Promiscuous Autobiography on Facebook: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany, Part II


Alex Wermer-Colan interviews Samuel R. Delany


MY FAVORITE AUTHOR

JANUARY 10, 2020



SOMETIMES A MILLENNIAL SENSIBILITY takes hold of an éminence grise.


In the photo to the side, writer and critic Samuel R. Delany poses for a candid portrait in his apartment building elevator as we head out for a walk across the park from the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts. Chip (as he is known to friends) is in the midst of putting his iPhone away, after taking a picture of me. On our short walk, Chip would take a couple dozen more photos, of passing buildings, people, and a small park where we sat in the sun on a cold day. Many of these photos Chip immediately posted, with commentary, to his Facebook page.


In my previous interview with Chip Delany, published here last summer, the 77-year-old prize-winning writer (Nebula Award, Hugo Award, Stonewall Book Award…), shared fresh perspectives on his life and work, along with thoughts on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. In this second installment, Chip talks neither about the past nor the future; instead, he focuses on the present, especially his current work and what he calls his “promiscuous autobiographizing.” Here, the gregarious novelist and essayist of the Stonewall era reflects on his use of Facebook for his own purposes at a time when social media companies face increasing scrutiny for violations of their users’ privacy and security.


Often Chip talks about how Facebook has become his primary mode of writing in his late years. In this interview, Chip offers a glance into what he identifies as his social media addiction, while making a case for how his use of Facebook attempts to go against the grain. As a diary and photo album, Chip’s Facebook page serves as a chronological record that refreshes his weakening memory. At the same time, it also acts as his primary portal to the outside world, where he gets much of his news, talks with friends, and meets strangers. Except for short walks, rare visits to other parts of Philadelphia, or trips to give readings and talks, Chip is usually at home, reading, watching movies or television, talking with his partner, Dennis, working with his assistant, Bill, or playing host to a visiting friend. No matter what Chip might be doing, he documents the experience with his smartphone and posts the photos to his Facebook page along with prosaic reflections and his now signature digressions. His feed is at once a catalog of the mundane — his morning pot of oatmeal often makes an appearance — but also a space for his philosophical speculations on political and metaphysical issues.


Since Chip started writing on Facebook around 2008, he’s moved his home and belongings three times, and, two years ago, he sold his archive to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, to which he also donated the majority of his personal library for a tax write-off. With over 2,500 followers, Chip’s Facebook page has arguably come to represent his major late work, amounting to nearly 1,000 pages of writing. In recent years, Chip’s relationship with his Facebook page has become more self-reflective and future-oriented, as he considers ways he can preserve his work in both print and digital forms. At the conclusion of this interview, he gives a glimpse into his thoughts on what a science fiction writer’s Facebook posts might look like as “literature.”


¤


ALEX WERMER-COLAN: Your last novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, was published in 2012. Since that time, you have edited previously unpublished work, sold your literary archive, and written a few works of short fiction. For the most part, however, you have said you spend your time on Facebook. What forms of writing has Facebook replaced? Do you still write fiction?


SAMUEL R. DELANY: I write mostly fractions of fiction in my journal, but they’re just sketches. Every once in a while, I try to record something: I used to keep journals and write letters. Except for answering emails, however, at this point, I do Facebook posting.


When did you start using Facebook? How has your use of the website changed over time?


I started using Facebook in late November 2008 because my San Diego friend, Kevin Donaker-Ring, and I had been emailing back and forth about my novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. We had been sending large hunks of it back and forth, which he had been helping correct.


As I recall, Kevin had been on Myspace, and when Facebook started up, he really thought I should be on one or the other of them, and he felt Facebook was the more versatile.


When I started out on Facebook, my posts were all verbal. Fairly long discussion threads often developed from mundane posts. I was never sure which topics would generate long threads. The ones that did often surprised me, and would go on for 30 or 40 comments. Others that I thought might fascinate people would die out after four or five. Facebook was originally spelled “FaceBook,” and it took me ages to adjust to typing the word with only one capital. I do know people don’t comment as much today as they did in the first half-dozen years. I’m still not sure if that was an algorithm or simply chance.


In general, my responses to movies usually got lots of comments.


What topics do you regularly discuss in your Facebook posts?


In order to divide the topics into categories, I would have to reread lots and lots of them. In my own mind, I don’t think of them as categories — just whatever is on my mind. Other readers, especially writers, were often willing to talk about any of them. It could be literature, a movie, or an artwork I’d seen in a museum or a book, a development in science or in science fiction, even something I’d seen in Scientific American, or a play, some aspect of construction work in the street, or how a piece of home technology functions, like the chains and weights used to raise and lower urban city windows. For a while, I talked about recipes I was cooking, and that could be fun. I really enjoyed discussing poetry, and sometimes still do. … Back then, it seemed people could go on about any topic forever.


Early on, I heard about Facebook’s love of kittens and puppies and even tried posting pictures of them along with abstruse philosophical topics, thinking that would generate interesting threads: sometimes it did; sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes people would ask what the kittens were doing there.


I remember one post in particular decrying the endless new chairs and other torture implements that NYC was always installing to make the life of homeless people difficult — often in the course of it, making the life of ordinary people in the city difficult along with it. They were always being installed in the Port Authority bus station. They must have cost the city thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Removing benches and places to sit in general was a big thing. And making telephone booths less and less private was another. It was an awful campaign: under the banner of making life difficult for the homeless, it made life difficult for the elderly and the visitor and the ordinary pedestrian exploring what was once a wonderfully welcoming city.







You seem to post pictures and ideas from your daily life, without much concern about hiding anything. Have you felt worried about Facebook’s violations of its users’ privacy?


No. It’s as private as you want to make it. I never thought it was a private medium. It was to communicate with others, and that’s what I was on it to do.


My partner, Dennis, is sometimes bothered by that aspect. Dennis doesn’t want nude pictures of himself on Facebook.


When I was in my 20s, however, I did nude theater, among other things. I was a member of the Charles Stanley Dance Company before he died. I really enjoyed that work, although basically I was a stagehand. But in some of the works, there was no distinction between stagehands and performers.


You’ve never really felt like you had anything to hide?


No. I was never bothered by any pictures of my body.


So, you have no secrets?


I have no visual secrets.


You have no secrets written down that you wouldn’t want anyone to find? You wouldn’t write down a secret?


Probably not. Or I would make it in code. And I would make it pretty difficult to decipher.


In The Fall of the Towers, there are little coded references to homosexuality, because I was writing at a time when that was how you did it.


There were people I was out to when I was in high school, though, true, not to my family. Marilyn Hacker, my wife and first confidante, moved to the East Village (Lower East Side) precisely because the neighborhood was known to be more liberal and tolerant of the life that I, at any rate, assumed I’d be living. I was a writer; I was in the arts; and I was gay. We had friends whom I was not out with, and I was not out — particularly — with the science fiction community when I started publishing, but by Stonewall, several people told me it was generally known I was gay, as much as any writer tended to be in those days.


In an essay that I believe dates from the mid-’70s, I wrote: “Honesty is the best policy, and a ‘policy,’ after all, is a strategy for living in the city.” A character named Timothy Hassler quotes it in my novel The Mad Man (June 1993–January 1995). That’s more or less how I’ve tried to live my life — I was a kid, after all, who had grown up in Harlem but had pretty formally broken with the Episcopal Church, where I’d been a choir member and an altar boy, by the time I was 13. I scandalized my dad by refusing to be confirmed after an attempt to have a serious conversation about religious questions with Father Scott. He was a very kind minister who took me to dinner at a small place in Harlem on 8th Avenue to talk about my very wavering faith. He just kept on telling me it wasn’t all that important, so I decided to take him much more seriously than he intended: I dropped “God” and became a (small-“m”) marxist and an atheist.


Do you ever write without the intention of sharing it with the public?


