Thinking about Sound: the Auditory and Tactile in "Kissed by Lightning"

American Quarterly's latest issue considers the idea of sound in American Studies. A thick and groundbreaking issue, the contributors open up a previously marginalized arena of American Studies to make us all think and discourse on the nature of sound and its relevance to American culture. With the Native American Film & Performance Forum now underway with a showing of Shelley Niro's Kissed by Lightning, I found myself considering the auditory features of the film. Below is an excerpt of my response to the film:

Shelley Niro’s Kissed By Lightning explores the relationship between the tactile and auditory. Three central themes provide the foundation for the tactile: Mavis cannot touch her dead husband Jesse, though he constitutes her memories throughout the film; her paintings represent the product of her hands –with texture, life, and color, her art can be touched; finally, there is Mavis’ physical-emotional relationship with Bug which stabilizes the narrative. But with  each theme the viewer relies on music to weave the plot together as the film cuts between memories of Jesse, Hyenwatha, and the Mohawk peoples of the past. Mavis’ memories of Jesse would be diminished without the sharp sounds of the violin to link the two characters; indeed it is sound that evokes her feelings of sadness and grief. The paintings function in the same way: while beautiful and a clear illustration of Mavis’ skill, their ability to depict Mohawk myths/legends only develops because of the use of “traditional” Mohawk music (e.g. drums, chanting). In other words, memory –that is, the past –needs music to connect the stories; music serves as a clear reminder that ‘the past’ is not simply visual, as viewers imagine it, but also auditory –one can hear the past. In fact, it seems Mavis can only see the past and paint it because she hears it in her husband’s stories and music.

The encounter between Mavis, Bug, and the African American singers lends itself to examination. Although a multicultural gathering, it reveals a set of assumptions on the part of the singers: there were “real” or “authentic” Mohawk people, that the Mohawk are “all gone,” and that contemporary Mohawk peoples know “traditional” Mohawk music and are always in touch with their musical “roots.” Interestingly, Mavis and Bug do little to correct any of these conceptions, except to say that they are indeed Mohawk. Their acknowledgement of identity comes with a brief silence that seemingly allows the thoughts to simmer with the singers: indigenous peoples are not “all gone.” But again it is music that defines the moment. After asking to hear a “traditional” Mohawk song, Mavis sings “Where is my Home?” a song written by Niro herself. The song defies stereotypes of chanting and it does not require drums or even dancing. Furthermore, it counteracts an older stereotype that white people make music, Native people make noise. Instead of connecting viewers to the past, as the camera focuses solely on Mavis, it highlights the transitory nature of the film, specifically the geographical and emotional transitions between Bug and Mavis. Other transitions take place as well: Zeus increasingly becomes more like his father, developing as a musician; Mavis’ paintings begin as images on canvas to legitimated “art” as they are displayed in a gallery, and the relationship between Josephine and Mavis. 

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As an aside, a huge thank you to all who showed up in support of our series of events. It bodes well for future events and, more generally, the future of indigenous discourse at UMF.

A Fine Ending to a Crazy Week

Sleep deprived and under the burden of allergies (or is it a sinus infection? we'll see...), I'm struggling to keep it all together and keep up with these posts. But it's nothing some Carole King and red wine can't cure, or home-made squash soup (oh the wonders of being home for the weekend!). In class on Thursday Gustavo told us he is editing a book, teaching two classes, directing six independent studies, practicing his own music, and then I lost track. How do these professors manage it all? I know sleep deprivation must be involved, but have they also find a hole in the space-time continuum that allows them to get all their work done. I don't feel lazy per se, but I wonder whether they ever feel like their drowning in work the way I do, as if they're never caught up.

The last work I read this week came by chance; returning Gary Snyder's Turtle Island to the library this morning, I decided to open it up (after a week of staring at it on my desk) while waiting for a paper to print. "What Happened Here Before" is magnificent and epic (not in scale, but in subject). Snyder tackles the long history of earth and condenses without missing or omitting. It left me renewed after Oroonoko, a tedious novella by Aphra Behn.

We're reading Yekl for Multicultural Literature and Film. It comes at an interesting time as Palestine seeks recognition from the UN. How ironic that they must have peace to be a full member, though the UN was created to help create peace, now they say Palestinians must do it themselves.

Last night I dined with some friends at a local restaurant, The Homestead, and we ended up sitting next to visiting writer Nikky Finney's table as she ate with some faculty and students. If you're a literature geek, you can appreciate sitting near a literary celebrity. I've yet to read too much of her work (if there is such a thing as too much), but the experience of being near greatness is always invigorating.

