The Ethics of Wealth: "The Exception and the Rule"

For my second outside event, I saw a production of Bertolt Brecht's learning play ("Lehrstücke") "The Exception and the Rule" at the Nitery.  It was directed by Professor Rush Rehm of the Classics and Theater and Performance Studies departments and sponsored by Ethics in Society and Stanford Summer Theater.

The play is about an oil merchant who has to race across the Yahi Desert in order to close an important deal.  The merchant travels with a working-class "coolie".  On their journey, the merchant's distrust of the honest coolie erupts when the coolie offers the last of their water to the merchant.  The merchant, thinking the coolie is trying to kill him with a rock because the coolie surely harbors feelings of antagonism towards him, impulsively shoots and kills the coolie.  In court later on, the merchant is acquitted for the murder, in spite of the fact that evidence proves that the coolie was only handing him a canteen of water, because the merchant acted in self-defense and - in the moment - could not have known better.

Rehm's production - and likely Brecht's text, which I hadn't read beforehand - vehemently paints the merchant and the legal system as corrupt.  Before the incident of the murder, the merchant - driven by capitalistic greed - had systematically mistreated the coolie and even violently threatened the coolie so that he would cross a dangerous river.  The merchant himself recognized that he had given the coolie reason to hate him, reason to revolt, and this recognition is what ultimately made him shoot the coolie.  So the merchant did in a sense shoot the coolie out of self-defense, but the merchant also created the unfavorable situation in which he would have to be in a position of self-defense.  And in fact, he was blind to the fact that the coolie was not in fact angry; he couldn't understand the coolie's fundamental generosity and good will.

This play is, of course, stylistically Brechtian in that the actors never fully become the characters and the audience is never meant to see the actors as the characters.  This kind of formal remove is evident in the play's prologue and epilogue, in which all the actors, chorus-like, recite the play's main theme, namely that the system is cruel and absurd and that these absurdities are generally taken as the rule, whereas moments of humanity and goodness are counted as exceptions.  The play also features songs, which abruptly bring us out of the dramatic mode and further alienate us from a straightforward, traditional experience of the story.  Rehm also worked hard with his actors to stifle moments of sympathy, especially in the rehearsal process when the actors desperately wanted to care for the characters they played.  Rehm activated a grammar of physical, often unnatural, movements to highlight the alien quality of the players, which would ultimately allow the audience to step back from the play and analyze it and by extension its content more critically and objectively.

Although Rehm certainly achieved a kind of distance between his actors and the characters they played, the production as a whole came off as a bit silly.  I think the actors ultimately delivered their lines in a very declarative way, which, yes, can yield a Brechtian feel.  And their gestures were similarly declarative, but in a way that ultimately felt elementary and basic.  There is a way to do Brecht that is precise and carefully choreographed, which is how Robert Wilson does Brecht, that does what Rehm set out to do but in a much more beautiful, intentional, and crafted way.  Even on a limited budget, Brecht doesn't have to be simplistic.  The Schaubühne Berlin put on a great production of "The Good Person of Szechwan" that was far less high-tech than Wilson's Threepenny Opera but didn't feel as necessarily stilted as Rehm's production did.  Although "The Exception and the Rule" is a learning play, and is  perhaps more didactic than his other works, I don't think it has to feel like a school play, by which I mean it doesn't have to feel constrained by its time and place to not carry a greater aesthetic vision.

To tie this all back to narrative theory, I think Brecht offers a really strange take on narrative because he wants to suck us dry of empathy by using the formal representation of the narrative to make us consider the content of the narrative in a very analytic, distant way.  What would a novel that aims to do that look like?  I guess what the prose would have to do is force us not to get swept up into the story and the characters.  My impulse is to say that stripped down prose accomplishes this, but I don't think that's necessarily true, because short choppy sentences don't necessarily have a distancing effect.  It would probably have to be on the structural level, like be written from a weird distant perspective or in a chronologically disorienting way that constantly points to its own formal weirdness.  Probably something really annoyingly postmodern.

1st Event of Qrtr

For my first literary event of the quarter, I attended classmate Ashley Chang's production of Titus Andronicus—renowned as Shakespeare's bloodiest.

The cool conceit of this adaptation was that there was no stage separating characters and audience. Rather, characters orbited around a dark lake Laganita while theatergoers--armed with flashlights-- were at liberty to follow whichever characters they chose.

Thus, instead of following the a linearly presented play, we followed characters, often observing them during the long stretch of time wherein they are "off stage" in Shakespeare's original script. So technically, the term "off stage" does not logically apply to this play as there is neither a stage nor a moment whence the curtain is drawn during which any of the characters aren't performing for some subset of audience members.

For me, the coolest parts of this adaptation were these interpolative, normally-off-stage periods where we got to watch the cast of villains engaged in stuff like spitting competitions, sipping 40s, smashing tv sets, and listening to "Bitches Ain't Shit" by Dr. Dre.  Audience members were even engaged by characters to participate.

Equally impressive was the synchronicity of the whole play. It was quite the demonstration of production skill (fuck yeah Ashley) getting all of these characters flitting about Lake Lag to converge in the right place at the right time.

