November 23 at the PIT, Brooklyn, Nov 23 at the PIT
Friendship and Fighting in Claremont and the PiT, Penny, Orwell, Our Friends our Selves
One of the early blurbs for the new friendship book came from my old Brooklyn neighbor Prageeta, now a prof in the English Department at Pomona College, where she works with Jonathan Lethem. David Foster Wallace spent his last days here, as a part of this department, before he took his own life on the 12th of September, 2008. I studied up the hill at Pitzer, then an alternative college, where people spent their days studying histories of laughter and anarchism. These days, the edge is a little lighter. The week’s reading would be my second reading with Prageeta this fall, as the friendship and fighting tour wound down through some unexpected ways.
Out the door at 325 AM, I caught the train to JFK, hurling out into the world, Atlanta, feeling the south for an instant, off to Ontario, into the sunlight, walking through Claremont, through the quad, the old dining Hall, Honnold Library, to the village, to Pomona College, to join Prageeta and Heidi, for poetry class, other voices, telling stories, extending a conversation that began years ago.
The author of Wayward Creatures, Heidi led us through a workshop of ideas, exploring layers of history and reportage as source material for poetry as a sort of social document. Look for a story about something that impacts you, Heidi asked.
I pulled out a copy of the New York Review of Books to an article that I’d read on the plane.
“We’ve got to Kill, Kill, and Kill” read the headline of the story by Dan Kauffman from the December issue, tracing the currents of anti-semetic discourse among Franco’s supporters in Civil War Spain:
“A new enemy, the same enemy,” said one source, naming the other.
“They multiply too fast, like animals infected with the virus…”
The targets:
“Free masons, nudists, anyone who behaved differently,
“The enemy is always the same..”
Before the panel, Prageeta and I corresponded, back and forth, tracing a few themes to address, back and forth, discussing it all
Look at the etiology of a scandal, the limitations of disposability politics, which emulates the larger workings of capital, I wrote, drafting questions for the panel. I’d ask students to:
1, Write about a friend, a chum, could be someone you adored, how it went?
2, What about a significant conflict with that friend or others? Was there a relational asymmetry, re Zaza and Simone de Beauvoir, etc. Simone de Beauvoir's childhood best friend Élisabeth Lacoin, known as "Zaza" whose early death at 21, which de Beauvoir attributed to societal pressures, deeply haunted the author and became a central theme in her work.
3, Could it or others tolerate differences? When did it break? Was it a good fight or a bad fight? Was it resolved, or did it end in a rupture?
4) What was the nature of the conflict? Was it in the social world, between minds, bodies, or material conditions? "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," wrote Marx and Engels. "All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development," posited Friedrich Engels. Was your conflict class-based conflict about work or status or more of the interior, of Freud, of Dreams, a family romance, or a relational matrix?
5) We've learned a lot about friendship, from Aristotle to Derrida to Hannah Arendt to Foucault. How has it changed?
6) And finally, what is the poetics of friendship? Which poem or fiction best illustrates the changing nature of friendship and conflict? What does it tell ?”
Warmed up from Heidi’s workshop, we all talked for the next hour, with the students sharing stories of trials and conflicts, struggles with politics, and friends. Those who did not fight and those who did.
I shared a few stories of friendships where fights ended things, or where it opened into something else.
Thoreau and Emerson stopped speaking, their tales reflecting that “certain ache” that comes when friends break up.
I referred to a few of the interviews, including with Bertha Lewis.
“Race trumps class… you can’t for rapprochement," said Bertha Lewis. Sometimes you have to just let it be.
My mind trailing back to Gogol’s story, ‘The Nose.”
"Sometimes there is no plausibility at all … sometimes things happen which you would hardly think possible."
I feel that way.
Look at the Professor and the Madman, said Heidi.
The first panel went swimmingly.
Prageets and I had dinner later that night, chatting away about writing and academic politics, Dale and Mike, grief cycles, Baby C and romance.
And gradually the other panelists arrived, joining us for a snack, giggling into the night.
Penny and I had breakfast in the morning, the beginning of an eventful day, chatting about my dad and her work, Ben Morea and Irving Rosenthal, who ran the Kaliflower Collective, which would not have Jack Smith. The fights were many.
You should interview Ben, Penny followed, telling me about Everything is Now: The 1960’s New York Avant Garde, chatting about the Cockettes and the Fuggs, Ken Bernard, the poet. ‘Dimitri allows for improv,’ says Penny, ‘living outside of the mediated world.’