Alexie & Friends

Again, it's been too long. I keep promising to recommit myself, but the rhythm of the semester hasn't come together yet. Everything still feels choppy, though this is only our first full week. Myles and I are still working out the infamous balancing act of time together/time apart/time for work/time for fun. I never feel like I'm winning the battle, especially with the work overload, but we'll see.

I won't make excuses for not posting, but I can say, when it's hot and summer-like, I have no inspiration. I loathe the heat and humidity and lately my room feels something akin to a sweat lodge. When the sun is out, I just want to bask in it and revel in the fleeting vestiges of summer, usually with a glass of chardonnay and some crab meat and crackers. Autumn and winter give me time to contemplate, cooped-up in my haven, watching the snow fall on bare maples.

It always disappoints me when I can't seem to get through my fun reading book. Indeed, I haven't even chosen an author to become enamored with; last year it was Bukowski; the year before, Vonnegut, etc. I think a trip to the library is in order. I'm shying away from the Beats only because it's so trendy right now and I don't want to be mistaken for a hipster. But, I'm thinking Sontag or maybe Paglia. I've read some of their stuff but I need more!

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So, part of this blog is going to be devoted to textual analysis and reflection. I'm taking a class with Michael Johnson (whom I secretly call Mikey J, a trend that seems to be catching on for all those enamored with his soft tone and wonderful bits of insight): Multicultural Literature and Film. In addition to the course, we've added a second component that acts as an independent study. This week: Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.

Alexie creates tragic characters, trapped by their own histories and tells us firmly: rez life, Indian life is cyclical.  Alcoholism, escape from the rez, the fleeting moments of basketball heroism never change. The world of Thomas Builds-a-Fire and Victor Joseph is awkwardly post-assimilationist: the Indians are already infected with alcoholism, live in HUD homes, are intermittently employed, sometimes for the BIA. Simultaneously, these Spokane Indians are rebels: Victor's father protested the Vietnam war, heard Jimi Hendrix play "The Star-Spangled Banner" (at once patriotically American and dissident), and Thomas Builds-a-Fire criticizes the Tribal Council and gets convicted by the local BIA for his story-telling.

The point of view shifts throughout book too, but we're never quite there, wherever we are. Readers becomes Indians at a distance: witnesses to "crimes of an epic scale." The perspective torments us as we struggle to unravel the hyperbole from realism and slowly discover that we can't. History, wedded to tales of modern rez life, leaves characters indifferent to atrocity and agony, unable to move out their indigence. To change would make these Spokane Indians participants and protagonists in their own drama. But, if "to do is to be" (Sartre), then Victor and Thomas and Julian and all the other characters can't do, because then they might be, be real people, be Americans, be Indians, be defined and confined by identity. Alexie's stories grimly inform us: Native Americans must be stuck in the in-between.

It's been too long! Some thoughts on Ecocriticism and Joni Mitchell

I can't believe it, but it's my first post for the month of August. So much has happened between my last post and now: I turned 21. I am back together with Myles, both of us more mature from the last time, more prepared to articulate ourselves and put forward the necessary effort. Mel is off to Australia in a few weeks and I'll miss her terribly. This summer has been a sort-of test period for being apart; we've only seen each other twice this summer (and did quite a bit in those few days), but all in all, we've only spent a week together for the whole summer. Australia will be the true test, both of us without our complimentary spoons to comfort the other from all the craziness of the world.

Last time, I talked about the implications of ecocriticism in the classroom. In order to see it fulfilled, we're going to have to engage in unconventional means to turn knowledge into action. We're also going to have to let go of the shackles of carefully-guarded disciplines in favor of interdisciplinarity. For those of us in literary studies, we need to give up on The Text in favor of culture as the text.

Recently, I came across a favorite old song of mine: Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi." (performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgMEPk6fvpg and lyrics:http://artists.letssingit.com/joni-mitchell-lyrics-big-yellow-taxi-tsgr9wh).

The miracle of Mitchell's lyrics lies in the fusion of environmental thought. While today's environmentalists are typically sub-divided into factions with specific causes, Mitchell takes a larger scope, lamenting urban sprawl, the end of the individual-owned farm, the use of chemicals on food (before Michael Pollan was even old enough to vote!), and the development of spaces for audiences to consume and conceive of nature. More importantly, "Big Yellow Taxi" functions like a poem, can be analyzed like one, and, like all writing, has cultural implications.