Well, no. But that’s because I think of writing as communication, and I want the communication to be clear. I figure, if you’re going to write it down … what is the Wilde quote? It’s in The Importance of Being Earnest, when his heroine, Cecily, remarks about her diary, “You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication.”


You write them down in order to read them again. If you want to read them yourself, eventually someone else might want to read them as well. I want to be clear to myself about what I’m thinking.


Did you always think your diaries would be read?


I’d hoped so. The model that taught me to write a journal was the Gide journals. There was a two-volume paperback edition in Vintage Books, which was abridged. I devoured them. Gide was an early hero of mine by the time I was a freshman in high school.


Did you ever feel insecure or embarrassed about what you shared in your fictional or autobiographical writings?


I’m sure I did, but I learned pretty quickly not to be. Before I was 21, I was inspired by something Jean Cocteau once said: “What your friends criticize you for, cultivate. It is you.”


I first encountered that line when I was 20 or 21. A handful of years later, I was chatting with the science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch and his partner, Charles Naylor, when Charles made the remark that I was guilty of “promiscuous autobiographizing.” I thought, well, Charles is my friend, and he’s criticized me for “promiscuous autobiography.” So, let me cultivate it.


What people are comfortable talking about in their sex life has changed so radically over the years, it’s a little hard to explain how that changes you. There are things that I feel I can be very public about and that my partner does not. There are things I wouldn’t have been comfortable talking about when I was 15, 25, or 35, which I’m perfectly comfortable talking about now that I’m 77.


There’s a generation of my family that, at this point, is entirely dead, though the last of them died only 20 years ago. While I think I’m comfortable having them gone, I don’t know how the rest of my father’s family feels, who, in the last years of my life, have become much more important to me. But I don’t see them frequently enough, and I don’t think they read enough of my writing to worry me. In the early years of my life, my mother’s family was much more important. Then, of course, there are my friends through school and business. I’m used to being very, very open there, and so far it’s never come around to bite me.


I’ve talked about having been labeled a sex-radical on public television. The one thing you don’t do when you discuss sexuality in public is actually describe sex. (Most of the time, you don’t even name the acts, though one thing AIDS has made clear since the early ’80s is that talking specifically about them was a life-and-death matter.) I’ve always suspected the only reason I got my four professorships is because so few of my colleagues read my academic work. I’m thinking specifically of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) — paradoxically my second-most-popular book. Because I’m retired, and because the situation it discusses has changed so radically thanks to the current president’s personal lawyer, it’s a situation very distant from most people under 30.


You seem to practice “promiscuous autobiography” on your Facebook page. When you post on Facebook, with whom do you usually communicate? What kind of community have you found?


Pretty much anybody who wants to communicate with me and who, more or less, remains civil.


I had one ex-student who was difficult and whom I have let other people take to task for me, and he’s actually improving, as other people keep telling him he’s not behaving in a reasonable manner. He’s actually a nice person and once brought me a jar of homemade chicken soup, but he doesn’t know how to talk to people who don’t 100 percent agree with him on what he thinks is good and bad in the world.


Others include a whole range of critics and teachers, and just ordinary people who are interested in science fiction, climate change, matters gay, or what have you. People too far away from where I am politically get bored very quickly with the discussions and just go away.


So far, I’ve never blocked anyone on Facebook, although the student described above came very close to it, and I even said I was going to do it if he kept up referring to anything he didn’t like as “scum” and using a few too many four-letter words and calling people “fools” who didn’t agree with him. But finally — since we started this interview series — because of all the other people who’ve criticized him, he’s decided not to follow me anymore to avoid them, which is fine by me.


As a student of mine once put it to me years and years ago, who rented a room in my apartment in New York: “If you keep score with individuals, you may come out ahead. If you try to keep score with the entire world, you’ll always lose.” I thought that was profound, and this particular student was basically trying to keep score with anybody and everybody who disagreed with him. He finally decided to drop me because I was friends with all these “difficult” people who didn’t like the way he put things and didn’t agree that his notions were going to save the universe.


How many of your Facebook friends and interlocutors do you think of as your “fans”?


None of them. I think of them as Facebook friends. I’m always verging on the maximum number of friends. As of this morning, 2,501 people “follow” me.


I go through my list every few months and any of the ones whose icons (or names) I don’t recognize, I drop — because I assume they have gotten bored with me or with Facebook. Now and then somebody among them, whom I also knew in person — like Josh Lukin, a young colleague at Temple; Russell Perreault, who used to work at Random House; or my one-time student Chuck Thomas, whom I first knew in 1975 at SUNY Buffalo and then whom I annually went to lunch with during the dozen-plus years I taught at the Naropa Summer Writing Institute; or Jonathan Bravard, the son of my late friend, Robert S. Bravard — dies.


Most of my current Facebook friends I know very little about. I don’t ask who’s single and who’s gay, who’s partnered, et cetera. Sometimes, because of their profile icons, I have a sense of who’s black and who’s white, and sometimes I don’t. Every once in a while, you learn that somebody you thought was a “he” or a “she” is actually a “they,” so you try to adjust.


Since I first met you, you’ve always taken photos of nearly everything you encountered. How do you understand your use of Facebook to document your explorations of the city?


To me that seems like an exaggeration, but my assistant says your observation is accurate, though I still think of myself as someone who thinks about writing more than I think about picture-taking.


I believe images taken in public places are public property. I don’t object to anybody taking pictures of me when I am on the street, and while I understand that some people are neurotically camera-shy, that’s their problem, not mine.


As I “drift” around the city, I take pictures and post them (although I don’t go out anywhere near as much as I did at one point). “Drift” is a term that goes back to my marriage with Marilyn. We used to call it, the both of us, “calculated drifting.”


Can you define “calculated drifting”?


Marilyn first used the phrase in a poem that appeared in Separations (1976). “I may go drifting anyplace, / lawful and with impunity.” I took the term over myself, and it became “calculated drifting,” which meant what you did both when you were exploring the city as a junior flâneur, or just turning up where you thought there was a possibility of finding sex — for me, pretty soon, when I discovered places like the docks/trucks, the active movie theaters, it became one with cruising.


Though I started looking for it at 13, I didn’t find it on a regular basis till I was 18.


I suspect it had its origin in France with the Situationists — “la dérive.” Guy Debord was another of my early heroes, though I did not get ahold of The Society of the Spectacle until the middle or late ’70s.


Debord defined “la dérive” as “a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.” To quote Wikipedia, it is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and (Debord again) “let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” It’s related to what I talk about in Times Square Red, Blue as “contact.” Debord was 11 years my senior. He was a filmmaker. I have been something of a filmmaker, although my work is very, very different from his. Much of his work was as a sort of anti-filmmaking, and I’m more an enthusiast of his writing: The Society of the Spectacle (1967), The Comments (1988), and the two volumes of Panegyric (1989 and 1997). I very much like the differences between them.


The first volume is a beautifully written biographical essay. Its opening lines could be the start of any of our lives: “All my life, I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction…” The other is a collection of photographs with minimal notes. Those photos are very much like the ones I often posted on Facebook during my wanderings around the city.


Since we’re talking of Debord, I’m also impressed with his use of his version of A Game of War, which figures as the Game of Vlet in Trouble on Triton. (The name is directly borrowed from a story by Joanna Russ, which I told her before she died that I was going to use, and she said it was all right. Russ may have taken her version of it from a combination of chess and Debord as well. [See her story “A Game of Vlet,” the single Alyx tale not included in The Adventures of Alyx but available as the penultimate story in her collection, The Zanzibar Cat (1984)].)


I wish I was more comfortable going out these days, taking pictures of people at work and images of the city. It seems to be, along with many other things, becoming something I “used” to do. There’s only so much drifting one can do inside of one’s own apartment.


What is it you like about taking photos of your everyday life and sharing them on Facebook?


