getting my kicks on Route 66

Monday. fastest route from South Bend to somewhere after St. Louis. 8 a.m. and I’m not good with mornings.

Lincoln, Illinois. lunchtime and we pick up Route 66 accidentally, exiting to go to Bonanza. buffet and there’s cherry pie. how bad can it be? very. salty pasty crust. pretty sure these were never cherries. could be composed of play-doh, perhaps. back on the road.

St. Louis, Missouri and we realize I forgot the actual guidebook. fail. this is going to be exciting and a lot more difficult than we expected. GPS refuses to help. tries to send us on roads that don’t exist. won’t acknowledge existence of Route 66. who needs directions for a quest? we do.

Eureka! no, really. Eureka, Missouri. Route 66 State Park. used to be Times Beach. shut down by  EPA due to horrific dioxin contamination. buildings razed, residents forced out, no one ever even fined for it. per EPA: Soil samples from Route 66 State Park show no significant [emphasis added] health risks for park visitors or workers. insignificant health risks?

“I’ve never been past Kansas on 66,” chatty park employee tells us. “A lot of people come through doing the drive.” pause. “Most of them aren’t Americans, though.”

Meramec Caverns. signs over 200 miles away in every direction. Illinois. Iowa. Kentucky. Tennessee. go? nah. not gonna end years of wondering. keep the mystery alive.

Cuba, Missouri. Wagon Wheel Motel. how much? owner smiles at us, hesitates. trying to decide whether we’re together. eventually tells us rates for “one queen bed…or two double beds.” sure. we’ll take it.

cool reassuring metal clink of room key. real key, not swipe card. (checking out the next day, other patrons suggest to owner that plastic swipe cards would really be an improvement.) plastic medallion attached advising us we are in room 18. rooms paired in gingerbread-y cottages.

tile floor. bathroom door sticks because of humidity; placard in room asks us to be careful with the vintage doors and points out that the 70-year-old windows do not open. enormous cow skull stares down at bed with balefully empty eyes. headboard: route 66 sign. decorative thingy with straw and bone (?) also attached. cute. and anxiety inducing—no flailing while I sleep here.

Missouri Hick’s BBQ. log façade. sign has hillbilly holding a pig. kitschy. questionable. more importantly, next door. please be good to my mouth. five sauces on table. looks like Famous Dave’s. even more questionable. we try them. classy people use bread. we use our fingers. honey. sweet. original. smoky. sweet and spicy. tomato-based, sweet like a six-year-old’s tea party, slow heat like a sip of ice-chilled whiskey. hello. I just met you…but we’re gonna be so good together.

I get pork. of course. it’s barbecue. pulled pork. tender, juicy, a little weak on flavor but my new sweetheart can fix that. mac and cheese: like someone made Kraft what you always wished it would be. green beans: butter, shreds of meat, butter, sugar, butter, pepper, butter. yes please and thank you. free coffee with dessert? I’m in. apple cobbler: canned pie filling taste, store-bought crust, totally acceptable. and free coffee. my favorite kind of coffee. yes I drink coffee right before bed. shut up. decent ice cream, even.

Tuesday. Cuba, Missouri. first things first coffee please don’t make me do anything without coffee. pre-coffee, I can’t even shower. goes all wrong, like toothpaste-in-my-hair, soap-in-my-mouth, deodorant-behind-my-ears wrong.

“I figured I’d bring the coffeemaker so you could have coffee before we get more coffee.”

hosannas. rainbows. unicorns. glitter. kittens. glitter kittens riding rainbow unicorns belting out hosannas. would sing some Motown hit about attacking him with my love, but there’s coffee. hard to sing with a mouthful of coffee. not that I can ever sing.

Route 66 Fudge Shop? of course we stopped how can you even wonder. peanut cluster. chocolate-covered Oreo. baby cakes. Neil Gaiman? no…hope not, anyhow.

“what are baby cakes?”

“!@^%$#^%$...chocolate cake...!@*&!@*(&()&@...covered in chocolate.” no idea what else she actually said because those were the important words.

“do you have any left?”

“I’m making more right now, so I’ll have some this afternoon.”

crushing disappointment. quite possibly I sniffled.

