Dis Be 'de Verse, Yo!

April is National Poetry Month in the United States, which is a fantastic idea, and the fact that bookstores across the country have poetry displayed front and center is undoubtedly a good thing. Unfortunately, merely being made aware of the existence of poetry seems to do little to encourage the actual reading of it among the general public. It’s only in the past few years that I’ve come to love it, chiefly because my previous exposure to it  (excluding epic verse, to which I was introduced at a very young age) had been the same watered down write-a-sonnet-now-write-a-haiku instruction and the smattering of Shakespeare, Poe, Frost, and Dickinson received by the average American public school kid. This lack of in-depth poetry education is undoubtedly what leads so many of my friends and peers to say that they don’t really have much interest in poetry.

This occasionally changes in college, when showing an interest in poetry can be a bit cool, provided that it’s something that was once counter-cultural but is now rather boring like The Beats, or something pointlessly bleak and edgy and ham-fistedly pornographic like the unpalatable Charles Bukowski, or something written by a member of a minority and swaddled tightly in identity. All the above are cool, provided they don’t rhyme (unless the author is black, then rhyming is cool again,) or follow any classic metrical conventions. The result is notebooks filled with self-obsessed arrhythmic moaning, anthologies with “grrrrrl” somewhere in the title featuring much blank-verse on the topic of the authors’ incredible and special vaginas that men apparently don’t appreciate out of A)Fear, B)Ignorance, or C)Both, (but deserve to be talked about because writing about your genitals is self-evidently a wonderful and progressive step toward a better, more equal society where people live and write about their genitals together in perfect harmony,) and a BBC poll in which a man named Benjamin Zephaniah was named the U.K.’s third favorite poet. Mr. Zephaniah, in what must be described as a genuine act of courage, declares himself “anti-empire.” Bravo. I salute your noble and unorthodox position, Benjamin. He must live in constant fear of being assassinated by the powers-that-be for writing shockingly subversive verse like the following:

Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas


Cos' turkeys just wanna hav fun


Turkeys are cool, turkeys are wicked


An every turkey has a Mum.


Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas,


Don't eat it, keep it alive,


It could be yu mate, an not on your plate


Say, Yo! Turkey I'm on your side.


I got lots of friends who are turkeys


An all of dem fear christmas time,


Dey wanna enjoy it, dey say humans destroyed it


An humans are out of dere mind,


Yeah, I got lots of friends who are turkeys


Dey all hav a right to a life,


Not to be caged up an genetically made up


By any farmer an his wife.



Turkeys just wanna play reggae


Turkeys just wanna hip-hop


Can yu imagine a nice young turkey saying,


'I cannot wait for de chop',


Turkeys like getting presents, dey wanna watch christmas TV,


Turkeys hav brains an turkeys feel pain


In many ways like yu an me.

            Perhaps one should thank Mr. Zephaniah for keeping verse alive deep in the heart of the land of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Yeats, and Auden. But is it really a good sign that he beat all of them in the public opinion poll? It seems that the United States isn’t the only country with a poetry problem. One fears that poetry as a popular phenomenon might be reduced to something singers and rappers claim to be creating in order to sound more intelligent (song-writing is perfectly fine, guys, you don’t need to call yourselves poets in order to be taken seriously, you just need to write better songs.)

            Last week I went to the Christopher Hitchens tribute at Cooper Union. Among the guests and speakers were Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Sean Penn, Andrew Sullivan, Paul Wolfowitz, Christopher Buckley, Lawrence Krauss, Francis Collins, Olivia Wilde, and Stephen Fry (whose book “The Ode Less Traveled,” is a fantastic introduction to rhyme, meter, and poetic rules and convention, despite the indefensible title,) James Fenton opened the service by reciting his poem “For Andrew Wood:”

What would the dead want from us

Watching from their cave?

Would they have us forever howling?

Would they have us rave

Or disfigure ourselves, or be strangled

Like some ancient emperor’s slave?

None of my dead friends were emperors

With such exorbitant tastes

And none of them were so vengeful

As to have all their friends waste

Waste quite away in sorrow

Disfigured and defaced.

I think the dead would want us

To weep for what they have lost.

I think that our luck in continuing

Is what would affect them most.

But time would find them generous

And less self-engrossed.

And time would find them generous

As they used to be

And what else would they want from us

Than an honoured place in our memory,

favourite room, a hallowed chair,

Privilege and celebrity?

And so the dead might cease to grieve

And we might make amends

And there might be a pact between

Dead friends and living friends.

What our dead friends would want from us

Would be such living friends.

            No mention of vaginas, turkeys, or imperialism, I’m afraid (not that those aren’t ever valid topics, just easily worn out and a bit tired at this point unless treated in a novel way,) just the universal themes of death, loss, grief, and friendship that everyone can understand regardless of race, gender, or haircut.

            Also at the Hitchens tribute, Benjamin Schwarz, the Atlantic’s literary editor, read an article written by Hitch about Philip Larkin. The piece was a review of a selection of letters Larkin had written to Monica Jones which, as Hitch brilliantly wrote “obliquely shows the civilizing effect that even the most trying woman can exert on even the most impossible man.” Ain’t that the truth?

             “The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin,” edited by Archie Burnett, was finally published this month. It is the most complete and well-annotated collection of Larkin’s poems to date, and re-reading the poems published in Larkin’s lifetime, I’m struck by how such a slim body of work can be so rich and filling. I can’t read very much in one go without feeling completely overwhelmed emotionally and intellectually. It’s a testament to Larkin’s incredible talent that he was able to be both consistent and concise while never compromising on beauty, emotion, and intellect.

Larkin’s work seems to be more popular now than ever (he made it to number 5 on the above-mentioned poll, just two slots below the imperishable Mr. Zephaniah,) and he’s certainly moved a little bit further up my personal ranking of poets, partly because of his friendship with one of my favorite novelists, Kingsley Amis, and the ideas about literature and culture which the two held in common (many of which I agree with.) I’ve been reading the 1000+ page “The Letters of Kingsley Amis,” and the first couple hundred pages are mostly letters to Larkin written when the two were first starting out as writers, which makes the volume an excellent companion to the annotations in “The Complete Poems.”

