“Extreme Reading” For The Undernourished

When I am teaching, which is about ten months of the year, what I miss most is reading—that is, reading randomly, instead of what is required. I am an extremely slow reader—the kind that needs time to digest each sentence. I once shared a car with a speed reader and I was flabbergasted—not only could she capture the entire sentence in one swoop of her eyes/brain, instead of having to read one word after the other, but she could also read in a car without it making her throw up. I was envious. I am envious of people who can read in cars, who can read in bed, who can read after 7pm, who can read in the tub. I can’t read at night—I fall asleep. I can’t read in cars—I throw up. I can’t read when I’m teaching—I’m too tired. I can’t read in the tub—I’m too uncomfortable.

My biggest reading accomplishment, which is not much of an accomplishment at all, is reading Midnight’s Children in a dentist’s waiting room—I had 11 appointments in 2 weeks. (I was on vacation, but the overseas dentist was so much cheaper than my American one. I believe the term is “Medical Tourism,” but I didn’t plan the trip for my teeth; I planned it to visit family.) I finished Rushdie’s novel and also had 2 root canals and 2 crowns.

I’ve met Rushdie a few times; once at a book party for another writer. I did the God-awful embarrassing thing of telling him how much I enjoyed the book he’d written four decades ago, as if he hadn’t written anything since. (This is how I saw it. I’m not sure if he saw it this way.) Here’s some of the conversation—not verbatim, but how I remember it:

Me: I really liked the bit where you wrote abracadabra for the sound the train made—abracadabra, abracadabra.

His response: Oh, that’s towards the end. So you actually read it all?!

Lovely. I thought this was a great response; it says so much. A writer has to write all the way to the end, but the reader can just call it a day whenever s/he gets bored, distracted, or is too busy to finish. So much competes with reading that it is a wonder that readers still exist.

So my time for reading is immensely valuable—when it happens I’m thrilled, and I try to ride the reading wave for a long as I can. I’m on one of those now—in the past two weeks, I’ve read The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer (loved it), Humanimal by Bhanu Kapil (loved it). Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thomspon (a wild relentless ride), and now I’ve almost finished American Romances by Rebecca Brown (I’m loving it.) I’ve just reached the end of her essay called “Extreme Reading,” which, I think, should be put on some kind of compulsory reading list for the world. There are many brilliant moments in it, like:

Every time you read a book you read what you desire.
Every time you read a book you make that book your own.

But my jumping off point is this:

I left home, read a lot and lost my faith.

Rebecca Brown’s book is about many things—the book cover blurbs list the icons—Gertrude Stein, Brian Wilson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and America. And all this is true; it is about all these things. But since she goes to lengths to point out that

Every time you read a book you read what you desire
Every time you read a book you make that book your own

then, this book, for me, is about the long search for faith. Reading is her faith. Writing is her faith. And I’m not talking about the kind of faith that enters your body as a Divine Presence. No, I’m talking about the kind of faith that you take into your body from the outside—a Eucharist. I’m talking about the faith found in syllables, but not words. The faith found in sounds, but not words. I’m talking about the faith that exists in music.

Evharisto (Greek for thank you), Rebecca, for this Eucharist.

& thank you City Lights for putting out this book.

Wall of Turquoise

Today, my computer died. Then, Humanimal arrived in the mail. So, I decided to devote my whole day to reading Bhanu Kapil’s book. Doing this, I could feel every inch of my body come alive. I read it all. Now, there are too many words inside my spine in response to this book, and so, for today, I’m going to say little. I’ll wait until I can be more intelligent about the words/pages.

For now, I'll say this about it: If you call a book a gem, the reader of your description will gloss over the word gem since it has become a clichéd way to describe a book. So how else can I describe this delicate book—little in size, huge in questions—that sparkles in the light of words? I will call it a ruby—a red that is compassionate, thoughtful, serious, damaged, complete; a red that offers its body to the universe. It is a book that offers help to the two little wolf-girls, the writer’s father, and the writer. It also offers an alternative future. It is a book that folds in half with pain. It is a book that presses open with love. There is one line, quoted from it, on the back blurb, by Laura Moriarty, that says, “Each feral moment is valuable.” This is one of this book’s truths. But there are also other kinds of truths to be found within it; the kind that say, “Many walls in India are turquoise, which is a color the human soul soaks up in an architecture not even knowing it was thirsty.” This made me want to paint the cream walls in my cottage turquoise, so that my soul has something to drink when it is thirsty. Sometimes, I don’t even know that I’m thirsty until I begin to drink. I was definitely thirsty today. And Humanimal came in a glass.

I imagine this was a difficult book for Bhanu Kapil to write; there must have been such an emotional struggle—the balance of when she felt she was giving back to the wolf-girls and when she felt she might be taking from them. The same for her father. The same for herself. Writing it must have required such vigilance. I can understand her “pushing the glass doors shut, ignoring the screams of the vendors inside.” I can also understand why the glass broke, why she had to write it.

Hmm, I seem to have written many more words about Humanimal than I had originally anticipated. I will stop now. Because honestly, sometimes reading is like drinking Holy Water from the Ganges; and now that I’ve written this, silence feels like it should be the order of my day.

Last Word: Thank you Kelsey Street Press for putting this book into the world.

Supplementary Benefit$

Sometimes, as you get older, you find yourself yearning too often than is probably healthy for you for the world of the past. And when you don’t hear and see people joining you in this yearning, you tell yourself your yearning belongs to a time that has long-gone, and the idea of a Welfare State that cares for all its citizens, and the idea of Trade Unions as doers of good and necessary against greedy corporations and uncaring institutions are things of the past as much as Duran, Duran, Green Shield Stamps, and even having a land-line.

But this week I read an interview with Nobel Prize-winning Economist Paul Krugman who said the same thing that I’ve been saying for the past 20 years (first out loud, and then when it began to feel as if I was the only person on the planet who felt this way, to myself). He said:

I just want a stronger welfare state and a little bit more social democracy. And some restoration of the labour movement as a counterweight.

When I lived in England, I used to be on a thing called “Supplementary Benefit.” What does this mean? When I graduated in the early 80s, unemployment was horrendous, there was little or no prospect of a newly-graduated person finding a job, (especially in the highly-valued profession in which I had trained—as a classical and contemporary dancer . . . ). What was I to do?

Back then, I was not a writer and so I would not have known how to make the most of my time as an unemployed person who could spend the day writing poems, so I signed up for a YOP—a Youth Opportunity Program. What was this?

They paid you slightly more (ten pounds or about 18 dollars) than you would have been paid if you were on unemployment and for this extra money, you worked 20 hours per week in some industry, which was related to the thing you had been studying. I can hear you asking: What “industry” calls for dancers?

Well, as it happens, there is one—Social Work; that is, arts-based workshops for Communities in Need. As part of this YOP, I was trained and then sent to offer workshops in a variety of arts in schools, in mental health institutions, and in community centers. By doing this, I increased my knowledge of arts other than dancing (I learned about Drama Therapy and Writing Therapy), gained a lot of teaching experience, and eventually graduated from the YOP and set myself up in the “business” of teaching dancing in a variety of community centers for the Inner London Education Authority, as well as for a local, private ballet school, and also as a choreographer for a children’s theater company. All this teaching, however, was not enough for me to eat and pay my rent. This was when Supplementary Benefit kicked in. What is this?

Well, whatever rent money I could not yet earn, the government supplemented to ensure that I did not end up homeless, and until I could make it on my own.

Okay, so let’s recap: I came out of college at a time of huge unemployment, I joined a government youth training program that related to my studies, my income was supplemented until I could stand on my own two financial feet, and I lived in a country that offered free health care.

Am I still on Welfare? No.

Do I still need supplementary benefit? No.

Do I still have free health care, em, . . . . No. (I moved to the U.S.)

And now?

I am now part of the graduate faculty in an MFA program. Getting here has been a long and circuitous journey, and often an extremely difficult financial journey. I spent five years without the ability to pay for health insurance, and for many years I worked a full time job as well as a part-time job. (I did not have a partner to share expenses, and I did not (and still do not) have children. I was a single, educated woman, struggling to make my financial way in a country in which health care coverage is offered at a huge cost.

Even now, the college I work for employs me as “90% faculty,” which means that I have to pay for 50% of my own health insurance. And my partner who is an adjunct professor at a Community College does not have any health care coverage at all. Which worries me every day, if I let it. This worry obviously also has an impact on the mental health of the uninsured individual. Things the insured seldom think about like: What if I slip on this ice and break my leg? How will I pay for this medical treatment? factor into your day-to-day thinking/living.

All that said, my “lucrative” job as a college professor is a destination I am sure I would not have reached if I had not had welfare safety nets and free health care to catch me, to hold me, to keep me safe, and to keep me on the road to my desired goal.

I am grateful for the Welfare State. I am grateful for Trade Unions that have had my best interest at heart.

Now . . . What next?

