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Category Archives: Essay
Trans/Love: Radical sex, Love, & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary
Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Art, Essay, Queer Theory, Sexuality, Still Life, Writing
Art, Dice, Essay Collection, GenderFluid, GenderQueer, mechanical pencils, Morty Diamond, original photograph, Queer, Queer Theory, Sexual Exploration, Sexual identity, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, still life, tea, Trans Sexuality, Trans/Love, Trans/Love Radical Sex Love and Relationships beyond the Gender Binary, Writing
On Being Gay, Different, or Simply Dangerous: Miller's Line in the Sand
Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Bisexuality, Essay, History, Sexuality, Writing
Bisexuality, COBRA, coffee, Eccentricity, Essay, Everybody looks better than I do in heels and I can't stand it, Faggot, Familial exile, G.I. Joe, Gay, God...I am really Gay, history, Homophobia, Homosexual seduction, Homosexuality, I Love Penis...Mug, Lipstick, Merle Miller, On Being Different, On Being Diufferent: What it Means to Be a Homosexual, Sexual identity, Sexual politics, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, SuperGay is just like Gay but twice as Fabulous, The "Fairy", What it Means to Be a Homosexual, Writing
It's a god-awful small affair, to the girl with the Mousy hair
-Life on Mars, David Bowie
The only thing I wouldn't trust myself around is someone else's coffee, not because I have a fear that I would attempt to "seduce" the cup into becoming a homosexual, but just because I have a very real coffee addiction and I would almost certainly drain the entire glass in one sitting. I do not believe that I have a problem, as coffee addiction demonstrates only that I am a cool and interesting person, and the tragedy of existence is because I'm a queer man some people wouldn't even bother to learn this fact about me before telling me to go to hell.
On one side note I'm not sure how one would "seduce" a cup of coffee into becoming gay. What would that look like? Would the coffee turn into a rainbow? How would it demonstrate its affection for members of its own sex? And would it look better in jeans than me. These are serious questions and I need answers damn it.
But another concern rises, which is that because I am gay, there are some that would be afraid to leave me around their children. This is not an unfounded accusation as this entire essay will focus on Merle Miller's canonical essay On Being Different: What it Means to be a Homosexual, but I should set up the intro first. You see working in my job I'm usually stationed either in the Local History Room where I serve a largely adult (typically senior citizen clientele) community, but when I work at the information desk at least a quarter, if not half, of the patrons needing help are children. They want to know about the 3D printer, they want to know if we have Dog Man or Percy Jackson, they want to compliment my rainbow glasses (more on this later), or else they want headphones for the kid's computers. These little interactions are often one of my favorite parts of my job and despite my awkwardness around kids I try to be helpful and informative. They don't know that I'm pansexual, that I find men, women, and everyone in-between as sexually attractive; it's just not even on their radar. And in this interaction is just doesn't come up because there's no reason for it. There is however, some concern on my part, that if any parents knew about my sexuality they may be concerned that I was attempting to infect their children with the "gay agenda."
The "gay agenda" of course, was a subplot of COBRA in the G.I. Joe cartoons to sway children to become members of the terrorist organization. I can prove this by the fact that Cobra Commander spoke in a really sharp lisp and wore boots that accentuated his butt. Only gay men, you see, have lisps and wear nice boots.
My regular contester might interject here and say that my concern is unfounded. We're living in an information age where acceptance of homosexuality is better than it's ever been. Queer people can get married, sign up for the same legal benefits as straight couples, they can even adopt children. In this kind of age there should be no fear for any queer person to be afraid of being out and open.
To this I can only sigh and respond that, yes, no queer person should be afraid, but that doesn't mean that they aren't.
Yes there have been incredible advancements over the last few decades for queer people, and because of these advancements I know and trust that will not be terminated from my job, exiled socially by my friends and loved ones, and will not be imprisoned in mental facilities or actual jails for being gay, but at the same time I find myself often in a territory that, while it is not openly hostile, still bears the mentality that there are some things that should not be said outloud. Being a queer man in East Texas is often akin to being Boo Radley: there's nothing specifically wrong with you, but most people would just prefer that you stay out of sight. The fear is, as I began, that you will somehow "seduce" the next generation into being gay and that returns to me Merle Miller's powerful essay.
One of the most pernicious charges against homosexuals is that the "lifestyle" is something that is seduced into children's mind. The image is that of a homosexual hypnotist luring children into the sexuality the way the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang lured the children out with twinkle tarts and lollipops. This isn't a conversation that has died away much in the time since Merle's essay, but it should be noted how the charge was leveled towards gay people, even by the people who were supposed to be friends. In quite possibly the most heart-rending passage in the essay Merle describes two instances of this perception:
The fear of it simply will not go away, though. A man who was once a friend, maybe my best friend, the survivor of five marriages, the father of nine, not so long ago told me that his eldest son was coming to my house on Saturday: "Now please try not to make a pass at him."
He laughed. I guess he meant it as a joke; I didn't ask.
And a man I've known, been acquainted with, et's say, for twenty-five years, called from the city on a Friday afternoon before getting on the train to come up to my place for the weekend. He said, "I've always leveled with you, Merle, and I'm going to now. I've changed me mind about bringing ———[his sixteen year old son]. I'm sure you understand."
"I said that no, I didn't understand. Perhaps he could explain it to me.
"He said, "———is only an impressionable kid, and while I've known you and know you wouldn't, but suppose you had some friends in, and…"
I suggested that he not come for the weekend. I have never molested a child my whole life through, never seduced anybody, assuming that word has meaning, and, so far as I know, neither have any of my homosexual friends. Certainly not in my living room or bedroom. Moreover, I have known quite a few homosexuals, and I have listened to a great many accounts of how they got that way or think they got that way. I have never heard anybody say that he(or she) got to be homosexual because of seduction. (19-20)
This passage is heartbreaking, and I know I should be shocked and appalled after reading it but, people don't really change all that much. I often hear friends mystified about the current political and social landscape being shocking for the fact that repugnant statements that were spoken in the sixties and seventies seem to be repeating. And while I am disgusted by such statements, sentiments, and expressions, I can only shake my head and remember what I said before: people don't really change. Miller's passage here is one that I heard spoken in some varieties and fashions growing up, either by adults or fellow classmates, and reading as much history as I do I'm aware of the fact that being a queer man or woman often meant that one had to suffer.
The argument that homosexuality is an infecting vice that aims at children is as old as humanity itself, and while the treatment of queer people in society is one of constant fluctuation (sometimes we're in fashion other times we're in the closet planning out next fashion statement) Miller offers a sentiment that feels terribly accurate:
A fag is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room. (19).
I've been called a faggot before, never to my face fortunately, and as I have embraced my sexuality more and more I've felt a greater and greater target attached to my back. Then again I wear rainbow glasses to work so I suppose that doesn't help. Living in East Texas, and in fact, living in a town that has been listed as one of the worst places in Texas to be Queer, there is always this concern that my sexuality will be perceived as a threat. Working in a public library, I encounter a fair number of children approaching the desk looking for a copy of Dog Man, Drama, Dork Diaries, or whatever Rick Riordan has published this week. This means talking with kids, interacting with them, and sometimes walking with them to the shelves to find the books. It's impossible for people to know that I'm gay without announcing it, but at the same time all it would really take is one person to assume and make a complaint.
And speaking honestly and plainly, I live in a constant fear that my sexuality could cost me my job. And this fear causes me to sit on my sexuality a lot, altering aspects of my behavior I normally wouldn't alter. The tone of my voice, the way I walk, or even just having a conversation with a coworker when a patron is nearby. This in turn just fuels an life-long established internalized homophobia and I feel like, well, a pathetic old closet-case queen.
This honesty isn't just for the sake of creating pity, it's keeping in line with something Miller writers about early in his essay:
I have always thought that one of the obligations of a writer is to expose as much of himself as possible, to be as open and honest as he can manage—among other reasons so that his readers can see in what he writes a reflection of themselves, weaknesses and strengths, courage, and cowardice, good and evil. Isn't that one of the reasons writing is perhaps the most painful of the arts? (36).
These essays aren't always easy to write, mostly because I check my stats daily and I know very few people read anything other than my early work about Finding Nemo or culture's obsessions with black penises. But I live by the notion that I'm a writer and that real writing is about honesty. I try to always be honest with my reader in these essays and after finishing On Being Different I honestly felt like I was often reading many of my own thoughts.
I feel different, a lot of the time. And just as often I find myself trying to conform and "sell" myself off as just another guy, or just another public servant, or just another East Texan instead of the ridiculous East Texas Queen that I am. My life feels more and more like a battle between cowardice and ambition, conformity and security, virtue and lies. And while I struggle with this conflict, I feel often that I'm missing the chances to simply be. Even just saying, or writing really, that I'm a ridiculous queen and a silly fag feels like bold efforts rather than just enjoyable self-declarations.
Being different, isn't enjoyable. Or at least it's not enjoyable the way it was when I was a kid.