“but you know what, I could give you a package of two. I made them for an order of a thousand, but I can make more. you can have these.”

there is so much love in this morning.

the edges of the Ozarks. signs say falling rock  and stone cliffs shimmer the nearly-metallic gray of limestone with highlights of white-clear quartz and maybe milky dolomite but it’s hard to tell the difference at 60 miles per hour and two hundred feet up. feels so much like Pennsylvania I almost want to kneel down and kiss this new familiar ground. creeks and streams anywhere but not everywhere. they appear and disappear like god’s been drunkenly waving a magic wand over it all.

gas station in Missouri. small town or maybe not even a town. rack of bumper stickers. every one of them has to do with guns. if you can read this, you’re in range. keep honking, I’m reloading. if babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted. I’m not even sure what that means.

Elbow Inn Bar & BBQ. a brown-and-white dog of questionable parentage lies in the road across the way. he raises his head and considers us as we pass, then puts his head back down. not sure whether we passed muster or failed. Hooker Cut and Devil’s Elbow: a slice through the rocks that takes us two hundred miles above the river. lookout. probably that’s Devil’s Elbow down there but the trees make it hard to see a definite bend in the river, the kind that would cause log jams and cursing. black-eyed susans march along the limestone guard walls. hot and wet, the air tastes green like growing with undertones of black rot. humidity clings to my camera lens. when I look down I can see the hairs on my arms sucking in the moisture. even my eyelashes are curlier.

repent now or burn later. this is the Bible belt. I bled for you. what have you done for me lately? – Jesus. maybe not so much like Pennsylvania after all. America is a Christian nation. not my America.

rock juts out from a cliff. someone has painted a frog (or maybe a turtle—the artistic quality is not the best here) onto the jutting rock. giant frog’s big bulgy eyes gaze benevolently down upon Route 66 traffic. comforting.

Lion’s Den Adult Store. billboard across the street. PORN KILLS. picture of a white, blonde, blue-eyed third-grader with her hair in pigtails wearing a pink checked dress no one in this century who isn’t Amish or Mennonite has worn aside from Halloween costumes. her facial expression is somewhere between “can I have a cookie?” and “no one mentioned there were thorns in this grass.”

Picher, Oklahoma. ghost town sounds like it just died but this town was killed. mandatory evacuation by the EPA. lead-zinc mining. toxic waste. first thing we see is the Picher Mining Museum. looks almost like it could be in business except for the three-foot-tall prairie grass in the yard and the window hanging open, black and empty, on the side. streets lead to empty house foundations. church windows stare blankly at us. signs telling us that this is property of the U.S. federal government block off some of the roads. so many butterflies fill the air. I think I could hear the sound of their wings if not for the deafening hum of the cicadas. keep out tidily spraypainted on buildings there is no longer a road to reach. be bold be proud together a drug-free America. this is the sign that gets me. desperate sniffle, trying to hold it together. once there was a town here. someday there will be no sign that there ever was (just like the bulldozed buildings of Times Beach because now that’s a state park and the only record of what it once was is in words and old pictures) but right now, the empty streets and bright yellow-orange butterflies still tell the story of people whose America didn’t work the way it should have.

driving 66 in Oklahoma. me behind the wheel. cruising. after a moment: “that was a turtle. in the road.” turn the car around, flip on the hazards (he has to hit the button, I can never find it in this car), and jump out to rescue turtle (technically a tortoise because he’s a box turtle but whatever no one really cares about that distinction anyway). behind me, a red Dodge with extra-large tires brakes, then veers around me. probably it has a hemi. carefully put turtle on the other side of road, several feet from the shoulder. he doesn’t say thanks. you know how turtles are.

do not drive into smoke the road signs tell us. seems like good advice but why would there be smoke and what are we supposed to do if there is other than not drive into it?

just outside Oklahoma City. construction? looks more like demolition. guess they didn’t want that school anymore but—holy shit that’s what tornado damage looks like how do you even begin to recover from that—there is a house that has a tree driven through the roof. houses before and after no problem. three lots down the road the walls are ripped off a little red mobile but the trees next to it are fine. conversation falters, hesitates, lapses into silence.

oil storage tanks everywhere. we didn’t know Oklahoma had so much oil. or so many grasshoppers. little crickets. big crickets. little grasshoppers. big grasshoppers. watch the side of the road carefully. you can see them everywhere. we stop at a McDonald’s somewhere just outside Tulsa for coffee and a bathroom. standing in the parking lot smoking, we hear a thud then another then another. grasshoppers. landing heavily on the ground. a black-and-white stray cat walks past, nose in the air, unconcerned about us but avoiding stepping on the grasshoppers. it is followed by three more, each a slight distance behind, clearly conveying that they each happen to be going in the same direction rather than being part of a group.

Wednesday. Tulsa, Oklahoma.

again: oil tanks. oil derricks. oil everywhere. gas stations proudly advertise that their fuel contains no ethanol. this is oil country, not corn country. definitely not in Indiana anymore. put the windows down and sometimes you can smell the oil as you drive past. grasshoppers everywhere still.