As for the rest of the play, given the nature of following characters rather than the plot as a whole, it was difficult to follow. Having not read the plot treatment beforehand, I couldn't really tell you what the play was about, except that it deals with and frequently features murder, rape, and madness. But not understanding the whole play meant that the gratuitous violence felt all the more gratuitous. The form fit the play well. Certainly, I don't know that this stateless, immersive form could have worked for a lot of plays, but it worked for an ensemble piece with the crazy tone of Titus.

Additionally, it was all the more "immersive" to be surprised when characters were surprised. Because audience members' perspectives were focalized around characters, many moments of dramatic tension were transformed into moments of surprise. For instance, in a traditional stage play, the audience has full knowledge from the beginning of the final scene that Tamora is about to eat and does eat a meal consisting of her murdered sons' ground up remains; if you were following Tamora in this production of Titus, however, the tense moments leading to Tamora sitting down at the dinner table are replaced with the surprise of learning about this inadvertent cannibalism when Tamora does. 

I'd certainly be down to see more presentations of plays like this, and I think it could work even better if the audience were more familiar with the story before hand. Regardless of my familiarity with Titus, however, I loved it!

Second Literary Event: Poetry Out Loud

I don't know why I keep finding myself at poetry events. I don't particularly enjoy much poetry, and am very skeptical of most modern poetry. This is probably because I can't tell good modern poetry from bad modern poetry, and so am naturally suspicious.

Anyway, I'm very glad that I went to this event, because it far surpassed my expectations. As someone who gets bored and distracted easily, it's difficult for me to read poetry, especially long poetry (Walt Whitman is an obvious culprit.) As far as I'm usually concerned, poetry consists solely of words on a page, ink on paper. I read them, they have meaning, and sometimes they even inspire pictures in my imagination. Sometimes, a certain phrase will linger in my head. But despite taking Poetry and Poetics, I must admit I'd never before thought of poetry being a different type of literary art - one in the vein of performance. So when I sat down in the Terrace Room on Thursday, I guess I was expecting performances of neatly recited poetry. Contestants standing with clasped hands, upright posture, and a polite smile on their face. I expected bland recitations, an effect of words hammered to over-familiarity through the process of memorization.

I should have known better. My experiences of poetry recitations in Poetry and Poetics section were one thing; Poetry Out Loud were quite another.

The first performance was of excerpts from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself". Figures. The poem that I had barely managed to finish skimming out of boredom kicked off the contest. But the grad student who performed spoke with emotion, and with feeling. His intensity surprised me, as he infused life into what had previously been for me an uninteresting text. I hadn't thought Whitman could be so engaging.

A few other performances that I remember off the top of my head were of Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter", and Shane Koyczan's "Beethoven". Each of these poems were performed with such strong, unique voices. The student who performed "The Walrus and the Carpenter" did so in such a humorous way that - this being my first time encountering the text, aloud or on paper - I found myself laughing every time he switched voices. Thinking about it now, the voices of the walrus and the carpenter were each so strongly written by Carroll that - had I been reading them silently to myself from a book - I think I would still have been able to hear them in my head. The fact that the student brought them to life, and gave voice to them, quite literally, only made them that much more "real".

Another poem that I very much enjoyed hearing for the first time was "Beethoven". This, I think, had much more to do with the fact that I identified very much with Beethoven's drive for perfection, and how his father relentlessly drove him towards that unattainable peak. "Not good enough. Not. Good. Enough." These themes, mixed with the speaker's beautiful voice, brought tears to my eyes. I don't remember that contestant's name, but she was truly an artist.

I didn't stay to hear the contest results announced. Having already picked in my mind which performances I liked, it felt like a moot point to stay.

Poetry Out Loud

            I went to Poetry Out Loud entirely ignorant of what I was in for.  For some reason, I thought I was going to a slam poetry contest, that the speakers had written their own poems.  I was prepared to be exposed to new poetry. 

And, in a sense, I was.  Although I am very familiar with much of the poetry that was read on Thursday night, hearing the poems read aloud changed my view of them; sometimes because the reader had a unique take on the work, sometimes because simply hearing things spoken made me catch nuances of phrasing and rhyme that I hadn’t picked up on before.

Perhaps the biggest example of this was the reading of “The Walrus and the Carpenter.”  (I lost my program in my sprint back to my dorm to hold my RWT hours on time, so I sadly cannot name the readers and give credit where credit is due.)  I was initially skeptical; after readings of “Song of Myself” and “Persimmons” that drew out all the emotional complexities of the work, a Lewis Caroll poem seemed, frankly, shallow.  However, I was proven wrong; the reader used voices that perfectly brought out both the hilarity and the underlying darkness of the poem.  I had not caught the repetition of the phrase “it was odd” before last night, and the emphasis on it bookended the poem nicely.  I was particularly fond of the voice used for the Carpenter, a slow drawl that is initially quite funny but slowly turns cold and sardonic as he and the Walrus begin consuming the oysters.  I ended the poem both with the usual sense of mirth that I get from the poem and with an underlying unease, almost guilt, about having laughed at all.

The reading of “The Raven” also deserves special mention.  While the frenetic speed that the reader used throughout the poem made it almost impossible to understand at points, it also emphasized the very auditory nature of the poem, with its repeated syllables and steady rhythm.  The shift of tone from comical to dark at the end also emphasized a change in the narrator that I hadn’t noticed in just reading the poem.  Really, the only problem I had was entirely beyond the reader’s control: after hearing the fantastic and hilarious rapped version of the poem, it’s very hard for me to take any other reading entirely seriously.

