No Reconciliation. No Empathy. No Kindness.
I've been seeing a lot of calls for people on the left (defined very broadly as "everyone who opposed Trump") to have empathy for Trump voters. To listen and respond to their concerns. To reach out to the Trump voters they know and try to change their minds with gentle persuasion and calm talks. That, I'm being told everywhere, is the work in front of us, what we need to do.

And it's been enraging me.

It's taken me a while to figure out why it's been enraging me. I've run through various reasons, but I think I've finally figured it out. Here are a few of the reasons, including the one that I think is the real issue for me. I know it's real because thinking and writing about it is making me shake and feel sick.

1) It renders me unable to help. I don't have family that voted Trump. I've had debates with many of my family members over various issues, including race and racism, but that "racist uncle" so many white people seem to have whose jokes they let slide for the sake of family peace? I don't have one. I'm thrilled about that, by the way. Even the most conservative member of my family voted against Trump. I can think of one who may have voted third-party or write-in, but he did so in NYC, so it's not like he threw the election. From what I've read, Jews in general went 70%-30% for Hillary, similar to Latino communities.

2) I didn't think it worked, from the evidence of my own experience. Turns out I'm wrong about this. OK. That happens.

3) It continues to put Trump voters in the spotlight, in the front and center of everybody's mind. Remember before the election, how tired we all were of thinkpieces and essays detailing the fears, the worries, the values of Trump voters? How we all kept asking why nobody was writing articles about Hillary supporters like that? This is just more of the same. More centering of white people and their concerns. More taking black voters for granted.

4) Hillary didn't lose because she didn't appeal to Trump voters. Hillary lost because the VRA was gutted. And the VRA was gutted because we didn't have the Supreme Court. There were over 800 fewer polling places this election. There were voter ID laws. There was voter intimidation and misinformation. There were people—usually black people—turned away at the polls for bullshit reasons. We on the left—particularly we white people on the left—have a duty not to abandon those whose votes were suppressed, part of a long US tradition of refusing suffrage to black people. Those are our people, our comrades-in-arms. Restoring their rights should be our priority, not yet more coddling of voters ready to line up behind a fascist.

All those are true (except #2, I'm wrong about that). But that's not why I simply cannot bring myself to "reach out" to those motherfuckers who voted for Trump. Here's why:

I'm a Jew.

I'm a Jew, and Trump ran an anti-Semitic campaign. He used anti-Semitic ads. He wouldn't disavow David Duke. He's been endorsed by the KKK and neo-Nazis across the country. Anti-Semites are his advisers and on his transition team. Since he's been elected, swastika and "Sieg Heil" graffiti have appeared on storefronts in Philly, in middle and high schools. The KKK is holding a victory march in North Carolina. Neo-nazi threads on Reddit have been celebrating.

It's no secret what the swastika stands for. It's no secret how white supremacists feel about Jews.

If you voted for Trump, you gave aid, comfort, and support to those people. You threw in your lot with people who want me dead. Who want my 17-month-old son dead. Who want my best friend dead. Who want her small children dead. Who want my parents dead. Who want my grandfather, my cousins, my aunts, my uncles, my cousin's two daughters dead dead dead dead DEAD.

Are you getting the picture yet? Are you getting the message that you sent to me if you voted for Trump?

So I don't give a flying fuck whether you held your nose or felt reluctant when you voted for Trump or wept as you walked from the polling place after endorsing the candidate of people who want me and many of the people I love dead. I don't give a fuck about your worries. I don't give a fuck about your fears. I don't give a fuck about your financial situation (bullshit argument anyway; people making under 50K a year broke for Hillary in the end). I don't give a fuck about your soul or your psyche or your future.

You support people who want me and the people I love dead.

There is no compromise possible here. What is the compromise with people who are OK with killing me and my family? That you'll only let half of us die?

No unifying. No empathy. No calm and patient talks. No kindness. No compromise. No reconciliation. No common ground. No reaching out. No more chances. Not from me.

Trump voters supported and continue to lend cover to people who want the children I love dead. This is not an exaggeration. This is exactly what white supremacists did to Jews when they were in power in Germany. Every time I think about swastikas appearing on walls in this country and I think about the children I love my heart starts pounding. Fuck them for doing this to me.

If you can reach out and practice the art of gentle persuasion on Trump voters, good luck and Godspeed. I support you and what you are doing 100%. You are doing needed work.

I'll focus my efforts elsewhere. On looking into doing volunteer work for the immigrants' center down the block from me. On contributing to the Southern Poverty Law Center. On lobbying to restore VRA.

I have nothing for Trump voters but bile and vitriol. They scorched the earth with their vote. They can go to hell.

I'm keeping a tight rein on this post; if you're not someone I've friended, your comment will be screened. Unless it's a racist or anti-Semitic screed, I'll unscreen it when I can.

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Anti-Semitism, July 2016
Well, yesterday was a day, wasn't it?

First Trump tweeted his impressively anti-Semitic anti-Hillary ad: a star of David calling her "corrupt" on a background of dollars. Here it is. After criticism, he pasted a circle over the star...poorly. CNN's newest employee has called objections to this ad "political correctness run amok."

As an aside, I always wonder what the right wing imagines the appropriate response to something like this to be, or, on the other hand, what form racism has to take for them to find it unacceptable and worthy of outcry. I've been alive long enough to know that they didn't have a problem with apartheid South Africa, so I suspect it's a pretty high bar.

Then Elie Wiesel died, a Holocaust survivor and human rights advocate. And a group I've admired for a little while, Media Diversified, a British-based group that advocates for PoC in journalism and other media (they've done amazing work publicizing UN Peacekeeper abuse of girls and women in African countries, for instance), found it in their heart to make only one comment, a retweet. This one.

So that's it. A lifetime of human rights advocacy, the endurance and survival of horrific suffering, literary work and memoir that helps ensure memory of truth, and none of that matters, because it's all erased by his Zionism. No acknowledgment of his speaking up against apartheid in South Africa, the Dirty War in Argentina, the genocides in Darfur and Yugoslavia, and on and on. Because it's so monstrous that a man who survived the Holocaust but lost his parents and little sister would prioritize supporting a nation-state that claims to offer safe haven to Jews that it eclipses every other single thing he has done or said. Is that what Jews get when it comes to solidarity?

Media Diversified could have played this any number of ways. They could have said nothing. That's always an option. They could have decided, hey, given his life, Wiesel is worth the effort of a string of four or five tweets and honored his achievements and work, put his inability to advocate for Palestinians in context of his life, suggest that offers us insight into what motivates Zionists in general, and that we take this is a lesson that no matter how great we may be, we all have weaknesses, blind spots, failures of empathy and acuity that can hurt others. But they didn't. They just retweeted a snarky comment implying that none of his other work matters.

Which is funny, because on the day Ali died, I don't recall them making a tweet castigating him for supporting Reagan, and suggesting that reactionary move undermines all his other revolutionary actions and words.

Given this lack of solidarity and Trump's tweet, and the anti-Semitic venom it's unleashed, I'm feeling a bit pissy about anyone criticizing Jews for being Zionists, for that matter (I do not consider myself a Zionist). Because if these assholes come to power, and they turn to anti-Semitic violence, and I have to take my son and run, is there some other country that's going to take us in? If not, think twice before dismissing Jewish Zionism, or suggesting that I should prioritize political righteousness over that.

My mother once said that if her family hadn't emigrated, and by some fluke she'd been born in Eastern Europe, she wouldn't have been a Zionist, advocating for a separatist Jewish state. She would have been a Bundist, advocating for revolution and change right where she was. And, she pointed out, odds are she would have been killed by the Nazis. Political righteousness is cold comfort when it comes to that sort of thing.

Israel does terrible, terrible things to Palestinians, and I am disgusted by that. But guess what country I live in? I live in the US, and its record--and current behavior toward--the native peoples of North America are hardly more admirable. Add to that the state-sponsored murder of black people, the lead-poisoned water in Flint...I'm not sure Israel really stands out for depravity.

So when a left-leaning group uses Israel as an excuse to devalue a Jewish man's worth, I'll remember that lack of solidarity. And yeah, I consider it anti-Semitism. Not because Israel and Zionism are above criticism or even attack. But because for that to be the only thing that matters is holding Jews to an inhuman standard, and to do so ignores the very real history of persecution Jews have faced.

