Four by Four #46

Housekeeping

Moving It All Connects... to its new platform, Ghost, has come with a few extra steps I did not anticipate, most of which have been on my side of things, but one of which, signing in, you need to perform, if you choose to. (If you’ve upgraded to a paid subscription, you’ve already signed in and you don’t need to do so again.) Once you sign in—all you need to do is provide the email address at which you receive the newsletter, no password is required—Ghost will recognize you as a subscriber, free or otherwise, and you will then have access to a comments section where you can share with me and other members your responses to the material I’ve curated. As well, you will no longer see the calls to subscribe that I insert in these emails or when you click through to my website (though free subscribers will still see calls to upgrade to a paid subscription). Finally, you'll also have access to your account through the “Account” button that will appear in the top right corner of your screen when you click through to my site. You’ll still receive It All Connects... if you don’t sign in, but if you would like to do so, please click here.

News & Events

Just a reminder about the events I have coming up next week:

• On September 9 at 7 PM, I will be reading at DADA in Ridgewood along with the artist and writer Lizzie Scheader. More information.
• On September 11 at 6 PM, I will be reading at Book Culture LIC along these fine writers: Aida Zilelian, Emily Hockaday, Jared Harél, Pichchenda Bao, and Stine An. Check out the Book Culture website for more their bios and other information.
• On September 13 at 2:30, I will be giving a talk/reading at the Jackson Heights Public Library focusing on T’shuvah, my third book of poetry. More information.

I also want to let you know that my latest post is up on Learning To Love The Questions, where I have started blogging for my publisher, Fernwood Press, about the connections between and among poetry, politics, and spirituality: “What Poems Do We Need Right Now?”

Four Things To Read

For Now, It Is Night, by Hari Krishna Kaul, translated from the Kashmiri by Kalpa Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili, and Gowhar Yaqoob:

I can’t sleep, therefore, I need to keep my mind busy. I must keep thinking about something—anything. All day long I keep thinking of my own problems. So what if I poke around in other people’s affairs now? Anything to pass the night.

Spoken by the narrator of “A Song of Despair,” this quote captures if not precisely what motivates the ruminations and sometimes actions of many of the characters in the stories in this collection—they don’t all have trouble sleeping—then certainly the tenor of how they think about the world; and the quote certainly seems to capture a central aspect of the imagination by which the stories are animated. The author, Hari Krishna Kaul, an uncle of Kalpa Raina, one of the translators, was born in Srinagar, Kashmir, in 1934. I know very little about Kashmir and its history, and so I am not going to pretend to be able to place Kaul in either his historical or his literary context. Kalpa Raina’s introduction does a good job of that in a way that actually whet’s your appetite for the stories themselves. (And if that sounds like a pitch for you to get the book and read the stories, it is. They are marvelous and fun, which is also important.) My ignorance about Kashmir notwithstanding, I did recognize certain aspects of the stories: the way they portray a traditional, somewhat insular community for which the alien and sometimes frightening outside world is barely worth noticing, unless and until—and there is always an until—it interferes with the community’s life. The characters confront the same kinds of problems we all confront, but—and I know this from Raina’s introduction; I don’t think I would have sussed it out too easily on my own—it is taken for granted within the narratives that this confrontation happens in the context of the social and political turmoil roiling Kashmir as contested territory. You won’t get a history lesson from these stories, but you do get a kind of psychological profile of people who have to live their lives under that kind of pressure, a pressure that often results in their having to leave. For that reason alone, the books bears more than one reading.

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Scenes From The Literary Blacklist, by Elizabeth Kaye Cook and Melanie Jennings:

The right to disagree is sacred. This includes those who disagree with the consensus du jour. Coordinated attacks on magazines and writers that decline to take a stand or take the “wrong” stand or the not-strong-enough stand make it clear that many believe literature’s primary obligation is to political purity, rather than literary quality. Certain cultural and political events like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the Israel/Hamas war become litmus tests while others—the opioid crisis, the war in Sudan, the literal silencing of women in Afghanistan—pass mostly unheeded.