I had to leave early, so I didn’t find out who won.  However, any of the fantastic readers would have deserved the prize.  Additionally, I walked out of the contest thinking about how different poetry is to each person and that, perhaps, reading poetry is better as a communal activity.  Hearing others read the poems certainly opened my eyes to different tools and tones in the poems, and I walked out with a renewed appreciation for the works.

Literary Event – Undergraduate Prize Winners

Literary Event – Undergraduate Prize Winners

By Paul Kivelson

Sorry this is being posted so long after the actual event. I went to the Undergraduate Prize Winners and thought it was very interesting for a number of reasons. First and primarily it was to see different people’s reactions to standing up and reading, some of the undergraduates where really relaxed and in control, while others were clearly tense and a little bit on edge. Made me think about how great writing comes from myriad different types of individuals and was in a weird way strangely comforting and reassuring. However people do not go to reading for the readers - thought it was great seeing peers stand up and get honored – the main thing I thought about was the work itself.

               I went to this reading with the plan to listen and see what types and tricks successful undergraduates use to craft their stories. I was suppressed when I found how different the stories themselves where in tone and approach. The first was sad, eloquent, with complex vocabulary, and a pronounced powerful tone. The next story was a little hard to hear as the speaker had a very soft voice, but seemed to uses long extended descriptions to drive the piece and the emotional appeal. The story after that used different techniques also and by this point I found myself quite confused as I tried to figure out all the elements they used to elevate their story. This story was funny, focused mainly on larger than life characters and a strange setting. I have to admit I also enjoyed his reading because he changed his voice for the characters in fun ways. The next story had many vivid images and an interesting conceit of giving and apartment to an eight year old to do with as she would. She used colloquial diction with a combination of strong idea strong ideas and images. But the story that followed was very suppressing in its conception and made me pause and think. It was a story about a dog, the dog of a sultan, who clearly was not a nice man. It thought that the story really had a vivid character that shocked with its originality.

               I was left wondering what makes good writing, it is obviously not any one thing. I came to the conclusion that perhaps focusing on a couple of elements of a story is productive solution to making a powerful story. It seemed to me that the stories while strong in every area are all focused on a few aspects constructing a narrative mainly. I wondered if this is due to author preference/voice or is a conscious choice and if it is a conscious choice should it be fought against. Does a masterful author except what they are good at and focus on that or purposefully focus on other aspects. So in summary, I listened to some really great stories and got a bad headache from trying to figure out the answer to a series of question that do not really have a simple answer. 

2nd Creative Writing Event

I very nearly missed the Undergraduate Creative Writing Awards altogether due to being highly distracted by the flagrant housing assignment injustice which had just been perpetrated on my draw group.  (We may end up launching multiple appeals…the possibility has been raised of inciting the righteous ire of a Feminist Studies professor on our behalf…in short, Shit May Very Well Go Down.)  But I digress.  At precisely 6:30, my friend who was planning to accompany me asked, “Wait, Audrey, when is your [creative writing] thing?  …Isn’t it 6:30?”  I jumped up from the table without taking a single bite of the banana I had just lovingly peeled.  Further delay was occasioned by a hotly contested sandwich and the fact that both of our bikes have broken gears, mine being permanently stuck on the very lowest setting and his on the very highest setting.  But at last our energy-inefficient journey to Margaret Jacks culminated in a sheepish entrance into the Terrace Room, where the first reader had just begun. 

            The kid whose turn came right after mine shared a heartbreaking/heartwarming story about the rescue of an abused, malnourished dog, which is normally exactly the kind of thing that would wreak havoc with my emotions.  However, the fact that my own story features a canine narrator apparently brought out the worst in me, because what I mostly kept thinking the whole time was, “My dog would kick your dog’s ass.”  His was sweet and helpless and mine was vicious, so yes, this did make me a terrible person.  

            Probably the most memorable reader for me was the last girl, who spoke eloquently, movingly, and best of all humorously about a traumatic haircutting incident which she suffered as a child.  Through this fairly mundane subject, she provided insight into larger themes like the dynamics between her family, her father’s character, and her experience of being Asian-American.  Having been another little girl who was vain about her hair and fought to defend it from the interference of my mother, and who always feared appearing too “excruciatingly Asian,” I definitely identified with a lot of the things she said.

            There was also a girl who shared an ode to her creative, independent sister, a kid who described some sort of ragtag band of musicians in Spanglish, and some truly phenomenal complimentary strawberries.  All in all, not a bad hour spent—it just happened to be overshadowed by the stress of our infuriating housing situation.

*The experience of actually getting up in front of the room and reading was scarier than I expected it to be, and I was much less charismatic than I had hoped to be, and really, I would rather not talk about it.