            A few poems and bits of correspondence from the two books have caught my attention in the past week. I’ve been brushing up my resume and beginning the search for work – freelance writing, mainly – and as a result I’ve come face to face once again with the classic horror of personal compromise, and the omnipresent fear (justified or not,) that one will have to sacrifice one’s dreams in order to survive. In “Toads,” Larkin perfectly expresses the frustration of having to work a regular job rather than having the courage to strike out and live independently:

Why should I let the toad work

  Squat on my life?

Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork

  And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils

  With its sickening poison -

Just for paying a few bills!

  That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:

  Lecturers, lispers,

Losels, loblolly-men, louts-

  They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes

  With fires in a bucket,

Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-

  they seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,

  Their unspeakable wives

Are skinny as whippets - and yet

  No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough

  To shout Stuff your pension!

But I know, all too well, that's the stuff

  That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like

  Squats in me, too;

Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,

  And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney

  My way of getting

The fame and the girl and the money

  All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other

  One's spiritual truth;

But I do say it's hard to lose either,

  When you have both.

            A complementary sentiment is expressed in Larkin’s “Poetry of Departures.” The fantasy of casting off everything one has and walking out of the rat race to freedom is presented, but more central is Larkin’s own awe at the idea of it, the envy and frisson he feels at the thought of throwing everything away and starting over, and ultimately the admission that the fantasy is nothing more than a story that satisfies his daydreams and arouses his desires while leaving him static and settled.

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,

As epitaph:

He chucked up everything

And just cleared off,

And always the voice will sound

Certain you approve

This audacious, purifying,

Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.

We all hate home

And having to be there:

I detest my room,

It's specially-chosen junk,

The good books, the good bed,

And my life, in perfect order:

So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd

Leaves me flushed and stirred,

Like Then she undid her dress

Or Take that you bastard;

Surely I can, if he did?

And that helps me to stay

Sober and industrious.

But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,

Crouch in the fo'c'sle

Stubbly with goodness, if

It weren't so artificial,

Such a deliberate step backwards

To create an object:

Books; china; a life

Reprehensibly perfect.

            Finally, in a letter to Larkin on June 16^th, 1947, Kingsley Amis explains the weakening of spirit, loss of pride, and general feeling of selling out that comes with telling people what they want to hear in the hopes that they’ll give you something you need:

“…The other day I filled up a form that made me very sorry. It was the entry form for the University of Oxford Department of Education. When I came to the part that said ‘Games and other interests’ I put my fountain-pen down on my writing-table, and thought to myself for a little while; then I picked up my fountain-pen again and dipped the nib into the ink-bottle, and wrote down on the paper: ‘CRICKET RUGBY FOOTBALL SQUASH DRAMATICS MUSICAL APPRECIATION DEBATES’. After that I felt much sadder, as if I had been writing to a girl to tell her I couldn’t see her any more, and much more frightened, as if I were an ambassador at a peace conference taking his government’s orders.”

Thank Hitchens

If it weren't for Christopher Hitchens I wouldn't be here. I don't mean this in any metaphysical sense, but quite literally: I wouldn't be sitting in this seat, at my folding card-table, with a glass of retsina and a cigar, unable to sleep, in front of a word processor writing. Hitchens deserves almost all of the credit for my own intellectual awakening about ten years ago, and my subsequent decision to be a writer. It's true that I was raised by two brilliant academics, and my parents are certainly the foundation of my love of reading, but by the time I'd graduated from New York University, I'd all but lost interest in the life of the mind. I'd been dipped and coated in various ideas about identity politics, trendy postmodernist theory, some sort of vague Western conspiracy to oppress the rest of the world, and, most perniciously, moral relativism. 

 

Fortunately, thin as it was, the batter didn't stick too well. When my generation was hit with the greatest challenge to its existence in the form of two planes smashing through two skyscrapers and a few thousand immolated corpses, the moral questions raised were more difficult to answer in my state of mind than they should have been, in hindsight. I had been taught that morality was a word about which hung a stale but pungent odor of hypocrisy, hubris, and absolutism. It was a relic from a time when religion ruled the lives of men and no right-thinking liberal person was supposed to believe in anything as old-fashioned and un-ecumenical as right and wrong, much less good and evil. Still ankle-deep in ash, people were already talking about chickens coming home to roost, payback for imperialist crimes, and reaping a harvest of our own sowing. There would later be times when I felt guilty for not joining the armed forces the day after the attacks, but at that time I was still filled with a kind of masochistic guilt – a belief that, having been so lucky in my birth, my environment, my situation, there must naturally be distant victims of my own prosperity, and that they were well within their right to punish me.

One night I happened to switch on to Bill Maher's talk show. One of the guests, a chubby but roguish man with somewhat stringy blond hair, was defending the invasion of Iraq and giving the finger to Maher's audience while mocking them for repeatedly bleating like sheep at the most simple of “stupid Bush” jokes. At first, I thought he was another right-wing pundit, but as I listened to his pleasant English voice, I realized he was arguing for the invasion from a left-wing point of view. I was bowled over. It was my first encounter with a genuine contrarian, someone who could never be pigeonholed or lined-up on a neat spectrum. It was the exact feeling I'd always had but hadn't been smart enough to understand or bold enough to articulate – I was always too afraid that by breaking party lines with those around me, the disapproval of the majority would outweigh the potency of the argument.