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Being Jewish
I was reading a great piece about queer YA lit the other day about intersectionality, and the multiple ways that characters and people can embody differences from the normative “white, cisgender, heterosexual, abled, Christian (or similar morality structure) and more often than not, male.” While I really like this piece, I was brought up short by “or similar morality structure”—I couldn’t help read it as a reference to Jewishness: we’re different, but not quite different enough to count. I blame the right-wing use of “Judeo-Christian,” to be honest, but more on that later. I want to emphasize that I have no idea if Tristina Wright meant it that way—she may have meant something entirely different, and the anger in this essay is not meant to be directed at her. It is directed at what feels to me like an attempt in the US to erase the historical differences between Christians and Jews, an erasure being committed in order to exonerate Christians of their history of violent anti-semitism while demonizing Islam.

I’m an Ashkenazi Jew, meaning that my ancestors came from the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. That’s probably the most common, most assimilated kind of Jew in the United States. I’m an atheist and I’m non-practicing, so what I say about my experience is not going to be the same for Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews like many of the students I teach, or any Sephardic Jews, to say nothing of Beta Israel, Bene Israel, or other Jews of color. (For a really good discussion about representation of Jews, including Jews of color, in children’s literature, please see this piece on Reading While White, a dialogue between Hannah Gomez and Allie Jane Bruce. As you can see from the comments, I am less sanguine about the representation of Ashkenazi Jews than they are, but those differences are, in my opinion, relatively minor—I am certainly strongly in favor of recognizing, respecting, and representing non-Ashkenazi Jews.) Nonetheless, my history, my culture, my way of thinking, and yeah, my morality structure is different from Christianity’s.

It took me a long time to realize this, partially because I am very assimilated, but partially because I’ve lived almost my entire life in New York City, where being Jewish, at least if you’re Ashkenazi and white, is as normalized as it is possible to be. The public schools close for Jewish holidays, for instance, and Ashkenazi culture has become so intertwined with New York City’s culture as to be in some places interchangeable. So even though I’m phenotypically very obviously Jewish, at least if you know what you’re looking at (thick dark curly hair, big crooked nose, thick dark eyebrows—flat feet, too, and apparently that’s a Jewish stereotype, who knew?), I’ve never felt singled out for being Jewish; if anything, I’ve felt, on occasion, not Jewish enough, because my family is non-observant. But those differences are there.

I guess I’ll begin by talking about basic word associations. I used to be a regular commenter on Feministe, and at one point, Jill Filipovic, the major blogger there at the time, wrote that she was grateful for her “church,” and one of the things she meant by that was feminist community. For her, using the word “church” was shorthand that denoted community, morality, support, compassion, and love. That’s not what the word “church” means to me. My immediate reactions to the word “church” are suspicion, fear, anxiety, mistrust. My immediate associations with it, with “Christ,” and “Christianity” are murderous hatred, anti-semitism, violence, ignorance. When I hear talk of “Christ’s love” I look around for escape routes. When I hear about “Christianity,” I don’t think “religion of love” or “peace” or “mercy.” I think “pogrom,” “mob violence,” “hatred.” It would never occur to me to use “church” to indicate something positive, and when Jill did, I had to think hard past my initial reactions to understand what she meant. Because not only do I think of churches negatively, but I don’t think of them as places of inclusion, where I am welcome. And no, you can’t just substitute “synagogue,” partially because of my vexed relationship with the religious practice of Judaism, but also because “synagogue” is about a specifically Jewish identity. The idea that you can use your place of worship as a synonym for an inclusive community comes from a place of privilege, of cultural dominance.

Yes, I have Christian friends. I have a friend getting her M.Div. right now, and I deeply respect her practice, just as I respect the role the black church has played in black freedom struggles, just as I respect liberation theology. In my general web of definitions and associations, though, these are golden needles in a generally murderous haystack. They are exceptions that don’t change my immediate feelings, or the history of Christianity toward people like me.

My first serious boyfriend was not Jewish. Once, over dinner, he mentioned my bisexuality to my grandfather, and I kicked him hard under the table. Afterwards I asked him “what the fuck were you thinking?” “I don’t know!” he answered. “We were making jokes about Christ and about gospel! I figured he wouldn’t care!” “We’re Jewish,” I pointed out. “Making jokes about Christian belief is not about being irreverent. It’s about being persecuted, marginalized.” A year later, that boyfriend lied in front of my face about my identity to his own grandfather. “Veronica’s family is of many different faiths,” he said. “So she’s still making up her mind.” Bullshit. My family is a bunch of Ashkenazi Jewish atheists for three generations. There’s no confusion at all. When I took him aside for a knock-down drag-out fight about this he said “You don’t understand! We don’t tell my grandfather anything that might upset him! We never told him when my cousin Bruce went into rehab!”

“I know you didn’t just compare my being Jewish to your cousin’s cocaine addiction,” I said. “So we’re just going to pretend that you didn’t say that.”

“My grandfather’s an old man! He shouldn’t have to worry about whether his grandchildren will be confirmed or [called to Torah]!” (He didn’t know what the correct phrase was, so there was a pointless digression here in the actual conversation.)

“Worried?” I said. “Worried? He should be so lucky.”

Sometime that same year, some scumbag shot up a Jewish daycare center. That, of course, is bad enough, but then I heard callers on talk radio saying things like well, I don’t support what he did, of course, but Jews have been parasites bringing down every civilization they’ve been a part of, so you can understand why blah blah blah…

It’s not really about personal prejudice. It’s about history. It’s about knowing that people like me have been murdered all over Europe for hundreds and hundreds of years by God-fearing mainstream Christians. “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat,” that’s the joke about Jewish holidays. But it’s not wrong. They tried to kill us. By definition, those of us here are the ones they didn’t get. But they didn’t fail, either, did they? How many of us have died?

For me, this influences the way I see the world and my responsibilities in it. I try and often fail to walk in the tradition of Jewish radicalism, of Emma Goldman and Mickey Schwerner and even my grandfather, who lost a job over his participation in CORE’s sit-ins and my parents, who met in SDS in Ann Arbor back in the day. And I try to do this not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because I am part of a people that know what it is to be on the wrong side of a pogrom. That know what it is to be the target of state-sponsored hatred and violence and exploitation. That means, as far as I am concerned, that I carry a special burden, the burden of their memory, the charge not to betray what they suffered and knew, and therefore to be on the side of those suffering and targeted today. This means I was open with my grandparents about my support for gay rights, even if I didn’t feel like discussing my own bisexuality with my grandfather—and as a result, one of my paternal grandparents’ best friends complimented my passion for justice, because whatever his own prejudices may have been, he could recognize what was happening. This means that when recognition and respect for trans women became an issue in my college’s Women’s and Gender Studies program a couple of years before I had tenure, I was outspoken and confrontational about advocating for trans women anyway, because my ancestors had never converted, even in the face of pogroms, and Andrew Goodman had gone down to Mississippi and died, and I wasn’t going to be scared into silence merely by a concern about tenure. I owed it to my people, and because of my Jewishness, “my people” here means Jews, it means Jewish radicals, and it means all oppressed and persecuted peoples.

It means that I’m not a patriot, because sure, I feel lucky that my great-grandparents ended up here rather than staying in Eastern Europe, where they would have been slaughtered, but I know that the US enacted immigration laws in the 1920s specifically to keep people like me out, to strand us in Eastern Europe, and then, twenty years later, when we were being slaughtered again, turned back boatloads of us to die. Am I supposed to feel grateful to that country? Proud of it? To say nothing of what it has done to American Indians, to African-Americans.

It means that I can’t support Israel, because it looks like an apartheid state to me, and of all peoples, we owe it to our ancestors to know better. But it means I can’t reject Israel, because 70 years ago, my people—and here I mean Jews—were being slaughtered all over Europe and nobody took us in. Am I just supposed to trust gentile countries that it won’t happen again? And it means that when I see those same countries turning their backs as refugees from Syria and Iran beg them to save their children, I see the parallels even if the leaders of those countries want to deny them.

It means that when I read about Muslims hearing about the Orlando massacre and praying the shooter wasn’t a Muslim, or when I hear about Trump’s brownshirt wannabes letting anti-Semitic vitriol loose on the internet, or hear him talk about keeping Muslims out, I recognize fascism and its effects when I see it.

This is me. Plenty of Jews feel differently, have different politics, even to the point of being reactionaries. The point isn’t that all Jews are radical leftists. The point is that the history and awareness of our identities of Jews impacts the way we see the world; the way we see politics is influenced in every conceivable way by being Jewish. It makes me radical. It may make somebody else liberal, somebody else conservative, somebody else reactionary. But it is all filtered through awareness of what it means to be Jewish.

I have a friend whose brother used to be in a white-supremacist gang, and who told him sure, we don’t like the blacks, but it’s the Jews we really loathe.

