K.M. Soehnlein

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Henry Louis Gates

So the president, a professor and a cop are having a beer in the White House…. No, this is not the set-up to a joke, it’s actually happening: the unlikely event leading today’s news cycle. This little photo op—the aftermath of the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his home, by white Cambridge police sergeant James Crowley, an incident that’s been making front page news for a week—has been framed by President Obama as a “teachable moment,” an example of how dialogue can tamp the flames of racism and mistrust. Gates himself probably understands full well why he’s participating in this meeting. In the introduction to his book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, he writes, “I distrust the rhetoric of crisis.” As the center of the crisis has moved from Gates-as-victim to Obama-as-loose-canon, while Crowley stands firm, unapologetic, there’s been a whole lot of rhetoric from all corners. And so, as seems to be the doctrine of this president, it’s better to talk than to fight, even if the talk will be limited to what can feasibly be spoken under the glare of camera-flashes.

Perhaps Obama is once again demonstrating political agility, showing everyone how this kind of thing is done: Let’s clean up this little mess so we can get back to the bigger issues, like this whopper of a health care bill I’m trying to get passed. But there’s a risk to today’s event, the risk that the whole thing looks less like teaching than like backtracking—an attempt to unruffle the feathers of the law-and-order types who were vocally pissed when Obama said Crowley “acted stupidly” in ordering Gates out of his home and arresting him for disorderly conduct. In that sense, Obama seems to be doing the very thing that he’s been doing for months, to the frustration of many of his supporters, which is backing off his original strong, truthful language in order to “calibrate” for the sake of making sure everyone is a little bit satisfied at the end of the day.

In this case, the truth—that it was “stupid” of the Cambridge police to arrest a man in his own home for being disorderly, since in fact his “disorderly” behavior had been prompted by their insistence that his presence in his own home was suspicious—was apparently more than Obama could get away with speaking. This strikes me as absurd. As Jol’s New York Minutes noted:

For the Cambridge police to demand an apology from the president for calling their utterly inept actions ‘stupid’ is akin to a restaurant's demanding an apology from a food critic for pronouncing a pot of feces stew ‘unappetizing’ upon first bite.

But the story of Gates’s arrest has been, from the moment it rocketed into the news, a story of competing narratives. There are of course the contrasting versions of what happened that day between Gates and Crowley. But there are also the larger cultural narratives at work: the irony of the scholarly, elderly professor living in a good neighborhood but mistaken for a criminal by a neighbor; the narrative of the victimized black man, who no matter how successful he is—or, in Gates’s case, how elderly, disabled (he walks with a cane) or close to (or inside of) his own home he stands—is still a target for the cops; the narrative of the “uppity Negro,” dragged to the stockades when he tries to claim his power (a narrative that not only pertains to Gates’s arrest but to Obama’s backtracking); the narrative of snobbery: Gates the upper-middle class, well-connected, college-educated man speaking down to a civil servant (he allegedly yelled at Crowley, “Do you know who you’re messing with?”); the narrative of the good cop who for all his best intentions nonetheless can’t surpass the historical biases of his profession, can’t admit he’s wrong, won’t apologize and so, in the end, has to be pacified with that manliest of American beverages, a domestic beer.

The supreme irony for me is Henry Louis Gates himself: the author of, among other works, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, a series of essays about American black men who rose to cultural prominence and thus came to signify something about their race. After a lifetime of looking at black men’s lives, Gates himself is the black man in the spotlight, being looked at from every possible angle, being reduced from an individual to a symbol: of race, of class, of masculinity, of scholarship and education. The situation attached itself to ready-made narratives; were Gates to write about this incident, he’d likely return the protagonist some of his specificity, which is to say his dignity. Perhaps he soon will.

I just read Thirteen Ways, after finding it in used bookstore the very day the Cambridge police held a news conference to defend Crowley against Obama’s use of “stupidly.” I’d previously read Gates’s work piecemeal (most of the essays in Thirteen Ways were published first in the New Yorker, in the 1990s), but it seemed important to read the book all the way through, to look not just for insights into the lives of the men he profiles—James Baldwin, Colin Powell, Bill T. Jones, OJ Simpson, Louis Farrakhan, Harry Belafonte, Anatole Broyard and Albert Murray—but to glean Gates’s larger, unifying argument, and to figure out what that might say about Gates himself. Could I learn a little about him through his writing about other men like him?

