Four by Four #47

Four Things To Read

Inseminating the Elephant, by Lucia Perillo: I very much wanted to like this book. Lucia was my classmate at Syracuse University back in the 1980s, and I remember getting a glimpse in the poems she brought to workshop of something I later studied quite a bit more deeply in the work of Albert Goldbarth, namely how to let a train of thought work itself through in a poem on its own terms. I read two of Lucia’s earlier books, Dangerous Life and Body Mutinies, with admiration and respect when they came out, and I remember thinking when she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship that she absolutely deserved it. Not that my opinion matters all that much. I just mean to say that I respected her work a lot for its intelligence, its irreverence and humor, its fearlessness in taking on subjects one would not normally associate with poetry, its political bite, and its wisdom. I caught glimpses of all of that in Inseminating the Elephant, but they were only glimpses. There were moments of real brilliance in some of the poems, a handful of which truly moved me, but most of which left me asking So what? This, for example, is from “Number One:”

how it is not so grim or tragic
when the boy-hand spiders across girl-shouldermeat
and she curls against him
like a pink prawn thawing from the freezer.

I get, or at least I think I get, that the language is supposed to indicate the speaker’s discomfort with/alienation from what’s going on between those two people, and that the simile of the pink prawn is supposed to cinch that feeling. My understanding of this, however, is an analytical, intellectual one, not an emotional one, and so I find myself asking, as I did when I finished many of the poems in this book, Why I should care?

By way of comparison, consider the opening lines of “Similar Girl:”

Most of the hospital’s emergencies lay
on gurneys that made a chickadee noise—
eent eent eent—as they rolled on rubber wheels.

The humor in the chickadee metaphor and its contrast with the seriousness of hospital emergencies is both intellectually—such a keen eye for detail—and emotionally resonant in a way that recalled for me my experience of Lucia’s earlier books. This was not, however, my experience of most of the poems in Inseminating the Elephant.

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Precious Things, by Sara Hosey:

And that was when I stopped crying. It wasn’t even really a decision; it was just a new reality, like the way I stopped sneaking cigarettes the day Kate told me she was pregnant. Though maybe it wasn’t even as hard as that. Because you know what, Kate? To hear that Dani was gay was easier than hearing he couldn’t believe a movie in which a queer kid [Elton John] grows up in a small town and isn’t persecuted. It was easier to hear than, “It’s fine, dad; Dalton’s my friend,” after I saw that little fucker knee my son in the balls on the playground. No, I wasn’t happy he was gay. I wasn’t happy, but I fucking pretended to be, because that’s our fucking job.

The narrator of “Precious Things” is a father coming to terms both with the fact that his son has come out as gay and with his divorce from Kate, his son’s mother, a woman he still loves. The passage I’ve quoted is part of the narrator’s response to Kate accusing him of being “happy” that their son is gay because that fact means their son’s identity now aligns with his liberal politics. As the narrator explains, however: “[M]y son being gay wasn’t making me ‘happy.’ Probably like most parents, I didn’t want my son’s life to be harder than it had to be; I didn’t want him to have to struggle with things that were easy for other people, like becoming a parent or getting a wedding cake. Yet Kate had implied that I was reveling in it, like some sort of next-level, male-Munchausen-by-proxy bullshit.” This story's strength lies in Sara Hosey’s willingness to let the messiness of how the narrator deals with what he is going through be messy and human and without an easy resolution. In part she does this by keeping the reader firmly rooted in the narrator’s point of view. You don’t have access to what is going on inside any other character’s head, which makes the process of following the narrator’s train of thought quite moving. You are, in a very literal way, figuring things out along with him. Importantly, this is not a liberal-good-guy vs. conservative-bad-guy kind of story, unless you count the patriarchal and homophobic cultural context as a “bad guy.” Instead, Sara Hosey has written an honest, illuminating, and heart-felt story in which a man struggles to come to terms with what it means for him to be a man in the context in which he finds himself. I hope you will take the time to read it.

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Examining the ADL’s Antisemitism Audit, by Shane Burley and Naomi Bennet:

While we expected that this difference in methodology would create a disparity between our findings and the ADL’s, our reappraisal also highlighted more basic problems with the ADL’s tracking system. In addition to identifying more than a thousand items we believe were misclassified as antisemitic—all cases of speech critical of Israel or Zionism—we found that the data included misapplications of the organization’s own standards and often did not provide enough information for us to assess the group’s judgment. Our analysis clarifies what the ADL’s prominent report captures and excludes, and shows how the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism skews the data—ultimately serving as a reminder of the need for serious statistical analysis done by an organization not beholden to Israel advocacy.

