Last night, well after dinner, the saddest thought hit me: no matter how much we work to preserve Michael Brown’s memory, no matter how much we’ll use his memory to spur positive social change, he’ll eventually be erased from our memory.  Or, if not erased, replaced by the names of other unarmed African-American boys who will fall victim to over-reactive law enforcement officials and open carry white citizenry who see “demons” rather than the innocent boys they are.  Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice.  The list goes on. 

~~~

My mother’s been staying with us for a few days.  We were talking about how different my children’s K-12 school curriculum is from our own.  My mother was educated in Buffalo’s parochial schools in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and though she got good grades, I gathered she had no particular fondness for the nuns who taught her.  Last night, she mentioned that in her senior year of high school, one of them took her aside and chided her out for not making more of her intelligence.  Her classmates had just taken IQ tests and she scored highest among all the young men and women of her graduating class.  Until that moment, she never had an inkling she was so gifted.  Not a single one of her teachers had ever provided her particular encouragement.  Given the mindset of the times, they saw her as just another working class girl rather than a bright mind worthy of encouragement.  Though my mother eventually became very active in her local union, she never pursued a college education.  She doesn’t have regrets about this, but hearing about her IQ tests made me angry at her old school teachers.  Had someone early on in her schooling really tried to impress upon her how much potential she had, she might have—who knows—gone on to cure a disease or helped eradicate poverty.  She might have done any of the things that, as a parent of young children myself, I hope my own children might do.

                                                               ~~~

This thought’s a bit iffier.  Through a link in a friend’s blog, I came across this short article about “gaslighting.”  Briefly speaking, “gaslighting” is the practice an emotionally abusive partner employs to erode someone’s confidence in their own perceptions, feelings, and sanity.  The term stems from a 1938 stage play during which a husband gradually lowers the lights in a room while denying to his wife that the room is getting dimmer.  Over time, after being told she’s crazy for thinking the room’s not as well-lit as it once was, the wife begins to think her husband must be right.  Over time, the wife loses faith in her version of reality and accepts his judgments and opinions.

Quoting from the article, gaslighting techniques include,

Countering: the abusive partner questions the victim’s memory of events, even when the victim remembers them accurately. Ex. “You’re wrong, you never remember things correctly.”

Blocking/Diverting: the abusive partner changes the subject and/or questions the victim’s thoughts. Ex. “Is that another crazy idea you got from [friend/family member]?” or “You’re imagining things.”

Trivializing: the abusive partner makes the victim’s needs or feelings seem unimportant. Ex. “You’re going to get angry over a little thing like that?” or “You’re too sensitive.”

Forgetting/Denial: the abusive partner pretends to have forgotten what actually occurred or denies things like promises made to the victim. Ex. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” or “You’re just making stuff up.”

Reading the article,  I kept thinking, wow, this sounds so familiar.  The reason?  These are exactly the techniques perpetrated by Right Wing media commentators to belittle or dismiss the concerns of those of us who do not belong in the 1%.  We’re too sensitive.  We’re wrong on any number of things.  We just don’t understand. 

Earlier this month, 1,001 Americans were asked to name the current unemployment rate.  At the time, the unemployment rate was 6.1%, yet the average response was a whopping 32%.  Somehow, people believed the state of the economy was much worse than it is.  Only an America that has substantially lost faith in its ability to judge the reality around itself could make such an outrageous assessment. 

So the question is, has the right wing succeeded in gaslighting America? 

Ellie, my nine-year-old daughter, chose to wear her Martin Luther King tee shirt to school today.  We bought it a couple of years ago while visiting the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta a couple of years ago, a trip I heartily recommend for any family with young children.  We haven’t talked about the Ferguson case much in our household, and last night we didn’t watch the news coverage of the announcement that police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted for the murder of an unarmed African American teenager, but this morning she must have glanced at the newspaper, for she intuited that the MLK tee shirt was the appropriate thing to wear today.

The hardest thing teach to a child is that nastiness exists in this world.  Fairy tales expose them to witches and monsters, and kids’ movies expose them to the grotesquely greedy captains of industry who willfully pollute the planet or threaten to tear down a Muppet theater for personal gain, but, generally, those villains are so far removed from the people they’d encounter in real life, or are so comically warped that, even in a nine-year-old’s imagination, they’re hardly believable.  So it’s hard for them to gather why nastiness truly exists.