Miller offers one more passage that, while it seems a dramatic turn feel accurate for everything this essay has been about. And if nothing else it's an excuse to return to the library. Miller elaborates on his youth and the introduction of sexuality:
Growing up in Marshaltown, I was allowed to take as many books as I wanted from the local library, and I always wanted as many as I could carry, eight of ten at a time. I read about sensitive boys, odd boys, boys who were lonely and misunderstood, boys who really didn't care at all that much for baseball, boys who were teased by their classmates, books about all of these, but for years nobody in any of the books I read was ever tortured by the strange fantasies that tore at me every time, […]
And in none of the books I read did anybody feel any compulsion, and compulsion it surely was, to spend so many hours, almost as many as I spent at the library, in or near the Minneapolis & St. Louis railroad station, where odd, frightening things were written on the walls of the men's room. And where in those days, there were always boys in their teens and early twenties who were on their way to and from somewhere in fright cars. Boys who were hungry and jobless and who for a very small amount of money, and sometimes none at all, were available for sex; almost always they were. They needed the money, and they needed someone to recognize them, to actually see them. (15).
I've spent a lifetime wanting to be different, wanting to be unique, and wanting to be my own person, yet constantly struggling against larger systems, organizations, or collected sentiments. Whether it was the oppressive environment of attending the most expensive private school in my hometown, whether it was being bullied for being effeminate, whether it was laughed at for being strange, and whether it's just the perception that I'm seen as some kind of freak by certain members of the community being different feels very much like being invisible. Or, perhaps more clearly, it feels often like people would prefer I was invisible.
These are perceptions, but these are honest perceptions about my sense of self and so Miller's On Being Different felt painfully relevant almost 47 years after it was originally published.
Miller's essay is very much of its time, and several critics have observed that the work is not as significant to our contemporary period. In an age where gay people can get married, adopt children, purchase property together, enjoy the same kind of insurance benefits as straight couples, and even get a third of the air of air time on Modern Family it would seem that the morose reality of the past would be "over and done with." The problem with this perception however is that it's not a universal reality, and even though this is probably one of the best times be a queer person, there are still a great many of us who are struggling both internally as well as externally.
Being different, and being labelled unwillingly as different is a drag because it promises you a lifetime of being an outsider. And even if one embraces this term, this kind of isolation can inspire paranoia, depression, and sometimes self-loathing. And for my own part I don't have an answer to this. As I said before I live with a fear that at any time someone could take offense to my existence and raise a stink, and my life could be over.
I don't want to seduce anybody into becoming gay, I would only ever want them to be themselves and be ready to be themselves whenever they were ready. It took me 26 years to find myself and I'm still figuring things out.
My fears aren't going to dissipate or disappear anytime soon, but rather than simply dwell on these negatives I try try try to stay positive, to stay ridiculous, to try on new lipsticks, and to try and figure out how a cup of coffee could be gay. Like seriously would little arms and legs pop out of the mug? And if they did what kind of shoes would they wear?
I can only hope that it wouldn't look good in pumps because damn it, everybody looks better in pumps than I do, and it's not fair.
All quotes cited from On Being Different were quoted from the paperback Penguin Classics Edition.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/merle-miller-and-the-piece-that-launched-a-thousand-it-gets-better-videos
https://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/10/21/on-being-different-what-it-means-to-be-homosexual-by-merle-miller/
https://themillions.com/2012/11/the-march-of-progress-is-never-neat-merle-miller-and-on-being-different.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2gbcVaZ448
So I have come to the conclusion that it's impossible to "seduce" a cup of coffee into becoming gay…HOWEVER, I have found what is, to my mind, the gayest and most accurate coffee mug for myself that I have ever found. My wife agrees, as when I showed it to her she simply went "Ha, gay." Which is usually her way of saying I love you dear. Whatever the case I have a mug to buy.
Comics Shop: The Retail Mavericks Who Gave Us a New Geek Culture
Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Art, Comics/Graphic Novels, Essay, History, Still Life, Writing
#buylocal, Art, Comic Shop, Comic Shop: The Retail Mavericks WHo Gave Us a New Geek Culture, Comic Shops, Comics, Dan Gearino, Dice, economics, Essay, glasses, history, History of Comics, Joshua Jammer Smith, mechanical pencils, original photograph, Retail, still life, tea, Writing
#5—Five Years In, 5 Years Closer to Death: Happy Fifth(?) Birthday White Tower Musings
Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Essay, Film Review, Happy Birthday, Literature, Philosophy, Prime Numbers, Satire/Humor, Science, White Tower Musings, Writing
"There's this old joke", A Brief History of Time, Albert Camus, Alvy Singer, Annie Hall, comedy, death, Diane Keaton, existentialism, Film, film review, Happy Birthday, Humor, If a woman is upset it's not because she's on her period it's because you're being a dick, Imaginary Time, Joshua Jammer Smith, Literature, Lobsters, Marshal McLuhan, Philosophy, Prime Numbers, reflection, romance, Romantic relationships, Science, Stephen Hawking, The Myth of Sisyphus, White Tower Musings, women wearing men's suits, Woody Allen, Writing
I'm told it's best to start things off with a joke. But keep your eyes open for the one at the very end.
There's this joke. A man works for five years writing for a blog, and after five years he remarks to himself, boy, this is really terrible. I spend hours and hours of my time and energy worrying and thinking about a bunch of writing that really hasn't made any impact. I've also spent hundreds of hours that could have been spent on exercise, cooking, spending time with my wife, taking my pets for walks, masturbating, volunteering in my community, or learning a musical instrument to help me seem interesting. All in all there's been a lot of time spent producing a handful of essays that, really, nobody seems to care about and haven't brought me one real iota of long term happiness. To which the writer responded to this thought, "Yeah, and the worst part is there's still so many damn essays I need to write."
Well, that seems to be my lesson. Writing for five years, and publishing my work to little or no praise is miserable work, filled with nothing but suffering, misery, and agony, and it's passed by far, far too quickly.
This is also, for the record, a cheap rip off of one of my favorite films Annie Hall, which also happens to have a character who happens to be a writer. His opening monologue is one which I have never forgotten, because it was one of those moments in life when one recognizes the voice that perfectly sums up what you believe and think perfectly:
Alvy Singer: [addressing the camera] There's an old joke – um… two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life – full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly. The… the other important joke, for me, is one that's usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud's "Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious," and it goes like this – I'm paraphrasing – um, "I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member." That's the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women.
I'm not being cute or coy or hipster when I say this opening left me forever altered. Much like when I first listened to Slipknot's first album, watching Annie Hall and listening to Woody Allen's monologue was like discovering a voice I had always been looking for. Although Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese were gods to me, Woody Allen came in and gave me an actual working model to move forward. Alvy Singer was the character I more or less was, not so much what I wanted to be, or at the very least he was a voice that I thought I could be in terms of my writing.
I'm a rather gloomy, depressive, self-depreciating, neurotic asshole, and here was a gloomy, depressive, self-depreciating neurotic asshole.
It may seem pathetic, but the earliest truth of writing was write what you know. I wasn't a gangster like Joe Pesci or a nameless Samurai-blade wielding warrior named Beatrix Kiddo, I was a nervous and depressed moody teenager dealing with a lot of self-deprecation that would eventually become a staple character trait.
My writing really started to mimic Alvy Singer, and Woody Allen in general, and so the character and voice began to form. That was about 12 years ago, and after about a decade of writing, five of which took place on this blog here, I'm still amazed by that opening and in many ways still paying tribute to Woody Allen who started it off with a joke.
But five years is half a decade to get over this self-depreciation crap and so I've been forced to reconcile the fact that dumping on myself and my contributions to humanity are simply going to be part of my aesthetic. It drives my mother crazy, it makes my wife mad, and at least three of my friends are planning on ways to kick my ass if I continue to annoy them with my bemoaning. I'm working on improving this condition, but habit dies hard damn it, and the case for mental instability.
All this lead in has actually been for a purpose however, so I'm going to attempt something novel: I think I might have actually done something. Or, to put it another way, I don't think I've done nothing with these essays. I've just done a little. I haven't wasted my time, or my reader, with my work, and while it's not a grand demonstration of self-worth, life has taught me in recent months that it is the small, little, everyday gestures that build up into the larger narratives.
And unlike Alvy, I'm going to try and join, and stay, in the happy club, because life is far far too short.
It wasn't fun watching Annie Hall the first time. In fact it was physically painful. I was moaning through most of the film, wondering how much longer I actually would have in it. I remember my mother and little sister in the kitchen talking, possibly working on homework, while I labored through the film.
Every few seconds I would lift the remote and hit the "info" button which would spring the title, time, channel information, and various other options like setting up closed captions and recording it to a DVR we didn't actually own at the time. It seemed like the seconds were literally infinite as Alvy whined about death or accused Annie's emotional state to her menstrual cycle.
One such moment was an actual animated scene and provides such an brief snippet of Alvy's sentiment:
[Alvy fantasizes being in love with the Wicked Queen from Snow White]
Wicked Queen: We never have any fun any more.
Alvy Singer: How can you say that?
Wicked Queen: Why not? You're always leaning on me to improve myself.
Alvy Singer: You're just upset. You must be getting your period.
Wicked Queen: I don't get a period. I'm a cartoon character.
At some point my whining got rather loud and I said in my pathetic and obnoxious adolescent voice, "When is this movie going to be over."
My mother to her credit suggested, "If you're not enjoying it, just change the channel."
Common sense is an easy trait to recognize unless it's coming from someone else. I can't remember if I offered a rebuttal, but whatever the case I shut up, muttering under my breath about the intolerable quality of the film until the final ending sequences when I really paid attention and ALvy offered up a beautiful quote:
Alvy Singer: You know you try to make things come out perfect in art, because they rarely do so in real life.
