12th Street Online - Writing & Democracy from the New School's Riggio Writing Program

Subway Ladybug

Debbie Rice — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:51:05 +0000

The subway stop at 181st Street was an odd place to see a ladybug. She boarded the train and flew directly to perch on the edge of my upended book. I stayed very still, staring at the shiny red and black of her wings, while she rested there. After a few minutes I gently moved the book into a flat position on my lap, and she obliged me by crawling over the lip and onto the surface. I put my hand in front of her for protection against any jostling that might shake her.

She was my ladybug. By the time we reached 96^th Street, my cupped hand was entrapping rather than protecting her. I began to think ahead to the exit with the most direct access to the outdoors. I couldn’t think of one. Fine. She would just have to stay with me until I got out downtown. I began to day dream about the tiny patch of green just around the corner from my subway stop. I imagined her new life there and wondered whether she’d miss home, and how she’d gotten stranded in that deep subway tunnel in northern Manhattan.

Then at 59^th Street, without my permission, the dainty bug slipped deftly through my fingers and flew out the open doors. I couldn’t believe it. I should have kept my fingers closer together. Now she’ll never get to see the little park I wanted to show her. She’ll most likely never make it out from underground. How sad. Then I realized what this was really about. I was homesick for a life where ladybugs were not uncommon.

I’d lived in New York for years but sometimes I still felt alien. I felt it on summer Sunday afternoons in Van Courtland Park, when the barbeque crowd threw their chicken bones and candy wrappers on the ground. I felt it on cold winter days when the melting snow was yellow and gray from dog pee and exhaust, and every cross walk was blocked by enormous snow drifts or giant puddles. I felt it as I walked beneath the elevated trains, so loud they drowned my voice and forced me to plug my ears. I felt it when one of my friends made a snide comment about Southerners, or suburbanites, or fly-over country. I felt it when I couldn’t call more than two of my neighbors by name.

The things I’d come here to find, were widely available. Theatre, gallery openings, and literary events were everywhere. There were more museums than I could possibly visit–enough culture to last me for the rest of my life. I’d spent an evening on Steve Forbes yacht; I’d appeared in television shows and commercials; I’d eaten in exclusive restaurants; I’d bellied up to the bathroom sink with my favorite celebrity at an event we both attended; I’d worked for a Broadway Producer and a Wall Street hot shot—things that would have impressed my younger self. But that day all I really wanted was to walk barefoot in the garden and feel the sun on my neck. I wanted long drives on country roads, trees as far as I could see; mountains, waterfalls and swimming holes. I wanted wide-open spaces and down-to-earth people.

All I really wanted that day was to go home.

“You confused evasion and artistic tact”

Ushshi Rahman — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:51:35 +0000

Then
in intermittent peeks, needled through the brick enclave
saturated, as a stop-motion cartoon
i saw him,
my Uncle
puffy like wild, overgrown mushrooms
bruised magenta bloc
sleepless caverns, now filled
lined the bridge of that lion muzzle-
as though they had loved him
with steel toed boots
white muslin wrapped
hint of civility in a butcher’s rusty penny quarters.

He said we came from wandering pilgrims,
arms crossed, neat and stiff
shielding his withered chest,
and it was now time for us to leave.

Beneath a Broken Bridge

Ethan Dante Bello — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:47:18 +0000

Under a bridge,

Kicking rocks at battered walls,

We smoked a few Winston’s,

Not for the thrill

But out of habit.

The sun dropped below the earth,

And the cloudy waters

Rose to our bare ankles,

You told me tragic tales of your life,

And I shared a few of my own.

Stepping through the ruins,

Of another man’s city,

In a crevice of the world

We didn’t choose,

Where no sitcoms are shot,

The ice cream tastes bitter,

And the devil,

If there is one,

Reins supreme in the thoughts

Of jagged minds.

We held hands and stood on broken glass,

With scentless flowers all around,

And watched the sun and the moon

Trade places a million times,

I grew hair on my chin,

And you stopped wearing heels,

But our beauty lived on

In the cracks of our sweaty palms.

