Let Them Eat Koch

One of the newer (but not newest, not anymore) bars in Bloomington advertises that it has everything but televisions.  I've been meaning to go there ever since I heard that, because I dislike the ubiquity of television sets in virtually every public place.  My favorite Chinese buffet restaurant, for example, hung one on their wall, always tuned to CNN.  Luckily, it's only one set and my favorite place to sit is out of sight, out of earshot.

More recently I was walking past a downtown deli and pizza place which targets a student -- well, a frat / sorority demographic.  This place has two or more television sets suspended from the ceiling above the counter, tuned to different sports channels, with the sound off -- which I know because I went in one day to look at their menu, thinking I might try their food sometime.  Maybe a serious sports fan, which I'm not, could follow a game without a soundtrack, but it still seemed odd to me.  It was as if the televisions were totems, objects that must be present in a well-appointed fraternity house, but don't actually have to be watched.  It's only important that the faithful be able to glance over and see that the holy rituals of professional and college sport are being performed, twenty-four hours a day, for this sustains the world.  It's not just television, come to think of it: I believe the effect for me would be about the same if the place had hung a bunch of books above the counter, where they couldn't be read but could be Seen.

Anyway, the bar I mentioned also has this by their main entrance:

I like it, but how do I know they won't consider me an asshole?  Only one way to find out, I guess.

In related news, someone posted a link to this article today.  Since I have fantasies of living in San Francisco, I read it, though like several of the commenters I thought that "Douchebags Like Me Are Ruining San Francisco"would be a more honest title: the writer is a startup/tech industry guy who's just been in the City for a while longer than the latest wave of douchebags.  He's probably wrong about San Francisco douchebags' uniqueness; Sarah Schulman described the same process and its consequences in The Gentrification of the Mind (California, 2012), and she's not the first.  For that matter, gentrification is also affecting small cities, like my own.  Downtown Bloomington is seeing a rash of upscale apartments for students with wealthy parents, including one notorious "party" building that occupies an entire city block.  (Coincidentally or not, it's across the street from the county jail.)  IU's douchebags are training here, getting "a degree in drinking with a business degree on the side" as a commenter on the article nicely put it, before they move on to Metropolis.

And this item too, from another comment on the "Douchebags" article:

Tuesday a cyclist ran over and very seriously injured an elderly person on a downtown (Market & Stockton) sidewalk. Last year an entitled tech wiz was racing down Castro, ran a red light, and hit and killed another elderly ped trying to cross the street. That evening he blogged about his record speed of 32MPH and posted video from his helmet or bike mounted Go Cam on the Internet. It came down when he lawyered up, of course. A year later he's on trial for felony manslaughter, finally. Oh, and he plead not guilty. His conviction should change his life forever ...  Couldn't happen to a more deserving soul.

P.S.  I excised a prison-rape joke from the comment.  Not important to the larger point.

A Small But Significant We

Continuing my project of rereading all her works, I just finished Marge Piercy's eighth novel, Fly Away Home (Summit Books, 1984).

When I was following these books as they were published, I thought that her novels alternated between so-so and brilliant.  I'm not so sure about that now.  Perhaps because I've become better informed about class, I now appreciate novels like The High Cost of Living more than I did the first time I read them.  Like many readers, I'd lazily pigeonholed Fly Away Home in memory as basically a romance novel, even though I also remembered its background of gentrification and the politics of real estate.

Fly Away Home is the story of Daria Walker (née Porfirio) a forty-three-year-old housewife and author of cookbooks, the mother of two grown daughters, married to a successful Boston lawyer.  Though she initially embraced domesticity, she stumbled onto her second career as a writer and become quite successful at it.  As the novel opens, she feels like a success: a happy woman in love with her husband who loves her back.  Of course things immediately begin to unravel, as she encounters some angry working-class activists who blame her husband for the deterioriating conditions of the houses and apartments they rent, and for a suspicious string of fires that have killed at least one person.  They also blame her, though as far as she knows those properties have nothing to do with her.  Then she begins to suspect that her husband is having an affair with another woman. When her suspicions are confirmed and he leaves her, she falls in with the activists, learning how to research her husband's real estate dealings.  At first she does so to improve her position in the divorce settlement, because her husband does his best to keep her ignorant of his finances, which are also hers.  But when she discovers how shady his real-estate dealings really are, she gradually becomes politicized and consequently becomes romantically involved with one of the activists, a carpenter named Tom Silver who shares her working-class background and her upwardly-mobile aspirations, but also has a background of leftist politics.  In the process she finds community among the activists in a neighborhood much like the one she grew up.

So yes, there are elements of romance here.  But they're interwoven with the politics.  (I suspect that any fiction by a female writer with a love interest will tend to be read as romance, whatever else is going on in it.)  Daria's ex-husband's personal failings are likewise connected to his abandonment of his original ideals of public service, and his embrace of predatory capitalism.  At the same time she's becoming involved with Tom, she also takes in another activist, a young Puerto Rican graduate student and single mother who's been burned out of her apartment, and builds a new household with her and her daughter much more readily than she embraces her coupling with Tom.  Her career as a writer and cooking teacher was already established before these changes in her life, and gives her something to fall back on to support herself as her husband withdraws from her.

