Monday, April 17, 2017

Reading Is Resistance: Tell Me How It Ends

The ability to incorporate abstraction into our lives is one of humanity's greatest intellectual strengths. That we can understand zero and pi, extrapolate from vague gestures, imagine what is impossible, and in general, live with, cope with, and even thrive on that which is ill-defined is how we were able to, not just express ourselves in the usual media we think of as “abstract,” but also put a person on the fucking moon, grow food just about fucking anywhere, and build fucking solar panels.

But that comfort with abstraction is not without drawbacks. Just because something can be shifted into an abstract idea, does not mean the best way to think about it is as an abstraction. In fact, one could argue that if abstraction is our greatest intellectual strength it is also our most dangerous intellectual ability, as pretty much every grand tragedy humanity has inflicted upon itself happened because of our ability to create abstractions out of people. For some reason, the ability to turn an understanding of numbers into the fucking internet includes the ability to turn people into numbers.

As a reader, I've almost always thought of books as one of the best ways to cultivate that innate human ability for abstraction, developing it, deepening it, expanding it to realms of thought we would normally prefer to be concrete. In some ways, empathy--that great superpower of reading--is an exercise in developing our abilities of abstraction by building connections to that and those which we have not directly experienced. Reading is often the crackle of electricity across that synapse between experience and emotion.

But there's a reason why Anne Frank is important. That abstraction of empathy through reading can also be an antidote to the catastrophic dehumanizing abstraction. Somehow, along with firing across that synapse, reading can bring other people; foreign people, distant people, out of the realm of historical, statistical, or numerical abstraction and closer to something real. Despite often being an engine for our abstract understanding, books can turn numbers back into people.

Valeria Luiselli's latest, Tell Me How It Ends is a book that turns numbers back into people. Tell Me How It Ends is an essay using the questionnaire undocumented immigrant children must answer when seeking one of the more permanent residency options in the United States.

From starting his campaign with a racist tirade, through his attempted Muslim bans, his silence on hate crimes committed against American Jews, Muslims, and people brown enough to look like Muslims, and his horrific “unshackling” of ICE, Trump has politically survived entirely on two fundamental principles; fear of otherness and (and I think I'm being very generous here by breaking this into a separate principle) Republican indifference to the consequences of that fear. To put this another way; there is absolutely no data that makes mass deportation practical, there is no illegal immigration crisis, there is no crime wave coming from Latin America. The only reason to tear families apart, turn communities upside down, and greatly destabilize or even endanger whole industries, including our food production and distribution industry, is abstract fear.

And we know it is abstract fear of otherness, because we have seen instances when person-to-person connection breaks through that abstraction and turns “Muslim” into “my neighbors” and a conservative community questions the new anti-immigrant push when a pillar of their community is arrested for potential deportation. (Just a bitter side note here about how frequently “conservatives” adopt more liberal viewpoints about shit that affects them. Anyway...) So let's use Luiselli's book, the story of Manu, her students who became activists, and the other children to de-abstract the South American refugee crisis. Let's use Luiselli's substance to turn numbers back into people.

Think about the pressure on your brain, the whisker of anxiety that brushes across your chin by fundamental questions posed by the best books: why are we here, what does it mean to be safe, who is your family, what dangers face you...Then, imagine your life depended on those answers. Then imagine you had to answer them when you were ten years old.

Picture a child in your life smiling at a balloon they've been given. That smile is about to be shipped back to Honduras like a defective product.

Imagine you were willing to ride on top of a train for hundreds of miles, a train known as La Bestia because so many people were hurt or killed while riding it, for something and then someone threatened to take it all away.

Explain to your child why their best friend's father was taken away.

Would your child survive in the desert with a coyote?

What if you had to put a piece of paper in your child's pocket to maybe save their life? And not even just maybe save their life. What if it was a police report on the shooting and killing of their best friend? What if they were so afraid they could not attend their best friend's funeral? What if they escaped the gang that threatened them, made it to safety, and their life hung by the thread of that piece of paper that had been in their pocket for thousands of miles.

Luiselli is writing about your child, your niece, your child's best friend.

Finally, why the fuck does Luiselli and all the other advocates have to do work to get you to empathize with fucking children?