Téa Obrhet: How We Make Meaning, Makes UsAn Excerpt from the 12th Street Interview

Kate — Mon, 07 May 2012 13:50:11 +0000

In this excerpt from the 12th Street interview, Téa Obreht talks backstory, process and the questions we’d love to ask our own work with Online Managing Editor, Kate Cox.

See Téa Obreht at 12th Street‘s launch event Wednesday, May 9th at 7:00 p.m. at the Union Square Barnes & Noble (33 E. 17th Street, New York, NY 10003.)

Photograph © Beowulf Sheehan www.beowulfsheehan.com

Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, The New York Times, and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading. Her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, was published by Random House in 2011. She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 Under 35. Téa Obreht lives in Ithaca, New York.

STREET : It seems especially clear to me in The Tiger’s Wife that storytelling is
a delicate balance between revelation and restraint. How do you decide what’s
necessary for a reader to know about a character’s backstory?

OBREHT: That’s a really tough question. I think that decision depends on what
needs to exist in the larger story as a whole. What I found in writing The Tiger’s
Wife was that I didn’t want to give background. The chapter on Luka the Butcher
was only supposed to be for me. I was supposed to write it to get to know the
character and to establish his villainy, and then I was going to cast it aside. What
I found was that the way his story played out was actually very beneficial to the
novel itself and to this idea of myth making. The leap to the characters of Darisa
the Bear and the Apothecary came from that. I certainly hadn’t done that before.
In my short fiction, I had learned about the character as I went along, instead of
doing a whole separate backstory. Several of my writing professors had said that
you must know what your protagonist would have for breakfast each morning.
And then there are people who give you the advice that you don’t need to know
anything; the character will come as he or she comes, and you’ll learn about them
as you go. I’ve definitely taken both routes. But it has to be in service of the larger
narrative somehow. There’s so much to be had in withholding. It’s not necessarily
what you withhold or reveal, it’s the way you do it. Writing short stories showed
me that you can do so much with implication and turn of phrase. If you want the
information to trickle through, you can do it very subtly, and the reader will get
the information without feeling like they’re getting information at all—which is
a wonderful thing to be able to do.

STREET : In writing short pieces, it feels easier to me to open an unmarked door
and walk through a dark hallway. The end is never far away; you can find your way
as you go along. It reminds me of what Joan Didion said about why she writes: “I
write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and
what it means. What I want and what I fear.” It seems that in short work, you can
do just that: write to find out what you think. You don’t have to know how it’s
going to come out. But I’m not sure the same thing applies to writing a novel. Do
you need to know the end to write the beginning? Since your background is in
short fiction, what surprised you the most about writing a novel?

OBREHT: The process was just so different. I was quite surprised at the lack of
control I ended up having over certain elements of the narrative. As a short story
writer, I would sit down and crank out the whole first draft of a story in twenty
four to forty eight hours, maximum. There would be all these different drafts and
the excitement of editing—which is a process I love. I love finding out how the
story will change from the first draft into something that actually makes sense
and flows and has connections between all its elements. It’s something that in
short-story writing involves a lot of immediate gratification: you’re done, you see
the beginning, you see the end, and now you can play. You’re in control of those
elements. You start a novel, and the end is such a long, long way away that you
begin to lose the thread of what it is you intended. By the time you arrive at the
end, the novel has taken over out of its own necessity. It’s dictating what needs to
happen in that revision process. That was a big surprise.

STREET : In the Riggio writing program, we talk about approaching editing as if
it were an interview: you ask your piece why it exists and what it’s doing. In your
PBS interview, you mentioned it being strange that your novel is a real thing and
that it feels almost like a person with a face. If your novel were a person, what
would you ask it?

OBREHT: That’s a really great question. Wow. I’d ask: How do you feel? Do you feel
as good as you could feasibly feel? When you were asking that, I had an image
of myself sort of hovering—this horrible image of myself hovering over the
hospital bed of my novel. I pictured it looking up at me and me asking: How are
you doing? Are you all right? Now it’s done, whether it’s good or bad. For better or
for worse, it’s finished. It’s out there, and it’s this entity that’s roaming around, you
know, taking the bus—

STREET : Living in other people’s houses—

OBREHT: My question for myself was, if this goes out today, are you going to be
able to look back at it in ten years and say, I really did the best I could at the time
for what I was capable of and what I knew? You hope that you’ll be able to do better
and that you’ll learn something by screwing up the first one in some way. So, I
think my question to my novel would be along the same vein: How ya feeling? Did
we do okay?

