K.M. Soehnlein

Letting Franny Speak: Taking Inspiration from Salinger

 Everyone knows The Catcher in the Rye, but the J.D. Salinger book that’s meant the most to me is Franny and Zooey, in part because it’s literature’s greatest brother-sister story. Classic fiction gives us plenty of brothers-in-arms; contemporary novels have pushed sisterhood to the forefront. But fiction about the brother-sister dynamic is rare. I say this as someone who spent the last three years writing a novel about a brother and a sister, looking for models beyond Franny and Zooey—a book I’ve loved since high school and long wanted to emulate—but finding nothing else out there.

 The Catcher in the Rye has been universally embraced (just yesterday, the NY Times' Michiko Kakutani dubbed it a “pitch-perfect portrait of adolescence”). But it’s always struck me as an unlikely classic: the portrait of an almost tragic figure with broken mind, possibly one that won’t be repaired. Holden Caulfield narrates his story from an institution, where he’s come to “take it easy”; at the end of the book, despite a hint that his rest-cure has worked, he’s still unable to commit to what he’s going to do next. This is a novel that puts the isolated hero through a series of tests that in the end seem to be stronger than he is. 

In contrast, Franny and Zooey details a spiritual crisis that is confronted—apparently successfully—by a family forced to take care of one of its own. Ex-vaudevillian parents and their seven brilliant children, former stars of a radio quiz show called “It’s a Wise Child,” (I wish I could have heard that broadcast, just once!), the Glass family is shattered by death. There’s a brother lost to World War II, and more centrally, there’s saintly Seymour, a kind of depressed, childlike guru—he’s the one in Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish ” who shoots himself in the head while his wife sleeps in bed next to him.

Franny and Zooey tells of the youngest Glass siblings over the course of two episodes: Franny’s nervous collapse in a restaurant, followed by her convalescence on the couch in the family’s ramshackle Upper East Side apartment. Zooey is at first reluctant to address his sister as she mutters a half-coherent mantra on the couch. But in the conversation that is the centerpiece of the book, handsome Zooey, with his stylish flop of black hair and his cigarette balanced on the soap dish, sits in the bathtub, as his comical mother, Bessie, in her bathrobe on the other side of the shower curtain, rattles on in her musical, italicized speech (“You could use a haircut, young man. You’re getting to look like one of those crazy Hungarians or something getting out of a swimming pool.”) 

It’s Bessie, a heroic mother if ever there was one, who convinces Zooey that Franny’s situation can’t be ignored; it’s Zooey who determines the plan that will restore Franny to vigor. Then brother and sister, each too smart for their own good, banter back and forth, pushing each other's emotional buttons in a way that only siblings can.

In the book’s final pages, redemption emerges in the form of Salinger’s hybrid-Buddhist/Christian/Jewish philosophy of kindness and oneness. Salinger plays on the old aphorism, “It ain’t over ’til the Fat Lady sings,” by giving Zooey the words to convince Franny of her connection to the world: “There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t…the Fat Lady.”

I haven’t made much of a secret about the fact that I undertook my new novel, Robin and Ruby , inspired by Franny and Zooey—wanting to capture the simplicity and elegance of its form, the compressed period of time it covers, the microscopic attention to gestures and conversations. But as I wrote, I started to feel that there was something unsatisfactory in the way that Franny’s collapse was a problem that had to be solved by Zooey; it was too much like the hysteria always befalling brilliant women in mid-20th-centruy fiction (think The Bell Jar or The Interior Castle). Did we need one more book about an unstable woman being saved by one of the men in her life? 

None of the women I knew were in need of rescue. It seemed I had to respond to Salinger on my own terms. My story was set decades later, on the other side of feminism; my Ruby was going to be taking women’s studies classes in college; she was going to tell her boyfriend if she was unhappy with him (unlike Franny, who tells her beau how much she misses him while guiltily thinking that she doesn’t miss him at all). Ruby would do what Franny couldn’t, which is get herself out of her own trouble, and perhaps even hand over a bit of wisdom, or at least a fuck-you, to her bossy older brother.

