Jane Wong’s poems; Kim Gordon’s video; and reactionary utopianism on the Left.
I’m All Lost In … what I’m obsessing over THIS week.
Week 19.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit that William Wordsworth nearly appeared on this list once again. It would have been Wordsworth’s record-making, 4th time showing up as a weekly obsession here.
I finished his comprehensive Penguin Classics collection on Saturday morning (scroll for my glowing review here), and I just can’t seem to leave him behind. On Saturday afternoon, to celebrate finishing this excellent set, I went and bought another book of his poems; a slim, hardcover volume. I set it out on my living room table.
Now I reach for it every morning and start my day by picking a Wordsworth poem and reading it aloud.
But phooey on dead white guys. Here’s this week’s list.
Three women: Chinese-American poet, Jane Wong; underground rock musician/legend, 70-year-old, Kim Gordon; and Ethiopian-American journalist, Lydia Polgreen.
1) As I reported last week, I bought tickets to an upcoming, live Q&A with one of my favorite contemporary poets, Victoria Chang. And, fortuitously, it turns out that Chang is going to be interviewed by Jane Wong, a Puget Sound poet whose own first collection, Overpour, was a highlight for me in 2019.
Reminded of how much I had liked Wong’s debut, I bought her 2021 follow-up, the immaculately titled, How To Not Be Afraid of Everything.
Wong’s poetry splices her outcast biography—mostly her formative experience in white America/”the Frontier” (growing up poor with a Chinese immigrant mom and derelict, alcoholic father)—into the harrowing history of her grandparents’ crushed lives under Mao.
She still speaks to them: “Was I a pigeon in this city in your dream? Were you/ hungry when dreaming?” And they still speak to her: “…I can only hear the vowels of your questions,/your fists curling and uncurling in sleep, the low rush of wind along ferns so tall—they must be pulled up by the sky.”
Wong is a master of the fine detail (”a butterfly crawls into a chip bag;” “fruit flies fluttering about like snow;” “my father’s ruined jaw/misshapen like a novice ceramist’s bowl”); the liberating revelation (”let all your hexes seep into your pores;” “beware of light you cannot see;” “leave any country that has a name”); and sumptuous mic drops (“Serenade a snake and slither its tongue/into yours and bite. Love! What is love/ if not knotted garlic”).
Her evident talent effortlessly lifts her verse beyond politics into poetry. An uncommon skill!
Poet Jane Wong
Marking my favorite poems in this collection with stars became redundant, but there’s definitely this one:
I Put on My Fur Coat
And leave a bit of ankle to show.
I take off my shoes and make myself
comfortable. I defrost a chicken
and chew on the bone. In public,
I smile as wide as I can and everyone
shields their eyes from my light.
At night, I knock down nests off
telephone poles and feel no regret.
I greet spiders rising from underneath
the floorboards, one by one. Hello,
hello. Outside, the garden roars
with ice. I want to shine as bright
as a miner's cap in the dirt dark,
to glimmer as if washed in fish scales.
Instead, I become a balm and salve
my daughter, my son, the cold mice
in the garage. Instead, I take the garbage
out at midnight. I move furniture away
from the wall to find what we hide.
I stand in the center of every room
and ask: am I the only animal here?
2) Earlier this year, Sonic Youth formally and posthumously released Walls Have Ears, a renowned, unofficial compilation of three live shows they played in the UK in 1985. That was the year of Bad Moon Rising, their perfect teenage witchcraft, art rock LP.
The songs on Walls Have Ears are clanging and de-tuned, threatening and careening, perfectly capturing my college-days’ favorite band in all their early ramshackle experimentation. This version of Sonic Youth, which I remember so fondly, provided the soundtrack to my magic-markered Converse and magic-markered jeans, early 20-something depression.
(4Columns ran Sasha Frere-Jones’ beautifully-written review of this “new” Sonic Youth record earlier this month.)