STREET : Right. Are you happy? Are you out there in the world having good experiences?
The idea of your novel being set adrift to have its own life is amazing
because that’s really what reading and writing is: a shared experience between
reader and writer, and eventually the experience of the language itself. Once you
let it out of your hands it takes on a life of its own.

OBREHT: Absolutely. And another thing I learned is that you can’t be married to
your own intent. You hope your words get across what you want to say and that it
functions as a whole, more or less, the same way for everyone who experiences
it. But the truth is, you’re not going to be able to come out of the pages tomorrow
when some reader is disagreeing with it, or not enjoying it, and shake them
and say, “This is really what I meant.” That’s something else to make peace with.
You can’t believe in the universality of everybody experiencing your novel in the
same way.

Letter from The Editor

Lila Selim — Mon, 07 May 2012 12:18:46 +0000

In preparation for our Issue 5 launch event this Wednesday, May 9th, here are some final reflections from our Editor-in-Chief.

Writing and Democracy. As students in the Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy, we talk about these words a lot, saying them in tandem, often every day, sometimes multiple times a day, for years on end. We claim that writing and reading are engines of democracy. We claim these things can save us and change us, and can change and save the world. We make it our mission to do just that. Some days I believe in that mission, and I know just how to accomplish it. Other days, I disregard it as idealistic garbage. Others, I’m just not sure. Believing in this premise seems as abstract as believing in God, and in some ways an even bigger leap of faith.

But today, as we are about to send our fifth issue to press, I feel as though I have some ideas about writing and democracy. I feel I know something I didn’t know, even one year ago, before I started working on this project. Over the last eight months I’ve spent hours every week doing this job. I’ve come to know my colleagues well, and I’ve been privy to what they are like on good days and bad, at work and play. I’ve admired them, and been inspired and challenged by them.

I’ve noticed most of us have a theme in our lives that carries through in our own writing. We write about the environment, Queer issues, the Middle East, African-American issues, women’s issues, trauma, or grief. Here at the journal, however, we find ourselves with a different task. Here, our job is not to promote our own voice or theme, but to collect others’ voices.

Last spring, I went to an event at Highline Park here in Manhattan, not far from the physical 12^th Street, where we do, in fact, compile these pages. The event, “Karma Chain,” was part of the PEN World Voices Festival, and was hosted by the festival’s founder, Salman Rushdie (whose interview in this issue I hope you will enjoy) and Lama Pema Wangdak, a Tibetan Buddhist monk.

I arrived at the Highline early, on a crisp, but sunny weekend day. Along with swarms of other clueless event goers, I was given a ticket, and told to line up along the Highline in single file, strictly according to the number on the ticket. Most of us thought we were waiting to be escorted into a building to hear Lama Pema and Sir Salman discuss something cerebral and spiritual.

I was in the shade and getting cold and aggravated. To my right was a middle-aged man, alone. He was a tourist from Denmark. Actually, he was an engineer, on his way to Arizona, if I remember correctly. But he liked New York, and had chosen to stop and do some touring on his way to engineering out West. To my left was a group of women overdressed for the occasion, in furs and gold jewelry. They were laughing and taking pictures of each other. I looked around and saw that everybody was doing what we were doing, talking to their neighbors in line, speculating about what would happen and when.

After quite a long time, the line grew to the hundreds. Then we learned that the Lama had begun the process by whispering a Tibetan sutra into the ear of whichever person was absurd enough to have showed up first. The first person whispered it to the second, and the second to the third. The message traveled down the line, mouth to ear, hand around mouth to protect the sacred secret. After the first message completed its journey to the last listener, he gave a second message. And after that one reached the end, he sent still a third transmission. I don’t remember what the messages were when I received them, or when I passed them on.

When it was all over, the whole group gathered to hear Rushdie and Lama Pema read the results of this experiment, and to find out why the hell we did this. The three sets of messages were, of course, wildly disparate from beginning to end. The messages that were sent out were not the messages received. We were there to hear each message, alter it, and pass it on. And that’s all there was. The simple act of participating was all we needed to do, an end in itself.