As is often the case with essay collections, the accumulated topical writing coalesces to create an autobiographical portrait of the author, and the portrait that emerges here is far from the loudmouth firebrand that some coverage of the arrest has attempted to create. Gates’s writing is analytical, occasionally lyrical and posited from a belief in cultural integration. He is most attuned to fellow writers like Baldwin and Murray, who wrote about race not from a position of separatism or victimhood but from the notion of how the races share a common human fate, and a common responsibility. He’s least sympathetic to Farrakahn, whom he notes as intelligent and charming and then piece-by-rational-piece takes him apart, for his anti-Semitism, his loony paranoia and his squandered claims to leadership. As for Broyard—the former New York Times book critic who spent his entire adult career taking advantage of his light skin coloring to pass as white, not only in public but to his own children—Gates finds him a bit sad, and certainly misguided. When it comes to racial identity, Gates notes, “You cannot opt out…. Racial recusal is a forlorn hope…racelessness is never a possibility.”  

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man was published in 1997, and it bears the faded tint of yesterday’s news—the Million Man March, the Simpson Trial, the rise of Colin Powell’s political fortunes after the first Gulf War. But its focus on the narratives that attach themselves to the lives of prominent black men, and his attempt to retrieve individuality for his subjects from those narratives, seems absolutely ripe for the situation today. I haven’t read anything that Gates has written about Obama’s ascendancy, but I suspect that he’d approve of how Obama was handling not only this personal incident, but current affairs in general. “Black America needs allies more than it needs absolution,” Gates noted back when Bill Clinton was being facetiously referred to as our “first black president.” Perhaps that was why Gates has stepped away from suggestions that he might sue the Cambridge police, now that the possibility of bonding over a brew has emerged. At the same time, the pull to see his blackness as a pure experience never to be understood by white oppressors—blackness as, essentially, a more authentic identity than whiteness—is something he admits is difficult to resist: “You might inveigh against, say, the ideology of authenticity, but in some measure you participate in it all the same.”

Weighing these competing pressures, he asks of his various black male subjects, “How does it feel to be a paradox?” I suspect not only Gates but Obama, too, is living out that paradox once again today, while the rest of us sit back and look at them, trying to decide what they mean.

What If? Ten Years Without John John

Monday is ten years since John Kennedy Jr.'s plane disappeared somewhere in the stormy waters off New England -- that's half a generation without John John, once everyone's favorite Kennedy, the chestnut haired golden boy whose pedigree and stunning looks made it all too easy to attach so many hopes and desires. Sigh. The mind reels with "What if?"

What if we could had him around during the Bush years, a dashing, progressive figurehead for the scattered Left. ... Maybe George, the political-junkie magazine he'd been editing, would have resisted the post-9/11-with-us-or-against-us rhetoric that so much of the mainstream media fell prey to, and served as a voice of clarity during those manipulative, Rovian days. ... Maybe he'd have been tapped by John Kerry in 2004 as a vice-presidential candidate, saving us the disaster-in-the-making of that other pretty-boy Johnny, then-Senator Edwards, who brought so little to the ticket and has since been forced to slink away in scandal and disgrace. Maybe with a Kennedy on the ticket, we'd have been spared four more years of W. What effect would a living John F. Kennedy Jr. have had upon the political opportunities for Barack Obama two years ago? ... Even if everything else had gone the same, it seems certain that JFK Jr. would have been the one hand-picked to take over Hillary's Senate seat, sparing us the ignoble public flame-out of his sister Caroline, under-equipped for the public spotlight during the brief attempt made to ensconce her in the halls of power, where she so clearly never wanted to be. (Had JFK Jr. lived, would anyone know who Kristen Gillibrand is today?)

Yes, yes, I'm romanticizing. The passage of time has that effect, especially on a fiction writer. Ten years ago I wasn't so squishy-headed about the whole thing, when I chewed through the media coverage of John John's disappearance in a piece I wrote for the Cubby Missalette called They Killed John-John: "The Famous Show" Claims Another Victim. Click that link and follow the essay all the way to the end, where, for kicks and giggles, you can hear Message to John John from the Gays, an underground Cubby Creatures recording featuring a wispy-voiced, tuneless me warbling "Where did you go, in your little plane, Johnny K?"

The Angry Writer

Something is going on right now with writers. Writers are getting angry. Angry about bad reviews. More to the point: writers are venting their anger against their critics in a public way. In the past week, a writer I know used her Twitter account to vent (her word) against a New Yorker reviewer by posting "may she rot in hell"—and two relatively high-profile incidents of writers mouthing off about their reviewers have rippled out across the inter-twitter-web. "Mouthing off" isn't quite right; these writers see themselves as striking back. Writer-versus-reviewer is not particularly novel. But what seems notable to me about these latest incidents is that writers are simply fed up with people talking smack about them. Writers understand the consequences of a bad review; frankly, it's pissing folks off, and they're using technology to respond in self-defense.

