Studying the clouds

As I believe I've mentioned from time to time, I'm not exactly a live-in-the-moment kind of gal. More of a dread-the-next-moment type. My catalogue of worries, personal and political, is endless, expectation of doom, personal and political, certain. In this I am a terrible communist indeed, and it's a constant struggle to push down my innate pessimism. In my own defense let me say that I do make this effort earnestly, I do foment revolutionary optimism in my own psyche daily, so I hope I get some credit for that. Then too, there's this contradiction: I am also an inveterate fantasist, a daydreamer. In the midst of everything else, I'm quite capable of stopping to, if not smell the roses, confabulate imaginary flowers. For my feverish little brain is always concocting all sorts of story lines, for me, my family, my comrades, my class, the struggle, the planet--story lines that are, come to think of it, fully imbued with hope. Perhaps, then, the pessimism is merely the surface layer. Perhaps my daydreaminess reveals a fundament of optimism after all.

These musings are occasioned by the book I've just started: The Cloud Collector's Handbook by Gavin Pretor-Pinney. This is a delightful little volume of education and enlightenment about, yes, clouds, in all their beauteous variety. Its purpose, like that of the Cloud Appreciation Society, which Pretor-Pinney founded, is to get us to look up. To stop, stand still, look up and marvel. The photographs are stunning, the pages are informative, and the writing is delightfully droll. I think I'm going to have a ball with this one, and I just might take up the challenge and begin keeping a record of cloud sightings.

"Cloudgazing," the author notes, "is the preferred pastime of daydreamers, wonderers, and poetic souls the world over." If I've just outed myself as among this company, so be it. I think cloudgazing, like its cousin stargazing, like birdwatching or flower appreciation (hey, I think the orchid show is coming soon!) is a wholly defensible activity for a revolutionary socialist. It's restorative. It lightens the load and bolsters resolve, or at least that's how it works for me. There's this, too: the clouds belong to everyone. They're one realm the greedy bosses are incapable of appropriating for their own profit. When I look up and appreciate their snowy formations, I know that my sisters and brothers around the world, all the billions of oppressed and exploited masses, can do the same. We share the cloud-filled skies, as one day we'll share the earthly world's riches.

A life of tender rue

My best friend is a schoolteacher and a big reader like me and we talk about books a lot. She recently read and recommended Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum. She didn't rave. She was in fact rather restrained. But she said that the main character is a teacher and that as a teacher she'd found it very well done. Since she knows that my mother was a schoolteacher too and that between the two of them, my mom and my friend, I've been deep in the lives of teachers my whole life and know something about the shape of those lives, she thought I too might enjoy this book.

I more than enjoyed it. It's divine. After reading it, I called my friend and told her I'd loved it and asked why she'd been so subdued in her recommendation. She said that she'd been unsure whether someone who's not herself a schoolteacher could appreciate the exquisite job Shun-Lien Bynum does. How well and truly she depicts the dailyness of a teacher's life. Which is exactly what this talented young writer achieves. But what I found more miraculous is how she evokes a teacher's consciousness as she moves through her life, during and outside the school day. For teaching, I think, more than any other job, defines, consumes, is the worker. I work as a secretary but a secretary is not who I am. A teacher is who my friend is, and who my mother was, awake and asleep, winter and summer, teaching or sleeping or grocery shopping. This teacher-ness is conveyed beautifully in the linked stories that make up Ms. Hempel Chronicles.

As a communist reader, I often lament the dearth of books that focus on characters at work, that is, characters as workers. For most of us spend most of our waking hours at work. Work takes up the biggest chunk of our lives. Why don't more books delve into this? Yeah yeah we all know why; see almost every post on this blog ranting against bourgeois culture. Here we have a fine counter to my lament. I don't know whether the author herself would see it this way--that this is a book about a worker, in some sense the ur-worker in terms of how much of the worker's life is spent at work, for teachers spend more hours per day and per week working than any other worker I know of, this is one of the secrets that only teachers and those who share their lives know, the long long day at school and then the nightly and weekendlong work grading papers,  writing report cards and so on--but to me this is a big part of Shun-Lien Bynum's accomplishment. This portrayal of what life is like for the workers known as teachers. (Note to the governors of Wisconsin, Ohio, New York, California, the billionaire mayor of New York, and every other politician currently trying to whip up public opinion against teachers so they can keep paying the banks our billions of dollars in tax money instead of a living wage to these most important workers: fuck you, you scum of the earth pigs from hell who've never done a real day's work in your lives!) 

It's not only the work itself that comes through in these pages. It's the joy, the pain, the tender rue, unique to the teacher's life I believe. One thread throughout these Chronicles is Ms. Hempel's chronic sense of underachievement, her feeling that she's somehow missed the main event of her own life and is doomed instead to forever usher others forth toward theirs. This is the teacher's own version of that horrid vicious anti-worker sexist old saw, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." There's no truth to that nasty saying, the inverse is in fact true, that teaching is a special talent, a calling, even, that very few have or can ever hope to master. Still, I think (based on my second-hand experience of two teachers' lives) that many teachers, even (as in the case of my friend and my mom) superbly gifted and universally beloved teachers, wrestle with this demon in their own psychic life, a nagging gnawing refrain of what-ifs, what if I'd gone to medical school instead of teaching junior-high science, what if I'd written that novel instead of teaching high-school English, what if I'd become a cartographer instead of teaching fifth-grade geography, a mathematician instead of teaching fractions to third graders. Ms. Hempel Chronicles reminds me in some ways of the superb Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. The two books both have a schoolteacher main character. They share a linked-stories structure. But where Strout's book was full of ragged painful rage and regret, in Beatrice Hempel we have a more subtle gentle thread running through the pages, the bittersweet love-hate relationship teachers have with their work, their lives.