I don’t know what town we’re in but it’s very small and there’s parking in the middle of Main Street which is seriously screwing with my head because I’ve never seen this before and I don’t understand it. instead of driving down the street you can just…stop. right in the middle. where there are parking spaces, used-to-be-white paint delineating them on the sun-baked asphalt. why this is the thing I can’t cope with I don’t know but I know I can’t. it feels like I drove us into some other time, not just another place, and we leave town heading west.

repent or die. God hates sin. judgment day is coming.

red red dirt. where it’s been cleared recently for power lines the red seems to glisten in the sunlight, a bleeding wound ripped into the earth with the sun-bleached white of felled trees shining like bones. red dust covers everything. when I rinse my hands in a gas station bathroom, the water is red-tinged. dust on my hands or iron in the water. I don’t know which. red like I always think of Mars as being. where am I really?

obey warning signs state law, Texas tells us. isn’t it that the point of warning signs?

the Texas Panhandle is gorgeous. mesas. canyons. hills. valleys. heather. mesquite. agave. yucca. prairie grasses. and what looks like cotton exploding out of black sunburned pods. silver-green fuzzy cactus. this was not what I expected from Texas. oil everywhere here, too. oil tanks. oil derricks. no one even bothers to point out here that there’s no ethanol in the gasoline. I guess that’s a given in Texas. plastic grocery bags struggle to free themselves from barbed wire fences. looking at them, I realize after a moment that not all of the white is plastic. some of it is shed snakeskin. from really big snakes. oh my god.

we stop to pee by the side of the road somewhere in Texas. a little turn-off with a shed. fire ants roaming aimlessly. peeing on them gives them a clearer goal: you. turns out they don’t like being urinated on. go figure. the only ones who don’t care are the mound of fire ants eating what I think is maybe a scorpion. the lowing of cattle fills the air with thrumming sound but we can’t see any cows at all. sound carries so far in land like this.

it is storming ahead somewhere. lightning stabs the sky, flickers like nature loves disco, licks the ground. where we are, no thunder or rain. with land this flat, we can see for miles. is that storm in Amarillo, or even further west? despite the storm, the air is dusty sandy dry. radio says it’s 90 degrees but it feels like 75 with a perfect constant breeze and a faint hint of crispness to the air. no green taste here, just brown. we love this.

cattle. everywhere. no longhorn cattle yet that we’ve seen. dead armadillos by the side of the road, almost all of them looking like they just fell over. no apparent injury. life was just too much. something else, too. maybe a giant lizard? I’m not sure. no billboards here. haven’t seen one for hours. no houses, either. just oil and cows.

Thursday. Amarillo, Texas.

Texas has horrible off-ramps. driving on 66, we’re on the side roads. signs say yield but the traffic comes in to the side. would need an extra set of eyes to be able to adequately see cars showing up. plus side: no one actually exits. ever.

we stop at the Cadillac Ranch. before I even get out of the car, the chemical smell of spray paint hits the back of my throat. this place is hopping, the busiest we’ve been through the whole trip. families, couples, teenagers, and what I swear is some kind of church youth group all wearing matching yellow T-shirts. empty and half-empty cans of spray paint litter the ground, as omnipresent as the heaps of cow dung. the sun is blinding-hot but the breeze makes it bearable. parents help their kids spraypaint their names onto the cars, concerned about the wind bringing paint back into their faces. as we leave, a father is carefully lifting each of his children over the turnstile, clearly trying to prevent them from getting their feet muddy: a doomed cause, given that the cars are surrounded by pools of dirty water bordered by shoe-sucking mud. in a gas station parking lot across the highway we make pb&j sandwiches and eat them in the car. with the windows up, there’s still a hint of cow shit scenting the air, imparting a manure taste to our sandwiches. I don’t know whether that’s our shoes or just Texas.