Well, in the final words of the interview, Paul Krugman says:

I'm getting increasingly optimistic on healthcare reform. Climate change looks like it's going to happen. So my odds that this will in fact be the kind of New Deal I was hoping for are rising. I had my scepticism, but he (Obama) is smart. He's impressive. And it is such a relief to have somebody whom you can respect in the White House.

And for today, for this moment in time, (because you never know what tomorrow will bring) I would just like to say in response to this: Amen.

Fourth-Hand Information #5

Annotating the Eurovision Song contest (without having watched it for 20 years)

How does one explain the Eurovision Song Contest to someone who has never seen it and does not live in Europe (or the surrounding areas, which are not quite Europe)? It is the worst of the worst of European pop music (well, not strictly European--keep reading), and countries vote for the best song, which is always much worse than anything you could possibly imagine.

(What is Europe?)

Abba shot to worldwide fame from it—they won in ‘74—and Abba was probably the climax, if the word climax can actually be applied to this event. Since then, it’s been downhill all he way. It’s stupid, and people watch it just to see how awful it can possibly get. Here’s one example of how bad it is:



Without having watched the contest for 20 years, I am still sure that each year it takes the ideas of kitsch and camp to new levels. But beyond the campness and kitschiness of it all, there has always been the underlying politics—songs sung in English by countries that do not speak that language, different countries with different cultural aesthetics, and, yes, even in the stupidity of this contest, you did always get the feeling that England was looking down its nose at most of its neighbors, and that France would never give high marks to England, and that Germany would never win because, well, it’s Germany, and Spain is quaint but they sing in Spanish, and everyone else, well, they were just that, “everyone else” and not England, France, Germany, or Spain, but countries in relation to them.

But then, life is not stagnant. Things change. Things have changed. And the number of “European” entries has slowly increased (or is the word splintered?) because more countries are free to become “European,” and allegiances have changed, and still change, and then Yugoslavia becomes The Former Yugoslavia (read:war), and then there is Israel who for this contest also becomes part of Europe, and I could go on, but it is all too ridiculous for words . . .

So it was with some surprise that I read yesterday that Terry Wogan (Britain’s presenter of the contest of the last 38! years) told a gathering of European broadcasters to stop taking the Eurovision Song Contest so seriously as "everybody knows it is rubbish". And then—I love this bit— (from yesterday’s Guardian) When asked if there was a gulf between the UK and Europe, Wogan replied: "There has always been that there. There has always been that general feeling of distrust of Johnny Foreigner, but of course it is mutual. Britain has attacked nearly every country in Europe and people don't forget."

Indeed. People don’t.

The article goes on for a little while and then there are over 100 comments in response to it. Here are two contrasting ones that kind of give you an indication of the conversation:

Example #1:
Eurovision is just amazing. The sense of righteous indignation that rises as countries bloc vote in predictable unison is all part of the magic. It is also heartening when Croatia/ Bosnia/ Serbia vote for one another, given that just over a decade ago they probably wouldn't have (I realise my analysis doesn't perhaps do justice to the former-Yugoslavia situation, but it's pretty succinct, no?).

We need to enter in the spirit more. It means striking a balance between taking it too seriously (the proposed entry by Aphex Twin was a serious misjudgement) and taking the piss (which makes our 'aren't-foreigners-funny-let's-send-something-really-shit-and-see-if-they-
notice-because-they're-not-as-discerning-as-us-dontchaknow attitude blindingly obvious, with predictable consequences).

We should probably also stop bombing places, getting drunk abroad and calling all Greek people Stavros.

Then we might - just might - make the Top 5.

Example #2:
Of course it's all rubbish. I mean when did Israel become part of Europe??
It's just a laugh but the Eastern bloc don't get it.

Remember, we are talking about a beyond-bad music “contest” here. The worst music you can possibly imagine. And even in this one night of ridiculousness people cannot let go of their xenophobia, their cultural superiority, their politics, and their pasts.

Apparently, Wogan went on to say, "Eurovision is an exciting, camp, foolish spectacle. You can't top it. It is fun, light entertainment. It is the biggest of its kind anywhere in the world. It is not about politics or asserting your place in the community, not even about national pride. It is not an opportunity to show your neighbours how much you love them. It is about picking the best popular song in Europe."

Come on—it has never been about that. Never. If it was about picking the best popular song in Europe then Britain would have sent a decent pop band/singer to compete. Instead, it picks some insulting representatives and sits back and watches in shock & awe.

But you know, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there was a time when not just "Europe" but the whole world loved each other, and wished all their neighbors well, and picked the best pop song to be its Inter-National Anthem . . . Yes, I remember it now. We were all drinking Coca Cola, and there were no uprisings, and the sun was shining all over the globe, and no one was being invaded, and there were no wars anywhere in the world. And yes, we did love each other. No, really, we really, really, did. How do I know? Because we had that song. No, not the one they sang for the Eurovision Song Contest. The other song. The one the whole world was singing. You know, the one that goes:

Fourth-Hand Information #4

Race, Not Space

I drive now. After a 17-year hiatus from daily car driving, I am now back to it. Because of this car-driving, as opposed to subway-riding, I now listen to snippets of radio instead of snippets of other people's conversations. Other people's conversations used to inspire me to write poems. Poems, for me, are the heart of the conversation—they are what hold us together. And poetry is the longest conversation that has ever existed, and I like to join in. But the radio, well, the radio does not inspire me to engage in an exchange. Instead, it provokes me. Taunts me. Gets me riled enough to report back from the frontline of my car seat. With one hand gripping the steering wheel in anger, and the other hand typing this blog as I adhere to the speed limit, this is what I have to say in response to what I heard:

My partner has never left the US and therefore only has this country to contemplate and to compare when he thinks of/about space. We often have conversations about space—urban, rural, sprawl. How one US state can be as big as some countries in the world—for example, Florida is comparable in size to Britain. This is one of our standing jokes: How can Britain be so “Great” when it is only the size of Florida? Good question. A dangerous question. We laugh because we know each other and trust each other well enough to be able to laugh, even though we know the answer is far from funny. So, tell me: How can Britain be so “Great” when it is so small?

The other day I was listening to BBC World (NPR All Things Considered), to a program called “An England Coping With Change, Loss” and this is an excerpt of what I heard:

Steve Bailey, 51 . . . says his family moved out of London toward Canterbury long ago because of increased immigration.

"Nearly everybody you meet [in the Canterbury area] will be people who moved from South London because of the immigration issue," he says. "Who have we got to blame — ourselves, our government — trying to embrace the world when we are not embracing our own people first."

It's more difficult to say that in the United States because almost everyone came from somewhere else. But there are a huge number of white British people who feel they are the real British people and that they are being ignored by the new multicultural agenda. Everyone in Bailey's local pub agrees that something needs to be done about immigration.

"It's not a question of race, it's a question of space," says Dave Hiatt, who is visiting the pub with his friend Abby . . . .

Hiatt says there is a unity and a pride in America that Britain now lacks.

"In Grand Central Terminal in New York, you walk in there, 1930s art deco, and you get different colors, different creeds walking around, and the biggest, largest Stars and Stripes you can above them; they all class themselves as American," he says. "In this country, if you put up a flag at Charing Cross or Waterloo, there'd be an outcry," he says.

That's a good summary of what many white people say all along the Canterbury Road, as it follows the River Thames toward the North Sea.

So how long did it take to jump from “it is not a question of race, It’s a question of space” to flags? If I counted this up in radio time, I guess it took about a minute. A minute to go from “it’s not race, but space” to I want my Union Jack.

So what were they trying to say? That if we hung a Union Jack in Waterloo Station they’d all move back to South London, and suddenly there would be enough space for everybody?

I was glad to know that I wasn’t the only person who’d noticed this leap. From the online site SuperSpade: Black Thought At The Highest Level (www.thesuperspade.com)

Brandon Q writes:

The part that jarred me is when an interviewer asks a Britain why its more difficult for Britains to accept immigrants (I should note that there appeared to be a tacit understanding that they were really talking about people of color) and a woman responded dryly, “It’s not about race, it’s about space.” For years now, I have considered how conflicts over land and resources become painted in race/culture specific terms in order for the powers that be to misdirect their true intentions. But I think the woman’s response more accurately depicts my thoughts and here is why.

Taken literally and figuratively, what keeps racism thriving is a perpetual denial of accepting “others” into your space. Literally, this “space” can be interpreted by where you live, where your kids go to school, where you hang out, etc. No less important is the figurative sense which can be interpreted via who you do/don’t allow to have access to your emotional space. There are a range of things people do with this void. Some fill this void with stereotypes that can serve as barriers to the type of humanity that God envisioned; Love your brother as yourself. Others are aware of their void and take steps to fill it with love and understanding. In the end, I suppose the takeaway from this post is that you should be mindful of how you filter who gets in your space and the morals and values that under gird these filters. It is impossible to allow poor morals to inform who gets into your space and not think these same values are expressed when you try to enter into another person’s space.

