I cite

Do bottled messages arrive at their destination?

After my mother died, a large, open-mouthed bottle of messages she had written came to me. It's strange because the bottle wasn't for her. It was a Christmas gift from her to my father. The bottle has a top, like an apothecary jar. Attached to the red ribbon around the top is a handmade tag, something like 'Rx for depression: take one when needed.' Inside, are tiny white scrolls, tied with green ribbons. Each little scroll has a remedy, perhaps a promise.

I haven't read the little scrolls.

But maybe that isn't true because I seem to recall unwinding one and reading my mother's handwriting. I don't know if this is a real memory or my imagination. The jar remains full of little messages that I haven't read, that in fact no one has ever read.

I know or imagine that my mother made this for my father at a difficult time in the marriage. I know or imagine that I know that she was hurt that he never read them, never used them. I think she told me this one time. The jar sat on his dresser for years, filled with the white scrolls and never ran out as the top gathered dust.

I don't know why I have the bottle now, why it came to me. And so I wonder whether to open it and read the messages.

The prospect is overwhelming, a confrontation with the intensity of my mother's love for my father, a love so unselfish as to be infinitely demanding. She often reminded us that my father was first, well, right after God. I'm not sure ranking combines well with love, but she was. I imagine that the scolls prescribe an afternoon walk or a nice dinner, prescribing what would remedy her depression, make her feel loved, rather than cheer up my father. I try not to imagine the possibility that the messages might be sexually explicit--but I don't know whether I fear the confrontation with the reality of parental sex or the possibility of my mother's naivete. She was a staunch, even a professional, Southern Baptist.

If I read the notes, am I violating, intruding into, their relationship? Am I impinging on my father's privacy (he has since remarried)? Or am I somehow taking his place, acting in his stead, taking upon myself an encounter that he avoided or refused? 

The bottle is somewhere in my attic. That doesn't seem to be the messages' proper point of arrival. But where or what is that point? I would hate them to end up in a dump. Or is it possible that their destiny was always not to be read, that my mother wrote them hoping for something she knew would never come?

outside

A voice as something more

While I was in Belgium last week, I went to an exhibit at the Strombeek gallery in Brussels that highlighted work by Johan Grimonprez (director of Double Take). One of the pieces was a sound piece, an interview with Karen Black. One doesn't listen to the interview with headphones but in a small, round room with a platform in the middle. The room is dimly lit, with a paraphrase of a line from the interview (about Alfred Hitchcock not having a belly button) written in white on one of the dark blue walls. One can sit or lie down on the platform--I bet 4-5 people could lie on it without crowding each other. Most of the interview involves Karen Black's recollecting working with Hitchcock on Family Plot.

The piece feels intimate, maybe too intimate (I wonder if it feels the same to people who have never seen Karen Black). It feels more intimate than it would if one were reading it or even than it would if one saw the interview on television. The dark space, the enveloping sound, the vulnerability of lying down in a public space all amplify the intimacy, the intrusion. One gets absorbed in or enveloped by her voice, caught up in it, at risk of giving over to it. Her voice feels more intimate than it would if one were listening to it with headphones or earbuds or on a laptop in an office--with all those versions of personal media we are less exposed in our hearing, less vulnerable to others' seeing us and maybe hearing us hearing (hearing us hearing could be linked to a version of a primal scene or to hearing ourselves being heard).

She does impressions--of Hitchcock, of different accents. These seem risky, outrageous--why is she performing so much, why is she so over the top--but even quick attempts to dismiss them--well, she is an actress, after all--can't bracket the excess and intensity of her enveloping voice.

It's her voice, in all those impression; her voice, pretending to be Hitchcock.

And how is it, then, that with vocal doubles we experience two people but one voice? The pleasure is the imitation, the impersonation, the slight exaggeration and bringing to our attention the eccentricity or uniqueness of what now echoes as an original. But the uniqueness only resounds as 're', as a repetition, as the approach to the original that isn't. With the vocal double, we hear the one who is speaking and know that it is him, but we also hear another--only rarely do we mistake one for the other, we know the difference (and that knowledge is a component of the very possibility of impersonation, of a vocal double--we could compare the vocal double, then, with the voice-over or the voice of an animated character). 

