Thoughts on Osama's Death

It was stunning last night to hear the news of Osama Bin Laden's death. Frankly, it had been so long that I assumed he would never be captured, in part because it was very possible that he was already dead. My first thought was "Wow, I'd really hate to be Pakistan right about now" because now there is proof that the government wasn't doing near enough to make terrorists within its borders feel uncomfortable. India is in the driver's seat as far as relations between the two countries go with Pakistan now having zero credibility. This could be a very bad situation, one that India might conceivably use to justify a nuclear attack if any further terrorist actions originating in Pakistan were forthcoming.


Today I am torn about how I feel. The pacifist part of me feels that it is never appropriate to celebrate someone's death no matter how evil they are (and certainly I am not celebrating Osama's death, but I don't really feel sad about it, either), but in reading more about the operation to find/attack Osama, and especially reading about how the crowd spontaneously started chanting "U-S-A! U-S-A!" at the Mets game last night, I find myself getting choked up and feeling a little "America! Fuck Yeah!" action going on. It is an unexpected split.

Starboard Wine and Samuel R. Delany's Canonicity

I've spent the last hour or so online looking to buy a copy of Samuel R. Delany's Starboard Wine (1984). It is the only volume of his nonfiction that I do not own. My search has thus far been unsuccessful, as it was when I undertook it at the end of December. I am so used to finding whatever book I want on amazon.com (and almost always for reasonable prices) that it is a disconcerting feeling when this process fails. I had seen a copy in fair condition for around $55.00 on amazon last summer and decided not to get it then because I didn't need it for my research at the time and thought I would wait until I had some extra money around, but now I am kicking myself for passing up the chance.


I did find that apparently Wesleyan University Press, which has published/re-printed most of Delany's nonfiction and several of his novels, was planning on issuing a new edition back in 1997, but it never came to fruition. It scares me that Delany has such a difficult time keeping his work in print (and had a tough time finding a publisher for his new novel, which is finally coming out in October after its original publisher, Alyson Books, went bankrupt earlier this year) because he is a tremendously important author, not only for the queer and African American communities, but for America in general. I focus on him in my criticism in order to keep him on the canonical radar, where he is already on the margins at best. He is too important to let fade into obscurity after his death (he turns 70 next year, so who knows how much time he has left?).

HBP

The Mets are currently losing to the Phillies (8-0 in the sixth), but they've hit two Phillie batters (Ryan Howard and Shane Victorino) with pitches, which has made me happy. The Mets have been playing with some grit lately under Terry Collins, but I still think what they need, and have needed since the beginning of 2008, is to get into a brawl. They need something to help them cohere as a group. The 1986 Mets got into four brawls during the season, and, while the game is different now and that is an outrageous number, one or two wouldn't hurt.

Thoughts on Cavafy

This evening I've been reading in The Complete Poems of [Constantine] Cavafy (the 1976 Rae Dalven translation) in between innings of the Mets-Nationals game. I first encountered his poetry in J.D. McClatchy's anthology Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems and enjoyed it enough to desire more.


Cavafy's poems are almost all either love poems (the majority of them clearly homoerotic) or retellings of ancient Greek myths or history. The latter are not very good (compared, for instance, with the skillful way in which H.D. writes about the same subject matter), but the love poems are excellent. They tend to be short vignettes, beautifully crafted, about brief liaisons and the former lovers of the speaker's youth.


"On Painting" especially stands out to me:


I attend to my work and I love it.
But today the languor of composition disheartens me.
The day has affected me. Its face
is deepening dark. It continues to blow and rain.
I would sooner see than speak.
In this painting now, I am looking at
a beautiful lad who is stretched out
near the fountain, probably worn out from running.
What a beautiful child; what a divine noon
has now overtaken him to lull him to sleep.--
I sit and look so for a long time.
And again it is in art that I rest from its toil.


That last line is spectacular: the idea that the turmoil caused by the struggle to create beauty ("the languor of composition disheartens me") can only be assuaged by beauty's calming influence.


I love the depiction of visual art in poetry. Cavafy describes the path to the sublime that the best paintings reveal to viewers in a way that is reminiscent of Frank O'Hara's poem "Why I am Not a Painter," which also speaks of the mysterious beauty of painting from a sideways angle, using a painting as an illustration of this beauty rather than attempting a straightforward description of its essence.

Pastiche

I have a pastiche of pop culture references running through my head today:


"Eleanor, gee, I think you're swell, and you know you do me well, you're my pride and joy et cetera"


"I want my baby back baby back baby back, I want my baby back baby back baby back (Chili's baby back ribs, Chili's baby back ribs)"


"April is the cruellest month" (OK, so Eliot isn't exactly pop culture, but he's nerd pop culture)


"So, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than estates of the Bonapartes" (War and Peace isn't pop culture as well, but Peanuts is, and there's that great storyline where Snoopy is reading War and Peace one word per day.


the beginning horn riff of "Goldfinger."