In Peter Brook's stage and screen adaptation of the Indian epic The Mahabarata, one character, a young man, is determined to study under the greatest weapon master in the land. He is turned down as a pupil, so he builds a statue of the teacher and practices in front of it every day. In a similar way, I began to write, always with Hitchens' own writing in my mind. I began to read with the same hunger I'd had as a boy, before the things on offer were as dry and insipid as Deleuze and Donna Haraway. I tore through four or five books a week: novels, history, politics, and poetry (for the first time ever.) All because Christopher Hitchens had appeared to me as the embodiment of the man of letters and I wanted to be one tenth as smart and well-read as him. 

 

I read every article he wrote that I could find - essays about Auden, blowjobs, George Orwell, full-body waxing, Thomas Paine, and the King James Bible. I watched countless videos of Hitchens debating on every topic, and went to watch him destroy opponents live with his dazzling rhetoric, wit, and knowledge. I watched as he sat calmly, with a scotch in hand, and jotted something on his notepad while his opponent (in this case Rabbi Shmuley Boteach,) told the audience that Hitch had been lying and that Boteach himself had never read anything anywhere that would prove the points Hitch had been making. When his turn came, Hitch looked once more at the pad, and then gave Boteach the names, authors, and publishers of three books which would support the single point he had been challenged on – from memory.

 

It was Hitchens' erudition, his easy style, his humor, which first led me to try my hand at speaking in public, expressing my opinion, arguing in earnest – that, and the fact that he once said that if you can cut a dashing figure at a podium you'd never have to dine or sleep alone. I began to lead the New York City Atheists monthly meetup group, and I gradually became more comfortable in myself and my thoughts. I stopped being afraid of running up against the chill wall of consensus. When people parroted opinions they'd heard someone else say because they thought that everyone in the immediate area would agree with them, I began to question them and to engage them in discussion. The more I read, the more I spoke, and the more I wrote, the more I came into my own. Through my work in and connections with secularist and atheist causes, I ended up meeting authors, diplomats, UN representatives, and working on political initiatives to keep church and state separate. And it all went right back to Hitch.

But the most important thing that Hitch did for me was to teach me what it meant to be a moral person and a moral writer. It was around the time that I'd first encountered Hitchens that I had independently come to the conclusion that rather than being a product of American imperialism, the attacks of September 11^th were the fruits of a hideous religious ideology, totalitarian in its ambition and tenets. My atheism, always a casual and personal philosophy which I had taken for granted, now evolved into a political belief in secularism. When God is Not Great was published, I realized that the time when religion ruled the lives of men was by no means over, and that it was up to members of my generation to push back against it or risk being destroyed. It was Hitchens' writing that showed me that moral relativism was an easy out – one which absolved the individual from having to make a difficult choice. For the first time in my life, I began to feel emboldened to describe things in terms of right and wrong. And I soon realized that the criteria for knowing who one's enemies are are by no means soft.

Because of Hitchens' literary expertise, I came to understand style, art, beauty, and culture as more than mere window dressing but as the point themselves. I soon realized that my enemies are easy to identify – they are, first and foremost, the people who burn books, who put death sentences on novelists, kill filmmakers, attack cartoonists, burn embassies, kidnap travellers, bomb nightclubs, throw acid in the face of girls who would dare go to school, demolish ancient statues, crush their own daughter's windpipes for speaking to men, have a truly imperialist dream of restoring an ancient and oppressive world order, and only read one old, morally twisted book. I decided I was on the side of libraries filled with many books. And when people criticized US soldiers for not protecting the Baghdad museum as quickly as they could have, I criticized the men who looted it. And Hitch was always ready to point out that these weren't the enemies of “Western” civilization. The word “Western” was completely irrelevant and unnecessary. 

 

And the root of all of this is what is now the most important philosophical tenet in my life thanks to Hitch: a belief in absolute freedom of speech and freedom of conscience without fear, and the corollary belief that if any one principle needs to be defended quite literally to the death, this is it. I looked for a quote to illustrate this point from my favorite book of Hitchens': Letters to a Young Contrarian, but I realized I'd have to quote the entire book. Just go buy it.

I met Hitch briefly a few times at events where he was a speaker. The last time he remembered me. I wrote to him several times, and he always replied promptly, whether it was me asking him for advice on learning about Australia (he recommended Robert Hughe's The Fatal Shore, a well as national poets and writers like Henry Lawson, C.J. Dennis, and Fergus Hume,) discussing what I thought was his Indian flag lapel pin (it turns out that it was the flag of independent Kurdistan – I told him I would give him one of my pins of the flag of secular Kashmir, but I never got the chance,) or, at my last correspondence with him, informing him of the fact that it was the 200^th anniversary of Shelley being sent down from Oxford for writing The Necessity of Atheism. In the response to that last letter, he insisted that the next time I was in Washington DC I call him up and come over for a drink. Unfortunately, the next time I was in his neighborhood he was out of town for the first of his chemotherapy sessions.

I have many things to thank Christopher Hitchens for. Chief among them are my love of: PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Iraj Pezeshkzad, Anthony Powell, James Fenton, Philip Larkin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, and countless other writers. It was Hitchens who made me decide to go to school to become a journalist, and Hitchens who helped me overcome my natural timidity, not only in social situations, but in the world – I would never have dreamed of going alone to Kashmir or the Congo (I've done the latter but was prevented from the former by worried family after the hotel I was booked into was the site of a grenade attack a few days before my arrival. But I'll get there some day.)

Christopher Hitchens truly made my life what it is today. I'd call him my idol if it wasn't for the fact that, iconoclast that he was, he would hate to be called anything of the sort.

I've posted the following video a million times on Facebook, but it is Hitchens at his best, and probably the 20 minutes most responsible for making me who I am today.