Which leads me, finally, to my ambivalence about this book's end. (Spoiler alert: stop here if you'd rather read the stories without knowing their destination.) I was saddened, and initially disappointed, to discover in the last piece that Ms. Hempel had left teaching. Oh no, oh damn, I thought. Why not let her work her life away at this hardest, most frustrating and most rewarding of all jobs? Like my mother did, like my best friend is doing as she counts down toward retirement, like so many do, for so little recompense monetary or otherwise, for the love of it when you come down to it, trite though that sounds. I felt let down. Betrayed, even, although that's probably putting it too strongly. On reflection, however, I'm satisfied. Partly because this too is the truth: that many many young teachers leave, especially nowadays faced as they are with the disgusting reactionary regime of forced testing, rigid curricula, ever expanding work loads and class sizes. And I realized, okay, I can accept that this particular teacher's story ends thus. The other reason I came to terms with Ms. Hempel no longer being a teacher is that in this last story she runs into a former student and, through their conversation and her swirling memories and feelings, she and we see her as her students saw her, see how important she was to them, how good she was at what she did, which she never really knew. So there is a note of another kind of rue at the book's close--unless I'm reading too much into it, me with my oversized regard for teachers colored by my love of my best friend and my mother--another sort of what if. What if she'd stayed? What other lives might she have helped shape? It made me wish Ms. Hempel had had a chance to get a pep talk from my mom or my friend, champion complainers about the horrors of their lives as teachers the both of them, but both of them chained to it by true love for their true calling. Maybe these real-life teachers could have persuaded this fictional one to stick it out. Maybe not. This is the hypothetical the end left me musing on, and I can live with that.

When a pointless read is done

Last week I picked up T. Coraghessan Boyle's newest novel, When the Killing's Done, at the library. While it was an adequate diversion for a couple of reading days, mostly it reminded me of why I'd never tried another of his many novels after having read one of his first almost 20 years ago. That book, The Road to Wellville, has to do with the founder of Kellogg's cereal company and of that industry around the turn of the last century. I'm not from Battle Creek but I am from Michigan, and partly because of that the novel piqued my interest, and kept it well enough to read the whole thing through. But I remember it left me with a hollow feeling. I remember feeling as if I had been entertained a bit, not nearly as much as the performer had intended with all his pratfalls and slapstick. I remember feeling that I had just taken a meaningless trip along the surface of something, never dipping underneath to anyplace deep or meaningful.

And so it was again with this latest read. Boyle is an adequate crafter of sentences, and of plot. But his characters are flat. What passes for internal monologue in a book all of whose chapters are written in close-third-person narrative is more like cartoon-balloon "thoughts" than the multidimensional many-layered consciousness through which real humans move and which more interesting writers convey. Nor do we get any meaningful sense of the main characters' motivations. No light shines to let us see beyond the membrane of glibness that wraps all speech and action.

Boyle is a master surface skimmer, and if it's possible this applies even more to the novel's themes than its characters. The story is about a clash between, on the one hand, scientists and conservationists working to defend, restore and maintain endangered species and the eco-balance of a fragile island environment and, on the other hand, animal-rights activists who oppose any such intervention when it entails killing animals of invasive species. The topic intrigued me, it's part of why I checked out the book. Believe me when I tell you I know absolutely nothing more about it after finishing the novel than I did a week ago. I certainly don't know anything at all about the history of these issues, the various movements and how they developed and what class forces they represent, not from this novel that supposedly drops the reader right in the midst of it all. Even without all that, without much information or history or context, I'd have settled for some level of insight into the complexities, confoundments, confusions, the knots and gnarls inherent in this sort of clash of commitments. I didn't get that either. For a writer all of whose books are tagged to some historical or current event or personage—in recent years you've got Kinsey and his sex researchers, you've got the immigration issue, you've got Frank Lloyd Wright and his circle—Boyle seems to have remarkably little to say.

His writing reminded me of no one else as much as Stephen King. Truthfully, though, King's books are more socially conscious than this, and if King's writing doesn't sparkle any shinier, at least his stories do make you feel something, care about somebody.

The haunting

Today, on the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 workers, I'd wanted to post the opening scene of the 1996 movie I'm Not Rappaport. The scene recreates the November 1909 mass meeting of shirtwaist factory workers at the Great Hall of Cooper Union where the all-male union leadership tried to clamp down the surging demand for struggle, only to be overwhelmed by it when the militant Clara Lemlich rushed the stage and, in Yiddish, called for a strike. That was the start of the Uprising of the 20,000. Unfortunately, try as I might, I can't seem to manage to get the video to post here. So if you're interested in watching the scene, follow this link.

Lemlich herself worked at many sweatshops. She'd no sooner be hired than she'd start organizing, and the bosses would fire her. That happened to her at the Triangle, which is why she was no longer working there on March 25, 1911.

Judging by the police barricades set up for blocks, a big crowd is expected for today's commemoration of the Triangle fire centenary. Indeed, from earlier this morning there've been reminders everywhere. As I emerged from the subway at Union Square this morning, I saw people gathering with some kind of shirtwaist imagery, presumably each shirtwaist to honor one of the dead, and they'll be marching in to the ceremony. The sidewalks around the area are chalked up with reminders of the anniversary, ephemeral memorials to the 146. The ceremony itself will feature music, speakers, tolling bells. All this is good. All this is right. To honor. To remember. What is not right is, among other things, the speakers' list. It includes many politicians, chief among them the richest person in New York City and current assailant against the teachers' union and all NYC workers, AKA the mayor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg. How dare he desecrate the memory of my sisters who his brothers the sweatshop bosses murdered! I don't know whether New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is speaking but I'm guessing he is too--and if possible this might be even more of an affront than Bloomberg's presence, as (the Democrat) Cuomo is currently engaged in a self-declared effort to crush the unions in this state.

And so on. Still, thousands of workers will also come, and their presence will lend heartfelt meaning to what would otherwise be a frustratingly hollow commemoration without concrete connection to the real legacy of Clara Lemlich, the shirtwaist workers, and the ghosts of the Triangle. I'll go too, on my lunch hour, to distribute fliers about the May 1 rally for worker and immigrant rights. For me, though, thinking about the Triangle fire is not unique to today. I work not 20 steps away from the building that housed that sweatshop. Every work day I walk past that corner, every work day I walk down the street that on that day 100 years ago was littered with the bodies of women who'd leapt to their deaths, every single day I think about them, and this has been the case for most of the last 30 years. You might say I'm haunted by the Triangle sisters. There's a plaque there, and frequently tourist groups stop and view it, and I often have to tamp down the impulse to harangue them with a rant about the real meaning of that event, which is not about fire laws contrary to the plaque's focus but is about the class struggle. Well I have succumbed to the urge once or twice and let loose a no doubt crazy sounding harangue. I won't today. Today I'll stand and pay my respects and pass out leaflets and listen to the bells and resist succumbing to some maudlin haunted sentimental bilge and instead look to the living struggle, from Egypt to Palestine to the Philippines to Wisconsin, the living struggle that every day avenges these sisters' deaths by capitalism.