Incident number one: Alice Hoffman. The New York Times reported last week on Hoffman's "Twitter outburst" over a Boston Globe review of her novel The Story Sisters:

Reviewing the book for The Boston Globe on Sunday, Roberta Silman wrote: “This new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work. Its vision, characters, and even the prose seem tired.” In a series of Twitter posts, Ms. Hoffman fired back with her own opinion. “Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron,” she wrote. “How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away.” Ms. Hoffman also lambasted The Globe and went so far as to post Ms. Silman’s phone number and email, inviting fans to “Tell her what u think of snarky critics.”

By Monday, Ms. Hoffman had evidently deleted her Twitter account. “I feel this whole situation has been completely blown out of proportion,” Ms. Hoffman said in a statement forwarded by her publisher...

Incident number two: Alain de Botton. After critic Caleb Crain pointed readers of his blog to a review he wrote of de Botton's Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, a review that accused de Botton, among other things, of "mean-spiritedness," the reviewed author found a forum for his strike-back: not Twitter, but Crain's own blog. In the comments section, de Botton wrote:

Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon - so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. You present yourself as 'nice' in this blog (so much talk about your boyfriend, the dog etc). It's only fair for your readers (nice people like Joe Linker and trusting souls like PAB) to get a whiff that the truth may be more complex. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.

"I will hate you till the day I die." "She's a moron." "May she rot in hell." Wow. One can only marvel at this kind of venom, being unveiled in such a public way, and with so much sanctimoniousness. De Botton does himself no favors by claiming that he is backed up by "all those who have read [his book] with anything like impartiality," as if he is the judge of who has or hasn't read his work with "impartiality." The irony is that to the outsider, Crain's write-up of de Botton's book reads like the kind of classy old-school review that every author hopes for; if such a review turns out to be negative, you're supposed to just suck it up as par for the course. In reality, the classy old-school review is a doomed species. So every review one manages to score carries that much more proportional weight.

In the end, de Botton, like Hoffman, recanted. Sort of. De Botton claimed, on another website, that he mistook his posting for "private" correspondence, saying metaphorically that it had been "inadvertently broadcast" to a wider audience than he had imagined.

I suspect that "outbursts" like Hoffman's and "naive" responses like de Botton's are the signs of a larger frustration most writers are feeling, not only about mainstream criticism, but with the at-large and ad-hoc culture of criticism that we all live with now. Writers are more beleaguered than ever, not least because we are more at the mercy of opinion than ever -- so many motherfucking opinions! The rant-and-post reviewer, on Amazon, on a blog, in a tweet, invests nothing more than a few minutes of his or her time, and the writer, who has put in a lot of time, has to live with the spleen. What writer can't relate to de Botton's plaintive wail: "that's two years of work down the drain"?  And what writer didn't feel for Alice Hoffman when in the end she retracted, with this bit of humble pie: "Reviewers are entitled to their opinions and that’s the name of the game in publishing"?

This is a dilemma that strikes me close to home. I got a shitty review from Robert Julian in the Bay Area Reporter for my second novel, You Can Say You Knew Me When, one that appeared early in the book's life and thus (as I saw it), managed to poison the climate for the novel's release. But I didn't—I couldn't—go on the offensive against Julian, no matter how much I thought his reading of my book was shallow and off-mark; because Robert Julian was the very critic whose enthusiastic review of my first novel, The World of Normal Boys, was among the earliest and strongest boosts I'd received. How could the same guy who loved my first book so much hate my second to the same degree? I didn't understand it; neither could I attack him for meanspiritedness or anything else. It seemed best to simply ignore him, and what he'd written about me, but it wasn't easy, knowing that the review was out there, casting its influence. Once the sting of his slam wore off, I came away with the understanding that a review, good or bad, is no more the "truth" than any other single opinion. But you still have to live with it.

The ability for the single opinion to find a platform, and an audience, is what writers are so pissed off about. Every opinion gets heard today, whether on Amazon or Twitter or someone's Facebook page or some random blog. Opinions get dashed off all the time, and writers suffer for them, and people like Alice Hoffman and Alain de Botton—and my writer friend who used her Twitter account to wish her reviewer a hellish afterlife—all seem to be saying at the very same moment: You're entitled to your opinion. And I'm entitled to offer, in response, a very loud Fuck You.