Adrian, Texas. the midpoint of Route 66 (to be fair, the town just east claims that, too, but this one seems to be making a bigger point of it, so I’ll accept that). Midpoint Café, where we have ugly pie (not all that ugly, but not very pretty either; more like “not as aesthetically appealing as it could be” pie but that doesn’t have a good ring to it I guess) and stop into the shop next door, which, oddly, is run by the woman who used to own the Midpoint Café. we know this because she tells us, seconds after greeting us with, “oh thank God, you speak English.” neither of us quite knows how to react to this statement—more often I get people doubting whether I do—but that fazes her not at all. “where are y’all from?” “Indiana.” “oh, well, that’s just about next door! we’re neighbors!” question: how do you get someone in Texas to proclaim that Indiana and Texas are the same place? answer: come in after a half-dozen people from Europe.

longhorn cattle, finally. a couple dozen in a field. the stare from live ones is only marginally less baleful than from the empty eyes of longhorn skulls. I didn’t even know cows could look hostile. they keep a watchful, distrusting eye on us as we drive past.

classic cars everywhere. maybe technically not “classic,” because these are just old cars, but there are fields chock full of them, they’re rusting out in fields (or what would be fields if they had crops but I’m not sure what you call it when it’s just an expanse with scrubby bushes in it). if lust is a sin then I’m sinning very very hard right now because I want these cars bad.

Glenrio, Texas/Glenrio, New Mexico. silent. not even the sound of cicadas or grasshoppers here. just the absolute quiet of a town long since abandoned. signs: trespassers will be shot. thieves will be killed. warnings are always appreciated. getting here was on an old, old section of 66, with pavement sections that make the car’s tires go whap whap whap on the road. I can’t tell if the road I’m standing on is pavement covered over with dust or if it was always and forever dirt anyhow. my footsteps sound so loud. louder than the grasshoppers landing in Oklahoma.

Hereford, Texas. Beef Capital of the World. talk about places I never thought I’d be.

Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge. we are on our way out, having seen no wildlife whatsoever, when something bounds across our peripheral vision. a mule deer, we think, because whitetail deer do not move like that. this is the emptiest wildlife refuge I’ve ever entered. no people at all. not even birds. but the cicadas are loud again here.

Oklahoma City. traffic. merge now state law. but that’s after the first half-dozen merge signs. I guess this is the “for real you guys we mean it” sign, but drivers don’t seem to take this one any more seriously than the others. this is a mess.

stop for gas somewhere between Oklahoma City and Wichita. no stray cats here that I see, but grasshoppers and crickets and some enormous beetle that may or may not be a June bug. inside, there are a dozen on the floor of the gas station, some crushed, some about to be. I avoid stepping on them. I don’t like feeling things crunch under my feet. I walk around a little, go to look at…oh I wish I hadn’t seen that. dead mouse (or something that was once furry). almost completely covered by grasshoppers. they’re eating it. get back in the car. “let’s get out of Oklahoma, k?”

Friday. Wichita, Kansas. rain. the news channel on in the hotel breakfast room warns us about flash floods, but I have no idea what county we might be in. Koch Foundation commercial. a list of countries like the drop-down boxes on websites, with the U.S. at the bottom because it’s in alphabetical order. then let’s rise again and that does-anyone-seem-to-have-a-noose tingle around my neck and America Freedom America Freedom KEEP AMERICA FREE. does anyone else think this is weird? can’t tell. everyone’s staring at the walls.

leaving Wichita, there are signs everywhere warning us about high water and some of the fields are flooded. an egret hangs out in one of them, looking slightly out of place but committed to its position. I silently give him a raise-the-roof gesture. I feel ya, buddy.

everyone says Kansas is flat but I think I must be in the wrong part of Kansas because this is not what I expected. we’re in the Flint Hills. flint, shale, violet prairie clover, the occasional cow or hay bale, no houses at all. sinkholes and streams. a hawk hangs suspended between the green ground and blue sky, riding the wind. no wing beats, no moving, just a moment of stopped time. in El Dorado Lake, drowning trees reach desperate black claws for the sky. I want to save them but it’s already much too late for that. lake and sky are the same super-saturated shade, like they were carved from lapis lazuli.

wild turkeys in a hayfield outside Kansas City give us the hairy eyeball. more welcoming than a lot of the signs. homosexuality kills (with a picture of an AK). Sodom will die again. sinners die. not hard to remember that Kansas is the home of Westboro Baptist Church. praise God or face the consequences.

1:30 a.m., standing in the parking lot of a rest stop on the Indiana Toll Road. humid like Oklahoma with constant faint precipitation that can’t decide whether it wants to be rain or fog, but no grasshoppers here. faint hum of cicadas in the distance. the air tastes gray and yellow: drizzle and ethanol. almost home.

we had a truck

Did you ever see Drag Me to Hell? It is, in most respects, a painfully bad movie. The scene that made me laugh so hard I choked on my fruit punch and needed several minutes to recover is no exception; it’s just also very very funny. The somewhat abridged version: Christine meets her boyfriend’s parents for the first time shortly after sacrificing her cat (long story) and makes the comment, “I had a cat.” Boyfriend: “You mean…you mean you have a cat…Unless something happened to him…” Christine: “Well, how am I supposed to know? You know how cats are. They come and they go.” Obviously, I am a terrible person for finding kitty sacrifice hilarious, but oh my god. It was perfect.

