SK Multi-Hyphenate

Spy Stories

Started teaching a two-week winter-session course on spy stories at Rutgers today. We meet every weekday through Friday, January 13th, for four and a half hours a day. Course description and syllabus here (second listing).

'Boyfriend 101': Essential Tips

While procrastinatingly excavating clutter from around my apartment today, I found Jim Sullivan's classic Boyfriend 101, subtitled A Gay Guy's Guide to Dating, Romance, and Finding True Love. I totally forgot I ever consulted such a thing, although my first thought was that I must have just skimmed it. But, no, I actually annotated the book, up till page 23; after that the marginalia disappears.

Here's some of what I marked up when I read the book four or five years ago. These tips may be useful to you singletons out there (a category that no longer, natch, includes me).

• "But dating is more than a means to an end. It can be an end in itself. It's a process that I ask you—and you should ask yourself—to be open to." (xi)
• "I had to tell him it can sometimes take more than a few dates to feel sexual attraction. Besides...he should not close himself off to the possibility of meeting men who might become friends." (xii)
• "Sex is a wonderful thing, but a must for the conscious dater is to get to know a man before having sex." (xv)
• "You're having a date when you meet a guy at a specified place and time in pursuit of the possibility of future romantic involvement. The operative words are possibility and future; throw the notion of immediate gratification out the window, because delayed gratification is part of the new paradigm." (Emphasis Sullivan's, 4)
• "The inner teenager is the playful, shy, sexy, seductive self-conscious, scared, and romantic part of us that wants to go out on dates, but may not possess the social and emotional skills to do it." (5)
• "If you're waiting for your prince to come, the length of the wait may surprise you. Ninety percent of men are not going to approach you—you're going to have to approach them. Even gorgeous guys need to make the first move." (12)
• "Of course, rejection takes on added weight when we've been intimate—have shared a deep part of ourselves—and then get that awful call: 'I like you but I don't think there's a match.' This can cause anyone to go temporarily insane." (16)
• "Ultimately, though, the best answer to rejection is a four-letter word: 'Next!'" (16)
• "You can keep dating fun by not focusing on the outcome—'Will he or won't he be my future husband?'—and, instead, staying 'in the moment' with your date. Suggest to your date fun places to go (an amusement park, a wrestling competition) and do (drive to the ocean, go horseback riding). Stop seeing a date as a talkathon in which each man spills his guts for an hour or two! You can talk and have fun at the same time." (17)
• "'Being' with someone, as opposed to 'being seen' with someone, takes precedence." (23)

Indeed, boys, it does—it really does. Apparently this last tip was the most impactful for me, because I didn't make another check mark in the margins for the remainder of the book. Who knows if I even read to the end? But if you'd like to, let me know—I'll give you the book for free. After all, as Sullivan observes, "Carl Jung said that when we take an action, there must be some positive payoff down the line or the subconscious will sabotage future action" (12). In other words, let me let you help yourself and snag that man!

Glenn Ligon and the 1968 Memphis Strike

Glenn Ligon’s 1988 work Untitled (I Am a Man), a replica of the sign carried by striking Memphis sanitation workers in 1968, is a prime example of his appropriative strategy. Not an original sign itself, nor an identical reproduction of one, Ligon’s painting is rather an appropriation of the sign, so that the words “I Am a Man” simultaneously exist in three separate but related contexts: the original historical context in which the message emerged, the context in which Ligon rendered that message, and the context in which a viewer apprehends the message. Indeed, Ligon sought to show in Untitled (I Am a Man) the “changing notions of what it means to carry a sign that says ‘I Am a Man’”—a kinetic discourse that, for him, is represented in part by the cracks on the painting’s surface. “The piece was made using oil paint and enamel paint mixed together, and that’s not a good combination,” Ligon has explained. “The minute I made the painting it started to crack, and given the subject matter, I thought that was interesting.”

Memphis 1968 is remembered as the place and year of Martin Luther King’s assassination, but the reason the civil rights leader came to Memphis—the sanitation strike—is less often recalled. On February 1st of that year, two black sanitation workers were accidentally killed when they were sucked into the compactor of a garbage truck. The tragedy underscored the inequity of the sanitation business, which was run by whites but carried out by an almost exclusively black workforce under vile, discriminatory conditions. As historian Michael K. Honey writes: “Hauling garbage was the kind of work the city assigned to blacks only." The men’s deaths were the proverbial last straw: eleven days later, on Lincoln’s birthday, some 1300 workers went on strike. The message they held aloft for the next two months—“I Am a Man”—responded as much to longstanding discourse that marginalized black people as less than human as it did to daily put-downs of “boy” from white supervisors. “‘I Am a Man’ meant freedom,” one sanitation worker recalled. “All we wanted was some decent working conditions, and a decent salary. And be treated like men, not like boys.”