Little Yellow Notebook

In the lounge in my home right above the television hangs a black and white photograph of my grandmother- Gladys Nakamura. Throughout my life, countless people have entered our home, looked at this picture of my grandmother and remarked on how much I, one of six children in my family, favor her. This woman, unbeknownst to me, has pale skin and very dark black hair cut in a bob. She is in her thirties in her photograph and the years of living a first-generation immigrant’s life here in the United States seem to show in her eyes. However, despite our age gap and the chasm between our skin tones, I favor her- this fact has been always been undeniably evident to everyone around me but myself. I have always been told I am the spitting image of my mother, so when I look at the differences between myself and this photograph of my paternal grandmother- who I only sometimes recognize bits of my father in- I do not understand what resemblance could possibly be there. Perhaps it is in my almond shaped eyes or my high cheekbones. Perhaps it is my quiet, discerning nature. I love the hybrid-Japanese culture in which I grew up in Honolulu but I still do not feel it connects me to my sobo’s Japanese American experience.

If she were still alive today, I would ask her about what it was like to live in the internment camps during WWII and why she chose to stay in California after being released- I do not even know if I will stay here after graduation. I would sit and listen to what her involvement was like in the NAACP at the height of the civil rights movement and I would compare it to the “commitment” I and so many other Stanford students have to our undergraduate chapter. I would ask her what she thinks of as progress despite the race riots in Los Angeles in ‘92, the election in ‘08, and our country’s current state of affairs internationally. I would ask her what my father was like when he was seven years old, what it was like to get married in one state when just 17 miles away that very union would be considered illegitimate, and what the Okinawan air smells like first thing in the morning. I would ask her all of these things and I would write about it. But for now, I look at this photograph every now and then and I only question- could my connection to this stranger truly birth a real connection to the past?

One day, maybe I will sit down in front of the television in the lounge and instead of reaching for the remote, I will reach for a notebook. I hope when that day comes, I am filled with even more questions than I have ever had before, and that in my little yellow notebook my answers will finally come.

second literary event

This is my second literary event in three days. I am not sure how much longer I can stand up under this deluge of culture. Seriously, though, this reading was fantastic. It was the undergraduate writing awards ceremony. I would highly recommend it to anyone who might want to attend next year.

The best part of the reading, in my opinion, is that it was everyone's first time. None of the undergraduates had given a reading before (or at least, so I assume) and they were clearly thrilled to be up there, standing in the Terrace Room on the fourth floor of Margaret Jacks (which must be one of the best places for readings in the world), sharing their work to an audience that clearly wanted to listen to them. I have never had an experience like that. I hope to, someday, although I'm not arrogant enough to expect it. I do intend to enter the contest next year, if only to say that I did.

The first reading was very powerful for me. Honestly, it was a better piece of writing than I've encountered at  a few professional readings. It was fluid, powerful, and delicate. The author had an incredible feel for place, scene, object. The sentences sounded right, in the same way that Hemingway's sentences sound right. It's difficult to put it any other way.

Another one of the writers had a great sense of metaphor. I remember relatively little of the plot (I'm sorry, she spoke in the middle, I got mixed up), but I remember the image of a hand pressed into the plaster of a kitchen counter. Very cool. Also a chocolate-milk ice sculpture with a spigot thrust into it. The point of the spigot is that as the chocolate milk starts to melt, you can "harvest" it and drink it. That's awesome. Besides having to endure an acute sense of wanting to freeze one of those sculptures for my very own, I have to say that I haven't encountered such a memorable or original image in any "professional" writing in quite a while.

Accordion Story

My father had never bought coffee for a woman before his twenties.  My mother had refused two marriage proposals by the summer she turned nineteen.  Twenty-three months after they met they were married.  There is something, says my father, about January.

They met at a party.  He found the bridge of her nose unusually high.  She can't recall her first memory of his face except the lashes.  So long, she says, it looked like he wore dusty little mink extensions.  She laughed from the nub of her belly and sometimes people would stare.  He could tell she knew they would.  She walked a little faster than he did.  Her calves were muscled like two near-drifting isthmuses.

Preserve, he tried everywhere that night to preserve -- across the room, in conversation with someone else -- the fallaway parts.  He watched her reapply lipstick once after dinner and again sitting on a barstool and again around 11:35 and again, he suspected, in the restroom.  She didn't have to watch herself as she did it.  He couldn't place a name on her accent, but she and Cary Grant shared a way with the long vowel o.  She wore suede gloves.  She'd studied Milton.  The first eight lines of Book Six of Paradise Lost were inscribed upon a pendant around her neck.  "Unbarr'd the gates of light," the pendant flashed at one point.  Whose gates, what light?

She didn't wear her engagement ring, so when he asked for her number at the end of the night, he had to find a way to clutch her awkward apology.  She was engaged to Blake E., and thought that everyone knew.  But you're from out of town, that's right.  You'd have no way of knowing.

The party was the first of my mother's several rejections.  My father didn't know it.  The night after the party he returned to his apartment and turned on the television.  An ad for the upcoming sitcom Seinfeld played.  Lucky, because that way in 1990, and again in 1991 when she rejected him again, at least he had Jerry and Kramer to come home to.

My mother and Blake E. were engaged for ten and a half months.  His family owned a company that produced jock-straps and a variety of athletic equipment that elicit less visual reactions.  Blake showered my mother with patience and distant looks of understanding.  He was her best friend in college.  He cooked her eggs the night her mom passed.  They had a dog named Rufus.  Blake would take Rufus for runs along the Marina when he felt his seasonal paunch set in, and on one such occasion, a man introduced himself to Blake, complimented Rufus, and asked if he wouldn't like to run the rest of the embankment with him and his rotund saddlebag of a pooch, Carter-Joseph.  The man quickly caught on to the little things about Blake.  He noticed, for instance, that Blake only had a dimple on the left side of his cheek.  A result of stitches.  Blake spent his childhood swimming in a pool with imprecise, jutting tiles.  When Blake smiled the dimple flexed inward more than a natural dimple would, revealing the hollows of fine, Teuton cheekbones.  Carter-Joseph's owner loved this.  Blake grew to love Carter-Joseph's owner.  They moved to Pasadena one April.  Following a long night's conversation, my mother was single again.

