Ending at the Start

I want to take a break from FB & Instagram (& Twitter?). Starting next year, tomorrow, I will not be a FaceBook presence. I want to be less present in all my digital social media. I really want to be looking at my iPhone less. However, I like to hear what others are thinking, saying, seeing, and doing. Strangely, I do consider my FB friends, “friends.” So what I hear of you, whether the LaGuardia student from years ago, friends from Copley Square HS, the decade I spent at Hunter College and my California Graduate School sojourn, I really do want to hear what you’re up to. But I can’t seem to keep this “right sized:” I look too often, and I don’t think I can rein it in any other way than taking a hiatus from Facebook.
I find the process of being a Facebook Citizen (which is to say digital citizen: Twitter, Instagram and Twitpics all belong here) fragmenting. I think my mania with haiku is a perfect sign of it.

Haiku are poems/
In A.D.H.D. Format:/
Quickly completed/
#haiku

In this digital format I get the germ of the poems and ideas down but I never return to savor the thoughts as long as the desire to check and publish so instantly. (HMMMM, I think I just talked myself out of keeping twitter, which I was hoping to just post with, along with my blogs todayeye and wqueens7 [which publish on FB].)

   Instead of immediately posting everything I think I would like to write on paper and think about what I’ve written a bit longer before I share them with the world.
The other thing is that I want to spend more time looking at books and the world. I realize that I have probably spent an entire day or more waiting for things to load while I was trying to see how you were doing, where you were, or what you saw (your pictures, poems and check-ins [Foursquare is another one to drop!]). I walked into a room over the holidays and I was confronted with a number of people looking down at their phones, some were still talking to the people closest to them, but I was struck by the oracular nature of the smartphones. People were looking into them like Narcissus into the pond.
So I think I will try to spend the first weeks of the year off of Facebook and Instigram and Twitter and post on my blog when I really need to say something. This is just my first cry for help, let’s see how it works.

-Finally, I want to spend less time looking at my phone, even though you are hidden in the digital folds and I AM INTERESTED in you.
-I want to spend less time trying to capture my moments in haiku to share with you instantly, you’ll do fine without my constant barrage of “poems.”^[1]
-I want to hear from people in a more personal form. So I will be trying to write more letters and postcards to those of you whom I do contact. The act of sitting down with paper and pen pleases me to no end. You are worth it. I would love to get a letter from you. You can write me at work if you don’t know my postal address:
Stafford Gregoire
LaGuardia Community College
31-10 Thomson Ave., E103
Long Island City, N.Y.
11101

 

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^[1] I still don’t consider haiku “real” poems. I like their efficiency, but they don’t rise to the level of Emily Dickinson and Theodore Geisel.

Grading Black Lit Finals Haiku

Grading Haikus

16. Reading Endlessly/
Final exams showing much/
(Of their distractions)/
#haiku

17. Lectures and readings/
Turned into raw sausages/
Squeezed into Blue-Books/
#haiku

18. Some evade learning/
Like the startled trespassers/
Avoiding the light/
#haiku

19. Then I read a test/
That defiantly points out/
I could have taught more!/
#haiku

20. S/he takes my lectures/
Builds an elegant thesis/
That outshines my own/
#haiku

21. Some students clearly/
Overstand literature/
And have been waiting/
#haiku

22. Harriet Jacobs/
Wrote *Incidents* way back when/
For TH!S young person/
#haiku

23. Race Repression in/
One-Hundred-&-Fifty-Years/
Have not changed at all/
#haiku

24. When Jacobs declared/
“Pity me & pardon me”/
She predicted now/
#haiku

25. Students are still moved/
By prejudice & the truth/
Of so long ago/*
#haiku
*Written so long ere

26. Reading this brilliance/
After seven hundred words/
Of summary: great/
#haiku

27. S/He revives my soul:/
Insight & Understanding/
Validate my work/
#haiku

28. I hope one day you/
See your work validated/
By a students’ thoughts/
#haiku

Today’s [L]ight Supremacy

I want to write about an article I read in the timestoday: “Beach Essentials in China: Flip-Flops, a Towel and a Ski Mask.” I came to the computer to comment on this. Perhaps I will eventually write a haiku to tweet with the URL, but I feel like the article on masks to keep women from darkening their faces on a Chinese beach simply ridicules the phenomenon without examining any of the secondary antecedents.  Dan Levin does point out the cultural bias that exists within Chinese culture and notes the class distinctions that pre-date European colonization of China in the 18th and 19th centuries.