Every immigration statistic is a reduction of people. And not just any people but quite often children, minors, people who have (for good reason) limited legal responsibility for their actions. Not just any people and children either; but people who risked their lives and endured hardships no native-born American would likely tolerate, all so they could work twice as hard for half as much money as native-born Americans would make because, whether it's delusional, relative, or true, they believe in the promise of opportunity America makes to the world. One fact becomes abundantly clear from Luiselli's book: whenever we go after immigrants (whether they followed all of the procedures or not) we attack people who are both utterly vulnerable and have demonstrated remarkable courage. In many ways, in most ways, in damn near every single way, the refugees fleeing violence in Central and South America for the safety and economic opportunity are exactly like the pioneers we valorize in our mythology as having built this nation.

It matters what we call people, even beyond the legal ramifications of calling the people fleeing the crime and violence engendered in large part by U.S policies, “refugees” instead of “immigrants.” I wonder what the state of our debate would be if Republicans, conservatives, and other immigration hardliners had to refer to the people they wish to deport back to the dangerous lives they fled, as “children.” This is, of course, another aspect of how reading is resistance. Sometimes in the direct ways here and sometimes in more subtle ways, books affect the language we use, they affect our lexicon, our diction, our word associations and thus, how we talk about and to each other.

Of course, there are problems here, too. The children who do get more permanent residency still have to contend with gangs and drugs and other forms of violence. They still have to navigate our education system and our employment system and, if they don't do well enough in those systems, potentially our criminal justice system, all three of which infected with systemic racism that disadvantages them. And, now, they have to do it in a country whose racists have been emboldened by an incompetent man getting three million fewer votes than his opponent. They have to survive in a country that constantly, relentlessly brags about its wealth and power while being the only nation in its economic class that doesn't provide universal healthcare and paid parental leave and has an essentially meaningless minimum wage and many of them will have to do it without having access to the thin shroud we call a social safety net.

Perhaps, our goal shouldn't be sifting through children to decide which of them deserves to stay. Perhaps we shouldn't be spending our time and money arresting and deporting people who just want to work hard for their families. Perhaps we shouldn't turn our backs on the consequences of three or four decades of meddling in the governments of Central and South America.

Instead, perhaps we should strive to become the place all these children were imagining while they road La Bestia.

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Short Story Collection Round-Up

Once again, I find myself with a stack of great books and not enough time to support all of them as much as they deserve. On the one hand, this is always a good problem to have; despite everything like [insert today's daily fucking disaster], the world is producing and publishing a ton of great literature. I'd always rather be pulling my hair out trying to find a way to write about all the books that deserve attention than scratching my head trying to come up with content. But on the other hand, I'm surrounded by books that deserve support (feel free to read this as “writers who deserve money,”) and I know there just isn't the media space for it.

Perhaps with the resurgence of indie bookstores, newspapers and other media outlets will also begin realizing that the coverage of books does more for their communities than helping book clubs make their next selection. Book coverage provides space for a broader exchange of ideas, a starting point for wider conversations about important issues, and an avenue for providing in depth information and context for events, ideas, and controversies. Perhaps the success of online book coverage and podcasts along with the return of independent bookstores will motivate local media to return to book coverage and writers will no longer have to sacrifice adorable woodland creatures in the hopes of inducing a mention on NPR. Perhaps the state of political discourse in this country and the obvious catastrophic consequences of that discourse, will awaken managing editors to how important book-type thinking is to making smart political decisions and show them they have a responsibility to bring books and book-type thinking to their communities.

But, until then, I'll do what little I can, including these round ups. One important note: I haven't read every story in the collections mentioned below, but I was excited by what I did read. If you're a fan of short fiction, you'll find a lot to be excited about in this list. (Though, if you're a fan of short fiction you might already have heard of these.) If you're not, I'm sure there will be a book in here you might want to try.

Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar
This is one of the books that I was reading and enjoying when the election shattered my reading brain for, oh, let's say a quarter. For a few years, I kept reading short stories in lit mags and anthologies that seemed to cram moments of magical realism into their narrative because...I don't know, maybe there was a trend I missed or maybe the authors hadn't figured out a better way to imply the magic inherent in daily life when viewed through the lens of literature, or maybe they were just sick of all the wannabe Carvers cluttering their workshops with long, hard talks, over rapidly diminishing whiskey bottles.