Yesterday after work I headed downtown and got there in time to march from City Hall to Wall Street with thousands of students and union members in the "State of Emergency Protest-Day of Rage Against the Cuts." Tomorrow I'll attend an International Working Women's Month event in Harlem. My own activism is extremely limited lately, shamefully so, but when I can make it to activities I do, even if it's just to add another living body to the mass. Which also helps me shake off the haunting. For today, and every day, what the ghosts of the 146--Lizzie Adler, Becky Ostrovsky, Golda Schpunt, Isabella Tortorelli and the rest--cry out for is not ceremonies, not class collaboration. They cry out for justice, which is revolution.

Poetic Injustice

I've been looking forward to reading the new poetry collection Poetic Injustice-Writings on Resistance & Palestine by Remi Kanazi, a young Palestinian-American poet and activist. Come next payday I'll order it.

I've heard Remi's work several times when he's performed his poetry at rallies in solidarity with Palestine but, bummer, I couldn't make it to his big book release event earlier this month uptown, which featured, along with him, an amazing lineup.

It's not just coincidence that I'm thinking again about how much I want to get this book into my hands. Today the criminal apartheid state of Israel carried out a renewed murderous bombing attack on a civilian area of Gaza. At least 10 Palestinians were killed. While the U.S. launches missiles against the sovereign African nation of Libya, riveting much of the world's attention on, and rage against, this latest outbreak of brazen imperialist war, Washington's Tel Aviv pets take the opportunity with no one looking their way to launch another round of their own killing.

Yesterday I ran up to Times Square after work and caught the tail end of a protest demonstration against the war on Libya. Then today we hear of this latest bit of dirty work by the Zionist state.

I am not of the poetry-can-save-the-world party. I am of the we-must-make-revolution-to-save-the-world party. But I do think poetry (and fiction) can help buoy and strengthen the revolution makers, and also help draw new fighters toward the revolutionary path by contributing to the awakening of consciousness. My sense is that Poetic Injustice is this sort of literature. I'm looking forward to finding some quiet afternoon to sit with it and hear its truths.

The Grapes of Wrath

In the latest in my occasional turn toward books I'd somehow never gotten to before, I just read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. This is a flawed book, more politically flawed than I realized as I was reading it. More on that, criticism from the left, in a minute. First a word on criticism from the right.

I've often come across references to The Grapes of Wrath in various writings by esteemed literary critics. They generally condemn the book as bad literature. Poorly written, bombastic didacticism. The consensus seems to be that this book is a cartoonish exercise in blatant communistic propaganda, contrived, sentimental, manipulative, designed to trick the reader into sympathizing with the poor downtrodden workers and to support union drives and strikes.

As I expected I would, upon finally reading the book myself I find this position absurd. Blatant propaganda? I'll say—by the bourgeoisie's literary experts, who always condemn any work of fiction that depicts capitalist exploitation, engenders sympathy for its victims, sides with the struggle against it. What a crazy reach it is for any critic to pan it, for it's beautifully written, in some places soaringly achingly stirringly beautiful. There are stunningly lyrical passages, there is an intense propulsive narrative drive, there are finely wrought characterizations. Most of all there is a powerful, deeply effective portrayal of human suffering and, at the same time, of courage and dignity and solidarity . It's this latter aspect, the fact that the novel sides with the poor and suffering masses, that incurs the wrath and enmity of the commentators, for this is the highest literary sin.

So much for the criticism from the right. Wrong wrong wrong as always. What of the left?

I was aware as I read, especially as the story developed and the ever more suffering Joad family moved along on its journey of hope and horror, that there was a narrow, even distorted, emphasis in this portrayal of the Dust Bowl migration from Oklahoma and surrounding states to California during the Great Depression. The focus is entirely on the Joads and their like: white former landowners and sharecroppers forced off their land and driven West in search of jobs. Nowhere in the tale, not on the road and in the stopping-off places along the way nor in the camps, Hoovervilles and orchards of California, do we see anyone except the Joads' cohort. No Mexicans—in the Southwest and California! No African Americans, an oppressed nation that was in fact in the midst of its own Great Migration, a major wing of it from the South to California, at exactly this same time. No, in this novel just about everyone's white. Just about everyone has endured the same tragedy of losing the small stakes of land that they'd held for several generations. And all these white former farmers are competing only with each other for the same jobs in the growing fields. I knew this was by no means a complete picture but I guess I sort of thought well, this is a snapshot of one particular part of what was going on, there were after all plenty of families like the Joads and so this is their story, one specific aspect of the broader overall story. I noted, too, some places where Steinbeck seems to go out of his way to take account of the national question. For example, several times he has a character note that a family ancestor had stolen the farmland from its Native inhabitants. Likewise, he points out that California itself is stolen, from Mexico. The characters use racist language a few times; it makes them look bad and I sort of assumed this was Steinbeck's intent.

I gave him too much credit, as it turns out. A quick skim of some left commentary reveals that there was a racist strain to Steinbeck's ideology, that he created white Dust Bowl migrant literary heroes in part because he saw them as superior to the Asian and Mexican agricultural work force that was already in place and that had been long engaged in unionization struggles. He saw the new white arrivals as replacing the workers of color, and this, the triumph of white labor—not of labor as a whole, of the multinational united working class—was what he looked toward.

Oh crap. How can we call this a novel of the working class when its author purposely omitted the most oppressed quarters of the class from his vision of the proper direction of the class struggle? Is it possible for a work of fiction to embody contradiction, to have both strengths and weaknesses, to be in some ways a contribution and in some ways backward? At least one critique I recently read allows no such wiggle room, going so far as to liken The Grapes of Wrath to Gone with the Wind. The latter is an out-and-out paean to the slaveocracy, penned in homage to the pro-KKK movie Birth of a Nation; does Steinbeck's novel similarly serve as an explicit tribute to white labor as against Black, Latino and Asian labor?

I imagine there is also a body of feminist critique of this novel. I can easily guess what the charges would be, and that I'd probably agree with them. And yet. The character of Ma Joad, hedged in to the most traditional sex role as she is, hit me hard. Her indomitable will to survive, her strength—and she is by far the strongest character in the story, her compassion but also her capacity for violent confrontation.

A masterpiece of class-struggle fiction? A historically inaccurate racist sexist literary lie? A lot to think about, a lot to learn.

Rape, reporting, & race

Yesterday the New York Times ran an appalling story about a gang rape in east Texas that left me sickened and shaken. The victim was an 11-year-old girl. There were, according to the Times report, 18 rapists. Eighteen! They included some star high-school athletes as well as some sons of locally prominent families. At least one of them videotaped the assault with his cell phone, and the video was shown around by the bragging rapists, and that's how the crime eventually came to light and they were brought to justice.