Earlier today, on Facebook, I posted a note about how proud I was of Ellie for wearing her Martin Luther King, Jr. tee shirt today.  Predictably, a number of friends “liked” this status.  Which was nice.  But then a friend I’ve known for most of my adult life wrote something to the effect that it would be nice if the Ferguson protesters were as peaceful as MLK.  To which I responded,

“And she’s a lot more peaceful than Darren Wilson.”

Yeah, I admit it: I had momentarily confused my daughter for Martin Luther King Jr.  Hence, the “she” instead of “he.”

When the discrepancy between reality and the grand jury findings is so vast, it’s hard not to believe the social compact has been torn asunder.  Even a child can pick up on that.  So how does one go about explaining such an egregious error?  Such a brutal murder? 

Errata #1: Last weekend, I came across this fantastic essay by Melissa Febos on the public reception of her 2010 memoir, Whip Smart, and about the need for generosity among writers.  It’s an essay everyone should read.  A few choice nuggets:

“Writing is an insecure profession, affected by factors beyond talent and intention and hard work, factors over which we are powerless.”

“It is hard to give when you don’t feel you have enough. The beauty and miracle of being human is that we can be afraid, and not act out of fear. I promise you, generosity costs nothing. It is an investment in your own security. It is how we build the world we want to live in.

Don’t stand in the back of the reading and talk shit. Don’t hoard contacts or job leads. Don’t hesitate to share all of your information, all of your opportunities. Announce your awards, and those of other writers. Nominate them. The solution to scarcity is more, not less.”

Errata #2: Here’s a neat Leslie Pietrzyk story, “What I Could Buy,” just published today at Hobart.

Errata #3:  My mother arrived in town last night to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with us, which is great.  Because she lives in Arkansas, we don’t get the chance to see her as often as we like.  Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday.  Here’s a Thanksgiving piece I wrote a few years ago.  I hope your holiday is filled with peace, kindness, and charity. 

Late Errata:  On Wednesday (11/26/14), Entropy Magazine published a personal essay, "My Salami Heart: Reflections on the Convergence of Art, Generosity, Success, Sex, and Law."  It's about my attempts to make a go of it as a fiction writer, and my quest to reconcile all those loaded terms in the subtitle.  Because it touches on a couple of hot-button issues in the alt-lit community, the editors asked that I put together an addendum of sorts touching on censorship and victim shaming.  The Addendum is included at the end of my essay.  

Pictured here are a few things I’m working on now.  It’s been an eventful week for me, with a few different things of mine now online:

1)      My review of Lance Olsen’s THEORIES OF FORGETTING is now up at The Collagist.  I loved Olsen’s “destructuralized” novel, which reflects so heavily the theories and work of earthworks artist Robert Smithson (especially his Spiral Jetty).

2)      An interview I conducted with Julie Lawson Timmer is now up at The Rumpus.  Timmer’s debut novel, FIVE DAYS LEFT, deals, in part, with a woman suffering from Huntington’s Disease.  My interview focuses heavily on Timmer’s research techniques, but should also be interesting to those writing about characters in states of suffering.

3)      My flash of satire, “[Title Withheld Pending Naming Rights Negotiations],” is now up at one of Entropy magazine, one of my favorite websites that have sprouted up in the last year or so. 

Anyways, do take care

A woman I know is shamelessly pursuing John Cusack, the actor, from afar.  Cusack, now 48, starred in the film comedies that she loved in the late 1980s and early 1990s, back in the days when she was an aspiring singer/actress.  Now she is the mother of teenage daughters, and though I don’t know the particulars, I sense that in some vital way, her marriage is no longer in a healthy state. 

The Cusack thing arose when she posted a comment online about one of his films.  From what I gather, he was not particularly pleased with the comment that somehow came to his attention.  He tracked her down through social media outlets and private-messaged her with none-too-flattering accusations of being a troll.  It was the type of message that most people would shudder at receiving.  But my friend, she is clever.  Wickedly smart, and wickedly funny, she drew him out into a conversation that—who knows?—may lead to somewhere.

In truth, seeing this play out makes me slightly jealous.  Not that I have designs on John Cusack—or anyone else for that matter—but it’s the excitement, the intrigue that makes me jealous.  If life was a Hollywood picture, one can see her Cusack thing developing into a screwball comedy, my friend taking the place of Claudette Colbert or Carole Lombard, and Cusack’s role being filled by, well, John Cusack. 

But this post isn’t about John Cusack.

