icon caret-left icon caret-right instagram pinterest linkedin facebook twitter goodreads question-circle facebook circle twitter circle linkedin circle instagram circle goodreads circle pinterest circle

Notes from a Crusty Seeker

Correcting the Record and Moving Forward in Truth

To those who rail against anyone who would destroy our history, I say, "You are absolutely right." No history should ever be destroyed. Instead its presentation should be amended to correct for distortion—to let it yell loud, clear, and truthfully the centuries of lies that we have been taught. This is but a tiny step to rectify the record.

 

The corrections of my distorted record (what I knew to be true history) began seriously about two decades ago when I worked for an organization that was involved in indigenous rights and issues. I'm ashamed to say that until I began working there, I hadn't thought much about Native history. I'd passively accepted what I was taught in my all-white school—all of which was exploded when I began to learn about the systematic genocide and suppression of Native peoples all over the globe.

 

With the current ongoing videoed deaths of so many Black men, my justice trigger has been pulled into high gear. I've been reading books, contemplating, and as they say in 12-step programs, doing a fearless moral "inventory." And much of what I've found inside me makes me sick to my stomach.

 

On a recent news report, Aisha Tyler was asked to comment, as the first Black actor in an important role in the sitcom Friends, about the producer's statement that "if [she] knew then what [she] knows now," she'd have done something about the lack of diversity on the popular show. Looking exhausted and disgusted, Tyler remarked that the producer had probably known then everything she knows now, but it was the great apathy that allowed her complacent White casting.

 

This statement rocked me because at a gut level, I believe it is true.

 Read More 

Be the first to comment

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism by Robin DiAngelo

Educator and sociologist Robin DiAngelo is brilliantly thorough, and I am grateful beyond expression. This is unapologetically a book by a white woman written for white people who dispute our part in our historically racist system. It's for people who find the discomfort of the discussion intolerable. And it's also for white people like me who have accepted culpability and have committed themselves to being as uncomfortable as it takes in an effort to become an antiracist—and it gets pretty damned uncomfortable; my last read, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, gave a new-to-me history that I was never taught in white school and a vivid new awareness of systemic racism and how black people have coped with it that's changed my vision.

 

White Fragility is clarifying, supportive, and further strengthens my commitment, even as the clear articulation of everything made me sometimes squirm. DiAngelo's genius is the ability to break things down and deliver them as digestible facts. And with that, I'll turn it over to Professor DiAngelo:

 

What is white fragility?

 

Given how seldom we [white people] experience racial discomfort in a society we dominate, we haven't had to build our racial stamina. Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race. We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense. The smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable—the mere suggestion that being white has meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses. These include emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation. These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy. I conceptualize this process as white fragility. (1-2)

  Read More 

Be the first to comment

Listen and Atone: A Message for White People

Even if you have never knowingly done something to hurt another person.

Even if you consider yourself "color blind."

Even if you live in an enclave of peace and harmony.

Even if you don't know any people of another race, so how could you be guilty of offending or hurting?

Even if you have lived a life of groveling in the mud and have worked for every dime you've ever had.

Even if the whole notion of "white privilege" strikes you as ignorant of your pain and suffering to merely survive.

Even then, please listen.

 

"But, but, but . . ." you protest.

 

All I'm whispering is, "Listen." What will it cost you?

 

Think of a time you were hurt—maybe as a vulnerable child—and nobody heard your screams. Or maybe they did hear, but they didn't help or they actually made you hurt more.

 

Think of a time life was unfair. You did everything right, but still you were rejected, tossed out.

 

Now think of our history: Europeans landed on an inhabited land where they were welcomed. In response, they committed brutal sustained genocide, stole land, stole children, put Natives in virtual concentration camps—

 

"But I didn't do that," you protest.

 

Please, I'm pleading with you. Listen.

 

These settlers built an economy based on free labor. Human beings were sold by African warlords because they saw white man's money and wanted it. These people were ripped from their families, shackled and packed like sardines, shipped across the ocean, raped, brutalized, tortured, murdered. Even after the slave trade was declared illegal, it continued. White people declared that other humans were not human, purveying it as a spiritual truth, because it justified what they knew in their deepest hearts was immoral. They defended it, and therefore their economy and right to a certain life style, by turning against their own government, flying their own flag, and fighting a war. Which they lost.

 

But still the abuse continued. By now it was woven into the culture. Our DNA.

 

"But I've never—"

 

Hush. I'm begging. Read More 

Be the first to comment

Percival Everett Has a New Book!