Cook and Jennings begin their piece with the story of how a story they chose for publication as fiction co-editors for Crab Creek Review, a decision with which the journal’s editor-in-chief agreed, was ultimately not published because of what might broadly be called “sensitivity concerns.” This is how they, in my opinion accurately, characterize the story, which was written by John Picard and is called “Who Was That Masked Man?”: “Tired of being support staff, Tonto takes back his original name (Puhihwikwasu’u) and returns to his tribe, thus derailing the Lone Ranger’s life of adventure.” Picard’s narrative is a biting, many-layered satire that sends up not only the racist stereotypes that the Tonto character embodies, but also the kinds of white manhood and masculinity embodied by the Lone Ranger himself. The editor-in-chief’s concerns about the story began, but did not end with a central component of that satire, the fact that Tonto speaks “Tonto-speak” throughout, which Tonto himself notes when he says that one of the reasons he wants to go back to live with his tribe, where he can speak his own language, is his desire to stop “sounding like two-year-old.” Cook and Jennings go on to identify other examples of what they call a “culture of censorship and censure in literary magazines,” but this one stuck with me most because it reminded me of an essay Janet Burroway published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Called “Slouching Towards Sensitivity,” the piece details the myriad sensitivity hoops, on both the left and the right, that she had to jump through in order to satisfy the publisher of the fifth edition of her widely used creative writing text, Imaginative Writing.(Unfortunately, the Chronicle puts all its content behind a paywall. Signing up for a free account will allow you to read the article.) Here, for example, is the list of words that she was told would disqualify from use a published example of creative writing, regardless of the context in which the words were used:

hick, hayseed, clodhopper, ridge runner…towelhead…third world, homeless, white trash, whore, slut, slave, the Blacks, beaners and noble savages…Nazi, minstrel, blackface, homosexuals, boy, skinheads, dead animals, Rooskie, kike, spic, exotic and gumbo. Also Indians (cowboys and), dementia, shame, crazy, insane, ape, goddam moose, make love, fart, hell, goddam, screw up, asshole, along with some stronger expletives.

Burroway’s and Picard’s experience do seem to parallel each other, except the Burroway’s text was ultimately published. I recommend reading her essay. I gave it to my creative writing students to read before we started using the fifth edition of her text. It changed the way they understood what a creative writing class was about.

The one quibble I have with Cook and Jennings is that they implicitly conflate the problem posed when a publisher preemptively refuses to publish because they fear the consequences of offending readers and the question of how to handle the work of a writer whose writing and/or personal behavior, criminal or not, are unquestionably informed by any of the various discriminatory stances and hatreds the above list of words ostensibly signals. The two issues are not unrelated, but I do think they merit separate consideration.

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“Rhetoric Without Reckoning,” by Simone Zimmerman:

In reading these unprecedented Jewish condemnations of Israeli actions, one gets the impression that something in Israel’s approach on the ground has changed dramatically in the past few months, not just in degree, but in kind. It has not.

Zimmerman is referring to the recent statements being made by Jewish leaders who had previously, and unequivocally, supported Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. While some of these leaders, she points out, have now accepted that Israel is in fact perpetrating a genocide, others, either by implication or explicit statement, still refuse to do so, even as they (finally) criticize Israel for its use of famine as a weapon of war. One example Zimmer quotes is this op-ed by Rabbi Daniel Gropper. Gropper was one of the rabbis who spoke outside the Israeli consulate in New York calling “for Israel to let a surge of food and other aid into Gaza...for the hostages to be released...and for an end to the war.” This is how Gropper characterized his participation in that protest, “I spoke as a rabbi who loves Israel, who wants Israelis to be safe, and who desperately wants this war to end — a Jew who desperately wants the hostages home,” but, by omission at least, not as a Jew protesting the injustices committed against the Palestinians, whether historically or even just since October 2023. Like Zimmerman, I do not want to minimize the importance of Gropper's willingness, and the willingness of those like him, to speak out now, even if it is late, even if it is framed more as a matter of Jewish self-interest than anything else, but it is also important not to pretend that statements like his represent anything other than that self-interest. (Gropper does not use the words Palestine or Palestinian even once.) This is where Zimmerman’s call for an explicitly Jewish-framed public reckoning—for leaders like Gropper and the organization’s they represent to do a kind of teshuvah—is important. The essay is worth reading for Zimmerman’s description of that process, but also for the information she brings together in the links she provides.

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The Arabic Alphabet: A Guided Tour, by Michael Beard, with illustrations by Houman Mortazavi:

Before I learned to read it, I confess that the Arabic alphabet seemed to me mysterious, amorphous, drifting, cloudlike, and a little sinister. Eventually, I came to feel that I wasn’t the only one. Eventually, as I learned it, letter by letter, it looked like any other alphabet, but a bit more beautiful. Eventually, this seemed a good reason to write a book about it.