These facts weren't the only appalling thing about the Times piece. The story itself descended into the worst despicably sexist terms in its characterization of the child who was so terribly brutalized and defiled. The newspaper found it necessary to comment that she was known in the neighborhood for wearing inappropriately mature clothes and makeup, and for hanging out in the wrong places. Yes that's right—the report implies that this 11-year-old child was a slut, she was asking for it, she deserved to be destroyed. This aspect of the report was picked up quickly by a number of commentators, who have denounced the Times for its disgusting blame-the-victim insinuations.

But there's another aspect I want to raise. Because after my first read and my first reaction, which was rage and horror, I cooled down a little and started to think, started wondering. I referred above to "facts"—but I know better than to rely on the bourgeois press for the truth. I used the phrase "brought to justice"—but I know there is no justice under capitalism, and especially not in rape cases, not for the victims of sex assault, nor for the young men who might be arrested and charged whether they did it or not. Yes, I'm talking about race: what I started wondering most of all was just who these 18 alleged rapists were. So I did a quick search and found some other, earlier, local articles about this case.

Almost immediately, a series of mug shots appeared on my screen. Young African American men. The victim's picture of course isn't available but I'm guessing that she too is Black because if she were white we'd have heard much more about this case much sooner; quite possibly we'd have heard about a lynching. As it is, knowing that all the alleged rapists are Black makes this a story not only about what we Marxists call the woman question, but also about the national question.

Now reread this from the Times piece: "The video led the police to an abandoned trailer, more evidence and, eventually, to a roundup over the last month of 18 young men and teenage boys." A roundup of African American youths.

The rape of this child was a heinous crime. It's almost impossible for me to believe that this roundup by the Cleveland, Texas, police, a force made up overwhelmingly of white men, is not another crime—a  racist crime; that is, that some of those arrested are innocent, picked up for the crime of being young Black men. And that they'll be railroaded into prison where they'll join so many other young Black men locked up for the crime of being poor and oppressed. So now there will be two crimes, that against the child and that against those who had nothing to do with it but were rounded up.

This is not the Glen Ridge rape. That case was beautifully analyzed in the 1997 book Our Guys by Bernard Lefkowitz, which I read and highly recommend. In 1989 in Glen Ridge, an affluent white New Jersey suburb, a bunch of star athletes gang-raped a mentally challenged girl--and almost the whole community united to defend and protect them. The victim and her family were made pariahs. The rapists were treated as heroes or, at worst, good guys who made a minor mistake. Not one of them ever served serious time.

Here, in contrast, we have cops rounding up Black youths. If there have been confessions, we have the likelihood that they were coerced. That some of them might be false confessions. That some of those rounded up didn't do it. This is the United States of America. There is no way that justice will be done. (Nor do I think that any trials, convictions and imprisonments of those who actually did commit the rape will constitute justice, for none of that will address or redress any of what's wrong with this society, any of the real causes of these crimes.)

Don't get me wrong--I remain enraged and shaken about the unspeakable crime that was committed. I can't stop thinking about the 11-year-old girl and how she'll manage to survive on into adulthood. If she'll manage to survive. Both the brutal misogyny of the crime and the sexist reporting of it make me want to scream and shout. But I won't join the rush to judgment against those accused. Because when Black men are accused of rape, especially in a case like this when so many are accused at once, and in small-town Texas no less, you can be assured that racism too is involved.

There is a long history of Black men being made into poster images for rape, whether the victim is Black or white, and of rape charges being used to justify racist violence and scapegoating. This goes back to slavery times and then the Klan and Jim Crow with the terrible lynch law era. Then there was the Scottsboro case. And more recently, the case of the Central Park jogger, for which the NYPD rounded up a bunch of Black youths who were demonized and caricatured as, basically, animals who had carried out what the media called a "wilding"--and who, despite their protestations of innocence were tried, convicted and imprisoned only to be exonerated years later after losing most of their youth to prison.

I recently read Jeffrey B. Perry's excellent book on Hubert Harrison, the first of a projected two-part biography of this great Black radical of early 20th-century Harlem. In the book Perry repeatedly returns to the lodestar of Harrison's political life: the principle (and practical necessity) that fighting racism must be paramount, that as long as white supremacy reigns there can be no class unity. A socialist revolutionary must always remember this. The Cleveland, Texas, rape case is the latest reminder.

It's International Women's Day

And I don't have time to mark it in any meaningful way. Damn. Let me do this instead. Let me hail my sisters in the thick of the still ongoing Egyptian revolution. And my Filipina sisters of Gabriela. My Colombian sisters fighting the death squads. My sisters in the Basque country. My sisters in the Iraqi and Afghan resistance. My Palestinian sisters. I hail the women who, around the world, lead the class struggle--including, right here at home, the schoolteachers and other public employees of Wisconsin who've been showing the way forward for the U.S. labor movement.

Happy International Women's Day. Down with the patriarchy! Kick the ass of the ruling class!

Whose Center is it?

One evening in 1981, or maybe it was 1982, I attended a meeting in a falling-apart former NYC public-school building on 13th Street in Manhattan. At this meeting, 15 or 20 activists began organizing a protest against a series of racist offenses against Black gay men at Blues, a bar in the Times Square area. The protest, which took place a few days later, was great, a big angry march and a wonderful expression of LGBT anti-racist unity.

The building where we'd met would later become New York City's LGBT Center. Now, all these years later, it's a big, beautiful, well-financed hub for all manner of social, political, and every and any other kind of gathering imaginable by and for our community.

Except Palestinians, apparently. Or their allies in the struggle against Israeli apartheid. Solidarity is no longer welcome at what once was a center of unity.

In mid-February, in a breathtaking and shocking accommodation with a small cohort of rabid racist Zionists, LGBT Center Executive Director Glenda Testone unilaterally canceled an event that had been scheduled to take place at the Center this Saturday, March 5, to mark Israeli Apartheid Week. She did so without any consultation with the event's sponsors, the group Siege Busters, although this group has met regularly at the Center, and with the bizarre excuse that the planned meeting would somehow violate the Center as a "safe space."

Safe for whom? For a handful of racists, apparently, those who would deny access to Palestinians and who apparently wield inordinate power.

The response has been rage and outrage. Letters, calls, and a petition that's now garnered thousands of signatures. Lots of Jewish LGBT people, myself of course included, have joined this chorus, whose initiators include novelist Sarah Schulman and professor and writer Judith Butler.