I also have a friend who told me when she gave birth to her daughter, she looked at the infant in her arms and realized, “Nobody is angry at you; you haven’t pissed anybody off. You’re completely new.”

I’ve never felt that. From the minute my twelve-month-old son was born, I’ve known there are people out there who want him dead, who would put the bullet through his head right in front of me. Not just him, but my godson and my goddaughter and my best friend and my mother and me. Not because any of us have pissed somebody off (though some of us have), but because we’re all Jews, and it has happened before, and not that long ago, and that means it could happen again. I worry about how to get my son to safety if I ever have to. And that awareness is part of being Jewish as well.

You know what else is part of being Jewish? A completely different intellectual history. The history of Jewish thought on, say, women, or marriage, or morality is different from the history of mainstream Western, which is to say Christian, thought. Our values are different. Screw this “Judeo-Christian” rhetoric, which is just the religious right’s attempt to make Jews forget that they’d gladly skewer us too, if they could, and enlist us in their attacks on LGBTQ people and Muslims. I never see “Judeo-Christian values” used to garner support for values I recognize as Jewish: “Due to our shared Judeo-Christian values and their emphasis on the importance of study and education, we must insist on full funding for public education, free for everybody, from pre-K through to college, and public libraries that are open 24/7, staffed by highly trained librarians!” Where is that call? Why is it always about how the gays are bad bad bad? Because I have Jewish parents and Jewish grandparents and Jewish great-grandparents and not once did any of them ever tell me jackshit about gay people marrying or trans people peeing, but every single one of them talked endlessly to me about studying hard and getting into a good college because that was what we Jews cared about.

I don’t have a problem with discussion of the Abrahamic religions together—certainly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share features and origins and scholars of religious studies know those better than I. What I mind is the attempt to portray Judaism as Christianity without Christ, as if sharing some religious texts erases the thousands of years of divergence and violence that came afterwards. What I mind is the attempt to subsume Jewishness in Christian dominance while estranging Islam.

My morality is not like Christianity’s, at least as I have been taught to understand it. I was never taught to turn the other cheek, unless you count the parental saying “if you ignore them, they’ll go away,” which, let’s face it, isn’t even true. I was never taught that the meek will inherit. When my uncle, maybe one of the kindest people I have ever met, told me about going to a counter-protest to a neo-nazi rally in Chicago, he told me that he wore his steel-toed boots, so that if the police lines broke and it came to fighting, he could crack skulls. Not when he was a young hothead. When he was a middle-aged, married father of two. My father took me aside and told me quite seriously once that I should never miss the chance to kill a nazi, because they’d do the same to me. Not when he was young. Just a few years ago. I don’t have a problem with either of these statements. Because fuck those people.

To be Jewish is to have a group history of trauma and persecution. It’s to have a culture that valorizes study and erudition. In the contemporary US, being Ashkenazi is to be white, at least in the places I’ve been, but still to know that your perspective is marginalized. Still to see yourself not represented in any positive way in the mainstream, especially if you’re female (fuck you, Woody Allen, I hated you long before your reprehensible actions were revealed), still to look for yourself in code (many black female nerds saw themselves in Hermione; fair enough. I read her as Jewish, myself). Being Jewish is not just about religious practice, and it’s not just about a structure of morality. It’s about having a particular history and a particular culture (or one of many, as I note above) that has developed in response to that history.

And so is being Christian. Because just as white supremacy can make us whites think that whiteness is default, normal, the unmarked state, just as patriarchy can make men think that they are the standard model of human being, so can Christian dominance make gentiles think that Christianity is just a matter of religious belief, or of the structure of one’s morality. But Christians too carry the burden of history, and a big part of that is violent anti-semitism. They have to come to terms with that, and they can’t do it if they try to erase the differences that mark us and how we experience the world.

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Ghost Towns
Yesterday, my mother came to look after Solly so I could go buy some clothing that fit me (I've gone up a size or two since having my son; I have no worries about that in and of itself, but it does mean that I have closet full of clothing that no longer fits me, and that is frustrating). I had been looking forward to this: I was going to go to the East Village, where I grew up, and hit Trash and Vaudeville and Meg for the kind of clothing that makes me feel like myself again. But it was one of the more depressing excursions I've had in a while.

I was reading Jennifer Marie Brissett's excellent Elysium on the subway, and was smack in the middle of a chapter taking place in the bombed-out ruins of an unnamed city when I reached my stop, and then I came above ground and the first thing I saw was the street torn up where Astor Place used to be, and the cube was gone. My stomach dropped and I may have actually staggered back. I haven't been around in quite a while, what with the pregnancy and the baby and nobody had mentioned this to me at all. When I was a little girl I thought the cube was hollow and you could go inside and play, and I remember pushing it round when I was a teenager. And it was just part of the landscape, and now it is not. They say it'll be back, but they also say there'll be a second-avenue subway, so I'm not holding my breath.

The absence of the cube made me take a good look around Astor Place and St. Marks Place, and I realized how little it looked like the place I'd gotten on the subway to go to school from sixth grade through senior year. All these chic glass and metal buildings; no Dojo, no Sounds, no drunks or homeless people (and where are they now? probably dead, those guys were living rough), lots of chi-chi activity. It was like seeing an overlay on a familiar picture; everywhere I looked I had to clear my head of what I knew used to be there to see what was actually there now, and I didn't like what I saw. I made my way to Trash and Vaudeville. I walked in to silence. Jimmy, the manager was in between music and there was nobody else in the store. I floated through the shop picking up random items to try on as he put on "Rebel, Rebel," and felt surreal, absent. As I was trying clothing on I looked around the walls and tried to figure out who if any of the referenced musicians were still alive. Not the Ramones. Not Joe Strummer. Not Bowie. John Lydon, I guess. I bought a couple pairs of jeans and floated out, down to 9th St, wondering if the coming move to 7th between 1st and A meant the shops' days were numbered. Gallery Vercon is closing after 30 years. I didn't recognize more than a handful of the boutiques. Second-Hand Rose closed down long ago, and I made my peace with that (also found her again running a couple of tables at the flea market on the Upper West Side on Sundays) but Jill Anderson is gone too, now. Meg is still there--hey, Meg is all over the city now! I couldn't find Fialka. I think a vintage shop called Dusty Buttons is there instead, but it's possible I just overlooked it, as I was in a haze?

It felt like a ghost town. Not because it was empty--there was plenty of activity on the streets. But because I felt like I was walking in a different neighborhood than the one that was actually around me. I've felt like this before, when Jenna Felice died and I tried to retrace my steps in the neighborhood we grew up in, and everywhere I went I felt her ghost. But this time I was the ghost, a remnant of the old East Village trying to find her bearings in the new one, moving in the same geographical grooves she always had, and not finding anything the same. That's why they call it "haunting," right? You're in your old haunts, but there are these new people and everything is different, everything but you. Of course, I'm different too; not a teenager with heavy black liquid eyeliner and fishnet stockings and motorcycle boots, not a young woman with fire-engine red hair and combat boots--well, I still wear combat boots. But a middle-aged mother with many white hairs who has appeared in public in yoga pants.

I went to the East Village to try to get what I needed to feel like myself, but there was no there left there anymore. I used to staunchly refer to the neighborhood as the Lower East Side, but fuck it, that battle was fought and lost years ago. I don't like the East Village any more. I'm not sure there's that much to like about most of Manhattan any more.

No wonder ghosts are so pissy all the time.

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Can cursive be saved? Why bother?
What topic of burning importance could return me to blogging? Human rights? Infectious disease? Right-wing assholes?

Cursive, obviously.

I like fountain pens. I collect them in a small way, i.e., in a I-just-can-and-will-not-spend-that-much-money-on-a-pen way. I like writing in unusually colored inks. I like a nice stub nib that makes my signature look pretty. I also write all my first creative drafts in longhand, so there's that, too.

Every so often, in the fountain-pen world, somebody bemoans the death of cursive: schools don't teach cursive any more! Young people can't read it! What should we do?

You know what I say? Burn, baby, burn. I bet nobody knows how to use a slide rule anymore, either.

Cursive is a way of writing long documents that is faster than print because you don't have to pick up your pen. Well, we have a speedier way of writing long documents now: it's called typing. We no longer have to torture those of us with poor hand-eye co-ordination and limited artistic skill by complaining that their capital Gs are not completely distinguishable from their capital Ss. So why continue?