I made this video as part of the Authors Guild's initiative, #SupportAuthors, to promote new books in the age quarantine.

 

The websites mentioned are Graywolf Press's page for Percival Everett's new book Telephone

and the wonderful new bookshop.org that supports independent bookstores--here is their page for the book: bookshop.org.

 

 

Now that I have just finished this magnificent book, my review:

 

How on earth do you review a book that is as personal, as tender, and as unnamable as your own soul? Reading Percival Everett, and this new novel in particular, is like entering the territory where all life comes from. I had such a hit of this when I first began the book that I literally passed out. In yoga there are names for this. Suffice it to say that it's when your consciousness is overwhelmed, stretched beyond its normal capacity.

 Read More 

Be the first to comment

Joys of Solitude 101: 10 Tips

As a person who woke with dread for the four decades I was compelled to work with other people in offices, silently thinking "if only I could work alone," I may have some wisdom for people who normally leap out of bed in anticipation of social contact—people who are now forced into a routine that requires low levels of oxytocin to enjoy. So to you, I offer the following tips, the first one of which got me through my years of mandated social agony:

 

1. It's only temporary. If you can just do this for the required time in order to stay well, know that one day you will be able to revert to your happy natural self. Anything is do-able, even life, if you remember that the only consistent thing is change, and this too shall change.

 

2. No more makeup, no more appropriate dressing of any kind. No more need for clothes! Think of the money you'll save.

 

3. You can fart with abandon.

 

4. Relax your facial muscles. I'll bet you have no idea how much time you've spent stress smiling, faking care when you really didn't want to hear about Bob's grandmother's operation, pretending you were okay with that guy/girl in the neighboring cubicle latching onto you when their very presence made you want to shower. No more pretending! Feel the relief and let it move through your now-flaccid body.

 

5. To keep that flaccid body from melting into a puddle of adipose, exercise at home—YouTube videos, Kathy Smith videos are my go-to, free weights, a treadmill, dance like nobody's watching—because nobody is. Nobody to impress. Enjoy some private endorphins. Work up a sweat. And, again, fart with abandon.

  Read More 

2 Comments
Post a comment

I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett

Once after dinner, as we sat in front of the television watching an Adventures of Superman rerun, I asked, "Was my father handsome?"
She replied, "Some might say yes."
"Was he smart?" I asked.
She stared at the television. "Why is it that after all the bullets have bounced off Superman's chest, he then ducks when the villain throws the empty gun at him?"
I looked at the television and wondered, knowing also that my quest for some detail about my history had been again thwarted, albeit with a very good question. I never pressed terribly hard, thinking that someday the story would surface, but then she died. (pp. 84-85)

I've quoted this out-of-context gem to give you a taste and because it made me laugh the first time I read this brilliant book about a boy who is named "Not Sidney Poitier" although he is the spitting image of a young Poitier. I laughed while I moaned. This is serious and hilarious stuff.

 

However a year after my first reading, when I read this book for a second time, I had a different experience. I hardly laughed at all for the first half (second half is funnier). Instead I was moved by the pain.

 

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a quest story—a search for identity, or one's true essence, in a culture where that is largely obscured by other people's perceptions of race, wealth, and the like. Each event in this quest is a step for Not Sidney to find out who he is. The book opens with him wondering who his father was, then careens into a life where he is a screen for other people's projections. After getting beaten, locked up, applauded for his money, and locked up again, he finally decides to go back to where he came from . . . only to be met at the L.A. airport by yet another person who mistakes him for the real Sidney Poitier. Exhausted and depleted of any sense of identity, he acquiesces and ends up receiving an award as the Greatest Black Man in the Universe—a role that is a distortion of anybody, including the real Sidney Poitier. His last line, in my opinion, is perfect:  Read More 

Be the first to comment

I Wish More People Would Read Books

Because I write books, of course I wish more people would read them. But I write fiction, and this morning, after seeing a plethora of fearful social media posts as well as the New York Times's trepidatious headline about Bernie Sanders's New Hampshire primary win ("Tightens Grip on Party's Liberal Wing"), my wish is that people would read more nonfiction.

 

Why?

 

Because, unless the books are the fabrication of a good ghost writer (i.e., The Art of the Deal, now disavowed by repentant ghostwriter Tony Schwartz), people tend to expose who they really are when they write.

 

Since the 2016 election, I have read a lot of political books:

 

In A Higher Loyalty, former head of the FBI James Comey came across as thoughtful and introspective . . . with a fatal flaw that turned off his self-analysis talent: blind righteousness when it came to his decision to talk about an ongoing investigation, despite the fact that it was against FBI policy.

