Apparently if you might possibly in some racist jerk’s universe be considered “a man of Middle Eastern descent” you better not throw anything away at work where anyone can see you. Kazim Ali, a professor at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, took a box of old poetry contest manuscripts out of his car and set the box next to the dumpster outside of his office, for recycling, as he had done many times before. A student called the police and reported that a Middle Eastern man driving a white Volkswagon had left a possible bomb on campus. Classes were cancelled, buildings evacuated, and the entire campus closed.

In “Poetry is Dangerous” Ali says,

Because of my recycling the bomb squad came, the state police came. Because of my recycling buildings were evacuated, classes were canceled, campus was closed. No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not because of my dark body. Because of his fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the culture of fear, mistrust, hatred, and suspicion that is carefully cultivated in the media, by the government, by people who claim to want to keep us safe.

These are the days of orange alert, school lock-downs, and endless war. We are preparing for it, training for it, looking for it, and so of course, in the most innocuous of places–a professor wanting to hurry home, hefting his box of discarded poetry–we find it.

That man in the parking lot didn’t even see me. He saw my darkness. He saw my Middle Eastern descent. Ironic because though my grandfathers came from Egypt, I am Indian, a South Asian, and could never be mistaken for a Middle Eastern man by anyone who’d ever met one.

The university does not seem to have responded well. They deny there was any racism in this incident. The package was considered suspicious because Ali was assumed by the observing student and by the police to be from another country and “Middle Eastern”. Instead of apologizing to Ali and to all the students, and disciplining the offending student for an insane display of racism, the campus administration appears to have bought into and magnified that problem, by using the opportunity to remind the campus community to continue policing each other. INstead of apologizing to Ali, the administration nobly forgives Ali for his “honest mistake” of putting his stuff out to be recycled while being dark-skinned. Instead of that compoundingly racist and stupid reaction, the campus could have used it as a moment to open a conversation about race and denying the “culture of fear” in their community.

Technorati Tags: academia, antiracism

Even Stephen King couldn’t get readers to pay for a novel via the Internet. So what hope is there for the rest of us?

This is a question I’ve pondered a lot lately, as it looks more and more as if the future of independent publishing is in serious doubt. (The IPA collapse, the PGW mess, independent bookstores screwed, the Time Warner scheme to destroy indy magazines, etc.) It would be awesome if there were more viable revenue models for publishing online. (I know it’s more viable than it used to be, at least partly because some of other’s former advertisers have told us they’re moving most of their ad money from print to online venues.)

So I’m intrigued to see whether Bill Kte’pi’s gamble will pay off. Kte’pi has a novel, The Saint of Daybreak, which he couldn’t get a mainstream book deal for. So instead he’s serializing it on his web site. And he has an interesting business model, different from King’s and possibly unique.

He’s posted the first chapter for free. He’ll post the second chapter as soon as he gets $20 worth of donations (via PayPal). And each chapter after that, he’ll post as soon as he gets $40 worth of donations. I’m guessing he doesn’t care how big the donations are, as long as they add up to $40. With 25 chapters, my back-of-the-envelope calculation says he stands to make $940 off this book. Not a fortune, but more than some small presses would pay. And better than nothing, which is what he’d get if he didn’t publish it at all.

The real question is not just whether he’ll get the donations, but how fast he’ll get them. If people have to wait weeks between chapters, that could dampen their enthusiasm for the project. And it’s possible he’ll get enough donations early enough to post the first few chapters relatively speedily, but then it’ll languish. The optimistic scenario is it’ll snowball as people tell their friends and more people visit the site.

It’s an interesting model, anyway. The only drawback is that I don’t think I’m interested in reading The Saint of Daybreak, for the same reason publishers weren’t interested in it:

Because it’s about vampires, and the plot involves a church conspiracy, which makes it slightly too similar to The Da Vinci Code (though the nature of the conspiracy is entirely different).

My friend Guy Thomas, disability activist extraordinaire, says, “Some people need service dogs and some people are allergic to dogs,” as a way of showcasing how complicated access issues can be.

This week, I’m wrestling with the same issue in a much less grounded and physical context. The other day I posted a blog entry on Body Impolitic which includes the beginning of the introduction to Women En Large: A Book of Fat Nudes, a book with photographs by Laurie Toby Edison and text by me. The book is 13 years old. Some of the text is dated and some of it was deeply flawed in the first place. I’ve received a good deal of feedback about it over the years. This is the first time it’s been republished, so I took the opportunity to make some changes.