The saddest lyric of "Big Yellow Taxi," is easily "They took all the trees/And put them in a tree museum/And they charged the people/A dollar and a half just to see 'em." A museum serves as a commemorative place, paying tribute to the past. A tree museum implies the end of trees, at least in a natural, liberated sense. Trees becomes symbolic of rigid organization through parks (both local and federal) and development communities. A personal anecdote: the recent re-paving of our street included new sidewalks and new water and sewer lines. As such, the trees lining the street were dug up and have yet to be replaced, leaving our house and others abominably hot from lack of protective cover. Meanwhile, the newer, wider thoroughfare in town has carefully trimmed trees, perfected to attract new investment to the town. The town's priorities are twisted, but it is a microcosm of larger trends in which swaths of land are clear cut and then replanted with limited shrubs and small trees. For all this pristine "beauty," we charge something closer to a million and a half.

In order to ensure that we live in nature not visit it, we need to start reading outside the ecocriticism canon. We need to read Joni Mitchell, Jack Johnson, and others. And we need to recognize the value of texts as something other than cultural artifacts. "Big Yellow Taxi" remains a valuable contribution to ecocriticism because it turns thought into action through performance. We can't all sing like Joni Mitchell, but we can turn environmentalism into action in our own ways.

Must knowledge be demonstrable to be valuable?

Alan Bennet's drama and the subsequent film adaptation of The History Boys features a scene in which two of the boys vying for Oxford and Cambridge suddenly get up and begin enacting a dialogue in front of the other boys in the classroom. Having learned this scene (and other shrapnel pieces of cultural knowledge: Gracie Fields' "Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye" and the difference between the conditional and the subjunctive tenses in French), the boys are trying to justify another teacher's "General Studies" class and its goal of creating "well-rounded individuals" by acting out their knowledge. Their teacher Mr. Irwin remarks, having figured out what they are quoting, "God knows why you learned Brief Encounter."

The title of today's blog post comes from a New York Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/education/edlife/edl-24masters-t.html?pagewanted=1&ref=general&src=me) asking whether the Master's degree is the new Bachelor's. In today's economy, the answer is, unfortunately, 'yes.' Reading the article, we find that Master's programs are becoming hyper-specific; we are professionalizing degrees. Who is benefiting from this scenario? Certainly not students who are putting themselves deeper into debt. Answer: schools and companies. Schools fill more seats, make more money. Companies connect with schools, scoop up their best students. The key word here is 'professionalized.' It is not to say that the English or Anthropology Bachelor's doesn't make you qualified, it means that all your knowledge, especially your unquantifiable knowledge (reading The Atlantic, trivia guru, your ability to act out all the melodrama of Brief Encounter) does not fit into the corporate ideology. In sum, because 'the market' is penetrating the walls of 'the institution,' this ideology has infected universities.

If this system didn't involve collusion between businesses and schools, it would be easier for consumers (e.g. students) to change the system, to refuse the status quo. Nonetheless, the system will change. Inevitably, the inflationary value of education will collapse in a tulpenmanie moment. It will only come when the overall educational ideology of the U.S. stops holding college professors on a pedestal as paragons of success and shifts towards an embrace of creativity and individuality. Then, and only then, will corporate ideology shift toward the notion, popular in Residence Life departments, that differences are good; differences make us successful.

Truth: my love of books might not translate into direct profit for my employer. But, my ability to connect with co-workers who also love books might make me a happier employee, a more productive employee, a leader through my creation of strong group dynamics, etc. It is the aforethought to see "random" knowledge" as "indirect" profit.

Turning Ecocriticism into Reality

It's been 15 years since the publication of The Ecocriticism Reader, a forward-thinking anthology put together by Cheryll Glotfelty. Of course, words like ecopoetics and ecocritical are older than the book itself, but this year marks a milestone. In her introduction, Glotfelty speaks of turning her corner of literary studies into a field in which teachers and students engage in active participation in the environment. Glotfelty's tone is one of idealism, but she remains a visionary. Unfortunately, because the contributing writers ostensibly wrote their pieces before Glotfelty's introduction, they do not openly share her interests and sometimes it is unclear what they intend to do other than interpret a text. The result is a seminal book that features a multitude of writers, many of whom are crying stick to the text!