Now, in retrospect, I see the same is true for our work on this year’s 12^th Street. Writing and reading are democratic acts as soon as we participate in them. Our job has been to find the message, cultivate the message, and pass it along. We have all been changed by engaging in the process of this work. Now we complete that process by giving you the message. It may not change the world. But it may change your mind, just a little. And that may be enough.

Dear Reader: I Am Here Because of You

Kate — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:14:27 +0000

community |kəˈmyoōnitē|
noun ( pl. -ties)
1 a group of people living together in one place, esp. one practicing common ownership.

Dear Reader,

True story: I am here because of you. Really, I am. Though, I didn’t know this until just now. See, before you I wrote to keep myself company. Yep, before you I was the sole inhabitant of a lonely little town called My Head in the center of a big, lonely state called New York. Population: one. Dusty place.

I am here because isolation is a robbery. Though, as I said, I didn’t know this until just now. Just this moment. Isolation, it turns out, kills inspiration. Isolation breeds narcissism. Isolation promotes solipsism. And, who was it? What great representative of our (okay, my) shifty generation? Who was it that said, “Isms, in my opinion, are not good?” Ah, ‘twas Buller. Ferris Bueller.

I know, I know, Rilke balks (in the ground). He was a big fan of solitude. And hey, solitude, in measured doses ain’t a bad thing. But language is not enough. People are what matter. And I’m not talking workshop, folks. I’m talking readership. I’m talking conversation. Wait, can one “talk conversation?” No matter, you’ll tell me. That’s why I’m here, remember?

Back to readership for a moment. Did you have one before you got here? Did you know who you were writing for (Say you were writing for you. Say it!)? Here’s the deal: We don’t create in a vacuum. Is that an original idea? No matter, you’ll tell me. That’s why I’m here, remember? If I’m honest, my only reader was my sister. Because she always cried at the end. Because she always knew who the characters really were. Because she was there on the other side of the Gchat box.

But there’s more to writing than one reader and one writer. There’s a community out there, to which we now belong. And some of us (okay, me) have never belonged to a community before. And, what’s more? We have a title! We are writers. I am here because here, that’s a real thing.

I am writing my final, final, final paper today. This will be, quite literally, all she wrote. In it I quote from Jhumpa Lahiri’s excellent essay, “Trading Stories,” in which she observes, “Being a writer means making the leap from listening to saying, “Listen to me.”” I am here because I am finally making that leap—have made that leap. I am here because of you. And without you, I am not here.

If being a writer means saying, “Listen to me,” then being a reader means saying, “I am listening.” I am doing both, simultaneously. And I always will be. In return for your ear, dear reader, I lend you mine. I can’t wait to hear what you have to say. So, farewell for a while. Because we are a community, we can meet on the page. And if we haven’t met, we surely will.

Thank you, from deep down below, for everything. There is no real language for gratitude except what comes from the flick of a pen.

Onward, then!

Kate

A Conversation with Elissa SchappellAn Excerpt from the 12th Street Interview

Charlotte — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:45:40 +0000

In this excerpt from the 12th Street interview, Elissa Schappell discusses womanhood from era to era with Charlotte Slivka.

Author Elissa Schappell Photo Credit: Emily Tobey

Elissa Schappell is the author of Use Me, a collection of linked short stories and finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. She is a contributing editor and book columnist for “Hot Type” at Vanity Fair and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review. She is also Co-founder and Editor-at-Large of Tin House literary magazine, and co-editor with Jenny Offill of the anthologies The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. Her essays, articles, and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies such as The Bitch in the House, The KGB Bar Reader, and The Mrs. Dalloway Reader.Blueprints for Building Better Girls, Elissa Schappell’s new collection of stories, explores the complex and multiple truths of the inner lives of women. Through accident and confusion, humor and irony, Schappell reveals what it is to be a modern girl in a society not built to understand her. The teen, the wife, the sister, the daughter, the friend, and the mother are chronicled in a series of journeys in the form of linked stories spanning thirty years.

