Letters from a brass watch man

Context note: Some scribblings I put down on paper in response to this article by Professor Wendy MacLeod in the recent Kenyon Alumni Bulletin. Still trying to decide if it's worth sending to her.)

Dear Professor MacLeod,

Read your article in the recent Kenyon Alumni Bulletin – “Why Don’t We See More Plays By Women?” – with interest. Speaking as someone who was taught playwriting primarily by female teachers, key among them Professor Harlene Marley, my first reaction to your article was: “Huh. That’s really weird.”

I don’t know. Let me ask you a rather blunt question: in general, do you find that your female students have a more difficult time writing about conflict than the males? If so, maybe the missing factor that even women dramaturges are looking for is a clear dramatic conflict. That’s the one thing Professor Marley really shoved down our throats – that ever since Aristotle, theatre has always been rooted in the conflict between two individuals at cross-purposes, maybe as a kind of sublimation of violence. My understanding is if that’s missing, no one really knows what to do with a play.

(Side note – I still sometimes find the whole conflict paradigm a little frustrating, even to this day. “But what if I don’t want to write about conflict? What if I want to write about people actually being nice to each other.” I’m sure Professor Marley would have responded: “You could, but that would be really boring.” Okay, okay. But I still have to wonder if there’s another way of going about things.)

Which isn’t to even slightly suggest that women can’t write about conflict. That would be an incredibly stupid thing for me to say, considering the number of counterexamples I’ve met through the years, from yourself and Professor Marley to my one friend – a successful writer – who spends her weekends beating the crap out of people with weighted sticks. (I’m personally convinced that this is a key part of her process.) I guess that all I’m really trying to raise here is the possibility that maybe female playwrights have a harder time tapping into those particular dark places of the soul where modern theatre, for better or worse, tends to thrive. Maybe because of the particular image of femininity they were raised with. Maybe because going into those places sucks and they’re really too smart to do that to themselves, the lucky gits.

Not that that would explain that experiment you cited – the one where the same play submitted under a male name was accepted more than it was under a female name… Hrm. I don’t know. Maybe the play was somehow read as being more aggressive when billed under a male?

On the other hand, going off of your example of your House of Yes, maybe it’s more of an issue of marketing. Like it or not, theater companies are businesses, with the same restrictions and issues as any other. They need to sell tickets, and sex and violence – id things both – are among the few reliable draws in this world. Maybe it’s that simple.

I don’t know. I wonder sometimes about the practicality of art. For me, I don’t think art or writing can be just about self-expression. I’ve come to the conclusion that writing (this letter excepted) needs to have a purpose outside of the self – be it to influence people in a particular direction, or give people needed distraction or comfort – or something. Otherwise, it’s all just pointless.

Then again, I haven’t finished a single damn thing I’ve started in the four years since I left Kenyon, so maybe that tells you how that’s been going for me.

Anyway. Hope that you found something useful or at least entertaining in all this blathering. Best of luck with your playwriting and television writing classes. Hope that one of your students this year proves just about everything I’ve suggested here dead wrong.

Sincerely,
Jon Stout
Class of 2006

Letter submitted tonight to the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Let me be blunt: I can see nothing more fitting than for the planners of the September 11th attack to be tried as common criminals in New York City.

The Republicans have been whining that military tribunals are somehow safer. On the contrary, allowing these men to be tried and convicted behind closed doors is significantly more dangerous. It allows the supporters of Al Qaeda to labor under the fantasy that these men are martyrs and heroes rather than murderers. An open trial is the only way to force the world to see the truth of these men and who they are.

The Republicans have also raised the issue of security, suggesting that a terrorist attack on New York during the trial is inevitable. But Al Qaeda’s greatest successes have always come when they have been unexpected – by avoiding our security precautions rather than confronting them (as they did in the case of the Underwear Bomber last Christmas - I ask the reader, did Detroit really rank high on their personal lists of likely points of attack?) I would almost be more concerned for the safety of New Yorkers if the trial is moved out of the city, as it means the attention of our security forces would be elsewhere.