Unlike most of the readings I recommend, which are either books or essays, this one is a website. I met Michael Beard, the site’s creator, when I was invited in 2012 to offer some brief comments on my translations of classical Persian poetry at an event honoring Professor Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani, which was, for me, a real honor. At the time, Beard and I discussed my writing an essay exploring what Iran would look like to an American, English-speaking reader if all they had access to were the translations available on the poetry bookshelves of, say, Barnes & Noble. I still think that essay, or some version of it, might be worth writing, though it would require altering the underlying motivation. At the time, there was precious little Iranian literature being published in translation, certainly not much that most general readers would know about, and so the view of Iran provided by the likes of Coleman Barks’ Rumi or Daniel Ladinsky’s Hafez was the dominant one out there. I mention that discussion because Beard’s impulse in suggesting that essay to me seems akin to the impulse behind this website: to interrogate the lens through which we know the Other and, in this case, to make that Other less alien. Here, for example, are two paragraphs in which he compares the Arabic and Roman alphabets in his introduction to the letter Alif:

The letters of the Roman alphabet are designed to seem physical objects of substance and weight. At the bottom of our letters, serifs have evolved to help us imagine them on little pedestals. We visualize our own alphabetic characters, the ones I’m using now, as objects taking up space, standing on a surface. The Roman alphabet’s simple upright, our capital I, takes up space assertively. The Capital I song in Sesame Street, which dates back to the days of Crosby, Stills and Nash (who sang it), makes our “I” a narrow house on a hill, inhabited, obviously, by the self.

The Arabic alphabet evolved from the same Phoenician characters as ours, but the Arabic letters do not feel like houses or towers with solid foundations. Alif ignores the ground and seems to float in air. Otherwise it would seem balanced precariously on its point. You can trace that sharp edge, taking shape slowly under the hands of countless scribes, shaped by the implement which creates it, the track of the reed pen. Even when shaped by typographic font or composed on a computer screen, Alif preserves a memory of the reed, with its chisel-shaped nib. The result tapers at the bottom and carries a little barb at the top. It’s this balanced, blade-like form that western calligraphers imitate when they attempt to make Roman letters look Aladdinesque.

Beard’s ability to see the letters as more than letters, to give them—however intuitively, poetically, subjectively—their full cultural weight makes this (as yet incomplete) website well worth reading through.

Four Things To See

All images are from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are in the public domain.

Tupu

Inca Artists (1400-1535 CE)

Tupu is a Quechua term for pin (“pithu” in Aymara and “alfiler” in Spanish).Women in the Andes use these pins to fasten textile garments, such as the acsu or lliclla.

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Seated Elder

Tolita-Tumaco artist(s) (200 BCE-300CE)

From the Met’s website: “This sculpture...depicts an elderly person, recognizable by facial wrinkles, baggy skin beneath the eyes, the few remaining teeth, and chin stubble. Its flattened head reveals cranial modification during childhood, a cultural practice that could have signaled ethnic identity or rank in antiquity. The gender of this effigy is not clear. Marked nipples, as in this figure’s chest, were more common in female than male representations in Tolita-Tumaco and Jama-Coaque ceramic traditions of coastal Ecuador. This statue, however, lacks the long skirts that are typically seen in female images.”

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Macuilcoatl

Mexixca artist(s) (1450-1521 CE)

From the Met’s website: “[T]his Aztec standard bearer represents one of the pre-Hispanic deities known as the Macuiltonaleque, or ‘lords of the five souls’... Associated with feasting, gambling, and games of chance, the youthful Macuiltonaleque embodied notions of pleasure, excess, and disease in pre-Hispanic Central Mexico. As denizens of the night, they were also thought to represent exalted warriors who, upon dying in battle, rose to the heavens to carry the sun disc on their backs from dawn till its midday zenith.

 As spiritual guides, the Macuiltonaleque inhabited, or ‘possessed,’ the five fingers of native priests and mystics so that the latter might be allowed to predict future events, diagnose disease, or act as matchmakers.

