Hairstyles of the Damned

I'm re-reading Joe Meno's punk-metal inspiried young adult novel Hairstyles of the Damned. Anybody can relate to the themes here, regardless of their musical tastes and lack of knowledge about the bands mentioned. That's because this novel is about belonging--or not belonging--and desperately wanting to find a way to fit in, something most of us struggle with long past adolescence. It's also about seeing parental relationships fall apart and wondering whether anybody is happy. Like everybody, Brian seeks belonging through friendships. Like many teens, his parents are among the most and least important influences in his life--we learn this because his mom is virtually non-existent in the story and yet Brian is most vulnerable (and endearing) when he interacts with his father, who is sleeping on the couch in the basement next to Brian's bedroom, or other adults.

During his teen years, Brian seeks belonging through music. During my teen years, I sought acceptance and belonging via religion. Music seems like a better vehicle for Brian than religion was for me. At least, it ultimately doesn't reject him nor does he reject it. For me, religion became untenable/impossible at the same time it became most desirable, leaving me in limboland. For Brian, music is always within his reach, just at the other end of his fingertips. But relationships are consistently fragile things, never quite within his reach.

Like always when I read good books, I wish I'd written it. But as Chris is always reminding me, I don't know enough about music to have written a book exactly like this one. It's true, I will spend the next ten years trying to fill in the missing places, the information that everybody else my age takes for granted. I don't feel bad about it--but the effects of homeschooling and growing up without a TV are consistently revealed in my utter lack of knowledge about anything pop culture whatsoever. Not only my lack of knowledge but also my inability to retain said information about pop culture. I can't tell you how many times Chris has mentioned groups like the Misfits or Jane's Addiction when we're listening to one of their songs and God help me if I remember who it is next time we hear it, no matter how much I like it when I hear it. Anyway, 70% of the time, I don't give a damn about my lack of pop culture knowledge. 30% of the time, that knowledge would truly come in handy--as a writer, a person, and a scholar. Oh, well.

Widow Basquiat, Gnarls Barkley, & Utter Utter Madness

I just finished reading "Widow Basquiat" by Jennifer Clement, a weird memoir-poetry-novel-thingie about the artist Jean Michel Basquiat's muse and lover, Suzanne Mallouk. It's a fascinating descent into the world of madness, money, heroin, and utter sexual abandon of the 1980s New York art scene. I didn't know a whole lot about Basquiat's artwork before (still don't, to be honest), but it's a tragedy that he made art for only a few short years before he died of a heroin overdose. One passage in the book depicted Basquiat as constantly living in symbol--everything he did, thought, or saw was not simply "symbolic" but carried, assumed, breathed, and embodied symbol: "Everything was symbolic to him. How he dressed, how he spoke, how he thought, who he associated with. Everything had to be prolific or why do it and his attitude was always tongue-in-cheek....He tried to make people notice him, wake them up, by using a symbol out of context. This occurred in his paintings and in his actions. He never took anything as it was" (p. 75). This is exemplified in a moment when he takes Suzanne to the Museum of Modern Art and sprinkles water all over the place to exorcise it because "there are no black men in museums" (p. 38): "It was really quite funny watching him sprinkle water everywhere, making sure the guards weren't watching....He did not think it was funny, though. Jean did it with great seriousness like a priest" (p. 40).

Suzanne cleaned up her act and became a doctor, specializing in substance abuse, especially heroin addiction. (I'm sure her 1980s self would be horrified). Here's a picture of the two of them together in the 1980s: http://www.brink.com/content/2031. And here's one of Basquiat's pieces: http://www.blackrobin.co.nz/ARCHIVE/vol1.2/SELLING/basquiat.jpg. I admit, when I read memoirs like this one, I confess to feeling like I'm too tame to be a true artist! Perhaps I'm just too tame to be a true artiste. ...

Speaking of "artistes" and madness: like everybody else, I'm truly in love with Gnarls Barkley's release "St. Elsewhere" and not just their song "Crazy." (Although if you check out the video for "Crazy" on YouTube, it is far more creative than anything I've seen out there in freaking forever. Oh, and "Crazy" was the first song I heard by Gnarls Barkley, this summer when I was in South Africa. I fell in love with it instantly.) But on the subject of madness, many of Gnarls's songs depict it in terms that you might ironically call poetic justice:

"I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind, There was something so pleasant about that place... Even your emotions had an echo in so much space. And when you're out there,without care, Yeah, I was out of touch. But it wasn't because I didn't know enough: I just knew too much ..." ("Crazy")