I think the adage is true: one picture is worth a thousand words. Lots of things can’t be described in words but can only be evoked in terms of type — if you are writing to an audience who is familiar with the “type” you are writing about: “There were mountains at the horizon, some touched with snow, some streaked with winter forests among the rocks, especially those to the left.” Yes, it evokes a picture, but it could be in Thessalonica or Colorado or even the Carpathians on the coast of Slovakia. I actually took the ride up through Dubrovnik twice, and it is quite as spectacular as everyone says it is, but in my first couple of trips to Europe, I didn’t have my own camera.


I thoroughly enjoyed the biopic on Zuckerberg, The Social Network (2010). My sense is that’s about when I started posting pictures of my own, or at least trying to get pictures from the internet that were appropriate for my posts. My assistant, Bill, says pictures didn’t enter into my own work until 2016. I have no memory of how that started.


The first mention of an iPhone is a wonderful picture Dennis took from our roof in New York, using his phone. It was, for the longest time, my Facebook cover photo. Photo by Dennis Rickett


I’m pretty sure if Dennis had a smartphone, I had one, too. I remember that it was a wonderful day: this was the time I learned about the Band of Alexander, an area of unlit sky between two rainbows that always appear on each side of it. It was June 3, 2012, and a bunch of people, including writer Christopher Bram and my cousins Peter Murphy and Evan Stent, saw it (that is, saw the real thing at 6:30 p.m.) and commented on my Facebook page in the thread my post first produced. A few years later, this whole view was blocked by the owners of the building next door raising the roof by three or more stories.


I always enjoyed developing pictures — one of my freshman high school friends, Danny Auerbach, had an extensive darkroom in his Queens basement, which I remember using. In my second Lower East Side apartment, Marilyn and I used to develop photographs in our bathroom after we moved from East 6th Street to East 7th. I still remember the smell of hypo and the endless washing of the prints. I write about that stuff in Dark Reflections, but I never had a really portable one-handed camera until my iPhone came along.


The Family of Man was one of my favorite exhibits (at the Museum of Modern Art) and the printed catalog was one of my favorite books. I even had a pocket version, which I kept for years, and earlier I’d had a full-sized one. One of my essays, “Mid-Century,” uses pictures from it, but the pictures I’ve always possessed of my personal life have been of my neighborhood, in snow storms or after neighborhood events. Being able to show my photos to other people, by means of Facebook, was a delight.


Do you see your use of Facebook as going against the grain of what people usually use the platform for?


I think going against the grain is something I aspire to do; I don’t know whether I actually achieve that or not.


What might I mean when I talk about going against the grain of Facebook? It might be something as banal as the fact that you don’t find a lot of kittens and puppies on my timeline, though just this morning, I reposted a nice video of a guy and a wild mynah bird, who began singing to each other. I pointed out in my comment that this was a very nice relationship threatened by manmade climate change.


If you don’t take your “psycho-geographic” walks as much anymore, what has taken its place on your Facebook page?


I just broke down and got myself a TV, and we’ll see if I can find a place to put it. These days I take more pictures of books — which I then post.


Because I don’t go out as much as I once did, probably I post more political things than I used to. And I used to take lots of pictures of technological stuff around my house, which I don’t do anymore, because we don’t have anything around of interest. I seem to have a picture series of the delivery folks who bring our evening sandwiches.


The best way to answer this is for you to look on my timeline.


Can you say a bit about your interest in publishing your Facebook posts in another format, like a book?


Well, yes, it’s something I’d like to do; but, no, I can’t talk about it too much more until I’m further along in the project. I have to find out what I can do in practical terms. A number of my readers have suggested, over the years, they’d like to see some of the posts and threads they’ve generated in a book.


I want it to be a collection that reflects the variety of what I post about. I really would like to have color pictures. (A black-and-white picture of a rainbow over a black-and-white landscape is pretty dull.) I’m not sure whether this can be reasonably done throughout or in a separate sheaf. I did show it to one of my favorite small publishers, who thought I should cut things and was not very sanguine about the color — though it looks as if I might be able to do it if I self-published, like with Amazon.


One reader has suggested I divide things up into categories, but others have said that the variety and the switching back and forth, along with the interweaving of day-to-day experiences, is part of what makes the progression enjoyable. I want to go with the latter. Neither I nor my assistant can talk about the number of categories entailed, and we’ve been working on it seriously for several months. At this point, I just think the emphasis on categories is the wrong approach.


An aphorism that I’ve often been drawn to is one I think comes from Goethe: “A man of 50 knows no more than a man of 20. They just know different things.” Often, however, you’re not aware of the things you trade away in order to keep on growing. I do find it interesting to learn what it is, new, that I seem to know now, and I’m painfully aware of how much I no longer know. That’s part, I guess, of growing old. 

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Alex Wermer-Colan is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Twentieth Century Literature, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Lost & Found, and Indiana University Press.

The Other Buddha: On “Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side: A Guide to the Lotus Sūtra”

By Nilanjan Bhowmick
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-other-buddha-on-two-buddhas-seated-side-by-side-a-guide-to-the-lotus-sutra/

Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side

A Guide to the Lotus Sūtra

By Jacqueline Stone, Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Published 10.01.2019
Princeton University Press 312 Pages 

 




JANUARY 26, 2020

THE TITLE OF Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Jacqueline Stone’s book is startling. Two Buddhas? Anyone even vaguely familiar with Buddhism would think there is just one. His life story is famous: a prince gave up the pleasures of his life to become an ascetic. He gained enlightenment, and then went on to spread it to others. Who is the second Buddha, then? Is he a contemporary of the one we are familiar with? Why is he not as famous as the first one? It turns out, as we read the guide to the Lotus Sūtra by Lopez and Stone, that what we are familiar with is an illusion. The historical Buddha is not the only Buddha. He has been preceded by many, not so much in history, but in a mythical past.

Myth and history are in collusion in the Lotus Sūtra, inventive myths turning into vibrant history and hazy history turning into an illusory past. The book’s intention is to challenge the familiar world of early Buddhism. In that ancient world, there is the Buddha, his disciples, some wiser than others, some near enlightenment, some far. There are notions like karma, rebirth, the four noble truths, and dependent origination (nothing exists without a cause). These notions are not challenged by the Lotus Sūtra. What is challenged is the uniqueness of the Buddha, the exact meaning of his message, the state of wisdom of his disciples, and even, unusually, whether the Buddha attained parinirvāṇa (the final release from the karmic cycle upon death). All this is brought out with patience and understanding by Lopez and Stone. The authors do not present some eulogy or defense of the Lotus Sūtra. They use the views and opinions of earlier translators and monks, chief among whom are the highly original Chinese master Zhiyi (538–597 AD) and the rather combatively luminous Japanese monk, Nichiren Daishonin (1222–1282), to explain the Lotus Sūtra. The book, in their words, represents a “seismic shift” where “conventional expectations no longer apply.”

If early Buddhism was a spiritual revolution, the Lotus Sūtra is a rebellion arising from it. The chief rebel is the Buddha himself. He asserts that what he had said all along to his eager disciples had more to do with their ability to understand rather than with what he actually knew. He knew that there were not three roads to nirvāṇa and that nirvāṇa was not the real goal, and yet he taught otherwise. If that is not shocking enough, the Buddha says that the dramatic story of his attaining enlightenment has to be considered in the perspective of his having been enlightened all the time. His famous life story was merely a display of sorts.

The Lotus Sūtra is set in India, the Buddha seated on Vulture Peak. He is delivering a sermon. A vast audience, human and divine, is listening awestruck. Frustratingly enough, we are not told what the sermon is about. Then the Buddha goes into meditation. Now something miraculous happens, which we do not normally associate with the historical Buddha. A ray of light emerges from a tuft of white hair between Buddha’s eyebrows and lights many worlds. What does this mean? According to one of his disciples, it means that the Buddha is going to reveal the Lotus Sūtra. According to Lopez and Stone, this means that the Lotus Sūtra has not begun yet. And as the Sūtra unfolds, chapter by chapter, it is not exactly clear when the Lotus Sūtra begins, if at all, and when it ends, if it ever does. The Buddha repeatedly promises to deliver the Sūtra, but apparently he does not.

