track of my book reading (partly inspired by this person), and I feel that this awareness has helped guide my literary and academic curiosities. I am, of course, disappointed that I couldn’t vault over the 100 books line I had set in my head – there’s always this year to attempt that again, though!

1) The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam

Ann Marie Fleming

2) A Contract With God, & Other Stories

Will Eisner

3) Eastern Standard Tribe

Cory Doctorow

4) Maus I & II

Art Spiegelman

5) Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!

Art Spiegelman

6) Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories

Ben Katchor

7) Bottomless Belly Button

Dash Shaw

8  The Quitter

Harvey Pekar

9) The Rabbi’s Cat

Joann Sfar

10) Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell

11) A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

David Foster Wallace

12) The Women of Tijucopapo

Marilene Felinto

13) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Ludwig Wittgenstein

14) Content – Selected Essays

Cory Doctorow

15) 1984

George Orwell

16) Pluto

Naoki Urasawa

17) Body World

Dash Shaw

18) English with an Accent: Language, Ideology & Discrimination in the US

Rosina Lippi-Green

19) Seventeen

Kenzaburo Oe

20) History of Sexuality Vol. 1

Michel Foucault

21) Invitations to Love

Laura Ahearn

22) How Nonviolence Protects the State

Peter Gelderloos

23) Women of the Fertile Crescent

Various

24) White Genesis

Ousmane Sembene

25) A Dangerous Woman: Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman

Sharon Rudahl

26) The Money Order

Ousmane Sembene

27) The Bilingual Courtroom

Susan Berk-Seligson

28) Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Azar Nafisi

29) The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain

Mazisi Kunene

30) Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

31) Shortcomings

Adrian Tomine

32) Stick Out Your Tongue

Ma Jian

33) The Tao of Pooh

Benjamin Hoff

34) People’s History of the United States

Howard Zinn

35) Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Poems and Stories

Gerald Vizenor

36) Solibo Magnificent

Patrick Chamoiseau

37) Rice

Su Tong

38) Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed

Vandana Shiva

39) Quechua Peoples Poetry

Maria & James Scully

40) Rhinoceros & Other Plays

Eugene Ionesco

41) Language Myths

Laurie Bauer & Peter Trudgill

42) Brazilian Poetry 1950-60

Emanuel Brasil & William Jay Smith

43) Dubliners

James Joyce

44) Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography

Sabrina Jones

45) Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

Daniel Clowes

46) Marvel 1602

Neil Gaiman

47) Therefore Repent!

Jim Munroe & Salgood Sam

48) French Milk

Lucy Knisley

49) The Taqwacores

Michael Muhammad Knight

50) Henry of Atlantic City

Frederick Reuss

51) Getting Off  – Pornography and The End of Masculinity

Robert Jensen

52) Public Power in the Face of Empire

Arundhati Roy

53) Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To The End of Taste

Carl Wilson

54) All My Bones Shake

Robert Jensen

55) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver

56) Summer Blonde

Adrian Tomine

57) Dictee

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

58) Epileptic

David B.

59) Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace

60) Cities and The Wealth of Nations

Jane Jacobs

61) If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

Sappho, tr. Anne Carson

62) The Descent of Alette

Alice Notley

63) Today I Wrote Nothing

Daniil Kharms, tr. Matvei Y.

64) Three Case Histories

Sigmund Freud

———————— (A quick note: the rest of this list should be interspersed into the rest of the year, it is not chronological) ———————–

65) The Wedding Dress

Fanny Howe

66) Adventures of Tintin

Hergé

67) Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism

Brian Loveman

68) The Great Perhaps

Joe Meno

69) Jamilti & Other Stories

Rutu Modan

70) Last Evenings On Earth

Robert Bolaño

71) Lost at Sea

Bryan Lee O’Malley

72) off the map

hibickina & kika

73) The Photographer

Emanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre

74) Suspended In Language

Jim Ottaviani & Leland Purvis

75) The Things They Carried

Tim O’Brien

76) Words of Farewell: Stories by Korean Women Writers

Ju-Chan & Bruce Fulton, translators

————————————–

There is an interest in institutionality (e.g. the city, the state, the property) and its dialogues/formation through social networks that Ângelo explores in The Celebration. Explored here are nations in microcosm, the nation as personal identities.