I am sure that the “Mandarins” of the north who had run the Empire for millennia had cast aspersions on the southern laborers who spoke Cantonese and probably had to work outside more. I am also certain that it was not the working the fields that caused the Darker Skinned Chinese their pigmentation, but natural selection for living in a warmer, more fecund, climate. This nicely parallels the Teutonic pretensions of the colonial powers of Northern Europe of the colonial age.

I feel like the deep seated bigotry that I am writing about here needs some discussion.  While I do think “White Supremacy” is a serious problem and had both culturally and institutionally corrupted human society; the societies that don’t even have “whites” in them also suffer from this bigotry. Interestingly, like religious bigotry (anti-semitism, anti-agnosticism [forced religiosity] and the late-comer Islamophobia) is really a place-holder for economic and cultural hegemony. Most racism is actually just a tool of entitlement, privilege and wealth.  We dress up our vicious and venal fight for our “things” as a “religious” or cultural battle.  The truth is we are fighting tooth and nail to keep things the way we are comfortable with them: maintaining our position and privileges. If we looked at life structurally or materially rather than emotionally this would be clearer. Of course the leaders, who use the colorless language of diplomacy in public, understand this perfectly.

The uneducated believe the lies of racial inferiority and proudly adhere to it in the hopes of acquiring some of the privileges unfairly denied the underclass.

“A woman should always have fair skin,” she said proudly. “Otherwise people will think you’re a peasant.”

This quote seems to lie on the cusp of the class-race North-South distinction. In the speakers mind is a rough bastardization of the “light supremacy” of the ancient mandarins (& colonial Northern Europeans). Indeed, I argue that the real Brahmins, Mandarins, and Patricians only understand this as a way to hold those who have had to work for them down. When someone is actually an intellectual or morally elevated profiteer, my experience shows, that “they” (the ‘light’) accept those who can profit them fairly readily. The overclass will continue to publicly spout these racist/classist/pigmentationist truisms, but they will not let them interfere with the acquisition of wealth.

A “peasant” is someone who believes these nonsensical distinctions, not someone who has browned in the sun of manual labor. [Digression Time] Indeed, when you have people of color integrated into a power structure that casts aspersions on colored people you see the “wheels of rationalization” grinding the cane of racist statements into the sweet treacle of their exceptionalism. When I played on my HS Hockey team I was one of those people who accepted the class distinction argument of race to excuse the knuckleheads who gave me associative power. The rationalization goes something like this: “I’m not a Nigger because I am not a poor ebonic speaking African American who participates in x, y and z behaviors.” So I’m not a Nigger because these people, my “friends” and “accomplices” understand how I’m different. I will ignore how they are my only “pass” in the white supremacist world that these utterances create and continue. [END digression] The poor who are not well represented in the New York Times except for Somalia-like pathogens or snake-handling coal-mining eccentrics, believe the lies that their cultures tell them: dark skin makes you a peasant, vulnerable to the white sails of colonialism and exploitation.  To believe the woman’s fear of melanin you have to think that Europe and America are rich not because of the 18th century military-industrial advantages, but because they have light skin, untarnished by agrarian manual labor.

The New York Times author and editor are free to ignore this subtext because though it is comic puff-piece that ridicules Chinese (read indigenous/3rd world) culture.

“People just don’t want to get tan.”

This statement by someone who obviously subscribes to the “light is better” ethos that benefits the ruling elite, the European Americans that subscribe to this paper and, presumably, Levin, the author of this (incomplete) piece. A bit more inquisitiveness would have drawn out the cultural antecedents that make “tans,” as signifiers of work, a symbol to be eschewed. Indeed, throughout the “Globalized World,” dark skin is a liability, at least subconsciously. [Digression Time] “Globalization” is the heir apparent to white supremacist capitalism. Now anyone can participate in globalization, however they cannot participate in it without using the tools of an unfair and rapacious system that disproportionately benefits the scions of “traditional capitalism.” I want to note here that what I mean by “traditional capitalism” is not capitalism, rather the centralization that benefits those in power. The Soviet Union, now devolved to so many dictatorships and potentates, was no less a “capitalist state” in my understanding. We, the subjects of these oligarchies, are no freer from the tyranny of the multinationals than the Soviet Subjects were free from Josef Stalin & Chairman Mao’s 5 year plans. [END digression]
[conclusion]

I used Diigo stickynotes to compose the first draft of this. I have proofread it and continued with the rough-draft-on-line-composition. Let me know what you think, if you can stand my scribbling and actually get to the end here. Perhaps this could be a new way of teaching critical analysis and staging research papers for my students. Any comments (Even those like “Tom” below) are helpful.