This is definitely one way to look at it. I suppose for me it raised the question of invasion, imperialism, and colonialism. I guess it always gets my back up when British people talk as if they are doing immigrants a favor by letting them into “their country” and a cultural amnesia settles on them as if it were a contagion that has wiped clean the memory of their country’s history of sailing around the world and going into other peoples “spaces,” and stealing their “spaces,” and asking for taxes to be paid on stolen land, then trying to make these “foreign” “spaces” “British,” and then eventually returning home and bemoaning the fact that there is not enough space for all these immigrants who hail (mostly) from the various lands that helped to make their Florida-sized country so amazingly “Great.”

I was once thrown out of a Fish and Chip shop in Larnaca, Cyprus because it was situated on an Army Base and as such was labeled “British land.” How can something be “British land” when it is on Cypriot soil? I cannot—emotionally—wrap my head around this concept. The military man who threw out my entire family in the middle of our dinner—yes, he would not allow us to finish our food—did so because he did not want to eat in the company of Cypriots, even though the shop was owned by Cypriots, and this food was cooked by Cypriots, and we were all sitting outside on Cypriot land/soil, which somehow—through the military—becomes "British space." For this British General, Sergeant, whatever, as it is for these white Canterbury-based South Londoners who were interviewed, it is most definitely about race, as in: We would love it if you just got out of our face.

Thank you, Germaine Greer

I've decided to post this article in its entirety. I am doing this for myself. After reading this comprehensive and perfect account from Germaine Greer, I feel as if I have undergone an exorcism. Thank you, Germaine.

The Making of Maggie

She found it easy to charm men ...women didn't count. She was the grocer's daughter with a strong moral conscience who ruled with an iron fist - or so the story goes. In fact, she was a millionaire's wife, who lacked scruples and did what her male colleagues told her, argues Germaine Greer on the eve of the 30th anniversary of Mrs. Thatcher's election.

• 
• • Germaine Greer
  • The Guardian, Saturday 11 April 2009

The year was 1972. We were all in our places and sitting comfortably, waiting for Lord Annan to answer the question "What are universities for anyway?" for the inaugural Richard Dimbleby lecture. The BBC TV cameras were ready to roll. At the last possible minute, a group of men in dark suits ushered in a blonde woman wearing floor-length scarlet chiffon, with ice-blue stones winking at earlobes and throat. As they handed her officiously to her place and ranged themselves around her, the whisper ran around the lecture hall: "Thatcher Milksnatcher!" This glamourpuss was the secretary of state for education in Edward Heath's government, the person caricatured by journalists as the "Mrs Scrooge with a painted face ... a reactionary cavewoman ... a desiccated calculating machine with a head full of figures", "the most mean and vicious member of a mean and vicious government" who put an end to free school milk for primary schoolchildren.

A few months later, the TV producer Gordon Reece began the long process by which the millionaire's decorative wife with the fake, cut-glass accent was made over into the no-nonsense grocer's daughter who in 1975 would become leader of the Conservative party. On Reece's advice, Thatcher changed her hairstyle, gave up low necklines, eschewed hats, wore pastel shades, kept her hands out of sight, and struggled to lower her voice. In return she was more than happy to keep him primed with expensive champagne and cigars at the party's expense. Never before had a British party leader been so packaged. The British electorate bought the package. Margaret Thatcher, housewife superstar, became prime minister on 4 May 1979. Reece would be there whenever she needed him, which in those early days was often.

The notion that Thatcherism is 30 years old may be beguiling, but it is essentially misleading. Thatcher's job was to present strategies that had been tried before in a way that would make them acceptable to a new generation of voters. She was not herself an economist, and her understanding of the how of what she wanted to do lagged way behind her understanding of the what, but even that was never more than superficial. She urged Britain to be great again, lamented the very thought that Britain was in decline, spoke of herself as following in "Winston's" footsteps - all nonsense that, recycled through the tabloid press, made her look and sound heroic.

She was fond of saying that she knew her own mind, but that was really all she knew. Certainly she mastered her every brief in astonishing detail, but she used the data as ammunition, pelting her adversaries with assertions they couldn't counter. She used the same technique to discomfit her civil servants, ambushing them with searching challenges of her own devising. She never defined an overall strategy, developed no theory of the state, had scant regard for democracy, and no scruples whatsoever. Thatcher's Thatcherism was whatever worked. Thatcherism is now being vilified throughout the English-speaking world as an evil ideology that exalted greed and selfishness to the point of unstringing the sinews of the body politic. It was never anything so systematic.

A story is often told of how, when she was leader of the opposition, Thatcher turned up at a seminar at the Centre for Policy Studies with a copy of Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, banged it down on the table and declared "This is what we believe". She claimed to have first read Hayek when she was at Oxford, but her version of his arguments is one he might not have recognised. Her commitment to a free market, wealth creation and lower taxation was absolute. She had no time for Hayek's misgivings and probably never knew that he believed that "probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all of the principle of laissez-faire capitalism". "Wooden insistence" describes Thatcher's style exactly. Capitalism needs strong and stable government. Free trade depends on the power of governments to order markets, by establishing and policing systems of uniform weights and measures, stabilising the currency, enforcing the law to protect the rights of traders and clients, and managing labour relations. The machinery of bank regulation proliferated under Thatcher, but what developed even faster was the culture of circumvention and bamboozlement, of which she herself was mistress. Success and profit were identical. Her career shows a bland disregard of the principles of honest dealing that ought to underpin the free market in which she had such blind faith. One of the enduring mysteries of the 20th century will be how on earth she got away with it.

From her first days in power Thatcher developed and refined ways of circumventing political protocol and procedure, partly because hers was usually a minority opinion. She liked to forestall opposition by making statements to the media that had not been agreed in cabinet, and she would sidestep cabinet altogether when she could. She didn't scruple to undermine her cabinet colleagues by criticising them in the house and beyond, breaking all the rules of masculine collegiality. She didn't always give credit where credit was due and sometimes claimed credit for the ideas and initiatives of others, as in the case of privatisation, to which she was a late convert.

Her high-handedness became more obvious after the Falklands war, which she elevated into a moral crusade to defend civilisation as we know it. She treated the victory in the Falklands as confirmation of her own fitness to rule, to take the tough decisions and see them through, whether her colleagues in government agreed with her or not. (Her triumphalism remains undented, though it has been estimated that more of the British men who fought in the Falklands have taken their own lives since the war than were killed during it.)

Thatcher's rather patchy ideology became the new consensus by default. In November 1984 the Financial Times pointed out that "Thatcherite economic policies are not very different from or better or worse than those to which other European governments, whether called conservative as in Germany or socialist as in France, have found their way."

Only where dealing in arms was concerned did she display the kind of recklessness and lack of scruple that is now being blamed for the global financial crisis, and that she did from the beginning of her first term of office. On 29 January 1981 a meeting of the overseas and defence committee of the cabinet, chaired by Thatcher, agreed to interpret the Anglo-American ban on exporting arms to either side in the Iran-Iraq war more flexibly than was honest. Within months the arms-trade subsidiary of the Ministry of Defence was building an integrated weapons complex in Basra, and over the following years the "defence allocation" to Iraq continued to multiply. Iraq did not pay up; the extent of the defaulting is not known, but this particular toxic debt had probably grown close to £3bn by the time the Iraqis invaded Kuwait and all bets were off.

The deals Thatcher made later, and apparently off her own bat, were impenetrably secret, the amounts of money vast. She sold armaments to King Hussein of Jordan, President Suharto of Indonesia and President Pinochet of Chile, offering them massive amounts of easy credit and the full support of the export credit system. In April 1985, after a series of meetings with the Saudi defence minister's son, one of them when she was away from Westminster on holiday in Salzburg, she set up the Al-Yamamah contract worth £40bn, to be paid partly in oil. It is has been reported that her son, Mark Thatcher, was paid commission of between £12m and £20m, although he has denied it.

The results of an investigation into the Al-Yamamah contract by the National Audit Office have never been made public. Other people must have been involved in putting together a deal of such complexity, but they were not Thatcher's cabinet colleagues. In 1988, there was another hush-hush meeting in Bermuda when Thatcher was on her way to Australia. It is this behaviour that connects Thatcher in the most direct way with the gung-ho hedge fund managers of today.

Thatcher's peculiar handling of the Westland affair, which resulted in the resignation of her defence secretary, Michael Heseltine, is best explained as a by-product of the Al-Yamamah negotiations, of which Heseltine obviously knew nothing. After Heseltine's resignation, the attorney general demanded an investigation into the leak of the letter from the law officer that discredited him, a leak that was almost certainly engineered by Thatcher herself. She managed to evade responsibility, but some who saw her performance in the house were convinced she was lying. For the first time talk of a leadership challenge could be heard. For Thatcher to take such a risk in a relatively minor matter, which on the face of it could have been sorted by direct confrontation, only makes sense if she was desperate to hide a game being played for much higher stakes. Just what that game was, and who stood to gain by it, is still unclear .