Lately, someone has mistakenly been sending text messages to me.  They’re coming from an area code in the Midwest, several states away, and are obviously intended for someone else’s attention.  They ask if I want to meet for lunch, or thank me for a chocolate pie, leaving it to me to invent the contexts behind these messages.  I’ve been tempted to phone or text the sender that they’re sending the texts to the wrong number, but such is the dearth of excitement in my life that I don’t want to surrender the fascination they offer.

Sometimes, I can’t help but read assignations into the messages.  Yesterday, for instance, I was asked,

Is anyone in the office with you right now?

leading me to wonder what the texter had in mind if I was, indeed, free at that very moment.

At other times, the message is simpler.  Thank you can mean so many things, but it is sent so often as to be slightly scary.  Why is the texter so thankful all the time?

Earlier today came this message:

Hey.  What was the name of the place where you said to get the keys for gas lights?

The gaslight keys.  It sounds so quaint, like something you’d need to enter into one of those treacly Thomas Kinkade paintings that some people find so comforting.  And yet, gaslight flames being so anachronistic and mysterious to our 21st century way of life, it makes me wonder if something more is going on.  Have I inadvertently been invited into a Dashiell Hammet mystery?  Was the previous key stolen to cover-up a murder, a theft, the disappearance of a cache of exotic amulets?  Does Peter Lorre lurk in the background?  Is the gaslight key needed to unlock a steamer trunk recently offloaded from a ship en route to Shanghai?  Film noir is on my mind—some darkly-lit B-movie in which dapper perps and whiskey-wise detectives race and outwit each other in pursuit of the vital piece of evidence.  It makes me want to dig through the closet for my old trench coat, cast aside all present-day concerns and troll for a locksmith who can provide, for a steep price, that mysterious gaslight key.  

A friend emailed me about my blog post of the other day.  The gist was that we shouldn’t censor artists on the basis of their personal failings.  He went on to say that the world would be much impoverished if previous generations suppressed Pablo Picasso’s work out of some PC concern that he didn’t treat all women with proper respect.

Because I am sensitive to censorship issues, I seriously thought about deleting that blog post.

The person who sent the email is a longtime friend, someone I respect.  In the past, he’s given sound advice on a myriad of concerns.  As far as I know, he’s never met any of the people mentioned in that blog post.  He doesn’t have a particular axe to grind, and yet he was disappointed in my conduct.

Admittedly, I’m not terribly familiar with the particulars of Picasso’s life.  I’ve been blown away by Picasso exhibits (most notably, Picasso: The Early Years 1882-1906, which I viewed on multiple occasions at The National Gallery of Art in 1997), and have seen hundreds of his paintings. I know he was a philanderer.  I know he’s not exactly a feminist icon.  But was he ever accused of physical, sexual, and/or psychological abuse?  That, I do not know.

But let’s just accept, for argument’s sake, that Picasso was guilty of the worst one could suspect against him.  While those crimes may have been tolerated a century ago, must we tolerate them today? 

What if, in 1900, gallerists told the 19-year-old Picasso that his work could not be exhibited unless he purged himself of abusive behavior?  Knowing Picasso’s ambition and hunger, would he have allowed decency to be imposed on him for the sake of furthering his art? 

Would he still have carried on many affairs with consenting partners?  Probably.  Would he have been abusive towards the women in his life if he knew it carried career implications?  Probably not. 

People are adaptive.  If financial and artistic ambitions are jeopardized by abhorrent behavior, most would ditch that aspect of their lives PDQ.  Or, to put it another way, a genius like Picasso would be smart enough to tone down his behavior. 

There’s nothing essential to Picasso’s art that obligated him towards abuse.  What’s scary is that we’ve allowed his example to absolve others’ sins. 

Where has this gotten us?

Just as Picasso’s example hovers over us, the lives of today’s artists will be used to rationalize artists’ behavior in the next century.

I agree with my friend: artists should never be censored.  If those who get their ya-yas out by abusing sexual partners want to write a novel, so be it.  If commercial publishers choose to bring that novel out into the world, so be it.  But a conscientious audience should not be obligated to embrace that novel. 

What makes the Oprah decision so galling is that, unless I’ve horribly misread her brand for all these years, I thought she represented an idealized conscientious and socially progressive audience.  There’s nothing empowering about sexual abuse.  I can’t understand why she and her people are not more sensitive about the many allegations that swirl around an author she’s chosen to promote. 

Simple as that.