This isn't the equivalent of not requiring students to learn to spell because of spell-check, or not requiring them to learn to do long division because of calculators. Students are still required to learn how to record their thoughts using pen and paper. This is the equivalent of not requiring students to learn how to use an abacus because of calculators. Learning how to type will serve them better educationally and professionally, to say nothing of personally. Cursive is no longer necessary. It's obsolete. If enthusiasts wish to continue practicing it among themselves, I have no objection. But why force it on innocent children?

My handwriting is terrible. It's always been terrible. No matter how many handwriting exercises I did, or how often I wrote, it remained terrible in precisely the same way. When I was a teenager, my uncle, who lives hundreds of miles away and whom I see once or twice a year wrote a note to himself in front of me and I realized that our handwriting is exactly the same. Exactly. There is clearly some genetic component in play here, and in our case, it was one that no elementary school handwriting teacher could overcome.

And fundamentally, why should they bother? Nobody needs to read my cursive but me, and I always knew what I had written. Is it sad that young people can't read traditional cursive anymore? I don't think it is, particularly. My friends in grad school who studied medieval and early modern literature had to take paleography classes in order to be able to read the handwriting that was used then. Why should 20th-century cursive be granted some kind of special status? We're in the middle of a transition to a different norm, and that's fine by me.

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RIP DR. J. Donald Millar, slayer of smallpox
Haven't posted in a while, but this is the kind of thing I can't resist.

I didn't know smallpox persisted as long as the late 1970s, but thanks in part to this man, we have actually eradicated it. That's the goal for polio now.


So anti-vaxxers can shut it. Vaccines work. Smallpox is dead.

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'Cause she thinks SHE'S the passionate one...
I have a new story up at Tor.com today, "Ballroom Blitz." It's a retelling of the 12 Dancing Princesses fairy tale set in a punk dive on the old Lower East Side. It's a story with a lot of history behind it.

When I explained the original fairy tale to a friend's partner a few years back, he said "So what's the moral of that? Don't be a woman?" "Pretty much," I said. It's clear to me reading the story that there's another tale buried in it, about the princesses trying to save and free the young men they're dancing with, young men under some kind of curse ("You're just excited because tonight we'll be freeing our princes," says the eldest princess to the youngest), but their plans are scuttled by one of their father's spies, who then gets to marry the eldest and presumably inherit the kingdom, while their beloved princes are beheaded.

What's the moral of that? Don't be a woman.

So I wrote a different story, about the young men the princesses are saving, and what happens when, in this version, they succeed.

I wrote the first version of this story back in 2007 or 2008 while listening to a lot of Flogging Molly and feeling a deep pull of nostalgia for the adolescence I wanted and never quite got (I got something not quite as good), and I brought it to Sycamore Hill, where a number of people told me exactly what was wrong with it, and they were all right. I put it away for a year or so, and then worked on it some more, and then put it away for another year or so, and then worked on it some more, and then put it away, until August 2014, when I realized I needed something to read at KGB and I could not find the draft pages of my alleged novel that I had planned on reading. I spent a harried 24 hours going over and over this story while listening to the So So Glos, rewriting and patching and stitching until you could hardly tell that it had once had as many problems as it had, and read three-quarters of it the following evening, at which point the incomparable Ellen Datlow snatched it out of my hand and said she was taking it home with her.

I don't argue with Ellen Datlow.

This story is not like many of the other stories I've published recently. It's not political; it's not about being Jewish (although, for the record, Jake and Isabel are both Jewish--plenty of Jews on the punk scene, there's a book about it, Lenny Kaye, Bernie Rhodes, Malcolm McClaren, Nancy Spungen, Mick Jones by descent, Chris Stein (my mother dated him in high school), Lou Reed of course, Joey Ramone, Richard Hell; I met the author at one point but I no longer remember where. Isabel is, of course, named after my heroine Emma Goldman, and though it doesn't come up in the story, Jake's last name is Auslander). It's about depression, which, in the words of Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace "runs in my family--it practically gallops." It's on my mom's side and on my dad's side--my father's father had such marked episodes of depression that they knew it even back then, when mental/emotional health issues were much less well addressed.

It's certainly done a number on me. The first bout with depression that I remember came when I was 14 and my best friend was shipped off to Connecticut by her parents. It lasted only a few months. But when my parents split up when I was 16, I entered a two-year misery that I came partway out of when I was 18. It wasn't until I went to a psychiatrist when I was 25, nine months after my late best friend had died that I went on anti-depressants and found out how people without depression feel all the time. "When did this bout of depression start?" the psychiatrist asked. "Well, you know, it's hard to tell," I answered. "I mean, those feelings are always there, right? But you just push them to the back of your mind and get on with your day, and then they get worse and worse until you can't do that anymore." "When you say 'those feelings are always there,'" said the psychiatrist carefully, "what do you mean?"

Apparently, for people without dysthymia, those feelings are not always there. So I went on anti-depressants 14 years ago, and they worked within an week and I have never once looked back and no, I am never going off them, because I remember what that was like and I would literally rather lose a limb. I'm on them right now and have been on them throughout my pregnancy, and no, I'm not interested in what the NYT article you read about taking anti-depressants during pregnancy says. Fuck the NYT. My mental health and freedom from misery and desire not to die are not up for debate, and they are not negotiable. You know what would be bad for my developing baby? A mother who cries constantly, can't manage to feed herself or put on shoes, and has constant suicidal ideation. You can look it up. Maternal depression is really bad for fetuses and babies.

Which is not to say I haven't had severe bouts of depression since going on meds. I have, I've had ones that lasted for weeks and ones that lasted for years, and it usually means I need to adjust my meds--add a new one, go up on a dosage, something like that.

Anyway, the point is, this story is about depression, and self-medicating through music, which I've done a lot of, and as far as self-medicating goes, music works as well as anything and better than most. When I read "Ballroom Blitz" at KGB, my mother told me it was like a punch in the stomach, that she had to keep repeating to herself "It's OK, because she goes to a therapist and goes to Barnard and graduates magna cum laude and gets a PhD in English at Penn..." about Isabel, which struck me dumb for a moment. Because Isabel isn't me. It never occurred to me that Isabel would be me. Isabel has my depression, and Isabel has my wardrobe (everything she is described wearing is something I've had and worn at one time or another), but Isabel isn't me.

Jake is me.

It's something of a departure for me. I've never written a male protagonist before, certainly not one meant to be in any way sympathetic, and I've never identified with a male character I've written before (let's be honest, I don't write many male characters--they just don't feature as important in my stories). So I sat down and thought about what I would have been like as a young man, and what my father, who has depression extraordinarily similar to mine, was like as a young man, and so I amped up the testosterone levels and the aggression and anger and violence, but Jake, trapped in pain and misery of his own making and knowing it's all his own fault, is me. (You can tell Isabel isn't me because she's good at calculus, and my own math skills drop off after pre-calc. Jake, with no interests outside of drinking and music? That's me during adolescence.)

Originally the story had a much bleaker ending: Isabel leaves Jake after freeing him, and he spends the rest of his days for the foreseeable future sitting at the bar, waiting for her to come back. But when I did the August rewrite...I don't know, I just couldn't. Maybe because so many of my stories have ended so grimly lately; maybe because I identified with Jake and even with Isabel too much to condemn them to that. I just knew I wanted to give them as close to a happy ending as they could get.

Once the story had a happy ending, I wanted to use "We Got the Days" by the So So Glos as the epigraph, and this may be the one time I didn't do what Ellen Datlow said. "Don't bother," she said. "Music is never worth it--it's always a pain in the ass and they always ask for more money than you get for the story." But the Glos were awesome and super-enthusiastic about the idea, and their manager was super-responsive, and they made it completely possible for me to do it, so many thanks to them, too.

I really love this story. I love the pyrotechnics of some of the passages of writing. It's deeply personal. So even if it isn't like a lot of my other work, I hope you like it.

(I named it "Ballroom Blitz" after the song that always closed out the night at "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control," the punk night I used to go to when I was living in Philadelphia. I know it's not technically a punk song (though The Damned certainly covered it a fair bit), but it should be.)

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Ellen Datlow's Doll Collection - [beware spoilers under LJ cut]
It's been an exciting week! Not only did I turn 39 and finish my 25th of pregnancy (the baby is kicking up a storm and I'm super-showing!), but Ellen Datlow's anthology The Doll Collection was released from Tor Books, and it contains my latest story, "The Permanent Collection."