I don't like hearing my voice. I don't listen to interviews or podcasts that I've done. I loathe listening to answering machines or voice mail when I have to hear my voice (although I should confess that this sometimes reverses itself as I listen over and over again to my greeting, somewhat repulsed, but still unable to stop listening and re-recording, perhaps in an attempt to eliminate the excessive part, the part that I can't quite control--and, no, it's not just the southern accent, although it could be related to the oddness I hear in the attempts to displace it).

Even doubled or impersonated, the voice is Real. Even recorded voices, taped voices, are Real--we can tell the difference. On the phone, we can hear if something is wrong--sometimes it's easier to hear that something is wrong than to see it--appearances can be deceiving. I don't like talking on the phone very much, either, wary of the exposure that is more intense than a face to face encounter, likely because face to face we see the reactions of the other.

Surrounded by music and noise, do we lose voice(s)? Or are we protecting ourselves from their intensity? Are we, vulnerable bare lives, barely subjects, whatever beings, at the mercy of the imaginary and the Real and denuded of Symbolic protections, do we need the noise to avoid the voice (and might schizoanalysis fail insofar as it risks trivializing the intrusion of voices without bodies)? And how has contemporary pseudo-politics worked to block from us the radicality of the Real voice, inducing us to refer to any misrepresentation or exclusion as a loss of voice or a denial of voice when really adding to the cacophony is the surest way for the voice not to be heard?

The voice is singular.

Can there be a Real voice of the people?

Request for a favor

Can someone who know how to use Photoshop or similar software make an image for me?

I need an image of a smoking gun behind the red circle with the diagonal bar across it, the kind that signals that something is forbidden. 

I would think that for someone with skills this is fairly easy to make. For someone like me, with minimal skills, it's difficult and a pain.

Much appreciated.

Left Behind

I'm in Belgium at the Ghent Film Festival. The last week or so has been a whirl (during which I lost my glasses, which meant I gave my talk wearing sunglasses--I need the bifocals to read the text--but the lights were so bright that it actually was pretty good to be wearing sunglasses, except that it risked making me look pretentious or like a Bono-wannabee, but then explaining this may have seemed even odder) and I'll likely blog more about all the goings on later. What's struck me, though, for reasons or causes or effects I can't quite fathom, is the phrase left behind.

That I even started thinking about it was the result of a mishearing. I thought someone said that I seemed quite concerned about leaving people behind--I had been wondering if someone who had been with us had been asked whether he wanted to go with us to a particular hotel for a drink. What he actually said was that I seemed very enthusiastic about seeing the hotel (The Metropole in Brussels). But I had started thinking of myself--very quickly, in a matter of seconds--as someone worried about leaving people behind.

This summer, I was hurt and angered by people in my family leaving me, that is, the car I was driving and all of us in my car, behind as they sped ahead and we couldn't see or catch up with them. The event gets more complicated in the ways that families tend to inflict on each other.

Last summer, my kids, my father, and I were hiking in the mountains of New Mexico. It began to hail. The kids started running down the mountain. My father, carrying a heavy pack, became slower and slower. I was in the middle. Soon, no one was in sight. I headed after my kids, calling for them, trying to get them to slow down. I yelled back for my dad, who didn't answer. So I trudged back up the increasingly slippery trail, worried that he was hurt and worried that the kids would speed up again. I shouted for him. He didn't answer. After ten minutes or so, maybe less, I could see him and he could see me. Still he wouldn't answer. Even as he approached me, he wouldn't answer. The sole had come off his hiking boot so he was having a difficult time walking; he doesn't walk well or quickly under normal conditions. I went back off toward the kids, trying to keep everyone together. At one point, my dad fell and had a difficult time getting up because of the mud, the incline, and the heavy pack.

Left Behind is also a series of Christian novels (as well as graphic novels and a film) based on the end times. Sometimes when I was a kid and I couldn't find anyone I would wonder whether the Rapture had occuured and I had been Left Behind. Sometimes I feel guilty about traveling a lot and leaving those I love behind. But feeling left behind feels worse than that, like a special kind of damnation, or being denied, abandoned.

Is leaving objects behind--I think of this as shedding--a way of damning the poor things?