 

In Hillary Clinton's post-mortem, What Happened, she is warm, funny, dedicated, smart, and unbelievably oblivious when she dismisses, with one line, the Democratic National Committee's rigging of the primaries—because it was legal, albeit completely unethical. She gives not one thought to all the people who felt betrayed to find out what really happened in that instance. It is the same oblivion that allowed her to condemn "deplorables" and promise unemployment for coal miners. For a smart and usually ridiculously controlled person, she could be incredibly flippant.

 

I like Comey and Clinton—a lot. I understand flaws and have plenty of them. I don't believe either one of them wants anything other than the best for this country, but they have blind spots—a similar tendency to instantly dismiss what they disagree with.

  Read More 

Be the first to comment

Awakening the Ancient Power of Snake by Dawn Baumann Brunke

 

I used to work as managing editor of a magazine whose theme was spirituality. Despite its subject, it was news and research-based at its core. Readers liked this, but often we would get pitches from New Age writers who couldn't understand the importance of science, verification, and credentials. It was my job to gently explain that although I understood that people had powerful personal experiences, for us to publish a "fact" story, the writer and/or material had to have had some kind of vetting.

 

I cannot imagine a better writer than Dawn Baumann Brunke for material that might otherwise fall into the "woo-woo" category for many readers. She is not only a deep dreamer with apparently 20/20 vision for details that she remembers, but she is a skeptical analyst of all things and a researcher who understands that history matters—that everything, including dream images, has history that informs meaning. And it helps that she is also an elegant writer who knows how to tell a story.

 

Who better to write about one of the most potent and controversial animals—snake? Snake is worshipped and loathed. It is embedded in our stories and architecture and reflected in our DNA. There is even a named phobia (ophidiophobia) because fear of snakes is common among our species.

 

This generously illustrated book is so full—from history, art, myth, and science, to personal stories of owning and feeding snakes, to understanding why our feelings about the iconic snake (in body and in image) are indicative of the sharp divides in today's culture, how these divides came to be, and what we might do to accept the synthesis of opposites offered by one of the most ancient symbols of healing, protection, and oneness. Read More 

Be the first to comment

Watching the Human Race

 

To mark publication of my anthology of stories and plays, Girl Stories & Game Plays, I'm sharing one story from the collection. Although I wrote it many years ago as a manifestation of my ongoing effort to soften my own judgmental nature, at this time when our culture has devolved into accusing "sides," this seems more applicable now than when I wrote it.

 

(Two other stories from the collection are also available on this site: Jakey, Get Out of the Buggy and a video of me reading Pose Please at the botton of Girl Stories & Game Plays book page.)

 


Watching the Human Race

 

Marla barely tolerates people. They make unreasonable demands, lie when it is to their benefit, and, worst of all, behave irresponsibly. Irresponsibility Marla cannot stomach. She hoped a Sunday walk across Central Park and an afternoon of shopping would distract her from her desire to murder the woman on the 35th floor at work who seems to take pleasure in upsetting Marla's orderly habits, and in whose presence, seemingly intelligent men's brains turn to mush. It is this mush factor that's kept the woman employed no matter how many days off she takes, how many rules she flaunts, or how, despite the five years Marla has personally handed her a paycheck, the woman cannot remember Marla's name and persists in calling her Maria!

 

That woman has everyone but Marla bamboozled. She wears Laura Ashley dresses, speaks in a studied throaty voice, and has unruly waist-length blonde hair that falls into her eyes at orchestrated moments of vulnerability. Friday, she suggested to Marla's boss that that idiot Selma handle payroll, knowing full well that this is Marla's job—a job that makes Marla feel powerful. Marla wishes to kill this woman, but since that is not realistic, she went shopping. Read More 

Be the first to comment

Is a Loveless, Joyless, Purposeless Life Still Worth Living?

Life doesn't end. It merely changes form.

I've never been a fan of what I call the "Bleak School of Literary Book Writing." In my many-times rejected and ignored short story "Metamorphosis or How to Become a Famous Writer or How to Make it Okay to Eat Unlimited Quantities of Candy Corn," the first-person protagonist (a struggling writer) defines this genre as fiction that "ascribes to the philosophy that life sucks, there is no way out, and this is best expressed through endless lists of obscure adjectives, designed to inject just enough intellect and depth to appeal to serious reviewers and get those oh-so-important front-cover praise blurbs."

