KIRPAL
GORDON: First off, congratulations, Mel, on your new book, The Encyclopedia
of Rebels, published by San Diego City Works Press. It moves gestalt-like in
serial form(s) toward a full inclusion, and I thought of Robert Duncan’s lines
in “Rites of Participation,” “To compose such a symposium of the whole, such a
totality, all the old excluded orders must be included. The female, the proletariat,
the foreign; the animals and the vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown;
the criminal and failure---all that has been outcast and vagabond must return
to be admitted in the creation of what we consider we are.”
I’ve been interested in past radicals for
a long time: what they accomplished, and to what degree they were fucked over
in the end--like “Big Bill” Haywood, leader of
mine workers unions, and the IWW, who had to flee to Russia or face life imprisonment here,
once WW1 and all the anti-sedition acts kicked into high gear. From all reports, life there was lonely and
even more alcoholic in the few years he had left--he never learned the language
for one thing--though he was an official Soviet hero. As I got into reading
about some of the radicals’ deaths--suicides, madhouses--the more pressing and
depressing it was to unearth more stories.
I began looking for successes, like Jane Addams: these people tended to
start out with money, education, and political connections, of course, and they
also had a more liberal, reformist approach to social evils. Still, it wasn’t invariably like that.
By the time I came around to writing the
last and longest piece which I conceived as the title piece for this
collection, I was trying to cover the widest array of rebels’ stories possible:
though the main thrust concerned John Brown and a discussion of some lesser
known abolitionists, and aspects of the Civil War--like the horrendous rate of
vets’ post-war mental illness. I think
if the book seems inclusive in ways that you’re suggesting, it may chiefly be
due to this last piece which goes into the background and accomplishments of
people like Mother Jones, Upton Sinclair, Dalton Trumbo as well as many
individuals who I knew nothing about--in some cases, I didn’t even know of
their existences--until I started my research.
KIRPAL
GORDON: It’s fascinating research delivered at a moment in time in which our
need for progressive political thinking could not be greater. You are certainly
“cooking” texts! However, much to this reader’s satisfaction, you blend &
bend non-fiction elements---biography, history, personal admiration for your
subjects, gossip, journal---with the tropes of fiction & drama to create a
hybrid text that indeed does poetic justice to the wide range of your American
rebels.
One thing that much enlivens & humanizes these rebels is
your own political activity as a grassroots activist in San Diego . Another is a very tender account
of your relationship with Kathy Acker from college days & beyond. A third
is your decades of teaching at UCSD. Would you comment?
The easiest piece to make into a comedy
was the radio play, based on an actual one, where Superman fights the Nazis’
fifth columnists. For the sake of the
book, I further punched out Lois Lane as a well educated feminist
heroine, tirelessly spouting off about women’s roles in Nazi Germany. Jimmy Olsen finds a woodsy fuck buddy in this
script, and by the end Lois and Superman are acting out scenes from Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf, as George and Martha, which morph into their speaking
as the country’s first presidential couple, bragging about how much land and
how many slaves they own.
The book’s lengthy title piece took a long
time to write: I tried a lot of different approaches to the humor sections
which all turned out to be silly, as I kept suspecting, and as my friend and
invaluable reader, Stephen-Paul Martin, confirmed. Then I started thinking about using anecdotes
from my own past in the New Left, and to a lesser extent family anecdotes,
revealing the chasms between my political beliefs and those of my regular,
liberal-ish Jewish family. I felt like
these anecdotes were both informative and sort of absurd (in retrospect)--like
our plans to stop a supply train during Vietnam, or some of the civil rights
sit-ins that ended in sexual encounters (after the sit in was over)!
Once I started doing this, I realized that
much of the impetus for writing about, and trying to understand the motives of,
these admirable radicals of the past was very personal, intimately tied
into the need to re-assess my own history: falling away from my activist past;
dealing with the usual difficulties and frustrations of trying to make a living
teaching and continuing to write. (This is basically the thrust of the entire
piece, “Saved by Hippolyte Havel, Anarchist,” which concerned a frustrated
period of time when I’d stopped writing, and was re-inspired by reading about
this wild guy in pre-WW1 New York.)
Since I’d been teaching at both UCSD and
San Diego State for many decades in somewhat precarious lecturer positions,
conditions of employment there naturally played a big role in this
reassessment--especially because I was writing it in the midst of California’s,
and the UC system’s, economic downswing. In “Encyclopedia,” I came around to
considering ways that teaching provided me with a substitute for activism, as
did the actual writing about radical figures from the past who I tended to
idealize.
The piece about Kathy Acker was initially
written soon after her death, and was therapeutic for me; I expanded it when
putting the ms. together, and its tone is really quite different from the rest
of the book. It was meant as an homage
to her but also as a clear-eyed-as-possible, psychological assessment of the
life circumstances involved in shaping her.