I disagree with the president on only one point: I do not believe these men should be executed for their crimes. I am not moved by compassion in this instance; quite the contrary. In fact, I know that the greatest desire of these men is to be martyrs for their cause, and that they expect and even welcome death. Execution is no punishment for them; so let them rot. Let time break them on its wheel, as it does us all. Let the years allow the magnitude of their crime to slowly penetrate their minds – because the worst thing that one can possibly do to a zealot is not to kill them, but to make them doubt.

The Republicans must be aware of the facts I raise. Their obstinacy in this matter leads me to suspect that their fears have little to do with the welfare of our nation and its people and everything to do with their own political futures.

Sincerely,
Jon Stout
etc.

Just trying out this livejournal update app for the iPod touch.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Republican critics said setting a firm date for starting a troop withdrawal encourages the enemy to simply wait out the U.S. efforts, and many officials in Afghanistan agreed, calling the timeline unrealistic. Some Democrats, meanwhile, were concerned the deadline wasn't firm enough and that a sizable force would be left in Afghanistan indefinitely.

From CNN: Will Afghanistan be Obama's Vietnam?

So regarding Afghanistan - I don't really see any way around it. Please correct me if I'm wrong here - but in spite of all of the hype in the media and the vague grumbles from both right and left, there really aren't a whole lot of real options on the table. In the end, we're going to have to commit more troops, and we're going to have to take the war debt - or pay the taxes for it up front, as some are currently suggesting (which is, as one might expect in a recession, probably going to go down like a lead balloon - which doesn't mean, in my personal opinion, that it's the wrong idea).

But let me get this straight - so say we don't send more troops to Afghanistan, and basically let the Taliban take over again. Are the Taliban just going to forget the fact that we kicked them out in the first place a few years ago? Correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't really strike me as the type to forgive and forget. We already know from 9/11 that they can hurt us. And unless I'm mistaken, their allied movement in Pakistan were until relatively recently fairly close to taking over there - along with its cache of nuclear weapons.

Like it or not, we're in the crux of the moment here. Giving in isn't going to make our enemies - the enemies we should have been fighting this whole time - go away. And if things don't finally get better for Afganistan, after all these years of being invaded and occupied, then they're going to get a whole lot worse for everyone.

I have two reactions to these words as I write them. The first is to feel like a coward, because even though I write these words I know I have no intention of fighting in the war I'm urging onwards. The other is a vague sense of disquiet - because I'm guessing that this is the kind of thinking that kept us in Vietnam long after the point of no return.

I know all of these things. But if there are other choices here, I'm not seeing them.

Friday, finally got down to Tri-C to return two books that I had out. They were only overdue, err, by about two months. The fines were, uh, hefty, but better than I had expected. Since I never like returning a book without at least trying to read it, I spent part of this week working my way through After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives by Edward Said.

I only managed to get about halfway through before I hit the point of no return on Friday. I've been meaning to read something by Said for a long time, being the most well-known figure of Palestinian academia. I chose this book in particular - as opposed to, for instance, his most famous work, Orientalism - because I thought that as a personal/poetic photo-essay, it might give me a more direct answer to a question I've been trying to figure out for a while*: who are the Palestinians when they're not fighting Israel?

It's a pretty big question - and one that I think might be key to the whole balagan that is the endless conflict/peace process. I'll discuss why in a moment.

So who are the Palestinians? Again, I only got partway through. Thus far, though, it seemed that Said didn't have any more answers than I do. He mentioned one or two details in passing that stuck out to me - that karate and martial arts were extremely popular among the Palestinians "in the interior" - i.e. in West Bank and Gaza - as I've heard they also are in Israel; and the overabundance of photographs and decorative objects Said noticed in Palestinian homes, which he suggested was an attempt to make up for a void in their lives (i.e. one caused by their dispossession, I assume).