Also, the Sūtra is ominously long. A clue about the length comes from the fact that, countless ages ago, one of the Buddhas taught the Lotus Sūtra “for eight thousand eons, without stopping, in verses equal in number to the sands of the Ganges.” So the 28 chapters of the Lotus Sūtra will hardly do the job. Moreover, this is not the first time the Sūtra has been delivered. The Buddha is not the first fountainhead of wisdom. He is just repeating what his predecessors have said.

Promisingly enough, in Chapter Two, the Buddha comes out of his meditation, opens his eyes, and starts talking. What he says is so disturbing that 500 of his students leave the audience. The Lotus Sūtra was not exactly well received on Vulture Peak. The Buddha says that there aren’t three ways to nirvāṇa, as he previously taught. There is just one — the path of the bodhisattva — to the realization of Buddhahood. One does not want to put a full stop to the cycle of birth and death, and escape into nirvāṇa; rather, one wants to stay behind to lead the other suffering sentient beings to enlightenment. That’s what the bodhisattvas do. If you are an arhat (already enlightened), that is not good enough. For the last 40 years, the Buddha had been using “skillful means” to train his disciples, meaning that he had told them less than the truth. Now that his end is near he has to speak the truth.

What of the second Buddha present in the title of the book? In Chapter 11, an astoundingly large stūpa, miles in width and height, appears in the air. The Buddha rises in the air to open its door. Inside, one finds a living Buddha, Prabhūtaratna. He appears in his great stūpa wherever the Lotus Sūtra is recited. He graciously invites the Buddha to sit with him. The Buddha obliges. Lopez and Stone explain that apart from the miraculous occurrence of the stūpa, the event is significant for other reasons. Stūpas are supposed to contain relics of the Buddha after his death. To find a living Buddha inside a stūpa breaks all conventions: it means that the Buddha never dies, that he never attains parinirvāṇa. But the received tradition of earlier Buddhism was that the Buddha had attained parinirvāṇa.

Soon we learn that the Buddha not only never dies, but he has been in this realm — called the Buddha-realm — forever. In fact, he was never born. The original story of the Buddha, the one we are so used to, was a mirage, meant only to keep the disciples searching. One feels a bit deflated, no doubt, to read what Lopez and Stone describe as a “bombshell.” However, on reflection, it is also a comforting thought, as one realizes that the Buddha is still among us. The disciples have to choose whether they want the living Buddha to inspire them or the conventional story we all know. They have to choose between the Buddha’s compassion, which makes him stay in the world as a bodhisattva, and the personal nirvāṇa that he attains.

Lopez and Stone take Nichiren’s words on the Lotus Sūtra very seriously. Nichiren thought that the entire message of the Sūtra, and its secret meaning, were somehow captured in its Japanese title: Namu Myōhō-Renge-Kyō (“Homage to the Lotus Sūtra”). All one has to do is to recite this and have faith in its power. Not reciting it — neglecting it — leads to serious trouble. Nichiren thought that the earthquakes, epidemics, and the impending Mongol invasion of Japan were all due to the neglect of the Lotus Sūtra by the monks, the laity, and the authorities. Nichiren’s own life was hardly a happy one, even though he was never short of devotion to the Lotus Sūtra. He was against both Zen and Pure Land Buddhism practitioners, and he paid for his opposition: imprisoned twice, he was once nearly beheaded, and yet he interpreted everything that happened to him as having a resonance in the Lotus Sūtra. He makes the Lotus Sūtra approachable by any person, however ordinary. Remarkably for his time, he thought that females were as favored to achieve enlightenment as men.

There is not much metaphysics in the Lotus Sūtra. One would expect long discourses on dependent origination, emptiness, and the like, but such philosophical satisfaction is not to be had. However, what little it offers has been turned into something fascinating by both Zhiyi and Nichiren. The basic idea is that of “three thousand realms [being] contained in one single moment of thought.” This mysterious, formulaic utterance has its inbuilt logic. It follows from the fact that nothing has any essence — hence, all the realms are really interpenetrating and, therefore, all the realms are Buddha-realms. Divisions are illusory. To realize this is to enlighten oneself. Yet Zhiyi and Nichiren do not think that this insight can be understood conceptually.

Unabashedly fantastical as the Lotus Sūtra is, remarkable in equal measure is the reserve and insight the authors show in presenting the book. They are not overly critical — as it is easy to be with a book speaking of miraculous happenings — nor are they overly excited by the riches it offers. Lopez and Stone are well aware that the Lotus Sūtra is not the Buddha’s word — it was compiled a good four centuries after he died. They realize that the Buddha is presented here as the originator of the Lotus Sūtra because the rebellion would not have carried much justification without his involvement in it. The upheaval spread to China, Japan, and Korea.

The appeal of this book might well lie in the fact that, even if it contains little in the way of philosophy, it is riddled with absorbing stories and parables, with fascinating people and equally fascinating gods. In being so earthy in its presentation, the book transcends ordinariness. The missionary zeal with which Chinese monks would burn themselves, or parts of their bodies, while chanting the Sūtra is a mark of its influence.

The Lotus Sūtra, which is also not the Lotus Sūtra, is given a near perfect summary when the authors write that it is a “sūtra that never ends, an assembly that never disperses, and a mission that is ongoing.” The guide that Lopez and Stone have written might just add a few more admirers to that assembly.

¤

Nilanjan Bhowmick is an assistant professor at University of Delhi, Faculty of Arts, Department of Philosophy.

Libraries and Authoritarianism 1940, 2020

By Jeremy Braddock

JANUARY 28, 2020

ON HALLOWEEN 2016, former Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren tweeted, “Colleges should stop building vanity projects like huge libraries and billing students–full libraries are on our smartphones!” At the time, this statement sounded like garden-variety know-nothingism, ideological in the sense that it didn’t choose to disparage lavish athletic facilities or dining halls, but not an act of motivated Truther-ism. Because it came eight days before the 2016 presidential election, however, the tweet now feels less random. As information sources, smartphones are now recognized as primary conduits of cutting-edge propaganda, and the platforms that have best exploited the smartphone (Google, Facebook, Twitter) have by definition failed to perform libraries’ enduring role of maintaining and providing public access to reliable information.


While the former point is a constant source of mainstream journalistic intrigue, the latter — which involves libraries’ historic role in combating propaganda and supporting civic practice — is easily neglected. To examine it requires going back to another time when the United States’s ongoing status as a democracy was not foreordained — to Archibald MacLeish’s tenure as Librarian of Congress, when, in response to fascist propaganda, this mission for American libraries was most clearly shaped and articulated. It is important to do this now, as our national library system is increasingly hospitable to disinformation: in January 2020, the National Archives displayed a photograph of the 2017 Women’s March that had been digitally altered to make criticism of the president of the United States illegible.


As Librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944, MacLeish was the first person to hold the office without previous library training. Lawyer, essayist, radio playwright, and second-tier modernist poet, MacLeish was author of what would become the New Critical bromide “A poem should not mean / But be.” By the time of his appointment at the LoC, however, MacLeish openly disowned the uncommitted position staked out by the poem that contained those lines (“Ars Poetica,” first published in Poetry magazine in 1926).


Shortly after leaving the position, but before the end of World War II, MacLeish delivered a lecture titled “Libraries and the Nation” in which he reviewed some of his activities as FDR’s wartime Librarian of Congress, placing them in the context of the then finally foreseeable postwar period. “[T]he world cannot survive in freedom and safety and enlightenment,” he said, “unless librarians alter basically their conception of their responsibility for the materials in their charge.”