It’s perhaps too didactic—to self-consciously corrective—to claim that writing Ruby’s story was a way of “letting Franny speak.” I had other inspirations as well—the 1980s as a social moment, the Jersey Shore as a setting. But it’s absolutely true that over the past three years of writing this novel, I’ve felt myself involved in a long conversation with J.D. Salinger, in particular the Salinger dedicated to exploring how a brother and sister might muddle their way through their early twenties together. Perhaps that’s why his death yesterday felt like a kick to the gut; even though the man had retreated from the world long ago, his novel remains, despite some of its last-century elements, so vital.

Franny and Zooey gave the world a cast of characters that Holden Caulfield might deem phonies or snobs. But I’m not sure Holden’s opinion is the one that matters to me. The Salinger tale that ends in institutionalization or suicide leaves me cold. The Salinger that ends with its heroine recognizing “just what to do next,” as Franny does here, is the one I return to again and again. You can follow Holden to the duck pond; I’d rather be in that cluttered Upper East Side apartment, smoking cigarettes in the bathtub and bantering with Bessie, doing my part to help get Franny off the couch.

 

 

To Be Gay With You

This week’s gruesome and brutal murder of a gay 19-year-old in Puerto Rico, George Jorge Mercado (pictured), is the latest horrifying reminder that violence against LGBT people is on the rise worldwide. Is there any consensus on why this is happening? Conventional wisdom says that the growth of the international queer movement, pushing visibility and civil rights, has intensified the backlash, but the sheer dehumanizing ugliness of the attack in Puerto Rico—which makes Matthew Shepard’s murder 11 years ago seem nearly tame in comparison—makes me wonder, do we really even understand homophobic violence?

This question had been on my mind since last week, when I saw a San Francisco performance by the British group DV8 called To Be Straight With You. DV8 combined its hallmark physical theater with audio culled from man-on-the-street interviews spouting blatant homophobia, and more personal testimony from people who had been victimized by anti-gay violence. Some of the victims were refugees from countries like Iraq, Zimbabwe and Jamaica, where anti-gay hostility is so culturally accepted that queer people are often forced to seek asylum in places like the U.S. and Britain, which offer some degree of legal protection.

The vocal collage in To Be Straight With You created for me a sense that anti-LGBT violence is a global crisis, something akin to “ethnic cleansing.” (Indeed, in Jamaica, where homophobic culture flourishes through the hatred inspired by murder music from singers like Buju Banton, one community recently declared a Gay Eradication Day, demanding that gays and lesbians leave the town or "suffer the consequences.") Is there any other population in the world today who can be put to death in 7 countries, as LGBT people can in Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and parts of Nigeria and Somalia? That these seven countries are all Islamic and bound to Sharia law explains why DV8 put a particular, though not exclusive, focus on homophobia among Britain’s large Muslim population. The question of how organized religions promulgate this global crisis was the underlying thesis of the entire piece.

Religions are kept alive within the structure of the nuclear family. What DV8’s stage piece drove home was how the nuclear family is more often than not the conduit for organized religion to transmit homophobia. The strongest moment of To Be Straight With You featured one dancer jump-roping nonstop (above) while voicing the reminiscence of a Muslim queer boy in England who, after coming out, was chased down and stabbed by his father, with the help of his older brother. The boy survived, retaining enough sassiness and strength to find his way to gay pride parade at age 14.

Familial homophobia is the subject of writer Sarah Schulman's new book, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, which Doug Ireland in Gay City News has dubbed "one of the most exciting gay liberation texts to appear in years." The same night I was watching DV8 in San Francisco, Schulman (pictured) was delivering the prestigious Kessler Lecture in New York City. Among Schulman's assertions is that homophobia—long understood to originate from the fear of one’s own innate or latent attraction to one’s gender—is not a phobia at all, but a "pleasure center." She writes:

"...homophobes enjoy feeling superior, rely on the pleasure of enacting their superiority, and go out of their way to resist change that would deflate their sense of superiority. Homophobia makes heterosexuals feel better about themselves. It’s not fear—it’s fun."