Also, I'm wearing my "I'm Keith Hernandez" shirt today.

I'm Keith Hernandez / A film by Rob Perri

"We would have been safe" (and game six)

I just finished re-reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close to teach it tomorrow, and even though this was the sixth or seventh time I have read it, the last quarter of the book still makes me cry. It concludes about as happily as it possibly can--Oskar's father is still dead (no magical realism here), but he solves the mystery of the key, he and his mother are reconciled, and he realizes he has to/will be able to move on with his life--though the actual ending is heartwrenching. Oskar's final words, "We would have been safe" (326), signify the final loss of his childhood innocence, which is normally a healthy, important moment of growth. Foer does such a good job of making readers care about Oskar, though, that we hope he can just stay protected and happy forever. Oskar grows up instead, and we are left with the fact that for all of our childhood nostalgia, we live in a world where, as Abby Black says, "people hurt each other" for no good reason, even when we try our best not to (290).


Oskar's last sentence, coupled with the flipbook that shows a body falling back up into the World Trade Center, is also a public lament for Americans' pre-9/11 hopeful naivete that we were somehow in the violent, messy world, but not of it. We all share that desire for safety, but as Oskar says, "In the end, everyone loses everyone" (74), so we must confront the danger and live our lives to the fullest.


Anyway, to cheer myself up I watched the tenth inning of game six from the 1986 World Series. It still always amazes me that the Mets win; I get nervous every time I watch it.


Today I watched both halves of the inning (usually I just watch the bottom half), and it was shocking how much it looks like Boston is destined to win. I can't imagine having watched it as a Red Sox fan. Just before Dave Henderson hits a home run to put Boston ahead, NBC replayed his home run from game five of the ALCS, so it plays like he was pre-ordained to hit another one. Shortly thereafter, there is a shot of Henderson and Bill Buckner with their arms around one another in the dugout, laughing. Later in the inning, Buckner comes up with a runner in scoring position and Rick Aguilera hits him. Buckner glares out toward the mound and the home plate umpire has to get in front of him and guide him toward first base. This reaction is completely ridiculous on Buckner's part because there is no way Aguilera would be throwing at him intentionally. It is like the baseball gods punish Buckner for his reaction in the bottom half of the inning. As gods are wont to do, their punishment far outweighs the crime.


My favorite part of the bottom half of the inning* is Ray Knight screaming with joy to the heavens (I use this term intentionally--Knight explicitly thanks "the good Lord" in his post-game interview with Marv Albert [so does Mookie Wilson]) as his teammates mob him after he scores the winning run. It looks like he is barely able to breathe, like he is drowning in a sea of Mets. It is also wonderful how once the run crosses the plate Vin Scully stops talking and just lets the crowd noise and the camera shots speak for themselves.


* For those of you unfamiliar with the bottom half of the inning, here's a re-creation of it using the old Nintendo game RBI Baseball with the original NBC audio:

Books Acquired Recently

Books Acquired Recently (in the order I acquired them):


Disch, Thomas M. The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. 1998. New York: Touchstone, 2000.


A friend who knows that in the past several years I've been beginning to explore the world of science fiction (mostly as a result of reading Samuel R. Delany) gave this to me. It looks pretty interesting, though I have a rather sizeable stack of other things to read first, including the rest of the books mentioned in this post. I've read Disch's Camp Concentration and generally liked it as an anti-war statement/indictment of the American police state, though it wasn't spectacular aesthetically.


Humphreys, Laud. Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. 2nd ed. 1975. New Brunswick: AldineTransaction, 2009.


I first read this during my senior year of college, and it changed my life. The model of non-monogamous, anonymous sex it documents was completely new to me at the time, and it helped to open my eyes to just how important-while-being-commonplace sex is. It also helped me in my long journey to acknowledge that my sexual attraction to men is legitimate. Furthermore, the book prepared a conceptual framework which gave me a base from which to encounter and appreciate writers such as Delany and John Rechy, who have become essential for me.


Delany, Samuel R. Trouble on Triton. 1976. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1996.


I'm re-reading this for a paper that I am working on, so I decided to get the edition that is currently in print rather than using my old Bantam edition. I am also thinking about teaching it next year. Usually when I teach Delany's science fiction I teach Babel-17, but I am getting a little tired of it. My problem is that the Delany novels I love the most and/or find the most interesting (e.g., in no particular order, The Mad Man, Dhalgren, Equinox, The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals) are generally either too explicit or too complicated/long (or all three) to teach to undergraduates. Trouble on Triton might be an acceptable compromise.


Tucker, Jeffrey Allen. A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2004.


This is also for the paper I am writing. I read pieces of it while researching my dissertation, but am now ready to interact with it fully.