So how do we turn literary studies into a conduit for activism? Teachers must begin by overturning the classroom. The four walls, the uncomfortable desk-chairs, the windowless spaces have got to go! How can we honestly claim to read something in an ecocritical light while making students sit at desks which defy ergonomic logic! Bad for our bodies --they've got to go! Start holding classrooms outside. Yes, even when it's cold. Why talk about the suffering of Native peoples in the mid-November winter? Go outside and understand it! When there's no snow on the ground, ask why. Ask about the experience of New England Natives in contrast to Natives of Cabeza de Vaca's "Florida." How does weather contribute to different texts and in what way can we see weather as a marker of experience? In sum, the classroom must become the last resort, not the common refuge for the safety of our learning.

When we do come inside, everyone must sit at round tables (oh the joys of Harkness!). We constantly lament the status of the environment in our global discussion(s). No one seems to agree and some, who deny that environmental crisis exists, seem not to be listening to anyone at all. Round tables will encourage group discussion and group problem solving. It will increase risk-taking behavior and encourage students to solve long, hard problems (like an environmental crisis) by talking with one another. And even when the environment is not the subject, students may take their skill to the problem or many others, for discussion and hearing what others have to say is so often the solution to a global litany of issues.

Teachers (yes professors, that includes you) need to engage in the greening lifestyle: biking to work, gardens, buying used stuff (despite the reputation of Craigslist, it is a small step toward greening ourselves and our classrooms), and anything they can. In bringing ethics into the classroom, it is no longer satisfactory to bring the ethics of writing and research, the ethics of a discipline, we must adhere to environmental ethics.  Mother Earth must be in our minds when we teach, not only when we teach about the Transcendentalists.

A brief aside: if you have not seen or read Into the Wild, do so --now!

Queering the Kitchen: EpicMealTime

With overflowing booze and bacon, Ernest Hemingway could only be proud. EpicMealTime, the sensational(ized) YouTube cooking channel has become all the rave in the last few months, with its host, a burly Canadian (actually, all three hosts are Canadians) and I couldn't resist discussing them!

Before reading further, check out a few of my favorite episodes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaKcl0Qg13o, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYxO3Y-wOrM&feature=relmfu, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eah23WvLYsQ&feature=relmfu, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xc5wIpUenQ

Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant, in their seminal essay "Sex in Public," theorize that the projection of national culture (i.e. heternormative white culture) subjugates the sexuality of its citizens; consequently, spaces for acting out sexuality (cinemas, clubs, print and online mediums) emerge. In this case, the kitchen becomes the space in which sexuality emerges, a space featuring multiple sexualities, a queer space. In EMT we see the dual narratives of national and globalized identities forming simultaneously as the series develops. The hosts use bacon and syrup as their signifiers for Canadian, while frequently appearing in supermarkets and ethnic restaurants. The latter locations indicate that the hosts have broken the barrier into a global community of consumerism and as such lose some of their Canadianess. 

The absence of hardened nationalism allows the hosts and guest stars to produce public sex, that is acts which  express sexuality. One of the hosts, Alex Perrault has become simply "MusclesGlasses" and the main host, Harley Morenstein affectionately refers to him as such. Inspired by fanfare, Morenstein engages in openly homosocial interaction, girded by undertones of homosexuality. He devalues the body in the same way as viewers, leaving him without a fully-expressed identity; MusclesGlasses is a condensed moniker summarizing Perrault's status as a masculine, accessorized body. There's also the wonderful ejaculatory imagery which seemingly appears in every episode: while making tacos, the men promise that the female tasters will sour cream; a later episode features ice cream. Morenstein's use of inflection is key to deploying his sexual commentary. 

Finally, there are the thinly-veiled acts of explicit homosexual sex. On a trip home to see his Dad, MusclesGlasses is fed taffy on a large stick by Morenstein who visibly enjoys feeding his the phallic object with its sweet nectar. Feeding each other food as symbolic of the blowjob has become a theme appearing in other episodes as well. Or, in "The Black Legend," the men make a giant crepe and find two girls to eat it in a play on girl-on-girl porn with Morenstein as the voyeur in the background, doing his best to appearing as if he is masturbating.

Kindly, the men want us to know that we can also be men like them with the sale of shirts that read "&Baconstrips&Baconstrips&Baconstrips," a phrase that is exalted in each non-dessert episode. The best we Americans can muster in retort to these virile Canadians: Vegan Meal Time (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbBCWZue57M). The Swedes have concocted a whole series entitled "Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time" making such delicious treats as "Macho Salad," a title meant to outdo EMT's "Meat Salad."

Bon Appetit!