What an opportunity, my father must have thought.  What odds.  He called my mother one evening after work, to apologize for the news and try his luck again.  He folded his motives neatly within the telephone static.  She wouldn't have any of it.  Her memory of him from the party was watery and distant, a generic kind of dream you expect to have dreamt but can't be sure of.  Besides, her suitors were accomplished and already queued.  She'd already begun seeing her co-worker's nephew, a freshly minted nephrologist.  A kidney man.  A blood scrubber, my father thought.

After six months my mother became engaged to the nephrologist.  She didn't wear his ring either, but thought she loved him very much.  Sometimes he would laugh in his sleep, or do silly things like eat his oatmeal from a plastic bag in the shower.  He would speak widely on things other than work, and taught my mother the latin names for over one hundred species of autumnal tree.  I think my mother still thinks of him when she gardens in November and the leaves fall in smatterings we like to call patterns, in which we attempt to find images.  I have heard that he could whistle under water.

The summer following their engagement, my mother and the nephrologist made plans to visit Egypt.  My mother could only take twelve days off from work, at the very beginning of August.  This happened to be the same time when the nephrologist's mother had been planning the quinquennial family reunion.  It would be held at the nephrologist's favorite childhood beach.  Her plans had been in the works for nearly two years.

The nephrologist's mother had never taken to my mother in the first place; when she and her fiancé told her they couldn't make it, things did not bode well.  You could say she never "gave them her blessing."  The nephrologist loved his mother very much and felt an unshruggable sense of debt toward her; the nephrologist was a nephrologist because of her fierce parenting, her resolve.  He could not decide if one love could justify the other.  My mother and the nephrologist became less familiar to one another.  They lived in different time zones by the end of that winter.

A dead car battery brought my mother and father together for the third time.  My mother's car broke down in a part of the city she wasn't familiar with late one night, and running out of ideas, she ran to the nearest payphone and called the only person she knew from that neighborhood.  My father showed up within eight minutes.  They sat on the hood of her car waiting for Triple-A to arrive.  She told him about the nephrologist.  He told her about some girl he'd really only gone on two dates with -- tried to make it seem like there was more than Jerry and Kramer to his life.

They could have had a nice evening, him helping her and she being grateful and their being friends, and just left it there, but my father didn't have the sense not to push it farther.  When her car was ready he held the door open to help her in and asked her to dinner the following night.  My mother told him she couldn't.  Next week?  My mother then tried to make it clear that by couldn't she meant wouldn't -- that she was very thankful for his being there and that they could probably be great friends, and that he was really a very funny guy and had a kind of comedic value that would be great for television --

My father wouldn't have any of it.  Surely she could entertain the idea of his taking her out just once?  My mother considered this.  I'll go out with you, she said, if you can learn to play an instrument that none of my friends play.  Almost all her friends were musicians.

That's why my father learned to play the accordion.

California Dreaming

            The greatest generation, that’s what they were called. Called from the ashes of economic ruin into the trenches of the second great war. Europe, somewhere only the elite could dream of going, somehow come true. But in true form, it was not a dream that was realized but a nightmare; a nightmare with tinges of a dream. For home was a nightmare as well. The South, 75 years after freedom, still a hard day’s work without penitence. Leaving a nightmare for a dream that had become a nightmare; only to return to that initial nightmare with a dream of a new dream. The life we lead.

            If I was to write a novel based on family lore I think the journey of my great great grandparents from Louisiana to California during WWII would be a really interesting novel to tell. First, I think that it would touch on one of the most basic of human faculties, our capacity for hope and to dream. The promise of jobs and escape from the Jim Crow south would an interesting exploration of human sentiment. What were the black sharecropping communities like at the onset of America’s involvement in WWII. What was their take on one of the truly defining moments of the 20^th century and a transformative moment in America’s history.

            Second, the journey. I’ve always found stories that take place on the road, an adventure, as particularly exciting. Maybe because they provide a definitive arch from the beginning. You have to leave where you are to get to where you want to go. Thus, you have your departure, your arrival, and the adventure in between. In a way its like Homer’s Odyssey, the same essential elements adopted to a more setting, with modern concerns, and modern characters.

            Finally, I think that it would provide a good historical snap shop of a period and place that have not been overdone. Oakland, California during WWII was really transformed and was a transformative place. You had an influx of vast numbers of migrants from the poor and rural South. Not only blacks, but whites, and Latinos as well. Thus you had an interesting interplay between the past formalized instances of Jim Crow to a new place without such institutions and the way in which the characters adopt and their lives play out in this setting.   