 

I've recently read two books in a row that do not fit into this School because they are, in the case of the classic A Meaningful Life by L. J. Davis, filled with humor, or in the case of The Mustache by Emmanuel Carrère, decidedly not bleak because of the high-energy Kafka-esque plot turns. However, both of their endings seem to ascribe to the Bleak School's notion that if you can't get what you want, if you can't control life, if you can't even agree on a common reality, life is not worth living or else it is merely a bleak and hopeless exercise to tolerate.

 

In my last blog about Herman Hesse's novella Bartleby, the Scrivener, I make the point that I don't believe Bartleby, a man who simply refuses to participate in life, is a victim of his oppressive obligation to make money unhappily, but rather he is walking apathy—a choice. Yes, he has an apparently loveless, joyless, purposeless life, in which (as in the earlier-referenced books) he cannot get what he wants and his death seems to be an attempt to at least control that. But I posit that all these conclusions are a kind of delusion and misunderstanding of what life is and what it is for. And therefore they are, in a sense, false endings.  Read More 

4 Comments
Post a comment

This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class by Elizabeth Warren

This past Saturday I went back to my hometown for my 50th high school reunion. When I lived there it was a tiny village and many of my graduating class of about 70 had known each other since first grade. A guy I've stayed in touch with, Doug, picked me up at the train station and proceeded to give me a tour, with such detailed understanding of the architecture, layout, relationships between families, and therefore the history of change that I felt as if I was meeting where I'd lived for the first time. "When did you learn all this?" I asked, astounded. It turned out he'd always seen this way and just kept learning from the time he was a small boy, until now when he is an architect turned city planner. He goes through life with a grid in his head about the relationship between people and landscape that I cannot begin to approach. If I ever wanted help with anything to do with building anything, I'd call Doug.

 

In This Fight Is Our Fight, Elizabeth Warren demonstrates the same grid-like understanding of cultural politics and economics, and therefore how the world works and doesn't work.* Through heartbreaking stories, she clearly explains the relationships between housing, education, systemic unfairness, people, and mega corporations. I cannot begin to convey what is in this book. But after reading just a couple of chapters, I wanted to hire her to lead the renovation to make the United States work for everybody.

 Read More 

Be the first to comment

3 Alison Lurie Books: Why Do People Act as They Do?

I am endlessly fascinated by the way people act in groups and how individuals in groups often evolve into homogeneity—talking in the same lingo with similar intonation, believing the same beliefs, etc. Probably my fascination comes from my loner inclinations. I've rarely done well or enjoyed being in large groups; hence, I have spent a lot of time examining them and me. My newest novel, currently circulating to publishers, largely concentrates on this topic, and I've recently discovered another novelist who seems equally fascinated by the mystery. In the interest of promoting (sometimes funny) loner perspectives about groups, I offer the following brief reviews of Alison Lurie's wonderful books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foreign Affairs

From the first sentence, I was sucked into this Pulitzer Prize-winning story of Vinnie Minor, a 54-year-old children's literature professor with a lot of fixed ideas about other people and herself. She is a loner and likes it . . . until she allows herself to soften and change, and yet still be a loner. This is a quiet story about truth and phoniness and relationships. The cover blurbs call it a comedy, which I found perplexing. I didn't laugh once. But that didn't matter. I was invested in and identified with Vinnie and the other characters, and enjoyed their ride immensely.

 Read More 

Be the first to comment

Learn from the Past—Life Photographers: What They Saw by John Loengard

 

Growing up as a photographer is like going to medical school and becoming an intern. You start understanding what the world is about and how to translate it into photographs. You may become more efficient, more proficient, more educated, more intelligent, more loving. If you’re not moved by what you’re looking at, your pictures will not contain the human response.
—Cornell Capa, p. 251

I think it was in 1996 or 1997 that I was working as a freelance transcriptionist when I got a series of tapes that changed me. Sitting alone in my room, I was hearing the voices of people who talked about events that I'd learned about in school, and many nobody could ever learn about because they were private knowledge from firsthand experience. These photographers had not only been on the frontlines of WWII, but behind the lines, in the rooms where Roosevelt and Stalin and Churchill sat; in a cave with Tito; on the sidelines as Hitler passed; on board the ship Vincennes when it was sunk in Guadalcanal (photographer Ralph Morse described, in the most matter-of-fact way, how men died right next to him and how “You’re in that other thousand that didn’t get scratched. Why? I don’t know. Your number wasn’t up.”*); with John Steinbeck supplying the back story that turned into The Grapes of Wrath; they had been with movie stars and poor black families that nobody ever heard of. And these were only the batch of audiotapes I transcribed. What about all the other interviews?