Finishing breakfast, I walked down Foothill, past Harvey Mudd College, to the Grove House, an event space at Pitzer College, brought to the campus in the 1970’s by my old prof. Barry Sanders, where we met every day, years and years ago, by Mead where I lived, out to Pomona for our panel on the complications of conflict and friendship.
Responding to the same prompts as the day before, Penny told us about John Vacarro, the cofounder of the theater troupe Playhouse of the Ridiculous, who tormented her for years and years.
“He wanted me in the company when I was 18,” she began. “I carry that, a peasant mentality. It made him sick.’
Penny paused and laid out a thesis.
“One of the greatest abilities is to contain a fight,” she went on. “I was born in 1950. Going to school, I was told I could be president. I couldn’t bring the poverty of our home to school or the school home.”
Still, John brutalized me, Penny explained.
‘I wish Penny Arcade were dead,’ he said. He was thinking about her.
‘I never forgot what that afforded me. Just being in his presence gave me an entry. I desperately wanted his approval, she said. It threw me back on myself. ‘I had no one to appeal to but myself,’ Quentin Crisp told me.
Penny passed the mic to Anna, the musician turned academic, who followed:
“First we fought, then we fucked, then we became family. I guess that makes me queer.”
“I don’t handle conflict well,” said Heidi, referring to a messy place between conflict and deep solidarity.
So far so good, the first round of the panel is almost over.
“I have many,” said R, a poet, artist and academic, dressed in black, following, tracing a distinct non-linear narrative. “... the last policeman who pulled me over,” he replied, highlighting a clash around race, or possibly, “the moment I wrote about when my mother spit on my face… or my father caught me a serve.” The struggles between self and family, individual and the larger social order, they would be many. “What if I didn't know I was beautiful? The women were building me up, then mom spit on my face.
He paused and reflected on his story.
“I studied with Eve S, Kosofsky Sedgwick, the author of Epistemology of the Closet.
Allen Ginsberg cruised me.
I thrived.
My mother is from the Phillipines. Her parents were assassinated by soldiers, stabbing babies with bayonettes. My mom’s outrageous. She dragged herself out in a pool of blood.”
It was going really well. The audience sat rapt taking in this story of queer exile and connection.
“My mom spit on me,” said R.
“Tell us more,” said Penny.
“Let the story linger,” said R.
Zigging and zagging through his story, Penny asked again.
“Don’t interrupt me!” R continued, voice raised. “It's not nice being told to stop,” he followed. I wasn’t sure anyone was telling him to stop. It felt like he was being told how to tell his story instead of allowing it to linger. The anger rose, like a mini enactment, not unlike the fights that took place during the interviews for the book, right there, around race and class, privilege and speech bubbling forth, right there, whispering to a scream, up from the stories.
“Its not about your mother,” said Penny
“Part of what I am getting at is about the nature of the story.” said R. “I want to tell the story. That moment has to do with the moment of fantasy of the story. That's why I should stop. I am going to stop. It's more provocative that way.”
I’m hoping everyone can just keep talking, without storming off. Will everyone stick with each other?
Steve followed, sharing a story about a fight of his with Penny.
“Its about the nature of the friendship."
“I want to hear from you,” said Penny, tears welling in her eyes. “From your story to understand the painful thing that happened to me.”
“In the trenches with Penny Arcade is the name of my essay in the book,” says Steve, reflecting on years of performing with Penny, their conflicts and ways they could connect. “We found a way to continue with each other,” Steve continued.
“The important part is what happened with R and I,” said Penny. “Steve and I would have enormous fights. There are no shortcuts to our personalities.
“My reaction was coming from a radical dissociative place,” said R. “The radical dissociative moment. I have zero tolerance for those who annoy me.”
R told a story about being told not to dance so provocatively by the pool at the hotel before the talk, to stop dancing outside the pool before breakfast, because he was disturbing the patrons, the spectre of at hotel, a black body in space, reactions from white patrons, bodies in motion.
He shared another story about “meeting a stranger driving, giving a thumbs up to a country song as the two caught each others’ eyes. How do I move in a line unapologetically? I just dance in public.”
“I asked you to continue,” said Penny. “Students ask questions. Why are you asking for closure?”
“Was it about long or longing?” asks R, referring to Penny asking him to get to the point, desire and anticipation. The audience on the panel longing for a resolution of the narrative. The storyteller moving backward and forth, without quite delivering the crescendo, an audience of college kids, sitting watching.
Finally, a question from the audience, as we are winding up, no closer to a conclusion.
“What happens if there are two versions of a story? And one side doesn’t agree with the other's account?” a younger student asked.