I’m telling you this so that you understand what I mean when I say that Tim and I, we had a truck.

Let me backtrack a bit. See, we’ve been looking for a truck on Craigslist, because having established the prices for renting a moving truck, our options became “buy a pickup truck” or “sell ourselves on street corners until we make enough money to rent a moving truck.” For various reasons, the second option is less feasible, so we’ve been working on the first one. Also, a truck would make transporting our canoe more convenient. That would be lovely, as right now, my middle finger on my left hand is still mostly unusable due to an unfortunate incident involving a canoe, several dozen mosquitoes, and a series of poor choices.*

We’ve had trucks in the past, but it hasn’t gone well.** However, we are endlessly optimistic, so we were sure it would go better this time. Last night, we went to go see a $750 F150 in Terre Haute. Said truck had “some rust” and “a weird steering issue,” but hey, $750, right? We met Norm, who was a nice guy with a couple of really sweet pit bulls who loved me. I petted the dogs while Tim looked at the truck, because my primary experience in the realm of fixing cars lies in creating workarounds to problems like “the sunroof leaks” or “the fan makes a ghastly noise” or “the ceiling liner falls down in front of your eyes while you drive.”***

The truck seemed okay, for a certain value of “okay,” where I mean, “seemed like it was probably worth some money.” It started right up, although the cracked windshield, lack of interior door panels, and failure of the right turn signal to function without being hand-held were mildly problematic. Plus, the driver’s side window didn’t work, which always becomes more of a problem—you go from “damn, I can’t open this window” to “this window keeps falling down all the time.” Eventually you have to jam things in beside the window to try to keep it up, and that sucks in winter when you can’t wear your coat due to the fact that it’s shoved into the door panel to hold up the window. As Tim pointed out to Norm, the tires seemed a little old, too.

Given all this, we decide that this is clearly the truck for us, and we offer Norm $600 for it after Tim test-drives it a bit. Norm hesitates, but after all, this isn’t even his truck. He traded trucks with his cousin, and then somewhere in that process, bought a different truck for himself, so now he’s got a mid-nineties Dodge. Norm tells us this with pride, making it clear that he shares the opinion of various Craigslist posters who say things like, “Will trade for different truck. No Fords or other junk. Chevy or Dodge preferred.” Norm considers our offer and proposes $650. We point at the windshield. He tries again with a counter-offer of $625. Out of a nagging feeling that we’re probably supposed to haggle (I mean, who doesn’t want to haggle?), we agree.

(Pay attention. This is where I jinx us.) I wave at the three or four tires in the bed of the truck and say, “I don’t think we need the tires, though.” Norm makes a half-hearted effort to convince us that they’re really quite nice tires, and we could use them to plant potatoes in. Pointing out that we live in a rental, Tim rejects the offer of tires to keep, so Norm’s two non-speaking sons (?) grab the tires and toss them into the garage. Norm provides us an extra passenger side mirror because the one on the truck wobbles alarmingly, expresses his regret that his cousin is in Maryland and thus cannot provide us with the interior door panel, and hands over the title.

We own a truck.

We feel pretty okay about this. Sure, the steering wheel wavers like a ninety-pound college freshman after a dozen shots of the Captain, and we might need to replace the tires sometime soon, but we have a truck! I follow Tim home, thinking happy thoughts about things we’ll now be able to transport with our truck. It’s about a two-hour drive, which isn’t too bad, and—no, wait. That’s only how it went in my head.

In real life, what happens is the driver’s side tire blows out after a mile. Yes. Pretty much exactly a mile. We call Norm and explain. Norm is surprised and distressed by this news, but thinks that maybe his uncle has some extra wheels, so he goes to check on that while we hang out in the liquor store parking lot. (Big Red Liquor, for anyone who’s keeping track.) We propose returning Norm’s truck to him, but after a while, Norm and his kind of sleazy non-speaking sons (?) show up with Uncle’s extra wheel and change our tire for us, putting the blown tire in the bed of the truck and thus returning our truck to its usual state of tire-having. We thank them and continue on.