The sensation of being young is discovery, because as you age you encounter people and ideas that, in truth, have been expressed over and over again throughout the entirety of human history. There's nothing really novel in Alvy's quote here, but when I wasthirteen that statement might as well have been made by Shakespeare or Socrates. They hit me in such a way that I was stimulated and I began to think about what art was, what it could be.
Of course my response to begin writing a novel about a group of angsty artists living in a nameless city who did nothing but talk about art. It was absolute shit, but it was the first push man. After that I was determined. Life was going to be made perfect in my art, because my life wasn't anywhere near that term.
Writer's never seem to be happy people and I'm not sure why that is. We tend to spend all of our time thinking about writing, and occasionally more time talking about writing. There's much time and energy spent worried about words and their meaning and whether or not we've really done something with them. And occasionally, after the third cup of coffee, in mid-afternoon, when our spouses and children are out shopping or playing, or just generally enjoying life while we're worrying about similes and articles, a thought appears that just feels perfect.
And even after that perfectly expressed thought is made there is a deeper dissatisfaction because I know I'm never going to get another sentence that perfect ever again.
Alvy seemed to offer me something of a reconsideration of this fact however, as he was taking Annie to a bookstore.
Alvy Singer: I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.
A friend of mine recently committed suicide and I've spent much of the last month or so just recovering from that miserable bullshit. Learning more and more about Savannah's personal life, and dealing with my own reaction to her suicide is something of a revelation, a word that I worry grows more and more meaningless with each new essay I write. But it's fair in this case to use that word, because suicide is something I have spent a significant amount of time worrying about.
Though I should be honest, I also spent a serious amount of time joking about it. Suicide was a real compulsion, and often I would think about taking my own life. After a while it just got to be normal. I would picture my friends and family reacting to my death, wondering who would and wouldn't care about my sudden absence. And this confession itself is it's own sort of exercise because it demonstrates a real truth about depression which is namely that it is a form of narcissism.
I didn't really want to die, I just wanted people to care about me. I wasn't considering suicide to really think about the implications and the real world affect.
Albert Camus to my mind provided the most realistic explanation of suicide in his great work The Myth of Sisyphus:
There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that the philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect. (3).
Camus came to the conclusion that life is worth living, and my friend did not. She was a frequently miserable person, and I'm not sure I could, I know I could not have done anything to stop her. And it's a shame to me, because I never got to watch Annie Hall with her and see what she would have thought about the film.
I'm pretty sure she would have thought it was shit, but still, I would have liked to have been disappointed with her response.
Stephen Hawking died shortly before I started writing this year's "Happy Birthday essay," and before I get to that I want to address the fact that there are "birthday" essays. It seems like I'm trying to create a new genre of essays, which is ridiculous I'm really only inventing new titles. Anyone who think that they're creating anything really new is so full of shit. I mean there's only so many letters, so many words, and unless you're J.R.R. Tolkien or the dude who made Cling-On you really haven't made anything new in terms of language. An essay is a fucking essay end of story, I'm just reflecting year after year and trying not to bore people.
But anyway, Stephen Hawking is dead now, and at the Tyler Public Library we had a small display set up to remember him and his work, and while I was walking back and forth helping patrons I kept spotting a documentary titled A Brief History of Time. It was based on his book of the same title and I took it home having a moment of sublime inspiration.
There is this idea of Imaginary Time and it has revolutionized the very way I see the universe, time, history, reality, and everything in between. In essence the notion of time being something that just moves forward constantly until it ends has been, not rejected, just reevaluated.
Looking to the actual book then, Hawking explores this concept and, as always, manages to make what is quite possibly the most difficult concept for a layman to feel approachable, and, far more importantly, understandable:
However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started—it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. (146).
Though of course this brings me back to Annie Hall, for the film starts with Alvy's childhood, and one scene in particular feels terribly relevant.
Doctor in Brooklyn: Why are you depressed, Alvy?
Alvy's Mom: Tell Dr. Flicker.
[Young Alvy sits, his head down – his mother answers for him]
Alvy's Mom: It's something he read.
Doctor in Brooklyn: Something he read, huh?
Alvy at 9: [his head still down] The universe is expanding.
Doctor in Brooklyn: The universe is expanding?
Alvy at 9: Well, the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!
Alvy's Mom: What is that your business?
[she turns back to the doctor]
Alvy's Mom: He stopped doing his homework!
Alvy at 9: What's the point?
Alvy's Mom: What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!
Doctor in Brooklyn: It won't be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we've gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we're here!
It's far more likely that this latter argument will have more relevance to the reader. Beginnings and endings are what life are all about. Life begins, life ends. Relationships begin, relationships end. The concept that reality just is, and that it always will be regardless of our place in the universe is a concept that doesn't sit well with people because stories are the foundation of everything. It's how we reconcile the beginnings and ends of our own lives. One day my life will end, but at least so will everything else.
Alvy's doctor almost assuredly never read the writings of Stephen Hawking, but he did at least give me a concept to work with as I wondered about whether or not it was worth it to write these essays down in the first place.
Five years. Five years writing and worrying and fretting and laboring over a series of writings, musings, philosophies, etc.. And to add to all of that it seems like more and more these essays seem less and less about myself. I can't see myself in these writings as much as I used to. They seem more to be about my ideas and thoughts about great books and films that I appreciate.
Annie Hall is a film that has changed for me as the years go by however. It's a film that I still love and appreciate, but five years on I no longer see it as this great, impressive font of wisdom. Woody Allen has, in recent years, become a bit of a creep and every time I discuss the film I have to acknowledge that the man is a real creep and the conversation usually stops there, which is unfortunate because the movie is beautiful on its own. What's changed is that I've stopped looking to Alvy's voice as a source of inspiration, or at least not as much as I used to.
Life is worth living. Not just because I've lost a friend. Not just because I've recognized my depression for what it is. Not just because I could be a father within the next year or more. Not just because life has begun to assume real shape for me. Life is worth living because it's worth living.
I've assumed the mantle of the man who wants to experience the world and the life he's living because I enjoy being alive. There's books to read, coffee to drink, orgasms to experience, and of course there's even more essays to write.
This blog, as I said at the start, does not always give me what I want, which, to be honest, I'm sure what that actually is. There's satisfaction in finishing an essay, and having one more work up on the site. There's a satisfaction in knowing that writing these every week I'm getting something of myself on the page. That knowing, that satisfaction is its own rewards. It's an irrational feeling, but Alvy offers me one more anecdote for that:
Alvy Singer: [narrating] After that it got pretty late, and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I… I realized what a terrific person she was, and… and how much fun it was just knowing her; and I… I, I thought of that old joke, y'know, the, this… this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs." Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y'know, they're totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and… but, uh, I guess we keep goin' through it because, uh, most of us… need the eggs.
I myself haven't been eating eggs in the morning anymore, but I am now calling Sunday my writing day. It involves sitting at my laptop typing away for most of the afternoon drinking my own weight in coffee and at the end of the day thinking about next week's work.
Thank you for five years dear reader, and thank you as always for reading.
AND NOW THE PUNCHLINE…
I'm told it's best to end on a joke. My wife pointed out to me that I started this blog the year we were married and so White Tower Musings is in fact only four years old.
If that isn't a testament both to the sort of woman I married and my piss-poor inability to do basic math I don't know what is.
Happy Fourth Birthday White Tower Musings.
All quotes cited from Annie Hall were provided by IMDb.com.
All quotes cited from The Myth of Sisyphus were quoted from the paperback Vintage edition.
Feeding Turtles Tumors While We Were Waiting to be Okay – Calypso and Suicide
Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Bisexuality, Essay, Literature, Masculinity Studies, Philosophy, Satire/Humor, Sexuality, Writing
"Butt-Piracy", "Elder Gay", A House Divided, A Modest Proposal, Anthony Bourdain, Calypso, Chester Benington, David Sedaris, Deadlands, Elder, Essay, Essay Collection, Get your credit score and work on gathering reliable assets, Happiness, Homosexuality, Humor, Joshua Jammer Smith, Kate Spade, Literature, Longview Pride 2018, Masculinity Studies, Philosophy, Pride, Satire, Self-Effacement, Sexual identity, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, suicide, Surviving, The Myth of Sisyphus, The One(s) Who Got Away, Writing
I mean the dude was just killing it. He didn't have spectacular abs, I thank whatever fortune I possess in this life for that, but his body was clearly one that he worked on. He had short blond hair and a great ass and he just twerked it wearing by now just a pair of khaki shorts, knee high socks and some kind of sport-tennis shoes. I was wearing my Mad Hatter socks, my fingerless lace gloves, glitter nail polish, my little red "pimp-hat," and of course my ultikilt. Some artist came on, someone who's five years younger than me probably could have identified, and I watched this young guy twerk and just kill it on the dance floor while the rest of the young people around him cheered him on. I was sitting with some friends on the edge of the venue just watching him wondering if I had any real desire for him, or if I was just impressed by his dance moves. He was just so free and gay in the ways that I wasn't and I realized, at that moment, that I was something the kids are referring to as an "elder-gay."
An "elder gay" as far as I can tell, is a someone from previous generations who identifies as some variety of Queer. The way my friend Alia uses the term one would suspect that an Elder Gay is something out of Dungeons and Dragons, some mystical being who possess knowledge of the organisms and energies that exist in the spaces between dimensions. Likewise the sage would almost certainly possess the knowledge of what is the best way to score a bank loan for that B&B you're dreaming of starting up in Dallas.