It occurred to me as I read that Fly Away Home is a mystery novel, with a political difference.  Even strongly feminist mystery writers like Sara Paretsky tend to protagonists who fit the individualist mold of the genre: lone wolves who solve cases by themselves, whose helpers and informants are part of the furniture rather than full participants in the detection.  But Daria joins a group of people who haunt the city's property records, tracing ownership of the buildings they live in to discover who is responsible for the deteriorating infrastructure, to say nothing of the murderous fires either welcomed or actively set to collect insurance money and drive out lower-income tenants.  Daria is the protagonist and viewpoint character, but she comes late to the research and is never at its center: the other activists are just as important, and teach her the detective skills she uses.

Fly Away Home is primarily a good read.  It starts off slowly to build Daria's backstory, but rapidly picks up steam.  Even though I remembered the outcome pretty well, I kept picking it back up to go on reading when I should have been doing other things, like writing this blog.  Its politics, as usual with Piercy's work, are still timely, and nonfiction books like Samuel Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) and Sarah Schulman's The Gentrification of the Mind (2012) cover some of the same territory.

Next will be Piercy's humongous historical novel of World War II, Gone to Soldiers, and its associated book of poems, Available Light.

Survivor's Anger: The Gentrification of the Mind

I've been meaning to write something about Sarah Schulman's The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (California, 2012), but haven't been able to limit myself to one topic.  It's a very rich book, provocative and full of ideas, and it deserves a far wider readership than it's likely to get.  Along with the intertwined consequences of the AIDS epidemic and gentrification, she also writes about the loss of history and its effect of that loss on younger generations of people.

This last was something I'd already been thinking about, because I never thought that most schools would or could deal accurately with the history of the gay movement or of AIDS in the United States, or of activism in general.  Since these are still controversial subjects, they're not going to have a secure place in any curriculum at any level; if they were covered at all, it would probably be inadequately.  If you want to learn about such things, you have to educate yourself, and not many people do.

So, for example, Schulman tells about teaching at the University of Staten Island.

Most of the kids who attend the College of Staten Island are working class or poor, many are immigrants.  I had been at my job for eleven years, but it didn't take more than the first few months for me to learn that Staten Island is hell for queer kids.  Year after year my colleague, queer theorist Matt Brim, and I cry on the night bus coming home from New York about how profoundly traumatized our queer students are.  We do everything we can to intervene but for most of them, by the time they get to us, it's too late.

This, by the way, is why I was so surprised and annoyed by, for example, Bernadette Barton's Pray the Gay Away when she implied that gay kids are only traumatized in the "Bible Belt" nowadays.  Barton managed to reach adulthood without any awareness of how bad things still are in her home region of the Northeast.

This night a girl, Michelle, came out in class.  She had been taking my courses for two years and had never given any sign of being queer, but this one evening she read a story about falling in love with a girl in high school and starting a passionate sexual relationship.  When her parents found out, they gave her an ultimatum.  If she wanted to have a family, she would have to break up with her girlfriend.  Without much thought, she followed their instructions.  Three years later, waiting in the bathroom line of a Staten Island dive bar, she met another woman and fell in love.  In her story, Michelle described uncontrollable desire, accompanied by the knowledge of the tremendous familial punishment that lurked, waiting to pounce.  And it did ... At the end of the story, the protagonist finds a boyfriend, Danny.  She says that she is able to "be comfortable" with him. And the story closes with her parents gleefully welcoming Danny into their home to watch the football game, offering him a glass of beer.

Later in my office, Michelle tells me, I know my parents love and support me.  This is just too hard for them to understand."

I say nothing, but I know that her parents do not love and do not support her.  All they care about are themselves.  They do not see her as real.  And for now, she agrees with them [10-11].

This is heartbreaking enough, but it reminds me how often even some gay people, including academics, accuse other gay people, especially activists, of being hostile to "the family," when in reality it is much more the other way around.  (If some of us are hostile, it's not without reason.)  Schulman has noticed this too.  She first mentions a gay male artist who has performed the works of Joni Mitchell for many years; a reporter for the New Yorker asked him "why he 'did not want' to be part of a recent Joni Mitchell tribute album.  'I wasn't invited,' John replied" (85). 

About a week later I had a Facebook conversation with a reporter from New York Magazine.  She said she had "read somewhere" that I argued that gay people should have nothing to do with their homophobic families.  I informed her that my belief was, in fact, the opposite of that.  I told her that my book on familial homophobia argued that third parties should intervene and create consequences for homophobic families so that they could not get away with marginalizing and shunning their gay family members.  Again, she skewed reality to create a false but comfortable illusion in which it is the gay person who has the power and refuses to participate, when the truth is that we are the ones who are excluded [85-6].

There was a lot of other material I wanted to quote as I read The Gentrification of the Mind, but I came to realize I wanted to quote most of it.  So instead, I want to urge everyone who might be interested to read it.