The Michael Jackson Generation

My first reaction to Michael Jackson’s death was a kind of ironic detachment. I called my friend Gary, and we immediately went into deconstruct-mode, trying to predict how the media narrative would play out. He foresaw the outpouring of mass grief for one of the most beloved pop stars ever, on the level of what happened after Princess Diana’s death; I anticipated a “Behind the Music” tabloid treatment: the King of Pop falls from the heights, becomes an inscrutable, unfathomable recluse hounded by lawsuits, permanently tainted by charges of child molestation, entirely irrelevant as a music maker. Pure tragedy: he’d gone from being a celebrity artist who touched everybody to being a public leper, gruesome, isolated, untouchable.

But soon I was combing the internet for his music videos and footage of his live performances, wanting to push aside the Michael of the last twenty years in favor of the Michael who ruled the twenty years before that. My initial detachment revealed itself to be a kind of shock and I realized that I was, against my own sense of rationality, deeply affected by the end of his life. Suddenly I was weeping over his astonishing performance of "Billie Jean" at the 25th Anniversary of Motown -- the event that introduced the world to the moonwalk. I was posting links to articles and texting friends for their reactions. Turned out my behavior was like a lot of other people’s, so much so that within hours more than one friend was complaining on Facebook about the flood of posts concerning Jackson’s death; some were using the crisis in Iran as a point of comparison: why is Michael Jackson’s death more important that what’s going on in the world? But of course it wasn’t more important, just different.

For two weeks, I’d watched in outraged horror the government assaults upon civilians in Iran, including the footage of one young woman, an innocent bystander named Neda, dying on camera after being slain by a police bullet. In comparison, grieving the death of a wealthy, famous person is a kind of indulgence, somewhat unseemly, and probably an example of herd mentality. Intellectually, I understand such complaints, but they do nothing to explain the way we actually go through life, attaching emotional significance to the music that accompanies our memories. We are all part of the herd, and we don’t always know what connects us until we realize it is gone. Put another way: Neda’s death in Iran is a shocking outrage against humanity; Michael’s death is a loss felt personally.

It’s not that much of a stretch to say that I came into consciousness as a 5-year old listening to The Jackson 5 on the radio singing "A-B-C, easy as 1-2-3" -- it’s a song that’s always been with me. It’s not a stretch to say that puberty was firmly anchored by MJ’s Off The Wall album, released the summer between middle school and high school, which I played on vinyl repeatedly with the girls in my neighborhood, practicing our dance moves to "Rock With You" and turning ourselves into teenagers. Or that Thriller was the soundtrack to my entire senior year of high school, and how even then we knew it was a big deal to be eighteen and alive and dancing to this music, which everybody seemed to love.

Nor is it a stretch to say that what happened to Michael Jackson in the eighties was a kind of horror show that felt like a betrayal. How was the boy who recorded the happy soundtrack to my generation's childhood replaced by the scary, ghostly figure whose music seemed to get sappier even as he became more frightening to behold? (I think the first time I ever heard the expression “a parody of himself” was in reference to Michael Jackson.) How did the yearning in his voice and the astonishing self-possession of his dance moves become the primal scream and bloated spectacle of his world tour concerts? More to the point: Why would this beautiful young man slice his nose off his face and bleach his skin? Did he want us to look away?

There were plenty of ways to try to pop-psychologize — his lost childhood, the likely abuse, the way our adoration pushed him into the very void we now saw so abhorrently, to say nothing of the complexity of race and skin color, which I couldn’t even pretend to truly understand. Like many people of my age, in adulthood I stopped paying attention, letting the so-called King of Pop do whatever it was he was going to do, like buy a ridiculously oversized, child’s fantasy mansion and hide away in it. Like marry a woman who was the daughter of the previous King of Pop, a union that seemed both preposterous and sad, a blatant bearding for Michael’s unmistakably queer energy -- his sensitive feminine voice held in balance with masculine fury and powers of seduction. By the time he was dangling his baby out a hotel window in front of reporters and parading his children around in public wearing what looked like burqas, he seemed just too fucking crazy to waste any thought on. Unreachable.

Now he’s dead, probably from too much prescription medication administered in his elite isolation, and we’re all fixated on him again. We can look again, not just at the nightmare Michael but at the life as a whole. Part of what makes this very public death feel like a private loss is that what seemed like a betrayal all those years ago was really just someone else's sad story, but there was no way to grieve. His death contains the recognition of that past loss -- of the talented kid who shepherded me and my friends through the '70s and early '80s, who fell apart before our eyes.