Similar opacity and unaccountability characterise Thatcher's use of the aid budget to finance projects such as the Pergau dam in Malaysia, in return for an agreement to buy British military hardware. In the case of the Pergau dam, the deal turned out to be illegal and £65m had to be refunded to the Treasury, but by then Thatcher was long gone. Otherwise she liked to use the aid budget to finance lucrative contracts for British firms, Amec, Balfour Beatty, BICC and GEC, most of them major donors to the Conservative party.

Margaret Thatcher would have said herself that in cooking up these massive deals she was batting for Britain, as she did when she went to Oman to secure a large construction deal for Cementation Ltd, who were employing Mark Thatcher as a consultant. It is hard to imagine Margaret's husband Denis Thatcher or her daughter Carol being privy to her billion-pound wheeling and dealing, but Mark is a different matter.

It is odd that the housewife superstar who never tired of telling the rest of us how to live, and how to mind the pennies, should have reared a son who is a chancer, and an inept one at that. Even so he is reported to have a fortune of £60m, much of it, according to "City sources", held in offshore accounts. In 1998 he was investigated on suspicion of loan-sharking. He has settled a court case in the US where he was accused of racketeering, and has pleaded guilty to a reduced charge in connection with his involvement in a failed coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea in which it has been suggested Jeffrey Archer was also involved. Mark lived with his widowed mother in Belgravia while the case was proceeding, but now lives in Spain with his second wife. If his mother sacrificed her own integrity to put her son in the way of easy money, it was not enough to keep him close to her. Her grandchildren by his first wife are being raised in America. Except for her faithful female staff, Lady Thatcher is now alone.

When I caught up with her last year, at the Archers' midsummer luncheon party at the Old Vicarage in Grantchester, she had abandoned any pretence of housewifeliness. She was resplendent in electric blue brocade and pearls, stiff champagne-tinted hair framing her face like a translucent diadem. The bloom on her fair skin was peach-like, the pink of her lipstick vivid, the blue of her eyes only slightly faded. Of all the people dutifully milling around her it was Jeffrey Archer who drew the most vivacious response. He was at her side for most of the afternoon, soothing and flattering her until she glowed. If she knew that he had been banished from the Conservative party for five years, if she remembered that he had served time in prison for perjury and perverting the course of justice, she didn't care. Margaret Thatcher, the grocer's daughter, keeper of the moral high ground, was basking in the attentions of a convicted criminal.

Even as Thatcher was putting a good deal of energy into projecting herself as a dutiful housewife, who made her husband's breakfast every morning before coming to the Commons, and rushed home to put his tea on the table every evening, she spent a surprising amount of time entertaining faintly and not so faintly disreputable men. For 10 years her closest confidant was the Murdoch journalist Woodrow Wyatt, turncoat, snob and flamboyant lecher, a man whom her father would probably have kicked out of doors. She was fascinated by the sexual transgressions of her heterosexual male colleagues. She found it easy to charm such men, by giving them her full attention and treating their every word as profound. Men who were immune to her blandishments were relegated to the second division. She snubbed her predecessor, Edward Heath, never offered him any job that he could accept and never invited him to social occasions at Downing Street.

Women simply didn't count. The two women who appeared at her side in 1979 did not last long. Janet Young, who accompanied her on the battlebus in the election campaign of April-May 1979, and served briefly as a member of her first cabinet before being packed off in 1981 to be leader of the Lords, is now chiefly remembered for her intransigent opposition to gay rights. Sally Oppenheim served as minister of state for consumer affairs in the Department of Trade from 1979 to 1982, before being bumped up to the Lords in her turn.

Thatcher was exclusively a man's woman, beginning with her performance of the role of her father's daughter. Though questioned repeatedly, she had nothing to say about her relationship with her mother, except that she taught her to iron a shirt, but she regularly invoked the figure of her hard-working, god-fearing father. Useful as she found the idea of him, she didn't spend much time with the man himself. Once she left Grantham to go to Oxford, she seldom returned. As soon as ever she could she ditched her Lincolnshire accent, together with her family's Methodist faith. What Thatcher did, as distinct from what she said, ran completely counter to her father's morality, which dictated that you didn't buy anything you couldn't pay for, that debts were to be discharged promptly, and that the better-heeled accepted responsibility for the weak and disadvantaged.

She told the journalist and broadcaster Brian Walden in 1981 that her father regarded the stock market as a form of gambling, and yet she presided over the expansion of the debtor economy and the liberalisation of banking, beginning the process that all her successors, whether Tory or New Labour, were to continue. The father dedicated himself to the welfare of his community; the daughter disabled local government. As prime minister, Thatcher worked hard to give the impression that she was close in fact and in spirit to her father, dragging him into discussions of all kinds of issues, but the facts of her rise to wealth and power suggest that she was actually in flight from him. When she prated of how she herself was witness to the fact that anyone could rise to the highest eminence, she omitted to mention that you had first to catch your millionaire, or that it helped greatly if he happened to play golf with the editor of the Daily Telegraph.

Alfred Roberts is credited with endowing his daughter with an exceptionally powerful moral sense. She certainly claimed that she had such a thing, and denounced every kind of behaviour or policy she was not prepared to endorse as morally wrong. But where her favourites were concerned, she was prepared to countenance truly reprehensible behaviour.

When she appointed Jeffrey Archer deputy chairman of the Conservative party in 1984, she knew full well that he had a mistress. Archer promised to give her up, but the break was anything but clean, and very painful for the woman involved. A year later, a business colleague informed the News of the World that Archer had been involved with a prostitute called Monica Coghlan, who was persuaded by the paper to take part in a sting operation. On 24 October 1986, she was filmed and audiotaped at Victoria station, receiving £2,000 in £50 notes from Michael Stacpoole, acting for Archer, apparently as a bribe to get her to disappear. Archer admitted giving Coghlan travel funds, but successfully sued the Daily Star for printing that he had paid Coghlan for sex. The judge's summing up was bizarre, but even stranger was the failure by any of the newspapers involved to challenge the verdict. The Daily Star ended up £1.2m out of pocket in fines and costs. It wasn't until Archer was running for mayor of London in 1999 that his witnesses began recanting. In September 2000, he was charged with perjury, tried, found guilty and sentenced to four years in jail. Throughout all these vicissitudes, he was still Thatcher's white-haired boy.

Thatcher showed a similar lack of conscience in dealing with her protégé Cecil Parkinson. She knew when she chose him to head the Department of Trade and Industry in June 1983 that he was involved with his private secretary, Sara Keays, and had ordered him to give her up and return to his wife if he wanted the job. Parkinson had asked Keays, a loyal Conservative and hard worker for the party, to marry him as long before as 1979; in May 1983, when she told him that she was pregnant, he apparently changed his mind, only to change it back again in June. Once again he asked her to marry him. Then Thatcher got to him, and in September he informed Keays that he had gone back to his wife.

Keays remains convinced that Thatcher had organised the press campaign in which she was consistently belittled, accused of seeking to entrap Parkinson and even told to abort her pregnancy. In Keays's words, Thatcher "allowed the authority of her office to be used to propagate lies in the media in order to conceal the true facts from the public and to discredit [her]". In 1993, after disagreements about maintenance payments, Parkinson, who had never met his daughter, took out an injunction forbidding the British media from making any reference to her, which actually resulted in muzzling anyone from making any complaint about his callous behaviour. An operation when the child was four to remove a brain tumour has left her with learning difficulties; she also suffers from Asperger's syndrome.

Despite his thoroughly contemptible behaviour, Thatcher's fondness for Parkinson, whom she was grooming to succeed her, continued unabated. "He thinks very much the same way as I do and is a great source of strength," she liked to say. "If Cecil says not to do it, we won't do it." Parkinson was one person who knew how to reassure her and how to keep her calm in a crisis. She would have brought him back to cabinet soon after he resigned, but wiser heads convinced her that he would have to stand for re-election first. She would have made him chancellor in 1987, but had to content herself with making him energy secretary. When she resigned as leader in 1990, Parkinson resigned with her. He is now in the House of Lords as Baron Parkinson of Carnforth. Meanwhile Sarah Keays struggles to give her daughter as good a life as she can.

What is clear from any reading of the vast mass of documentation of the Thatcher years is that Thatcher herself is not the author of Thatcherism, which is a thing of shreds and patches. It was put together, as her public persona was, in response to a series of pressures originating in circumstances beyond government control. For years it had been clear that whoever ruled Britain was going to have to deal with the problem of failing industries, excessive public spending, and the power of the elite trade unions. Heath tried to do it and was defeated by the seven-week miners' strike in 1974, called an election and lost to Labour who pursued similar policies with a similar lack of success. By the time Thatcher was elected in 1979, the public was out of patience with the unions. She had a mandate to deal with them, but she had to proceed with caution. All observers note how timid she was in her first period in office. When the Russians dubbed her the Iron Lady in 1976, they did her a huge favour. The sobriquet enabled her to appear strong and confident, when all the while she was walking on eggshells.