Switched

My great-grandfather never wanted eight children. Food in the early 20th century Oklahoma was a finite resource, any farmer could tell you that, and children were just a catalyst to that resource being depleted. They meant time and money, and a wife whose beauty was slowly swallowed up by wrinkles with the arrival of each bawling infant. My great-grandfather was satisfied with the first two children, even though they were girls. One of them had toes that hadn’t quite formed right, with the webbing still there between them. It wasn’t very noticeable, but my great-grandfather decided this was another sign that two was more than enough children; there was no use creating any more disfigured kids to eat up the little food they brought in. When he accidentally made two more girls, he decided to stop sleeping with his wife, my great-grandmother. But nights are hard to get through alone, and sometimes, to distract oneself from calloused hands and sore feet, from the crop not growing as it should, a person likes to turn to the body next to them and find a moment’s comfort. Three more children were conceived this way.

During the seventh pregnancy, my great-grandfather prayed for a miscarriage. When he was hoeing the hard earth left over from a cold winter he wished that the baby, the size of your pinky finger, would slide out effortlessly. They would bury it in a shoebox like they did the extra kittens, for the wife’s sake. When the buds started peeking out with pink eyes from the trees, my great-grandfather wished the baby would be born early, a hard grapefruit of a child so that it would cease breathing on its own. When my great-grandmother’s belly swelled out and it looked like another healthy baby was on the way, my grandfather stopped wishing for anything all together.

In the tail end of summer, my great-grandmother went to the hospital with contractions and pushed alongside another woman who was giving birth at the same time. The other woman’s baby came first, quietly, and there was no sound other than her ragged breathing and her husband’s pacing. WIthin minutes of this other birth, my grandfather became a father to yet another girl. Immediately after this baby was delivered, she was taken to another room to be cleaned up. My great-grandfather, in a fit of frustration and rage at letting this happen again, also left the room, trailing after the nurses.

When the nurses returned with only one baby, it was obvious something was wrong. “Where is she?” my great-grandmother asked. The nurse shook her head. “It didn’t make it,” she replied, and started cleaning up the afterbirth. My great-grandmother became hysterical, asking her husband what had happened, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t explain, only looked out the window in silence. On the other side of the partition, soft mewls came from the other woman’s child. My great-grandmother sobbed and screamed at her husband to do something, that their child couldn’t have died, that she would have felt it, but he did nothing. The nurses had to move my great-grandmother to another room. Before my great-grandmother’s bed was wheeled out to the hallway, though, she peered over her pillow at the neighboring mother. In the woman’s arms was a naked little girl, with the new parents hovering over her, admiring what they had made. The infant stretched her arms and legs, and my great-grandmother's last vision of the baby were her wrinkled, red feet, with the webbing still linking each toe.

LITERARY EVENT: senior reading

I am sorry to put LITERARY EVENT in capital letters, but I am not taking any chances with this piece being overlooked in the avalanche of last night's blog posts.

So. Last night I went to the senior reading, an annual event to honor seniors in the creative writing department. Putting aside a myriad of questions that I found myself wondering--who organized this? why are only a few seniors performing? why did none of the faculty turn out?--I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

One piece made use of some excellent magical realism. Now I tend to distrust magical realism, on the whole. When I was in high school and reading Garcia Marquez, my Spanish teacher explained it to me like this: "If we were in a world with magic carpets, but no one thought the magic carpets were strange, and if all the people behaved precisely as they do now...that's magical realism." His example of magic carpets illustrates what I dislike about magical realism: the showiness of it. The artificial originality. Instead of really shedding light on the human experience, the writer gives you a magic lamp.

But in this piece, the realism established itself before the magic. The author spoke in a simple first person voice about her life growing up in a rural setting with her mother and grandmother, both of whom could charm birds and squirrels into dancing by just playing their fiddles. I realize, of course, that this is not literally possible, but it just seemed like a romantic embellishment on family lore--no magic yet. Then, after the protagonist moves to the city, this happens: "A raven flies to me and speaks to me in my mother's voice: 'Your grandmother is dying. Come back.'" (I apologize for the mutilated quote, but I didn't write it down at the time and now a whole day has passed, wreaking havoc with my memory. It was better in person.) So now the magic comes to bear in a fully human, climactic moment. The author's mother's remarkable relationship with animals was already alluded to, so this moment doesn't feel like a deus ex machina, and the naturalness of it contrasted with the strangeness in a very perfect way. That was a special and wondrous moment for me. I appreciated it deeply and if the writer of that story happens to read or hear of this post (about a million to one shot) then I congratulate them on having accomplished something special.