An "Elder Gay" is someone who has survived and managed to stay "cute" and queer and not let the straight superstructure complex of heterosexuality break you down and force you back into the closet. The term implies a level of strength, wisdom, and integrity and so I'm a little fretful to use that term on myself because, looking at the path my sexuality has taken, I'm not really sure I can use that term for myself.
Then again I looked up the word "Elder" on Urban Dictionary and aside from the smutty implications it has for Mormons there was a definition that read: "Gay men who prefere[sic] to take cock from behind." This definition was followed by the various refining elements that read: #fudge packer, #rump roaster, #fag, #gay, #butt pirate. I've never honestly considered "butt piracy" because I've no idea whether that job comes with any sort of real benefits, and at this stage of my life and career working without health insurance just isn't an option. I do like the idea of taking cock from behind though so perhaps I will allow myself the title of "Elder Gay." It sounds like something I could put on my resume.
Watching that kid dance, and sitting next to my friend Alia Q and her boyfriend however, I felt a wonderful sense of place. Even if I didn't want to dance, and I found myself fine and dandy just sitting on the bench blowing bubbles and watching the younger queer kids have fun, the moment had a real sense of purpose and joy. It was my first official Pride Event. There had been one or two such events in my hometown of Tyler, but they were small affairs that didn't have the same level of teeth to them. Attending this event, even if it was during the last two hours of the official day, was a chance to be out, to really be out, and be happy. And if nothing else, realize that I really was an "elder gay."
Suicide has been haunting me more and more lately. Not that I'm seriously considering taking my own life, I've promised three of my friends that I wouldn't, and while I know that sounds like a soft promise these three women are the sort of people who would hold a severe grudge against me and I'm almost positive all of them would immediately consult necromancy just to bring me back and kick my ass. Though I'm sure in fact my punishment would be something far more benign like being forced to watch insurance seminar power-point presentations and therefore all the more cruel.
But as my regular reader might remember, just a few months ago I lost my friend Savannah Blair to suicide. Not long before this Chester Bennington had decided to take his own life by hanging himself. Having recently begun reading all of William Shakespeare's plays I began a book entitled The Medical Mind of Shakespeare and discovered there was an entire chapter dedicated to Suicide. And just in the last week of writing this essay Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade have both killed themselves. This series of losses all seemed to be one long endless reminder of the disease of depression, and so on the morning before the actual Longview Pride festival I decided to sit down and finish reading David Sedaris's latest book Calypso. Sedaris is one of my favorite authors and is consistently funny and so I thought it might be a great way to have a laugh and prepare myself for the days festivities. I opened the book, started reading, and d iscovered several passages of the book dealt with the recent suicide of his sister Tiffany.
I heaved a heavy sigh, muttered the sentiment "fucking really?" and read the book in one long burst. I can't say that by the end I'd come to a better place, but I had become sadder because I realized that I would probably never have the gumption to feed one of my eventual tumors to a snapping turtle.
Calypso is a book that, like the rest of Sedaris's oeuvre, is about observing the absurdity of everyday existence, while also managing to find some human statement in our faults. Sedaris doesn't just acknowledge that he has selfish or cruel thoughts about other people, he simply writes them down turning them into the narrative of everyday life. And this honesty over time just becomes part of the sarcasm, satire, and the general method. His prose is always self-effacing while also managing to be self-promoting, and by the end of just one of his essays the reader has almost always come to some kind of conclusion that Sedaris is doing his best to stay one step ahead of the joke he's turning himself into.
But Calypso felt different from his other books because it possessed a sharper bite that I suspect comes with growing older, and also perhaps from losing a sibling to suicide.
In one of the essays, A House Divided, Sedaris describes walking down a beach near a house his family was renting out, and talking about their sister when others sister Lisa mentions the mode of death. She's interrupted briefly by a woman walking a dog and then casually mention that Tiffany took her own life with a plastic bag. Asphixiation is supposed to be one of the miserable ways to go, I know this because my wife tells me things like that all the time. She reads essays and Reddit posts by doctors and scientists and supposedly strangling is unbearably painful. Sedaris doesn't mention this but he notes something about the tool used to take his sister's life:
It's hard to find a bag without writing on it—the name of a store, most often. Lowe's it might read. SAFEWAY. TRUE VALUE. Does a person go through a number of them before making a selection, or, as I suspect, will any bag do, regardless of the Ironic statement it might make? This is what was going through my mind when Lisa stopped walking and turned to me asking, "Will you do me a favor?"
"Anything," I said, so grateful to have her alive and beside me.
She held out her foot, "Will you tie my shoe?"
"Well…sure," I said, "But can you tell me why?"
She sighed, "My pants are tight and I don't feel like bending over." (62-3).
This gave me something to think about because my pants are often tight at work and I own almost no laceless shoes, yet I always stoop down to tie them if they become unlaced. This terrifies me as there is a set of stairs at the library that I'm sure is going to kill me. But after this I think about what kind of plastic bag I would use if I decided to asphyxiate myself and this becomes a problem. Almost all of the plastic bags in my possession are ones my wife has brought home after one of her endless shopping trips and these tend to usually be from Hobby Lobby. Its may sound vain on my part but there would be nothing so gosche as to kill myself and then be found with a Hobby Lobby bag wrapped around my head. The people who find me may suspect I support the corporation's philosophy of denying birth control coverage in employee health insurance, or else that my sex-life was so awful and/or nonexistent that I had to take up a hobby to fill the time. I think if I had to use any sort of bag I would want it to be from someplace like Half Price Books or Barnes & Noble, that way the medical examiner would think I was cultured, or at least a reader, or at least someone who spent their time around books which is something I suspect at least most people would like to appear to be.
I know it's morbid, but suicide is still to me one last means of controlling my fate in this universe. Since I have no use for religion, and because my wife refuses to take up ballroom dancing with me, the only real means I have of staving off the inevitable realization that my life has no meaning is to dwell on death, and this in part tends to push me to thoughts, or considerations of suicide. Before Louis C.K. was rightfully skewered by the #MeToo movement I did watch him pretty regularly and he had a sentiment that was best expressed, "You don't have to do anything, because you can always kill yourself." This sentiment was one that made me laugh, but I realized that it was one that had also appeared before in Albert Camus's book The Myth of Sisyphus.
He begins his book by noting:
There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that the philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts thee heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect. (3).
Suicide is, ultimately, about survival. The people that one sees moving about, shopping for groceries, urinating on public busses, picking their nose when they think no one is looking, and giving their boyfriends hand jobs in the far back corners of a public library, are ultimately people who survived past the impulse to kill themselves. It's absurd, and ridiculous, but each person has found some conclusion that amounted to, "No, I need to keep living today."
My reason tends to be coffee, books, movies, Deadlands, and orgasms. Each of these brings me a tremendous amount of pleasure, and if I'm being honest I'd like to have more experiences with them before I finally shuffle off this mortal coil.
Calypso is a book that, while reading it, I kept thinking about because, ultimately, it seems to be defined by a recurring theme of being a survivor. Sedaris writes about the frailties of his body, the problematic dynamic he has with his father, suffering a gastro-intestinal virus during a book tour, having a tumor removed, losing his sister to suicide, and finally just surviving to the age he has lived to.
Looking at a later passage in The One(s) Who Got Away Sedaris asks his partner Hugh how many men he slept with before they settled down together. As Hugh counts men up well past the number fifty Sedaris observes his jealousy, the difference in their physical attractiveness, but then also the fact that both of them are still there. He writes,
By what miracle had neither of us attracted AIDS? How had we gotten away? I don't just mean later, when people knew to be safe, but back in the days when it didn't have a name and no one understood how it spread. One of the men Hugh had lived with—a professor he had his first year of college—had died of it in the late eighties, and surely there were others, on both my side and his. Yet for some reason we'd escaped, had prospered, even. Now here we were, the shadows lengthened, our spaghetti growing old, as he hit the half-hundred mark, then blithely sailed beyond it.
Whore. (159).
It is nothing compared to living with a man for several decades and scoring up an impressively sluttish roster of former lovers, but as I sat at the Pride Event next to my friend Q who was clapping and regularly saying, "Yes queers you DO IT!" I was struck by the fact that we were both survivors, Q more so than I. She had been far closer to Savannah that I was. I couldn't tell you her favorite film while she was alive, nor her favorite book, nor could I even tell you her fucking birthday, and yet over the last few months I've had the audacity to label her as a friend. What I suppose connected us was our mutual associations and our working together, and I suppose Gay Movie Night. But what I find, what I return to over and over again is that both Sav and I were, until her end, mutually suicidal. The only difference is Sav stopped finding a reason to go on, whereas Q and I had.
Reading this short passage again I realized David Sedaris very much qualifies for my previous definition of "Elder Gay," because along with the previous work another of his essays in Calypso titled A Modest Proposal he tackles the development of Gay Marriage in the United States. Sedaris is honest about the fact that he'd never considered marriage. He writes:
The Supreme Court ruling tells every gay fifteen-year-old living out in the middle of nowhere that he or she is as good as any other dope who wants to get married. To me it was a slightly mixed-message, like saying we're all equally entitled to wear Dockers to the Olive Garden. Then I spoke to my accountant, who's as straight as they come, and he couldn't have been more excited. "Fox tax purposes, you and Hugh really need to act on this," he told me.
"But I don't want to," I said. "I don't believe in marriage."
He launched into a little speech, and here's the thing about about legally defined couples: they save boatloads of money, especially when it comes to inherited property. My accountant told me how much we had to gain, and I was like, "Is there a waiting period? What documents do I need?" (125).