One segment that gets appropriately criticized is the third paragraph, which naturally is in the posted excerpt. The second paragraph describes a variety of aspects of fat. The third paragraph reads:

A woman is a person with two X chromosomes. A woman is a person with a vagina and a clitoris and without a penis and testicles. A woman is a person whose body can bear children. A woman is a person who expects to be judged by her looks every minute of every day.

The paragraph is intended to describe a variety of aspects of being a woman. You will notice immediately that it also has the unintended, and powerful, consequence of showcasing “woman defined by biology” and thus excluding transwomen from much of womanhood as it is described. Since Laurie and I unequivocally believe that transwomen are women, this presents a problem.

Laurie, very understandably, wanted me to change the paragraph before I posted the segment. I know why she feels that way. But I ran up against two problems: one political, and one aesthetic, and in the end I posted it exactly as it had been written.

The political: Despite how passionate I feel about the right of transwomen to be included in “women,” this piece was written for Women En Large. It’s not about trans, or gender, it’s about fat women. Because our language, and our thinking patterns, and our culture are so simplistically and dualistically gendered, all of
the standard ways to include transwomen in descriptions of female-ness (such as “self-identified women” or “regardless of birth gender”) have the effect of placing the trans issue in the center of the topic. I couldn’t see a way to rewrite the paragraph without effectively making it about gender, about the elimination of gender duality. And that undermines the piece’s focus on the core topic of fat women.

The aesthetic aspect is similar; it may, in fact, be another way to say the same thing. The paragraph as it stands is clean and clear. It speaks to what most people expect when they hear the word “woman.” It reads well with the previous paragraph about fat, and it segues well into the next paragraph, which talks about the experience, and range, of fat women.

Another paragraph down, in listing the wide variety of fat women, “transgender” is included as one thing a fat woman can be. Again, this reflects both my core values (then and now) and the failures of the paragraph about women.

So all of that leads up to a question: When (if ever) is it all right to blur (or transgress) one value in favor of focusing on another issue? When, if ever, is the impact of a clean well-written paragraph more important than coming as close as possible to a whole truth?

The whole introduction is going up on Laurie’s website, and it will be there for a long time. I can make a convincing argument for any of three courses of action:

1) add an aspect of womanhood that clearly and unequivocally includes transwomen, and say so, even if it dilutes the point of the paragraph;

2) take the time to restructure at least the opening of the whole damned essay to get around the issue; or

3) leave it be, as part of a larger whole?

So help me out here. Which would you do, and why?

But I’m not getting why the Lambda Awards censored Origami Striptease from their reading. What, it’s got sex in it between ambiguously gendered people who talk melodramatically about their gender while sticking things into other things? “We only make religions out of things we cannot know” he said. He opened up the Braille of me, and read.” Then she slices her panties off with a knife. Isn’t that what being queer in San Francisco is more or less about?

Click To Play

Actually, on seeing the video, I speculate that there may have been a reaction to it being a video and Munson’s (cute) slightly hoochie-mama poses and camera angles and that white fur rug thing. On paper I’m sure it looks all properly “literary” even if it is about nerd-queer genderfucked white girl philosophical musings about assfucking and pussylicking. If Peggy Munson had stood up and read it, it’s not like anyone would have stopped her. So my guess is the video made it get judged as porny.

I still don’t get it though. I’ve heard way dirtier! AT the San Francisco Library. Is this Kathy Ackerville Central? What? And the too straight part I’m completely missing; it was obviously not straight.

This article about churches debating whether or not to let child molesters in made me really sad.

I don’t know about Judaism or Islam, but I was raised Christian (I’m not now) and the message is clear, across denominations: love your neighbor as yourself, do not judge, turn the other cheek, welcome the sinner.

Part of the reason I’m not a Christian, aside from a lack of belief in God, is that I don’t have the wherewithal to practice Christianity–any form of it. I’m not able to not judge–or even to attempt it. I don’t want to attempt it.

But when it comes to what freed child molesters should have a right to, going to church, if they want to, is at the top of that rather short list. Keeping them from church would be like keeping them from therapy because the therapist has other patients who aren’t comfortable with being under the same roof as a child molester. It’s letting your fear get in the way of someone else’s attempt at redemption. How is that Christian?