"The Permanent Collection" is narrated by a 1935 Shirley Temple doll, but it is about a fictionalized version of the last doll hospital in New York City, which was a truly creepy, Gothic place. The physical description of the hospital is exactly as I remember it (I was there twice), and two interactions I chronicle between the owner and a customer, one when the latter was 5 or 6 and one twenty years later, are quite accurate--I was that little girl, and I was that woman in her 20s trying to do right by her Paddington Bear. Which just goes to show, I suppose, that you should never be nasty to writers, because like elephants, we remember, and then we store it up until we find a story to fit those incidents. When I went there in my 20s, about 10 years ago, I remember thinking "Damn, Angela Carter needs to write about this place, it's like something out of The Magic Toyshop." I waited and waited for Carter to work her magic, but she declined to take any action on the matter, with the very poor excuse that she was dead. So eventually I had to do it.

When I wrote this story, I felt a little guilty. My previous three stories, "Phosphorus," "Burning Girls," and "Among the Thorns," had all been deeply political, making interventions in discourse about politics and fiction that I felt needed to be made. "The Permanent Collection," on the other hand, was, well, just a creepy, sad story about a doll that had once been loved, and now lived in horror. Then the galleys came back, and when I reread the story, I focused on the ending and realized that you can take the story out of the leftist discourse, perhaps, but you can't take the leftist discourse out of the story.

[AHEAD: SPOILERS FOR "THE PERMANENT COLLECTION"]




( Spoilers for the ending of Collapse )

And I guess I am my parents' daughter, and my politics will tumble through when I least notice it.


[SPOILERS OVER]

Anyway, I love this collection. I helped Ellen with the introduction, and I named the volume--Ellen mentioned to me that she'd had this idea for years and had been trying to sell it, but couldn't think of a name that worked. Knowing Ellen's own impressive assortment of creepy dolls and creepy doll parts, I rolled my eyes and said "Well, obviously: Ellen Datlow's Doll Collection!" And with only slight modification, that was it.

So run out and buy it. Or stay in and order it from your local bookstore. Or wherever. It's a beautiful book.

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Return of the Super Squeak
Back when my godson was just a little baby, instead of the big-boy-underpants-wearing, articulate, mobile child he is today, his mother, my best friend, got in the habit of calling him Squeaky Mouse, because...he squeaked a lot and reminded her of the cats' beloved mouse toys that also squeaked a lot.

One day, we all--she, her husband, and I--sat down to dinner. She had put my godson in the playpen, and he was protesting his exclusion from the dining festivities quite passionately.

Without thinking about it, she looked over at him and said affectionately and, unconsciously, right on tempo, "You're a very squeaky boy."

At which point I giggled, she and I locked eyes and I said "The kind who squeaks at his own mother?"

And Squeaky Mouse became the Super Squeak there and then. I spent a lot of time working out lyrics, and then forgot most of them as he stopped squeaking and started speaking.

Now my godson has a lovely, pudgy, angry baby sister, who is if anything even squeakier than he was at that age--she is just over a week old. It's the return of the Super Squeak!

She's a very squeaky girl,
The kind who squeaks at her own mother.
She will never let you put her down,
Once you get her out of the crib

(That girl's a super squeak)

She likes to chew on her own hand,
She squeaks unless you hold her.

And so on.

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Music to end the world by

I was walking home the other day, and I had the music on my iphone set to shuffle, and some of the most ominous sounds I have ever heard came through the headphones. I recognized it, but I couldn't place it. It was apocalyptic. This was the music that would be playing when the mushroom clouds formed over New York City, DC, Chicago, Moscow, Petersburg, Beijing, Tokyo, Delhi, and the Middle East entire. It was the music that would be coming from the boom box carried by Death when the four horsemen ride out.

It was the Sex Pistols doing "Pretty Vacant."

Sure, "Anarchy in the UK" is self-consciously apocalyptic, and that's all well and good, but listen to the opening of "Pretty Vacant"--it's about a hundred times more ominous. It made me think of other songs whose openings seem to me to herald the end of the world: "London Calling"--sure, that one is literally about apocalypse, but I'm really not concerned with words here, unusually for me, but with sounds. The other candidate that sprang to mind was The Slits' cover of "Heard it Through the Grapevine," which opens with the most menacing humming I have ever heard.

I guess for me, the world ended sometime in the late 1970s.

Which makes sense. My aesthetic of the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic is stuck there as well, maybe it goes as late as the mid 1980s, but certainly not later. My future is the dirty future of clanking, barely functioning mechanics, wreckage, urban decay and destruction, with either the stark searing desert sun or murky dark skies. My future is capitalism rampant, The Tyrrell Corporation conspiring with Weyland-Yutani, airing blipverts on Channel 23. My future is Alien, Aliens, Blade Runner (though rewatching it, I can't help but think that part of what's supposed to be so dystopic is merely the presence of so many non-white people in the city, and that doesn't really strike me as what I mean by the end of the world), The Road Warrior, the original British Max Headroom ("Remember when we said 'no future'? Well, this is it!", even Soylent Green). The future where our hero shoots a woman in the back as she runs away from him and thugs sell the corpse of their latest hit to the body bank ("Hands are worth more than cameras. Luddite."). That's pretty much the future I still think we're headed for--elite luxury on the backs of squalid suffering. Well, that's pretty much the present we're in. How does it feel to live in fear?

But now the future aesthetic is all pretty and sleek, spotless white. It's the Mac future. Everything is holograms and works like a dream and is about validating the human spirit or some such bullshit (see Prometheus, or better yet, don't bother). It's not my aesthetic anymore. I can't tell whether we're genuinely supposed to believe that the future is bright and beautiful or whether this is still dystopic, just the appealing, superficially satisfying dystopia of Huxley's Brave New World. I don't know what kind of music goes along with that kind of world. I'm sticking with the apocalypse I understand, with its feral children and warriors of the wasteland, more human than human. Me and my music.

It's too bad she won't live, but then again, who does?

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Lies they tell you about pregnancy
There are a bunch of lies about pregnancy that need to be dispelled immediately.

1) Pregnant women have glowing, clear skin.

Right now, you could play connect the dots on my face if you were so inclined and I sat still for it.  There is a giant zit on my actual lip (no, it's not a cold sore, I know the difference) that so upset my toddler godson that he just couldn't believe his eyes and had to call his papa over to marvel at it.  I am pushing 40, people.  It's not like I miss any aspect of my adolescence, but definitely not this one.

2) You get an energy burst in the second trimester.

Bullshit.  Maybe the people who do this are confusing "I want to throw up less often" with "I have a burst of energy."  I am exhausted all the time. All the damn time.  There is no energy burst.

3) Morning sickness ends with the first trimester.

It lessens, I'll give them that.  But my run to the bathroom yesterday morning confirms for me that I have lots more puking to look forward to.

4) The second trimester is a great time to have sex!

Maybe this is true if you already have a romantic partner.  All I can say is that as a single woman, cutesy-wootsy nudges on pregnancy websites about how my partner and I should "make love" now as we'll be too tired when the baby comes, references to increased blood flow to my pelvis, and recommendations that if I'm having trouble sleeping I should get my partner to give me a pre-natal massage (do all non-pregnant partners know how to do this or something?) are really getting right up my nose.  Shut up, pregnancy websites.  Now is not a good time for me to do any of that stuff, because first I'd have to go out and find some dude and not only am I too fucking exhausted to bother (see #2), but my new shape is not really considered that alluring by most men.  Not that I was fighting suitors off with a stick before, but now is particularly not the time.  I need a pregnancy website aimed at single women.  It could say things like "Now is a great time to think about how happy you are that this pregnancy hasn't tied you to any of those assholes you dated," or "Enjoy lying in the center of your bed and taking up all the room you need to be comfortable."

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What I liked
You know what I liked in 2014?  Lots of things, actually.  I liked being nominated for writing awards.  I liked winning the Shirley Jackson.  I liked becoming pregnant (well, the actual process lacked a certain something--something about a doctor inserting a catheter through one's cervix for the purpose of putting sperm into one's uterus lacks a certain je ne sais quoi--but I was delighted for the process's success).  I liked seeing my book come out.  I liked moving into a new home with my wonderful family.

But perhaps you're wondering what I liked this year that I had no hand in.

Are you in luck!  Here's my write-up for Aqueduct Press's annual round-up!

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What I missed
When I was a teenager and depressed, all that helped was music.  I stopped reading, I didn't really care about anything else, I lost almost all my friends (well, they were asshole teenagers anyway), I slept all the time, but I got my shit together to go out and hear music, because that was the only thing that still made me feel good.  The problem was, before the internet, it was really hard to find the music you wanted to hear.  It was hard to find like-minded people.  And I didn't know a single venue that let you in if you were under 21.  This was particularly true after Giuliani came to power--places that I'd been able to get into previously all of a sudden started carding.  So I did the best I could with what I had, and that did not work out too well.  I look back, I wonder what I should have done differently, and I still can't see what my options were.  Find other kids at my school who were into punk rock?  I went to a fairly small school, I still remember who everybody in it was, and I can't think of a single one besides me.  There were kids into heavy metal, grunge (which even at the time I characterized as whiny white boys staring at their shoes), hip-hop, and those are all fine and legit interests to pursue (except for grunge, which I have no time for), but they weren't mine.  I look back and I'm still not sure what I should've done.