But mixed in with this is the unexpected joy of returning to the music, which never really went away. Last night, spontaneous MJ dance parties broke out all over the world. I experienced that communal outpouring at a gay bar in the Tenderloin, when the DJ slipped into Rock With You, and the dance floor immediately filled up, and we all busted out our best moves again, still carrying inside of us our younger selves, who learned to dance to that song all those years ago, before we grew up and forgot who taught us how it was done.

Freedom from Religion

I've been mesmerized by the events in Iran since the election "results" that came in this past Friday, results that favored the ruling president -- Holocaust denier, artist censor and homo-hater Ahmadinejad -- over the opposition candidate, Mousavi -- symbol of hope for reform for many of Iran's youthful population, including young women. The supposed victory was announced implausibly fast and by such a wide and obviously fraudulent margin that millions of Iranians immediately took to the street [photos], and have returned every day since, a spontaneous populist expression of outrage at the top-down control by the ruling mullahs over so many aspects of day to day Iranian life. Cries of "coup" and "dictatorship" have risen up in a country where freedom of speech is not a given, and speech is often punished.

Having opened my Twitter account only a few days prior, I found most of my news there, tagged #iranelection, a feed of comments from folks inside the country and around the world that continues to renew itself at a shockingly fast rate, far outpacing reporting by traditional news outlets. (The failure of the mainstream media to pick up on what was happening on the streets has itself become a story within the larger story of the events.) With websites and radio shut down inside Iran and foreign reporters arrested and beaten, these dispatches from everyday Iranians marked a new means to bear witness, demand accountability and seek aid at a time of heightened crisis. There are signs that the pressure is working -- Iran's s0-called Supreme Leader has been forced to dial back his original dismissive rhetoric and now says election results will be investigated. What happens next is at this writing frighteningly uncertain. There are reports that the mullahs are feeling the heat, both from the the massive display of popular outrage as well as criticism from governments worldwide, though other reports warn that we might be seeing a Tiananmen Square-level crackdown against protesters, or a civil war.

I know no more about Iran's political workings than any other U.S. amateur news junkie, but I do know that the Islamic Republic of Iran has never been a place where personal freedom has had much of a foothold, and so whether Ahmadinejad keeps his chokehold on power or Mousavi's popular support edges him toward the center, we're still looking at a country run by religious fundamentalists. Even the vision of hope revealed by the past few days of mass protest, largely by young people -- Iran is a country where a third of the population is under 30 years old -- can't erase the fact that the protest generation has  been raised in a country where anti-Semitism is official policy, where homosexuals are executed in public for having sex (there exists an underground railroad for queers who want to leave the country), and where women struggle for any measure of political influence. Beliefs and attitudes must be resisted as surely as individual politicians. Mousavi, a former hardliner, has only recently been a voice of liberation; could he possibly provide the kind of change that would bring true freedom to the people of Iran? Would a queer man or woman living in Tehran, or an artist, or an atheist, experience some measure of freedom under a new regime?

If there is anything that has sparked my interest in the past few days' astounding political display, it is not the hope  for one candidate, or even, really, for "all the votes to be counted," but for the people of this vibrant and storied nation to create for themselves the possibility of freedom. Separate church and state: that is my real wish for this new Iranian revolution. Only then will real change take root.

Library Laureates

Last night at the San Francisco Main Library I was thrilled to be honored as a Library Laureate, one of 35 writers selected as part of an annual tribute to the local literary community -- and as a way to fundraise for the Friends of the Library. It was quite a schmancy night -- the wine flowed, the catered hors d'œuvres kept coming and folks were dressed to kill. The theme of the night was Evolution -- in honor of the Darwin bicentenary. A handful of men wore Darwin garb -- bowlers and beards -- and there were women dressed with feathery references to various exotic and endangered species. (Someone dressed as Annie Oakley and someone else as Indiana Jones, and though I didn't really get the evolutionary connection there, I do love a costume.)

After a group photo -- how do you corral thirty five adults onto a stage for a posed pic? very slowly -- and a wine reception, they sent everyone off to different wings of the library to eat dinner at tables for ten, with five tables in a room. I don't travel in the major-donor circle a whole lot, so I didn't know what to expect, but Kevin and I were at a lively table, which included another writer, an literary agent and a number of library volunteers. The two women I sat between were great conversationalists. (I learned a lot about Andrew Carnegie's role in creating free public libraries. "He wasn't very good to his workers," I was told, "but he was good to the public.")