Zadie Smith’s *On Beauty* (Summer Read #1)

7/19/12 8:49 pm

Just finished Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. Hmm, where to start? We’re on Fire Island and the kids are at Bingo Night (I’ve been journaling in my notebook and writing haiku journals in my two blogs todayeye and wqueens7). I have made this book last altogether too long.

I liked On Beauty because Smith is a consummate novelist, freighting everything with meaning. Each word is simultaneously informative within the story and about life as well. I really love reading good novels (or novels that I like). It reminds me of what is good about life: everything is simultaneously a fact about the world and a symbol to be interpreted.  (That is one of the things I’ve been meaning to write about, the semiotics of life in the world.)

Three points to to start with, first the most personal and idiosyncratic: Adultery. In 93 or 94 I was a reader for Don McQuade’s Cold War Ethnic Literature course at Berkeley and for that class I read Eat a Bowl of Tea. The plot was not adultery per-se,  but  a wife who is raped and continues to have sex with her rapist because her husband is impotent.  Reading that book as I was in my 1st long term relationship was really hard on me emotionally.  I think it was because I was so insecure about having a girlfriend and I was so happy to be living with Linda and to have had a real connection with a  partner, the idea of a marriage not working out “happily ever after” stylee was horrifying. This time the adulterer is a protagonist.  He’s not terribly likeable, nor is his relationship, but their marriage is a huge part of five lives and the idea of even a bad marriage failing upsets me. It isn’t a bad marriage, just a rote one.  I’d imagine it is like every marriage: habit. To disrupt the routine of a family is, to me, for some reason, terrifying. I guess I’m happy about my life and any threat to it is frightening.

Second, and I guess this is related to the adultery plot, SEX. First, his first affair is with a woman whom he has known for thirty years. Claire recalls recalls seducing him without any desire for him or and real understanding of why she did it.  I, somehow, understand that “Imp of the Perverse” that would make you behave horribly and then deal with the consequences.  I am glad I’ve never cheated on Linda and that it has been a while since I did any of those self destructive behaviors that are, as they say in AA, moving towards a drink. Phew!

Claire, the woman of the initial affair, is also described as mega fit in the most unattractive way. She is the opposite of his zaftig African American wife physically, and in some ways intellectually and temperamentally.  He doesn’t like her, he just does it because he can. JERK!  I could see falling into that sort of trap if I didn’t try to keep myself spiritually fit.

Victoria, -Vee-, the daughter of an academic rival who sort of seduces him at her mother’s wake, and was the first love of his oldest son, is described as completely beautiful and composed, but also young and immature.  She “sexts” him and manipulates him into a second encounter, where he sees her ugly side and snaps out of it.  Of course, she is nineteen and he is fifty seven.  She is a student and young woman, and he is a father and professor.  There is no simple “right and wrong” here, but I find it possibly excusable:but finally inexcusable.

Her beauty and stereotypical beauty of youth is a social asset and very glamorous, but inappropriate. I liked this part of the novel. The collapse of visual or two dimensional beauty into something other than an asset worked for me. Like Claire Malcolm, the wirey poetess, the babalicious buppy princess, two forms of fetishized women presented to middle aged men like me, are finally shown to be thin, two dimensional wraiths in inappropriate and unequal power relation relationships.  I like that, and in some ways that was the main gristle of the novel for me. however, I think it could have been handled more economically.

The novel ends with no closure. There is huge growth on the part of Howard, but it is incremental. He doesn’t get everything back (like I wanted), but he does make huge steps towards righting himself to a better, more independent and complete person.

One other little thing that bothered me was that the language wasn’t quite right I admire Smith for trying to leave England, but I was bothered by a few misused words (road).