In the course of his lecture, MacLeish described the two major projects of his tenure at the Library. One had been to build the Library’s collections and existing resources for the purpose of antifascist national security defense. Though not exclusively items of foreign propaganda, the new acquisitions during World War II testified to the Library’s instrumentality to the development of the US security state. On the other hand, at MacLeish’s direction, the Library of Congress, in concert with regional libraries, had been charged with disseminating and promoting public information about the war in general, as well as in advocacy of democratic institutions and the liberties they guaranteed. Although, as Brett Gary argues in The Nervous Liberals, these projects at times met at cross purposes, each was centrally involved with the problem of antidemocratic propaganda in an ostensibly free society.


To put it in terms coined by the corporations governing the distribution of information today, MacLeish’s position was that if a library was to be an “organizer of the world’s knowledge” and “not be evil” (as Google styled itself, years before its autocomplete algorithm was gamed to promote right-wing hate speech), it would have to acknowledge that its social function was to be something closer to a media company than the supposedly neutral platform Mark Zuckerberg would have us believe Facebook to be. For a democratic society, this would mean emphasizing the library’s function as a repository for the most comprehensive collection of materials — thus protecting its holdings from censorship of any kind, including, implicitly, items of propaganda — while also openly embracing librarians’ expertise in actively shaping the conditions of materials’ use and reception, and in promoting that vocation as a public good. If libraries were “the people’s university,” as MacLeish had written in early 1940, it was “the duty and obligation of the university to interpret between the books and those who need them.” In 1939, MacLeish had admitted that although librarians had been excellent custodians, “[t]hey have not learned to get readers for the books.”


In “Libraries and the Nation,” MacLeish said candidly that it was “a matter of public interest, but of limited public knowledge” that key military and intelligence initiatives, including CIA predecessor the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), had been organized from within the Library of Congress. This activity would have a grave legacy in the Cold War period, but it can be inferred that MacLeish’s interest in speaking openly about it — before the war had ended — emphasized his concern that information about the OSS should become a matter of public knowledge and accountability as soon as possible. [1]


MacLeish went on to speak at greater length on the subject of “public knowledge,” which had been the principal theme of his public writings during his tenure as Librarian of Congress, asserting, “In a society as complex as ours, the great reference libraries are an essential part of the functioning mechanism of the nation’s life. Not only are they essential to scholarship, but they are essential to operations which are not ordinarily considered to be related to scholarship.” He stressed that the destruction of libraries and burning of books — as had been exemplified in Poland, Western Russia, China, and in the bombing of the East Wing of the British Museum — had explicitly been part of the program of total warfare. And he went so far as to say that what was most distinctive about the current war was that “[t]he spoils […] for which the Nazis fight are men’s minds.” In MacLeish’s view, the war had essentially been of and for public knowledge and information, and he suggested this should be seen recursively as an ominously ironic tribute to the function of libraries. He concluded his talk by announcing plans not only for the rebuilding of Eastern Europe’s libraries, but also for the invention of a system of international interlibrary loan and a universal cataloging system.


As Librarian of Congress, however, MacLeish’s public writings had, unsurprisingly, been much more directly concerned with conditions in his home country; and they were strikingly candid about what he saw as the possibility, even the likelihood, of a homegrown fascism in the United States. This was something he openly mused about as early as 1935, when he worried about the combined effects of mass unemployment and “all the forces which fascism can buy — the press, the movies, the commercial theatre,” by which he meant the organs of propaganda and disinformation (later writings would also stress the importance of radio).


He returned to these issues in his first public address as Librarian of Congress, which came on October 19, 1939, just over a month after Germany’s invasion of Poland, a week after Adolf Eichmann’s first forced deportation of German Jews to Poland, and three days after the first Nazi air attack on Great Britain. MacLeish insisted that it was now the public vocation of libraries to educate adult citizens about their rights and freedoms in a democratic society, and in the more general skills of reading and interpretation that he hoped would prove valuable in resisting fascist propaganda:


The “either,” as I see it, is the education of the people of this country. The “or” is fascism. We will either educate the people of this Republic to know, and therefore to value and therefore to preserve their own democratic culture, or we will watch the people of this Republic trade their democratic culture for the non-culture, the obscurantism, the superstition, the brutality, the tyranny which is overrunning eastern and central and southern Europe.


“[Governments] have learned,” MacLeish later wrote, “that if the citizens of a democracy are not taught the traditions of democracy they will be taught other traditions — and that they can be taught other traditions.” Teaching not only the history but the civic sensibility of republican democracy — which together are what MacLeish intends in the word “tradition” — was the most important of the “operations not ordinarily considered to be scholarship” MacLeish would reference in the “Libraries and the Nation” address in 1945. Both depended on materials for, and competencies in, reading and reference.


Insisting that the library could no longer be conceived as a neutral site in the ideological war of information, MacLeish repeatedly stressed that librarians could not be satisfied “merely by delivering books from public libraries as books are called for” — that is, with policies of what is today commonly termed “access.” They should instead become “active and not passive agents,” and even become identified with the library itself as a social institution: “They must think of their libraries as organizations of intelligent and well-trained men and women qualified to select from the record in their keeping such materials as are relevant to the decisions the people must make and able to provide those materials to the people in a useful form.” (These words were written in May 1940, after the fall of Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, and Belgium.)


Given the off-site availability of so many library resources today, MacLeish’s sentiments may seem like artifacts of a bygone age even to committed researchers. And we might also be tempted to view his emphasis on books and print nostalgically, a hallmark of what George Hutchinson, in Facing the Abyss, has recently identified as the decade of maximum participatory literacy in US history. But it would be wrong either to overlook the “intelligent well-trained men and women” working in libraries today, or to confuse MacLeish’s emphasis on books as a sign that his was a less complicated or media-saturated environment. MacLeish’s project was entirely conversant with an age of mass communications research, which he in fact assisted from within the Library of Congress, and he was especially sensitive to the fact that it was the imbrication of new media with structures of profit that made them especially susceptible to disinformation purposes. Disinformation was especially successful, MacLeish implied, because of its amenability to manipulation through advertising, and also because of the hyperactive, enervating temporality already inherent in the culture of mass communications.


Asserting that Sherman’s responsibility for the burning of Atlanta had consumed an entire generation of debate, MacLeish claimed that by contrast, the atrocities of Guernica and Badajoz had already been forgotten. The psychological tendency to forget — or become desensitized to — these events, he suggested, was produced both by their seemingly serial nature, and, counterintuitively, by the magnitude of the atrocities (a point often made of life under the Trump regime as well). The fascist practices on the ground were in this way mirrored by fascism’s discursive practices:


[Acts of intimidation and disinformation, at home and abroad] are commonplaces to such a point that they no longer shock us into anger. Indeed it is the essential character of our time that the triumph of the lie, the mutilation of culture, and the persecution of the word no longer shock us into anger.


It was because of the numbing effects of actual aggression, together with discursive confusion, that MacLeish was so strident in his affirmative defense of democratic institutions, and of libraries most of all. But within the more programmatic activity at the Library of Congress, he also oversaw more specific means of defusing fascist propaganda. Shortly after the United States entered the war in 1941, MacLeish was tasked with heading a new agency, organized out of the Library of Congress, named the Office of Facts and Figures. Normally understood as FDR’s propaganda wing — and subject to attacks from the left and right — one of Office’s publications was a 1942 booklet titled Divide and Conquer, which was designed to educate US citizens about the strategies of fascist disinformation that were now actively present in their daily lives.






















It also, notably, included a list of sources, further emphasizing the civic virtue of scholarly practices, and the central role of the library in facilitating them.


