A Caricature

 

Daily Dose

From There There, by Tommy Orange

THE QUOTE

"The quote is important to Dene. This there there. He hadn't read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, its been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there."

From Dene Oxendene

All the Place You've Got

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.” 
― Flannery O'Connor , Wise Blood

It's not the usual way of English words to carry so many meanings. English takes on what it needs as it goes and is just as likely to add a word as to use the same one in multiple senses. Ours is not, by it's nature an evocative language. Ambiguity, at least as I was taught by the noble spinsters and widows of my childhood classrooms, is no friend to accuracy, and accuracy of expression was the highest good.  To be misunderstood was most often the fault of speaker not the listener. Say what you mean. Be honest -- but not rude. If you don't have anything nice to say... you need to work on your vocabulary.

The most immediate meaning I know of place is all to do with home. My grandparents used the word to give directions, "... up to the old Sopher place and turn right at the stand o' pine there." The Sophers, by the way may have given up their tenancy and the ghost long before the listener was born, but no matter. "Went by your Dad's place the other day" I still hear from friends back to home for a visit.  Place in this sense is both familiar then and a little formal where I grew up; the assumption of ownership, a little land, time.

Might mention here, My Brother's Place is the name of the bar where they've held my last two class-reunions. I did not attend.

For my mother, my sister, and my sister-in-law, place most often means a table-setting and if needs be a bed. If they know you, or you know somebody they know, there's always a place for you. Hungry or not, there's a plate. Fresh sheets on the sofa if there's nowhere else to lay your head. When a high school friend was thrown out of his home for reasons that sadly seemed obvious to us all at the time, and even though my parents may not have approved of him entirely for that same reason, he was welcome to stay as long as he needed. What you do.

For my father place could also mean good work or bad, but steady. It was always good news when someone found a place in the shop. And a job meant a place of your own someday, if the pay was enough and that was good too. I never thought but that I would find a place of my own in both ways when I grew up.

Another of my father's places was less happy in that he raced coon dogs and of "win, place, or show," place was often as near as he came to the prize. The story as he told it usually had more to do with men than dogs. He had some good ones, some that weren't. Loved dogs either way. When the good ones lost though, and it was often the case, someone put in a fix, or called the thing for their friend instead of the winner, or a line-judge was just "g-d" blind. It is the way of things. Effort and skill don't guarantee a damned thing. Why that dog only placed.. Everybody knows it, not supposed to say it, but damn.

"It's not your place to say..."

That's the place with which I am exercised just now.

When I was in the seventh or eighth grade, the boat people were very much in the news. At the ignoble end of the American war in Vietnam, you may remember, refugees first in their hundreds and then in their thousands crowded onto any boat they could find in an attempt to escape the victorious Communists. Night after night Walter Cronkite and the others showed the boat people in their desperation, waiting for rescue, salvation, waiting for their old allies and employers the Americans to save them from the sea. We all saw them. TV showed the living and the dead. That was new. Shocking and heartbreaking. I remember the efforts to save them. I remember the kindness and generosity of some Americans who would eventually welcome the refugees into their communities. I remember too the racism and the hatred with which some of us rejected the effort.

In response to a negative editorial in the newspaper, I wrote a letter. What was I? Thirteen? The newspaper printed my letter. I don't have a copy anymore. Can't tell you what I said, or how badly I might have said it. Still, they ran it.

It wasn't that my parents weren't proud of me, but they were embarrassed. It wasn't my place to tell off newspaper editorial writers. It wasn't my place to talk politics in public or to lecture my elders on their moral shortcomings.

They weren't wrong.

But then, neither, as I remember it, was I.

And there the matter ended.

I thought of this not long ago when refugees became news for Americans again. What place do these people have? What place do we make for them? Whose place is it to say?

The essayist Rebecca Solnit says that places are more reliable than human beings. Seems true, but only if and when a place is allowed us, no? My sense of place is in the people I love. That's where I've found home. Hasn't so much mattered where I was so long as I was with the family I have and the friends I've made.

The place where I grew up is not a place where I would choose to live. For all the security I had in my family, the place I knew as a child was hostile to the person I was to become. I sensed it early on, long before I knew who I might actually be. Nothing I've seen there since has told me I was wrong.

The places where I've lived since have been better suited to me, and I to them, but even where I am now I don't entirely trust to be safe hereafter. I recognize where we are now. I remember. I have seen these angry faces before. I've heard hate. I know the sound, even when the words aren't the ones I remember.

My discomfort in the place we are isn't personal anymore. Can't be. I know who and where I am. I am lucky in this. Others aren't.

This isn't about winning.

Can't blame anyone else for the place we are, who we might become, to what horrors we seem eager to revert. Here we are. What shall we do about it?

I must make a place at my table, just as I was taught.

This is the place I've got.

This is the place we've got to.

Say so.

“This is the place of places and and it is here," said Gertrude Stein. That seems worth fighting for.

A Caricature

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From Classics Revisited, by Kenneth Rexroth

DYING GERTRUDE

"So Gertrude Stein on her deathbed: 'What is the answer?' and after a few minutes, 'What is the question?' -- a very French death."

From Essays (Montaigne)

Daily Dose

From Portraits and Other Short Works, by Gertrude Stein

LYING

"Lying in a conundrum, lying so makes the springs restless, lying so is a reduction, not lying so is arrangeable."