Sluts on Parade: The Importance of Being Dressed

Edit: I'm adding the following link to a good round-up of the feminist arguments against SlutWalk. I agree with a majority of the points, although the authors are undoubtedly on various other points on the political spectrum. Although I'm not particularly convinced that we live in a culture which actually encourages rape. While women are continually objectified in our society, I resent the implication that men can easily be somehow turned into rapists by their environment. It's a very low opinion of men and devalues the importance of their individual characters.
http://www.feministfrequency.com/2011/05/link-round-up-feminist-critiques-of-slutwalk/


When I first learned about the “Slut Walk” protests being held around the world I wasn’t sure what to think. Then when I discovered that they were being held after a police officer in Toronto made a stupid remark insinuating that women should dress more modestly to avoid being sexually assaulted, I thought “this is a cause I can get behind! I’ll march.” Then I started reading more about the protests and a sense of profound disappointment set in.


Obviously, the idea that women are at all responsible for being assaulted, harassed, or raped is a sickening one which should be met head on and protested against vigorously. Blaming the victim is never an appropriate response to a crime (one immediately recalls the appalling number of apologists who excused Bill Clinton’s sleazy behavior toward women by suggesting that the victims in question were attracted to his power and charisma, rather than intimidated by the same.) I have many female friends who have been flashed, groped, catcalled, and assaulted. I’d venture to say the majority of them. And even if evidence was produced that women in short skirts get harassed more than the Amish, that would in no way shift the blame from the aggressor to the victim. So I was 100% behind the message of the Slutwalk.

Then I saw some pictures of previous marches. It involves many women dressed as, well, sluts. The idea behind this is that women should be allowed to dress however they want without fear of being harassed. This is true. But just because someone has the right to dress however they want doesn’t mean it’s always a good idea to dress that way. I’d like to make it clear that I’m not saying that women should never dress how they want – I’m saying that for the purpose of a protest against sexual violence, dressing in bras and fishnets is a breathtakingly stupid way to go about things. And this idea of mine isn’t confined to the Slutwalk protests specifically.

The idea that people shouldn’t be judged on how they dress or appear is not only foolish but undesirable. The very same people who affirm the right to dress as they please will often assert that their dress is a form of expression. That concept is, in fact, the very basis of the idea of dressing like a slut as a form of protest. One’s choice of clothing should be, and indeed is, a first amendment right. The people who say they don’t make a big deal about how they dress are often making a big deal about how they don’t make a big deal about how they dress. And I’ll give good odds that many of the hippies who say “don’t judge me for the way I dress” aren’t afraid to be suspicious of a white man in a suit and a tie. So, if dress is a form of expression, the question must be asked: what does your dress express?

I’ve often thought that one of the most self-defeating aspects of modern protest culture is the number of people involved with dreadlocks, ripped clothing, stretched earlobes, and dirty beards. Does anyone think this is a great way to be taken seriously by the people you’re trying to reach (although very often the target audience of protests is markedly vague – are they hoping to change policy? Recruit more true believers in the cause? Change people’s minds? Make themselves feel better because they’re taking some kind of action?) I understand that this particular fashion - and it is a fashion - is mean to be a contrast to the suits and ties of the people in power. The idea that it’s somehow non-conformist is ludicrous when one sees how many people actually dress like that. But the probability that people who look like that will be genuinely listened to and that their opinions will be seriously considered doesn’t seem very high.

Let’s look at a case study: the most stirring, poignant, and important protests in this nation’s history – the marches led by Dr. Martin Luther King and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, starting with the famous 1964 march in Selma Alabama. I invite you to look at photographs from these marches. Everyone is wearing their best clothing. These men and women, black and white, are asserting their dignity, even their humanity, by appearing this way. These are not the naked slaves brought over to be bought and sold like chattel. They are citizens; responsible, serious, and equal citizens. If one looks at a photo of the redneck Sherriff Eugene “Bull” Connor in Birmingham Alabama, his pot belly stretching the front of his disheveled uniform, next to a picture of Dr. King in immaculate suit and tie, this distinction truly has meaning and should not be ignored. It is not a coincidence that just happened to work in King’s favor. A black friend of mine recently told me that growing up he couldn’t afford to look like a slouch. He had to dress more carefully than his white counterparts in order to get any respect. If you want to be taken seriously, dress seriously. And if you want to be really subversive, dress better than the people you’re protesting against. Dressing worse than them is the easy way out and hurts your credibility.

The case might be made that Gandhi wore a loincloth and talked about Indians spinning their own cloth to wear simple clothes. First it should be obvious that Gandhi recognized the importance of appearance – he knew that his campaign of non-violence was, in its most basic sense, a PR campaign. It called into question the moral authority of the British Empire using dramatic means to trigger human emotional responses. The importance of press coverage and, by extension, image, to all of this was something that Gandhi recognized very well. It also seems clear that part of Gandhi’s very deliberate personal image was calculated to play on naïve Western ideas of Indian simplicity and Eastern “spirituality” – a cliché that any self-respecting person should reject. It should also be noted that Gandhi’s followers, while they did significantly wear native clothing, were not dressed in loincloths, and the British authorities were much more comfortable engaging in genuine political negotiations with men like Nehru and Jinnah.

I am 100% in favor of public protest. But I think that the hippie generation in America specifically (the soixante-huitards in Europe are an entirely different matter,) changed the nature of protesting for the worse. Ever since Abbie Hoffman (a SNCC veteran,) and his Yippies tried to levitate the Pentagon assisted by chanting from overrated poet and North American Man-Boy Love Association member Allen Ginsberg, protests in America have become decidedly gimmicky. The new impetus is toward various forms of street theater – people blowing vuvuzelas, wearing jester’s caps, staging passion plays. One can’t help but wonder, once again, who the protesters are trying to reach – I have a suspicion it may be their fellow choir-members. The American hippie generation, which never tires of acting like it profoundly changed the world for the better (how many wars did they actually stop, again?) also left a legacy of turning the act of protest into a rather self-indulgent circus. We have them to thank for the stereotype that everybody who demonstrates in defense of their ideals are probably just pot-smoking hippies. Only some of them are and they’re the ones ruining it for the rest of us.