STREET: I found a correlation between the women in Blueprints, and their struggle for identity, ground, and power; and the struggle of women in the 1970s, who tried to put feminism on the map while also trying to live it. Sometimes that was a really difficult experience. What do we know now?

SCHAPPELL: There is a definite correlation, and I chose to start the book in the 1970s because that was the birth of second-wave feminism—coming out of the 1960s and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, we had the Women’s Liberation Movement, Gloria Steinem, the battle for the ERA, the message that “Sisterhood is Powerful.” At the same time there was the Miss America Pageant and Phyllis Schafly and Anita Bryant, and a rise in pornography and the Playboy culture. What we learned was that no matter how many times I listened to Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman, Hear Me Roar” on my record player, I saw twice as many jigglefests on TV.

In the first story, “Monsters of the Deep,” the main character, Heather, is a teenager in the 1970s, a time when women were being encouraged to embrace their sexuality in such magazines as Cosmopolitan and Ms. However, despite this burn-your-bra freedom, women were, as ever, being labeled as “sluts” if there was even a whiff of the promiscuous about them. Forget that, if they made people uncomfortable. “Slut” has always been a quick and easy way to demonize a woman, demolish her character and ego.

And in Heather’s case, it’s not boys who start these rumors about her; it’s the girls at her school who are threatened by her. They project all the anxiety and fear and shame they feel about their own sexual feelings on to her.

Some girls would tell their mothers about this, but Heather’s mother, despite being part of the modern “Me” Generation, and embracing her sexuality—gives her daughter a very contradictory message: Don’t be yourself. Be like everybody else. Pretend. Pander to the popular girls. Because being part of a group is where your power lies. Most of all, protect me from your pain.

We see later in the last story of the book how, despite the fact that young women were told sisterhood is powerful and we’re all in this together, to feel good about their bodies and sexuality back in the 1970s, that message didn’t grow stronger in the 1980s and the 1990s—although with the rise of the Riot Grrrl movement in the 1990s (which was a small movement, sadly, but growing, happily, into a wave of third-wave feminists) it started to gain some steam again.

Throughout the book what you see, I hope, are the ways that the idea of what it meant to be a woman in earlier eras reverberates through later generations. For example, in the “Joy of Cooking,” the identity of the mother character (who has no name) has been informed by her own mother’s beliefs about what it means to be a good wife and mother. The grandmother was of a generation that didn’t believe in divorce, who believed a wife suffered in silence as her husband cheated on her, and that one didn’t coddle their children. In contrast, Emily’s mother, who’s come of age in a different time, isn’t willing tolerate that in her husband. We see that the grandmother, who because of the time, was resentful that she had to give up her career to have children. On the flip side, Emily’s mother, who gave up her dream of being a musician to raise children, is more wistful. Her decision to stay at home (one that feminists fought for, and a theme that comes up again in “Elephant”) is what makes her happiest.

Women are barraged with contradictory messages about who they should be, what they should want, and what rights they have to want what they want. These stories reflect this. Yes, some of these women are angry, and why wouldn’t they be? Many of them can’t express it, for fear of not being taken seriously, or dismissed. Or, worse, demonized, or labeled as dangerous, characterizations that critics—some of them women!—have made in their reviews. Saying that stuff, putting it out there, that’s my job as a writer.

What do we know now? Sigh. That you have to fight over and over and over for the same hard-won freedoms—look at reproductive rights, the fact that women still don’t receive equal pay for equal work, the way they’re trying to finesse the definition of “rape”, the fact that all the social support systems that benefit women and children are being cut.

In some ways we’re moving forward—sex-positivism, gay rights, but we’re also moving backwards. Not everyone’s attitudes towards women and the rights of women have evolved. Some, as we see in the Conservative movement, seem hell bent on dragging women on their knees back into the Stone Age.

I think what we know now is that if you don’t learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it—if women don’t support women, we end up in a bad place. I think of Madeline Albright saying, “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help women.”

12th Street Issue # 5 Launch and Reading

Kate — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:35:36 +0000

12th Street Issue #5

About the Event: POLITICS AND LETTERS COME TOGETHER FOR AN EVENING OF READINGS BY ELISSA SCHAPPELL, TÉA OBREHT, AND STUDENT CONTRIBUTORS TO 12TH STREET ISSUE 5, PUBLISHED BY THE NEW SCHOOL WRITING PROGRAM.