But Jarrar's magical realism is successful, feeling natural in the moment that you're reading, while also revealing the fundamental strangeness of existence. And it's good enough to be the conference read for Grub Street's Muse and the Marketplace.

Massive Cleansing Fire by Dave Housley
Dave Housley's collection is like a cross between Cormac McCarthy and Lydia Davis. (Yes, that is a sentence you just read.) Mixing the flash fiction form and occasional analytical narrative distance of Davis, with the scorched-earth lyricism of McCarthy, while using the narrative frame of always encroaching flames, Housley's stories create a new and piercing perspective on our current slow-motion apocalypse. I mean, one of the longer stories is called “Seven Clowns Before the Explosion,” for fuck's sake. That alone is worth the price of admission.

The collection also has an interesting structure, as Housley circles around and re-approaches ideas, images, and situations. “The Fires” series examines the last moments before a mysterious and relentless fire consumes the situation. “Those People” and “You People” examine a black man on a celebrity cruise featuring a Paula Deen style character, complete with public racist remarks, and “The Combat Photographer” series looks at a combat photographer adjusting and not adjusting to life without the constant approach of fire. Too often, the phrase “linked stories,” is marketing speak using either tenuous connections or repeated characters to grasp at novel-level sales, but Massive Cleansing Fire does it the right way, using the variety inherent in a collection of short-stories to explore topics in a way the singular perspective of a novel really can't.

A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson
I've been circling Evenson's short fiction for awhile now after reading his dark, cynical, depressing, can't-tear-your-eyes-away sci-fi novel Immobility (I also recently read and really enjoyed his novella on “identity in a poisoned world where the remaining 'people' (if they can be called that) exist as identities in single brain” sci fi novel The Warren). And they're published by Coffee House, so you know they're going to be good. As someone who has dabbled in, but never executed, pulpy genre writing, I'm intrigued by someone who can move between such different styles of thinking.

You can tell they're written by the same brain however, as the stories in A Collapse of Horses have a similar darkness and cynicism, just without the narrative shield of a radiation poisoned planet. In the short stories, you have to confront the grimness head on. But, there is a kind of beauty to this darkness, something in the marks left on the world by the struggle of life that transfixes the eye. Evenson's stories are like those black and white pictures of the elderly who wear the contours of their lives in the wrinkles on their faces or like aerial photographs of abandoned quarries.

(Oh, I once tweeted that I would love to write a video-game with Evenson. I stand by that wild flight of fancy.)

Kingdom of the Young by Edi Meidav
The first couple of stories in Meidav's collection immediately reminded me of Donald Barthelme. There are lots of different ways to be weird, and I've always believed that freedom for weirdness can be most easily explored in short fiction where you aren't required to sustain your weirdness for the length of the novel. In short stories (and poetry but in a different way, and also essays, but in an even more different way) you can present something that is both complete and just a dabble into some weird idea you had.

The same probably also goes for the emotion of “unsettling.” There aren't that many novels that explore that slightly off-kilter emotion of being “unsettled,” and those that do, tend use it as a precursor or component of fear rather than as a complete emotion in itself. Meidav's short stories are the best kind of weird and unsettling.

Calamities by Renee Gladman
I'm still not sure I've figured out what Calamities is a collection of, or even, if it's a collection at all. Each little “prose object” could be a self-contained short story or a chapter in a novel. Or a chapter in a book-length essay. Or all three. Or something else I haven't imagined. But whatever they are they're brilliant and I've been wanting to tell you all about it.

Each of the untitled sections begins with the line “I began the day,” and goes, well, somewhere. Sometimes through a relatively banal almost “Dear Diary,” series of events, sometimes through critical, narrative, or creative considerations, and sometimes to places that don't fit into any neat categorization. But that's why I love Gladman's work. We naturally categorize things and there are good and bad results at that tendency to sift, organize, and label. On top of all the self-contained ideas and images, Calamities forces us to examine that drive.

Prose-poem-essays? Grammar-tized thought-chunks? Or maybe I'll just stick with “prose objects.”