 

At the time, the entire collection comprised about half of the still-living original Life magazine** photographers—the first so-called photojournalists. At the time of their interviews, they were in their 80s and 90s and still humble and arrogant and regular people who had found themselves, mostly with no preparation, in extraordinary situations where they not only coped, but thrived. It was not just what they had witnessed that moved me; it was their ordinariness (and, in the case of a couple—Cornell Capa and Gordon Parks—their compassion). I'd listen and type for a while, then find myself lying on my floor sobbing, so overcome with the sound of their voices telling little me, an anonymous NYC transcriptionist, their history through my headphones. Nobody but John Loengard (the interviewer who was also a Life photographer who was tasked with videotaping these picture-taking historians) and his associates had heard this extraordinary material.

When I returned my transcripts to my boss at the transcription agency, I was gasping. "This stuff is unbelievable," I told her. "I can't stop crying." To which she responded that all the transcriptionists were reporting this reaction. Read More 

Be the first to comment

What If Altruism is Our True Nature? Review: Not Forgetting the Whale by John Ironmonger

[2/27/20 Update: See author John Ironmonger's blog about how this book relates to our current coronavirus outbreak.]

 

Scientists tell us we are programmed to be drawn to round baby faces; dopamine is released in our brains and we feel protective instincts. Likewise, when we see somebody struggling or hurt, there is an instinct to help.

The word "perversion" derives from the Latin perversionem and is defined as "action of turning aside from truth, corruption, distortion."

So, looking at our present government policy of taking children away from their parents, locking them in cages, and neglecting them, one can deduce that we have a policy of perversion. In response to being directed to commit perverted acts, some of us refuse and blow the whistle, and others become full-fledged perverts. On a recent 60 Minutes interview, Nazi war criminal prosecutor Ben Ferencz says that "War makes murderers out of otherwise decent people. All wars and all decent people." It turns people against themselves—their inborn altruism—turning them into perverts.

The election of the Trump administration has brought us into all-out war with and for our national soul.

John Ironmonger's 2015 novel Not Forgetting the Whale begs the question of what is natural—self-preservation or generosity and sacrifice, and the story swept me away and ultimately reaffirmed my belief in our innate altruism.

In this smart and compelling parable we learn about dependencies, supply chains, connections between everything, and how things happen according to streams of supply and need. We debate the possible end of civilization as we know it due to our human self-interest vs. an optimistically imagined natural impulse for generosity and sacrifice. All this forms the matrix of this story about a naked man and a beached whale, both of whom wash up on the shore of the off-the-grid village of St. Piran in the southwest corner of England.

The writing and storytelling are wonderful. The profound issues start artfully and become more heavy-handed as the book progresses. But I am interested in these subjects so I was consistently intrigued, sometimes pausing to contemplate the big issues of what causes everything to happen and how to redirect the train of actions leading to catastrophic events. There is a mythical quality to the tale, and the sometimes-sentimentality or intellectual debates about our nature worked! I was completely engaged and couldn’t put the book down. Read More 

Be the first to comment

The Mueller Report Is a Must-Read

Like a good book, this report has a solid structure: each section builds on the previous one, if you contemplate the stated facts.

 

We may think we already know most of the information in this report via the media, but reading the first section account of Russian interference in our elections by affecting our culture is a personal experience unlike hearing news. It is chilling to read about specific Russians masquerading as Americans, setting up organizations and rallies, and sowing lies that bloom and grow exponentially as they are repeated by the likes of Trump et al. as well as millions of ordinary citizens. If you read this blow by blow, you will experience the truth of the words "We were attacked."

 

Mueller reports facts, but I believe metaphor is the best way to convey the impact of those facts to anyone who doubts we were attacked or to anyone, like me, who accepts that we were attacked (and that it is ongoing), but who hasn't viscerally connected with what this means:

 

Imagine that alien beings infiltrated all of our communications grids. They became part of our phone conversations, the media we consume, and our culture. Imagine these aliens have studied our American culture and can mimic it, blending in so seamlessly that they can participate in our communities as any local does. They get to know people, learn their vulnerabilities, and craft just the right things to say to trigger their deepest fears and angers, thereby making these Americans unwitting alien surrogates, carrying the carefully crafted messages further into our culture to create maximum conflict (and—my opinion—eventually war, thereby changing the world stage because people will no longer wish for democracy if this is the result). Imagine these aliens infiltrate our voting mechanisms, knowing better than we do how they work and all kinds of statistics about the layout of our electoral college and what kind of pressure and persuasion will work best where.  Read More 

2 Comments
Post a comment