Analyzing the information economy of the war, the OFF publication quoted liberally from Hitler’s own public statements, going so far as to include as an epigraph his notorious theory of the utility of the “big lie,” which has been referenced more than once in recent months. In his recent book The Road to Unfreedom, Yale historian Timothy Snyder has argued that the overarching purpose of Russia’s television network RT — which broadcasts internationally in six languages — is less to provide specifically targeted instances of disinformation than it is to undermine the very concepts of truth and factuality. This accords directly with MacLeish’s thesis that “[t]o lie, not in the name of truth, but in the name of lies, is to destroy the common basis of communication without which a common culture cannot exist and a work of learning or of art becomes unintelligible” — a theory of gaslighting that dates to 1940. In 1942, before the OFF was abandoned and replaced by the Office of War Information (OWI), MacLeish identified Divide and Conquer as a part of the Library’s “Strategy of Truth”; in recent months, of course, Facebook and Twitter executives have each disavowed the obligation to act as “arbiters of truth.”


Recent events have also underscored the essential function of the library — and of librarians — as “active and not passive” agents in the face of the contemporary crisis, perhaps the most famous recent example being the January 2017 “DataRefuge” initiative undertaken at the University of Pennsylvania, and joined by librarians and hacktivists in many other cities including Toronto, to download and preserve climate change data housed at the Internet Archive. In the weeks after the 2016 election, the Internet Archive itself announced plans to build a complete copy of its entire holdings in Canada. Inspired by the American Library Association’s famous privacy policy — instituted in 1939, and more recently used to successfully challenge the Patriot Act in 2005 — activist librarians have turned their attention to concerns over data privacy. They have pointed up the way that for-profit academic journal publishers such as Elsevier surveil their users (even in academic libraries), exploiting harvested data in their ongoing turn away from publishing and toward data analytics. Greta Van Susteren’s false choice — smartphones or libraries — returns with a bitter irony, as both can be means of surveillance on university campuses. For its part, the Cornell University Library plans to introduce a new Privacy Services program in spring 2020.


The question of educating citizens on the insidious agencies of disinformation is one that libraries share with other institutions. A 2016 article in Salon that observed that the citizens of Finland have been notably resistant to propaganda gives reason to affirm this work: Finland has one of the strongest school systems in the world. Meanwhile, last year’s report from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reported that fewer than one in 10 15-year-old children, worldwide, were able to distinguish between fact and opinion in standardized reading tests. Teens in the United States were successful 13.5 percent of the time. Unfortunately, it is not hard to imagine that report’s warm reception in the corporate boardroom of Van Susteren’s former employers.


¤


Jeremy Braddock is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University, where he is co-chair of the University Faculty Library Board, chair of the Media Studies Initiative, and a Milstein Fellow in Technology and Humanity. He is the author of Collecting as Modernist Practice, which was awarded the Modernist Studies Association book prize in 2013.


¤


[1] Gary’s The Nervous Liberals provides an excellent account of the dilemmas that propaganda intelligence research itself posed for a liberal democracy, and of MacLeish’s extraordinary sensitivity to the problem. It is in this context that Gary also examines the origins of Harold Lasswell’s communications research, housed during the war in LoC. A concise analysis of the cold war legacy of Lasswell’s work can be found in Christopher Simpson’s Science of Coercion.

Away in a Manager: On Michael Lind’s “The New Class War”

Away in a Manager: On Michael Lind’s “The New Class War”

By Gregor Baszak JANUARY 28, 2020


The New Class War

Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite

 

By Michael Lind

 

Published 01.20.202

Portfolio
224 Pages

 
A FEW DAYS AFTER Donald Trump’s electoral upset in 2016, Club for Growth co-founder Stephen Moore told an audience of Republican House members that the GOP was “now officially a Trump working class party.” No longer the party of traditional Reaganite conservatism, the GOP had been converted instead “into a populist America First party.” As he uttered these words, Moore says, “the shock was palpable” in the room.

The Club for Growth had long dominated Republican orthodoxy by promoting low tax rates and limited government. Any conservative candidate for political office wanting to reap the benefits of the Club’s massive fundraising arm had to pay homage to this doctrine. For one of its formerly leading voices to pronounce the transformation of this orthodoxy toward a more populist nationalism showed just how much the ground had shifted on election night.

To writer Michael Lind, Trump’s victory, along with Brexit and other populist stirrings in Europe, was an outright declaration of “class war” by alienated working-class voters against what he calls a “university-credentialed overclass” of managerial elites. The title of Lind’s new book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, leaves no doubt as to where his sympathies lie, though he’s adamant that he’s not some sort of guru for a “smarter Trumpism,” as some have labeled him.

Lind cautions against a turn to populism, which he believes to be too personality-centered and intellectually incoherent — not to mention, too demagogic — to help solve the terminal crisis of “technocratic neoliberalism” with its rule by self-righteous and democratically unaccountable “experts” with hyperactive Twitter handles. Only a return to what Lind calls “democratic pluralism” will help stem the tide of the populist revolt.

The New Class War is a breath of fresh air. Many on the left have been incapable of coming to terms with Hillary Clinton’s defeat. The result has been the stifling climate of a neo-McCarthyism, in which the only explanation for Trump’s success was an unholy alliance of “Putin stooges” and unrepentant “white supremacists.” To Lind, the case is much more straightforward: while the vast majority of Americans supports Social Security spending and containing unskilled immigration, the elites of the bipartisan swamp favor libertarian free trade policies combined with the steady influx of unskilled migrants to help suppress wage levels in the United States. Trump had outflanked his opponents in the Republican primaries and Clinton in the general election by tacking left on the economy (he refused to lay hands on Social Security) and right on immigration.

The strategy has since been successfully repeated in the United Kingdom by Boris Johnson, and it looks, for now, like a foolproof way for conservative parties in the West to capture or defend their majorities against center-left parties that are too beholden to wealthy, metropolitan interests to seriously attract working-class support. Berating the latter as irredeemably racist certainly doesn’t help either.

What happened in the preceding decades to produce this divide in Western democracies? Lind’s narrative begins with the New Deal, which had brought to an end what he calls “the first class war” in favor of a class compromise between management and labor. This first class war is the one we are the most familiar with: originating in the Industrial Revolution, which had produced the wretchedly poor proletariat, it soon led to the rise of competing parties of organized workers on the one hand and the liberal bourgeoisie on the other, a clash that came to a head in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Then, in the 1930s, while the world was writhing from the consequences of the Great Depression, a series of fascist parties took the reigns in countries from Germany to Spain. To spare the United States a similar descent into barbarism, President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, in which the working class would find a seat at the bargaining table under a government-supervised tripartite system where business and organized labor met seemingly as equals and in which collective bargaining would help the working class set sector-wide wages.

This class compromise ruled unquestioned for the first decades of the postwar era. It was made possible thanks to the system of democratic pluralism, which allowed working-class and rural constituencies to actively partake in mass-membership organizations like unions as well as civic and religious institutions that would empower these communities to shape society from the ground up.

But then, amid the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a “neoliberal revolution from above” set in that sought to reverse the class compromise. The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the newly emboldened managerial class was “global labor arbitrage” in which production is outsourced to countries with lower wage levels and laxer regulations; alternatively, profits can be maximized by putting downward pressure on domestic wages through the introduction of an unskilled, non-unionized immigrant workforce that competes for jobs with its unionized domestic counterparts. By one-sidedly canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist societies after World War II, Lind concludes, the managerial elite had brought the recent populist backlash on itself.

Likewise, only it can contain this backlash by returning to the bargaining table and reestablishing the tripartite system it had walked away from. According to Lind, the new class peace can only come about on the level of the individual nation-state because transnational treaty organizations like the EU cannot allow the various national working classes to escape the curse of labor arbitrage. This will mean that unskilled immigration will necessarily have to be curbed to strengthen the bargaining power of domestic workers. The free-market orthodoxy of the Club for Growth will also have to take a backseat, to be replaced by government-promoted industrial strategies that invest in innovation to help modernize their national economies.