See, I don’t believe that raping a child is worse than raping an adult. I don’t believe that raping a child is worse than murdering a person. It’s different, and needs to be handled differently. All are evil acts.

I also don’t believe that any generalizations about the redeemability of child molesters can be true. Some must be Hannibal Lecter types. Maybe some are driven by shriveled souls. Some are probably on an evil power trip that they might be able to get past to some degree. Some are frightened children themselves. I don’t know, I can’t see into their souls. But that’s the problem. No one can.

I don’t believe that the child, or children, these people raped and abused will be helped in any way by their exclusion from honest worship. I don’t believe that potential future victims will be protected by a denial of honest, open worship from a known child molester.

I agree with the person in the article who called this hysteria. I think it is. I think people are hysterical about child molesters for three reasons. The first is that it’s a relatively new crime. Previously, it was either so taboo, so unthinkable–or else so mundane and not worth mentioning in a world in which parents literally owned their children–that it was never named and no one came forward. Abusing children has only been a crime for about 100 years or so. Being new, this crime feels freshly taboo, dirtier than the age-old crimes of murder and rape.

Secondly, in the US, we are almost pathologically sentimental about childhood and insist upon the innocence of children and the childlike state. Even Europe has no J.D. Salingers, and European hipsters never slid into the infantile mode that American hipsters still employ. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Lolita is the primary masterpiece of a European transplanted to the US and commenting on the corruption of American society. Japanese infantilism is so heavily sexualized it would make Americans … well, hysterical. What other industrialized nation keeps abstract children so on a pedestal (or pedastal?) Or what industrializing nation, for that matter?

Thirdly, in the US we’re hysterical about sex. We can’t heeaaaaaandle the truth. We’ll show blood spraying and serial killers on children’s prime time, but we won’t show people tongue-kissing. So having sex with children, even sexualizing children in any way, is an affront both to our absurd dream of the innocence of childhood, and to our desire to keep sex at a distance.

And this whole child-complex afflicts liberals equally with conservatives. Both are guilty of letting their little brats run around restaurants screaming. Both ostracize Mothers Who Spank. Both conveniently forget what little monsters children can be and call bullying “teasing”. The only difference is that the one group insists on saving pre-child lumps of flesh from destruction, while the other insists on putting poor kids through the daily humiliation of asking for a free lunch–oh, no, wait, the first group put a stop to that. Whew!

I think I’m particularly sensitive to this issue because I just completed and sent out a story about a woman who crosses the line with a young teenaged boy. I wrote it because I was very disturbed by a long-term disagreement with an ex-friend of mine. She’s an ex-friend in large part because of this disagreement.

It centered around a discussion we had when Mary Kay Letourneau was released from prison. LeTourneau is the teacher who had a sexual relationship with her 13 year old student, was caught, wouldn’t stop, and got pregnant by him. She was eventually sent to jail for seven years when she wouldn’t stop seeing him.

She was released and immediately married the former student, who was now 22 and taking care of their two daughters. I was discussing this with the ex-friend, who wasn’t as shocked by the situation, and the marriage, as I was. After a lengthy discussion in which I pointed out that she’d have a problem if it was a male teacher and a 13-year-old girl, she burst out that she didn’t mind women taking advantage of young boys because men had been abusing women for so long that she didn’t mind a woman getting some back. I was so appalled I could barely speak to her.

I was further appalled when this same friend told me that she was dating a young man who was barely legal and more than a decade younger than she, and that she had struck him when drunk, just to see how he’d react.

After I ended our friendship, her attitude–and the personal history I suspected her of having that gave rise to it–really haunted me and I ended up writing a fantasy story about a world in which men had disappeared and only women and children of both sexes were left. The women start seducing the boys. My protagonist, modeled after my ex-friend, turns out to be far more predatory than she would have imagined.

I deliberately set up a scenario that made the child abuse ambiguous, but I only ended up rendering real-world child abuse ambiguous for myself. In a discussion with a gay friend I found that older-man/younger-boy relationships (remarkably along the lines of the Greek ideal) are an open secret in the gay community and many teenaged boys seek such relationships out and are grateful for the caring sexual awakening that they receive. I can easily imagine now that some teenaged girls might also seek out such relationships and benefit from them, even though the danger of abuse is so great.