Even as she bulldozed and dragooned her cabinet colleagues, behind the scenes Thatcher was doing as she was told, by Reece, Parkinson and Tim Bell. Bell's charm is legendary; one eulogist claimed that dogs would cross the street to be stroked by him. Thatcher is supposed to have enjoyed sipping scotch on the sofa with her two "laughing boys" Reece and Bell after a hard day in the house. The words she uttered were written for her by Ronald Millar, and subsequently tinkered with by her. Millar, a playwright, used to say that he treated her like an actress before a performance. He did not say, as others might have, that she was a bad actress, which she certainly was. Whether she was intoning the prayer of St Francis on the steps of Downing Street or gushing about the capitalist system being divinely ordained, she was unconvincing. A particular problem was that she never understood any of the jokes that Millar and Bell wrote for her.

Having succeeded in restyling the product, Reece and Bell set about building relationships with the media that would sell it for them. Thatcher was rolled out for meeting after meeting with newspaper editors, with whom she behaved as prettily as they could have desired. As owner of the News of the World and the Sun, Rupert Murdoch had the power to drive the manufactured image of Thatcher as lower-middle-class heroine deep into the national consciousness, but he was initially slow to come on board. In 1970, after the milk-snatching episode, the Sun had labelled Thatcher the most unpopular woman in Britain and voiced a doubt as to whether she was actually human. In 1975 Reece set about courting Larry Lamb, the editor of the Sun, assuring him that Thatcher's policies represented the real interests of working people.

It was the Sun that dubbed Thatcher "Maggie" and created for her an entirely new persona, concentrating on good housekeeping values and the breathy rhetoric of making Britain great again. When she was elected in 1979, the Sun exulted: "At the exact moment when the grocer's daughter from Grantham became the most important woman in the world, spring sprung [sic]. It did. It really did." The alliance between the Maggie machine and the Murdoch media made possible the ultimate defeat of the print unions and the modernisation of the newspaper industry. And another brick was added to the rising edifice of Thatcherism.

Thatcher's strength derived directly from her limitations. If she had been better read, if she had been afflicted with imagination, if she had had a sense of humour, if she had had anywhere near as much insight into the lives of ordinary people as she claimed to have, she would have been unable to pursue her headlong career, riding roughshod over the consensus towards the property-owning debtor economy in which we now struggle. If socialism had been in better shape, she would not have been able to turn it into a dirty word or confuse it with totalitarianism and state monopoly capitalism. If the trade unions had not betrayed their own class, if they had understood the importance of organising all workers, including women, including those in the service sector, if they had not institutionalised inequality, the people might have defended the cause of labour.

Thatcher thought that she and Reagan overthrew the Soviet Union, but the fact is that, like old Labour, it simply fell apart. The Thatcher phenomenon was only made possible by the weakness and indecisiveness of the opposition. It is justice of the most poetic kind that Thatcher's is now the evil empire and Thatcherism a dirty word.

Immigrant #6: Unsung Elegy

So probably one of the most well-known quotes from contemporary poetry was given to us by the late William Carlos Williams. You can find it at the end of his poem, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower." It goes:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
  yet men die miserably every day
            for lack
of what is found there.

This idea is what drives me to write. That said, this is for immigrants and the children of immigrants, especially those living in Binghamton, New York. And also for Robert.


Immigrant #6: UNSUNG ELEGY

When planes hovered over your childhood,
hurled bombs onto the roof of your school,

your father’s candy store, the post-office next door,
when your mother, father, brother, and sisters

filled four suitcases with clothes (but not photographs),
when they fled south to be sheltered by government

tents (no stoves, no bedding,
no remnants of dowries;

their wedding garlands buried
beneath a heap of bedroom walls),

you weren't there.
You were here,

where they told you to change
your name to make you

palatable to the clientele
who ordered avocados stuffed with shrimp,

as a ghost played jazz
to accompany their mastication.

When planes surveyed your homeland
scouting for more targets,

when your uncles forsook their flocks,
your aunts abandoned their wardrobes

with their children’s birthdates
scratched into the doors,

the LPs in your living room waited,
stacked and mute—

black vinyl tombstones,
carved with the groove and tongue of home.

You were
never one

to balance a water-filled glass on your head and spin
with the poise of the boys from your village.

Instead, you sat silent—no grieving bouzouki
to convey an elegy.

The unsung
folded you

into the armchair you’d turned 180 degrees
away from the coffee table, the sofa,

your daughters, your wife.
While they faced in, you faced out,

staring beyond patio doors at preoccupied roses
past an umbrella of crabapple trees, listening

for your ocean
too far away to hear.

Literally, The Sweetest

Location: grocery-store checkout line, southern Vermont.
Characters: Man in front of me (#1), man behind me (#2), me in the middle, listening:

Man #1: What time did you finish? Did you work through the night?
Man #2: We stopped before we came to the end—one AM. Bumper crop this year. But we lost a vat— down by the river—tipped right over . . .
Man #1: How much did you lose?
Man #2: 220 gallons of sap, straight out of the vat, straight into the river.
Man #1: Oh man . . .
Man #2: Yeah, that’s sure gonna be The Sweetest River.

It is sugaring time in Vermont. The maples look like they are decorated with ribbons. And now to add to the festivities, there are 220 gallons of sweet sap flowing through the river that runs 20 feet from my house. It makes me want to catch the river in my mouth.

Mouths are things that have been on my mind a lot this past week because my partner had a severe toothache, actually a severe pain where a tooth used to be, which, of course, got me thinking about dental health coverage, which, of course, always takes me back to an English childhood when I used to have dental care for free. No, it was not because I was poor; it was a kind of fundamental English human right, if you can imagine that. In my 28 years of living there, I had a number of fillings and an overnight stay in a hospital to have my wisdom teeth removed, for free—I paid nothing, nada, zero.

I liked my dentist, and he liked me. He had thick eye-glasses that made his eyes enormous as he bent closer towards my face to look further into my mouth. He also had a theory about “Cypriot girls”—according to him we got our wisdom teeth earlier than girls of other ethnicities. I didn’t question his theory, I just acknowledged the precocious maturity of the young women who shared my ethnicity. Early wisdom teeth surely meant early wisdom.

I was listening to a Harvard economist speak this week, and he said many things, none of which I understood enough to represent here, but in the economic options he offered up for people to consider, he fleetingly mentioned the idea of an increased trade union presence as one way to stop rampant capitalism. Let me say again, this was a fleeting mention, as if he had just burnt his tongue, and needed to cool it off quickly by moving to something a lot less controversial, cooler. He added that people who want this kind of increased trade union presence are a tiny minority who are living in the nostalgia of what trade unions once were, and not what they have become. And it dawned on me—I am a part of this tiny nostalgic minority who sees The Good that trade unions can do. If they once did a lot of good for a lot of people, then is it not possible that this can once again be true? Surely, if this is supposed to be the time of Give Change A Chance, then unions should be allowed to restore our faith in them.

My mouth is a Trade Union. It is the place where my teeth are unified to work on the trade of chewing. Every time I type the word “teeth” I see the word “sugar” hiding right behind it. Then I see the word that links these two words—“decay.” (And this post started off so jolly—sweet rivers, sweet trees . . . .) The thing is, if I were to follow my original idea of squatting at the mouth of The Sweetest River to drink its Maple Sugar Waters, this consumption would likely lead to a dental visit, which would then lead to the inevitable dentist’s bill.

And the dentist would look at me, and shake his head in disapproval, and mutter, “Ah, ah, ah, little girl, little girl, that’s what you get for drinking from The Sweetest River in the United States of America.”

Notes On Things I Don’t Understand

So my Modus Operandi, so far, for this “blog” has been to approach it like a weekly column, one chunky piece of prose that tries to capture some of what travels through my brain and heart. Some thoughts are fleeting. Some thoughts are perennials. But in the world of my distractions this past week or so has been a time of extraordinary movement—both inside and outside of my body. Therefore, I am finding it impossible to gather what I’ve been thinking and feeling, to assemble it into one chunk of connected prose. This week, then, no column. Just notes:

o Why is it that I turn my face away from any act of violence when it is represented on a screen, but I read, & read & read & read & read about violence as if there is no tomorrow?

o This week I have read four books about war. When I drop off to sleep at night I sometimes see a man, who has had his nose blown off, trying to breathe. And sometimes when I am warming up the car, I think about a soldier who botched his suicide attempt and shot a hole in his own neck, which then led to his left eye hanging on his left cheek. And what I don't understand is why the doctor and the nurses try to nurse him back to life, instead of allowing him his choice--to die.

o Why is killing yourself illegal, but killing “enemy soldiers” sanctioned? If we cannot do what we want to do with our own bodies, then what is left? Why is it that we follow orders, even when we believe they are utterly wrong?

o I’ve been thinking a lot about love because I have been writing about it—the love that connects you to one human being in particular, as well as the love that connects you to many human beings—random strangers as well as friends. I’ve been thinking about love because I have been thinking about loneliness.