I love the indecision in these lyrics: "I prefer peace. Wouldn't have to have one worldly possession. But essentially I'm an animal. So just what do I do with all the aggression? ....Life is a one-way street. If you could paint it, I'd paint myself going in the right direction...But the truth is, I'm only guessing... It's even dark in the daytime. It's not just good, it's great depression. When I was lost I even found myself looking in the gun's direction. And so I've tried everything but suicide... but yes, it's crossed my mind. But I'm fine." ("Just a Thought")

St. Elsewhere depicts the isolation and beauty in madness: "Anywhere you sit you can see the sun. Unfortunately on this island I'm the only one. And same rules apply on a rainy day. Then it's not such a pretty place to be. It just rains and rains and rains on me....Way over yonder there's a new frontier. Would it be so hard for you to come and visit me here? I understand. Well, just send me a message in a bottle then, baby." ("St. Elsewhere")

My favorite song is probably Feng Shui : "And you're welcome to stay. But even your company must complement the Feng Shui....You see, I do not play. Forgive me Father, I was forced out of Feng Shui. A flow as subtle as a summer breeze. Like the whispering winds and the talking trees. Too big to be boxed in, it bobs and weaves. It evolves, it solves, it gives and receives. And everything I say is calculated, appropriated, written, and arranged in Feng Shui."

Okay, so it's not as if Gnarls Barkley isn't getting a whole shitload of attention lately, especially for a first release. But I can't help it. They appeal on all sorts of sensory levels.

Chris and I are going to see "Blood Diamond" tonight. Talk about madness. I'm hoping it's more than Hollywood hype. We were very careful not to purchase conflict diamonds for my engagement ring and our wedding bands...I hope this movie, rather than simply being a misrepresentation of Africa as so much of western media is, provokes people to action, the kind that cripples the diamond industry to the point of taking its own action.

Oprah Winfrey & South Africa

Oprah Winfrey has just announced the opening of a 40-million dollar school for girls in South Africa that she is sponsoring (and under-writing). She says she tried to help girls in the United States but failed because "I took them on ski trips, we had etiquette classes...you'd teach them how to do their makeup, we'd read and talk about books. And when they went home, they were criticized and beat up because their families said, 'Who do you think you are?'" (See USA Weekend, Dec. 17th, 2006).

Now, I'm thrilled personally that Oprah Winfrey is doing something for young women in South Africa. God knows, they need it. Thank you thank you thank you, Oprah! But if she thinks that it's going to be different for these young women she's helping in South Africa than the young women she tried to help in the U.S., she's got another think coming. Femaleness and blackness are still not treasured qualities, and South Africa is an extremely violent society. Young women are the victims of that violence more often than not, exposed to violence from their families and their boyfriends. She's got her work cut out for her.

The Devil is a Gentleman

A couple of weeks ago, I finished J.C. Hallman's new book, The Devil is a Gentleman: Exploring America's Religious Fringe (Random House, 2006). Loved it. Hallman started the book when, out of curiosity, he attended a Vietnamese mass commemorating those who had died during the Vietnam war. A long-lost cradle Catholic, Hallman had gone partly because he found the church's statue of Christ compelling. The eyes were gouged out and replaced with glass replicas. "...they gave the statue an eerie presence..." Much later, he said, he learned that people who come back from war or exile or other bad things "turned their backs on abstract conceptions of God...They resurrected a personal God, brought him back to life. They gave him eyes that looked real" (p. xiii). Hallman soon embarks on a very personal, very historical, very odd exploration of America's "religious fringe." He seeks out a UFO cult in southern California, checks out Scientology, goes to a druid rite and a witches' convention, travels along with fundamentalist Christian professional wrestlers who "wrestle for God," and even attends a Satanic mass, among other groups he visits.

What I found really interesting about the book was the respect Hallman offers for each and every religious variety, regardless of how kooky it seems to outsiders. EarthGoat interviewed him and asked him about how he managed to do this. Hallman had this to say:

" Some of these groups are pretty odd, you can't get around that. But there's something about the world, and about these belief systems, that makes them attractive to people -- they have adherents. I wanted to get at that, to portray these people in such a way that you began to get a sense of what was potentially attractive about them. Partly, too, it was a technical problem: Can you describe a Christian wrestling match in such a way that a sophisticated, skeptical reader came to care about the outcome?" (http://earthgoat.blogspot.com/2006/06/j-c-hallman-interview-devil-is.html)

As it turns out, this was a deliberate choice, one made out of respect to Hallman's mentor, the very dead William James, who wrote a book in the late 19th century called Varieties of Religious Experience. James held strictly to a doctrine of "pluralism," which meant that he believed it was necessary to respect everybody's religious experience. James evidently deeply wanted a mystical experience, perhaps one of the reasons he became a psychologist. Oh, and the other thing about The Devil is a Gentleman--it is also a biography of William James. So if you ever wanted to learn something about the brother of Henry James....