While we’re at a gas station cleaning the truck’s amazingly filthy windshield, Norm calls Tim up and offers to take his truck back. But now we have a tire, and we figure the odds that another tire is going to blow out are incredibly low, and after all, Norm was pretty nice to come give us a new wheel, so we stick with having a truck. On the road again, I start considering possible names for the truck and have just about settled on “Bertha” when I notice that the truck in front of me has suddenly started pulling hard to the right, and a moment later, Tim pulls off onto a side street, and I remember that I don’t ever win at poker because I suck at calculating odds.

Yeah. The front passenger side tire blew out.

I have to tell you, this is a bummer. We contemplate Bertha for a little while, as Tim tries to call Norm. Norm, however, has likely gone to bed, as it is around 11 p.m. and he works first shift. We are concerned. Terre Haute does not seem like a place likely to have a plethora of tow trucks available, and at its best, AAA has never succeeded in getting any vehicle of ours towed with less than a 45-minute wait. This truck, it is clearly not meant to be ours. (And I never should have made that comment about the tires.) We go back to Norm’s place, where we explain the situation.

Norm is appalled. We are sad. Norm is a really nice guy. We are appreciative. Norm offers to take the truck back. We accept. Norm gives us our money. We offer to get Bertha towed back to his place. Norm calls his buddy, who has a tow truck. We show Norm on our GPS where Bertha is. Norm apologizes for the hassle. We apologize for the hassle. Norm gets into his new Dodge. We drive home.

We don’t own a truck anymore. We feel pretty okay about this.


* It’s amazing how necessary the middle finger on one’s dominant hand is. I’d always thought that it was mostly the opposable thumbs that allowed me to be a tool-user, but turns out, that middle finger is kind of crucial. I am in the sad sad state of being unable to cut my own meat, walk the dog, or give out terrorist fist-jabs without excruciating pain.

** Our first truck was an eighty-something Chevy S10. It lacked power steering and power brakes, which was terribly exciting, since I am just barely tall enough to drive early-eighties trucks, and that meant that I had to cling to the steering wheel whenever I had to use (stand on) the brakes. Also, it had typical Chevy issues like the Chevette that was my first car, e.g., the radio came on randomly without warning and played Spanish music very loudly for an unpredictable length of time. Having had experience with this, though, I was able to roll with it and just pretend that I’d done it on purpose, shouting, “Ay!” at appropriate points. The city stole that truck, because we forgot to renew the plates, which apparently means that the city will just come pwn your vehicle and then laugh at you when you want it back.

Our second truck was a seventies-something F150, which, again, I am barely tall enough to drive. It was orange and ugly and had typical Ford issues like sometimes not running. One day the neighbor kid asked us how much we wanted for it. We pointed out that we had no desire to sell it and also it had typical Ford issues. However, he apparently got his training in the school of “No means maybe,” because he hounded us daily until we finally sold it to him…at which point he took up hounding Tim to help him fix it. Not a good deal. We were so happy when they moved.

*** Don’t ever decide the correct solution to the ceiling issue is to just rip out the lining. Then the car takes up dropping weird bits of gluey lint onto your head and in your eyes at the worst possible time, and any time you drive somewhere, you end up looking like you have a case of chunky, yellow-tinged dandruff. Staple-gunning the liner to the car works pretty well for a short time, and as long as you keep the staple gun in the car, you can throw some more staples in there at red lights whenever necessary.

the rust belt, ruin porn, and neglect

I’ve had these pictures from Detroit and Gary sitting on my hard drive for almost a year now.

The thing is, I don’t usually explain my photography. I caption photos most of the time, but the captions have very little to do with the actual content of any given photograph, and with few exceptions, the more emotion I have about a photo, the less the caption has to do with that emotion. Most probably, this is indicative of intimacy issues or something like that on my part, but it’s also about the fact that by and large, I don’t think art can or should require explanation.

The pictures from Gary and Detroit require explanation.

They require explanation because posting them without telling you why I took them feels false and hollow. They require explanation because so many pictures of Gary and Detroit don’t explain. They require explanation because taking those pictures means I owe explanations.

I take photographs of abandoned places. Of old things. Of cemeteries. Of roads that no one drives on anymore. Of buildings collapsing into dust. Of bricks being torn apart ever so slowly by the inexorable growth of trees.

I do it for a lot of reasons. Some of them are easier to explain than others. Walking through old cemeteries is both beautiful and heartbreaking. The epitaphs say so much about how people lived and loved, about how they felt when they lost those they loved. Even those who wrote the epitaphs are gone now, but their love still lives for anyone reading their heartbreak. Someday, even those words will have faded. Some of them have already. They knew they would when they wrote them and still believed it was worth it for the time they would last.