o Love & loneliness. Truth be told, I am always thinking about both of these things. I recently ordered two more secondhand books. The first was called Bowling Alone and the second was called The Pursuit of Loneliness. This is what I do: I order books for reasons that are vague to me. I know nothing about why I do it other than I know I must do it, and somewhere down the road I hope I will read them and the reasons will become clear.

o About a week or so ago, I tried to go shopping for groceries—twice. Both times I turned back after 5 minutes because of a detour. (A car had gone off the road—it had skidded on black ice.) I was not sure that my 14-year-old car could make it up a steep hill without All Wheel Drive. The second time the man directing traffic assured me the detour was safe, the road had been ploughed, and that my car would make it. And then he added, “Plenty of people who looked a lot more nervous than you have made it up there.” He looked trustworthy, like he knew what he was talking about. I nodded my head as if I concurred and trusted his judgment, and then I pretended that I was just going to turn my car around, knowing full well that I was going to do no such thing. I drove back in the direction of my home wondering why I am not more fearless than I am.

o There are a couple of blogs that I now read regularly. At first I went to them because I consider the writers of these blogs my friends (that is, they are people I respect and with whom I have shared meals and conversations), and then I realized I went there to see what they were thinking about, what their distractions were. Then I found that reading about their distractions made me feel less isolated.

o The following is in not from a blog, but it is from a link that I got from a friend’s blog. It is a tiny excerpt from an extended conversation/interview between Bhanu Kapil and Lisa Birman, which appears in the current issue of an online journal called Trickhouse (www.trickhouse.org). In this dialogue--that is meandering, wide, and captivating--I came across this tiny morsel from Bhanu (Kapil):

"To summarize: I hated England. No, that’s not true. I had a childhood I did not understand until much later. I didn’t understand that I lived in a community of working-class immigrants, and that the violence inside and outside of our homes had a context. And, regardless of everything, I’m wired to that context, which was, of course, not singularly brutal. As an endocrine being, for example, I’m flooded by the feeling of being home as soon as I arrive in Heathrow."

If I took Bhanu’s name away from this quote and replaced it with my own, it would still be 100% true. Obviously, I have many memories of the feeling of “being home,” but the one that I always come back to—because it is the one that always shocks me with its truth—is this one: On a visit home, a day after I’d landed, a young homeless man told me to, “Fuck off, then, Paki. Go back to your own country.” This is what he said to me when I was unable to provide him with the “spare change” he had requested, since I had only been home a heartbeat and had not yet made it to the bank to change my money.

o Yes—“Fuck off”—home.

o I was at my accountants the other day and he introduced me to his receptionist because she too was in the country on a Green Card. She said she was English. She sounded and behaved 100% American to me. This confused me. Then she told me her mother was English and that she had a British passport even though she had lived the majority of her life—since very early childhood—in the States. I asked her why she had not become an American citizen. She said she wanted to always be British. She said it with a look on her face that told me she was in love with a country that she didn’t really know. There was no ambivalence. She said it with the expression of a person who does not know what England is like to English people who are not white. She had not lived there, really, She had not gotten her first period there, lost her virginity there, got dumped there, got married there, got raped there, got divorced there. She had not witnessed the every day violence of English words on English streets.

o When you have no lived experience of a place, only the joys it offers when you choose it as a place to visit, to identify with, is this place home?

o If you say the word home about a specific country, it is likely you will have at least one wrinkle of pain about your mouth when you say the word out loud.

Big American Trip is born

Big American Trip by Christian Peet (Shearsman Books) has just been released. I plan to buy a 100 so that I have them on hand to give a copy to anyone who looks in need of the ride . . .

"The Milk Snatcher"

1984-1985 marked one of the most influential political moments in my life. I did not know this—intellectually or even emotionally—for a long time. I accidentally discovered it in the year 2000 when I was sitting in a NYC movie theatre watching a movie called Billy Elliot. I knew nothing about this movie other than it was British and it was about a little working-class boy who wanted to be a ballet dancer. Somewhere in the middle of the movie there was a scene where the father (a miner) had to cross a miners’ picket line, and the older brother who was also a miner was one of the many picketers. I might have 99% percent of the details of this bit of the movie wrong—for example, the older brother’s and the father’s roles might have been in reverse—but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that one miner crosses the picket line (out of love for his family and desperation) and another minor, who is closely related to him doesn’t, but watches him do it.

If, as the adage goes, “a picture speaks a thousand words,” then, for me, this image captured a million of them, plus an emotion so deeply hidden within my body that 14—14!—years later, watching this scene—set in Northern England in 1984—in a Manhattan movie theatre prompted me to weep until I was convulsing. (I’ve shed tears before in movie theatres, but never to this level of full-throttle sobbing.) The intensity shocked me. I had no idea of the depth of loss I felt.

I was once a working-class kid that had a serious training in Classical Ballet, but the similarities between myself and Billy Elliot stop there. So what prompted the depth of my response to this scene in this movie?

I am not a miner. I have never been a miner. No one in my family was/is a miner. None of my friends are miners. But back then working-class people born in England did not have to be intimately connected to a miner to understand their relationship to them. A single miner was a man. But miners, collectively, were a symbol. They symbolized the power of working people against Capitalism. When the protesting miners’ backs were broken, it was as if all our working-class spines were broken. In the movie theatre, I realized that my body had never fully healed from what was broken—that is, the power of honest-to-god protest, the voice of working people against exploitation. (The only thing I can think of as comparable to this is when The World protested against the war with Iraq & Bush dismissed The World as a bunch of small protests from “interest groups.” If The World is an interest group and protests come to no avail, then where does this leave us?)

This year/month/week marks the 25th anniversary of the beginning of The Miners Strike in England. I remember their wives coming down to London to stand outside of supermarkets with their plastic buckets—for money and for food. And as we tossed various cans of food and our spare change into their buckets, we wondered how long they could hang on. Every day they looked hungrier and more tired, every day we tried to eke out more spare change in support, and every day another miner’s family lost its home.

Bus loads of police went North. Car loads of miners’ wives came south. 1984.

For those of you reading this and need a tiny bit of historical context, this comes from this week’s Guardian:

The 1984-5 strike, called in an attempt to halt pit closures and the rundown of the industry at a time when there were more than 180,000 miners working in 170 collieries, was the most important industrial dispute in Britain since the General Strike of 1926. The dispute centred around often violent picket line confrontations between police and miners. It was called off in March 1985 without a settlement and by 1994, only 8,000 miners were left at 16 collieries.

Responding to the claim the strike was anti-democratic because the National Union of Miners was trying to bring down an elected government, [Arthur] Scargill (head of the NUM] writes that the government "declared war on the miners" and compared their strike with an earlier miners' national strike which paved the way for the Heath government's defeat in a general election in 1974.

But let me be honest, I cannot articulate for myself, and/or for anyone reading this, the complexity and depth of this moment in time, and what it means for me today. If you’d like a succinct overview of the impact of this, and how it relates to today, you can look at a short response from Billy Bragg: “How We All Lost When Thatcher Won." And if you want words from the horse’s mouth, check out Arthur Scargill’s (head of the National Union of Miners) account: “We could surrender - or stand and fight.”

I’m not really sure what this post is about anymore. I think it was supposed to be about the anniversary of one of the most formative political experiences of my life, but then why did I title it, “The Milk Snatcher?” Do you know who the Milk Snatcher is? Let me give you a clue: Her first name is Margaret.

When I was at school in London, all children under the age of 11 got free milk. And then we didn’t. Margaret ended that. In place of free milk, the children at my school stood in the playground and chanted:

Margaret Thatcher, The Milk Snatcher.
Margaret Thatcher, The Milk Snatcher.

I chanted this at age 8 or 9. Was this my first formative political experience? I think it might well have been. I lived in Finchley in the 60s. Margaret Thatcher was our MP. First, there was free milk. And then there wasn’t. That same decade, (if I did the research I might even find that it was even in the same year) Donovan had a hit song called “First There is A mountain” . . . then there is no mountain, then there is. Okay, so his lyrics might have been about one kind of trip, but the moronic decision to literally take the food out of the mouths of children was the work of someone who very probably had never “done drugs” and yet knew how to send us on a ” bad trip;” a trip that to my mind working people have been on eversince.

So when I read about movies being made about this woman, in 2009, and actors who want to try to show Thatcher’s “sympathetic side,” I am so filled with anger that any objectivity I may have goes out of the window. What am I saying? Objectivity? If I could stand that far back, I’d fall off the edge of a cliff.

Fourth-Hand Information #3

On Behalf of the EEC

This week, a friend wrote to say: Thought for the day from Susan Sontag, from Against Interpretation: "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art."