Well, this is hardly a book review, or  even a cogent assessment of the novel, but it is a good personal account of some of the main parts of the novel from my perspective…

Forever Now

22a. Finite stream of “nows”/
Compose the august balance/
Of our existence/
#haiku Via @emilydickinson

22b. Forever’s made up/
Of an endless stream of “nows”/
Creating our lives/
#haiku

22c. Forever’s composed/
One “now” at a time by us/
Continually/
#haiku

22d. Forever’s composed/
By humans eternally/
One “now” at a time/
#haiku

From:
Forever – is composed of Nows – (690)
BY EMILY DICKINSON
Forever – is composed of Nows –
‘Tis not a different time –
Except for Infiniteness –
And Latitude of Home –

From this – experienced Here –
Remove the Dates – to These –
Let Months dissolve in further Months –
And Years – exhale in Years –

Without Debate – or Pause –
Or Celebrated Days –
No different Our Years would be
From Anno Dominies –

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/182912

Some Thoughts on Religion

10. Metaphors of faith/
Often elude most beliefs/
& understanding/
#haiku

11. Buildings for worship/
Show diminished faith in G_g/
If s/he so grand/
#haiku

12. Universal G_d/
Cannot be segregated/
Into one building/
#haiku

13. G_d’s ubiquity/
Is poorly served by finite/
Human rituals/
#haiku

14. Specific worship/
Diminishes creation/
For those who’ve lost G_d/
#haiku

15. Any creator/
Is within everything/
Pleasing or hateful/
#haiku

Autobiography for Class (Draft 2)

Stafford Gregoire

ENG101.1211

Professor Gregoire

30 April 2012

 

the shy[1] rebel

Stafford has always had a strange sense of the world. Even in 1st grade he admired the kid who couldn’t do the normal 1st grade assignment, “naming his parents and grandparents and where they were from.” “Tony” was a kid from down the block and his parents and parents were always around our block. They were from Cambridge, the town we lived in, Stafford could have done the assignment for Tony: “my parents and grandparents are from Cambridge, Massachusetts, just like me,” he should have said in Mrs. Pierce’s 1st grade class. Instead he wet himself in front of the class: “Stafford’s hero!” For some perverse reason, ever since then whenever Stafford encountered a “freak” who couldn’t or wouldn’t “behave normally,” he had a new hero. I think that this is because his parents told him to respect people who stood up for themselves, and never to shame children who refused to conform to the norms of society. Ever since then Stafford has elevated people who refused to conform to society. Personally, I think that he elevates eccentric people to defy conformity and make himself more unique.

As soon as Stafford grew up, he left home. Arrogant, he wanted to make his way in the world on his own as a bicycle messenger. He moved to New York City in 1979, just after the city went bankrupt and was allowed to default by the federal government. The crumbling city was perfect for Stafford because “[t]he small community often tolerates eccentricity. The city, on the contrary, rewards it” (Park, cited in Kidder 307). Like yeast in moist flour or hops in a brewery or a bully on a 3rd world police force, Stafford had found his perfect environment. It is a place where he can live the fantasy The Toronto Star reporter Cheney described as “[l]iving by your own skill and animal cunning, like a gladiator in the Roman amphitheatre, surrounded by fat and decadent citizens” (Cheney A1). Of course, that is a young man’s dream of rebellion. And if you look at most of these imaginary heroes of the street, they prefer to keep these fantasies to themselves. So Stafford lived his fantasy life of an urban warrior.

_____________________________________________________________________

Works Cited

Cheney, P. “Bicycle Couriers in Love with Life on Mean Streets.” Toronto Star, 27 March 1993, A1, A8. Print.

Kidder, Jeffrey. “Appropriating The City: Space, Theory, And Bike Messengers.” Theory & Society 38.3 (2009): 307-328. Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 Apr. 2012.

 

 

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[1] passive aggressive

Spring Growth

May Day
Today I will notice people working/
And ignore advertising/

I will celebrate students learning/
& smile at loud cries for attention/

I will do my very best to help/
& not judge those who don’t/

I will satisfy only my needs/
& observe the “wants” needy cries/

I will do my job diligently/
So I can help the world improve/

I will not notice when I find others’ faults/
& try to see assets & motives/

If my outlook changes anything/
It is the entire world that will improve/

You may not notice it out-there in the world/
But you can transform the world in your HEART/

~Stafford

Executing Assignment

I agreed to write/
The assignment I gave class/
I will stage it here/
#haiku

Hope Wins

Where to begin?  I was up and at the polls before they opened and there were 20 people there waiting at 5:45 am.  By the time they opened the polls in Woodside, where I vote (at 6:08, don’t get me started), there were 100 people there.  Excitement lit up the foggy pre-dawn darkness.