But this rediscovered set hardly prepared me for founding Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon’s new release: a jaw-dropping single that came out this week called I’m a Man from her forthcoming album, due on March 8, The Collective. (What an album title, by the way; so perfectly evocative of the 1970s—and it reminds me of Louise Glück’s similarly titled final poetry collection, Winter Recipes from the Collective.)
Co-founded in 1981 by Gordon with her now-ex husband Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth mined 1960s and early 1970s counterculture detritus, turning that recently past era’s madness into a contemporary celebration—rather than rejection—that connected the revolutionary lights of “The ‘60s” to the angry yearning of mid-1980s post-punk/pre-alt-rock, cultural misanthropy and art.
Kim Gordon getting down in the video to her new jam, I’m a Man.
Kim Gordon’s daughter Coco Gordon-Moore in Gordon’s new video, I’m a Man
Gordon does exactly that in I’m a Man with a video that channels Midnight Cowboy’s (1969) acid-trip scene, both as a way to revive the movie’s original deconstruction of the American Cowboy myth, while also updating it with a garish meditation on today’s politics of non-binary identity. Gordon, with her signature Gen-X-era detached irony, delivers the lyrics from an angry male point of view, which is sure to rattle casual listeners.
Don't call me toxic
Just 'cause I like your butt
It's not my fault I was born a man
Come on, Zeus
Take my hand
Jump on my back
'Cause I'm the man
The gender-bending (both Gordon’s male persona and the clothes swapping that ensues) gets overlaid with time-warping as well: Gordon cast her doppelganger daughter Coco Gordon-Moore in the video (alongside dreamboat actor/model, Conor Fay).
Meanwhile, Gordon’s Black-Sabbath-heavy guitars and beat poetry recitative, synced to a herky-jerky anti-rhythm, push the off-kilter ambience through the walls.
3) I hesitate to write anything about the war in Gaza. The seething antisemitism, both creeping and blatant on the left, and the unhinged settler Zionism, defining the racist right, make it a poisonous topic (understatment of the year).
However, this excellent NYT opinion piece on Gaza by staff colulmnist Lydia Polgreen (the paper’s former international correspondent for West Africa, South Asia and South Africa) captured a larger subject I’ve been trying to wrap my head around for years. In challengeing the political essentialism that guides some pro-Palestinian activists, Polgreen identified and called out the reactionary utopianism that has long plagued the left at large.
Defined, in its anti-establishent trappings, by a kind of idyllic machismo, this brand of politics can show up as casually as knee-jerk anti-development campaings to preserve neighborhood “character;” as bufoonishly and man-splainy as the primordial Burning Man festival; or as pathologically as ascetic quests for purity.
That later version can warp into psychotic extremes such as Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s more tellingly named “Year Zero.”
This leftist fetish for authenticity is twins with the right’s own nostalgia and fear-based bogeyman politics that specialize in branding chosen scapegoats as “outsiders” while fostering dangerous sentiments about who and what count as real. Remember Sarah Palin’s “real Virginia” soundbite, a populilst philosophical framing that has since come to define MAGA’s anti-city pathology. (Northern Virginia’s metropolitan suburbs, of course, were the phonies while Southern Virginia’s voters were salt of the earth.)
The self righteous overaching originalist and nativist narratives from the left and right respectively have their roots (for the Western world anyway) in Bible stories about wicked cities such as Babylon, and Sodom and Gamorrah, where idolotry of the material world leads humanity astray. God must, and does, destroy them.
To my mind, the left mastered this religio-poltical narrative in the late 19th Century when progressive William Jennings Bryan famously demonized cities in his Cross of Gold speech. (It’s hardly surprising that Bryan’s career ended with an ignomious reactonary asterisk: He was the lead prosecutor in the Scopes trial against teaching evolution.)
Liberals and progressives still channel these reactionary impulses; it’s not an overtly religious wrath, but it is a puritan mindset. I’ve certainly noticed strains of it on the local level. From the “Seattle is Dying” storyline that equates people experiencing homelessness with criminals, to the gatekeeping neighborhood groups who fight against housing development, Seattleites tend toward a provincial politics similar to the “Keep Austin Weird” mentality, a hipster NIMBYism that writer Max Holleran exposed in his pro-development book Yes to the City. The hilarious title of his chapter on Austin’s no-growth movement: “Exclusionary Weirdness.”
