Altered States at UC Berkeley

Over the weekend I attended an interdisciplinary conference at UC Berkeley called "Altered States: Metamorphosis, Epiphany, Revolution" put on by the Comparative Lit. department. Thanks to Anthony, who is in the Comp. Lit PhD program at UC Riverside and drove all day with me on Friday, I was able to hear several papers by graduate students and see Amy Hollywood of Harvard Divinity do a presentation she calls “Don’t Touch Me,” which is about 40% scholarship, 40% creative performance, and 20% feminist deconstruction of both scholarship and performance. My Dad came in from Alameda and spent the day in the front row with us. In the spirit of a post from the second week of camp this past summer, I’ve been noticing again that my concept of “fun,” and therefore how I describe what I enjoy doing, differs quite a bit from most people I meet.

For instance. We were at the conference on Saturday from 9:30 am until 5:30pm. We got three breaks, all of them truncated by panels that went long and Q&A sessions that spilled over. At the end, we nibbled brie and crackers and tried to clarify things with panelists, asked them questions, discussed the talks with each other. On the walk back to the car, I was animated, elated, excited! That was so FUN! I kept saying. Fun because Anth and Dad were there to talk with me. Fun because I think Amy Hollywood is doing a brilliant, layered, strange piece of scholarship with “Don’t Touch Me,” and it makes me hopeful about the state of the academy. Fun because Brook Henkel, from Columbia, who presented a paper called “The Mysticism of Film: Cinematic Visions in Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törleß” spent fifteen minutes telling me more about his project and engaging in some lively argumentation. I think the experience of learning, the physical moment of “Aha!” that occurs when new information, new categories, new connections are made, is fun. It’s pleasurable. It energizes me. Hence, eight hours of paper presentations later, I was bouncing down the streets of Berkeley like I’d just drank a pot of coffee. (I suppose I had come close to it, anyway, over the course of the day.)

Henkel’s paper was particularly interesting to me because of the confluence of issues I also think/read/write about: sexuality, adolescence, and what Musil calls the Other Condition, which is a type of consciousness reserved for visionary, or “altered” moments. Henkel reads Musil’s character of Törleß as someone obsessed with externally confirming his experience, who distrusts his own “visions” (which are written in such a was as to seem cinematic) unless he can somehow validate them in the experience of someone else. I asked Henkel, as we stood too close to the trash can and prevented everyone from casually dumping their paper plates in the pile without acknowledging us and our conversation, if he thought that was a condition of adolescence, a normal condition for everyone, or some kind of pathology. He thought about it. “I think everyone has this desire to some degree, likely beginning in adolescence,” he said, “but this character is obsessed.” So visionary, or “altered state” experiences are fundamentally frustrating (and ultimately, truly maddening for some) because by their nature they flout three basic desires: the desire to control when and where they happen, the desire to remember their wisdom perfectly, and the desire to articulate them adequately to others. How are we to use the wisdom gained from our time crossing into the “secret, unnoticed life of things” if we have trouble remembering and articulating it once we’ve crossed back over into normal life? Henkel seemed unperplexed by this question, but he liked my “irritation.” I told him I wasn’t irritated, I was caught in what seemed to me a very noble frustration. We agreed that the problem of bringing useful wisdom back from the Other Condition was likely only to be solved by those who cross over and back regularly. One must practice having visions, then.

This conversation dovetailed nicely with a question I asked of one of the conference coordinators: why no panels about drugs? What a long and rich artistic tradition we have of writers and filmmakers using psychotropics to create deeply affecting works. Seems that they belong at an Altered States conference, deserve to be critically read and viewed by people this skilled. “We got some papers on that,” she said, “but they just weren’t that good.” Wow. So the American phobia of DRUGS has not yet been destroyed by the bright light of rationality in the academy, and the myriad artifacts of human explorations into altered states induced by injesting substances both legal and illegal, synthetic and organic, culturally traditional and culturally taboo got lumped into a “that.” She defended the conference by reminding me that there was a paper on Dionysian cults. Yes, that’s true, I said. But I am still surprised that there wasn’t enough good scholarship submitted on the Beats, or writers of the psychedelic movement, or even the opium-smoking artists of Paris and Vienna in the 30s and 40s. It seems those kinds of altered states still, still, STILL, are considered second-rate next to an ecstatic vision from God, which most of these academics don’t even believe in. Strange, and disturbing, since that indicates even those who study the altered state, Other Condition, visionary “trope” in literature are cynics, not people deeply fascinated by the human potential for expansive, ecstatic experience. Or maybe they are, and there was just some little politics going on that I’m unaware of, where scholars of early Christianity and ancient mysticism don’t like the kids from the other side of the timeline, and it hurt them enough to invite Sarah Juliet Lauro, whose paper was titled “The Zombie Martyrs: The Contagious Spirit of Christian Conversion Narratives.”