Under which circumstances would the managerial elites ever return to the bargaining table? “The answer is fear,” Lind suggests — fear of working-class resentment of hyper-woke, authoritarian elites. Ironically, this leaves all the agency with the ruling class, who first acceded to the class compromise, then canceled it, and is now called on to forge a new one lest its underlings revolt.
Lind rightly complains all throughout the book that the old mass-membership based organizations of the 20th century have collapsed. He’s coy, however, about who would reconstitute them and how. At best, Lind argues for a return to the old system where party bosses and ward captains served their local constituencies through patronage, but once more this leaves the agency with entities like the Republicans and Democrats who have a combined zero members. As the third-party activist Howie Hawkins remarked cunningly elsewhere,

American parties are not organized parties built around active members and policy platforms; they are shifting coalitions of entrepreneurial candidate campaign organizations. Hence, the Democratic and Republican Parties are not only capitalist ideologically; they are capitalistically run enterprises.

Thus, they would hardly be the first options one would think of to reinvigorate the forces of civil society toward self-rule from the bottom up.

The key to Lind’s fraught logic lies hidden in plain sight — in the book’s title. Lind does not speak of “class struggle,” the heroic Marxist narrative in which an organized proletariat strove for global power; no, “class war” smacks of a gloomy, Hobbesian war of all against all in which no side truly stands to win.

In the epigraph to the book, Lind cites approvingly the 1949 treatise The Vital Center by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who wrote that “class conflict, pursued to excess, may well destroy the underlying fabric of common principle which sustains free society.” Schlesinger was just one among many voices who believed that Western societies after World War II were experiencing the “end of ideology.” From now on, the reasoning went, the ideological battles of yesteryear were settled in favor of a more disinterested capitalist (albeit New Deal–inflected) governance. This, in turn, gave rise to the managerial forces in government, the military, and business whose unchecked hold on power Lind laments. The midcentury social-democratic thinker Michael Harrington had it right when he wrote that “[t]he end of ideology is a shorthand way of saying the end of socialism.”

Looked at from this perspective, the break between the postwar Fordist regime and technocratic neoliberalism isn’t as massive as one would suppose. The overclass antagonists of The New Class War believe that they derive their power from the same “liberal order” of the first-class peace that Lind upholds as a positive utopia. A cursory glance at the recent impeachment hearings bears witness to this, as career bureaucrats complained that President Trump unjustifiably sought to change the course of an American foreign policy that had been nobly steered by them since the onset of the Cold War. In their eyes, Trump, like the Brexiteers or the French yellow vest protesters, are vulgar usurpers who threaten the stability of the vital center from polar extremes.

A more honest account of capitalism would also acknowledge its natural tendencies to persistently contract and to disrupt the social fabric. There is thus no reason to believe why some future class compromise would once and for all quell these tendencies — and why nationalistically operating capitalist states would not be inclined to confront each other again in war.

¤

Gregor Baszak is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His Twitter handle is @gregorbas1.


https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/away-in-a-manager-on-michael-linds-the-new-class-war/

Before “American Dirt,” There Was “The Korean Angela’s Ashes”

Before “American Dirt,” There Was “The Korean Angela’s Ashes”

By Marie Myung-Ok Lee

FEBRUARY 5, 2020


THE CONTRETEMPS OVER Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt revolves around a narrative of a publishing industry eager for blockbusters, white authors who inhabit the stories of marginalized people, and embarrassment when the multiple flaws and tone-deaf passages of the hyped-up book are exposed.

Amnesia about such fiascos is also common, which is why it is important to revisit an all-but-forgotten story about a would-be blockbuster from 20 years ago that had been billed as the “Korean Angela’s Ashes” — before it self-destructed. I was exposed involuntarily to the machinery that creates these publisher-to-Oprah pipeline books, because my own novel was likely sucked into the manufacturing of Ten Thousand Sorrows, a book that was unmasked to be so egregiously fake that the publisher quietly stopped publishing it in the United States (heavily revised paperback editions appeared in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand).

A woman calling herself “Elizabeth Kim” wrote this book at the behest of an agent she met at a Marin County dinner party for vegetarians. Even though she’d been a very young child when she was adopted by a white American couple, Kim managed to construct a memoir of a Korean childhood. The finished product, Ten Thousand Sorrows, blazed onto the literary scene in the premiere issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, with a big blurb from Arthur Golden, the author of Memoirs of a Geisha, and received a half-million-dollar advance. Then it all began to unravel.

There was no doubt that the author was Korean-born and adopted by a white family. But everything else about the story was taken on trust. In one particularly unbelievable scene, she wrote of watching her mother murdered by her evil grandfather and uncle in — according to the press release — an “honor killing” for having a mixed-race honhyul child. Kim recounts excruciating details of her grandfather stringing her mother up on a roofbeam of their humble Korean hut. “All I could see through the bamboo slats were her bare feet, dangling in midair,” she writes. “I watched those milk-white feet twitch.” After this horror, these same male relatives burn her private parts as she’s pinned down on her mother’s Buddhist altar. Not for nothing did a review in the San Francisco Chronicle call it “so thick with grief and violence that at moments, it’s almost unbearable to read.”

But readers with even rudimentary knowledge of Korean society also found it unbearable to read — because they could tell the book was full of fabrications. First, Korean houses, especially “huts,” don’t feature roofbeams you could hang someone from. Second, there’s not even a word for “honor killing,” something the author describes as “disturbingly common” in Korean culture. Third, her traumatic memories of being called honhyul — mixed blood — are extremely strange; this is a formal, almost clinical term, not at all pejorative. Much of her book centers on this poorly chosen word, which she claims she can never forget having heard almost every day while growing up in Korea.

Here is where I may have unwillingly entered the picture. I had used this word myself, erroneously, in my own unpublished novel about a Korean adoptee, Somebody’s Daughter, which my agent had submitted to Doubleday, to Kim’s editor, where Kim may also have worked as a freelance reader. When Kim’s book came out, bearing many similarities to my manuscript, including the odd word honhyul, I had to rub my eyes. This mistake was my own; I’m a child of Korean immigrants, and my parents were afraid of us kids picking up accents, so I only learned the language formally, at a Korean university as a Fulbright scholar on a research grant, and my guess at the word “mongrel” turned out to be quite amusing to my manuscript’s more informed readers — the equivalent of calling someone “biracial” as a slur. When others who had also seen my work-in-progress encouraged me to speak out, I wrote letters, including to O, not seeking compensation but merely protection of my personal intellectual property. But the editors refused to speak to me.

Korean studies professor Brian Myers, meanwhile, noticed that much of Ten Thousand Sorrows just didn’t add up, and he compiled a list with dozens of inaccuracies that he said he sent to the publisher. Book industry writer Hillel Italie at the AP wrote a piece called “Book Criticized for Factual Errors,” which rounded up these and others’ objections. Even the title, said by Kim to have been taken from a Buddhist proverb her mother loved — “Life was made up of ten thousand sorrows and ten thousand joys” — came under scrutiny, because, while this expression might appear in a Marin vegetarian-potluck as a westernized Zen catchphrase, it’s not Korean. Choe Sang-hun, the co-author of How Koreans Talk: A Collection of Expressions, told me via email: “I don’t recall any proverb that contains 10,000 sorrows.” Ten thousand also colloquially indicates “a lot” — our American “millions.” Seoul-based journalist Charse Yun, who’d written an article on the debacle for KoreAm Magazine, told me that he remembers it as “explicitly Orientalist and immediately problematic. There’s no way she could have ‘known’ these ethnographic tidbits and ‘facts’ sprinkled in as a young child, but she makes it sound like she’s an anthropologist explaining Korean culture to the non-Korean reader.” Further, similar to accusations leveled against American Dirt, “The book caters to a reading audience that probably likes and or wants to read such distorted, two-dimensional depictions of other cultures, masking the sense of their society’s assumed superiority. Such a book just aims to cash in on reinforcing stereotypes.”