I have not yet heard what the next steps in the response to this outrage by the Center will be. But this is not the Center we started to create that night 30 years ago with the Blues bar protest. This must not stand.

For more information, check here and here and here. And sign the petition demanding that the Center reverse its exclusionary decision here.

UPDATE: Tomorrow, March 5, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., there will be a demonstration to protest the LGBT Center's ban on anti-occupation queer meetings and activists. I'll see you there, in front of the Center, 208 West 13th Street, just west of Seventh Avenue.

I read a lovely book: Wading Home

While some white men make offensive art and win fame, acclaim and riches (see previous post), many women and people of color keep making beautiful, original, meaningful art that the marketplace never rewards, or even notices.

I had had the novel Wading Home by Rosalyn Story on my to-read list for a little while when, earlier this month, I heard that the novel's publisher, Agate, had announced it was making the e-book version available for free for the last two weeks of February, Black History Month. Why would a publisher take such a drastic step, a step that denies it any income? Agate's Doug Seibold has a lot to say about the injustice of the treatment of books by and about African Americans in general, and of this novel in particular.

In fact, to its publisher’s embarrassment, Wading Home has gotten hardly any attention at all--despite the hundreds of advance reader’s copies we distributed months before it was published, despite the efforts of PGW’s excellent sales force, despite the author’s appearance at BEA, despite how the book’s publication coincided with the fifth anniversary of Katrina. And despite the fact that I’ve had a hard time finding any other such novels from trade presses--novels by black writers addressing this event, which had such a huge impact on how both black people and others think about the lives of black people in this country today. Next to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Katrina and its aftermath may have been the most consequential event of the last decade. You wouldn’t know it by the response of the book publishing industry.

Please go read the full statement on the Agate website, because this is an impassioned, thoughtful, cogent, angry piece that deserves to be read. It contains much truth about the racism of the publishing industry.

 As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I don't own an e-reader and, for now, at least, have no interest in getting one. So I couldn't take advantage of Agate's offer, but it did spur me to move Wading Home to the top of my to-read list. It wasn't easy to find a copy, but I finally did, at the Strand, and I read it last week.

This is a lovely, moving, accomplished piece of fiction about one of the most important events in U.S. history, the greatest single catastrophe in U.S. history--Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans, a catastrophe suffered mostly by  African Americans and yet one whose stories so far have mostly been told by white writers. The stories that find their way to publication, that is, or to be more precise as Mr. Seibold points out, that are published and reviewed and spotlighted. A couple of years ago I read the novel City of Refuge by Tom Piazza. I liked it very much, in fact I listed it as one of my best reads that year, and I wasn't the only one. It got a lot of play, a lot of attention. Unlike Wading Home.

Was City of Refuge, by a white author, a better book than Wading Home? Now that I've read  Story's book, I can answer: absolutely not! Of course not! It is an absolute injustice that it's the Black writer's book that remains relatively obscure.

And what an excellent, deeply felt and beautifully written book this is. I was swept into it from the opening pages. I cared about the characters. I wept in several places. There is a humanity here, a compassion, a sweep in its view of family and community and history, that resonated for me. And there is political consciousness, truth telling, honesty. All the qualities I value in fiction.

Wading Home also contains some of the finest writing about the natural world that I've read in a long time. Much of the plot has to do with a Black family's land in rural Louisiana, its history down the generations back to slavery times, the risk of losing it, and what this land means for those alive after Katrina. Usually, as a reader, I'm not big on nature descriptions. For some reason they tend to bore me, I tend to gloss over them. That wasn't the case with this novel. Somehow, Ms. Story's depiction of Silver Creek, the vegetation and wildlife, the smells, the sounds, the feel, gripped me in a way such passages rarely do. I really felt transported to that precious place. Which in turn drew me even deeper into the story, the stories of Julian and Simon finding their way home after Katrina.

This book deserves a large audience. It is an indictment of capitalism, of all the ways this racist system distorts and damages everything in this society including the arts, that it remains largely unread.

I saw a misogynist movie: Black Swan

The other day I relented on my bedbug ban on NYC movie theaters and went to see Black Swan. My my what a swamp of sexist--no, I've got to go further for this film is not merely sexist, it is full-on misogynist--ideas and imagery. What wrecks, what weak sad pathetic wrecks, and not just that, what vicious competitive violent destructive self-destructive confused insane and sexually lunatic yet frigid barely human beings we gals are, according to screenwriters Mark Heyman and Andres Heinz and director Darren Aronofsky. As artists, we're not nuts in the standard way male artists are permitted to be nuts in the movies, the Agony & Ecstasy/Lust for Life/Pollock way. No, for us it's our very femaleness that predetermines our downfall. To drive the point home, they made sure to include a hot lesbian sex scene, an overwrought masturbation scene, a standard-issue monster mother, lots of blood and crazy red eyes and on and on, climaxing in attainment of artistic perfection achieved only and simultaneously with death.

This makes me tired. This endless onslaught. And reminds me why I've nearly given up on the movies. This is the best Hollywood can do. This is what passes for cinematic art in this country. Black Swan and Aronofsky are nominated for Oscars. Don't even get me started on the whole list of nominees, at least one of which, The Social Network, is a deeply sexist movie about a bunch of millionaire misogynist assholes; one of which, The Kids Are All Right, shows how all lesbians really need is a good male fuck as all it takes for a lesbian in a longterm committed relationship to lunge for heterosex is for a heterosexual male to stroll into her life; one of which, The King's Speech, asks us to empathize with the multibillionaire head of state of British imperialism; one of which, Inception, is so laughably moronic, vapid, unimaginative, derivative, flat, shallow and all-around uninteresting, that is, the exact opposite of its hype, that when I watched it with some friends a few months ago, we kept asking each other if this could possibly be the same movie about which we'd read all those rave reviews.

I was left similarly nonplused after seeing Black Swan. Could I be the only one who found this movie offensive and misogynist? I'm glad to find I'm not, having googled the title of the film and the word "misogynist" and found quite a few articles accusing it of same. I suppose there's some small comfort in that, though I'd much prefer not having to wade through this swamp in the first place.

Ah Aronofsky. I loved his first two works, Pi and Requiem for a Dream. I found The Fountain, while weirdly fascinating for its utter over-the-top madness, a stunningly hot mess of a movie, a failure in every way, and politically reprehensible to boot with its portrayal of a conquistador as a hero and its weepily Victorian female swoonily romantically dying throughout the whole long slog. The Wrestler was unoriginal, predictable, sentimental claptrap, albeit watchable since, admit it, who can turn away from what has become of Mickey Rourke's face, but that didn't save the movie. I doubt I'll ever give another Aronofsky movie a chance. He's insulted me, as a viewer, an artist and a woman, once too often.

