“I have beliefs,” says Elizabeth Costello, in Coetzee’s eponymous novel, “but I do not believe in them.”

(Noted in the interesting William Deresiewicz review in the Nation last week.)

Losing Sleep

Robin Morgan’s “Goodbye to All That (#2)” got me so upset it took a few days out of my life. As Emily Hazleton says over at Slate, “you really have to read it to get the full effect.”

Morgan’s piece starts out borrowing the power of her historic piece “Goodbye to All That” and then launches into a rant about much of the appalling behavior we’ve seen directed at Hillary. Goodbye, she says,

Goodbye to the toxic viciousness . . .

Carl Bernstein's disgust at Hillary's "thick ankles." Nixon-trickster Roger Stone's new Hillary-hating 527 group, "Citizens United Not Timid" (check the capital letters). John McCain answering "How do we beat the bitch?" with "Excellent question!" …

Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs.

I’m no less outraged by any of this, and applaud resisting and exposing such virulent sexism. That’s not all Morgan sets out to do, though, or her piece wouldn’t have gotten under my skin as it did.

She misses an interesting opportunity at this juncture:

I was celebrating the pivotal power at last focused on African American women deciding on which of two candidates to bestow their vote—until a number of Hillary-supporting black feminists told me they're being called "race traitors."

The logic here gives me pause. That someone calls “race traitor” makes the contest itself no longer worth celebrating. “I was celebrating… until.” Why stop? Why not instead critique what disturbs about those feminists being called “race traitors”? What’s odder yet is that Morgan goes on to make the same sort of argument that ruined her celebration in the first place—she doesn’t see how any woman could not vote for Hillary. It’s “with us or with the terrorists” all over again. I must be self-hating, to have voted for Obama. According to Morgan, I’m one of the “women letting history pass by while wringing their hands, because Hillary isn’t as ‘likeable.’”

Actually, I find her likeable enough. I love that picture of her as a college student, with the big chunky glasses and the extremely serious mien; I'm interested in her commencement speech at Wellesley and the speech in Beijing to the 1995 UN World Conference on Women that Morgan excerpts. Lately, in contest with Barack Obama, when they compete for the attention of the left, she can seem almost as appealing to me as she did back when her biography first made the national news. And I’m grateful to her for running for the job of leading this crumbling and corrupt empire. I think it takes courage, and I do believe her candidacy is good for women. I can understand why some people vote for her. I understand why my mother stayed on the Hillary side in the Maine caucus yesterday, after she saw how wide Obama’s margin. (She is an inveterate champion of the underdog. And she knew that she’d have more of a chance to speak if she wasn’t standing next to my father on the other side of the room.)

But for me, the reasons not to vote for Hillary spring from deeply held political convictions that are inseparable from my feminism.

I didn’t vote for her:

—because I remember her praising the Israeli bombing of Beirut in the summer of 2006; she sounded as though she was cheering, and it was harsh and ugly and wrong;
—because she voted for the war in 2003, after millions of people around the world stood up against it;
—because I take her experience seriously—she is heir to the Clinton administration, which may look good from the airbrushing of this particular vantage point, but was nonetheless the architect of, for example, the NAFTA (see the tens of thousands of Mexicans marching in the streets recently to protest its final implementation and the destruction of their livelihoods). She was a part of the rising to power of a segment of the Democratic Party that that turned its back on the country’s poorest and most disenfranchised, that believed that meeting the ravages of the Reagan revolution meant moving toward it. (Don’t think I haven’t read Obama. But that’s another discussion.)
—Because she’s more heavily funded by lobbyists than a Democratic candidate has ever been. (It’s kind of funny that in calling Obama to task—as he should be—for claiming not to be funded by special interests, her website jumps to the Public Citizen, where she leads the list of Democratic presidential contenders, with more than double Obama’s funding from special interests.)

Morgan positions the Obama-Clinton battle historically (“not since the suffrage struggle have two communities—the joint conscience-keepers of this country—been so set in competition”), but without, it seems, reflecting on that painful moment’s lessons.