Words like equity, inheritance, benefits, insurance, and escrow are words that are steadily becoming more and more relevant to my day to day existence. They suggest, I suppose, a worldliness or at least that you have a head on your shoulders and that you know where you're "going" in life. I need to know that I'm going to have at least few bucks in my bank account before I can apply for a loan, I need to have a credit score, and I need to have something for collateral. These realizations are not epiphanies, they're just day to day realities that come with surviving.
Watching that young man while I adjusted my silk gloves and straightening the hem of my kilt, I saw someone who wasn't wondering about whether or not his dad "accepted" his lifestyle, I didn't see a young man who was wondering how he was going to "survive" a miserable biological assault on the homosexual community, and I didn't see a young man struggling to make sense about whether his gender identity and sexuality meant there was something morally wrong with his very existence. I just saw a young man possessed by music and having a fucking blast. And while I blew my bubbles and watched his butt wiggle about I was happy for him. I wanted him to be happy, happy in the ways I hadn't been but wanted to be when I was younger. Happy in the ways I wish my friend Sav could have been during her life. His body and mind hadn't yet been afflicted with the realities of things like the development of tumors, low bank funds, or the suicide of a friend.
And so maybe as I think about it, perhaps I need to adjust the working definition of what an "elder gay" actually is. Getting older, surviving to become older, is in someways a mix of resentment and fondness for youth. It's the desire for the ones that come after you to have fun without fear of personal or societal retribution, while at the same time hating them for having so much liberty. Being a queer man who stayed in the closet until he was 26 I envy this next generation of young queer people who hopefully, if I make my life something that matters, won't be afraid to come out and live their sexuality as they so chose. I envy that their survival won't be as afflicted with the struggle to justify or explain their desire to a warring camp of people who would rather they just didn't exist in the first place. I hope for a generation of young queer people who treat marriage the same way straight people do, just something you do when you stop dancing at parties and instead sit off to the sides blowing bubbles wondering if you're supposed to go to work on Monday and whether or not you should have really spent $50 on rainbow buttons and flags instead of a savings bond.
Surviving can be a drag, but at least there's the chance to have a few more orgasms, and maybe feed one of your tumors to a snapping turtle.
All quotes cited from Calypso were taken from the First Edition Hardback edition published by Little, Brown & Company. All quotes cited from The Myth of Sisyphus were provided care of the paperback Vintage International edition.
I've provided a link to the definition of "Elder" provided to me care of Urban Dictionary. I had no idea that Mormons were such a kind bunch, I guess you learn something new everyday. Yet another reason to prolong my life if only to understand further the intricacies of mormon sexuality. Anyway, enjoy:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Elder
I really wanted to start this essay out with the following statement: "I attended my first "real" Pride Parade with a Llama, a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in my backpack, and wearing a kilt." It was a lovely sentence that was completely true, but technically, like I said before, I had been to an actual parade in my home town already. Still, I at least got some great photographs.
Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Art, Comics/Graphic Novels, Essay, Fun Home/Alison Bechdel, History, Prime Numbers, Satire/Humor, Sexuality, Writing
#43, A History of the Breast, Amanda Palmer, Boobs, Breast Milk, Breast Milk as Menstrual Blood, Breasts, Breasts and Fruit, Breasts Vs Boobs, Brian K. Vaughn, Cunnilingus, Desert Hearts, Diana Cage, Essay, Fiona Staples, Free the Breast, Fun Home, graphic novel, Holt/Cold, Humor, Hypersexualization of Female Breasts, Jean Fouquet, Katy Perry, Katy Perry Elmo, Katy Perry's Boobs, Knockers, Marilyn Yalom, May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, Nicki Minaj, Nicki Minaj's Boobs, Pound the Alarm, Prime Numbers, Saga, sex, Sexual politics, Sexual Rhetoric, The Art of Asking, The Lesbian Sex Bible, The Travels of Marco Polo, Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels, Women Can Breastfeed WHEREVER THE FUCK THEY WANT, Writing, Yes I wrote an entire essay about boobs I know I write a lot about sex between men but I like women too you know
Thought experiment, file #43: consideration of the prominences located on the upper ventral region of the torso of homo sapiens sapiens, specifically of the female sex. Thought Experiment shall concern itself with the following: What's the deal with breasts and boobs yo?
[000.0001__initial concerns]
Boobs are not the same thing as breasts. Breasts are parts of women's bodies responsible for feeding babies, and babies are pure, and innocent, and sexless. When was the last time you saw a sexy baby? Case and point. Boobs are different from breasts then because when I think of boobs I think of pornography. I think of beer commercials. I think of skinny women with their boobs packed into bras which are designed to press the flesh and blood of their bodies up close to the base of their chin so that we can see that flesh flex and ripple and flex while the women smile and entice.
Boobs to me is sex, but is this an empty observation?
Plenty of writers, commentators, academics, and cultural theorists who need tenure and so they write about something sexy to sell a book and help the review board forget about that incident last spring with the tennis star that left him divorced and looking for cash, have all written about the sexualization, and in many cases over-sexualization, of human breasts. It's important to note that these theorists have almost entirely centered their attention on the female breast because that tends to be where this sexualization takes place.
Meditating on or observing the rhetoric of noticing sexy-boobs is really just an empty gesture. Unless one can add something to the argument a writer is really just masturbating on the page. I have tried at least twenty times to write about breasts on the internet. Doing my best to scrape together boob-puns and picture after picture of clever and terrible innuendos that rely on breasts for the joke to work. In the end all I've done is observe a lot of boobs, and I'm not sure whether I've really learned anything from the experience.
[004.7884t____first observation]
Buzzfeed has dedicated an entire "article," if you can call the collection of photo series they do articles at all, over what Katy Perry has used to cover her breasts during performances and music videos. This includes, but is not limited to the following: whipped cream dispensers, candy, muffins, cupcakes, shells, pockets, a banana, film reels and even Elmo's face. This last was purposefully salacious because she had recently appeared on Sesame Street performing her song Holt/Cold with Elmo and many mothers of children who viewed the program complained that her outfit was "unnecessarily sexual," specifically, her boobs were bouncing around through the whole thing.
For my own part, if I have to pick a favorite it would be none of these because while the woman is certainly curvaceous, it's her thighs that often leave me a puddle on the floor. I have no reasonable explanation for this. There's just something about Katy Perry's thighs.
This leaves me in the minority however because the mountain of discourse around Katy Perry's body has to do with the big bouncing mountains of writing and blogging material on her chest: her boobs.
It seems those mounds of flesh are an endless fertile crescent for creeps on the internet who write up manifestos using creepy and fucking fuck expressions like "mounds of flesh." It's just that every time Katy Perry appears somewhere in culture somebody somewhere has to comment about her breasts. This is nothing new, because for close to two decades society decided to talk about Madonna's vagina and who or what was visiting it regularly. Katy Perry is not Madonna, but like Madonna Katy Perry has used her body in her visual art as a means of establishing some sort of aesthetic. Her imagery tends to be sexual in nature, but unlike Madonna who tended to fuck on screen for attention, Katy Perry has often used her breasts to be both sexual, and funny. Her boobs aren't pornographic, they're something to look at but also to laugh at, and so while the rhetoric tends to be "look at Katy Perry's boobs" the aesthetic is usually to the effect of, "Well, duh, she's pointing right to them."
[#0111.54__second Considerations]
My favorite book of all time is Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and I've written somewhere around four or five essays about the book. In fact having finished it again recently I've considered returning to it and writing yet another in a long line of kiss-
assery. The power of the graphic novel to me is the combination of honesty, attention to detail, and the near constant literary references that make me feel special because I have a fucking Masters degree. The book is always an inspiration though, and I'm better for having it in my life because it helped me realize that I'm just as attracted to men as I am to women.
There's plenty of frames in the book that make me pause and consider Bechdel's aesthetic, but one frame always stops me. Allison is in college reading, devouring really, numerous books about feminism and lesbian identity and in one scene she is reading a novel while eating and Bechdel provides the quote:
This frame has the impact on me that it does because when I was young, and just starting to write reguarly, I would often compare a woman's breasts and boobs to fruits like melons, peaches, or…yeah that's pretty much it. I mean, what monster or hack would compare a woman's breast to a dragon fruit? I suspect part of being a young writer, a young male writer, I should specify, is comparing body parts to food. I suspect this is a habit because when you're young you're still in high school and every high school teacher has to bombard their students with relentless symbolism because that's all you're going to do in college level English classes, apparently. Discuss how boobs feel like peaches, or jelly, or pillows, or sponges. Why can't men write about a woman's breast without using something else to describe them? Why do boobs have to be anything apart from boobs?
Being honest here, I think it's because men don't have boobs, we just have cocks and balls, and cocks are just these hard poles we rub until goo shoots out and balls are too tender to squeeze. When a man feels a breast however it is very much like the rest of a woman's body: soft and alien. There isn't any real frame of reference because there's nothing a man can feel on himself that compares to a woman's breast, and because fruits tend to be soft and "fleshy" and sweet it stands to reason that they're the first thing a man is likely to think about when he's trying to give his reader an erection.
This leaves a male writer's female reader in a bit of an awkward position because it's highly unlikely she's ever compared her knockers to ripe figs or honeydew melons. She'll probably just refer to them as breasts, and leave the word "knockers" to male writers like Mel Brooks.