Within The Celebration, we are thrust into relationships to space and bodies rooted in centuries-old histories. This is evoked in the narrative of Andrea’s relationships and romantic longings, as momentary contact crafts permanent dynamics. “They never really ended their affair, and for years afterward she would have occasional visits from him. There were always the same old conversations, the same idle sensuality, coupled now and then with a certain nostalgia toward her body” (Ângelo, 45). We see in this relationship an example of memory and previous social identities interposed in the present, as “courtship” (Ângelo, 45) transforms, with sexual activity, permanently into an “affair” that, in doing, transforms the entire breadth of their interactions. There is no longer a period without sexual overtones in Samuel’s description of “the affair”. Anderson discusses this in the context of nation-states as “characteristic amnesias”. “After experiencing the physiological and emotional changes produced by puberty, it is impossible to ‘remember’ the consciousness of childhood” (Anderson, 249). “Occasional visits” (Ângelo, 45) produce and voice a sustained sexual tension, and we find physical manifestations of social identity w/r/t Andrea’s “certain nostalgia toward her body”. This can be considered an example of a citizen/participant internalizing discourse, social relations, and physical actions as marks upon themselves, their body. “We have then, the sovereign and his force, the social body and the administrative apparatus; mark, sign, trace; ceremony, representation, exercise… the individual subjected to immediate coercion” (Foucault, 455). Andrea’s body is no longer her own, and she, like many others, can only look upon it with nostalgia.

What also needs to be considered is the capability to reflect an internalized discourse in an externalized relationship, a transformation of physical space for social needs. Let’s transition to another moment of The Celebration – the departure of Roberto’s mother. “There’s nothing left for me in this house”, she exclaims, seeing an absence of redeeming value in the relationships and social circle of her chosen family. Rather than addressing this directly, though (e.g. ‘There’s nothing left for me with these two’) we find the mother using physical symbols – “this house” is an entire way of life, a full social identity that she seeks to reject. Just as Andrea must leave Minas Gerais in order to create new social dynamics, Roberto’s mother cannot simply reassert herself within the home to change her condition – departure, exile, is necessary. This self-exile/social rebirth, seems to be a modern permutation of homo sacer, a loss of control over one’s family dynamic that is altered through a radical shift in space.

It is within these physical/geographical manifestations of social systems that we are best able to explore the human ramifications of state-building, and so we see that “inside the boundaries of properties of the great landowners there are no political rights, because freedom of opinion is nonexistent” (Ângelo, 4). Ângelo emphasizes language of institutionalization (whether manifested in a feudalistic system or in sovereign state-building). Even as we only see regional work and workers here, “slavery was a national institution” (Fausto, 28), and we are exploring the nation in microcosm. The effect on ‘citizens’ (i.e. slaves, tenants, farmhands) is a rejection of their rights – and by extension, identity – as citizens, as Brazilians. There is a relevance given to literature here, by suggesting that discussion or “freedom of opinion” is the vital element of political rights (what this says about the status of political rights under a state of censorship is not touched on, though the background is clear – The Celebration remained unpublished for nearly a decade under Brazil’s dictatorship).

It is within rapid change and social upheaval that we find senses of Minas Gerais, of the life and body politic. Perhaps then, this is where Ângelo lays bare some of his politics: a reliance on networks of people as the creators and arbitrators of the State hints at where networks of resistance to the State must lie as well. The Celebration is an argument over the memories of Minas Gerais, and a hope for revision – the historical narratives of the city and people as both limit and potential.