One has to wonder, of course, which men were excluded from this effort to attain “freedom,” given that in 1968, one year before Stonewall, queer men of color certainly faced a double bind of delimited manhood—and this historical tension surely informed Ligon’s appropriation of the slogan in 1988. Indeed, the historical moment of the making of Untitled (I Am a Man) was suffused with its own tensions around queerness, not least because of the AIDS crisis and the rise of the Christian right, which found easy targets in “gay art.” (Ligon’s first professional exhibition was a 1989 group show—the same year a Mapplethorpe solo show was famously cancelled at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. due to conservative outcry.) Ligon’s painting, then, highlights racial, gender, and sexual oppression—and the intersectional work performed by these fields of power—in two separate historical moments.

Furthermore, Ligon’s appropriated, reworked image excavates the historical centrality of queerness—of twinned homoeroticism and homophobia—to racial oppression at large. Eric Lott identifies this dialectic as the basis of minstrelsy, and also as a chief reason for the failure of “a possible interracial labor alliance” in the nineteenth century—a failure whose implications lingered long into the twentieth century. (Memphis’s political leaders, after all, refused to recognize the sanitation workers as members of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; the standoff only ended when the city finally conceded such recognition.) To my eyes, the specter of this dialectic, of this lost promise, haunts the Ligon painting. The work’s formal elements even record this fissure: oil and enamel mixed together results in surface cracks.

But what I also see in Untitled (I Am a Man) are the cracks, as it were, in today’s historical moment, in which the presence and power of a black man in the White House has spurred thinly veiled racialized opposition in the form of the tea party movement and persistent questions about a putatively missing birth certificate. Interestingly enough, the Obamas, perhaps in a gesture to their pathbreaking role, picked a Ligon to adorn their private quarters. A part of the same series that includes the Hurston quotations, Black Like Me No. 2 (1992) foregrounds a line from John Howard Griffin’s 1961 memoir Black Like Me, about the white author’s experience of darkening his skin and traveling the South as a “black” person. “All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence,” the canvas reads—a lesson about how flimsy the notion of racial essentialism, and a politics based on it, is.

Further reading: Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign; Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

Short Stories to Learn By: Oates's "The Dead"

Joyce Carol Oates has a new book out, but I'm reading her 2006 selected stories for my MFA workshop at Rutgers-Newark. The story that's haunting/inspiring me right now is "The Dead," from her 1972 collection Marriages & Infidelities. About a prescription-drug-addicted novelist who writes a zeitgeisty bestseller that nets her the cover of a famous magazine, the narrative opens with Ilena contemplating pharmaceutical side effects:

Caution against hazardous occupations requiring complete mental alertness. What did that mean, "complete mental alertness"? Since the decline of her marriage, a few years ago, Ilena thought it wisest to avoid complete mental alertness. That was an overrated American virtue.

With that, the story's sardonic tone is set, and Oates never lets up over the next 32 pages of this tour de force of the form. The best passages demonstrate a total fusion of prose and point of view that spur me to achieve the same in my writing. Here's Ilena, who maintains her teaching career despite her elevated profile, after she has sex with her lover Gordon in his office:

She sprang back to her feet, assisted by this man who seemed to love her so helplessly, her face framed by his large hands, her hair smoothed, corrected by his hands. She felt only a terrible chilly happiness, an elation that made no sense. And so she would put on her coat and run across the snowy, windswept campus to teach a class in freshman composition, her skin rosy, radiant, her body soiled and reeking beneath her clothes, everything secret and very lovely. Delirious and articulate, she lived out the winter. She thought, eying her students: If they only knew....It was all very high, very nervous and close to hysteria...

I was so fully absorbed by "The Dead" that I resisted nature's call halfway through in order to reach the end without stopping. When I finished, I felt Ilena beating inside me—and I knew how to produce a similar effect in my next story.

Review: 'Imperial Bedrooms' by Bret Easton Ellis

My latest review for the WETA Book Studio is of Bret Easton Ellis's putative sequel to Less Than Zero. The Book Studio is run by Bethanne Patrick (aka the "Book Maven") for the PBS affiliate in the Washington, DC, area. So happy to be contributing to the site. I think it's rad.

Earlier this month I reviewed Martin Amis's new novel The Pregnant Widow there.