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Headband

Nasca Artist (6th-7th century CE)

This vibrantly colored headband with ornamental tassels, made by Nasca weavers on the south coast of Peru, illustrates both the impressive technical skill needed to produce a fabric of this length and complexity and the remarkable preservation of organic material in the Nasca desert, one of the driest places on earth...The exclusive use of camelid fibers, obtained from llamas and alpacas native to the higher altitudes in the Andes, suggests an influence of the highland Wari culture, an empire that later dominated the coast.

Four Things To Listen To

Country Gongbang - Mushroom Hunter

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Endea Owens & The Cookout - Where The Nubians Grow

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Remember Monday - Fat Bottomed Girls

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Tuba Skinny - Jubilee Stomp

Four Things About Me

Last month, I received an envelope in the mail marked “Confidential” from someone whose name on the return address I did not recognize. When I opened it, it was a copy of their Bachelor of Science degree from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. There was no letter or note explaining why they had sent it to me, so there was no way for me to know at first if it was meant as a thank you or an I-told-you-so. It took a bit of digging in my email archive, but it turned the sender was a student who took my class on Zoom during the pandemic shutdown. I have a vague memory of a returning student—this person was working full-time—who had quite a bit of difficulty making the switch from in-person instruction to a virtual classroom. They had not been in school for some time and were not, at least not at first, as tech-equipped or -savvy as the online classes demanded. In the end, though, it all worked out. I did my best to be more than flexible—as did every teacher I knew—and this student passed, moving on to John Jay, where they received their BS this past June. So I think it's safe to assume that the copy of their degree was meant as a thank you of sorts, though I can’t imagine why they didn’t write a note. It put me in mind, though, of how rarely I have heard back from students over the years. I can think of one who wrote me to say thank you after they graduated from law school, of another who wrote me a long letter about how important my creative writing class was to them, and there have been a couple with whom I maintained a friendship for a while (one of whom, whose spouse was on active military duty, stopped corresponding with me after I criticized our invasion of Iraq in 2003). Still another, after maybe two decades, found me online and took ou a paid subscription to this newsletter. Overall, though, given that I taught for 36 years, it has been a very rare occurrence for me to hear back from students. So I appreciate that my former student sent me their diploma, even if I had to some research to figure out its backstory.

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A book that had a profound influence on me as a young man was Fear and Trembling, by Søren Kierkegaard, which I read when I was an undergraduate. The book is Kierkegaard‘s attempt to make sense of the biblical story of The Binding of Isaac, which in Jewish culture is also known as the Akedah (Genesis 22:1-18). Most of you are, I am sure, familiar with the basic plot, which is that God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah. Abraham obeys and takes Isaac to the mountain, prepared to offer him as a sacrifice. On the way up the mountain, Isaac points out to his father that, while he sees that they have fire and wood, they do not have the sheep they will need to make the sacrifice. Abraham tells his son not to worry, that God will provide the animal they need, which God eventually does, but only after Abraham has bound Isaac to the alter and is about to kill him. It‘s been enough years that my memory of Kierkegaard‘s argument is spotty at best, but at it‘s heart was the bind in which God‘s command put Abraham. On the one hand, he had to have felt he had no choice but to obey; on the other, he also had to have had, simultaneously, absolute faith that, in the end, God would not ask him to kill his son. When I read Fear and Trembling, I was struggling with my own relationship to the god Judaism expected me to believe in, to the idea of God in general and whether or not I needed such an idea at the center of my spiritual life. The book captivated me. I don't remember now if I read it for the class I took with him, but I know I discussed it with my professor, friend, and mentor Terry Netter and that I shared with him during those discussions my primary frustration with the book: Kierkegaard seemed to ignore Isaac entirely. More to the point, he seemed to be saying, if only by implication, that Abraham‘s crisis of faith—his need to demonstrate his absolute faith in God—made it okay for him to deny or disavow both his role as Isaac‘s father, the love he had for him as a father, and Isaac's humanity in and of itself, which is what made it possible for Abraham to use Isaac as the instrument through which his faith would be proven. For me, this was best represented by the fact that Abraham did not ask Isaac if he was willing to be sacrificed. How could the god in whose image we were ostensibly created, I remember asking Terry, consider that proof of anything righteous? (I have since learned that there is somewhere a midrash which says that Abraham failed God's test.) I don‘t recall what Terry said in response, but I do remember some time later that a woman who worked in his office—he was the director of the Fine Arts Center where I went to college—told me he‘d confided in her, because he did not want it to go to my head, that I might very well have found “the key to proving Kierkegaard wrong.” (Those were her words; I have no idea if they were his.) What made me think of this story was looking back at the paintings Terry did back then that I linked to in Four by Four #1. He was, I think, the first male teacher in my young adult life who took my intellect and my creativity seriously without trying to mold me in his own image. I wrote him a letter ten or fifteen years ago to thank him for that, but he never responded. I have always regretted losing touch with him after I graduated.