Politically correct

Rising out of the drear 1950s, led by the civil rights movement which in turn gave rise to the anti-war movement and the women's movement and the gay movement, inspired by the anti-colonial uprisings and wars for national liberation in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific islands, on through the 1960s and into the 1970s, there was in this country a flowering of political consciousness. As we all know. It is now most often referred to with the all-encompassing term "the 60s." To the bourgeoisie and all those in the grip of that class's ideology, which most definitely includes the liberal intelligentsia, "the 60s" is now a term of opprobrium. To those of us who are partisans for the class struggle and against racism, sexism, LGBT oppression and all forms of bigotry and exploitation, "the 60s" is or should be shorthand for everything righteous—rebellion, revolution, activism—for rejecting the norms of capitalism and fighting toward a new way of organizing society. This latter, our view of the 60s, is also known by another term, especially as regards education and the arts: politically correct.

Those of us of the 60s/70s generation of activists did indeed come to understand some things as correct and some other things as incorrect by the lights of our politics. That which seeks to advance the struggle, that which conveys the reality of oppression and exploitation, that which upends the old hierarchies and gives voice to those whose voices were heretofore suppressed, this is correct. The old ways of seeing, doing, explaining, steeped as they are in bourgeois consciousness and backward, reactionary ideology, are wrong. Incorrect. Offensive. Above all, untrue. Based on all the false old assumptions, all the lies and justifications of the chattel-slavery-subjugation-of-women system that built the wealth of this country's capitalist class. By our lights, all this needed, and of course still needs, correcting. This is a noble and necessary endeavor.

It is also a frightening challenge to the status quo and for that reason has been subjected to a 40-year-long onslaught of taunts, derision and every other possible means to flip the truth into its opposite. The problem isn't racism, sexism, oppression, exploitation, we're told. The problem is all these uptight rigid purveyors of the whip of political correctness, which is portrayed as an assault on freedom of expression. How dare these people—and for these people read people of color, women, LGBT people, workers, the disabled—how dare anyone trespass on anyone else's freedom to be as incorrect as they please? Is this a free country or what? And so they've managed, the bourgeoisie and its witless mouthpieces, to turn reality on its head with the well-worn Big Lie tactic of endless repetition. And so "politically correct" joins "the 60s" (and especially its literary sub-genre "the madness of the 60s," which I've ranted about before) as A Bad Thing. None of this is surprising. Not the ruling class's efforts to shore up its image and beef up its propaganda; not the bosses' vicious, mendacious attacks against any and all who do try to tell the truth; and, saddest of all, not the efficacy of these efforts. Hardly anyone proudly, boldly claims the mantle of politically correct anymore. Most run scared of being so named, and if so named turn somersaults to defend against the accusation.

Which brings us to the latest round of doings in the literary world. First, by way of noting that "the 60s" is a broad term and can be stretched decades to make a point, I must quickly mention a book I read about in this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review. It's a "madness of the 60s" memoir—set in the 80s! Apparently it tells the poignant tale of a young woman who was so misguided as to travel to Central America and join a bunch of wacky internationalists doing solidarity work in support of the anti-imperialist struggles there. The men she worked with were of course louts. The women were, like her, naïve and confused, and motivated by their pitiful devotion to the loutish men rather than any of their own opinions or political ideas. None had the slightest inkling of what they were doing, and all were completely misled by the Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans fighting the Reagan administration's overt and covert military intervention. The reviewer loved it. I expectorated onto the review.

But the main event I want to point to is a bold, courageous initiative by poet Claudia Rankine, begun at the AWP conference in D.C. earlier this month and still under way online. AWP is the big daddy of literary conferences, put together by the organization of college writing programs and attended by many thousands of poets and writers, almost all of them associated with a writing program in one way or another. I went once, a few years ago when it was here in NYC and the staff very kindly allowed me to attend for free as a worker, rather than student or faculty, at a university. That once was enough, for the whole thing was far too drenched in academia for me. Not my scene. Still, thousands of folks attend, and in a literary culture where it's virtually impossible to be published without an MFA and the only way for writers to make a living is by teaching, I can understand why they do. Once in a while something noteworthy occurs, as it did this year.

I've read a number of accounts of it and I'd urge you to do the same. Basically, at one of the poetry panels, Claudia Rankine's presentation consisted of having Nick Flynn get up and read Tony Hoagland's poem "The Change," then her reading her response to the poem, then her reading his emailed response to her response. Google the key names and you'll find lots of blog postings including several that have the full texts. You'll find that Hoagland's poem includes blatant racist language and imagery. You'll find that Rankine's response is deep, incisive, painful, and so full of truth that … that, yes, sure enough, in his response, Hoagland accused her of "political correctness, with its agendas of rightness, perfection, enforcement, and moral superiority." He also calls this brilliant African American poet "naïve," explains the nuances of U.S. racial history to her, and avers that his poem "is not 'racist' but 'racially complex.'" Hoagland's stunningly, yes, racist and sexist condescension becomes even more breathtaking when you reread and think again about Rankine's thoughts, which are nothing if not complex. "Who let America in the room?" she asks. She says she "could taste the vomit of Reconstruction and slavery in the back of my throat"—but only after acknowledging that she knows what she's opening herself up to by daring to speak up about any of this.

I don't like using the word racist because of you use it it means you are an angry black person. Angry black people are the old black and everyone knows that's pathological. … The old black is positioned in a no-win situation where to express an opinion based on what you see, experience, feel or deduce rsisk falling right into some white folk's notion of black insanity.

This is one brave truth-telling artist. Further, in the wake of all the commentary that's been swirling since AWP, she is not shying away from pursuing the issue. She recently posted an open letter on her website, calling for people to submit their own "thoughts on writing about race." She poses a series of provocative questions as "a few possible jumping-off points." They include:

• If you write about race frequently what issues, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages do you negotiate?
• If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?
• Do you believe race can be decontextualized, or in other words, can ideas of race be constructed separate from their history.

Rankine will post responses received by March 11 on her blog.