Ethiopian-American and NYT opinion writer Polgreen, who notes her formative affinity to iconic 20th Century anti-imperialists such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, India’s Nehru, and the intellectual power house of Algeria’s resistance movement, Wretched of the Earth author Frantz Fanon, is, of course, talking about a far graver topic than zoning politics. That is to say, it’s not my intent to reduce her piece to a treatise about my own pro-city obsessions.
I’m simply thankful she has identified a persistent chauvinism in left politics that has always made me uncomfortable, and pointed it out in this cause celebre.
I’m compelled to quote Polgreen at length:
A good deal of the antipathy toward Israeli Jews today is undergirded and enabled, I believe, by something that to some ears sounds progressive: the idea that people and lands that have been colonized must be returned to their indigenous peoples and original state. But that belief, when taken literally, is, at best, a kind of left-wing originalism, a utopian politics that believes the past answers all the questions of the present. At worst, it is a left-wing echo to the ancestral fantasies of the far right, in which who is allowed to live in which places is a question of the connection of one’s blood to a particular patch of soil.
Implicit in the emphasis on indigeneity is a promised restoration, albeit one of a very different sort from the imperial fantasies of Vladimir Putin or the gender obsessions of Ron DeSantis. Decolonization “is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes,” as the scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write in an influential academic paper published in 2012, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”
“The broad umbrella of social justice may have room underneath for all of these efforts,” Tuck and Yang write. “By contrast, decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life.”
There is perhaps no more vexed question in the world than how this might play out in Israel and Palestine. There is no doubt that Palestinians long lived in the land that became Israel. Jews have deep historical roots in that land, but a vast majority of the people who established the state of Israel came from elsewhere, fleeing genocide and persecution in Europe and forced into exile by Middle Eastern and North African nations. It is impossible to separate Israel’s birth from the dying gasps of the old colonial order. It was, in the indelible phrase of Arthur Koestler, “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.”
In theory, decolonization includes the disestablishment of the very idea of land as property, of modern notions like nationhood and citizenship. In theory, it is a chance to do it all over and replay history with the benefit of indigenous ideas and traditions to guide us.
But history doesn’t work that way. People do bad things. Other people resist those bad things. Humans invent and discover; they create and destroy. There is no going backward to some mythic state. There is no restoration. The events that unfold over time shape the land and the people who live on it, and those people shape one another in manifold ways, some brutal and destructive, some generative and loving. But time and experience ensure that nothing can ever be the same as it was before the last thing that happened.
As I was thinking through these issues, I came across a series of social media posts about settler colonialism by Iyad el-Baghdadi, a Palestinian writer and activist whose work has been an indispensable guide for me in the present crisis. I sent him an email, and he agreed to speak with me to expand on his ideas. I explained my unease with the reliance on concepts like indigeneity to decide who has a just claim to live in a place.
“Don’t take these people seriously,” he told me, though he made clear that he has some sympathy for those who espouse such views. “They’re not really motivated by some kind of ideology. They’re really motivated by emotion, and they kind of slap together an ideology to satisfy their emotion, but then emotions, by their very nature, cannot be satisfied that way.” He told me that sometimes when he hears people talk about Palestinian liberation, it is almost as though they are expecting a literal reversal of 1948, what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, of their expulsion upon the founding of the state of Israel.
“It is as if there will be this magical moment and all our villages are going to appear out of the earth. And then 75 years of settler colonialism is going to disappear,” he said. “But this romantic idea is really unmourned trauma.”
Questions of indigeneity are simply a distraction, he said, from the real challenge of building Palestinian political power. “I don’t care if they’re settlers or not,” he said. “The solution is not to constantly try to moralize. The solution is to fix the power imbalance. The future needs to be rooted in the truth that all human beings are equal and that Jewish life is equivalent to Palestinian life and that we can together work on a future in which nobody is oppressed and we can address the inequities of the past.”