The "laureates" had been asked to prepare five-minutes worth of remarks to deliver during the (very pretty) dessert course; our subject was to be evolution, or our own work, or libraries in general, and as is often the case with a rather loose assignment, some folks were quite prepared and held the room's attention, others didn't and rambled. The highlight for me was author and critic Jonathon Keats's commentary about how evolution has actually been a somewhat "stupid" process; he cited such evidence as the fallible human eye and our awkward spinal column, which doesn't make it very easy for folks to sleep at night.

For my remarks, I had put out a call via email and Facebook asking for "what the library means to you." Within a few hours I was flooded with replies -- everyone, it seems, had specific memories to share. I pieced them together and added my own; I even dug out my 1974 summer reading card, issued by the Westwood Public Library. Here's what I said:

In preparation for tonight, I polled a few family members and friends for their memories of the library as a way to stimulate my own memories.

I got some wonderful responses – my editor at Kensington Books, John Scognamiglio, wrote: "The library is where I first fell in love with books and why I have a career in publishing. My mom took me there when I was either four or five and we checked out HARRY THE DIRTY DOG and I was hooked …"

A couple of my friends who are now mothers bemoaned the fact that their children find everything online now, because they’re missing out on the more sensory aspects of the physical building. One wrote: "I was in love with it — the smell, the quiet, the shiny gloss of the card catalog. I really don't think kids get that love any more with electronic searches."

In fact the sensory, or even sensual aspect of the library was commented on by a few. One female friend wrote:
"The library meant a place where I could read what I want, uncensored, while still being able to make out with my high school boyfriend in the stacks… Libraries = rite of passage coupled with freedom of speech. Not easily re-created online..."
 
A male friend expressed how the library was the site of a recurring fantasy of coming upon one particular high school hunk – a lifeguard at the local swim club – in the stacks where a particular book with homosexual content could be found.

And of course like many young, closeted kids, for me the library was a place where I could learn about things that back then weren’t discussed in the government or the media, much less classroom.

But even before the library became associated with the sensual and illicit, the library was really important to me as a kid – our town library in Westwood, New Jersey was only three blocks from my house, and there was a large and active children’s room. The two librarians were sort of like good cop and bad cop – Mrs. B who always smiled and hugged you, and Miss T. who was more likely to shush you.

My sister Kim remembered that she was working at the library at one point, shelving books, and she heard Miss T’s “horrified voice saying…. 'Oh no!  Not the card catalogue!' and I knew she was talking about the movie, The Breakfast Club, which had just come out.  Perhaps you remember the scene where Judd Nelson is pulling index cards of out the drawer and stuffing them back in randomly.”

The library had a summer reading program. You’d read a book, then go in and report back on it to Mrs. B., and she’d mark it down on your card and at the end of the summer you’d get a certificate. I actually have my summer reading card from 1974, when I was in 4th grade and read 15 books. Here's what I read:

1. Encyclopedia Brown & the Case of the Secret Pitch
2. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
3. Paul Revere
4. Crazy Horse
5. Encyclopedia Brown Solves the [something?]
6. John F. Kennedy
7. Encyclopedia Brown Gets His Man
8. Nathan Hale
9. Encyclopedia Brown Keeps the [something?]
10. Encyclopedia Brown Shows the Way
11. Encyclopedia Brown Tracks Them Down
12. Johnny Appleseed
13. If You Sailed on the Mayflower
14. Farmer Boy
15. Abraham Lincoln

Apparently I was into mysteries and history. I don’t read as many mysteries as I used to, or as many biographies. But I still keep track of the books I read every year. There’s no librarian to report back to, no hug from Mrs. B, but that’s OK. Reading has become its own reward.

After I spoke, a woman at my table told me that the summer reading program still goes on at her local branch library in Noe Valley, in much the same way it did in Westwood. I was also told that the services the library provides are, since the economy tanked last year, in greater demand than ever. The good news from last night is that the Laureates dinner is going to help meet that demand: $250,000 was raised. That's a lot of Friends for the library.

This is what a bookstore going out of business looks like.

I stopped by Stacey's, the legendary downtown San Francisco bookstore, today. My heart sank, my stomach knotted and other parts of my body performed in similarly cliché ways, all of them nonethless deeply felt. Stacey's is going out of business -- following other venerable local establishments like A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books and Cody's, not to mention essential faraway stores like the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York and, most recently A Different Light in Los Angeles. All these stores managed to survive the full-frontal assault from the chains in the early 00's, but this credit-crunched economy has proven lethal. Books just don't bring in the bucks, at least not in bookstores. (Ebooks seem to be another story...)