Date and time: Wednesday, May 9^th, 7:00 pm

Location: 17^th Street Union Square Barnes and Noble, 33 East 17^th Street, New York, NY 10003

Fee: Free and open to the public.

About the authors:

Téa Obreht is a 2011 National Book Award finalist and winner of the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction for her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories.

Author Téa Obreht Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Elissa Schappell is the author of Use Me, a collection of linked short stories and finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. She is a contributing editor and book columnist for “Hot Type” at Vanity Fair and the New York Times Book Review. Schappell is also Co-founder and Editor-at-Large of Tin House literary magazine.

Author Elissa Schappell Photo Credit: Emily Tobey

Sarah Schulman: An American Witness Part 2: Occupy Student Debt, and the Beauty of Being Uncomfortable

Ted Kerr — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:01:06 +0000

For many activists Sarah Schulman is an important source of meaningful and effective lessons in social change. For more than ten years, her and her long time collaborator Jim Hubbard have been interviewing members of ACT UP, for their ACT UP Oral History Project, ensuring the experience of the seminal AIDS activist group are lost in history. Earlier this year, The New York Times published Schulman’s deftly researched op-ed, “Pinkwashing” and Israel’s Use of Gays as a Messaging Tool to frenzied response. Later this year a slate of films, books and creative projects about the early days of AIDS, including United in Anger, a film produced by Schulman, and directed by Hubbard, will be released. Schulman’s influence cannot be understated.

In the last part of this two part interview Schulman discusses the Occupy movement, what makes a good social movement and shares her thoughts on the narcissism of some writers, and the importance of being uncomfortable.

PART 2

12^th Street: You and Jim have spent more than 10 years collecting hours of interviews for the ACT UP ORAL HISTORY PROJECT, now you are starting it see footage show up in culture. While you see this as progress in your book you talk about what is missing from the PROJECT so far…

Sarah: …the suffering. Yeah, our film addresses that. One of the things we did in the film is that every time someone speaks who died of AIDS, their death dates come up underneath them. The viewer starts to calculate the person’s age. At a certain point, the viewer realizes most people died at 26. Once they take that in they start to understand these people are being interviewed during the last year of life, they are spending to their dying day fighting the AIDS epidemic.

We have shown it to friends who have gone through similar experiences, people who have spent the last 20 years saying all of my friends died, and finally others begin to understand what that means.

Certain things that were not conveyable become conveyable.

12^th Street: Yeah, my 33^rd birthday is coming up and I realized I am not allowed to complain about getting older because if I was born 20 years earlier I would be closeted, dead, or burying all my friends. I think about this because I am seeing people my age and younger discover ACT UP. It’s exciting, but also upsetting because it the times gets reduced to images…

Sarah: Look this can never be fixed, okay. I will always walk into a room and see all the people that are not there. Younger people will not see who is not there. That is always going to be the case. And it is the same with any mass death experience.

I will show you a photo of my ancestors. Have I shown you this already? (Sarah walks to her bedroom, turns around comes back with a framed black and white photo. We stand in the doorway between her bedroom and the living room). This is my great grandfather, my beloved Grandmother who raised me, and her two sisters, who were exterminated in the holocaust, and her brother who was exterminated, and her niece who went to Auschwitz and survived. I was raised on this, I look in a room and I know who was not there. (Sarah turns around and puts the picture down, and comes back.) All my life they have not been there. So I know how to do it. There are plenty of people who don’t know how to do that, and they are never going to know.

When Florentine Stettheimer died she was one of the last Surrealists. She died at like 88 and I think about how she lived to see her entire art movement historicized. She lived to see who was in the canon and who wasn’t and all the distortions. I have also lived to see that. I have watched and seen the AIDS cannon be identified and it is very weird. Except it is very truncated. Everyone died in their 20s and 30s. I saw it 50 years earlier than I should have seen it.

12^th Street: Do you have any thoughts on the Occupy Movement?