Rogan Family History

If I wrote a novel it would probably be a rip off of East of Eden by Steinbeck. My family's been in California for five generations now on each side of the family, maybe four on my mother's. I'd start the story with the history of one side of my family, probably my father's and talk about how they came over from Norway and got into publishing and eventually wound up in San Francisco after moving from Milwaukee to Seattle. I'd write a lot about my Grandfather's generation–– he had lots of siblings, one of which is still alive today. Aunt Verna is one hundred and three years old now. I'd write about how my Grandfather's brother died in WWII and how my Grandfather joined the service and learned to fly. He flew C47s and dropped troops on D-day. There's a couple good stories in there, mostly having to do with my Grandfather being a good guy. I'd also write about my mother's side of the family–– her grandfather was a Sheriff in Nevada durring the Gold Rush and eventually moved to San Francisco in his old age. I'm sure I could come up with a couple good stories about him. My mother's grandmother came over from Ireland durring the famine–– there's also material here. My paternal grandfather met my grandmother in San Francisco. She was a very smart woman, but girls weren't allowed into college, so she became an actress. After the war my Grandfather met her through his brother on a trolley car after work. My Grandfather owned a bakery in San Francisco, right by the Ferry Building, my dad grew up delivering sandwiches with his brother. Right about when my dad was going into high school, they moved from san Francisco to Santa Cruz where my dad and a lot of his siblings have lived ever since. My mother grew up in Lafayette. Her father was also in the war–– he was in command of a ship in the Pacific. After the war he worked for the Justice Department and married my Grandmother. My mom moved to Santa Cruz and met my dad. Now I'm here. I'd probably take a page from Steinbeck and have myself be a character, but stay out of the way of the narrative. There's a bunch of love stories I could tell, there 's also plenty of bad things I could write about, and a lot of American history tangled up in it. I like when writers write about things that they actually have some kind of relationship too–– I think were I to write a novel, this would be it. My family's history has been pretty well documented and lots of people have done some story-worthy things, so I don't think I would have trouble coming up with content. This could work as a series of short stories.

my history?

I know very little about my history. This much is clear to me.

Writing about my lack of history seems to be a literary sin, like writing a story about writer's block. But I don't want to make anything up. That seems unforgivable. And I genuinely know very little. When I was in first grade, I remember I had to make a family tree. It went back to my grandparents, and no farther. I still don't know who my great-grandparents are, and my parents have actually forgotten who my godfather is. This last fact in particular boggles the mind. They must know who he is and just not want to tell me, for whatever reason. Maybe he's a felon or a drug dealer or John Kerry, or someone else who would embarrass our family.

My parents have always been secretive about their past. I know nothing about how they met or when or why they got engaged. I did not realize that this was unusual for a long time.

I took advantage of this assignment to send my father this text: "I am supposed to write about our family lore. Do we have literally any family lore? I cannot think of any." He responded with a story about my great-great-aunt Mary, who was apparently a renowned whistler in her hometown of Woodstock, Illinois, and who apparently "studied for years to become a professional whistler," because once upon a time such a thing was possible. (This country would be happier if professional whistlers still existed.) Anyway, her first performance was panned. Nobody smiled, nobody clapped. And just like that, her whistling career was over. I suppose I could spin this into a story, but a novel? I'm not sure.

No, if I were going to write a novel about my family, I would have to broach the subject of my godfather. Perhaps some amazing story lurks there. I hope so. I could do with some lore.

UPDATE: my father just sent me this e-mail... "Apparently there was murder in your grandmother's family but mom says she doesn't want to talk about it." What??

Spirits of Questionable Origin

  It is easier to leave Cuba when you are older.  This is what my father told my brothers when his uncle Jesús, his mother’s brother, finally came to the United States.  He was in his sixties. My father and most of his family were able to escape in 1967 under some legal crapshoot called the Lottery, in which a family name is drawn and that family is allowed to leave on a plane rather than a makeshift watercraft with the American Coast Guard nabbing you out of the water in the shallows of the Florida Straits before they send you back to Fidel’s prisons.  I do not know how Jesús got to the United States, though there are rumors that he was released from the country and traveled up through South America.  One day he simply sauntered into my father’s shop, dressed head to toe in white, and my father gave him a welcoming embrace.  Both patted the other on the back of the shoulder in some DePaula gesture of emotional discomfort.  I imagine the details; I was not there. 
     I have been told that he was a bus driver in Havana, and that he accidentally killed a pedestrian while on his route.  I have heard of no governmental punishment, only penance of a personal kind.  This was when he began to wear all white.  He dressed in that way for twenty years, for forgiveness of his sin or to ward off the evil eye.  Superstition carries equal weight to religion in Cuba.  He also had a gold chain with a medal, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, the patron saint of Cuba, Our Lady of Charity.  When he came to the United States, he was balding and in possession of an ample gut and slim, dark limbs.  He quickly found a lover, a young man that my father said was kind and made his uncle happy.  I have seen photos, both mustachioed men posed on the hood of an old convertible, smiling.  Jesús’s gold medal rests on his white undershirt.  I imagine that it matches the gold in his teeth but I do not remember.

  He joined a Santería community in Miami, continuing his spiritual practices and rituals from the old world.  He was a healer of some sort, not quite a priest.  He sacrificed chickens and performed other such rites, involving curative herbs and a deep connection to the good and evil spirits of the world.  He came to my parents’ shop to bless it, and my father was very grateful.  

  I do not remember meeting him though my family says that I have, many a time as a child.  I remember that he was to come for my brother’s wedding, he was to drive other members of the family and attend the ceremony.  He did not come, and this deeply affected my father.  Perhaps he wanted the marriage blessed; my father does not practice Santería, but he believes very strongly in spirits.  They did not speak for over ten years, when Jesús finally died.  I was there when my father received the phone call.  He stopped for just a moment before he returned to his repairs.

My grandfather

My grandfather, a short, wiry and highly disciplined man, who came from a small town in, moved to Delhi when he was promoted to the central logistics department of the Indian Railways. Now, in spite of his seniority, which he very much believed in, he had to make do with a dark and depressing flat, in place of town bungalows, and, instead of being driven around in a jeep, he was forced to take the train each morning. I mention these complaints, which will certainly seem frivolous, because, as my grandfather claims that, on the morning of October 31, 1984, they were at the top of his mind.