Shifting gears: What I loved about Amy Hollywood’s work was that it simultaneously did the job of teaching me about things I didn’t know and derailing my models for “knowing.” Her piece did not explicitly address the idea of the altered state, rather, it put us all in one! Where we had been doing the receiving work of listening to formal arguments, we were suddenly being asked to do the active work of connection in the face of a poetic, fragmentary experience. Hollywood dealt with elements, not points or issues. Her elements were sometimes historical figures (such as John Edwards, and his oft-forgotten wife Sarah Pierpont Edwards), sometimes objects, sometimes texts (Howe’s Frame Structures), sometimes the strange convergence of object and text (crumpled pages, destroyed poems), and she framed this renegade work with a quote about the sublime, which takes place “where works touch.” I call it renegade because she can’t publish it in its current form due to having no permissions from the sources she quotes. Another surprise! I applauded her for bringing a maverick work-in-progress to us. I’ve been reading Stanley Aronowitz’s book The Knowledge Factory, which asserts mostly the death of learning and the stagnation of the humanities, so this crack in the decay, where Hollywood’s bright little weed poked through, thrilled me.

Hollywood reminded me of one of the reasons why I started writing on gorgeous curiosity lo these many months ago, and she called it “meditation on the infinitesimal detail.” This is the way I’m learning to watch films from Anthony via Margaret Waller at UCR. This is a Derridean activity of seeing Big Picture in Very Small Piece, of allowing for fluidity and connectivity between objects and experiences that seem to lend themselves to categorization and separation. Amy Hollywood expressed another of my work’s grand projects: how to tell a story and also disrupt the complacency a narrative can generate. “We should have suspicion of any history that is error-free,” she said. I think this is why she seemed so happy: if the anxiety of perfectionism is replaced by the careful consideration of the meaning of everything (misspelled word, missed appointment, missing link, wrong thought, wrong shirt) not in a Freudian, pathologizing way, but in a deeply curious, compassionate, and creative way, then our constant engagement, which for many is an “altered” state, becomes fabric, grain and weave, the embedded functioning of our lives. We achieve at least one of Musil’s concerns: the ability to move fluidly in and out of the Other Condition. And then comes the desire and mandate to articulate. I recognize that I didn’t discuss the papers on Political and Formal Transformation. I didn’t discuss the papers on Monstrosity and Divinity. There’s just so much, so much.

Susie Bright Lights Up The Booksmith

I have extensively borrowed a book by Susie Bright, "Full Exposure," by which I mean, I never returned the book to a friend with whom I no longer have contact. I moved the book from an apartment in Hollywood to my parent's garage to Cambridge, MA to Allston to Brookline to Cambridge, again, over the course of six years, and never read it.

Ask me why. Go ahead. I have no answer, at all. I'm actually quite ashamed. But now it's signed, to Vanessa, so I guess I've effectively stolen it.

After listening to her read and speak I think Susie Bright has been a hero of mine this whole time, and I just didn't know it. I read Full Exposure in anticipation of her Best American Erotica 2008 event, and had that uncanny experience of deja vu that happens when a writer articulates one of my own dearly-held but heretofore idiosyncratic beliefs: like the notion that all creativity is linked to, springs from, or is in some way interacting with the erotic body.

She was electric and charming, in her home-sewn dress and Earth boots, hanging out in front of the podium instead of back in the Green Room, discussing the death of her father, reading a story about a religious sexual sadist, and telling us of her admiration for her teenage daughter all in one moment. She was cozy in her body, her project, and her honesty, and I admired her not just for the work she's done to help people quit their prudishness, but for the embodiment of genuine performance she gave to us, a gift of love without the appearance of it being laborious.

At home afterwards, I opened up my very own advance copy of Boink: College Sex by The People Having It, a beautifully produced, glossy paperback goldmine of gorgeous sexy photos, sassy erotica, and deeply truthful essays by young people from Grand Central Publishing, coming out in February. I'm featured on the cover, and a story of mine made it into the collection (hence the plug!). The coincidence of these events, Susie and Boink on the same day, is far too delicious to ignore. In the generally exhausting conservatism of Boston's Higher Education Universe, where I spend most of my waking hours, I found a powerful reminder of such a large piece of my mission: bringing the juice.

It's possible that my involvement with Boink will have ripple effects in my career. But what is exciting about Susie Bright is that she's been able to MAKE a career of what other writers try to hide, do under another name, or do half-assed. I'd like to start a new genre called "philosmut," where the thinking is Derridean and the sex is blood-rushingly explicit. An experimental style that involves very sexy characters with HUGE brains. It's out there, I'm seeing bits and pieces in these anthologies. I think the army of writers willing to try is large, but the battlefield on which they're allowed to march is small. I know Susie says there's way more magazines now than there used to be, but write more than one or two sexy scenes in your novel, if you're a young female trying to debut, and it simply can't be mass marketed, unless you're willing to get a silly cartoon slapped on the cover and be told you're another machine producing "chick lit." Write a sexy scene that's not strictly hetero-focused, and you're automatically a queer writer relegated to a single stack in an independent store. Of course some great books get through, but hell, that's always been true. I'm feeling fiercely committed to seeing some more change in this situation during my writing career.