I think Schulman's on to something, but I think there's more going on. The attack in Puerto Rico, the Shiite death squads who patrol Baghdad for queers to torture and kill, and the exhortations to violence by Jamaican dancehall singers are all based on something that seems deeper than “enacting superiority.” The leap to violence might best be understood by research done at the University of Arkansas in 2002. Psychologists noted that anti-gay feeling is often less a matter of  fear than of disgust. Homophobes have been trained to see gay people as dirty and contagious—something diseased than can spread. Arkansas researcher Jeffrey Lohr notes,

"While fear causes a 'get me away from that' reaction, disgust manifests as 'get that away from me.' These different emotional reactions can lead to very different behaviors, according to Lohr. 'The same emotions that mediate attitude can mediate behavior,' he said. 'If fear mediates avoidance, other emotions may mediate attack.'"

The oft-quoted Bible verse used to support violence against gays, from Leviticus, refers to man-lying-with-man as an "abomination," with its connotation of disgust and loathing, and says, “blood shall be upon them.” Does anyone need any clearer example of how a religion can propagate anti-gay violence—comparing the way some people naturally love with a disease that needs to be wiped out? In DV8’s piece, a young woman from South London claims not to be prejudiced but says of gay sex, “It’s nasty." Disgust like hers is the end result of ancient tribal dogma turned into scripture by organized religion, propagated within family structures and unquestioned at the street-level by poorly educated youth.

Can art adequately address this kind of entrenched disgust? One of the feelings I was left with, amid many, after watching the DV8 show, was that it had created an argument for the importance of tough penalties for hate-based violence. The good news is that after years of trying to enact federal hate crimes laws, our Democrat-controlled Congress finally succeeded. Last month, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Just as significantly, Obama signed legislation that finally lifted the ban on HIV-positive travelers entering the U.S., a law that had been on the books for 22 years. For all the shortcomings of the Obama's actions on gay civil rights, these two laws strike me as an especially important tandem victory, as strong a stance as any world leader has taken to ensure not just that gay people are protected under the law but that this country actually can serve as a kind of safe haven for those who have nowhere else to go.

After signing the Hate Crimes Act—which, it's worth noting, also includes religious belief as a protected class—Obama spoke from the podium [video], saying,

"You understand, that we must stand against crimes that are meant not only to break bones but to break spirits. Not only to inflict harm but to instill fear...No one in America should ever be afraid to walk down the street holding the hand of the person they love."

I was particularly moved by his inclusion of that final phrase. Perhaps the best way to confront the global crisis of hate that we are facing is to remember we are fighting for our right to express our love.

Lit for Pride

Few things put a smile on my face more than walking into my favorite bookstore and finding my novel on special display, complete with a Staff Favorite card attached. I snapped this pic at Books Inc. in the Castro, where their LGBT Pride Month rack gave a top-shelf slot to You Can Say You Knew Me When.

Most gay writers seem to object to the "gay writer" designation to some degree -- David Sedaris just put his ambivalence on record, saying that yes, he is a gay writer, but please don't shelve his books in "the ghetto" -- though you can't deny that this kind of prominence puts you right in the face of potential readers. (In San Francisco, June is a big month for queer tourists, some of whom are going to wander into a store like Books Inc. and buy something the staff recommends.) No writer wants his or her audience limited, but not everyone has Sedaris's platform or visibility.

Indeed, invisibility is an ongoing issue for books by queer writers, as yesterday's infuriating column in the Washington Post Book World makes clear. Asked by a reader to recommend a "new gay book," editor Dennis Drabelle responds, "not many of these are being published anymore," then goes on to recommend a single British novel many years out of print. As awesome queer website Band of Thebes observed of Drabelle's idiocy,

A more helpful answer might have steered readers toward the annual Lambda Literary Awards, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the ALA gay book prize, and the revamped Alyson Books.