Because I had known Kathy up close for so long, I’ve often found a lot
of people’s assumptions and writings about her, both when she was alive and
since, to be weird (though her “presentation of self” certainly invited this):
myopic, self-serving, inaccurate, just off-the-wall For one thing, I wanted to set the record
straight. Her life and work remain
totally fascinating and hugely significant to me. The tragedy of her death was
compounded by her refusal to have chemo or radiation after her mastectomy, or
to even consider that--partly due to (understandable) paranoia about the
medical establishment.
KIRPAL
GORDON: I find the comic elements in your character descriptions serve as
compassionate reminders to see the humanity behind the mesmerizing,
larger-than-life quality. Keeping them human helps limit the hero-ification of
these radicals which indeed helps us understand better what it means to speak
truth to power. For example, I have always admired-feared the John Brown solution
& to read of how different generations of African-American leaders have
thought of him really enriched my understanding. Ditto on your anecdotes from your
time in the New Left; they contextualized the struggle & brought it up to
date. And yes, Hippolyte Havel roaming the West Village is not a detour. Like his bohemian
neighborhood, he’s a destination!
Regarding your remark that teaching has provided you with a
substitute for activism, how have you found student responses to be over the
decades? Is our horrific legacy of racism, nationalism & elitism so
institutionalized as to be rarely addressed?
For
awhile, in the “Encyclopedia” piece, I thought about trying to explicitly
sketch out some of the ways these figures intersected with my own activities,
but I decided against that approach. I strongly believe what James Baldwin says
in his preface of Evidence of Things Not Seen, his brilliant meditation
on the Atlanta child murders: “History, I contend, is the present--we,
with every breath we take, every move we make, are History.” So I did
want to draw out the kinds of historical legacies and immediacies which you
mentioned regarding Langston Hughes and John Brown: Hughes had 2 relatives who
fought and died with Brown, and he saw Brown as a hugely important figure.
For instance, Upton Sinclair was one of
the founders of the League of Industrial Democracy (so was another rebel in the
book, Florence Kelley) which was the progenitor of the much diminished
Socialist Party led by Michael Harrington (who wrote the very significant study
of American poverty, The Other America), Bayard Rustin and others: that
was the group that SDS spun off from--rather violently. At that time, the
Socialist Party refused to condemn the Vietnam War--one reason that Bayard
Rustin began to fall out of favor with the left. When they realized they’d
spawned this radical young group, the Party tried to hide their mailing lists:
needless to say, quite a schism rapidly developed.
About the students: it’s hard for me to
generalize since I’ve been teaching mostly lit/writing majors and minors who
are atypical for this science school. UCSD is set up with 6 different colleges
which largely seems to me a way to maintain a top-heavy bureaucracy. The core
courses are different in each college (along with some graduation
requirements). A few of those courses seem
to involve some history of U.S. racism.
But, to generalize, I do I feel
that the lit and writing students are often bright, creative and motivated, but
lack information, especially about history: particularly problematic, they don’t
understand that such a perspective is absolutely crucial. Often, a poli sci,
history or ethnic studies major in a writing workshop will know a lot more than
the lit majors (the communications majors seem to know even less). (Unfortunately, the lit majors usually
haven’t read much literature either, the Dept. leaning rather heavily toward
cultural studies.) For our class readings, I try to clarify the biographical,
social and historical contexts--and to pick works from different eras and
geographical regions of the world. But I
also emphasize the importance of a close reading of the text, a skill that
often seems to be lacking--and one which I believe can actually be taught.
A few years ago, some very telling events
regarding student racism happened at UCSD.
It started with the “Compton cook-out” which was a major party
at a large apartment complex near school where students, especially frat
members (happily, UCSD doesn’t have frat houses on campus--yet) occupied many
apartments: the party was apparently spread out, each apartment having a
related theme. An unbelievably offensive
invitation went out on line, quickly going viral locally, offering women
guidelines on how to come dressed, and acting like, ’ho’s. There were photos of mostly Asian students in
blackface and fright wigs. Some students at school started to react, there were
demonstrations; soon 2 major petitions appeared on line, with (if I remember
correctly) about an equal number of signers: one was this is appalling, the other,
what’s-the-big-deal-get-over-yourself.
A number of weird events followed, some of
which got a fair amount of national media attention, to the consternation of
the administration: UCSD already had the smallest percentage of African
American students of all the UC campuses.
A few black students residing in the dorms were being taunted, and they,
not the offenders, were placed in other housing facilities; someone put a
KKK hood over the statue of Dr. Seuss (a major La Jolla benefactor to the school); a noose
was found hanging in the library.