Having my work possibly lifted, and having the well poisoned for my novel, was a bitter pill — after holding on to my work for months, Doubleday rejected it. However, I thought my problems were smoothed over when I received an offer for a two-book deal with another big publisher. This was on a Friday. On Monday, the offer was mysteriously rescinded, and no one told me why. I suspected it was because somebody was worried that my own work tracked too closely to the now-suspect Ten Thousand Sorrows.

My only real recourse was to do nothing. My agent agreed that squawking by a yet-unpublished author would be unproductive and that I just had to bury this novel in a drawer. Years later, however, an editor who remembered the book called my agent to ask why she couldn’t find it on Amazon. This editor was then able to buy my manuscript for the price of a used Toyota Corolla. My agent advised against it, finding the cheapness insulting, but I felt by then (five years after Sorrows was published) that it was time, and I am grateful my novel had this unexpected chance to see the light of day. Somebody’s Daughter — after being edited to make it less like Ten Thousand Sorrows — was published with Beacon Press’s Bluestreak imprint, devoted to fiction by women of color.

By then, the clarion call over the inauthenticity of a majority of the details in Ten Thousand Sorrows coalesced around the primary one: the “honor killing.” Charse Yun reported Doubleday’s statement, an astonishing walk-back: “We do now believe that there are not sufficient studies for Ms. Kim and Doubleday to have stated as an established fact that there is a tradition of honor killing in Korea.”

Defenders of appropriative literature often wonder why people claim to be “hurt” by mere words on the page. But consider that Doubleday three years later published James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, i.e., “the War and Peace of addiction,” according to the blurb by Pat Conroy. When it also became an Oprah pick, increased sales also meant increased scrutiny, and an investigation by The Smoking Gun revealed this memoir was also a pile of fake details — so fake that aggrieved readers took to the courts and forced Doubleday to address damages in an unprecedented move: offering refunds to readers who could prove they bought the book believing it was a memoir.

Compare this with the damage to Korean and Korean-American communities by the people who hyped Kim’s Orientalist narrative as a “true” story, in which Asian men come across as misogynist honor-killing fiends, where a barbaric Confucian culture leads to the murder of a sweet mother who just wanted to do right by her child, who toils alongside her in the rice paddies — in a season when rice is not grown in Korea. There is no evidence that Kim even remembers her actual birth mother, or her situation. As she says in her epigraph to the memoir, “There is no record of my mother’s brief life.” Translator and professor Heinz Insu Fenkl, who also wrote an autobiographical novel about growing up as a biracial child in Korea, told KoreAm that the book “comes across more as a fictional pastiche of a range of works than something actually recalled from experience.” What was sold to readers was witness; what they unknowingly consumed was fantasy — including my mistake of honhyul, which Ji-Yeon Yuh, a professor of Asian diaspora history at Northwestern, confirms “most certainly would not have been used in casual circulation in Korean rural farming villages of the 1950s” (KoreAm interview).

I still do not view Elizabeth Kim or Jeanine Cummins individually as bad actors. The Oprah train to fame and fortune pulls up, and they accept a ride: who can be blamed for that? This is also a gendered issue. In an NPR interview with journalist Maria Hinojosa on Latino USA, Cummins suggested she was so traumatized by the uproar that she was considering stopping writing. Frey, in contrast, has hardly slunk away; he’s the CEO of — fittingly — a writing factory that produces young adult novels, one of which was made into a feature film by DreamWorks. And, as a born-again novelist, Frey became a best seller.

But the Ten Thousand Sorrows fadeout and lack of paperback release was not the big news its publication had been; Doubleday did everything to avoid drawing attention to this debacle. A former editor at O at the time of Sorrows’s appearance was shocked to hear the book had had these problems at all. She told me that memoirs at the time were taken at face value, and that Ten Thousand Sorrows perfectly fit the magazine’s needs as a “woman’s story with a compelling narrative.”

But if the compelling stories are fake or inaccurate, we can’t say they are just whimsy or honest mistakes. The major audiences for American Dirt and Ten Thousand Sorrows are white women who are reading about brutalities (a child being crushed by a garbage truck in Cummins’s novel, rape and more rape in both works). They believe in the act of reading that they are learning about another culture, developing empathy and doing “something” about the border crisis or about Korean adoptions. But the opposite is happening. They are imbibing erroneous stereotypes about the people Cummins and Kim ironically state they are trying to “humanize.”

What the defenders of these books also often miss is that a six- or seven-figure advance to a writer who writes an inaccurate book about the border or Korea could also fund, say, 40 more accurate and knowledgeable writers at $25,000 each.

But I studied economics long enough to know this isn’t going to happen. “Money creates taste,” as the artist Jenny Holzer has said, and the forces that created American Dirt and its barbed-wire launch-party centerpieces are going to gravitate to a future work just like it. Narratives for middle-class white readers pay off big, and there’s nothing wrong with that, except writers of color are already often at too much of an economic disadvantage to access the structures that provide these million-dollar advances with the accompanying huge publicity budgets.

So what can be done to serve engaged white readers who want the “real” but can’t tell the difference?

The American Dirt case differs from Ten Thousand Sorrows because fiction has — and should have — a wider artistic license. I would not suggest the book should be “cancelled,” as Sorrows was, but I have a modest proposal: truth in labeling. Taking cues from the food industry, we should recognize that books that center on a general theme of injustice and race can fall into one of two metaphorical types: GMO and Organic.

Organics, like Mexican-American author Luis Alberto Urrea’s Across the Wire and By the Lake of Sleeping Children, are renderings of lived experience at the border (and apparently, Cummins has “sampled” vivid scenes from these books). The category of Organics would also cover novels that have an underlying social justice theme, that bear witness, that spur readers to action, and that, importantly, show awareness of their author’s position. Good storytellers of any ethnicity can bring forgotten and marginalized communities vividly to life. John Steinbeck lived and worked in the communities he chronicled, and his work shows it. Who can forget the beginning to The Grapes of Wrath, with the starving family watching food being destroyed?

Cummins’s and Kim’s work, on the other hand, exemplifies the genetically modified organism — that is to say, synthetic amalgamations of various pieces of existing literature. Cummins admits as much, in her author’s note. She takes a story line of “saintly mother in the Mexican border crisis” and fills out its DNA helix by splicing in others’ work as Kim might have done with mine. Similarly, it was the addiction community that first supported and then was disappointed by Frey’s work. These books are created and pushed for entertainment purposes, and it’s disingenuous to suggest otherwise, as was done with Cummins.

Having a bookstore “border wall” between Organic and GMO would allow consumers to purchase an entertaining, escapist book without the illusions that it was anything but an alternate universe. Esmeralda Bermudez, a writer for the Los Angeles Times who has been critical of the American Dirt for its inaccuracies, told NPR that it could indeed be “cheap entertainment, like a narco-thriller on Netflix.”

One of the most popular TV shows in South Korea right now is Crash Landing on You, a romance/thriller about a paraglider who accidentally gets blown into North Korea. Having been to North Korea myself, I was impressed with how accurate some of the details were. But at the same time, a scene of the two principals kissing at the Military Demarcation Line is the kind of goofy license allowed, even expected, in these kinds of “K-dramas.” Knowing the genre, no one would object that, in real life, the characters would immediately be shot or blown up by mines.

Being publicly shamed and having her book out of print did not seem to hurt the career of Elizabeth Kim. She is a member of a speakers’ bureau where Ten Thousand Sorrows is now “a novel,” and an edition appeared in Korea, where its Korean translation tellingly eliminates the faux proverb; now, perhaps karmically echoing A Million Little Pieces, its decidedly un-Buddhist title is Ten Thousand Kinds of Sadness.

¤

Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s next novel, The Evening Hero, is forthcoming with Simon & Schuster. She teaches at Columbia, where she is Writer in Residence at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.