Finally, one other item under the Politically Correct rubric. I was planning to write about this but I've gone on too long as it is so I'm just going to point you to this article. Headed "Let's say goodbye to the straw-feminist," it's Cordelia Fine's response to a slew of reactionary reviews of her book Delusions of Gender. In that book, which I've now added to my to-read list, she dismantles the sexist underpinnings of the increasingly dominant strain of evolutionary biology and psychology, the Steven Pinker school of biological determinism as regards innate sex differences, i.e. trucks vs. dolls or, as per Lawrence Summers, home ec vs. science. These reviewers to whom she responds in this piece accuse Fine of political correctness, that most dreaded of offenses. Kudos to her for taking them on.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Last week I read another old book and hit another home run. (I'd just read Great Expectations and loved it and now plan to read more Dickens soon, perhaps reread some because I'm not sure which I read in high school.) This time it was The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. It's embarrassing to admit I'd never read it, or any of McCullers' work. I don't know why that is, it's just one of those weird lacunae in my reading resume, but boy am I glad to have corrected the omission and boy now do I ever want to read her other books.

For this is a magnificent novel. So humane, so political, so full of consciousness about oppression, rage at this society, yearning for liberation. Wow. It's not the writing, for sentence by sentence, word by word, McCullers is not a dazzling stylist. It's what the words add up to. What she says with them.

How could I not love a book that devotes several pages to a Depression-era African American doctor's soliloquy on Marxism and the need for revolution? That depicts the soul-weariness of a would-be union organizer who can't get anyone to listen to his radical message? That shows a poor teenaged girl's constricted options and wide-open dreams?

From Richard Wright's 1940 review:

Tto me the most impressive aspect of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race. This cannot be accounted for stylistically or politcally; it seems to stem from an attitude toward life which enables Miss McCullers to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.

And from May Sarton's:

This book is literature. Because it is literature, when one puts it down it is not with a feeling of emptiness and despair (which an outline of the plot might suggest), but with a feeling of having been nourished by the truth. For one knows at the end, that it is these cheated people, these with burning intense needs and purposes, who must inherit the earth. They are the reason for the existence of a democracy which is still to be created. This is the way it is, one says to oneself - but not forever.

I'm going to try to swing by the Strand soon, to pick up a used copy of The Lonely Hunter, Virginia Spencer Carr's biography of McCullers. I've just got to know more about the artist behind this masterpiece of working-class literature.

From Hubert Harrison, for Black History Month

Last month I noted a new book I wanted to read, the biography Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 by Jeffrey B. Perry. I've got it in my hands now and I hope to read it soon. I was leafing through it, fondling it in that excited way I do with new books, and found in the front matter some quotations from the works of this great but sadly now little remembered leftist leader. Here are a couple of them, in honor of Black History Month.

On U.S. "democracy":

As long as the Color Line exists, all the perfumed protestations of Democracy on the part of the white race must be simply downright lying. The cant of "Democracy" is intended as dust in the eyes of white voters. ... It furnishes bait for the clever statesman.

On imperialist war:

During the war the idea of democracy was widely advertised, especially in the English-speaking world, mainly as a convenient camouflage behind which competing imperialists masked their sordid aims. ... those who so loudly proclaimed and formulated the new democratic demands never had the slightest intention of extending the limits or the applications of "democracy."

I was stunned by one other page in the front of the Harrison biography. It has a photograph of Harrison's gravesite, which has no marker and just appears to be a mass of untrimmed dry grass. The caption notes that this great leader "lies buried in an unmarked shared plot in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx." Woodlawn Cemetery! This is the site of a current struggle by a group of workers, all Black and Latino men, fighting against unmitigated, brutal, vicious racist treatment by the bosses--just the sort of struggle Hubert Harrison would have been in the thick of. This struggle has been going on for some time but now it's hit a new, urgent stage. The members of Teamsters Local 805 are fighting for their very jobs and right to union representation. There's been a lot of community support for the Band of Brothers, as the Woodlawn workers call themselves, with a series of solidarity marches and rallies. Last weekend, the Latina group Mujeres por la Paz visited the Woodlawn gravesite of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and, styling themselves the Band of Sisters, demanded a union contract and no layoffs for their brothers the Woodlawn workers.

The next action for the Band of Brothers is this Monday, Feb. 21, when supporters will rally at Woodlawn to show the cemetery bosses that these workers are not alone. I'm going to pass along the information about Hubert Harrison and his unmarked grave to the Woodlawn workers.

Victory to the Band of Brothers! Hubert Harrison presente!

Could this be the start at last of labor's upturn?

Tens of thousands of workers and students have been demonstrating outside and staying inside, occupying the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison to stop the governor's move against collective bargaining rights for public employees. We can never know what's to come, we none of us have a crystal ball, but I do know that they're calling the plaza outside the Capitol "Liberation Square" in honor and emulation of the sisters and brothers who rocked Egypt--and that, just as in Egypt, there is no turning back.



The current round of attacks on government-employee unions, especially on the teachers' unions, should be understood as an assault not only on the working class's right to public services, the services to which we are entitled and for which we pay with our tax dollars, or toward which our tax dollars should be going instead of to the Pentagon and to bailing out the banks--not only as an assault on our right to services, and not only on the labor rights of public employees, especially teachers who are being outrageously scapegoated when they ought to be national heroes--not only all this. But more specifically, the current wave of assault on public-employee unions is a racist and sexist bludgeon. Most government employees, especially teachers, are women. A great proportion of these workers, especially city and federal employees, are Black.

With this reactionary, cynical and, by the way, completely bipartisan political rampage against public employees, from California to Wisconsin and Michigan to Florida and New York, the bourgeoisie might finally have gone too far. Labor, the sleeping giant, might finally be forcibly awakened.

On Wisconsin!

Thawra!

 

That means revolution in Arabic, and all over the world today the workers and oppressed  are hailing the sisters and brothers who are making revolution in Egypt. This is a beautiful day for the class struggle. No one can say where it will go from here, but it's for sure that no one can undo what has been done. The only direction is forward. The Arab masses are in motion. With their courageous action they have won a great victory by overturning the U.S.-puppet Zionist-aligned Mubarak regime. My heart is full of joy and gratitude to them. Long live Egypt! Long live Palestine! Onward to revolutionary victory! Thawra thawra hata nas!

Should a socialist indulge in schadenfreude?

Of course she should, can and does, in terms of big important events on the stage of the worldwide class struggle, for example the impending doom of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Anyone whose allegiance is with the workers, the poor, the oppressed, anyone who stands in solidarity with the fight for national sovereignty and against imperialism can't help but derive great joy from the increasing misery of the U.S.-puppet regime and the class of thieves and murderers it serves.