My disgust of sexual abuse of young teens–set aside young children–has not lessened, but my sense of the complexity of this issue where older children are concerned has increased. It’s also affected my view of all child sexual abuse: not that it isn’t wrong and horrible, but that it is textured and nuanced–that all abusers, though all criminal, are not all the same. And that, yes, they’re still human beings; and that, in fact, this crime, this sin, is an explicitly human one.

What I’m saying is that child raping is horrible, but so is child beating. So is woman beating. So is woman raping. So is man beating (yes, it is) and so is man raping. So is murder of anybody. And it depresses the fuck out of me to hear Christians saying, on their home turf, that every kind of sinner can worship, but not the child molester. If there’s a better definition of a sinner in need of redemption, can someone please tell me what it is?

Recently I was at a forum for Bay Area literary magazines, over at SF State. It was mostly a pretty solemn affair, apart from Howard Junker’s trouble-making. At one point, all the other panelists were agreeing that you absolutely, TOTALLY must read a magazine before submitting to it. You should get to know the editor’s quirks and dearest desires, so you can cater to them. Otherwise, you’re just “carpet-bombing,” or strafing, or something. Then the ZYZZYVA editor jumped in and said that you really shouldn’t bother. After all, he said, all literary magazines are pretty much the same. The only reason there are so many literary magazines is because there are unpublished authors who want a venue for their work, not because there are readers demanding them.

I don’t think Junker was 100 percent serious, but in any case, I think he and the other panelists were missing the point. I used to submit to magazines without having read them (back in the late 90s), but since then I always read a mag before submitting. But this isn’t because I thought I could figure out what an editor was looking for, and send them the perfect piece. After all, I write fiction to try and do something that I’ve never seen done before. If I read a magazine and it had a piece that was just like something I’d recently written (in style or content) I would immediately tear my own piece up and never send it anywhere. And as the fiction editor for other, nothing horrifies me more than when writers try to cater to my tastes. I want to publish stuff I never would have come up with on my own.

So why do I read magazines before submitting to them? Because about a third of the time, I decide I hate the stuff a particular magazine is publishing. Not necessarily that it’s bad, just that I don’t like it. I read an issue of Tin House a few years ago, and I could see why some people liked it, but it wasn’t my cup of tea. My odds of getting published in Tin House are low enough to begin with, but this lowers them considerably. If I don’t like the stuff they’re publishing, what makes me think they’re going to like my writing? (At this point I have to reiterate that Tin House is a fine publication which many smart people rightly admire. The only reason I mention it by name was because otherwise people would jump to god-knows-what conclusions. Also, I’ve never met anyone who works for Tin House, and I’m sure they’re really nice people. See, I’m exposing my tummy. Please don’t hurt me.) Likewise, last night I was reading a small-press genre fiction mag, which had nice production values but the writing made me shriek with laughter. So, no subs from me.

Whether you believe, as Howard Junker does, that lit mags cater to writers, not readers, you’re definitely supporting a magazine by sending them stuff. OK, you’re not supporting them with money, except for the one sample issue you bought. But by adding to their slush pile, you’re saying that you think they’re good magazines and you dearly want to join their cattle pen of writers. Which, in some cases, may just not be true.

So I was googling “performance art” for a piece I’m going to write about a performance artist. And judging from the first few hits that popped up, it’s going to be harder to make fun of the genre than I’d realized. For example, there’s Jack Bowman, with his “Alice in Wonderland makes Plato’s Cave fully three-dimensional” and his “Nazi Clown from Hell rails against Capitalism” pieces. Both of which were HUGE hits in Dayton, OH.

I am Izan Knarf….the Nazi Clown Magician………I have been in Hell for 60 years….I have come to entertain you… I am really a nice guy…..just because I have this thing on my head doesn’t mean I an not nice……..look a bad guy wouldn’t have a bunch of hearts….he would probably have skulls floating through the air.

(I’m wondering if Jack Bowman knows the guy I once shared a stage with in Cincinnati, who was late for the show because he’d been arrested for punching a police horse in the face.)

And then there’s this:

On Election Day, May 5th 2005, Mark [McGowan] successfully kissed an A4 colour laminated photograph of Tony Blair 100, 000 times, the performance took place outside 10 Downing Street. He said that he was unsure at the begining where to kiss the Prime Minister, on the forehead would be like kissing a baby, on the cheek would be like kissing my mum and on the lips just seemed gay. In the end he kissed him on the lips saying i’m not gay, Tony’s not gay and everyone knows that. After 100,000 kisses things did get a bit weird towards the end. He then tried to get a camel to lick his scrotum. It kicked him in the testicles.