Buildings falling apart are everywhere. For the last two and a half years, I’ve made the drive from Lafayette to South Bend and back again an average of twice a month. A defunct gas station sits along U.S. 31. I don’t know when it was last in use, but whenever it was, gas was less than two dollars a gallon. Two and a half years ago, the roof was sagging. One day in winter, it collapsed entirely over half of the building, the roof and walls sliding down into an endless nap. Closer to South Bend, a house that I never realized was unoccupied had a huge tree limb plummet through its porch roof during an early spring storm a year ago. Now the house and the tree both lean, supporting each other as best they can while time and weather push them harder every season.

Nearer to Lafayette, on State Road 25, houses people lived in two and a half years ago are empty now, their curtainless windows blank and blind. Many of them will be bulldozed into oblivion when the new S.R. 25 is laid, just like the trees between Logansport and Fulton were. On one drive they were alive, a young but burgeoning forest, and the next they were dead, hundreds of them hacked down and lying lifeless on the muddy ground, waiting for the construction project’s next phase. Waiting for progress, like the blind houses are.

These places are beautiful. Here, people lived, people loved, people laughed and cried. These are the buildings that people have created, that people dreamed of and worked for. This is why I take pictures. For me and for them, because nothing remembered ever really dies. Some of those pictures are ones I have posted. Some of the places are gone now. Some will be soon. I remember them.

The photographs I take fit into the category of what many people would call “ruin porn.” It’s a term that I find it hard to grapple with, because I think the definition of “porn” being used here is one that’s fundamentally negative, and I don’t believe that all pornography is necessarily exploitative. But I’d rather address how people describe it and react to it than quibble over the term:

• In RustWire, Richey Piiparinen tells us that he believes ruin porn “has ‘outed’ ruin. It did this through the simple act of caring to look. Before that ruins in America really were a pornographic experience: a scene from the underbelly, of and for the poor, the scrags. It was a private affair dirtied through the interaction between the filth of the aesthetic and the guilt of the observer for having to live with it. But by outing and framing it—not to mention capturing the inherent beauty in broken things—Ruin Porn exposed the failure and decay, thus clearing the secrecy, the shame, and leaving perceptual room to see less emptiness and more space.”
  
  
• In bfp’s post on Feministe, she describes “ruin porn” as “very similar to other phenomenons that Feminists do know about and have an opinion on, things like poverty porn or even just porn itself. It is a fetishization. It is a camera trained with a hyper intense gaze on a subject. It is viewers getting off on the most vulnerable moments of the subject,” going on to say that “There are very few people born and invested in Detroit or the various Rust Belt cities that find these pictures appealing…These pictures do show Detroit. But they don’t *represent* Detroit. They don’t make up what Detroiters love about Detroit. And they certainly don’t represent the real problems of Detroit. Or post-industrial cities.”
  
  
• John Patrick Leary’s (well worth reading) article in Guernica points out, “So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city.”

I point to the statement I quoted from Leary. This is why I owe the explanation. This is why I haven’t posted the pictures yet. Because a disintegrating house here or a collapsing gas station there—these are part of larger narratives, yes, narratives of deindustrialization, of suburbia, of what “Progress” means in America, of what and who becomes grist for the mill of capitalism. But they are not creating or contributing to the narrative of a specific place and the people who live there in the way that photographs of Gary and Detroit’s abandoned buildings do.

The Rust Belt is where I come from. I was born in Magee Women’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. I grew up in Allegheny County. Pittsburgh is and always will be home. My home. When I was a kid, we moved to South Bend, a city I didn’t realize I loved until I left it. I love the Rust Belt cities. Pittsburgh. Cleveland. Youngstown. Akron. Gary. Detroit. Chicago. Grand Rapids. Johnstown. The two places I’ve lived longest and loved most are numbers 6 and 8 in U.S. News’s report of “America’s Dying Cities.”

And so. I come back to “ruin porn.” To bfp’s claim that these pictures “showcase ugly old abandoned Detroit (or any post-industrial city),” that they don’t “*represent* Detroit,” that they “don’t represent the real problems of…post-industrial cities.” And I say: These pictures do represent the Rust Belt. Industrialization was the driving force that made these cities what they are, and it is the driving force for what they are becoming. Pittsburgh was steel mills just as much as it was rivers and mountains. Trains carrying coal, Three Rivers Stadium, Heinz ketchup, suspension bridges, the brownfields of Hazelwood Coke Works, Clark Bars, the Liberty Tunnels, salads with steak and french fries, PPG Place, Kennywood, Isaly’s chipped chopped ham, St. Clair Village, the Cathedral of Learning, collard greens from the Strip District: They all represent Pittsburgh as it was or as it is. They are Pittsburgh, just as much as people saying “yinz” and the Steelers and the Inclines, and so are deindustrialization, gentrification, and disinvestment.