Groups like code pink yell and disrupt meetings while wearing pink. Brilliant. Someone told me about a “hilarious” shirt during demonstrations for gay marriage which read “I taught your husband how to do that thing you like.” This is undoubtedly a surefire way to bring any fence-sitting conservative opinion around to your side (incidentally, gay marriage is one of those issues on which I find myself at odds with the liberal consensus, with myself taking a much more radical stance: marriage should not be a government-run institution and people should be taxed equally regardless of their romantic relationships or lack thereof.) The amount of undeserved self-congratulatory back-slapping for how clever organizers’ forms of protest are rather than what is achieved is cringe-making. This isn’t me being dour or joyless – I think that if aesthetics are taken into consideration one has to conclude that having beauty on one’s side is far preferable to squalor or tackiness.

So, dressing like “sluts” in order to reclaim the word (the argument has been made on numerous feminist websites that this entirely endorses the patriarchal lexicon rather than heroically co-opting it,) doesn’t seem to me like a good way to get across such a serious point. And if one wants to reclaim “slut,” (which seems incidental and distracting to me when compared to the noble aim of advocating against blaming the victims,) dressing like a misogynist’s fantasy doesn’t make any sense. The first thing the organizers should do is decide who their audience is. It definitely isn’t rapists – savvy cultural argument won’t change their behavior. It probably isn’t the legal system – rape is already illegal and the way the victim was dressed does not affect the sentence. So the audience must be a younger generation of people who need to be taught that holding people at all responsible for the crimes committed against them is a completely indefensible position. And if they see their elders running around in panties and behaving like particularly vulgar men, that message might not come across.

On the topic of intended audience, I’m reminded of a pamphlet I saw at Columbia University. It was called “Consent is Cool.” First of all, “cool,” isn’t the same thing as “mandatory,” but I’ll let that go. It’s always lame (and probably counter-productive,) when public service messages try to speak to kids in the manner in which adults think kids speak. It’s also condescending. Most kids – and especially not Ivy League College students – shouldn’t be talked down to. Now, my question is who the intended audience of this document is. Is it the kind of scumbags who don’t care about consent? The roofie contingent? Because their behavior isn’t going to be changed by a pamphlet. And you know what? They already know they should have consent. They’re just so fucked up they don’t care. As far as I can see, the only people this pamphlet will have any effect on are the already-timid. The document is entirely about spelling out in almost lawyer-like precision exactly what you want from your partner (i.e. “May I touch your breast? Would you be willing to unzip my trousers? How far do you bet I could insert this object into my person?” ) Not only does this completely ruin the romantic nature of a sexual experience as well as rob young people of the important experiences of learning together, overcoming discomfort (or even enjoying it a bit,) surprising one another and oneself, and discovering a few things the hard way, but it also devalues sex emotionally by treating it like a legal transaction. Want to prevent date rape on campuses? Encourage victims to come forward in safety and prosecute the perpetrators seriously and publicly. And don’t imagine it will go away with a fucking pamphlet encouraging kids to be blatant and about their desires. Most boys will learn from experience that a lack of subtlety is usually a bad thing.

I’d like to make it clear that I am, in fact, a great fan of naked women. I’d go so far as to say that I enjoy them significantly more than naked men. In paintings, sculpture, magazines, and my bed, I appreciate them very much. But context is important, and by walking half naked through the streets you’re making bodies far less fascinating, mysterious, and powerful than they are. Both clothes and the lack of clothes are powerful symbols. And people who are themselves uncomfortable with dressing like sluts might feel estranged by these walks. The embracing of a “slutty” look might even imply that people who don’t exercise their right to behave with promiscuity or give a public display of skin are somehow less comfortable with their bodies, their sexuality, or are even against the message. But liberation and freedom are expressed best with nuance, restraint, and careful consideration. This kind of common pageantry can be alienating and can detract from the cause, which is indeed a righteous one. I’d love to participate in an event highlighting the injustice of blaming victims of sexual assault. But I’ll feel embarrassed standing next to a bunch of girls gone wild. And I’m willing to be that many other people who the organizers would like to have on their side will be turned off by their methods as well.

I sincerely hope that future generations be taught that one can behave like a lady or a gentleman (and I’m not talking about gender roles here, but civility,) and that, if one is genuinely serious about enacting change, dignity is far more important than cuteness, gimmicks, or in-your-face spectacle. I think that the Slutwalks were founded with the best intentions and I fully support their original message. Women should never be held responsible if they’re sexually assaulted or harassed. The only things that will prevent rape is encouraging respect for women (wearing pasties and writing “slut” on your stomach in lipstick seems a misguided way of doing that,) prosecuting offenders, keeping tough but fair laws on the books, creating a safe environment for victims and witnesses to come forward in, teaching both men and women to be vigilant and aware of their surroundings and situations and setting up counseling services for survivors, giving them a chance to speak up, and organizing events (including marches) in order to keep this issue in the public eye.

Reclaiming the word “slut” to assert that women have the right to act just as vulgarly as men sometimes do is at best a distraction, at worst counter-productive.

Death of a Tyrant

Epitaph on a Tyrant

by W. H. Auden

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.


Once again, people who look to poetry for meaning and solace can turn to W.H. Auden, the poet who, during World War II wrote about the greatest moral struggle of his time. In the days following September 11, 2001, his poem September 1, 1939 was republished in many outlets, offering what seemed an eerily prophetic image of our own tragedy.

This Sunday I was at work late at night in 30 Rockefeller Center, one of the most beautiful skyscrapers in New York City, filled with powerful sculptures and reliefs featuring modern and classical scenes (including the famous statues of Prometheus and Atlas,) testifying to human acheivment. The bulding itself was completed six years before Auden wrote the latter poem. At a little after 10 o'clock my boss emerged from her office and told us all that the President was going to make an important statement and that the rumor was that it was related to the death of Osama Bin Laden. We sat waiting for almost an hour for the White House website feed to begin, and when it did we were riveted.