Sarah: I am very happy they are there. It is very exciting. I agree with Noam Chomsky, I wish they would have at least one concrete demand. If it were up to me I would pick eliminating student debt. This is a strategic choice. The 99% is really a false construction, as soon as you get into any privilege at all it breaks down, but I would say almost all of them have student debt. And I think we could have cultural agreement that student debt is very undermining to the entire advancement of the nation. It is the kind of demand that could actually be won and would require enormous transformation to be won, similar to domestic violence laws, and the status of people with AIDS. It would be huge and I think it would be winnable.

12^th Street: That’s an ACT UP strategy right – winnable goals?

Sarah: It predates ACT UP. Successful, popular movements have winnable goals.

On the other hand, there is also a whole American tradition of utopian movements, utopian socialists and anarchists and hippies – Occupy could be part of that. And those movements tend to be most effective when they are in coalition with agenda oriented movements. But on their own, I am not sure what they produce.

I think about the hippie movement. It produced yoga, Pilates, yogurt and green consciousness but even green conscious has not produced social change. There is a subculture of people who recycle and eat organic food but we don’t have systemic social transformation around those issues in the United States. So I am concerned that if Occupy does not come up with something they will face so much police violence they will dissipate.

12^th Street: Do you see a relationship between ACT UP and Occupy?

Sarah: They are strategically opposite movements. What they have in common is disenfranchised people objecting, but their tactics are completely opposed. Everything ACT UP did was towards a stated goal that was winnable and doable. Occupy is the opposite and they are insisting on that as their way, and their right. I am willing to wait and see what happens I just hope that they don’t get crushed.

12^th Street: Do you see Occupy’s strategy as queer?

Sarah: No. I think that having winnable doable goals backed up by direct action is a strategy of profoundly repressed people in crisis. Gandhi used it, Martin Luther King used it, and the Labor movement used it. People who have to have change or they will die use it.

12^th Street: I agree. I was hoping Occupy would be queerer but it isn’t. Occupy could be crushed because those leading, their lives are not on the line. Come springtime I am not sure what it will be like.

Sarah: Yeah I am not sure, when I look at my students; they’re in terrible shape. They cannot get jobs at all.

12^th Street: Are they part of Occupy?

Sarah: No they have not even heard of it.

12^th Street: I think that is a failure of the Occupy movement.

Sarah: If their issue was student debt then students would be attracted to it. That is what constituency politics is all about. You invite a constituency to make their own lives better by participating in a movement that offers them a concrete advantage.

12^th Street: There is that line in your book after you outline what is wrong with the MFA structure where you state that one hundred radical students could have real impact. It made me curious about your thoughts on the role of writing in creating change. Do you think writers have a different responsibility than others in creating change?

Sarah: They have the same responsibility as others, which many writers don’t want. They want special dispensation. They have the responsibility. If you are an artist you have an individual voice, you have a responsibility to act individually, but as a person you have a responsibility to act with others. And many artists don’t want to but they have to. Artists are the only ones who conceptualize doing exactly the thing they want to do as somehow enough. You know what I mean; there is a little narcissism there.

12^th Street: Seems like a good time to discuss your ideas around ‘The Pleasure of Uncomfortability’.

Sarah: I am not very responsive to New Age ideologies, the idea that everything is the way it should be, we must be grateful, things will be what they are suppose to be. It’s all crap, and it is a multi billion-dollar industry. This is an ideology, rooted in pretending everything is neutral and as it should be, that all of our supremacy ideology is constructed naturally and that we should just embrace it. And if you are a person outside of that and you try to change it you are inherently negative. It is a false construction.

So if you are ACT UP and you’re sitting in at the pharmaceutical company headquarters, you are the bad person because you are ruining their day, whereas what they are doing is just business as usual – so they are (thought of as) good. It is a flipped value system. The gesture towards justice is stigmatized and the maintenance of injustice is considered normative. All of new age culture is based on these ideas.