Today, Stacey's looked like it had been looted. Or such was my first reaction, taking in the expanses of empty and half-empty shelves -- all that once-cozy lacquered wood looking naked and exposed. What books remained had been arranged with their faces out (no hard-to-read spines, just full-on cover art), enticing the last buyers like big-eyed orphans hoping for homes. What was left in stock was pretty random. I wandered the depleted fiction section thinking I might find Proust's Swann's Way, the Lydia Davis translation that had just been recommended to me, but it wasn't there, and instead I wound up with a different first-person narrative by a French writer, Grégoire Bouillier, a contemporary author whose Report on Myself is blurbed on the back cover as "Proust in a bottle." (It weighs in at 161 pages, which is about the amount of time it takes Proust to bite that madeleine.)

Everything was 50 percent off (no new inventory being stocked, no special orders taken), so there were quite a number of shoppers, all of them, like me, looking a little dazed and hurried, as if ready to get out before the taint of failure could attach itself too quickly.

The cashier who rang me up had a kind of shocked, almost surly demeanor, which I guess is natural. She's losing her job, after all. I asked for a bookmark, thinking I'd keep it as a souvenir of a bookstore I'd visited dozens and dozens of times over the years and never imagined not being around. No luck. The bookmarks were gone too. So I forewent my usual "no plastic bags" mindset and took one when she offered.  The store's graphic logo suddenly seemed like an artifact from the past, the good old days when an 85-year-old, three-story retail outlet on San Francisco's busiest street could be counted on to last forever.

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UPDATED: Check out Kemble Scott's video of Stacey's last event, a reading  by mystery writer Cara Black. Ingrid Nystrom of Stacey's is interviewed and she says that "the big elephant in the room is that we have too much space." Strikes me that the other elephant in the room is that the average age of the crowd looks to be about 50 -- that ongoing topic, the question of whether young people are reading.

Short Story Stimulus: Daniyal Mueenuddin hits the Bay Area

SEE UPDATE AT BOTTOM.

Here's something to do this week that fits your recession-budget (as in, it's free) while keeping you in touch with the topical world (can you say Pakistan?). American/Pakistani author Daniyal Mueenuddin is in the midst of his first ever U.S. book tour and he's got five readings in San Francisco and environs in the next week.

I first saw his story Nawabdin Electrician in the New Yorker -- apparently Salman Rushdie did, too, because he selected it for Best American Short Stories 2008. It was the kind of writing that took me a page or two to get into, in the way that unfamiliar settings, like the Pakistani dessert, and names you're not sure how to pronounce (just like in those old Russian novels) can create enough cognitive dissonace that your brain resists sinking into the actual narrative. But I'm glad I fought through, because the writing has a lot of sly humor and the characters are unpredictable and unforgettable. In this story, there's Nawab, a crafty old electrician who has "a signature ability: a technique for cheating the electric company by slowing down the revolutions of its meters, so cunningly performed that his customers could specify to the hundred-rupee note the desired monthly savings." This makes him especially popular with an upper class estate owner, K.K. Harouni, who agrees to get Nawab a motorcycle for his years of service. One night on that motorcycle, the electrician stops to help a stranger on the side of the road and....well, as in all good stories, something goes terribly, terribly wrong. How Nawab reacts makes for a truly jaw-dropping ending...one that sent me looking for more of the author's work.

Mueennuddin's stories -- eight in all -- have been published now under the title In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. The book, his first, is a story cycle -- each story stands on its own, but together, through interconnected characters and settings, they make up a complete whole. In this case, the connection is Harouni, the landowner; his relatives, associates, servants, and so on, each get their moment in the spotlight, creating a mosaic portrait up and down the levels of Pakistani society. I've now read three of the stories, including the title story, in which the corrupt old Harouni takes a young cousin as a mistress, and we watch from her point of view as she adjusts to this role that she never asked for but is determined to make the most of.

The 45-year old author has a Pakistani father and an American mother and has spent his life going back and forth between both countries -- he used to practice law in New York; now he runs a mango farm in Pakistan. The collection is making a big splash -- he's in the top ten on Amazon, is talking to the Wall Street Journal about his cross-cultural biography, and is interviewed by Beatrice about his favorite Turgenev short story.