Other than that, though, Said talked a lot about how fragmented, inconsistent and impermanent Palestinian identity is. He made their history sound like a series of disasters, or maybe the same disaster reenacted over and over again, to the point that he describes the ramshackle buildings in a refugee camp as 'ruins waiting to happen.' He also commented that the major form of Palestinian literature is (as I understand it) basically Post-Modernist in mode. A few lines I copied down:

The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability... our characteristic mode, then, is not a narrative, in which scenes take place seriatum, but rather broken narratives, fragmentary compositions, and self-consciously staged testimonials in which the narrative voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations and its limitations (38)

I guess none of this should surprise me, given what a mess the politics and the history of the region has been for the past hundred years. Especially in the period where Said was writing the book (the first edition was published in 1986, around the same time as the War of the Camps. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that incident.) I don't know. Maybe that's just the nature of trauma - once experienced or in progress, it doesn't tend to leave room in one's life for much else.

I have a tendency to look at the Palestinians' situation through the lens of what I know about the history of my own people (though I'm sure neither of them would really appreciate the comparison). Like Palestinian culture, Jewish culture across the past two thousand years has been fragmentary, contradictory and inconsistent, a mishmash of different influences at different times, as one would expect when the participants are spread out over thousands of miles. What's weird is that, in a strange way, I think we somehow made it work for us; even if the formal definition of our identity is famously complicated, even if we believe completely different things at times, there's always been something there that can't quite be put into words. I think we had a few things going for us, though, that the Palestinians didn't. First up was a central tradition of some sort - the Tanakh, the Talmud and the Mishnah - that no one ever quite really broke with entirely. The Palestinians don't; unlike the Jews, they don't have one single religious tradition or philosophy (Said, for instance, came from a Palestinian Christian background, unless I'm mistaken). The second was a sense of narrative, of our particular place in the story - where we were from, what we were about, (for some) even a sense of where we're going. The Palestinians don't have that either, at least from what I can tell so far. If they have a central narrative, it's the narrative of their dispossession by the Israelis.

Getting to the point, though - why is this a massive issue, at least in my mind? Imagine for a second that your entire identity - who you are as a person - was more or less entirely tied to resistance (peaceful or otherwise) and continuation of a particular conflict. How would you ever be able to stop? Call it Patton's Dilemma - who are you once the war is over?

It's something I'm worry about - both about the Palestinians and the Israelis, to be honest. I guess that's the thing about wars and conflicts this long. In the case of the Israelis, though, there's at least theoretically a tradition and a culture to fall back on when and if the bullets ever stop flying; some place to go back to. What do the Palestinians have to define themselves if they do wind up making peace with Israel? Or even if they actually do win? Even Said admitted at one point that he wasn't sure if getting the land back would be enough to get what the Palestinians truly want - I believe the way he put it was 'restoring ourselves to ourselves.'

I think one of the reasons the peace process has failed so far is that it keeps trying to address the real, tangible facts of peace - who gets what land, water rights, who holds what military power and how much - without looking into the problems like these - the ones that are much, much harder to really affect, but which are, I suspect, equally important to the conflict and why it keeps on continuing. All I can really say for sure is, I really hope there's someone Palestinian out there who's at least trying to work on this.

* yes, as a cultural outsider, yes, without knowing how to speak or read Arabic -- two things that I'm sure doom any efforts on my part to futility, I just thought I'd try anyway.

So. Uh. All of a sudden, I have a job. Just got it yesterday. I start a week from Monday

Also, that gig that I've been talking about vaguely on Facebook? It came through.

:D

So I'm sitting on a bench outside of Borders at Crocker Park about an hour ago, writing some stuff down, when this middle-aged/50's woman I've never seen before in my life abruptly pulls up in a blue Ford Focus with her windows lowered. "Hey," she says. "Hey. I've got something to say to you."

There wasn't anyone else around. "Yes?" I say, sort of automatically.

"Fuck you," she says.

"I'm sorry?" But she had already started to drive off.

Uh. Okay. Come to think of it now, I might have seen her when I'd been in Brueggers' a little while before, getting a refill. She was over in the corner reading a book; I glanced over to see what the title was. "American Massacre," I think. Maybe she thought I was staring, or something?

Anyway. People are weird sometimes.