From Tender Buttons

Summer Camp

I'm collecting my thoughts, and books, for June. Last year's display table was a celebration of our history, a collection of biography, a reclamation or bringing out, as it were, of our past. I made table signs, as I still was allowed, now and then, to do in those days, using photo upon photo of our famous, infamous and too little known faces. Those images provoked considerable curiosity and made a kind of a quiz: "Did you know? Does she belong in this gathering? Was he really?" I was glad of the chance to challenge my coworkers and our customers. I was glad of the sales.

This year, I've decided to go off in an altogether different direction. Our aspirations would seem to have settled very much to earth. Once, before the plague, we danced and marched to a revolutionary bacchanal and liberation meant, among other things, fucking, dancing, drag, fun, defiance. We forget this. Most that would remind us of it are dead. In their absence -- still so keenly felt -- we have drifted, or been led, off the streets and out of the bars and into the courts and legislatures, we've occupied the suburbs, had what's left of our hair trimmed, lost our mustaches, bought strollers, invested, conformed and advanced. We have lost more than most of our illegality. We've survived, some of us longer than anyone might have imagined even a decade ago, and many if not most of us, at least among the boys, have become established, even respectable to a degree that might astonish or even break the hearts of the best of us that came before.

There's nothing regrettable in this, so far as it's gone, which is far further than I myself might have dreamed. I am by no means nostalgic for a past, even my own, that was so hostile as to undo more of us than even disease and neglect did in the days only just going. The world, for us, is a better place in just my lifetime. But I do wonder sometimes that in our rush to better ourselves, we don't sometimes forget too much. Last year I made it my mission, in however small a way, to memorialize some of our own, to call fresh attention not just to the struggle and the sacrifice, but also to the individuals who brought us as far as we've come. The faces, the images of our past were easy enough to find. I could copy and download these. Our actual history, our books, the evidence of us that can still be owned and read, was harder to come by. So much is gone. So much, if available at all, is priced to be purchased now only institutionally or accessed digitally or preserved as artifact rather than fact -- a fact being, for most people, a tactile thing, requiring the reality of being seen, held, read. A book is a fact only so long as it is read. It is all well and good that our stories are now to be preserved, that our lives are no longer subject to editorial apology and justification, to bowdlerization and emendation, that discretion has progressed to it's proper, other meaning and that rather than being hidden, the value of our history and herstory, of our lives and the lives that came before and contributed to the making of ours, are now to be understood, interpreted and remembered at our discretion, and with a discrimination not external to ourselves but arising from our liberation. I worry though that the democratic nature of liberation is not lost when the only record and memory of it is left to historians, librarians and archivists. Revolutions die not when they end, but when they are left to the interpretation of specialists. Even so, I gathered what I could to sell, and sold what I could.

This year, I want something more of the dance than the march. The signs for my annual table display I've reluctantly had to request from the professionals -- so as to keep to the generally dull standard of professional presentation of which I've already grown painfully weary -- rather than make the signs myself. (From such small concessions to "standard" and uniformity is the creativity and autonomy of each of us eventually wasted, but leave that for another day.) This year's signs will, hopefully, read:

"Summer Camp"

And on the table will be books by Patrick Dennis and Quentin Crisp, Joe Keenan and Brian Bouldrey, Gertrude Stein, Florence King, Jane Rule. There will be glossy biographies of movie goddesses and DVDs of "Mommie Dearest" and "Butterfield 8," of old musicals and melodramas. I've been hunting up paper dolls and hilarious old pulp paperbacks with titles like The Man from Auntie and Strange Sisters. I've asked for the biggest, ugliest costume jewelry the Gifts Department can find, and false eyelashes and fire-engine-red lipsticks from the Cosmetics Counter -- yes, the bookstore actually has a cosmetics counter. I've squirrelled away a copy or two of The Case of the Not So Nice Nurse and a few other treasures I could not reorder new. Ronald Firbank will not be represented. It seems there are now no immediate plans to reprint. Other equally disastrous gaps too sad to enumerate will probably be noticed by no one but me.

Watching "Make Me A Supermodel: Season Two," I was shaken from my usual contentment and filthy-mindedness, when a beautiful girl, already weak from not eating, was made to weep for not entirely losing the shape of a healthy woman. A fat old modeling agency queen with a tape-measure and the soulless wet eyes of a rabid bulldog did this, made this girl cry, for not conforming to the diseased standard of gay misogyny! On an earlier episode, I watched a whole pansexual panel of equally soulless monsters euphemise their homophobia as they snidely humiliated and dismissed from the competition -- with, we were assured, the kindest of intentions -- a beautiful, blond androgyn for being "unmarketable" and "too specialized," his looks "too strange" and "too refined," his walk insufficiently "strong." I burned with shame to think such creatures as were perched on that judges' panel could still exist, that we could still produce such deformities of sensibility and give them power over the fate of such exquisite youngsters. It was like watching angels in Hell.

I thought to write to the producers of the show, to organize some kind of protest. My instincts were old. Then I mentioned something of what I'd seen to a young, straight, female coworker.

"I pity everyone involved" she sighed, and I had to laugh. She was absolutely right, of course. Last bark from a dying breed, was what I saw. The end can't come too soon.

Meanwhile, it still seems worthwhile, at least to me, for a month, on a display table in an independent bookstore, to remember when summer camp wasn't left entirely to the bullies.