Drift away

Slowly, over time, I've found myself blogging less. Part of this is because of other work--finishing a big project, travel, a new term. But this isn't the only explanation. In the past, I've blogged when busiest, most extended. It could be symptomatic of a larger shift, the critical energies and debates part of what I thought of as my bloggy neighborhood have changed, moved to other topics, other places, generally dissipated and reconstituted. It could also be a matter of changes in the technologies and interfaces, not just moving to Facebook and Twitter but changes others have made to their layout as well as my alienation from Typepad. Typepad has enacted a total remake of its entire interface (it's now a lot like blogger). I hate it.

But there is something else. I think it's my greater pessimism or maybe even hopelessness. Differently put, it's pessimism and despair as customary, as daily habit, as the overall mode of life rather than as a reaction to events. I've always written posts that have been pretty pessimistic about political change. Yet the very act of writing, of documenting the torture, the move to fascism, the declines in symbolic efficiency, the venality of finance capital, gestures toward the possibility of something else. It's as if one says something, writes something, because the addition of voice and view could make a difference, could add to flow in one direction and resistance in another. So even when one writes that it doesn't make a difference, the very act of writing or speaking suggests otherwise; there is a difference between enuciating and the enunciated content.

I've written here before about whether or not the world has already ended and we are just caught in the wake and disintegration of its memory. Seeing previews for so many of the horror films about to be released, as well as the harsh ugliness of District 9 and Zombieland, not to mention the upcoming The Road and 2012, it seems as if the culture itself is now realizing the end, the end not just in itself but for itself. It's like our whole world looks like Southland Tales, like we've become a kind of screen of violence and filth.

The awfulness of the summer, with the ludicrous town halls and open displays of brown shirted thuggery, as well as the mindfuck of the birthers and anything that erupts out of Sarah Palin's and Glenn Beck's gaping maws, reached a new level with the total contempt for the President, Congress, and political process demonstrated by House Republicans this last week. It all gives me the same feeling as the poor professor debased in a crowing bird costume at the end of the Marlene Dietrich film, The Blue Angel. The overall feeling of decay, decadence, collapse is overwhelming.

The Republicans create the people who elect them: people who have no faith in government (and the Republicans always prove that they can screw up more than anyone can expects--we all learned this with Katrina), people who are suspicious, people who think that the government will lie to them (George W. Bush proved the truth of this one), people who think the government protects the rich (top one percent has had a great ride over the last decade while everyone else is at a 20 year low). The Democrats don't even try--they just look to the next 2 years, try to compromise, and fail to realize that 25-29 percent of the people will oppose them no matter what; these are the folks who kept confidence in Bush, the Republican base. The Democrats should ignore them completely, rather than enabling the Republicans to let their appeals to these people determine the debate. Rather than communists or socialist--like their opponents allege--the Democrats are not ideological enough. They have no principles at all--just short term tactics, like they were run by second tier network programming executives or marketing folks laid off from the Gap. 

Death panels are a symptom--a symptom of our denial of the fundamental inequalities structuring our society and our projection of this inequality onto the old who we are suspect are taking more than their share, whose need and dependency now feels like a kind of parascite that sucks up our energy and resources as it kicks back and enjoys golf and a Viagara powered sex life most of us only dream of. We resent having to support these white haired golfers and so work to suppress our fantasy of just putting them down, of being freed from their old, wrinkled faces and our own miserable future (imagine Synedoche, New York, a shockingly depressing film). Death panels express a kind of wish fulfillment. More than just the displacement of the truth of private insurance onto the government, they are ways that some of us transfer and deal with fear and anger. No wonder the old people don't want any change--they can feel the underlying fear, now the fodder for so many zombie films and references. Zombies are the new aliens.

So popular culture hasn't even been able to cover it all up or deflect us from encountering the overall horror. It's exacerbating it rather than providing some kind of compensatory enjoyment. We saw "The Soloist"--not great, but interesting insofar as rather than the complete cliche of the triumph of the human spirit, the message was more generally one of accepting limitations and coming to grips with one's inability to change the world, that and images and statistics reminding us that there are 90,000 homeless people in LA.  That's more than four times the size of the town I live in. At any rate, pop culture's failure to divert us from or compensate us for the overall decline is likely because of the catch 22 of the economy--it's hard to kid ourselves or placate our anxiety with shopping as therapy. Now with the swine flu, back to school and fall football are also fraught with fear and anxiety. A student died at Cornell a day or two ago. 