As is often the case with me, even though I thought this quote was brilliant, I couldn’t articulate why, and/or even exactly what it means to me. I suppose this is the number one reason I sit down to write rather than sit down to chat and/or debate. I’m not good at live words, spontaneous words. They either come out wrong, or come out diluted, or half-baked, or one-sided, limited, generalized, or, even worse, they have even been known to come out of me with the exact opposite meaning of what I am trying to say. For example: On leaving an establishment, I have been known to say “Hi” instead of “Bye.” (I wonder if this is some kind of disorder.) Anyway, when I write things down, of course I don’t get to say exactly what I mean—because that to me is an impossible task—but I do come as close as I can, for that moment in time, at least.

What I can say for sure—for today, only—is that I’d love to replace hermeneutics with an erotics of art. Why is it that what we think so often takes precedence over what we feel? People who know me well have known me to say I would give up everything (writing/teaching) if I could sing. Why? Because if singing is done honestly & well, it pierces my body (in a good way), and, in no time, I am moved to tears. (e.g. Tim Buckley singing “Pleasant Street,” Chris Cornell singing, “Billie Jean,” and Cassandra Wilson singing everything. No thinking/interpreting/ science is involved. 100% feeling. For me, this is one of the erotics of art.

Erotic—meaning “arousing or designed to arouse.”

This week, I read an arousing and amusing article on how social networking sites can infantilize the human brain. (I’m not sure how much hard fact there was, but it captivated me because of its stance.) It was difficult to select a part of it to highlight here because there were quite a few nuggets to which I felt I could respond. In the end, I chose this paragraph because it relates to empathy and to literature, and it gives a sense of the tone:

“[Baroness] Greenfield also warned there was a risk of loss of empathy as children read novels less. "Unlike the game to rescue the princess, where the goal is to feel rewarded, the aim of reading a book is, after all, to find out more about the princess herself."

Personally, I’ve always wanted to find out more about the princess, in particular her treatment of the peasants. I want to know how much the peasants get paid for their work, what they do for their work, and what they think about the princess, and what the princess thinks about them. Is she worth being rescued? Rescuing, on the basis of status—a status not even earned, but born into—would not be enough to induce me—as a child or as a grown-up—to rescue her.

So, of course, now that I’ve said this, I’m second-guessing myself. The “princess” bit is the least important part. What is important is that someone needs rescuing and, as a fellow human being, if it is in my power to rescue someone—princess or peasant—then off to the rescue I will go. No social networking site needed.

But just so we are clear here, for me to be able to happily trot off to the rescue, I’d have to forget that she is closely related to one of the biggest private landowners in the country, that her ancestors, back in the day, cleared entire villages, imprisoned, exiled, and even executed peasants who tried to stop their land from being taken from them by the aristocracy in order for the “ruling class” [that even includes people with the lowliest rank of Baroness] to have their very own theme park—Killing for Entertainment, Not Food.

And after I had torn myself away from Facebook to rescue her, I would have had to ask myself: Would this princess have come to my rescue, or to the rescue of any of the peasants who were executed as poachers for trying to hunt for food on the land that was stolen from them? Well, would you, princess? Would you?

It is so difficult to love one another--unconditionally. Therefore, it is much more preferable to think of people as texts and focus hermeneutics on the population as a whole. Doing so would allow us to save the erotics for our specific lovers, and for art. Don't you think?

This has been a public broadcast on behalf of the EEC.
(The Emphasizing Erotics Corporation).

Fourth-Hand Information #2

Change/s

Today, a secondhand book arrived in the mail. The book included an invoice. On the invoice was the date I ordered the book—February 14th (Valentine’s Day). A day on which some countries around the world are prompted to remember that love should be celebrated. On this day, I celebrated in various ways—a card I left secretly in a drawer, a digital photograph of an amaryllis in bloom sent to me while I was away, across the country. And while I was on this other coast, I ordered this book. I have no idea why. I cannot remember what prompted me to buy it. I tend not to buy memoirs. But I do remember that this writer had previously written many other books, which were not about his life. This writer is well known to many, but until minutes before I ordered his book he was unknown to me. His memoir is called A Tale of Love and Darkness. His name is Amos Oz. This was not the name he was born with. It is the name he gave himself. This is what sticks with me today.

People change their names for a variety of reasons, but I feel that if this variety were examined we could probably put all the reasons for the decision to change it into two columns—those who change it to belong, those who change it to rebel. Oz apparently changed his name as an act of rebellion—to free himself of the associations of the name into which he was born. Associations of privilege—intellectual, I believe, not financial. I was not born with any kind of privilege—intellectual, financial, or otherwise. And, perhaps, because of this I think about privilege quite often—who has it, who doesn’t have it, and the impact this has on a person’s life—positive, negative, etc. Whenever I think about it, I do not come to any concrete conclusions. I make no grand declarations. It is all feels so relative, so amorphous.

For example, recently, because of the “credit catastrophe” (Crunch? Talk about understatement . . . ) I’ve been thinking about a writer I know who sold her first book while she was in a mental institution, living on welfare. She went from zero money to more money than she (& I) ever dreamed of having. I’ve been thinking about her because the last time I spoke to her she told me she was renting her home and had been advised to keep her money in the stock market. I remember this shocked me. Any child of immigrants knows that the first thing you do when you have money is buy your own home. But she was not a child of immigrants. So instead of immigrant parents she got herself a “financial adviser.” And so I wonder now if has she has lost “everything.” Is she struggling to pay her rent? Am I suddenly “better off” than she is? This is not something I can ever ask her. But I’ve been thinking about her when I go food shopping, when I hang my laundry to dry, when I mop the kitchen floor, when I vacuum the cobwebs from the corners of the ceiling in the living room of the cottage I own. I think about her a lot, and I hope she has managed to salvage enough money so that she does not have to return to the dire circumstances in which she once lived.

By reading the first two pages of A Tale of Love and Darkness, I have learned that Oz was raised in a tiny basement apartment in Jerusalem. Cool in the hot months, cold in the cold months. Not much in the way of material possessions, but with a mother who spoke four or five languages and read seven or eight, and a father who spoke eleven languages and could read sixteen or seventeen. And “Books filled [his] home.” How differently we are all raised. The number of languages we hear in our home as we are growing up. (For me, two, and on a few occasions, three.) The number of books in our homes. (For me, none, except for the cookbook that came for free with the new stove.) The number of parents we have in our lives. (For me, two.) The amount of money we are surrounded by. (For me, enough to “get by.”)

We live in one world, but we live in so many parallel universes—the upper class universe, the middle class universe, the working-class universe, the educated universe, the uneducated universe, the many varied cultural and ethnic universes. . . (Obviously, I could go on and on here.) And we also live many lives within our one life—financial lives, love lives, urban lives, pastoral lives, sick lives, healthy lives. When I think about living this in this way, it makes sense that we all could/might contemplate changing our names—not once, but as many times as seems befitting. A name-change to go with a status-change—from rich to poor, from poor to rich, from single to attached, from attached to single, from the speaker of one language to the speaker of another/many other languages, from renter to homeowner.

On the third page of Oz’s book, he says: “Words like ‘cottage,’ ‘meadow,’ or ‘goose girl’ seduced me all through my childhood.” I don’t know what a ‘goose girl’ is, but ‘cottage’ and ‘meadow’ were also magical words in my childhood. Perhaps if I changed my name to Meadow Georgiou, I could retain my cultural and ethnic connections. And if my cottage were in New England, I could spin it into a thin thread that could (if I still wanted it to) connect me to the land of my birth.

Residents/Residence on Earth

My first post began with a little diatribe on the fact that I love TV, but don’t actually own one. This one is going to begin with a little diatribe about the fact that I don’t own a cell phone. I’m not a Luddite. The only criteria I had for buying my cottage was that it must have high-speed Internet access. It does. & my laptop is plugged in 24/7. High-speed Internet access is a mini-miracle in a rural village of 600 people. But cell phones, well, there are real reasons for remaining cell-phone-less:

1. I live in a State where the cell phone reception is so bad that even the people selling Real Estate don’t bother with them.

2. In general, I don’t much like talking on the phone because I cannot see peoples’ faces & I realize that so much of how I respond depends on the kind of face someone is making when they speak to me. So my phone conversations brim with long silences that come across as if I’m pretending to listen, but really checking my email. Or as if I’m bored by what the other person has just said. Or that I’m boring & have nothing to say. Having a cell phone, then, would add to this torture.

3. Cell phones come attached to another bill. I can barely afford to pay my landline. Get rid of the landline? Remember, I have zero—& I really mean a big, fat 0—reception from my home, which brings me to

4. I work from home.

So.

What does it mean to “work from home?” I hear people discussing it on the radio as a potential option for people who want to become something called an “entrepreneur.” The “experts” always talk about the self-discipline that this takes—setting & keeping your own hours. They talk as if working from home means you are always one minute away from skiving off. They present it as something that could turn into one long vacation, if you are not vigilant. Vacation?