Those have come up recently in our house. We’ve been watching the excellent 14 hours of the PBS production Eyes on the Prize at home with our kids recently. Toward the end of it, Rosa said: I wish I could watch the same history of the women’s rights movement. (That there isn’t a similarly powerful and comprehensive one is not, by the way, reason alone to vote for Hillary.) We filled in with Ken Burns’ by comparison tepid, but still engaging history of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. When we got to the part at Seneca Falls where Frederick Douglass (who once slept upstairs, in Amos’s bedroom) stands up and defends Stanton and women’s suffrage, and because of him the motion carries, we were very excited to see that coalition at work. Then, later after the Civil War, when the former allies are painfully at odds, I found myself covering my face in despair, only to glimpse between my fingers Rosa and Amos, their faces all screwed up, confused, dismayed. We hit pause to discuss the ugliness of what Elizabeth Cady Stanton had just said (that Sambo shouldn’t get the vote before white women, in short) and how someone they had just been learning to admire for her lifelong struggle for women’s rights could have become so “nasty.” She was desperate, I said. That’s what happens when people are desperate. But you can see that the really sad lesson of this story is that the black male leaders and the women’s suffrage leaders turned against each other. But history’s like that, I found myself saying. It’s easy for us to say, sitting on the coach today, they should have defended one another’s right to the vote; they shouldn’t have gotten so carried away with proving who had suffered the greatest injury, who deserved the earliest prize. "Why couldn’t they have just put the word 'sex' in?" Rosa wants to know. I have no answer.

It was in this context that I read Morgan’s piece. She denigrates Obama’s campaign as made up of people who think that “it’s fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he can learn on the job, goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction brought by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance.”

Call it “nasty,” call it “toxic viciousness”: no good comes of it. Does making the case to vote for Hillary require that Obama and Bush be equated? (Presumably that’s what the comma splice is doing: the grammar reflects the tenuousness of the actual connection, a lack of care in her thought.)

This is not an election to decide who has been (or is) more oppressed, and reward the prize accordingly. This is not a race to choose between the rights of women or the rights of African American men. We all have the right to vote, now.

I think Morgan’s suggestion that Obama would make an excellent president—after eight years of Clinton (echoing Gloria Steinem’s similar wish in her Times piece?)—carries a condescension that has historical resonances, too. And I want to cover my face with my hands again. I want nothing to do with—and wish the feminist movement had nothing to do with—that quality of mind that prescribes what’s best for others’ lives; that finds comfort in derision and mockery (“Duh,” she offers as proof that Clinton’s record makes her more qualified; “Grow the hell up” she tells women “who can’t identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power”). No, no, no. No good can come of such a presumptuous, ugly, rattling, ellipses-driven attack.

A great deal has been made of Obama’s insistence on both/and rather than either/or. Critics can say they’re mistrustful of his rhetorical flourishes. I say: he’s right. That’s what we needed in the struggle around the 15th amendment, and it’s what we need now. Let’s hold both candidates—and their supporters—to the elegance and power of their best phrases. Let’s refuse the positioning of this primary as a battle between African American men and white women, and remember it’s about changing the status quo in Washington. And, really: Why not celebrate a contest that has the power to keep people awake at night, stir historical questions, enliven tired movements, make ten-year-olds fight their parents for the newspaper?

“I like Michelle Obama best out of all the candidates and their spouses,” announces Rosa, tossing down the Sunday Times. “I wish I could vote for her.”

Cross-Generational Appeal

Fresh back from AWP—no, exhausted back from AWP—I am struck this morning by the fact that various of McSweeneys (see, for example, Animals of the Ocean, in Particular the Giant Squid) excite the same pleasure in both the adult and the child halves of our family as the candidacy of Barack Obama.
R scoots other ordinary looking books aside, pausing only at an issue of n + 1. Look, she says, pointing to the headline: Lower the voting age!

Stay this moment

"If one does not lie back & sum up & say to the moment, this very moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No: stay this moment. No one ever says that enough. Always hurry. I am now going in, to see L. & say stay this moment."
—from Virginia Woolf's diary, 31 December 1932

"Mom! Mom. I just realized we only live once. I mean, we only have one life. That's a problem for me with my plans."
—from the backseat, yesterday

Dear NYRB

On Patrick Leigh Fermor’s time at a Benedictine abbey near Rouen:

“Then he started to sleep. He slept until a few meals and church services a day were his only lucid moments. Then the pattern changed again. His lassitude dwindled away and was succeeded by a ‘limpid freshness.’ He now slept only five hours in twenty-four. It was as if a profound tiredness, rooted in the outside world with its demands on nervous libido and instant response, had overswept him, then receded in this quietude to release a flood of unimpeded energy. ‘Even the major causes of guilt and anxiety had slid away.’”
—from Colin Thubron’s review of Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence (and four other of his travel books)

As I was falling asleep, and thinking that perhaps I should get all five—in lieu of the abbey, which is clearly actually what I need—I suddenly thought, Wait. Isn’t this some kind of racket? Wonderful absorbing review in the NYRB of five books published by NYRB.