The same morning, the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, was shot dead by her two Sikh bodyguards, revenge for her decision to attack the Golden Temple, which ‘Khalistan’ freedom fighters or separatists had militarized. My grandfather had heard about the assassination on All-India Radio, but it did not greatly trouble him. He was perusing a stack of daily reports as the train drew into a station. The brakes screeched but were then lost in a human roar, as yet indistinct, pressing on the windows. His ears were inured to the noise of the city, but he heard the fury in the voices and felt fear spread upward from his stomach.

Before the train had stopped, someone began to pound on the door. A man standing in the hallway opened it and the voices, now distinct, spread in. My grandfather looked up, and finally realized what would happen in the blank face of the Sikh, bearded and turbaned, sitting across the table. A man, whose appearance and words my grandfather has forgotten, quietly walked into the compartment. The passengers began to take out passports, tickets, anything with their names on it, and the man walked down inspecting their documents and nodded at them. Before he reached my grandfather’s table, two other men ran past him, and seized the Sikh by his arm. They dragged him across the floor and towards the other door. He was crying silently and belatedly tried to kick out but they subdued him. As they reached the door, my grandfather stood up and began to ask the most pointless questions possible, ‘What are you doing? Where are you taking him?’ The men, smiling, ignored him until they reached the door, when he began advancing towards them, now yelling insults. They finished throwing the Sikh off the train and, without a word, took hold of my grandfather and threw him out as well.

The platform, astonishingly, was empty, except for a small group of men in a circle, holding weapons. Two of them were holding the Sikh down. The man who had thrown my grandfather off the train asked another, ‘Him also?’ The man walked over, unperturbed my grandfather’s screams. He was at least six inches taller than my grandfather and came close enough to be able to look straight down at his face. After a second of silence, he began to laugh. Then he became serious. ‘This stick-man a Sikh?’ he said to his partner. He turned to my grandfather. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘get back on the train. We’ll do what we have to.’ My grandfather’s throat stopped with impotence and he began to collapse, till the man supported him. The Sikh, moaning quietly, was pulled along the platform, behind the terminal.

My Grandpa

This blogpost turned out to be quite the challenge for me, simply because my background is so varied. In truth, I’m sort of a mutt. A combination of various ethnicities namely German, Polish, Native American, and some west African country. This made it hard to choose a specific legend, event, or family member to base this blogpost on, but in the end I chose my grandfather who happens to give me my African-American and Native-American heritage.

My grandfather is a very unique, and ambitious man, who has great stories to prove his character. I’ll start with his humble beginnings. He was the grandchild of former slaves, and was born fairly poor. Although he was poor throughout his childhood, he exhibited a high intellect, and was rewarded by college admission. Though as the tale grows sweeter, it also grows more intense. During his undergraduate education, my grandfather lived in a colored dormitory, due to the segregation that was prominent in this era. My grandfather attended college during the expansion of the civil rights movement, and as a result, tensions were high between blacks and whites. One heated day, for reasons unknown to myself, a crew of police officers equipped with K9 units ended up surrounding his dorm, and ultimately unleashed the K9’s unto my grandfather and the other African-Americans inhabiting this dormitory. My grandfather received a nasty bite from one of the dogs leaving short term, but very prominent damage. The inhabitants of the dormitory decided to sue the police officers, and the case was eventually taken up by Thurgood Marshall himself. The dorm inhabitants won the case, and my grandfather ended up graduating college with honors.

Later in my grandfathers life, he joined the marines. He was an avid hunter and outdoorsman and loved the camaraderie that came with joining the army. He received valuable snipers training, and his present day deadeye shot is pure testament to this. My knowledge of my grandfathers time in the marines is cloudy, but what do I do know, is that some of the skills he learned during this time have stayed with him his whole life. He is still an avid hunter and goes a couple of times every year.

After leaving the marines, my grandfather joined the Freemasons, and also entered medical school. By this time my grandfather had a couple kids of his own, my father included, and had to take his youngest son (my uncle) with him to medical school lectures, while his other children were at school. He did this throughout his whole medical education. As for the Freemasons, my grandfather went on to obtain the highest title offered to masons, but tells me I’d have to join if I want him to describe any specifics.

To end my grandfathers legend, I will detail an event that happened to him during medical school, a time where he was married with kids. One day, my grandfather left his home, telling my grandmother he was going to class. My grandmother had grown suspicious of my grandfather and feared he was cheating. She followed him that day to see where he was going. As my grandfather arrived at his destination, my grandmother, watching from afar, concluded that he was not going to class, and was in fact cheating with another woman. She watched him enter the building with the other woman as she grabbed a loaded pistol from the glove compartment. She followed my grandfather into the building and found the room that he was in (how she knew this I am not sure) and found him engaging in sexual acts with the other woman. My grandmother raised the pistol at the couple as my grandfather met her gaze. There were tears in her eyes and they held each others stare in a tense stair down. With lightning swift reactions, my grandfather grabbed for the pistol, simultaneously emptying the ammo clip from the guns shaft and wedging his finger between the hammer to prevent any shots from being fired. It seems his marine skills paid off in the end, just not how you’d expect them to.