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I met my oldest and closest friend at the same college where I took Terry Netter’s class. Ronny and I were English majors. I don’t remember how it came to be that we started talking to each other, but once we discovered that we lived in the same town, we discovered immediately that we had a lot to talk about. Two things stick out about that initial getting-to-know-you conversation. We’d both been friends with a guy named Don, who’d been killed in a car accident while we were still in junior high school. Don had been Ronny’s classmate in the local Catholic school. I don’t remember how he and I became friends. Probably as part of that conversation—Where did you go to high school?—we discovered another connection that surprised us both. The Catholic high school Ronny went to no longer exists as far as I know, but she had to take the same bus to get there as I had to take to get to the yeshiva high school I attended from 8th to 11th grade. “You were the kid at the front of the bus!” I remember her exclaiming when we figured this out. Indeed, I was. There were three Jewish families in my town. One family kept their son in public school. The other family sent their children to the same yeshiva I went to, but they did not take the same bus as me. I was the only one who rode the school bus that also picked up Ronny and her friends. They were very curious about who I was, she told me, since I always sat by myself in the front of the bus, but—she didn't remember why exactly—they chose to let me stay a mystery. Ronny and I became very close very quickly, and we remained close throughout our years at college, so close, in fact, that we promised to be at each other’s wedding no matter where in the world we happened to be at the time. I kept that promise, when I returned earlier than I was originally supposed to from teaching in South Korea so I could be at her wedding. She tried to keep her half of the bargain, but failed, having been defeated by a huge summer traffic jam on the Long Island Expressway on her way to the courthouse where I got married. She was very pregnant at the time and just could not endure sitting in the car any longer. (I have a vague recollection that, adding insult to injury, the air conditioner in her car went on the fritz while she and her husband were on their way.) It is impossible, of course, to capture a nearly forty-year friendship in the space of this short paragraph, so I will just say this: despite the ways in which our lives—our ambitions, our families, our careers, the fact that we lived in different states—inevitably took us far from each other, that distance disappeared whenever we talked or saw each other. Then, in April 2021, Ronny was murdered by her husband, the man I came home from Korea to see her marry, in an act of domestic violence that—and I know this is a cliché, but it is in this case true—I don’t think anyone saw coming. I know some of the details, which I am not going to share here, and I have my suspicions about what might have caused Ronny’s husband to snap, but those are speculations from a distance that I also think it would be irresponsible to share. We had not spoken since the beginning of the pandemic when I heard the news that she was dead, and I have been these past five years missing her voice, missing her. Her presence in the world was an important part of mine, even if we were not always in the present with each other.

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I didn’t get my driver’s license till I was twenty, which was late for a kid growing up where I did, but once I got it, I inherited my grandfather’s red, Chevy Malibu station wagon. My college roommate called it the “sporty red wagon.” I don’t remember how Ronny and I got to talking about the difference between manual and automatic transmissions, but she was very surprised to find out I did not know how to drive a stick shift, which she considered an essential life skill. She insisted I had to learn and that she would be the one to teach me. She had a very old Volkswagen at the time and my first lesson was to be driving it around an empty campus parking lot one Sunday. I was just beginning to get the hang of shifting gears when, as I put my foot on the break to slow down for a turn, the car did not slow down and I ended up running into the curb near the parking lot’s entrance. Ronny smiled and in the deadpan voice she used when delivering the dry jokes she was famous for said. “I knew the brakes were going to go out sooner or later, but I figured I had another month or two at least.” She seemed perfectly calm, but I was really rattled. I hadn’t been driving all that long and felt, in what I now know was a bit of an overreaction, like I’d just had a too-close-for-comfort brush with death. (This was before it was against the law not to wear seat belts, so I don’t know if we were wearing them. Ronny, though, was often a stickler for safety, so we very well might have been.) I don't remember what happened after that except that Ronny never did teach me how to drive a stick shift and, to this day, I still don't know how to do it.

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