I'm pretty sure what other people should have done (kept your hands off the starry-eyed teenage girl, for one, you asshole), and that would've helped me not be such a basket case in my 20s, but...meh.  Nowadays, when I'm depressed, I spend a lot of time brooding about what I missed out on, what I can't get back.  Particularly now that I'm expecting a baby.  My life is about to change in a massive way, I think, and I hear a lot of doors closing, doors that probably closed about five or ten years ago anyway, but when you're single and childless, you can fool yourself for longer.

Make no mistake.  This is a much-wanted baby.  I have wanted a baby for years and years.  But I have conflicting feelings and some of them are about trying to come to terms with just having missed out on what feels like a massively important aspect of life.  You know how many people I dated up to age 22?  Zero.  In my twenties, I went for three-year stretches without getting laid (I can't say my life now is a never-ending cavalcade of erotic adventure, but, well, I'm older, most people I know have settled down anyway).  I spent a lot of time indoors reading instead of out at clubs, dancing.  And again...once I get past 26, I'm not sure what I should've done differently.  I was in Phillie.  The internet had happened, so I did my research and went out lots of places (I remembered the name of that night--it was "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control").  But you know what?  Philadelphia is actually kind of boring.  Yeah, yeah, we were never bored because we were never being boring, but you weren't in fucking Philadelphia, then, were you?  I went as hard as I could, but...it's just a boring place.  And I still had the friend problem.  Which is to say, I had awesome friends, but almost none of them shared my taste in music and nightlife.  At least by this point I could drink.

So I look back, and I'm not sure what I would do differently.  Maybe have a bit more self-confidence and dye my hair fire engine red when I was 16 instead of 26, but I'm not sure that would have really changed things so terribly much.

Sometimes doors close, the timing is wrong, and you just miss out, and you don't get that chance again. And you need to find a way to live with that.  But I'm not quite sure how.

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Wish you were here, Psyche...
This write-up is specifically for my friend Psyche Ready, who could not come with me to Irving Plaza Saturday night because she is very responsibly committed to paying her rent, and so had to go into work on Sunday morning in Virginia, where she now lives.

Psyche and I met when I was in grad school and doing some part-time work in Penn’s Office of Career Services to make ends meet (ha—so I naively hoped) and she was doing some full-time work there also to make ends meet.  We turned out to have a lot in common—a fascination with myth and fairy tale (I was getting my PhD back then and studying feminist revisions of fairy tales; now Psyche is getting her degree in folklore); dark curly hair; a lifelong passion for punk rock.*  And then in a move at once flattering and frustrating in that it meant we couldn’t really hang out much, she registered for my class—how could I drag her out to see bands and go to—goddamn, what was the name of the punk night at that club in Phillie I used to go to?  I have no idea and google doesn’t know either--on inappropriate weeknights if I was supposed to mark her essays with a pretense of objectivity (“Psyche Ready is super brilliant and a lot of fun and can hold her liquor far better than I can.  A+”)?

After that, she upped and moved to Oregon.

And then she came back to the East Coast! And then I won tickets to Irving Plaza to see Stiff Little Fingers and the So So Glos last Saturday night, and tried my best to get her to come up to NYC and use the other ticket with me, but she couldn’t, which was fucking tragic, it really was.

Irving Plaza is all ages in general, and this show was quite seriously all ages, and I don’t mean that as a euphemism for “kids too young to legally drink,” I mean that between the kids too young to legally drink who were there to see the Glos, and the dudes pushing 60 who were there to see the Stiff Little Fingers, there was quite a wide age spread in evidence, and I was smack in the middle, too young for the Stiff Little Fingers crowd and too old for the So So Glos crowd and if that isn’t the fucking story of my life musically speaking, I don’t know what is.  But it was quite nice not to be the oldest person there (and I’ve had enough of being the youngest person at any bar or club to last me the rest of my life, thank you very much).  And it warmed my heart to see the teenage girls dressed the way I dressed back in my teens when my mother would force me to put on a trench coat before I left the house.

I still get disoriented at how clear the air is in bars and nightclubs in NYC these days.  When I was a teenager, you’d know you’d been out all night and seen a great show if your clothing reeked of beer and cigarette smoke when you woke up the next morning (for a given value of “morning” that included one in the afternoon).  I used to wake up and bury my face in the clothing I’d worn the night before just to inhale the scent.  I’d wake up with my throat sore from the smoke—it went along with the temporary loss of hearing and the hangover.  But now smoking is Not Allowed in clubs and bars, and that’s probably a good thing because people have to work there and why should they run that risk, and the air is clear as crystal and there’s no haze to see through and my throat is fine, and when one older gentleman bumped into me and I caught a whiff of the smoke caught in the folds of his clothing—I guess he’d just been outside to smoke—I was hit by such a wave of wistful nostalgia that I had to lean on the wall for support.

I never started smoking because even as a teenager I already knew that if I started I would never, ever, ever stop. In the words of Hildy Esterhazy from On the Town, I never give up anything I like.  No will power at all.

Here’s something else: the bands went on on time.  Like, on the dot on time.  What’s up with that?  I mean, I guess I appreciate it—particularly when the venue in question has no chairs and your friend couldn’t make it so you don’t really have anybody to hang out with, hanging around and waiting loses what little charm it has,** and it’s not like I had a book with me (even if I had, I’m reading Joshi’s biography of Lovecraft these days and, well, it’s not so enticing that I wouldn’t rather drink some cider and stare blankly around me).

Look, Psyche, I’m screwing around here with reminiscences about cigarettes and wondering how you end up two hours late because I’m not sure how I can say this in any way other than I’ve said it before: they were amazing.  They kind of always are.  I was prepared for them not to be amazing, because Irving Plaza is a venue that I don’t love—it’s big, and the stage is significantly higher than the audience, and there’s a real separation there that you don’t/didn’t get at places like Death By Audio and the bars I went to when I was young, and I’ve never liked that as much.  At some point, I made it a rule never to go see a show at Roseland, because it was never that much fun.  Whatever kind of energy the band had couldn’t cross the divide over into the audience.  So I was ready for Irving Plaza to do the same thing.

But it didn’t.  That’s the band’s magnetism at work.  Charisma, maybe, but I saw it the very first time I saw the Glos play, when I literally hadn’t heard of them before that afternoon, when I was bored out of my mind with myself and realized how much I was longing to go out and see a band again, picked up a Time Out, went through listings, looked at bands’ facebook/myspace pages until I hit a song that sped up my pulse, and went from my apartment in Jackson Heights to Market Hotel in Bushwick, and hung around drinking beer and listening to music. I hadn’t been keeping track of how many bands had been on already, and didn’t know what order they were going on in anyway, and had never seen so much as a picture, but when Alex and Ryan Levine, Zach Staggers, and Matt Elkin went to the stage and started fucking around with mike hook-ups and suchlike, my head snapped around and I thought “That’s the band I came here to see.”  And I was right.  It’s the same thing that makes you move close to the stage when they’re playing.  It’s not like I can hear any better six feet closer to the stage.  It’s not like the sightlines change drastically.  It’s just a compass needle swinging north, I guess.  You want to be nearer.**

In “All the Young Punks” off the Clash’s second album, Strummer refers to Mick Jones’s guitar as a heart attack machine.  This probably isn’t so nice if someone you love has just had a heart attack,**** but it always felt to me exactly right—rock and roll, punk rock, when it’s right, when it’s on, is like getting an electric injection of adrenaline and speed straight to the heart, your pulse races, and you might explode or die, and if you did it would be worth it, it would be well worth it, and you don’t care.  I can feel the bassline sometimes inside my ribcage, and it feels like being shaken into pieces from the inside.  If I have to die, and who doesn’t, I can think of worse ways, and I honestly can’t think of a better one (why the focus on dying in this paragraph?  I think that remembering Jenna’s death brought it to the forefront of my mind.).  I’d like to read the obituary on that one: “Veronica Schanoes, scholar and writer known for her work on fairy tales, died on Saturday night.  The cause of death was a particularly resonant bassline.”  Of course, I suppose that I wouldn’t be able to, under those circumstances.  Just as well I survived, then.