Or does the excellence of both the books and the review absolve them?

Oh, perhaps it does.

The Future of the Book

While I was in New York a couple months ago, I visited the home office of Archipelago Books in their lair in the American Can Factory, down by the Gowanus Canal. Jill Schoolman has put together the most tantalizing operation. Long shelves on either side of the big room are filled with the four-year-old press’s offerings of translated literature, which taken together or singly, are unspeakably beautiful. That’s a physical fact. As for the words—the variety, the challenges and poetry and particular articulations from faraway places—I will want to say more, here and elsewhere: about Magdalena Tulli’s Moving Parts and Dreams and Stones and this season’s Flaw; about Marguerite Duras’s Yann Andréa Steiner; about Elias Khoury’s much celebrated Gate of the Sun and his recent Yalo. (It occurs to me that the blurb from Edward Said about Khoury makes an apt description of Archipelago itself—it is a press giving voice to “dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages.”)

Oh, and I want the two previously untranslated Cortázar books and A Mind at Peace, by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, which Orhan Pamuk calls “the greatest novel ever written about Istanbul.”

Yes: I covet them. Even their paperbacks I want to hold and go on holding, and this makes the Archipelago books one answer to the questions raised at the panel and lecture I went to a few weeks ago on the future of the book. When Amazon released their Kindle the next Monday, it felt a bit like a continuation of the conference, at which Joseph Epstein regaled us with his idea of the book ATM; Terry Belanger raised his mischievous brow over the edge of his laptop to talk about how books might be like horses (we may not use them to plow the fields anymore, but people still live with them); Lisa Gitelman performed a neat and energizing debunking of the “moral outrage” and questionable logic at work in the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” report; and Sven Birkerts gave in measured tones a talk about “the hive life” and a promising yelp of discovery at one point in the very brief discussion after.

About Birkerts’ personal revelation, I know nothing. Soon after the very interesting trio of mini-talks, questions were abruptly cut off, discussion ended.

The panel was moderated by Corey Flintoff and the NPR gloss he provided for the Mt. Holyoke/Five College/Museums10 event perhaps perfectly coincided with my colleague’s comment about the quantity of gray hair in the audience and her friend’s grumbling about how no students had actually shown up.

As I drove home, thinking about facing the work that had been on my plate at the day’s start, and was still there because I’d gone to the conference, I got grumpier. I was thinking about the amount of time and money that had gone into the conference—the museum meetings, the devoted independent bookstore owner schlepping the piles of books for people to peruse (buy?), the academics who were paid to present, and arrangements that must have been made to acquire the voice of Flintoff. All the human effort. And it was over. Like that. No real discussion.

And who comes to such things—who from the community, who of working people, who of young people—who comes to discuss the future of the book?

And, indeed, why should we?

Why would anyone who is on the outside of that conversation want to enter it? And how could they?

This passes for intellectual life? I was fuming by the time I reached the Coolidge Bridge. This is public discussion?

As Larry Kramer’s teeshirt says: Where is the outrage?

And yes, over even this: That so much arranging and organizing and spending and politesse and human capital goes into a simulation of intellectual engagement whose very structure dampens its possiblity. And that this is taken as a matter of course.

Why talk about the future of the book, how bleak the year 2007 in publishing as though it’s separate from the bleakness of these times?

So the Congress voted this week to devote $70 billion to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s about $233 per US citizen.

For much less than my war share, I could get a subscription to the entire spring list from Archipelago.

Three Months Later

At some point this summer I must have thought: A blog will be the perfect recovery from the long sickness of writing a novel. You will be brief; you will slip thoughts in between unreasonably taxing editing tasks and school pick-ups; you will be easy and light.

But I don’t have high-speed access.