Isn’t that the story of life? We all live in multiple relationships simultaneously, sometimes with very little resemblance to the other, even among partners, even among lovers. Everyone has their story.
Finally, the students leave for class.
And we continue talking.
You ok? I ask R, my voice quiet. I’m sorry I interrupted.
You can't force rapprochement. Bertha’s words from my book run through my mind.
We all need to talk, to clear the air.
It's what we would do in groupwork, air it out.
And so we talked, hugs following.
And I walked into the afternoon, remembering those tricky conversations on campus years ago after the riots in 1992, when we talked all night.
Off to see Al, my old prof from Pitzer, still about, telling stories from years and years prior. I knew him in the fall of 1988, when I wore cowboy boots to class, tucked into my jeans, with a leather jacket.
“You sounded like a ditzy airhead who had something to say,” noted M, all those years ago, in the class.
“You should settle into your writing,” said Al. “It would be well worth your effort.”
That was 37 years ago. But we planned to get coffee. I walked to an old coffeehouse in the Village, but could not find my professor. I could not recognize my old prof, sitting discouraged, not sure if he was at the cafe or not.
And then I saw him, hunched over, eating a sandwich, reading a book about Jesus.
Wearing a hat covering his face, he recognized me, with a smile.
“I’m a little older than I was when you last saw me,” he said.
“So am I,” I replied, looking at his face, his skin, 37 years later, the grooves of age, sun, still smiling.
We chat. I’m not sure he recognizes or remembers me.
How did you get started, I asked.
“I was at Buffalo teaching from 1961 to 1968, teaching as an abd. They loved me. I had published an article about Oedipus in a journal of aesthetics and criticism. My wife got rheumatoid arthritis. I applied for jobs out west, taking a position at Santa Barbara. They invited Dylan Thomas to give a lecture. He had sex with the wife of the person who put him up. They are furious. And lay into my friend, who invited him, denying him tenure, ripping him apart. I got angry. And told everyone so. My friend said, you know you are never going to get tenure after that outburst. He told me about a job at Pitzer. They wanted someone to teach modernism and Shakespeare. I got an offer to start as an associate. Sounds like you have a big decision to make, said the dean at Santa Barbara, showing little inclination to match the offer.
Wachtel was at Pitzer for the next half century. They loved me, says Albert. We spent the afternoon telling stories about Bruno, whose statue we used to see at Campo de Fiori in Rome. He was burned at the stake there in 1600 for heresy. He published a book saying the earth was not the center of the universe in 1582, believing Nicolaus Copernicus, who saw something else in the universe, proposing the heliocentric model, which placed the sun at the center of the solar system with Earth and other planets orbiting it. This contrasted with the prevailing geocentric model where the Earth was stationary at the center. “The universe is infinite,” said Bruno. He was tortured. “I believe in the spiritual entity that made that.” They burned him at the stake. The Catholic Church says, we didn’t burn him because of what he said about Copernicus. We burned him because of what he said about the Virgin Mary. She was a kid who got pregnant and said god did it.
Sigh.
King Lear is his favorite Shakespaere play. He was a super human, says Al. Without him, there is no Marlowe, the author of his favorite Faust, “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.”
“Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?”
He spent years teaching Ulysses, publishing, Cracked Looking-Glass: James Joyce and the Nightmare of History, his study of Joyce’s thought as it mirrors relativity theory, in 1992. It fits in with Einstein. Look at the Universe. She sees it one way. I see it another way. Don’t ask what's right. There are different interpretations of the world. I think back to the fight.
We have conflicts. You sympathize with all our perspectives, that we have to be aware of, empathize with. Bloom has his point.
I asked Al about favorite novels, list Ulysses, Brothers K, War and Peace maybe, Jane Austin, all of them, George Elliot, Sound and the Fury.
What's your favorite Faust?
I’d say Marlow for pleasure, Goethe for meaning.
"Nature has neither kernel nor shell; she is everything at once. You remember the god you are like, not me," wrote Goethe.
And we said goodbye, decades after our first meeting, both changed, still here.
Into the afternoon, I walked through the village, looking at the cactus gardens. The conversations continued into the evening. Everyone is a little worn out, a little weary.
“Thinking is hard work. That's why so few of us do it,” says Penny, beginning her performance, seeming to paraphrase Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s words from the Twilight of the Idols:
Says Penny Arcade, performing. "I came from a line of poets from Leroy Jones to Diane Di Prima."
“The integrated spectacle stirred, stuffed into our brain. It's all there in the introduction to Sunset Blvd. The media hijacks our attention and spits it back to us…” says Penny, tracing a history of advertising and the underground. By 1970, people pushed back. I grew up in a culture of resistance. I didn’t watch TV. … I made friends with places the way others made friends with TV.