I was at the Lambda Awards last month, and I can assure you that many, many queer-themed books are being published. (Check out the gathered GLBTerati from that night on Homo-Neurotic.com ... I was there in a chartreuse ascot, and posed for this pic with short story writer Justin Torres.) Band of Thebes offers a list of authors whose "new gay books" might have made for a better answer from Drabelle. A couple of current suggestions from my own shelf: Rakesh Satyal's Blue Boy, a beautifully composed tale of a grade school baby-gay who finds transcendence through voyeurism, the Hindu god Krishna and early-90s-era Whitney Houston; Vestal McIntyre's Lake Overturn, which weaves together many stories of the residents (both gay and not) of one Idaho town; Drew Ferguson's The Totally Screwed Up Life of Charlie the Second, a funny, sexy first-person teen romp; and Trebor Healey's A Perfect Scar and Other Stories, just re-released , which includes a heartbreaking favorite, "The Mercy Seat." And those are just by the boys.

Seems to me that Dennis Drabelle and The Washington Post Book World ought to print an apology. And how about reviewing a couple of new queer titles while you're at it?

Meanwhile, if anyone needs any evidence that those who hate queers understand the power of gay-themed books, check out this story about Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be-Bop, first posted on Salon and then covered on the Advocate. A wingnut "Christian" group has not only attempted to ban this book from a library's shelves -- they actually WANT TO BURN IT.

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.

Praise Song for the Day: Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural ooem

Barack Hussein Obama is President of the United States of America. After giving his rather sobering address, the context of which was downturn and crisis, and the emphasis of which were themes of responsibility, sacrifice and the work to be done -- hopefully, optimisitically, it should be added -- the podium was handed over to poet Elizabeth Alexander who then did in lyric what Obama had done in rhetoric: honored the past, surveyed the citizenry and then set us philosophically on a course for the next leg of our national journey.

I transcribed Alexander's poem, Praise Song for the Day, and am excited to post it below, with my guesses as to line breaks and punctuation (to be corrected later when the official text is released*). Her poem was a perfect illustration for why we still need poetry. Speaking artfully, rich in metaphor, but determined to "say it plain," she offered a "praise song" for the lowly -- slaves, laborers, those who repair "things in need of repair," those who write "hand lettered signs" and who figure things out "at kitchen tables," those who make music.

Interestingly, a praise song is a Christian form that "highlights the emphasis on personal encounter with God over intellectual understanding." In ending her poem not by invoking God but by invoking Love -- "love that casts a widening pool of light" -- Alexander has created a secular-humanist praise song, one fitting for a democratic state occasion.

This poem thrills me. I had high hopes going in, and Elizabeth Alexander exceeded them.

Praise Song for the Day
by Elizabeth Alexander

Each day we go about our business
Walking past each other
Catching each others' eyes or not
About to speak or speaking
All about us is noise
All about us is noise and bramble thorn and din
Each one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem
Darning a hole in a uniform
Patching a tire
Repairing the things in need of repair
Someone is trying to make music somewhere
With a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum
With cello, boombox, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus
A farmer considers the changing sky
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words
Words spiny or smooth
Whispered or declaimed
Words to consider, reconsider
We cross dirt roads and highways
That mark the will of someone and then others who said
I need to see what’s on the other side
I know there’s something better down the road
We need to find a place where we are safe
We walk into that which we cannot yet see

Say it plain
That many have died for this day
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here
Who laid the train tracks
Raised the bridges
Picked the cotton and the lettuce
Built brick by brick the glittering edifices
They would then keep clean and work inside of

Praise song for struggle
Praise song for the day
Praise song for every hand lettered sign
The figuring it out at kitchen tables

Some live by “love thy neighbor as thyself”
Others by “first do no harm” or “take no more than you need”
What if the mightiest word is love
Love beyond marital filial national
Love that casts a widening pool of light
Love with no need to preempt grievance

In today’s sharp sparkle
This winter air
Any thing can be made
Any sentence begun
On the brink
on the brim
on the cusp
Praise song for walking forward in that light.