You can catch Mueenuddin (pronounced Mwen-o-Dean) at City Lights in San Francisco on Wednesday, Feb. 25, followed by readings in Danville, Corte Madera and Berkeley; later he hits Pasadena, Portland, Seattle, and NYC.

UPDATE: I'm planning to check out his reading on Sunday, March 1, at 3:00 at 1:00 in the afternoon, in Oakland at Diesel Books on College Ave. Look for me there.

Rushdie, Guantánamo and the Truth

Still Satanic? Apparently so. It's the 20th anniversary of the fatwa that sent Satanic Verses writer Salman Rushdie into hiding. Offended by his satirical depiction of the life of Muhammed, Iran's ruling ayatollah called for the award-winning author's death. The frenzy whipped up by this led to the murder of at least one of the book's translators (in Japan) and the serious injury of two others (in Italy and Norway) and sparked violent riots throughout the world. Rushdie made it out alive -- and has lived out of hiding for several years now -- but the official word from Tehran is that the order against him "is still valid." The Independent talks to Muslim writers like Hanif Kureishi about the longterm chilling effects of this on free-thinking writers everywhere.

Elsewhere on the terror front...What happened inside Guantánamo? The stories are starting to be told. The UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas started the Guantánamo Testimonials Project several years ago. This testimony from a guard named Brandon Neely is the first time I've come across the Project. It's mesmerizing and disturbing reading. If you weren't already convinced of the need to close down this hellhole, this might tip you over.

One of the points Neely makes is that the lives of guards and prisoners -- the innoncent ones who have been released -- are forever ruined, while the architects of Guantánamo (he mentions Bush and Cheney by name) will not be held accountable. Sen. Patrick Leahy last week proposed a South African style "truth and reconciliation" panel to get to the bottom of what happened at Guantánamo and elsewhere. And on Salon, a former radical Islamist talks about the work of the Quillam Foundation to counteract the effect of Islamic radicalism -- a kind of deprogramming from the abuses of the jihadi-mindset: "You have to show to them that Islam as such does not support many of the Islamists' arguments."

The State of the Arts?

Will the "stimulus bill" include money for the arts? It's been a confusing week, full of cliffhangers and turnarounds, and as of this writing the inclusion of artists in the national economic recovery effort is still unclear. The House passed its version of the bill yesterday -- without a single "yes" vote from Republicans -- including $50 million for the arts.

The Senate is still debating -- and therein lies the uncertainty, because the Senate passed an amendment that prohibited funds for being used for the arts:

As the Senate debated the economic recovery bill last week, an amendment was introduced by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) to prevent arts groups from receiving economic recovery funds. Coburn’s amendment stated the funds could not be used “for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project.”

That Tom Coburn -- who is anti-abortion, who doesn't believe in global warming and who sees "the gay agenda" as one of the biggest threats to our nation -- might oppose cultural funding doesn't surprise me. But the fact that Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer and a list of other liberal Democrats supported for the Coburn amendment makes my blood boil. [Feinstein's spokesman equivocated, saying she doesn't see the arts as "wasteful," as the Coburn amendment has it, but her focus is on infrastructure.]

Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune nailed it when he noted:

...the argument that the labor-intensive arts are not job-creation engines is patently absurd; they just fuel different kinds of struggling workers, workers unaccustomed to bonuses. Their role in generating billions of dollars in ancillary economic activity for stores, restaurants and the travel business has been proven in bucketloads of surveys and analyses.

Jones also makes the point that Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration put the arts at the top of national agenda in 1935. But ever since Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan led their culture war on the NEA in the late-80s, liberal politicians have been notably afraid of artists -- or rather, afraid of the way government money for potentially subversive artists can be used against supportive politicians during election campaigns. Already this week, right-wing pundits are calling arts funding "immoral".

If the House's $50 million for the arts manages to survive the Senate's short-sighted shenanigans, then it looks like we'll have an NEA-administrated fund for artists of a size larger than anything we've seen for a while. That would be great news. The bad news is that you could then all but count on an anti-art backlash during the next election cycle.

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UPDATE: Looks like the version the Senate passed put arts funding back in the bill. From Bloomberg.com comes this report of the Senate vote:

...details of what provisions survived negotiations between the House and Senate were still emerging even as the plan headed for congressional passage. ... Lawmakers dropped provisions barring funds from going to museums, arts centers and theaters. A ban on money to casinos, golf courses, zoos and swimming pools was retained.

According to one friend of mine, a choreographer, the lobbying effort from the dance community was intense, once word of the Coburn amendment got out. Looks like arts groups held their own this time.