The machines were cranky as they started and the people in the 47^th district had to wait until the most experienced blue-haired old lady came and jiggled a lever on the back just so to get the machine back into order.  I was seventh in the 47^th district, 007.  You’ve seen the picture.

Teaching and grading papers all day there was a strange air of camaraderie and hope.  Spike’s dad put it into words as we watched our kids practice soccer last night before the results were in: “It’s like Nine-One-One, everyone has feeling of secret connection.”

Indeed, as the kids played soccer at McCarren Park two Hasidic men came up with their gloves and joined the Latino guys who were playing softball in the warm November evening.  Only in New York do you see Orthodox Jews shagging fly balls with strangers.

As Mason and I drove back to Queens NPR called Pennsylvania for Obama, and one of the wags said: “I can’t imagine a path to the Whitehouse for McCain that doesn’t include Pennsylvania.”  Before we got over the Greenpoint Bridge they were calling Florida for Obama, and Mason took my cell and excitedly texted Linda that news (and Dole’s SC Defeat).  I came home and ate with supreme hope.

During the day I got an email on my phone from a friend from the 70s who had lived with me in Boston and known me in my messenger days.  We had been through a fair amount together and he contacted me out of the blue as a way –I assume– to reach out of his white New England life and celebrate with a dear old friend (of color).  I had similar calls and emails from Australia, Ireland and Northern California.

This impulse, this digital coming together is, for us progressives, like coming out after a storm.  The last 8 years have been hard.  Personally, I have felt “occupied” like I did as a young non-white man in Boston in the 70s.

So these contacts made because of the HOPE of the Obama campaign feel especially good.  To be reminded of the good and decent whites who were my dear friends during the horror of bussing in Boston in the 1970s, the people who reminded me that I was a man, a friend, a  person of value “un-adjectivized” (not a black man) has begun the thawing.

Before Mr. Obama’s election I was still in my shell.  I was a bit jaded and cynical about friends from the “way-back-machine” contacting me and asking me to drink the Kool-Aid.  I didn’t want to HOPE because I didn’t want to be disappointed.  I have been stand-offish.  But their naïve enthusiasm was touching.  It reminded me of going to anti war marches and Pete Seger concerts with my parents in the 60s.  I don’t think that the 60s, in light of the Republican avarice we’ve lived through from 80 onward, were all that great.

SO last night, and all day yesterday I felt like we had finally become a nation again.  I felt the possibility of Human Companionship.  On September 11^th, 2001 we all receded to our livingrooms to watch our lives and country on television.  We got the “Dulce et Decorum Est” romantic version of America.  All of those grand Ken Burns PBS documentaries seemed more real than playing baseball or listening to jazz.  I feel like our nation slipped into a massive communal state of DuBoisian double consciousness, alienated from ourselves by our image of ourselves as something else.

When Spain was attacked on March 11, 2004 the nation came outside together.  After 9-11 we went into our living rooms and isolated.  They re-established their humanity in the most basic way.  I have been jealous of that European land for these four years.  Yesterday we came out.  We came out in the millions.  We got a 9-11 mulligan and we chose to participate instead of isolate.  The contacts from Europe, Australia, California and Vermont are contacts from our higher place.  America can stop fearing.  We can HOPE again.

One of my colleagues has called this the moment that America becomes Post-Colonial.  We have stepped (a little bit) beyond the colonial and imperial traditions we’ve inherited and begun to live up to our constitution.  The whole world is breathing a sigh of relief because we can choose someone who has a vision of a greater America that doesn’t have the 1945 and 1992 unipolar American power in mind.  “We don’t have to subjugate/ in order to be great.”

America has returned to the dream by electing Mr. Obama.  From Dakar to Dushembe, from the steppes of Mongolia to the factories of Viet Nam there are people who are seeing the America of FDR, JFK (neither of whom were angels), the America of hope and individual opportunity, the America of the Great Society, the America of freedom to be (not to earn), for the first time.

GOD BLESS AMERICA