And I was thinking why does this appeal to people. Simultaneously I was thinking of my life; me saying that’s something is wrong is always constructed as the problem, not the fact that it is wrong. Saying homophobia in the family should be eradicated is creating a problem, not homophobia. This is the same construction. It is false stigmatization. Behind all of this is a very gentrified idea that we should all be totally comfortable all the time and if we are ever ill at ease or question ourselves, or not have the answer to something, then that is negative feeling and that is something to be avoided at all costs. That is why we sanitize, homogenize, have a police state, have television the way it is. It is why the entertainment industry is based on the repetition of the bland. It is all profound efforts to keep us from questioning ourselves in a way that is uncomfortable – which is of course what we should all be doing.

Lets enjoy being uncomfortable. Lets enjoy figuring out there are things we can ask ourselves, that there are contradictions, there are ways to change and alter, that others have different points of view. These are beautiful things, this is what it is to be an intellectual, and an artist and a citizen, and a live person. So lets value being uncomfortable. And lets devalue this banalizing anesthetizing that is now falsely considered desirable.

12^th Street: It seems like a through line in your work.

Sarah: Yeah, well the work I have been doing with Palestine, believe me I have had to face some things that are not pleasant about how I was indoctrinated by my family. They told me things that were not true that they thought were true. So I was raised and taught that there was no one in Israel when the Jews came, that the desert was empty, that the Palestinians left of their own free will. All these lies I was raised with have taken me my whole life to undo. I am confronting a false hero paradigm that my whole family was invested in because, as you know, I come from a family where four of my grandmother’s sisters and brothers as well as my grandfather’s sister were exterminated in the Holocaust. Because I am going though it now and I understand what it is like. I really know that anyone can do it.

12^th Street: Because you have been through it with your family in terms of the Israeli issue and homophobia?

Sarah: …but with homophobia I am the disadvantaged person, when it comes to Israel I am the advantaged person. Not only am I Jewish, I am Ashkenazi, the privileged group that has most benefitted from Zionism and its construction, and yet even then I can do this. I can face that these things are not true. I can face I am not superior. I don’t deserve these privileges, other people are my equals. I have responsibilities to them. So if I can face that, anyone can.

12^th Street: What is the best way to share the pleasure of being uncomfortable?

Sarah: By example.

Writers in the World, Messages in the Street

Ted Kerr — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:39:13 +0000

By Ted Kerr, Managing Editor, 12^th Street

“In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street,” starts David Markson’s Wigginstien’s Mistress, a novel about a woman wandering the globe thinking she may be the last person on earth. In hopes she is not, she writes in large white letters, “Someone is living in the Louvre.”

After the November 15^th raid on Liberty Park, the ebb and flow of the holiday season, and the winter that never really came, I had a hard time remembering that mere months earlier revolution had hit the streets of New York. There was a time when, as the leaves fell, a roar of voices could change the direction of my day. The setting sun often followed me down to Wall Street where I would bathe in spirit fingers, shared frustrations, and hope.

These memories came back as I started to see the work of someone’s quick penmanship on lampposts, construction sites, and walls here at The New School. I was drawn in by the now familiar and inviting O; egged on by the forward moving Cs, the U—a reminder I am implicit regardless—and the functionary P, and finally the Y, both a question and a figure with arms open to the sky. OCCUPY: a rebellion, a rally cry, a plea for survival, and a reminder that there are others–other times, other ways of being, and other people who are working for change. Like Emma Goldman’s pamphlets handed out on Union Square, and Gran Fury’s Silence = Death posters making noise during the early days of the AIDS crisis, Occupy and its manifestations have become messages in the street; someone is living.

As a writer interested in my place in the world, who believes that writers have an opportunity to bring people together, I follow Occupy almost apolitically at times, drawn in by a movement that can trace one of its founding moments to an email sent out by a magazine, that has spawned a renaissance in poster art, and for a brief moment in our digital age, elevated the pizza box to the most effective publishing tool around.

I am a part of 12^th street because I believe in our mission of using literature to spark conversation around writing and democracy. I see us–through our website and annual print journal–as similar to the occupiers. We are Wiggenstien’s mistresses, leaving messages in the street, hoping we are not alone.

Note: Sections of this essay were excerpted from Kerr’s opening remarks for the March 5^th 2012 Riggio event, OCCUPY THE PAGE: The Importance of Print in Creating Change. Watch 12^th Street online for a wrap-up of the event.