[04041.0009__third anomaly]
I have many books in my library that deal with men, specifically, how and why men fuck, with each other. I have very few books about lesbian sexuality, and this often leaves me, to quote the great French philosopher Michel Foucault, pretty fuckin bummed in myself. Still there are a few books about women in my library, more than a few, and between my considerations of Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj (she's next you see) I found a few books that deal with women and their anatomy.
A History of the Breast by Marilyn Yalom has been sitting in my "to-read" pile for close to
a year, though in fact calling this now functioning shelf full of books a "pile" is an exercise in self-delusion. I have a problem and I intend to handle it, that's what retirement is for. The book is unique however, not just because the cover is adorned with Jean Fouquet's Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels which shows Mary as a European aristocratic woman bearing a single orb-resembling breast to her child, but also because it is part of a niche collection of books that center their attention on a single body part. Someone was able to fill an entire book with concepts and ideas that people have formulated about breasts, and while I haven't read the book in it's entirety I'll open it from time to time and read a passage, and this one struck me at this reading:
Husbands often favored the use of a wet nurse, since it was believed that couples should refrain from sexual intercourse while the mother was nursing. It was widely thought that a mother's milk was a form of vaginal blood, transformed from blood to milk as it passed from the womb to the breasts. The agitation of intercourse would have the consequences of corrupting the milk supply, curdling the milk, and might even kill off any fetuses that managed to be conceived. As for the aesthetics of breast feeding, many husbands did not like the appearance of their wives with a child at the breast. Nursing, a praise-worthy occupation for ancient goddesses and the Virgin Mary, was not considered attractive when practiced by highborn ladies. Many upper-class women, subservient to the eroticized ideal of a youthful bosom, were thus obliged to entrust their babies to wet nurses. (70).
I'm honestly not sure which part is more surprising here, the fact that husbands didn't think breast-feeding was sexy or that breast milk is apparently menstrual blood. I should probably go with the blood though since men being stupid will hardly be much of a revelation.
I've never fully understood the male reaction to the Menstrual cycle given the fact that, as men, we're supposed to be doing nothing but thinking about vaginas all the time. It would seem men like vaginas, but only when they don't have to actually think about how they work. At work in this dynamic however is the difficulty of the Breast Vs Boob paradigm. Men like boobs when they're these big squishy bags of fun that don't have babies or reproduction attached to them, but the moment men consider a woman's actual biology a boob becomes a breast again.
Breasts are reminders that sexuality is not a sterile or artificial construct, but a messy exchange of fluids that results in procreation and new life. When a Boob starts to leak milk it must be connected to a vagina, and there's nothing like leaky Boobs then to turn men off.
[5555.00301__fourth argument]
I want to read Marco Polo's Travels. I bought the book at the PeaPicker, a local bookstore in my hometown of Tyler, and I've always wanted to sit down and actually read it. There's this idea that I would be really touching history by listening to the records of one of those who came before. This has nothing to do with Boobs, but I feel like it might have something to do with boobs. Or not. It's still a nice thought.
[5555.00302__fifth observation]
Nicki Minaj is another one of those women in recent times who has gained a certain prominence in society for being a skilled musician, but also because she has very, very large boobs. And, to note, a rather large heinie. I say boobs and not breasts because there is usually not much earthiness to Nicki Minaj, or at least not in the songs and videos I've watched.
I wrote an entire essay about Nicki Minaj and her boobs, ultimately arriving at the conclusion that the sexuality model she was offering in the video for her song Pound the Alarm was largely artificial given the fact the entire aesthetic was building on carnival. As a mode of celebration carnival goes back to the Middle Ages where people would celebrate the life and death of the year by celebrating sexuality but also death and with this came many jokes about poop and farting.
Pound the Alarm has no reference to feces, or bodily odors for that matter, but it does have lots of Boobs. Nicki herself is always the center of the video and her breasts, her boobs, are always part of the display.
She bounces them.
She jiggles them.
She pushes them together with her arms and wiggles her butt.
And throughout the short film when the music hits a spike she will thrust her shoulders back making her boobs pop out at the reader. There's nothing inherently wrong about this, and I don't want to be the male writer who says Minaj isn't allowed to advertise her body and sexuality. But looking at Minaj there is always a sexualization of her body being displayed or encouraged. Her breasts are not earthy or biological, they are part of some sterile sexual performance which is at the heart of her entire public persona. Sex is not about procreation it's about fun, and her boobs are just part of the fun. Great big
jiggly bouncing fun at that.
Observing the observation of Nicki Minaj's boobs is much like the observation of the observation of Katy Perry's Boobs then. Whatever merriment and mirth is derived from watching whatever Nicki or Katy decorate their boobs with, at the end of the day they remain boobs rather than breasts, and the understanding is there will never be any babies suckling on them any-time soon.
[0777.091__Seventh Seventh Seventh]
In Desert Hearts Cay seduces Vivian finally by stripping naked and refusing to leave Vivian's bed despite her protests. Put aside the fact the scene would flop appallingly if Cay were a man, Cay's refusal eventually succeeds and the pair of them finally making love and thus providing a sexual denouement to the tension which has been building during the entire film. The first time I watched this scene however was not when I was twelve and supremely and erotically fixated upon "lesbian" sexuality (and I quote that because "lesbian" porn exists and it definitely wasn't made for lesbians, or at least not the ones I know, they clip their fingernails). It was Gay Movie Night and I was hanging out with a group of friends all of whom were queer women.
The sex didn't show any cunnilingus, it was just Cay and Vivian kissing and eventually suckling on each other's nipples. It was shortly after this act that Vivian experienced an orgasm. None of my friends were entirely sure how this occurred, in fact there was a dubiousness that lasted until we finally shrugged and someone simply suggested, "Well, they were just chillin." Chillin, of course, became synonymous with orgasm.
I became convinced rather quickly that lesbians possessed some secret power to bring their partners to orgasm simply by touching each other's nipples and so I went to my library and looked in my copy of The Lesbian Sex Bible. Breasts only appear twice in this book, and only one has an entire quote, it reads as follows:
TOUCHING BREASTS AND CHESTS
Everyone loves breasts. We either want ours touched or we want to touch someone else's—and often we want both. Touching her breasts and nipples releases a feel-good hormone called oxytocin that gets her excited and ready for sex. If your lover is more masculine, she might find that having her breasts cupped feels too girly. Instead, concentrate on playing with her nipples. Pull and pinch the nipples, roll them between your fingers, grip her tits girly, or stroke her chest as if it were flat. (84).
This passage was rather interesting largely because it contained the words "breasts" three times, and the word "tits" once. Tit is a word I've avoided because it honestly sounds too masculine, or else too sharp. I like the word Boob though because it has a linguistic curvature that's fun to say. "Tits" isn't fun, but neither really is "breasts."
Whatever the case the passage left me disappointed because it revealed nothing of Lesbians' secret power to give each other orgasms simply by stimulating each other's nipples. Such is life.
[8.08__a return before final assessment]
I could read Marco Polo's Travels, but I also want to read War & Peace before I die, and I haven't even touched my hardback Plutarch's Lives. There's so many books I want to read but I don't have time for. This thought has some connection to Boobs, I just don't know what it is yet.
[011111111.111111110__another return before final assessment]
Amanda Palmer painted her almost naked body so that one half of her was the outward physical form, but the other half showed her muscles, tendons, nerves, and the child gestating in her uterus. She was pregnant at the time and so the belly that protruded outward from her physical form was not just for show, she was actually pregnant. This was not the first time Amanda Palmer "revealed" her breasts to the public. The internet abounds with pictures of her either in concert, in videos, or at public events periodically bare chested and simply not giving a fuck. As she is want to do. Even beside me while I write is a copy of her book The Art of Asking, which has her naked and covering her breasts with her arms while holding a flower.
There's so much to be impressed about by Amanda Palmer, but I return to her New York performance because the image of an almost naked, pregnant woman standing perfectly still outside a library is something just indescribable. Her bare breasts are part of a performance, but rather than simply be about showing Boob, her breasts remain breasts because of the baby in her tummy that is clearly up for display.
It was a moment of pure honesty and a reminder of the biological function and purpose of breasts that was both challenging and fascinating.
The last few years have seen a rising of the "free the breast campaign" as women the world over have begun to push back against the sexualization, or over-sexualization of breasts, demanding the same rights as men to bare their chests without fear of social or legal reprisal. This cannot be attributed solely to Amanda Palmer, but the willingness to show her body as a means of both demonstrating the power of the body, as well as its own naturalness surely was a knock to the supremacy of Boobs.
[final thoughts]
The cover of Saga Volume 1 and issue #1, shows Alana holding the baby Hazel to her chest where the babe is suckling gently. The cover, and the book itself, garnered widespread condemnation by certain comic book fans who objected that a "family book" had such advanced material. The only problem with this criticism is that Saga was never a "family" book as it contains numerous scenes of violence and sexuality, however the initial charge of corruption due to breastfeeding remains the best example of the final separation between Breasts and Boobs.
Human beings are an ego driven species, and we tend to think about fucking a lot. And in the Information Age where millions of images of breasts can appear with just a few clicks of a button, the sexualization of breasts appears to be an seemingly unending, unmovable onslaught. Likewise the conversations about the hyper-sexualization of breasts can become a pedantic affair because conversations about sexuality can become heated rather quickly. In an environment where people don't even like discussing condoms how can one create an atmosphere where nuance about women's breasts can take place?