The speech was beautifully written and delivered and I'll admit that my eyes were moist at times and my throat slightly choked with emotion. Here was a promise fulfilled which, for the past ten years, had begun to recede in my mind during the other losses and victories in the war on terror. And suddenly it was a reality. And a welcome one at that. For the first time in my life I was genuinely glad to learn that someone had been killed. And my guilt at feeling this happiness was very brief indeed. I quickly came to the realization that there could be no good reason to lament this death and that elation at the event was not only natural but entirely justified.

My car ride home that night took me through Times Square, where crowds had begun to gather in front of the news screens as images of a grinning madman were displayed several feet high over a digital ticker relaying the good news. Some people wore flags around their shoulders. Others kissed and embraced, reminiding me of the famous photograph of the sailor and his girl on V-Day. Throughout the night television broadcasts showed men and women, mostly members of my own generation, rejoicing at Ground Zero, in front of the White House, and on college campuses across the country.

But it wasn't long before cynicism emerged. There were soon glib comments comparing the celebrations that night to the footage shown of people rejoicing in the Middle East after September 11th. The people who made these comments showed a particularly lazy equivalency; an inability to see the important difference of meaning between waving your own flag and burning another's. And, worst of all, they were in danger of abdicating their own right to make a clear moral distinction between the death of a tyrant at war and the killing of thousands of innocent non-combatants.

This was not a man who deserved sympathy of any kind. When people began to ask "why do they hate us?" after the attacks, they often ignored the important fact that our enemies had given us more than enough reason to hate them. Bin Laden was a mass murderer who masqueraded as a savior, a freedom fighter, and a spiritual leader to Muslims around the world, all the while making the lives of countless of his co-religionists more miserable, backward, and filled with death. In this way he was like Shakespeare's Richard III:

"And thus I clothe my naked villany

With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil."

But still people expressed unease at the celebrations, and not without reason. After the horrors caused by the extreme nationalisms of the last century, "Patriotism" has become a dirty word in some circles - associated with xenophobia and imperialism. But this isn't the only face of patriotism. Patriotism isn't, as some like to simplify, an irrational and blind pride brought on only because you happened to be born in a certain place. The many immigrants who are proud of their adopted countries and feel a sense of true belonging and a pride in the ideologies which these nations espouse and the acheivments of their fellow countrymen and women are evidence to the contrary. Especially in a multi-ethnic and pluralistic country like the United States, the notion of patriotism is rarely expressed as any sort of ethnic solidarity. The belief in ideals is important, whether it be a commitment to democracy or a cherishing of the coveted right to express our dissatisfaction with our leaders. And on the defense of those ideals John Stuart Mill spoke with characteristic eloquence:

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

 
On September 11, 2001, I was in the first couple of weeks of my freshman year at NYU. I watched the towers fall from University Place in Greenwich Village with my parents' apartment squarely in the foreground. When the first one collapsed on itself (fortunately not falling over and greatly increasing the bodycount, as the killers had hoped,) a woman next to me grabbed my arm and let out the most horrifying scream I've ever heard before or since. I walked around my downtown neighborhood, running into my friends on stoops with their heads in their hands, seeing stunned businesspeople, ash covered, staggering uptown, and wondering at my own dumb numbness.

I was soon at my parents' apartment, where my father had snapped reflexively into all of the cold war survival training he'd been given as a child in Texas. He stocked up on canned food, filled up the bathtubs, closed all of the windows, and wouldn't let any of us out of the house for the next three days. I was sad that I couldn't go to donate blood, but I was filled with my first feeling of patriotic pride when I learned that the Red Cross had asked people to stop volunteering to donate their plasma because the number of people who were eager to give far outnumbered the number of people who needed blood. And when we learned about the actions of the people who brought down United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, many people realised that an inspiring standard of bravery had been set by their example.

This was the formative experience of my life and many people of my generation. It is strange for me to come to the realization, as we approach the 10th anniversary, that the toddler who tugged his mother's sleeve and pointed to the plummeting humans and told her that the birds were falling is now a teenager. And the children conceived in those weeks when men and women made love with fear around them, looking for solace in one another's arms and thankful that they hadn't received one of the many last "I love you" phone call from the buildings or the airplanes, are now nine years old.

Several people I know signed up for the armed forces on September 12th. I'm very proud of them. In awe, in fact. Thomas Paine, one of the most inspiring thinkers of the American Revolution expressed it in his own "The Crisis:"

"But when the country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir. It was time for every man to stir. "

Being raised by ex-hippie baby-boomers, the thought of joining up, somewhat embarrassingly in retrospect, never even crossed my mind. Since then, I've wondered what would possibly tempt me to pick up a gun, useless soldier though I'd likely be. I've begun to think that if a museum or a library were attacked, that would conceivably be outrage enough for me. Because it seems to me that this was a war declared on the idea of Civilization itself. The prefix "Western" is unnecessary - in today's globalized world we all have a right to claim the learning and the history of any tradition as our birthright. And the enemy couldn't be clearer or more repugnant: they are men who believe that half the world's population should remain stupid chattel, they believe that free expression can be punishable by murder - whether English novelists, Dutch Filmmakers, or Danish cartoonists - that the beautiful and ancient art of other civilizations can be destroyed with impunity, that men and women dancing in nightclubs in Bali and London deserve to die. Their laughter comes only from the suffering of others. It is men like Bin Laden who are the most vocal proponents of racism, imperialism, the subjugation of women, the slaughter of homosexuals, censorship, and the destruction of art. Can any fellow-traveling with men of this sort be anything but despicable?