I’ll tell you what else I love about the Glos—they look like they’re having a tremendous amount of fun when they perform. I was a ’90s kid, and grunge was supposed to have changed my life, 1993 was the year that punk broke, blah blah blah, but I tell you what, grunge bored me then and it bores me now.  I kept listening to Nirvana and Pearl Jam and so on, and watching footage of them perform, and all I could think was “Why do these white boys keep staring at their shoes and whining?” You’re playing rock and roll!  People are paying you for it!  You’re being cheered and applauded!  Why do you look so bored? My life was boring and miserable back then.  I’ve been through major bouts of depression.  I turn to rock and roll to blast me out of that, to burn out the misery and the cobwebs and electric shock my heart.  That doesn’t mean everybody has to be happy and poppy and butterflies, but punk rock isn’t working at McDonald’s or on an assembly line or even going to high school: you don’t have to do it.  If it makes you miserable, if it’s nothing but drudgery, you can just stop.  So don’t get up there and act like you’re trudging through the Slough of Despond;*****  I spark on anger, but I want adrenaline and hedonistic joy too, because it’s contagious, because I need it.  And I’ve never seen anybody look like they’re having a better time than the Glos playing a show.

And I guess that’s what it comes down to, Psyche.  I love this band, and I love seeing them play because it makes me feel alive, it makes my heart race and my head spin and my body move.  So you should’ve been there Saturday night, and consider this your invitation to come crash with me next time they play.

Oh yeah, some band called the Stiff Little Fingers played too.  I guess they were all right, if you like that sort of thing.******

* I once got a marketing email from Amazon.com that said something like "We've noticed that customers who enjoyed Maria Tatar's The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales also like Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution," and I thought "I have got to get a look at that database."  Uncanny

** I like to pass the time under those circumstances by imagining what’s happening backstage.  When a band goes on two hours late, what precisely is happening?  When I saw Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, they went on two hours late and claimed that it was because their taxi driver went to the wrong borough, which I still think is a pretty feeble excuse given that they had played in the same venue the two nights previous.  What is happening backstage?  Is it the equivalent of me not being able to find my shoes, and then finding my shoes and realizing that I have no idea where my keys are, and then finding my keys and getting out the door only to find that it’s raining and I could’ve sworn I left my umbrella in the closet where it belongs only it’s not there?  Or is it more like when I’m hanging out with a friend and I know I’m supposed to be home by 5 PM to make dinner, and it’s 4:15 now, but another fifteen minutes won’t hurt, and anyway, if the trains run right I could leave at 4:45 and get there on time, and then I look at my watch and it’s 4:55, but I still don’t really feel like going anywhere, and I know I should phone, but I feel kind of guilty and don’t want to admit that I haven’t left yet, and anyway, it’ll be quicker if I just get up and go without calling, but you know, it takes fifteen minutes or so to say good-byes, and then I have to wait 20 minutes for a train because the MTA has fucked up?  I mean, if you’re already, say, an hour and a quarter late, what is the precipitating factor at an hour and forty-five minutes that makes you say “OK guys, really, we really have to go do this now”?  I’m rambling.

*** Um, not in a creepy way.  It’s not like I spend my spare time stalking musicians.

**** I’m only half-joking.  For quite a while after we took my late best friend off life support after she had been declared brain-dead, I visibly, physically flinched whenever I heard anybody refer to themselves as “brain-dead” when they meant tired or absent-minded or forgetful.  But I got over it, eventually, because time goes by and hyperbolic metaphor is a vital part of the language.

***** Yes, that is a reference to Pilgrim’s Progress.  What?  I’m a goddamn English professor, for fuck’s sake, I can throw in a reference to Pilgrim’s Progress if I want to.

****** This is a joke.  I’m being facetious.  I know who the Stiff Little Fingers are.  Do not under any circumstances comment and explain it to me, particularly if you’re some dude who thinks he’s going to school me on 1970s UK punk.  Just don’t.  Nobody will come away happy.

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My work at Tor.com
Tor.com has provided me with two awesome bits of news recently, about two pieces I'm particularly proud of, one each.  Without further ado:

1) Burning Girls, the novella I wrote a Jewish witch in Poland and New York City is in Tor.com's annual "Some of the Best" anthology!  I'm very pleased, of course.  The honor comes with a mini-review by Carl Engle-Laird in his post about the anthology.  He actually focuses on an aspect of the story I had not consciously considered, the fact that the magic employed by the main character is not systematized.  I'd never thought about that.  I just based it on what I'd read of Jewish magic, and erudition went hand in hand with invention.

2) "Burning Girls" is not the only story of mine about Jewish women and the supernatural that Tor.com will be publishing!  "Among the Thorns," an answer to "The Jew in the Thornbush," the Grimms' most anti-semitic fairy tale (it had been quite popular in anthologies up until, oh, around 1945, when suddenly stories about German gentiles torturing and murdering German Jews didn't seem quite so entertaining any more, go figure).  The story will be going up in April 2014, and the cover art has been recently released, and it is one of the most stunning works of art I have ever seen.  I want it.  I want to get it done on a huge canvas and hang it on my wall, except I would feel bound by all laws of art and morality to donate it to a museum.  Here it is:



Here is the amazing thing: this was exactly what I had in mind for this story's art.  I was imagining the protagonist's face with her hair slowly turning into vines of thorns, and then, here it is!  Only more beautiful than in my mind's eye, because I am not a visually gifted person.  I've never even met these illustrators, Anna and Elena Balbusso (twins!), who also did the fabulous art for "Burning Girls," but I desperately want to because they are artistic geniuses, and we are clearly on the same wavelength.

Hurray!

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Surfacing
I'm watching the 2005 TV show <i>Surface</i>, about a bunch of different people dealing with sea monsters, and the government cover-up to prevent the general public knowing about the sea monsters.

It's pretty good.  It taps into many of my fears--being eaten while in the water being a big one.  Don't worry; I keep a handle on this fear by never ever ever ever ever going in to the ocean over my waist, preferably over my knees.

The main problem with it, plot-wise, is that I have to keep on rooting for people who make fundamentally stupid decisions.  The 14-year-old kid I can have some sympathy for.  He's fourteen, and the essence of adolescence is bad decision-making.  But the grown woman with the five-year-old kid who drags that kid into dangerous situations, doesn't bother to protect him when she knows the government is trying to shut her down and has destroyed her career and murdered people to do so, who drops that kid off with his dad and goes to the bottom of the ocean in a submersible she and her two friends created out of what looks like a giant rusty barrel, and then spots a leak in the seal around the window halfway down but decides to keep going anyway, and who then seems SURPRISED that she is going to die?  Well, yes, lady, WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

And the dude who abandons his wife and two small daughters to GO WITH HER and keeps claiming that it's all happening for a reason?  That reason is that YOU'RE A FUCKING IDIOT.

And the parents who AFTER they leave town find out that their older daughter throws a giant pool party while their younger son is raising a baby sea monster, and then leave town, leaving the two teenagers home alone AGAIN?  WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?

Here's what happens when big bad scary government men assassinate some of my colleagues and destroy my career and tell me to back off my research (presumably my work on Alice in Wonderland threatens the fabric of society as we know it): I look at my beloved godson, realize how much I would rather be dead than see something bad happen to him, and I BACK THE FUCK DOWN.  Here's what happens when somebody offers me the chance to continue that research and clear my name and restore my career by going to the bottom of the ocean to sea-monster breeding ground in a home-welded tin can while living off the grid and not telling anybody about it: I look at my beloved godson, think about how much I want to see him grow up, contemplate how much I enjoy being alive, and I ask them if they're OUT OF THEIR FUCKING MINDS.

There's a point at which I look at two characters trapped on the bottom of the ocean floor in a leaking iron barrel, or adrift at sea in a leaking raft while being circled by a twenty-foot shark, or a few feet away from a 150-foot sea monster trying to protect its eggs while clinging to the deflated remains of their life raft, and while I am, of course, tense and anxious about their imminent deaths, I can think nothing other than "You have only yourselves to blame for this situation."

Am I being too victim-blamey, here?