My own thoughts here are random, spotty, and really only amount to a collection of quick observations. In fact upon consideration it seems fair to argue that this "essay" was in fact just an excuse to download a lot of pictures of topless women. This is not a nuanced discussion at all, and Boobs remain Boobs and Breasts remain Breasts.
It seems the only sane response is to appreciate breasts as sexual protuberances until it's time for the baby to be nursed. Because, and this is important, at the end of the day the kid's gotta eat more than I need to appreciate a great pair of boobs. And besides, unless Playboy goes bankrupt anytime soon, there's always gonna be a space for looking at Boobs.
All Quotes cited from A History of the Breast by Marilyn Yalom were taken from the Hardback Knopf edition. All Quotes from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Allison Bechdel were from the Hardback Houghlin Mifflin Edition. All Quotes taken from The Lesbian Sex Bible by Diana Cage were taken from the Hardback Quiver Press edition.
Below is a link to the aforementioned article listing the varies garments employed to dress Katy Perry's now famous breasts. I hope the reader enjoys and also takes the time to learn a little bit of history about breasts after "reading" this "article":
https://www.buzzfeed.com/whitneyjefferson/things-katy-perry-has-worn-on-her-breasts?utm_term=.bmKDBV1YY#.si8Z6zBRR
Please find below a link to the wikipedia page for breast. Why? Because read the reference section. Seriously Wikipedia is changing, and even though your high school English teacher told you to never, never, NEVER use Wikipedia the only reason she told you that was because your lazy ass would have just copy/pasted the whole fucking thing and then you wouldn't have learned anything. But now that you're an adult, you can scroll down to the "references" section and see what research ACTUALLY went into producing the material that helped you bullshit your way through twelfth grade Health Class. Anyway, enjoy the page, and the boobs, and, more importantly, the FACTS about the boobs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast
Below I've provided a link to the World Health Organization(WHO), specifically a page dealing with breast-feeding that provides general information, links to resources, and general health information.
http://www.who.int/topics/breastfeeding/en/
I've also provided something similar for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/
And finally here also is a link to Planned Parenthood:
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/breastfeeding
*****Writer's Note*****
On one final note I would like to offer my apologies to Katy Perry for my weird, creepy comments about her thighs. I'm not saying they're not lovely to look at or that…that…
Ahem, sorry, as I was saying it was wrong of me to…to…
You know what I've lost whatever dignity I had here. I resign myself to being a pervert. Remember me well friends. And please don't look at my browser history. It is a tale of sadness.
BH, BU, & OE
Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Essay, Literature, Philosophy, Science, Still Life, Writing
Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, Essay, glasses, Irish Breakfast Tea, Joshua Jammer Smith, Literature, Mug, Science, Stephen Hawking, still life, tea
The Case for Reparations: A White Tower Review
Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Essay, History, Literature, Politics, Race, Writing
American Exceptionalism, Between the World and Me, Bill Maher, economic disparity, economic disparity between blacks and whites, economics, Essay, Federal Housing Administration, GI Bill, history, Home Owner's Loan Corporation, HR 40, Jim Crow Laws, National Sin, Politics, race, Real Estate Redlining Racism, Redlining, slavery, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, The Beautiful Struggle, The Case for Reparations, We Were Eight Years in Power, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, Writing
I don't watch television. That's honestly how I get so much reading done. That, and I come from a position of privilege of which some I can promise is based on my whiteness.
Somewhere in between discovering that Corner Bakery sells the best coffee I've ever had, scoring a full-time position at the Tyler Public Library, taking care of washing the dishes and doing the laundry, spending time with my family, and starting a new blog dedicated to posting photos of left-over plastic from BOB the Library's 3-D Printer, I somehow managed to read Ta-Nehisi Coates's new book. We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy isn't the first of Coates's books that I've taken the effort to read. In fact this year alone I've read his other books which include the first volume of his Black Panther series, Between the World and Me, and his memoir The Beautiful Struggle. All of these books eventually came through the book drop at the library, and each time that they did I would scramble to pick them up and read them.
It wasn't just that I wanted to read these books because I had heard the name Ta-Nehisi Coates before and knew that he was quickly becoming a public intellectual that was worth reading to understand the public discourse. I picked up any book written by the man because his words were scored by an incredible conviction and beauty. Every time I pick up a book or essay by Coates I know that I am reading a writer who believes in every word he puts on the page, and pays careful attention to the arguments he's crafting with them. And to be honest the last writer who I honestly believed had that same attention to detail was Christopher Hitchens. I don't like to add the title of "great writer" to many people I read because that would ultimately cheapen the title, but I have no hesitation in saying that I believes Coates is a great writer.
As usual though I'm ashamed to admit that I was aware of his presence in the zeitgeist and culture before I actually took the time to read him. The first time I had ever even heard of the man he was appearing on Real Time with Bill Maher in promotion of his essay that had recently been published in The Atlantic: The Case for Reparations. My wife and I had recently moved into an apartment in my in-laws garage, we were just married and needed a place to live before graduate school started up, and every night at dinner they usually had the television on. Coming from a home where people sit and talk with the television set off and in another room there was a culture shock element, but I watched the show paying attention to the interview because I had heard of the controversy that this magazine article had caused. Coates wasn't a black man pointing out that slavery was a vice and a black mark on the United States cultural history, he was arguing that the United States had a moral obligation to not only acknowledge the reverberations of slavery, but to try and actually atone for it.
I also remember Bill Maher teaching Coates the old joke about black men caring more about their Cadillacs than their houses.
This was my introduction to Coates, and while I recognized there was a brilliant mind that was worth reading, I was dealing with the new territory of being a newlywed, beginning graduate school, and starting this blog which, at the time, was pretty much one long series of kiss-ass articles about Christopher Hitchens and George Orwell. My regular reader will note that times have changed and now I only really kiss Christopher Hitchens's ass. As such Coates was left largely unread, and unappreciated by me until early this year when I picked up Between the World and Me, and I recognized that the man was possibly one of the greatest writers since James Baldwin, a writer whom Coates has been compared to numerous times and fittingly so.
While I do have every intent to get around to reviewing that book, after finishing We Were Eight Years in Power I recognized how important The Case for Reparations was, not just for Coates's cultural legacy, but for any reader who recognizes humanity and the importance of bridging the gaps that can sometimes form. It's not too much to write that the United States is plagued by it's own cultural sins in terms of slavery and the steady abuse and genocide of Native American populations. Yet frequently the experience of an American citizen who opens up this conversation is one of either quick dismissal or outright anger. Coates himself notes this early on in the essay as he notes the immediate and anticipated rebuttal of this argument:
Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past twenty-five years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for "appropriate remedies." (178).
If the reader has ever actually discussed such a matter with friends or family they may have had such a reaction. Thanksgiving was a time in our nation's history where people would gather and eat and celebrate just being together, but as of the last six decades it seems that tradition has largely been replaced by correcting your grandfather about what a transgender person actually is, and listening to your aunt discuss the dangers of GMOs and the importance of "healing crystals." Reparations does not get the same amount of air-time that these "sexy" issues do, but when Coates's article was published it created a bit of a storm in the public largely because many people felt threatened or vulnerable even if they had no real stake in this argument.
And this habit and feeling is best explained by Coates just a few paragraphs later.
That HR 40 has never—under either Democrats or Republicans—made it to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you'd expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America's crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world's oldest democracy? (179).
I anticipate the reaction of some of my regular readers, Why are you bothering with this liberal, self-loathing bullshit. Coates's article does nothing but further tarnish the image of the United States as a nation of possibility. Yes there have been troubles that have faced certain portions of the population, but what good does it do bemoaning the events of the past?
This is a difficult question at first to answer, largely because it reeks of a kind of national and personal solipsism.
The recent debates which have taken place over the removal of Civil War statues that bear the images of Confederate generals and soldiers has sparked debates, not just on FOX News, but all over the United States and no one is entirely free of it. If you are a person such as myself who lives in a small town in East Texas you're sure to encounter at least one or two such persons who feels compelled to inform you that removing statues is akin to erasing history, which is amusing because such people usually tend to be the kind of people who go into a library and never check out a book where actual history is recorded. For my own part I've tried to stay out of these debates largely because I want to avoid the headache, but the one position that I've clung to, which I do not mind shouting out into the infinite white noise that is the internet is that any argument which bothers to actually dig into the actual discourse that is history is worth consideration. And Coates's article does just that.
Coates follows the economic trends of a few individuals in Detroit, observing how African Americans became the prey of predatory real-estate deals that left an entire generation screwed out of any kind of reasonable mortgage. Coates observes the general trend in the city of Detroit alone in order to observe a larger trend in the history of the United States which was that African Americans typically were denied or deceived from achieving economic prosperity and some of the points made in the article shocked even me. Perhaps the most pernicious was the reality of the G.I. Bill, the government provision still in effect today which allows veterans to receive finincial benefits for college educations.
The oft-celebrated GI Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country's insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with White officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book The GI Bill that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits "that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title." (187).
This passage was difficult for me to read the first time, largely because I grew up in a house where stories about World War II were as common as stories about Ronald Reagan beating the Soviet Union using only his wit and his Iron Man technology which he built with his bare hands. In hindsight I'm pretty sure my dad was over-emphasizing Reagan's engineering skills. But the stories of World War II were always stories about heroes, and young men overcoming great odds to defeat the forces of real evil. It seems fitting that a narrative built on "othering" should blow up in my face and reveal, not a "Greatest Generation," but a generation of people who benefitted economically at the expense of others.