Thank you for reading this far into my mini-diatribe.  I appreciate your consideration.  I’d also appreciate it if you’d read a bit further and perhaps consent to signing this online petition.  It may not make for a better world today, but it could improve the world for our children.  Thank you.

Years ago, clicking through the remote in the wee hours, I stumbled upon cable rebroadcast of a 1950s-era sitcom.  Starved for vapidity, I settled my butt on the couch and watched.  The show wasn’t Leave It To Beaver but, depicting the lighthearted adventures of a middle-class family, its dynamics were similar.  In this particular episode, the family’s precocious son mistakenly believes a neighbor lost his job.  When the neighbor sends the family television set out for repairs, the boy thinks it has been repossessed.  The boy tells his family, tells other neighbors.  At first, people want to help the neighbor, provide him job leads, and maybe bake a casserole so his family can enjoy a hot meal despite their diminished circumstances, but when they track him down on a Saturday morning, they become incensed: the deadbeat ne’er-do-well is golfing! 

Why isn’t he out pounding the pavement looking for work?  Why is he squandering his remaining cash on greens fees?

Of course, the ha-ha moment comes when it’s revealed that reports of the neighbor’s pink slip are greatly exaggerated.  He remains gainfully employed!  In fact, he’s thriving!  And that precocious boy?  He’s just so damn cute and lovable that everyone laughs off his ugly allegations of impeding penury doom and embraces him in one big warm fuzzy.

But me?  I shuddered.  One needn’t be cynical to imagine the confrontation had that man really lost his job.  The worst aspects of Eisenhower-era conformity would be imposed on him.  Harangued and shamed, he’d be made to feel like a reprobate.  Should he remain jobless, he would be shunned, for ostracism was the exclusionary tool of choice that kept WASP-ish communities lilywhite, god-fearing, respectfully Republican, and free of the destabilizing threat of radical Otherness. 

Increasingly, a New Ostracism is emerging that uses “virtual” medias to bring social shame and exclusion on individuals in the larger “real” world. 

Un scandale recently hit the alt-lit writing community when a popular poet was accused of being a serial abuser of women.  A spontaneous online campaign against the poet, aimed at disrupting his professional standing, brought success: publishers pulled his titles from their catalogs.  Last month, allegations against others in the alt-lit community were made.  An editor and a fairly well-known indie novelist were outed as also being serial abusers of women.  The outrage seems to be taking a similar path.

 

Other examples of “The New Ostracism” abound.  Community activists use sex offender registries to hound down and harass neighborhood offenders in hopes of driving them away.  “Bad boyfriend” sites invite women to write-up abusive or cheating boyfriends so other women might be spared the agony of a relationship with them. 

Whereas old-school ostracism sought to ignore or exclude their targets (as William James aptly described the phenomena, victims are made to feel as if they’ve been “cut dead”), the precipitating online acts against New Ostracism victims do the opposite: publishing addresses of sex offenders and blogs about how that person physically abuses lovers are acts of recognition.  Yet the intent behind these very public acts is to deprive victims of the dignity that comes from having a sense of communal belonging and social companionship.

When the target is a poet whose social and professional circles, presumably, are filled with people who like to believe they have a social conscience, New Ostracism can be very successful.

But how about other circumstances?

Consider the case of Ray Rice.  Earlier this year, a video of the All-Pro running back punching out his then-fiancée surfaced on TMZ.  Football fans may not be particularly PC, yet the reaction was swift: Rice was released by the Baltimore Ravens, his club, and indefinitely suspended by the NFL.  So embarrassed were the Ravens by their association with the player that they took the near-unprecedented step of offering to exchange whatever Ray Rice jerseys fans purchased for jerseys of other Ravens players; so embarrassed were Rice’s former fans by his actions that almost 8,000 took the team up on this offer.

Can ostracism, which traditionally has been employed to preserve status quo hegemonies, be used to help enforce positive social change?  The answer is messy.  Attempts to curb domestic violence are noble, but on the internet, a medium where hoaxes and scams are not unknown, undocumented allegations bandied by specious and/or anonymous parties quickly take on the vigilante appearance of a witch hunt.  Stoking outrage and courting invective, New Ostracism rides a wild unpredictable path. The campaign against the poet?  Before it snowballed into a putsch to derail his career, it began as a plea not to support a crowdfunding campaign to pay for his OCD therapy.