Several weeks later, an anonymous student confessed, claiming that she
and her friends just happened upon a small piece of rope; she was simply
astonished that one of them could make a noose out if it. They went to study in the library, and she
forgot all about it, leaving it on a table (it was found hanging from a
bookcase). (Supposedly, she was suspended for a quarter.) One campus, closed
circuit TV program applauded the Compton cook-out, taking the opportunity to
show many of the blackface photos again, and to use “the n word” as often as
humanly possible.
The school newspaper took a very rational
line, condemning what was going on and pointing out that many of the students
didn’t even have the information to make a semiotic analysis of what a noose
meant to African Americans. Worse, they apparently didn’t care enough to inform
themselves--slavery was a long time ago, and hey, this is the age of reverse
discrimination. (I was proud that two of
the main editors were my students!) All
along, I kept ranting (undoubtedly, with many colleagues), that this was indeed
a failure of education. Although I hate
the expression, “a teachable moment,” since it applies to virtually every
moment we’re breathing, it did seem like a time for real discussion. I have no idea how much of that went on
outside of specific humanities and social science classes. The administration
staged a very lame “teach in”: black students and others spontaneously walked
out of it, and held their own version.
The Black Student Union came up with a list of demands, a few of which
were met--mostly involving hiring more administrators, in the capacity of
overseeing diversity hiring.
KIRPAL
GORDON: Your remarks on grim John Brown with his whipping of son & self
remind me how much we need these correctives to our hero-ifying impulses. As
for UCSD, real discussion about real people based on an actual event currently
happening on campus is an incredible opportunity for a group “ex ducare”
experience. In this era of terrorism, it is hard to imagine American college
students unaware of the implications of a noose or a KKK hood; they aren’t
merely emblems of the terrorism we perpetrate on black people---they’re the
evidence of the crime yet to be brought to justice.
Which connects to your notion that a close reading of text is
a teachable event for without understanding language, context, nuance, history,
symbolism & psychology, we would not come to appreciate that we make
history every day, as Baldwin said. Which leads me to ask you, now that we’ve started a
new year, who from 2013 would you nominate for entry into your encyclopedia of
rebels?
As for a 2013 list, I feel like I don’t
know enough about global politics to begin to do justice to such a task. (Similarly, I know much less about who’s
writing fiction today than, say, what novels were written in the U.S. and Europe in the 19th century on
which I’m totally fixated.) Offhand, I
can’t think of any politicians, elected or otherwise, who’d make my list,
though the late Paul Wellstone (was he assassinated?) and Elizabeth
Warren are certainly positive forces.
On top of my list of anti-politicians would
be Ed Snowden, who has actually been getting a lot of positive press
lately. For instance, the exteriors of
numbers of buses in D.C. have big THANK YOU, ED SNOWDEN ads on them. Getting government out of individuals’
private lives is apparently an idea that people of virtually all political
stripes can get behind. And tapping cell phones of leaders of other countries,
aside from being a poor strategy to win friends and influence people, is just
plain tacky. Of course, I would also put Julian Assange and the Wiki-leaks crew
on that list, as well as Chelsea Manning--though I must say to do what she did
while in the military seems tantamount to a death wish.
Mostly the list would be composed of
individuals whose names I don’t know, and probably never will. People like
Grace Lee Boggs, and many Detroit activists who are trying to build
self-sustaining infrastructures--urban farms, soup kitchens, housing and
alternative schools--in the middle of near total economic collapse. Like the
admirable Zapatistas, I think these people have given up on representative
democracy, seeing it as a fiction of the “Empire of Money,” as they term it:
they’re all about participatory democracy.
Subcomandante Marcos would surely be on that list.
While individuals in Detroit and Chiapas
are already operating from close to ground zero, I assume there will continue to be severe, more
or less worldwide economic crises since very little manufacturing is left in this country, and the giant financial
institutions are barely regulated. The
existence of alternative modes of survival would, at least, give people some
sense of possibilities.
I know a little about a number of
significant movements in Latin America to redistribute arable land to the poor, and also to
take over defunct factories. I think the Right to the City movement has
resulted in squatters being able to stay on land, and improve it. In places
like Chicago and Cleveland, there have been some successful worked-owned
businesses springing up when companies have failed or outsourced their entire
workforce.
Smart political commentators like Naomi
Klein and Amy Goodman serve very useful functions. I also think there are many progressive
aspects of the slow food movement. For
that matter, my hat is off to any teacher who can continue to work creatively
within the current horrendous, assessment-driven education system of No Child
Left Behind aka Race to the Top. In other words, there are a lot of people on
the front lines as the Empire slides into further decline.
KIRPAL
GORDON: So how can Giant Steps readers stay better informed on your writing
(your earlier book with San Diego City Press Works, The Unmaking of
Americans: 7 Lives, is killer) and thinking and teaching and activism?
Many thanks, Kirpal, for the opportunity
to spout off. While parts of The
Encyclopedia of Rebels itself are a kind of meta-commentary on how and why
it was written, I really appreciate the chance to review my own processes in
writing this book.
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