In mid-April 2023, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a report which claimed a 140% increase in antisemitic incidents, which include harassment, vandalism, and assault, over 2022. In response to the fact that this narrative is in part rooted in the ADL’s efforts “to categorize anti-Zionism as antisemitism” as well as “broader questions [it has faced] over its statistical methods,” Burley and Bennet decided to examine the numbers in the 2023 report more closely using the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), “a tool developed by scholars to identify antisemitism while avoiding erroneous conflations of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.” (They chose this definition over the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition, which has been criticized for precisely that conflation.) The results are striking. According to the ADL’s report, there were 3,162 antisemitic incidents connected to Israel or Zionism. Using the JDA, Burley and Bennet found that 1,472 of those, about 47%, did not appear to be antisemitic. To be clear, the remaining 53%, or 1,690 antisemitic incidents, is not an insignificant number. Even more significant, though, is their finding that the ADL’s methodology “significantly undercount[s] right-wing antisemitic incidents.” This is troubling because, as Burley and Bennet note, citing the activist Erik W. Ward, “antisemitism is not just a feature but the ‘theoretical core’ of modern American white nationalism.” More to the point, Burley and Bennet found, more accurately counting white supremacist/nationalist antisemitic incidents would reduce “the legitimately antisemitic Palestine-related incidents [to] mere statistical noise” within the context of the report. This doesn’t mean those incidents should not be taken seriously, of course. It does suggest, however, that using accusations of antisemitism to “save and protect Israel” by silencing pro-Palestinian voices allows the truly dangerous growth of white-supremacist antisemitism in the United States to continue unchecked.

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Substack Note About Charlie Kirk’s Death, by Mary Geddry:

None of this is to suggest that Charlie Kirk deserved to die. Political murder is abhorrent, no matter the target, and his death is a tragedy for his family, his supporters, and for a nation already staggering under the weight of polarization. But it would also be dishonest to ignore the legacy he leaves behind. He normalized contempt as a political strategy. He made his wealth and his name by teaching others to scorn those who were different, to view the poor, the queer, the immigrant, as objects of ridicule rather than fellow citizens, or hell, fellow human beings.

Geddry publishes a Substack newsletter to which I do not subscribe, but this note—Substack’s answer to Tweets or Facebook posts—appeared in my feed and I think it is worth sharing because it does a marvelously thoughtful and balanced job of holding Kirk accountable for his views, while at the same offering an analysis of his assassination as “not a vindication” for those who opposed him, but “a warning…a reminder that words have consequences, that violence begets violence, and that a country which allows hatred and firearms to intermingle unchecked will continue to bury its own.” This brief essay is worth reading.

Four Things To See

All images are from the National Gallery of Art and are in the public domain.

Ginerva d’ Benci (circa 1474-1478)

Leonardo da Vinci

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Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878)

Mary Cassatt

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The Blue River (circa 1890-1900)

Auguste Renoir

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The Rhinoceros (1515)

Albrecth Dürer

Four Things To Listen To

Chip Wickham - Drifting

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Gesaffelstein - Nameless

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Prole Sector N1 - Flatline

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Sarah Nemstov - Deconstructions II

Peter Veale, english horn
Benjamin Kobler, piano

Four Things About Me

I realize that part of what I am doing here in the “Four Things About Me” section of this newsletter is keeping a kind of digital journal, something I have tried more than once to do, with at least three different apps, except I thought then I’d be writing about my life as I lived it. I was intrigued by how much more a digital journal would allow me to include in my entries: images, maps, links to relevant documents, and more. Every time I started one, though, there was something unsatisfying about it. At first, I thought I missed writing by hand, which I really enjoy, but writing on my iPad with a stylus didn’t satisfy me either and not only because it doesn’t feel like writing on paper. I think what I miss when I try to keep a digital journal is the end point, the fact that a physical journal has a final page. I don’t want to dig too much into the metaphorical connection one could draw between writing on that last page and death—or starting a new journal’s first page and rebirth—but those connections are there. The back cover of a notebook is an external constraint, an ending imposed by the material world, and the blank page of a new journal forces you start all over again, just like you do when you begin a new stage of life. I believe it’s important to have those experiences in your life in both large ways and small.