1. if you do not need to shower or brush your teeth to begin working, this equals more work hours.
2. If you do not need to commute back & forwards to work, this means more work hours.
3. If you make a big pot of curry for the week & are prepared to eat the same thing for lunch & dinner from Monday to Friday, & therefore do not need to go to the store to pick up lunch, this means more work hours.
4. If you have forgotten what day it is, this means more work hours.
5. If it is summer & it is still light outside, this means more work hours.
6. If it is winter & it is too cold to go outside, this means more work hours.
7. If you have forgotten that the concept of a weekend exists, this means more work hours.
8. If there is no such thing as sick days, personal days, vacation days, this means more work hours.

So, yes, it is all about self-discipline.

But there are four occasions a year when I am required to leave home to teach for 8 days. Two of those trips are made by car—they are in the same State; it is a 3-hour drive. When I arrive there is a phone in my office, & a phone in my room. For the other two trips, however, I have to travel to the West Coast—take a shuttle to the airport, two connecting flights, a taxi to the ferry, ferry to a college-appointed driver, who then takes me on another drive. Door to door, it is 12-hour trip. When I arrive there is no phone is my office & no phone in my room. These are the two weeks of the year when I could really use a cell phone. But I tell myself I’ve survived for this long, so getting one for 16 days isn’t really worth it.

This time, however, I did notice that public phones in airports terminals are now extinct. I also noticed something else—even though the book industry might be collapsing, magazines abound.

Under the subtitle: “Times Is Changed:”

• There is an out lesbian—Ellen Degeneres—on the cover of the Ladies Home Journal.
• There is a Black President—Barack Obama—on the cover of every other magazine that is not the Ladies Home Journal.

My connecting flight was in Detroit—once home of Motown, now home of the Sweatshirt/T-Shirt combo that says, Yes We Can. & when there is an out lesbian on the cover of a magazine that has the word “Ladies” in the title, & when a country votes in a black man for President, it does make you feel that anything is possible, & that you can.

I did not buy the sweatshirt or the T-shirt or even the magazine because for this trip I had practiced some well-planned forethought, & packed a new book of poetry that coupled well with my journey. The book is For That Entire Passage: A Valentine for the United States of America, by Lisa Birman. I don’t know Lisa Birman, but her bio says she is an Australian living in the US (Colorado), & I believe her.

She has written a book of poetry about what it means to leave one country to live in another, & she documents the feelings of love & betrayal & passion & ambivalence that go hand-in-hand with that decision, especially when you didn’t loathe the country that you left, & especially when you fall in love with the United States of America—warts & all. So, Lisa Birman & I have a lot in common. We are both Resident Aliens—our cards are green & wrapped in plastic, & our hearts are, well, our hearts are red & complicated.

There are many things that resonated for me as I read her book—I felt as if I knew what she was talking about from the inside out. I wouldn’t say that I fell in love with the U.S. en masse, but I did fall in love with New York City. If any one place has felt to me like it is welcoming my whole person, it is Brooklyn. Brooklyn & I got married in 1988, & even though we have gone through our trial separation (2006) & even though now we are divorced (2008), we have parted on the best of terms & we will always mean the world to each other. I stole the marriage metaphor from Lisa’s book. It belongs wholly to Lisa Birman. In her book she married the United States of America. It becomes her lawful, wedded country. She pledges, “I do/ I do . . . “ I love that idea. I totally get it. It is a realistic/believable comparison. Go Lisa.

In the last line of the entire book she writes “the memory of country disappears.” It does. This disappearance of a country feels natural. But then, in its place, something inorganic springs up—nostalgia for a country that has never existed, and homesickness for a nation that has never existed. Instead, it is for the homeland that dwells in your imagination and in your heart. For me, the creation of this imaginary homeland also led to the creation of a love to go with it.

So we are coming up to Valentine’s Day, which if you are not already thinking about love, can make you stop to think about it. This year, my valentine does not go to my homeland—real or imaginary. It doesn’t even go to Brooklyn or New York City. Instead, it goes to the “green and pleasant land,” on which my cell-phone-less cottage is currently located—my latest residence on earth.

Fourth-Hand Information #1

There are two things that you need to know about me:

1. I am an immigrant (from England to the United States).
2. I am easily distracted.

“ I’ve Asked The Butcher To Cut It Out”

I used to love TV. In fact, I used to love it so much that now I do not actually own a TV set. Well, that’s not 100% true. I did buy one a few months back for $5 from a thrift store, and then I bought an antenna with ears, so that I could watch the presidential debates, which I did, and I have not turned it on again since. This thrift-store TV will only last a few more months. After that, something will happen that I do not completely understand. I just know the bottom-line—it will make my $5 investment extinct. Which is also fine because the TV I love is the TV that comes through the wonder that is Netflix and the DVDs that I select and watch on my computer screen. I call this Total Control TV. I choose what I watch. Could there be anything better? Well, on occasions, sometimes, yes, there could.

The Guardian newspaper online has a regular column called “Last Night’s TV, “and I read it even though I no longer live in England, and I have absolutely no access to any of the programs it responds to on the following day of their being broadcast. I’m not sure why I do this. But it does go hand-in-hand with my nostalgia for a Britain that has never actually existed, as far as my experience goes, anyway. I call this non-existent Britain “TV Britain.”

“TV Britain” and “Last Night’s TV” come together for me on many mornings to offer me nuggets of information that I could not possibly live without. For example, recently a “Last Night’s TV” column (written by Nancy Banks-Smith) told me about a program called Country House Rescue. How to rescue stately homes from ruin! This is a TV show, you ask? It is. Disgusted at the idea and even more disgusted by my own interest, I was immediately drawn in. What advice would the Country House Rescuer –Ruth Watson—give the poor Country House owners Alistair and Mary-Ann Robb? With my breath bated, I read on.

Well, Ms. Watson’s advice was disappointing in its predictability. It boiled down to this: open a café, precede it with a gift shop, and make the General Public—who only ever want to shop and eat—walk through the gift shop to get to the tea and cakes. In case you didn’t catch that, let me recap: Make people walk through the area they don’t want to be in to get to the area they do want to be in, and on the way make them discover their lives would be worth slightly more if they bought a box of 10 blank notecards with illustrations of Cothay Manor on the front of them.

For this advice, they had to bring in an expert? Surely, everyone who lives in any country with a department store in it knows this. We were taught this as we were cutting our teeth on Marmite Soldiers. Who doesn’t now know that to save yourself from buying unnecessary merchandise you have to walk through a department store with your eyes closed until you get to where you want to be? Only last week, I rode up five floors of Macy’s escalators with my eyes squeezed shut to get to Ladies Underwear, on the 6th floor, for the bras I buy once every two years.

Even the English Aristocracy cannot be this segregated from the world-at-large. Are the Landed Gentry so far removed from 21st Century-living that this golden nugget of information on how to navigate contemporary consumerism has not yet reached the noble ears that hide behind their medieval walls?

And though most of my jewelry is costume, I might be reluctant to take advice from a woman wearing a necklace made from citrus fruit. (What happens when the clementines rot?) Knowing The Robbs for the brief moment that this column allowed, even I would have known to try coaxing them into an organic farming endeavor, rather than offering tea and cake to tourists. And just gazing at the one photo attached to this column, I could see Lady Mary-Anne and Lord Alistair would be more at home milking a cow than whipping up cream for a bunch of puff pastries.

Okay, so you get the picture. So why did I keep reading about “Last Night’s TV?” I kept reading because of this:

Mary-Anne (The Lady of the house) upholstered every chair, made all the curtains and spends five hours a day gardening. . . .The garden at Cothay, admiring itself upside down in lilied lakes, is entirely Mary-Anne's own work. . . She is 68. . . . . Mary-Anne said she had arranged to have her heart buried in the garden. [She actually said, on live TV] "I've asked the butcher to cut it out.”

Well. At this point in the article, the journalist comments on the fact that this would be the moment for a “fascinating interview with this accommodating butcher.” And she may very well be right. But I could not move beyond Lady Mary-Anne and her desire to have her heart cut out and buried in the garden. Why cut out the heart? Why not bury her whole body with the hollyhocks and bluebells? Did there really need to be a butcher involved? And by default, was she saying she would like her body—devoid of heart (and soul?)—buried next to her husband? And if she was, what did this say about the marriage? Did she love her lilies more than her Lord?

I don’t know, but it did start me thinking. As I read this article over my morning coffee at my kitchen table, I wondered if Mary-Ann had also sat down to read this article, with her afternoon tea, thinking to herself: I cannot believe I said that out loud. I wondered if Mary-Ann wondered how many millions have taken in her words—private thoughts that slipped out on TV and were reprinted in a newspaper, online. Private words that—up until that TV moment—were about a private life.

Poor Mary-Anne. All she had wanted to do was find away to rescue her house and pay the one million pounds (almost two million dollars) she and her husband will one day owe the tax man. And for this, she was ready to contemplate a public garden where strangers could come to view things such as stone snails or stone mermaids and even a naked man made of stone, standing in the center of a water fountain. But her heart, well, until that moment, she thought it was safely tucked under her skin. But after this media exposure, it was no longer the private place where she stored her love.

And for today, distracted as I am, the privacy of love—and where we store it and where we find it— is something that interests me.