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'Cause you're just a So So Glo
Friday night, I went downtown to see the So So Glos, the best band in NYC, play the Mercury Lounge.  This was nice for me, because usually they play their own place, Shea Stadium, which is what we New Yorkers call a royal pain in the ass to get to, as it's in Greenpoint on the G.  (Note for non-New Yorkers: the G train is the only subway in the city that runs between Brooklyn and Queens without going through Manhattan first.  This should make it very convenient, as Brooklyn and Queens are two halves of the same island, while Manhattan is an entirely different island.  However, the catch here is that the G train doesn't really exist.  You may see it, sometimes, once or twice a year, as you're waiting for the F at Carroll St., but that's just a ghost train.  It appears, it disappears, but as a mode of mass transit, it simply doesn't exist.  You can wait twenty, thirty, forty minutes.  I don't believe in it. (Further note: fifteen years ago, I was living in Brooklyn and trying to figure out whether or not I wanted to be a journalist by writing up articles for a Queens community newspaper.  This entailed going to Queens community board meetings, which were so dull I actually have no memory of them, and they went on for fucking ever, and then I'd try to take the G train home.  Usually at midnight.  This coincided with the activities of a man known as the "G-Train Rapist" for exactly the reasons you'd think, and I decided to give up the reporting and avoid the G train.  Now you know why I never pursued journalism.  Back to the So So Glos.))*

I preferred their old place, Market Hotel, which was in Bushwick and easier to get to.  I tried to write a YA novel set around Market Hotel (it had vampires; this was my attempt to cash in), but...eh, I'm not a novelist; plotting does not come easy to me.  Or at all.  The whole thing was basically a flight of fancy around what my adolescence might have been like if there had been the internet and all-ages venues with punk rock instead of the Village Voice and numerous bars that wouldn't let me in and middle-aged married men playing Irish rock.  (I tweeted to my teenage self to get the fuck away from him and go find some cute punk boys her own age, but she didn't listen.  Sometimes I can't stand her.  Most of the time.  But the poor thing was so insecure about anybody liking or accepting her.  She took what she could get.)

Anyway.  I got to Mercury Lounge half an hour after the show was supposed to begin, and when I got in, the other band they were playing with, Diarrhea Planet, was already onstage.  I figured they had gone on first and played a short set, and I had missed them completely (this has happened before).  So I was standing there, mentally composing this long post about how I know I'm middle-aged, because I missed my favorite punk band's set due to the fact that it took a long time to get the baby down to sleep, and I wished I'd brought ear plugs, and back in my day, bands never went on at the stated time anyway, and what was with these kids and their new-fangled punctuality and they could just get right the fuck off my lawn and--

--and as it turned out, the Glos were going on second, and I hadn't missed a damn thing.

It would have been a very cranky but funny post, I tell you what.

But the Glos are way better.

They were so good.  It was the kind of setting in which they're at their best, small room, low stage, crowded enough to have enough people to respond but not so crowded that you couldn't dance, and they looked like they were having so much fun, and I was having so much fun, and the music was clean and hard and awesome (Zach Staggers really is an amazing drummer). After the show I wanted to call up everybody I knew and gabble excitedly at them, but I am middle-aged now, so everyone I knew was asleep, so I didn't.  It was so exciting and electric--I always forget what that feels like, to be part of a good show, like little fizzy bubbles going off in your blood, and then when it's been a while I think it's probably not such a big deal, but it is, it's totally a big deal.  It was like the first time I saw them, when I was living in Queens and longing for a band that made me feel like the Clash did, and I took a flyer on a listing in Time Out New York and hauled my ass out to Bushwick and waited through three other bands who were all fine, you know, but not amazing, and as soon as they walked up onto the stage to set up, I couldn't take my eyes off them--something about they way they moved, I guess--and I just knew they were going to be amazing and they were, they totally were, and it was worth the two hours there and two hours back and the waiting and standing around not knowing anybody, and I didn't care, I didn't care, it was all worth it for that moment when, as Lester Bangs put it, you sup on lightning and nothing else in the realms of the living or the dead matters at all, not at all.

They're older, now, than when I first started seeing them, and it shows.  I don't mean that in a bad way, God knows they're all much, much younger than me, but they look older and a little more hard-bitten, not the young, shiny, fresh-faced boys they were, what, four years ago?  Five?  Five, I think.  And man, do they rock and roll.  Ended the night by covering the Beastie Boys' "Fight for Your Right to Party" (I kind of thought that in the spirit of having just been on tour they would've done "No Sleep 'til Brooklyn," which is my favorite BB song, but they failed to consult me yet again.

Bought the new CD and asked 'em to sign it, and can I just ask, what gives with me?  Am I going to be 80 years old and still tongue-tied in the presence of cute boys with electric guitars?  I mean, for serious, I am 37 years old.  Aren't I supposed to be jaded and sophisticated by this point in my life?  Weirdly, Alex Levine (vocalist, bassist)  remembered me (and not "Oh, you're that old woman who can't stammer out a full sentence," either) as the person who was writing a book with Market Hotel in it ("I remember people who are part of our tribe"--I didn't ask whether he meant Jewish or New Yorker or punk rock or some Venn diagram intersection of all three (which would include him and Nancy Spungen, Tommy Ramone, Lou Reed, Richard Hell, and Lenny Kaye; a person could do worse)), and I had to confess that that book didn't work out ("Lots of things don't work out," he said), though now, having seen them again, I want to go back to that novel and try again.

I do get sad for the teenage girl I was, who would've given her eye teeth for this band and their all-ages shows and venues and their kindness in connecting with their audience.  That girl needed some way to find those shows and venues when nobody in her school liked enough to tell her about them.  That girl might've been too shy to talk to them, but maybe not, not if her best friend had been with her.  That girl needed a peer group who was passionate about the same things she was passionate about, and she needed friends, and she needed somebody to find her attractive who wasn't twice her age and skeeving on her.  And she needed a place to dance violently and sweat and smoke up.  Maybe not smoke up--pot makes me throw up--but she needed to be doing something illicit with people her own age.  Maybe she could have taken 'shrooms or X or something.  Maybe she could've gotten laid several years earlier than she actually did, and then she wouldn't have wasted her time falling hard for some geeky grad student who was totally not good enough.  Maybe she wouldn't have run as far from rock and roll as she could get once she realized how fucked up her scene was.  Maybe not.  Maybe things would've turned out just as suckily.  Maybe now I'd just have different regrets.  But...I kind of think I wouldn't.

The past is the past and there's nothing to be done about it, except make the most of the present, I guess.  But you don't get another go-round at being a teenager.  So I also think it's OK to take some time an mourn what you never got.

* I have been corrected by the gentlemen in question themselves--Shea Stadium is off the L, which is much, much easier to get to.  Which means I have missed numerous shows due to being completely and moronically misinformed.  Not that I am fucking pissed at myself or anything.  I totally am.  But the future has many, many gigs in it.

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How many?
"O when may it suffice?"
                -- W. B. Yeats

A very, very incomplete list.

Henry Smith
Jesse Washington
Laura Nelson
L. D. Nelson
Will James
Anthony Crawford
Isaac McGhie
Elmer Jackson
Elias Clayton
Emmett Till
James Chaney
Michael Donald
James Byrd, Jr.
Patrick Dorismond
Amadou Diallo

Trayvon Martin

And yet when Jeremiah Wright wasn't supposed to say "God damn America."

Well, I'm white.  I can say it.

God damn America.

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Hey, I've got an idea for a dystopia:
Only white people get to vote, and women don't even get to finish talking about abortions, let alone have them.

Throw a teenage love triangle in there, and maybe we could get a movie deal out of this hellscape.

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Voting Rights Act, do NOT rest in peace
Rise back up like a particularly pissed-off vampire.

Four days ago, Representative John Lewis pointed out on Twitter that it was the 49th anniversary of the disappearance of Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and James Chaney, lynched for trying to register black people in Philadelphia, Mississippi to vote.  I was raised to revere these men.  When they disappeared, handed over by the Sheriff to the KKK, the Federal government dragged their feet about investigating for three days, claiming this was a "local matter."  The local authorities didn't see why they should get excited over the disappearance of "a n-----, a kike, and a n------lover" (they were mistaken; it was two kikes, thank you very much).  Nobody was ever convicted for their murder; 2004, Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter.  Their families wanted them buried together, but Mississippi's cemeteries were all segregated, and forbade it.

Forty-nine years.  Andrew Goodman was a New Yorker, a student at Queens College, where I am a professor (we have a clock tower dedicated to Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney on campus).  He was twenty-one.  So was James Chaney, who was taking considerable risks simply by being who he was--a young black man in Mississippi in 1964.  Schwerner was all of 25, and had been under surveillance by the KKK for his organizing work.  If not for the racist fuckheads of Mississippi they could all still be alive today, to see the VRA gutted.

Fuck these motherfuckers.  Reagan kicked off his campaign in 1980 with a speech advocating "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and it was no secret what that meant.  He'd be fucking thrilled today.

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