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My first girlfriend’s name was Sandy. I was in sixth grade and she was a year older, which at that age is a pretty big difference, especially since it meant she was in junior high school, while I was still an elementary school student. I don’t remember how we first became friends, but I know that we got very close very quickly. I do, though, remember very clearly that she said no when I asked her if she wanted to “go out” with me. I don’t think I had any concrete idea of what it would have meant for us to be boyfriend and girlfriend, but, given how close we were, asking her felt like the right thing to do. I have a vague recollection that she gave our age difference as her reason for rejecting me, but I am not sure. What I do know is that we finally became an “item” when, at a baseball game one of the parents in the neighborhood took some of us kids to, Sandy rested her head on my shoulder, a sure sign at the time that we were more than just friends. I also remember the moment Sandy explained to me that the real reason she said no when I asked her out was that she had a congenital heart defect that that her doctors had no way of repairing and so she knew she was probably not going to survive past her teens. We were sitting in her family’s apartment in the middle of the summer and I had asked her why she was wearing a sweater even though it was so warm. She got cold easily, she explained, because of her weak heart. I don’t remember what I said in return, but I know we were together for a while and that we spent a good portion of that time in her apartment because she was not able to go outside all that much. I also don’t remember that we ever officially broke up, but I have a memory of hearing that her brother was very angry at me because I didn’t visit Sandy in the hospital during the months before she died. No one ever told me she was in the hospital, nor was I not invited to the funeral, and it pains me even now to think that Sandy might have thought I’d purposely abandoned her when she needed my friendship most. I will never know. Somewhere, though, I have a picture of us, she in a sweater of course, at what I think was my sisters’ birthday party, and I have what she wrote in my sixth grade signature book:

Dated Forever

Richie,

Red as roses
Green as grass
Poor little donkey
Fell on his ______.
Don’t get excited
Don’t get red
Poor little donkey
Fell on his head.

Love,
Sandy,
Always

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At the front of that signature book is a page where you could list some points of interest about yourself. I’m looking at it now. My favorite writer back then was Leon Uris, author of Exodus and Mila-18, though I am a little surprised to learn that I read those books before I became a teenager. My favorite song at the time, at least according to the signature book, was “Billy Don't Be A Hero,” by Bo Donaldson & the Heywoods. Before that, my favorite had been The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” As I paged through the book looking for Sandy’s message, I was once again confronted with the casual antisemitism that permeated the community in which I lived, right from the very first page, on which Jim wrote, ”Roses are red, violets are blue, I’ve never met a nicer Jew.” Fran wrote, “To the Jew: Have a penny good time in 7th grade,” and Andy said congratulations with, “Of all the pushy Jews, you top them all.” While these were not the majority of the messages people wrote for me, they stood in for what I know many more of my fellow students were thinking, and they were a precursor of the increasingly menacing and violent antisemitism I dealt with in the mid- to late-1970s. Nor is that level of Jew-hatred a relic of the past. Recently, I spoke with a Jewish colleague who is twenty or so years younger than I am and who grew up in the town next to the one where I lived back then. The stories he told about his experiences with antisemitism were almost completely interchangeable with the ones I tell from my youth.

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Back in 2009, before I really understood how the Internet and Google searches worked, I posted an essay to my blog (not this one) in which I wrote about the antisemitism I experienced when I was growing up. In my ignorance, I used the last names of the boys—and they were all boys—who left the antisemitic messages in my signature book. One of them, Andy, contacted me because my essay was turning up in google searches related to his business, and he was understandably concerned that people who found him online might think he still held the beliefs and attitudes he expressed when we were in sixth grade. It was, of course, not my intention to hurt his business, certainly not forty years after the fact, so I apologized profusely and removed from the post the last names of all the people I mentioned. I also contacted the relevant search providers and the owners of any blogs where my essay had been cross-posted to remove that older version from their caches. Unfortunately, I no longer have the email exchange between Andy and myself about this matter, but I remember two things. First, he wrote at some length about how proud he was to be able to say that his children had friends from all kinds of different backgrounds, and, second, he never once thought to apologize for what he wrote about me all those years ago, leaving me to wonder how much he himself had really changed. There is, however, one email from him in my archive. In it he told me that he’d lost a potentially “great client” because of the “unappealing content” (meaning my post) that a google search had turned up about him. I don’t have a copy of my reply to him, but at that point, since I’d already contacted everyone I could, there was nothing more to do except wait for all the search engine caches to clear. Since I never heard from him again, I assume that’s what happened and that his business was not damaged any further. I felt and feel badly that he lost that client, but there is also a small, spiteful, petty part of me that when I think about the fact that he never apologized can’t help but find some satisfaction in the fact that karma really can be a bitch.

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