More of my friends, from different countries and not all academics, talk about a new test: are we alcoholics yet and how do we know? Some are cutting the problem off at the pass, looking to yoga and meditation. Others say that if you worry about it that's the sign that you are fine; the real problem is when you don't care anymore. Is this middle age, the stage of life where we realize that it's half over, and that's if we're lucky--most don't make it to 94. Or is it something more? 

The thing is, even if it's something more, we won't even know.

Idiot alert

The idiot is me (the grammatical error registers the idiocy at another level).

Preface: I've been feeling the urge to confess. The following wasn't what incited the urge, or the error to be confessed, but it's pressing, nonetheless.

Confession: I am shockingly ill-informed about basic aspects of political science. Like, it's really hard for me to grasp that anyone would think or have thought in terms of Westphalian sovereignty. It makes absolutely no sense. That is, it doesn't account for power in the world. Nor does it even account for power in the world in which was ostensibly dominant--the Cold War. I just can't even fathom that this has been the dominant way of thinking in international relations. Paul has been convincing me that it has been (to save me from publishing something inane). But I just don't get it at all--there can't have been a Cold War (division of spheres, MAD, Iron curtain) and a supposition of Westphalian sovereignty. But, apparently the rest of the discipline has long thought otherwise.

Maybe this is the result of a background in Marxism--class struggle, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, workers of the world, and all that. Or maybe it's just plain idiocy.

Probably the latter.

Izvestia (1984)

Lessons in racism: fishing

The annual lake trout fishing derby is going on in Geneva today. Paul and I jogged by there and I noticed that prizes were awarded by both fisher (age of person fishing) and fish (weight of fish). Different kinds of fish were eligible--lake trout, rainbow trout, brown trout, and land-locked salmon. This reminded me of being taken fishing in the bayous near Pascagoula, MS when I was a kid in the sixties. And it reminded me of lessons in racism.

My grandparents distinguished between fish that were for white people and fish that were for black people (not their term). More accurately, the difference was between fish that everyone ate and fish that only black people ate. If we caught these fish, we either threw back or brought them to Margaret and Sam, the old couple who worked for my grandparents. Black people ate sheepheads and croakers. White people didn't. Sheepheads were apparently too boney for white people. And white people 'just didn't like' croakers. No real reason--but that's how racism works, the difference that makes the difference, that is in something more than itself.

I recall the term 'croaker sack' as racially loaded, but I don't recall how. It suggests to me now a link to the racist unconscious in that even if it only referred to a bag of fish it turned this bag of fish into something vaguely obscene. Differently put, even if 'the facts' of everyday life on the Gulf Coast in the sixties are that there is nothing racist about 'croaker sack' it marks for me the unconscious of the Other: what were my grandparents really saying?

Not all foods, or practices of turning stuff in the world into food, are racializing. And I wonder if my grandparents or my childhood self absorbing their language thought that the racial dimension of food was fixed (the unspoken truth underlying and supporting Jim Crow) or whether if they thought that they as white people had some say, some role, in determining how food raced. For example, I recall that my grandparents ate squirrel, but rarely, maybe just once or twice and this not after the mid sixties. I recall discomfort--my grandmother's?--when the squirrel stew was prepared and served; my sense was that there was something dirty, unmentionable, about it, that it had something to do with a past that was better left forgotten. Was that because they by that point had moved on from their share-cropping poor white past to become comfortably middle class? Or was it because the civil rights movement was challenging their position and identity as white such that they needed greater distance from lesser foods? (These choices are not either/or).

I have no idea whether black people in and around Pascagoula (and Moss Point and Gautier) ate squirrels. That's also an aspect of racism, both that I don't know (a result of segregation) and that I suspect that there might something to know, some kind of indication of a racial difference that cuts through commonalities in food arising from climate and location (what grows, the fishing season) and that persists underneath centuries of slavery, exclusion, and oppression. This second aspect points again to objet a in the racist unconscious.