So Susie Bright is still relevant, necessary, and a wonder to behold. I wanted to invite her over to drink tea and tell stories and laugh, discuss issues that make us furious, cook a meal that makes us swoon, and read some philosmut together.

The Art of Asking Questions

A week ago, I piled into a sweaty auditorium with 300 other literati at the Boston Public Library to listen to Salman Rushdie give a lecture. Sir Rushdie discussed the "human scale" of novels, and how dealing with political issues or social climes in a novel directly is more and more possible now. He claimed that traditionally, writers explained a character's life from the inside, the "character is destiny" trope, but that now, acknowledging the "outside" (i.e. class, race, nationality, community, etc.) is also important. The intervention of outside forces, often political or more recognizable state-run forces, into the private lives of novel characters seems more possible, from a technical standpoint, than it used to. "How do we deal with this kind of material, considering that our work can so quickly become dated?" he asked.

The answer, for Rushdie, is that a novel either gets better or worse. If it gets worse, it is because it is only topical, not great in any other way. If it gets better, it is because it is a great example of form, contains excellent character development, in the face of its topicality.

I took notes, learned things, and wanted to ask Rushdie to elaborate on a point he'd made about
how current writers incorporate material of the social & political spheres differently than the political writers of the past. I raised my hand with all the other excitable fans when it was time for Q & A.

I never got a chance to ask my questions. This is due, in large part, to the way everyone else who asked a question sucked up valuable minutes, minutes I could have spent listening to Rushdie talk, telling their own opinion or story before they got to their "question," which was usually not a question at all, but a plea to be agreed with. Someone would begin with "Don't you think that it's just a matter of..." and I would put my hand down again, again, again. I may never have been called on anyway, I realize. But I did start reflecting on the questions that were being asked.

They were bad. This is not a problem that is relegated to those particular kinds of social hangers-on who want a chance to have their literary hero look them in the face. The problem of bad question-asking is visible in every area of my life--in my students, adminsitrators, fellow faculty, fellow writers, people in performance, friends, summer camp staff, and so on. Bad question-asking is a product of bad note-taking, bad reading, bad listening, and bad logic. It's not just narcissim, although for some that plays a part. It's also a failure of education.

A good question after a lecture references some piece of the lecture directly, or some general theme of the lecture, interprets it, and then draws out a new idea from it. For example, "Mr. Rushdie, you mentioned that great novels have both a literary meaning and a political meaning. I'm curious as to the relationship between those meanings--must they always be different? Do they change? Can you provide an example of a literary meaning and a political meaning in a particular text?" Good questions don't seek merely to reinforce the asker's personal beliefs. Good questions, asked in front of a group, open up discussion that other listeners can feel included in. Good questions prompt the answerer to reconsider their own ideas, language, and delivery.

I don't know where and when students are taught to ask good questions. My writing students have to brainstorm questions for their research projects. I've certainly trained my camp staff to do "active listening," but in general , people see personal conversations as separate from public debate. I don't see the big difference, at least when it comes to the best ways to elicit information from others.

At one point, a man got on the microphone and told a very long story about how he'd been ostracized from his cult religion because he wrote a book denouncing their doctrines. "I'm just like you, Rushdie," he said. "I've been opressed for my beliefs too."

"I'll try to find a question in there," Rushdie said, and proceeded to discuss the important of writing novels even under tyrannical governments. He quoted Bellow, "For God's sake, open the universe a little more."

It was a graceful way to evade a self-interested non-questioner. So these are my two new skills to practice: formulating better questions, and finding good questions where they may not have been intended.

An Evening with the Torture Expert

Darius Rejali is a professor of political science at Reed College, an international expert on torture, and author of the forthcoming book "Torture and Democracy." (Princeton UP)

Also, he's one of my favorite academics to have dinner with. I'm lucky that Darius was my brother-in-law's thesis advisor, because that means when he visits Boston, we all get to sit around a table and chat about torture.

Talking with Darius is like simultaneously reading a great history book and watching a Wes Anderson movie. He's filled with knowledge, and he's trying to get it out of him in ways that are at turns hilarious, opaque, revelatory, complex, and/or shocking. I learn content from him, but even more than that, I learn about a way of being a scholar that truly appeals to me.

During his "Reed on the Road" lecture on Monday night, Darius dropped this in as an aside: "People ask me how can I study something so grim? And I tell them it makes the beauty in the world that much more beautiful."

Not squeamish, not afraid, not dismayed, but filled with curiosity and a longing to understand the processes by which human beings destroy each other, for the purpose of ceasing that destruction? Yes. Oh yes.

Thanks Rejali, for giving me context to the Kerry-stun-gun episode. Thanks for reminding me that all social processes are simultaneously miraculous and studiable. Thanks for caring enough about human rights to write a 900-page book on the history of how we've violated them.