In the past 20 years, there have been both successful and foiled plots by Islamic terrorist groups in
Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chechnya, Denmark, Egypt, England, Eritrea, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Netherlands, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Palestine, Panama, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Singapore, Somalia, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Tunisia, Uganda, The United States and Yemen. If one believes in any kind of cosmopolitanism one should be shocked by the global nature of this fight and furious that there are men who have declared war on everything worth saving, no matter where. Anybody who thinks this isn't the most important and potentially zero-sum (if nuclear weapons fall into the hands of terrorists,) fight today is deluded, and if someone thinks that these people can be reasoned or negotiated with they haven't been listening to what they've been saying. No amount of political concession would stop these attacks. It would, in all likelihood, embolden them. By calling for the conversion or destruction of most of the people on the planet terrorists have said as much. And people who worry about offending the sensibilities of these men should realize that they've already offended the most dearly-held rights and beliefs of civilized men and women in every country. People who think this is a fight that can somehow be avoided are kidding themselves. Staying neutral isn't a possibility - we're all already targets.

Perhaps the most obnoxious complaint to emerge in the past few days is that this will only cause retaliatory strikes. Well, it might. But is killing Bin Laden really going to make them hate us any more than they already do? And the occasionally-heard brainless idea that by killing Bin Laden we're simply perpetuating a cycle of violence seems to imply that the people espousing such rot think the world would be better off if we had let him go and decided not to pursue him at all. Does anyone seriously think that would have been appropriate response to the attacks of September 11th? Does anyone believe that by killing Bin Laden we've made an already dangerous world significantly more dangerous than it already was?

It seems to me like the world is looking up compared to the way things were several years ago. Dictators are being given the boot and secular-minded democratic young people are making themselves heard and felt around the world. Obviously there will be more terrorists and there will likely be more attacks, but this is an important success in a battle that could in all likelihood continue for the rest of my lifetime. And there will always be brave people to resist this kind of totalitarian enemy. As Christopher Hitchens has said:

"It was obvious from the very start that the United States had no alternative but to do what it has done. It was also obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history. Al-Qaida will take longer. There will be other mutants to fight. But if, as the peaceniks like to moan, more Bin Ladens will spring up to take his place, I can offer this assurance: should that be the case, there are many many more who will also spring up to kill him all over again. And there are more of us and we are both smarter and nicer, as well as surprisingly insistent that our culture demands respect, too."

I long for a day when people can write, draw, film, sculpt, and say whatever they want without fear of retaliation from religious fanatics. While we continue the possibly unending struggle toward that day we should celebrate the things that make our culture and civilization worth preserving. So wear a flower, grow your hair as long as you want, kiss someone you love in public, dance to music at a nightclub, read a copy of the Satanic Verses, mix yourself an ambitious cocktail, criticize your least favorite politician, vote, and read some poetry aloud. Because it is a time to celebrate - not to celebrate death or violence, but to celebrate a small but significant step toward a more liberal world.

Love you madly,
Natty

"It matters not where you live, or what rank of life you hold, the evil or the blessing will reach you all. The far and the near, the home counties and the back, the rich and the poor, will suffer or rejoice alike. The heart that feels not now is dead; the blood of his children will curse his cowardice, who shrinks back at a time when a little might have saved the whole, and made them happy. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.



My own line of reasoning is to myself as straight and clear as a ray of light. Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to "bind me in all cases whatsoever" to his absolute will, am I to suffer it? What signifies it to me, whether he who does it is a king or a common man; my countryman or not my countryman; whether it be done by an individual villain, or an army of them? If we reason to the root of things we shall find no difference; neither can any just cause be assigned why we should punish in the one case and pardon in the other. Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man."

-Thomas Paine; "The Crisis"

My Valentines Day falling in love at the library's rare book and manuscript room.

I have a not-so-secret fetish: archives. To be sure, libraries in general are intensely erotic places: the quiet, the rows of books on shelves standing silently like accidental arcades, the feeling of being surrounded by thinking people, each entirely alone in her own thoughts. Topped off with the recent addition of timed lights in the stacks, meant to conserve energy but also encouraging a mischeivous darkness, the feeling of concentrated intellect can be arousing.

But right now I'm not in the stacks. I'm in the brightly-lit manuscript and rare book room on the sixth floor of Columbia University's Butler library, sitting at a wooden desk and staring at the back of an asian kid's head. The feeling is certainly not an erotic one, but the contents of the box on my desk have stirred a profound romantic feeling in me.

I came to the manuscript department when I found out that they had four boxes of papers belonging to World War I poet and pacifist Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon had had a series of homosexual affairs, his most serious being with the beautiful and effeminate Stephen Tennant. It was because Tennant's name was mentioned in the collection's catalog citation that I sought it out.

I had supposed that the letter would be in the fourth and final box of uncataloged correspondence, owing to the fact that Tennant's name hadn't been listed among the letters found in the other boxes. I requested the file and in a few minutes it was brought to my desk. I didn't find anything Tennant related, but I did find plenty of interest and a reminder of why I love archival research.

The box contained several folders, all relating to Sassoon's son George, comprising correspondence from 1938-1955, school essays, school records, miscellanious documents, and photographs. George was born in 1936, so this means that the box contains an intriguing, albeit incomplete, picture of his youngest years, from when he could first hold a pen to after his acceptance to King's College Cambridge. I knew little about George before opening the box, and now I can only claim to have intimate glimpses into the life of a young boy, son of a famous poet and child of his time.

The first document of interest I came across was an undated plain postcard with no address or name of recepient. It is written in the clumsy cursive of a child, but with surprisingly good grammar and no spelling errors (which may suggest it was a collaborative effort. Without context, it is impossible to know if the note is meant as a serious rebuke or something more playful, but the tone is unmistakably that of a wrathful child:

Smelly Creature,

You are ruining my and Daddy's life, by coming over, you nearly killed him with nervous indigestion, and now you expect us to love you. And if you think we do, you are perfectly in the wrong. Today, you have broken the document which you have signed. And in consequence, lost next weekend and 4 weeks of the holidays (you are lucky to get any at all.) Every visit counts as a week, and a very nasty greeting.

Signed,

G.T. Sassoon

(P.S. Show this to Granny.)