Finishing in Claremont, I took the train from Claremont to LA Union Station, watching the city as the train moved West. Arriving at Union Station, it was raining, pouring all afternoon. We walked through the LA County Museum of Art, perusing images of performers, Brassi's 1930's Paris, Rivera's 1990's East Los Angeles. Found our way to Chinatown, stopping for dimsum and tea in a lovely quiet spot, watching the rain pour through the afternoon. The owner sat with the tv on to old Hong Kong b movies to the left. We talked about life after it all changes. And joined Sienna at Mutmuz gallery, gossiping about Penny Arcade and music and art and the latest show at the gallery, out for beer nearby, with Joy Division playing. The waiter sat to drink with us, bringing us extra saki. 'Here is to life, he said. 'And mistakes, our many mistakes' we toasted to that, to just getting through the day, through the stumbles, missteps, growing, living, making it. It was still raining when we left. People scurrying about with umbrellas trying to elude the rain. The earth needs it here. I guess we all do.
Next Morning, good morning cats, good morning movie posters, good morning blue skies, good morning cars, music, traffic, a dilapidated building on one corner, a Limo on the next, Los Angeles, ever changing, on the way out into the morning, still wet from the night before.
I spent the way back, still reflecting on the week, my old Brooklyn neighbor, Prageeta, who brought my Lower East Side buddy, Penny, to my old ramping grounds on the West Coast, where she shook it up. We shared stories about Italy and the demimonde, Jack Smith, Ben Morea, of Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, Judith Malina, The Living Theater, Bob Kohler, of Gay Liberation Front, my dad, her oral histories, performance, a changing world, full of stories. Pics of Penny and Steve Zehentner, by Peter Hujar, of myself by Penny, of Prageeta. And of course, Brassi's Paris at LACMA.
Back to NY, Coffee Saturday, a back in town journey from Brooklyn to Princeton to Bushwick to Gowanus to Bed Stuy, Brooklyn to Berlin friends and back.
Sunday,
One more book talk:
On Friendship and Fighting book tour continues on Sunday,
November 23 at the PIT, Brooklyn, Nov 23 at the PIT where...
Benjamin Heim Shepard and Eric Laursen talk about Orwell and his friends, the fights he had, that we have and the ways to learn from them.
What: A conversation at the PIT,
When: Nov 23, 215 PM.
Where: At the PIT,
P.I.T. means Property Is Theft. Address: 411 South 5th St, Los Sures, Williamsburg. Brooklyn, NY 11211
I’d ride to Judson, in the West Village, back out to Williamsburg, to the PiT, where I met Eric, for the talk, out for pints, and back out to the Bowery Ballroom with everyone from the reading.
"Do you smell a vouvant?" wondered Robyn Hitchcock, performing there, presumably referring to the picturesque village of Vouvant, France, known for local specialties. But no one was really sure. "I'm guessing we haven't played this one," he said, channeling his own surrealist silliness, bantering with the audience about where they stood the night before, singing old Roxy Music covers, etc. Tired from his tour, his voice aching, the music got better and better as the show at the Bowery Ballroom went forward.
We'd spent the afternoon discussing friendship and fighting. at the PiT "Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist" said George Orwell, seeming to paraphrase Stalin in his 1942 essay, "Pacifism and the War", during World War II. We revisited the friendship fight between Orwell and Alex Comfort at the PIT, talking about David Graeber and memory, anarchism and affinity, democracy and organizing, Go back to where you came from... said Baldwin. If you wanna fly let go of the shit that ways you down, said Eric Larson, paraphrasing Tony Morrison,, talking through the book, George Orwell and Alex Comfort is the book The Duty to Stand Aside: Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Wartime Quarrel of George Orwell and Alex Comfort, written by Eric Laursen, himself. Our panel spilled into the afternoon, talking all day about activism and pacifism. I'm not doing it to change anyone's mind. I'm doing because I don't want it change me said Aj Muste. The conversations about friendship and conflict extend in any number of directions. I miss David Graeber and those days, I wonder if we will ever fully grasp a dialectical anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin, merging activism and social thought, activism and praxis, a jigger there here, activism there, a few narratives there.
The kid is home from college, taking me out on the road for an adventure on Monday, on the road, talking old movies and choices, about bike tools and archeology, squatters next door and old lesbian avengers t shirts, growing up and figuring it out, between Brooklyn and Boston, childhood and growing up.
Thinking about it all, trying to make sense of it:
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