You might have been hearing about a change to postal rates that would put a lot of indy magazines out of business. For example, The Nation says it would face an extra $500,000 in costs under the new system. (It wouldn’t affect other magazine, because we’re too small to use periodicals mailing at all.) In a nutshell, a drastic change to the mailing costs for periodicals is being rammed down publishers’ throats, with only a short window to protest (until April 23) and no chance to adapt in time.

Here’s what happened. Time Warner, which publishes a lot of big magazines, suggested a new rate structure which would reduce costs for big publishers and increase them for small publishers. But the Postal Service rejected Time Warner’s proposal, opting instead for an across-the-board 12 percent rate increase for periodicals. Then the Postal Rate Commission stepped in:

The Postal Service proposed rates based on pieces, pounds, and containers. The Commission instead recommends a rate structure proposed by Time Warner, Inc, under which rates apply to pieces and pounds, as today, but also to bundles, sacks, and pallets. The piece rates would vary based on machinability; and the bundle, sack, and pallet rates would vary based on the type of entry facility. As a result, the recommended rate structure is much more complex than the one proposed by the Postal Service.

The Time Warner proposal would have “77 different bundle and container rates” for magazines. Some regulators suggested at least phasing it in, to give publishers a chance to change their operations to get the lower rates. But no. The insanely twisted and complicated scheme goes into effect on July 15.

A lot of people, commenting on this decision, have focused on how the “founding fathers” wanted to use postal rates to support smaller publications and freedom of speech. I have no idea if that’s true. I do know, however, that the Republicans are supposed to be in favor of less burdensome regulations. Going from a simple rate structure to one with 77 different rates is an example of government bureaucracy gone crazy. As long as the postal service maintains a monopoly, it should keep its rates as simple as possible.

The National Review and other smaller right-wing magazines are opposing the rate change as well. Maybe having conservatives upset about the decision will make a difference. Also, the Review says there’s a congressional hearing coming up on the issue.

What can you do? Well, there are letters you can sign on to. There’s a campaign you can join. But I would actually take the time to call my Senator or Congress person and register your concerns. I think phone calls are probably still taken more seriously than online petitions. You can also contact Time Warner and let them know you’ll be boycotting their publications if this goes through:

Richard D. Parsons
Chairman of the Board and CEO
Time Warner Inc.
One Time Warner Center
New York, NY10019-8016
212.484.8000

I, for one, would be sad to give up Entertainment Weekly. But I’d be sadder to see another layer of indy magazines go away.

Sure, there have been jillions and jillions of online reviews of both DC’s Infinite Crisis and Marvel’s Civil War. But I’m willing to bet that most of those were written by people who’d actually read the comics in question. Which, like, totally taints your critical perspective. You get so close to the work that you get myopic with all that knowledge. So what everybody’s really been crying out for is a review of both series by someone who hasn’t read either one of them. So this is your lucky day! From a standpoint of almost total ignorance, here’s my comparison of Infinite Crisis and Civil War!

1) Without having read either one of them, I can explain the plot of Civil War. I can’t explain the plot of Infinite Crisis.

2) Civil War cloned Thor. Whereas Infinite Crisis cloned Superman’s entire supporting cast. There was Dark Cat Grant from Earth 5 and stuff.

3) Infinite Crisis lectured the reader about how superhero comics have gotten too dark and joyless. Whereas Civil War demonstrated darkness and joylessness. Showing is better than telling.

4) Civil War displayed total ignorance of American legislative procedures. Infinite Crisis displayed totally wacky physics, like a badoollion Earths appearing in the sky without their gravity fields destroying us.

5) Civil War had 10,000 tie-ins, making it feel oversaturated and drawn out. Infinite Crisis had 10,000 lead-ins, making it feel like an anti-climax by the time it arrived.

6) Infinite Crisis: comics commenting ineptly on comics. Civil War: comics commenting ineptly on politics.

Apropos of the previous post on Kiri Davis’ “A Girl Like Me,” here’s a snippet from a Bill Cosby hosted show from the 70’s. Compare and contrast.