Hilarious, no? The next folder is filled with letters to the aforementioned granny (Lady Gatty,) including thank-you notes for presents including "the morse thing" (possibly a telegraph transmitter and receiver?) George writes to her of Scotland, enviously describing how a neighboring boy was given a lamb that is now grown into a sheep and "produced this other lamb the night before last." He is also much impressed by a Mrs. Fryer who has a one-eyed King Charles Spaniel named Crumby. The correspondence continues through George's grammar school years on blue paper with two-and-a-half pence stamps bearing the then-Duke of Windsor in handsome profile.

The next folder offers a charming challenge. George has written to his father and given him a "secret code for our letters." The code consists of letters being assigned a random number and punctuation marks various dots. There follows a letter in the code, which I've attached below, including solution. George's interest in cryptography continues in later letters, including a simple and rather ineffective code by which every 2nd and 3rd word is crossed out and the remainder is the message.
 

George signs his letters "Binks" and has a fondness for X's and 0's. Sometimes a modest number of these marks is insufficient for his tastes so he appends the mathematical formula ([infinity symbol] x XO). In one postcard he asks his dad to bring a spade and saw to school, presumably so he can break out. He tells his father about cricket matches between the "Improbables" and his team the "Impossibles," and laments the fact that when one of their teachers went to serve on a jury he returned with a simple tale of burglary rather than murder.



A folder of undated letters includes one in messy pencil handwriting with little spacing between words:



DEARDADDY
I SUPPOSEYOU HAVE
READIN THENEW
SPAPER THHAT ANEW
AIROPLANE WITCH HAS NO
PROPPELERANDIT
CANGOTOTHEMOON, IF IT
WANTS TO. ANDITCAN
GO VERYFAST IF ITWANTS
TO.AND WHAT ITUSES TOFLY
WITHISAJ JET OF SOME-
THING BU TIDDNT NOWH-
ATTHE SOMETHING IS
WITHLOVE
FROMGEORGE
THORNCROFT
SASSOON

In one typewritten letter, "Binks" goes mental with the hugs and kisses:

In another, he borders the text with them:

One can see the change in George's handwriting over time, and even an assignment from school to write a letter using the old stencil system favored for teaching handwriting and various lettering styles:

As he gets older, his handwriting gets better and his letters lengthier and more complex. His father doted on him and almost every one of George's letters begins with a "thank you" for some gift he'd been sent. In return, he gives detailed accounts of his studies in german, chemistry, engineering complete with pencilled schematics, and all of the boys at school who want to fight him.

In a folder marked "Unidentified," there is the following congratulatory telegram:

In the same folder there is a letter postmarked 1966 on the stationary of the Galway Hotel from one of George's Cambridge friends who is travelling in Ireland:

"...I had a long boozy session with the land lady of a bar who was terribly worried about the extreme moral danger her daughter was exposed to in England. As said daughter is in fact a nurse at [illegible] I shall have to see what sort of contribution in the way of moral danger I can offer when I get back!"

This folder also includes a series of letter's from George's headmaster to Siegfried, beginning with him having "most serious doubts about George's character" and saying that his own life "is not a very pleasant one." In the next letter he says that George is sullen and rude to the Sister in the Sanatorium, but assures the pacifist Siegfried that he "beat him soundly." The letter goes on in an even more dramatic fashion:

"I understand that he is allowed to procure chemicals and carry out experiments both at Heytesbury and at Mull. I further understand that the experiments include explosives (ed: in an earlier letter to his father, George had complained that the school's gunpowder was under lock and key.) Mr. Palmer is seriously alarmed about this, and so am I. Our advice is that you stop all of this, and at once... I know what he means to you, and I do with that there was something agreeable that I could say about him, but there is nothing at all to which I can cling or which gives me any hope at all for this unhappy boy's future.

Yours rather wretchedly,
Arthur [Illegible]"

It turns out the headmaster's fatalism was unwarranted. In the final letter, he says that "George has made an excellent start to the term" and that "His G.C.E. results were splendid and even better than expected." He rather sheepishly concludes with "You must have thought me very disagreeable (indeed, I was) in the past."

Perhaps the most intriguing item in the "unidentified" folder is a plain piece of paper, blank on one side, and bearing the words "With the Compliments of Mrs. T.S. Eliot" printed in elegant black script on the other.

I could go on about George Sassoon's archive for ages, but I'll spare you and conclude with the final folder: photographs. In these photos we see young Binks with a full grin and his father's rather goofy ears. In one photo he sits on a rock next to his father in corduroy shorts and sandals.

In another he reclines on the lawn of a manor house, squinting in the sun with his hat off, surrounded by speckles of little flowers on the recently-cut lawn.

He walks down the street with an old lady in a fur coat and head kercheif. He is wearing a rather grown-up double breasted wool coat with peaked lapels, a flat cap, and he's gazing distractedly into the distance, perhaps dreaming of blowing things up.

Inside a blank card there is a photo of him in a woolen sack coat, shorts, and wellingtons. He's holding an air rifle almost as tall as him and making the face that comes naturally to any boy feeling the thrill of holding a weapon.

And in a tiny square of faded black and white, he is a baby, lying on a carpet, his mother onher knees bending over him. You can barely see her mouth, but her cheeks can be seen pushing outward in a beaming smile. He is smiling too, looking off into the distance, possibly dreaming of explosions even then. Lady Gatty sits in a chair behind them, an inscrutable expression on her tough-grooved face falling somewhere between nostalgia and not giving a damn.

If a person's life can be read in the documents she leaves behind, a wonder how I would be remembered if I were ever important enough to be archived. Is google filing away all of my emails? Will Verizon produce the ill-advised text-messages to women which my own boozy sessions have resulted in? Will the letters, diaries, and postcards I've sent embarrass whatever legacy I may have? What private and intimate words do you leave behind? And when you write them, can you picture a man in a library reading them after you're dead?

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO,

Natty