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* UPDATE: The correct lineation of Alexander's poem is now available. Interestingly, it has far fewer line breaks than I'd imagined; indeed, sections of it are essentially written as prose. I've left my interpretation in this post, a record of my inaugural-morning experiment: what I heard based on Alexander's recitation, versus what was actually on the page.

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* UPDATE 2: The above update's link to the poem was wrong: released by a "transcription service," not by the poet herself. The actual text of Elizabeth Alexander's Praise Song for the Day can now be read. Line breaks and all.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance

At the Lincoln Memorial yesterday, openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson delivered a "prayer for our nation and for our next president" [text] that was as radical as any I've ever heard at a public occasion. Calling on a "God of our many understandings" he launched into an unlikely list of blessings: tears, anger, discomfort and -- my favorite -- "freedom from mere tolerance," which seemed to strike at the heart of so much bigotry, especially of the variety that gay people experience. Remember when Sarah Palin, during the v.p. debate, insisted that gays should be "tolerated," as if that was the best that we should expect from our leaders? The video of Robinson's speech is currently on YouTube; catch it now before HBO takes it down.*

Also infusing the pre-Inauguration event with activist fervor was the legendary folk singer Pete Seeger, whose joyous rendition of This Land is Your Land, with Bruce Springsteen at his side, included a timely verse about the ills of private property:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;

Sign was painted, it said private property;

But on the back side it didn't say nothing;

That side was made for you and me.

After a long campaign, and these many months where Barack Obama has had to continually remind us that there's "only one president at a time," I couldn't be more ready for tomorrow.

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* UPDATE: Towleroad reports that Robinson's invocation -- already being dubbed "controversial" because of its inclusiveness -- was not shown by HBO, based on a decision by the Obama Inauguration Team to have Robinson speak as part of the pre-show before the president-elect even took the stage. So was Robinson's inclusion, in the end, a kind of "mere tolerance" on the part of the new administration? After Elton is following the story.

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* UPDATE 2: Robinson's moment to be included HBO's rebroadcast of the event [After Elton].

The poet, not the preacher

Enraged by the news that Rick Warren will give the invocation at Obama's inauguration? This guy equates gay marriage with incest, pedophilia and bestiality, while boasting about how he's opened his arms to people with AIDS. WTF?? I'm all for Obama's one-United-States-of-America inclusiveness, but you can't convince me that this bigot is the best person to invoke an era of "hope" and "change."

I'm keeping my eye on the poet, not the preacher. The choice of Elizabeth Alexander to be the voice of art and imagination on inauguration day is significant. She's an accomplished but not a particularly high-profile poet, which means she's been selected not for symbolism but for substance. Someone in the Obama camp, we can assume, has actually read her words -- that alone gives me hope. As Alexander herself points out in this Poetry Foundation podcast, Obama was photographed, three days after his election, carrying Derek Walcott's "Selected Poems." She points out, too, that Obama's "we are the ones we've been waiting for" is actually a line from June Jordan's "Poem for South African Women."

My University of San Francisco colleague Dean Rader writes a thoughtful appreciation of Alexander's selection:

As much a scholar and an essayist as a poet, Alexander isn't really a central figure in what some refer to as "the poetry shirt crowd" -- the central cast of poets who win awards, appear in The New Yorker and Poetry on a regular basis, and move in the main poetry circles. Her books are not published by the big New York publishers or the elite university presses; instead she goes with Graywolf, one of the best independent presses -- one that focuses on quality over quantity.

A sampling of Alexander: Daily Kos blogger Kellogg posts Alexander's "Emancipation." Deep Dish includes Alexander's "Butter." Alexander reads her "Ars Poetica #100: I Believe" on YouTube and "Ars Poetica #92: Marcus Garvey on Elocution" on a video posted at Mahalo.

While the Rick Warrens of the world stir up division, Elizabeth Alexander reminds us that "children everywhere [are] trying to come back together and talk."