On the one hand, everyone (seen from the perspective of a small child) was all together, the same, all fishing in the bayous and sweating in the heat, all eating cobbler and grits and peas and greens and crab and okra and tomatoes. As a very young white child, I was around black people more than I would be after I started school; black women cared for the white babies in the nursery of First Baptist Church (the reality of the segregated churches thus didn't appear to a young child who spent all of Sunday in their care; that would come later, in Sunday school and the worship services). Black women also worked in the kitchens of the nursing home my grandfathered owned and the Blue Willow Cafe run by a friend of my mother's in Charleston. Food and care, then, weren't raced so much as they were sexed. 

On the other hand, there were total racial differences. Growing up in racism meant not only that one didn't know what the differences were (and so fantasized about them) but also that one didn't know that some of these differences were Real, that is, minimal differences, the indiscernible objet a that turned nothing into something. For example, I never remember my grandmother serving or eating or having cheese, but this doesn't seem a marker of anything.So I've always thought that southerners just don't cook much with cheese, except maybe velveeta or pimento cheese. No minimal difference here. Rather, the raced difference would be in the supposition that there is something else in the set of foods southerners eat that is different for black and white and that this something matters, that is, it attests to the jouissance that separates us from the them.

The jouissance of the croaker sack.

Ninety minutes.

Ninety minutes. Ninety minutes.

I was on the phone with att for ninety minutes.

5 different people. I spoke to five different people. Well, I spoke to 2 people and screamed at 3 people.

45 minutes, approximately, were spent on hold. This means they were spent hearing att ads.

What could I have done with ninety minutes?
Gone to the gym.
Replaced some lightbulbs.
Gone to the grocery store.
Reviewed an academic article.
Prepared for class.
Talked to my children about their hopes and dreams.
Do some reading for something I'm supposed to write.

And now, what am I doing? Obsessing about the stolen 90 minutes. Sacrificing more time and feeling on the stolen minutes. Almost as if I enjoy it.

Weirdly, I feel almost guilty about writing about it. As if they will know. As if somehow in continuing to complain I have violated the 'compromise' we reached. As if I had been compensated for the time or had freely chosen to donate the time and so, really, I have no right to complain, my continued fury isn't justified, not after the deal.

The facts of the case: my daughter dropped her phone in the toilet. It worked for a day, but the screen was freaky. Then it wouldn't recharge. I don't have the special cell-phone insurance, which is like a fee plus then a fifty dollar charge for the new phone, which is just any old phone (not a cool mp3 playing slider--in pink). My goal: get a replacement phone even though I didn't have a warranty/insurance. My argument: in this economy the company needs to demonstrate that it values its customers. I have two incoming teens and so we are talking a growth market, more texting, more features, new models over the next decade or so. And, the thing is, all the company people agreed with me. They told me over and over again how much they value their customers. Then they would look at their available resources while I was on hold. One person mumbled so horribly I had a screaming melt down--and it was clear her native language was "english." So, there was nitpicking (I mistyped nitpacking which is actually a better term) about whether I should talk with customer service, the warranty department, or customer relations. One person said she could get me a comparable phone for 50 dollars (this was after 30 minutes of talking). Then, she put me on hold, spoke to her supervisor, and said that of course this would require me to sign another 2 year contract. Then I threw my cell phone through my front window, shattering the glass and letting in the horribly cold 29 degree April wind that passes for spring in this god-forsaken hell hole of the rust belt. Actually, that's not true. It is 29 degrees, but I didn't break the window. So, she gave me to the mumbler. Oh. My. God. Then I started searching for guns online. Then I went to another person who didn't want to be bothered with my screaming fit. Then I got a super nice manager. He said he would send me a replacement phone for free. It's not as fashionable as my daughter's glam pink slider. But he's express mailing it for no charge. And giving us 1000 roll over minutes.

Was it worth it? And is my preoccupation with the horrible intensity of the entire encounter an indication that it was or wasn't? That I sold my soul, my time, for a free phone? That they really purchased from me a sense of obligation, a kind of fealty such that when our contract is up in 18 months I really will stick with them and not switch to Verizon, just as I said? I told them, show us you want us, that we are worth it, if you don't in 18 months we're switching. And so is that what actually happened? And now I'm locked in for longer than I would have been had I just purchased another phone and plan.

Don't get me started about my lost black snap front cardigan that I can't afford to replace (but am tempted to, nonetheless, just to get rid of the obsession with its missing).