The GI Bill was one of the greatest economic boons in American history, and an entire generation of African Americans were denied access to it because FDR needed to secure a political legacy.
At the same time the GI Bill was opening doors for millions of Americans the Home Owner's Loan Corporation along with the Federal Housing Administration began opening loans which were dramatically reduced from previous mortgage rates thus allowing the possibility for lower income families to purchase homes and thus create a new standard of living. It became not only possible for United States citizens to buy homes, it becomes part of the national rhetoric. The key to success was not just gainful employment and finanicial success, owning a home was a sign that one was living the "american dream." And as my reader can surely guess, this too was denied African Americans as Coates points out.
That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards' code of ethics warned that "a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values." A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might includes madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and "a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites." (188)
Coates is careful to remind the reader that this redlining was supported by the federal government, and thus another in a long line of economic obstacles was praised as an overwhelming success by New Deal supporting liberals. It's strange to me how many progressive friends of mine who still praise the New Deal and FDR as some kind of beacon what happens when government works, yet Coates article, along with mountains of historical discourse have largely revealed the New Deal to be one lord line of fuck-ups and FDR to be an adulterous egomaniac.
But nevertheless this passage, much like the one actually shocked me the first time I read it because I had never been taught that. No teacher had ever mentioned the fact that African Americans were outright denied access to reduced mortgages, though it was something I had assumed given my knowledge of the "white flight" which helped create the culture of suburbia.
These discoveries illuminate something about the education I received, namely that the complexities inherent to the African American experience was something that was largely ignored or white-washed. I read books about the Civil Rights movement and slavery, and so I was given the general outline of the travesties that blacks my home country have been subjected to, but the nuances and details were largely ignored. And this negation of details leads me to a deeper conclusion about my country, which is that there is an unwillingness to really atone for what has been done.
This isn't just my observation, because Coates to make this point far more eloquently than I can.
And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collectively biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering Alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.
Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill gotten and selective in its distribution. (202).
He goes on in the next paragraph saying,
What I'm talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I'm talking abut is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. (202).
Every nation has their own sin, and every nation has their own regrettable action. This isn't a truly original thought for other writers better than me have expressed it far more clearly than I ever could. Recognizing their sin however has allowed these nations to move forward, and while it hasn't by any means erased the evidence or awareness of their sin, it has allowed for a deepening understanding the failings in their humanity. The perception of perfection or moral superiority is a dangerous concept for a people to internalize because it allows for the possibility of "othering" other people. When any group believes themselves naturally superior and drafts a cultural rhetoric which justifies atrocity, or worse, freedom from responsibility then tragedy is soon to follow.
The United States is not immune from this trend because our history, our real history shows this to be true. Whether it was the consistent abuse and eventual genocide of Native Americans, the abuse against Irish immigrants during the 1800s, the general xenophobia against jews which has never truly abated in our culture, the institution of Slavery followed by the establishment of Jim Crow laws followed by the barbarity of Mass incarceration, the internment of the Japanese following Pearl Harbor, the manipulation of hispanic Americans during World War II which culminated in the atrociously named "Operation Wetback," the massacre of Wounded Knee, and while I could probably spend an entire page listing out the offenses of the United States this list is meant only to affirm one central point: the United States is not an innocent nation. There is blood on our hands, and for some reason no one really wants to acknowledge it and offer some kind of atonement. There is more an impulse to argue, "yes it happened, let's move on," which in itself is yet another form of denial of the issue.
This might just be the trend of history working against us, and it might be that the United States will never even consider reparations. This to me however would be a tragedy because it would suggest a real emotional insecurity of this nation which, supposedly, the greatest country in the world. The sign of a mature person is one who is willing and able to acknowledge their faults, it's someone who can admit when they've fucked up and offer a real recompense. There have been signs that this nation can and would do just that, but not to the extent that was really necessary.
Coates article isn't just a fascinating portrait of one of America's lasting sins against a portion of its populace, it's a real meditation about the nature of the democracy that many praise and enjoy. He is observing that it's easy to enjoy the benefits of a democracy when you're the privileged party, but then offers the question of what kind of democracy is it when that same group negates the reality that their success is coming at the expense of others? The Case for Reparations is not about arguing for a simple pay-off the African-American community, because money is an empty gesture. The health of a democracy is measure by the maturity of it's populace to understand what a real equality is, and so looking at The Case for Reparations I observe not just a beautifully written essay about the differing economic levels of blacks and whites, but a real call for Americans to recognize their past and deepen their emotional understanding of their culture's past.
Coates offers up just such a summation near the end of his article:
An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America's maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders. (207).
Finally sitting down to read The Case for Reparations was a marvel to me because with every word I recognized that Coates had established himself as a definitive and consequential voice in the body of American Letters. Reading this essay I realized how privileged I was to have the economic benefits that I did, and I considered how many white people I had met growing up who had been part of a long tradition of wealth. And at first while I intend to explore this notion of privilege, the larger concern for the health of a democracy seems far more, if not equally, relevant. I've watched in just the last few months how my country has become more and more divided over the issues of the past and race, and it seems, at first, like any kind of hope for a healthy and reasonable conversation is next to impossible.
In the face of this reality I admit with no hesitation that I feel afraid everyday. Each morning comes with it's own sorts of challenges, and the conversations seem to be getting more and more outlandish and violent. It behooves one to hope that there is space for a real conversation like the one The Case for Reparations opens up.
All it takes for democracy to fail is for people to feel that their voice has no place or relevance. All it takes for a democracy to implode is for people to stop talking because they're afraid of discomfort. The important conversations about this country's past are not going away, and so I am, in spite of everything, inspired by The Case for Reparations because Coates reminds me that the voice of individual citizens to argue about the nature of their democracy isn't just a matter of the past, it's a constant ever-changing discourse. What kind of democracy would we inhabit if we stopped trying?
All quotes taken from The Case for Reparations were cited from First Edition, hardback copy of We Were Eight Years in Power as published by One World Books. If the reader would be interested in reading the full article however they can follow the link below to The Atlantic's home webpage where the essay is posted. I highly recommend it, even if the reader is still unconvinced by my review, and even if they disagree with Coates's argument. It's worth taking a few moments to consider this essay and it's place in the larger discussion of race in the United States.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
I've also posted a video below where Coates discusses his article. There are many like it, and YouTube's A.I. being what it is it should provide you links to other videos where he discusses it. Unless your browsing history is different than mine in which case, I don't want to know.
I've included below a few essays which explore Ta-Nehisi Coates as well as the argument about Reparations. Enjoy:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/ta-nehisi-coates-and-a-generation-waking-up
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-reparations
And because I'm me, I'm also including a link to Adam Ruins Everything where he talks about the racist history of Redlining and how this has helped created wealth disparities between blacks and whites in the United States.
Underground Blue
Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Academic Books, Art, Comics/Graphic Novels, Essay, Feminism, Fun Home/Alison Bechdel, History, Literature, Masculinity Studies, Sexuality, Still Life, Writing
Academic Book, Alison Bechdel, Art, Comics, Essay, Essay Collection, Feminism, glasses, Hillary Chute, history, Joshua Jammer Smith, Lemon & Ginger, Literature, Masculinity Studies, Sexuality, still life, tea, tea strainer, Twining Tea, Why Comics?, Why Comics?: From Underground to Everywhere, Writers, Writing
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I'm Tired I've Been Down That Road Before I, Claudius Icarian Games Icarus Ice Cream that ISN'T Ice Cream Ida Tarbell Idealism identification Identity Identity Crisis Idris Elba If a woman is upset it's not because she's on her period it's because you're being a dick If they ask if you want Pepsi throw over the table throat punch the shit out of them and then proceed to burn that motherf@#$er down If you're reading this pat yourself on the back because you can read and that's awesome ignorance I have Measured Out My Life in Coffee Spoons and K Cups I know too many Michaels I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings I Like It Like That I Like it Like That: True Stories of Gay Male Desire Illuminated Manuscripts illusion Illusion of choice I Love Lucy I Love Lucy Mug I Love Penis...Mug iMac Imaginary Time imagination Immanuel Kant immigrants imperialism Imposter Complex Impressionists In Bed with David amd Jonathan incest Incorporation of images in Pedagogy Independence Day Independent Comics Indie Fiction Individual Initiative Individual Will Industrial Nightmare industry infidelity Infinite Jest Infinite Jest Blogs Infinite Possibility Infinity Informed Democracy Inherit the Wind Injustice innocence vs ignorance In One Person Inquisition insanity Insects Inside Out inspiration integrity intellectual Intellectual Declaration of Independance Intellectual masculinity Intellectual Parent Inter Library Loan internet interracial relationships Interview Inu Yoshi invert Invisible Man Invitation to a Beheading Ion IOWA iPad Ipecac iPhone ipod IRA I Racist Iran-Contra Irish Breakfast Tea Irish history Irish Writers I Ruck, Therefore I Am Isaac Asmiov Isaac Deutscher Isabel Allende Isabella St. James Ishmael Islam isolation Israel Issa Rae It It's an Honor It's illegal in the state of Texas to own more than six "realistic" vibrators It's time to adopt the Metric System in America for crying out loud It's truly truly difficult to find good coffee and by good coffee I mean the type that leaves you feeling as if you've actually tasted something beyond human understanding close to the furnace of all Italy Ivory Tower of Academia ivy I wandered lonely as a cloud I Want a Wife I Was a Playboy Bunny I Will Fight No More Forever I work at a Public Library J.D. 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