Bookslut also interviewed Hallman. You can access it at the following link:
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2006_07_009358.php

An exercise in self-aggrandizement

I was talking with Dennis Loy Johnson tonight, the publisher of Melville House (www.mhpbooks.com) and MobyLives (www.mobylives.com). I don't want to share too much of what he said, because it will eventually appear on New Pages (www.newpages.com) as part of a series of interviews I've been doing on the publishing business. But I asked him about literary blogs, and what he thought about them, and whether there were too many of them, and what somebody should do if they wanted to write a literary blog that was actually useful and stood out from the crowd and was something that people "in da bid-ness" read. I was struck by his response. He said most literary blogs are dull because the people who write them follow this kind of format: "I went to a literary reading last night and this is how it went and afterwards this is how much I had to drink at the local pub and then this is what I heard on the radio on the way home from the bar." And his response to that is, "I don't know you, and I don't care, so why are you writing about this?"

I think he's right about so-called literary blogs. But in my writerly mode, I sometimes like to read strangers' blogs because I feel like I'm spying on them. By spying on them, I do not mean in any icky, stalker-ish sort of way, although maybe there really is no difference. I don't know--I'm the one doing the spying. What I mean by spying is that I like to read these things in the same way that I like to eavesdrop on people when I happen to be sitting one table over from them in a crowded cafe and I hear one of them say to somebody on his cellphone, "I swear, Ed, he is trying to kill me, I am not making this up!" or "It's my job to count the bodies before they got out." And yes, both of those are things I've actually heard real people say when I just happened to be near enough to hear their conversations. Blogs, MySpace, even Facebook are great ways to get material for books. What are people like? What will they reveal to perfect strangers? And anyway, what did her mother say to her when she brought home the local homeless dude for dinner?

wealth in people

One of the more confusing concepts to understand about Africa is how power and authority were structured before the coming of Europeans and the imposing of western-style state power over the continent. The explanation for how Africans ruled is suggested by the phrase "wealth in people." What does this mean? And how did "wealth in people" work?

In pre-colonial African society, acquiring vast amounts of material goods was not the way to wealth OR power. This could be explained in part by the fact that Africans did not have very good ways to store surpluses. You could grow extra yams--but what good would it do you when those yams rotted in your storehouse? So rather than putting stock in acquiring things, or basing an individual's worth or power based on his accumulation of material wealth, a man (and it was usually a man, folks, I'm sorry to say) acquired influence, prestige, and authority by acquiring a range of what could be called "dependents." Dependents could be wives or children, but they might also be relatives, neighbors, or slaves. You could acquire "dependents" in any numbers of ways, but once a person was obligated to you (whether because you had given an individual food when s/he was starving, or because you had married a woman, etc.), you could call on their labor at any time. It was the acquisition, then, of these "obligations" that gave a person power. Power was access to labor, vast amounts of labor.

One political theory suggests that the construction of different types of power is based on "scarce resources." In land-hungry Europe, power became linked to territories because this was the scarce resource. Of course, Europeans still needed access to labor, but power was exercised by controlling land itself. Labor was controlled in a particular space; the space was what was critical. In land-plentiful Africa, labor was scarce and much needed. In vast tropical forests, men needed lots of workers to clear land in order to build huts and cultivate crops. Hence, a very different kind of "wealth" emerged, and a very different kind of power was exercised over people.

State power and authority in precolonial Africa was thus very loose, kind of weak, and not territorally based--something very difficult for westerners in 2006 to grasp. How could you possibly rule if territory was not your basis for rule? But pre-colonial kings did, in fact, do just that. Their power was based on a set of reciprocal obligations. They bestowed gifts and favors so that people would be obligated to them. If people were obligated to them, they could call on their labor when needed. If you called on a person's labor, you were obligated to continue bestowing gifts upon them--often, as your dependent, it meant that you fed and sheltered them.

This is a very simplified version of state power in precolonial Africa but I find it compelling. I think it would be very difficult for people in today's world to move to an alternative structure of authority because we are so obsessed with possessions; yet I'm also convinced that our obsession with territorial divisions (i.e., national boundaries) will either fade away or be violently undone some day. Perhaps not within my lifetime, though....

New Car

On Monday night, Chris called from De Anza College, where he teaches, to tell me he might not make it home in his car--a 1995 Honda Civic which had 10,000 miles when he bought it and is 3,000 miles shy of 200,000 now. It had started declerating on the highway and shaking badly. I told him to drive down Camino Real from San Jose to San Francisco. That way, if the car broke down, he could just take the CalTrain for four bucks instead of a taxi or a tow for $100-500.

Ah, the joys of car shopping. We have found a used Nissan Sentra, which we are buying this morning. I really hate having to make car payments on a car that I know we're going to have to sell in a year and a half when we move to Africa. But you do what you gotta do.