But hereabouts we're supposed to be about the arts. It's on not the world stage but the actual stage—the Broadway boards—that the events occasioning my question are unfolding. I'm talking about the ever unraveling travesty that is writer-director Julie Taymor's latest work of musical theater, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. As anyone who follows the theater even a little, and everyone who lives in New York where the whole mess has been front-page news for months, knows, this musical has major-league tsuris. The elaborate production design and attempts at unprecedented special effects make this the most expensive show in Broadway history. Trouble is, all the high-tech gadgetry, all the spectacle, can't compensate for an essentially lousy play. Even if they somehow could, the gizmos and doohickeys don't work. The whole months-long saga of tryouts, of rejiggering the book and music and choreography, which in this case means acrobatics more than dance, has been marked with repeated serious problems, especially mishaps with the flying contraptions including several injuries to actors, at least one very serious.

About that—worker injury, worker endangerment—I feel nothing close to schadenfreude. I feel rage. At Taymor and at the deep-pockets producers who've sunk $65 million dollars into what from all accounts (more on that in a minute) can scarcely be termed a work of art yet who, for all their money, can't manage to make it safe for the people doing the on-stage work. I'm enraged, too, at OSHA and New York state and city worker-safety officials, who should have long since stepped in to force the profiteers to fix this thing or shut it down. And I've got, if not rage, a lot of disappointment in and questions for Actors Equity and the other stage workers' unions. The Broadway unions, like the rest of the labor movement, have been under siege for a long time, and it's hard not to see their apparent inaction here as evidence of the state of their decline. Granted, they may be working behind the scenes to push for better on-stage safety. They should have been doing much more, much more publicly--mounting picket lines, making demands, building a solidarity movement, reaching out to the huge New York population of workers, union members and theater lovers. Instead, as unions in other industries have done for the last 30 years since the UAW's original Chrysler give-back contract, they seem to see their duty as supporting the bosses' profit-taking in hopes of keeping the enterprise open and saving jobs.

As to those jobs, all of them, onstage and back: I have only sympathy, fellow-feeling for the actors, singers and dancers subjected to these conditions. Conditions—unsafe physically and debased artistically—that theater workers feel compelled to grin and bear, grateful to have any job at all. This is a terribly unstable industry for its workers. There is no joy like landing a job, whether it's a lead role, in the chorus, downstairs sewing and mending costumes, up in the rafters working the lights, or in the box office selling tickets. Once you've got a show, you want it to stay open, naturally. On Broadway as in a coal mine or any other site of wage labor, no matter how dreary, how dangerous, you need that job. Oh god, as they sang in A Chorus Line, I need this job. At what cost, though? It might not hurt a theater worker's future prospects to have Spider-Man on the resume, but there will be no prospects after a broken neck from a fall due to defective equipment. On Broadway as in the mines, the bosses will always stint on safety in favor of profits.

Here's where schadenfreude comes in. I do take pleasure from this week's round of uproariously bad reviews for the Spidey musical. I am glad that these profit-takers in artist ("pardon me, I mean artiste," as the Times' critic Ben Brantley purred) garb are being humiliated. They should be ashamed.

Now, I'm not utterly starry-eyed about Broadway. Lots of shlock has passed that way. Much, maybe most, of the musical theater is mediocre, unmemorable. Much is objectionable from my political viewpoint. Hardly any, including a lot of the old musicals that I'm still sentimentally attached to and whose music still stirs my corny old heart, meets the mark for the best of what I wish from any art. In recent decades, the whole industry has become such a pure profit monster, with ticket prices rising so out of reach of most workers, that I guess it'd be silly to hope for something true and good and beautiful, new and creative and with, god forbid, something to say about society. All that said, though, this derivative cartoon cardboard cutout stunt is a new low for the New York stage and I'm glad for whatever potshots are thrown at its perpetrators.

Earlier I referred to "all accounts" because I base my broad characterizations of the awfulness of this so-called musical on what I've read in various reviews and commentaries. I have not myself seen it (even if I wanted to I couldn't afford a ticket) yet I feel safe, and justified, in the conclusions I've drawn about this stinker. I've made a long study of reading reviews, of books, movies and stage productions. It's more art than science, I suppose, but I think I've got it down, how I take into account the source, class slant, artistic standards and so on, breaking it all down so that I'm generally able to get a pretty good sense of the piece in question and what I'd think of it. Often I conclude that a negative review is wrong or am intrigued enough to want to see for myself. Or the opposite, I read through a rave and know to stay far away. I'm sure I'm not always right but one thing I have to admit is that the mainstream critics are not always wrong either, even if they're right for the wrong reasons. Such is the case, I believe, with the Spiderman musical. I'm sorry for the workers whose jobs—and safety—depend on its success but I'm not sorry for the miscreants whose worship of commerce over art are responsible for its becoming, already, a legendary failure.

I want to say one more thing about what Broadway can do. You might think that it's so in the grips of big money and old thinkers that it's incapable of mounting any but the most conventional works of musical theater. That we must look elsewhere for innovation, particularly politically conscious work. And mostly I'd say that's true, that exciting new work, in the musical theater as in drama as in books or movies or any other art form, is doubtless being created in countless corners by impoverished unknowns, and that most of it has no chance of ever seeing the light of day, at least as long as art remains locked down under capitalism. Once in a while, though, somehow, a bright light shines through.

Such was the case with Caroline, or Change, which I was lucky enough to see in early 2004 before it closed after an all too brief run on Broadway. This musical by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori was unlike any I've ever seen. Innovative—hell yes, with talking washing machines, and scenes that conflate and compress time and space. Musically successful—OMG yes, with a near-operatic score that ranges wide and strikes deep. Artistically challenging and politically meaningful—since seeing this show I know that there is no topic that the genre of musical theater could not take on, no subject that is out of bounds, no approach that is out of reach. As I've admitted before, I'm a corny old sucker, and many's the old-school musical that reduces me to tears, but they're sentimental tears, triggered by various varieties of shtick. At the end of Caroline, or Change, by contrast, I was shaken deeply, to my core, by the important story it told, the profound issues it raised—and, not least, by the unbelievable and shamefully underappreciated brilliance of Tonya Pinkins in the starring role. I remember that as I rose and walked down the stairs from the balcony and out onto the street and over to the subway, as the minutes after the final standing ovation during which I'd sobbed my eyes out passed, as it turned into five minutes since the end, then 10, then 15, I was still trembling, I still felt undone. That it was the last thing I thought about as I fell asleep that night, and the first when I awoke next day, and for many days after that. That it haunts me still. This is what the musical theater can do.