And yet, sometimes witch hunts lead to actual witches.  Jian Ghomeshi, the wildly popular CBC talk show host was  recently let go by that network following a wave of sexual assault allegations.  If the allegations are true, the man is a beast whom we should all choose not to associate with. 

Through New Ostracism incidents like this, society is hopefully, if gradually, being transformed.  After the Ray Rice scandal broke, the former General Manager of another NFL franchise said that the league had systematically hushed “hundreds and hundreds” of domestic abuse allegations during his 30 year career.  Given the Ray Rice backlash, one suspects the NFL will not be so quick to cover-up domestic violence allegations in the future.

 

Which brings me back to the poet.  His name is Gregory Sherl.  Although small independent poetry presses have largely washed their hands of him, his debut novel was published earlier this year by a larger commercial press.  This month, Oprah.com features it as one of their “recommended” reads.

Oprah?  Giving support to an alleged creep?  It makes no sense, does it?

It’s incredibly easy to write articles bemoaning the bad behavior of others when that bad behavior has no direct connection to your life.  Outrage is easy when you don’t risk anything by expressing it.  This past week, we’ve all read reports about the woman who was catcalled a gazillion times while strolling through Manhattan.  A story like that gets a lot of buzz because a) it’s so shocking, and, b) catcalling is indefensible.  No one risks being made to feel out-of-touch if they write about what a horrible injustice that woman has been made to feel.

But to out a fellow writer?

Because the alt-lit and MFA worlds are relatively small, and because I suspect most people who frequent my blog are part of the alt-lit and MFA communities, I suspect a lot of people reading this will be at least somewhat familiar with Gregory Sherl. 

 

As you probably guessed from the title of this blog post, people are petitioning Oprah to drop the book from her lists. 

I admit it: when I first saw the petition, I was conflicted.  As a would-be novelist myself who would love to be published by a larger commercial press (and would be overjoyed if Oprah fell in love with that novel), my first thought is that I should stay clear of this petition, that I shouldn’t rock the boat.  Why would I, a would-be novelist, want to do anything to put me at risk of being labeled as a trouble-maker within publishing circles?

Because I have children.

I’ve done some digging.  As near as I can tell, at least 5 women have come out with very troubling and very similar stories of abuse.  Here are a couple of them:  one and two.  Please be advised that these are not for the faint of heart.  


As essayist and novelist Roxane Gay (BAD FEMINIST, AN UNNAMED STATE) commented on the HTLM GIANT blog piece that first raised allegations against Sherl,

“I was taken aback by the original post, because I've known Greg Sherl for years and in fact, blurbed his novel last week, which feels quite uncomfortable now. Witch hunts serve no one's best interests but this doesn't feel like a witch hunt. I hope Sherl gets the help he clearly needs but I'm not going to doubt victims or belittle them, or get cute with cherry picking their statements to make some kind of vague point, as you have done.”


If these are true, Gregory Sherl is as a bad monster as Ray Rice and Jian Ghomeshi are alleged to be.  

I swear, hearing stories like this keeps me up at night.  I’ve got three children: two boys (ages 13 & 15), and a nine-year-old little girl.  My daughter is incredibly bright (she scores off the charts on logic, reasoning, and problem-solving tests) but she also has a learning disability that affects her self-confidence.  I worry about her.  Actually, I worry about all my children: it’s part of being a parent, no? 

I worry about what might happen if, some day, my daughter falls prey to a sexual predator, a spousal abuser, a creep like any of the men I’ve written about above are alleged to be.  I wouldn’t be able to control my anger.  I’d probably do something incredibly wrong-headed, like attempt to take-out my anger on whatever jerk was doing my daughter wrong.  I can only imagine how I’d feel if that creep was allowed to thrive because people refused to sign a petition that would bring his horrible behavior to the light of others.  I’d be mad at those who didn’t sign that petition.  And I’d be mad at me if I didn’t sign it too.

Please consider signing the petition.  We need to change the world so that domestic violence and sexual abuse are things of the past.  The actions we take today have an effect on all our lives for years to come.  We’ll be protecting our daughters, our sisters, our nieces, our friends, and all their grandchildren.  Abuse of any kind should not be tolerated.  

Addendum: I just realized that Mr. Sherl's publisher, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, are also the publishers of the finest novel I've read so far this year: Amy Rowland's THE TRANSCRIPTIONIST (click here for my review of THE TRANSCRIPTIONIST).  I feel bad for them: alleged creeps can, apparently, pop up in the best of houses.