They are the Pittsburgh that, according to U.S. News, is dying. Like Detroit. Like South Bend. Like Cleveland. Like Flint. Like Grand Rapids. That’s the underlying narrative of ruin porn, isn’t it? This is what concerns bfp and Leary: The narrative that these places, our homes, are dying. Maybe some of them are already dead and this is just the last twitching of the corpse before rigor mortis settles in. Such a shame that these once-beautiful buildings are being destroyed by those people who don’t even appreciate what they once were. Urban decay. So sad, yet so very fascinating. Like it’s just an interesting circumstance that this is all happening, except that this narrative insists it already has happened.

Let me make it clear that I’m not disagreeing with bfp and Leary, not about this. Not at all.

I’ve seen a hell of a lot of posts from people who are “grossed out” by homeless people interfering in their privilege to take pictures of the corpses of once-loved buildings. Professional photographers who have the money hire police escorts to make sure nobody who actually lives in the city or in the buildings they’re photographing can bother them. God forbid someone living in the place you’re photographing with 15,000 dollars’ worth of camera equipment should ask you for a dollar so they can buy a coffee. People get offended about homelessness. Like homeless people are homeless just to annoy them and make them feel guilty. No worries, though. The money they’re going to make selling their photographs will probably buy a lot of Xanax.

That narrative, that attitude—they make me furious.

Because what you see in Hazelwood, in Braddock, in Detroit, in Gary, in South Bend? That’s not decay. Saying Rust Belt cities are decaying is like punching out someone’s front teeth and then saying that they have tooth decay. Decay is gradual. Decay is natural. Decay is more or less inevitable. None of these words apply to what’s happening to Rust Belt cities. Note that I didn’t say “what’s happened” or “in Rust Belt cities.” I didn’t say that because that’s not what I meant. It’s not done. It’s not over. It’s happening right now. Earlier, I referred to “disinvestment.” That’s the polite way that the business world has of referring to what bfp calls “neglect” and I’d call negligence and dereliction of duty. Rust Belt cities are not dying. They are being killed. Would you refer to someone who has cancer from industrial pollution as "decaying"?

In a lot of ways, reading people’s comments about their photography of Rust Belt cities is like playing a game of racist bingo or seeing a performance of the art of defending racism, as people pretend that poverty just happened without any apparent cause, or if there is a cause, it must be the fault of those who experience it. That’s what the narrative and the attitude pretend isn’t happening. They’re insisting that there is no care required, no duty, no responsibility. Piiparinen thinks that ruin porn is good because it “expose[s] the failure and decay,” a way of shifting the responsibility from the viewer back to the viewed; Leary describes "ruin photos" as "spectacles of degradation." This perception implies that these cities failed, that these buildings are decaying because of that failure, that exploiting that failure by taking photographs of it and selling them for money is somehow cleansing the city (and by proxy, its residents) of the shame it should feel for that failure.

And yet. I still don’t agree with bfp’s assessment that photographs of the impact of neglect in the Rust Belt are inherently and always exploitative without any potential positive effect. These are pictures that, whether they intend to or not, commemorate and illustrate the way that white privilege, capitalism, and classism combine as people try to justify engaging in a deliberate and unconscionable dereliction of duty while coining phrases like “financially distressed municipality” to refer to “areas that we aren’t going to bother caring about because the people there probably deserve it anyway—if they didn’t, they’d leave.” People taking these pictures are, more often than not, taking advantage of their own privilege to exploit these cities and the people who live in them…but the pictures they take still create a memorial of the wrongs that have been done.

Let me state this clearly: I believe that the buildings documented in most of these photos are beautiful. My house was built in 1910, and over the years, it's acquired more than its share of scars. For that matter, I have more than my share of scars, and many of them have dark memories behind them. But I wouldn't accept a claim from someone else that pictures of my scars are indications of failure or spectacles of degradation. No. That's the clear consequence of a narrative that blames the victim.

Where bfp and I differ is in how we believe that narrative can be resisted or rewritten.

I think part of that effort can lie in photography. In showing people pictures that say, “Look what we are doing to this city,” and to the people who live in it.* I don’t think it’s helpful to point to isolated examples, to gentrified neighborhoods inhabited by people who seem to think homelessness is some kind of disease caught only by those who deserve it, and focus on those alone as exemplifying what a city is. Those are only part of the story, but they’re the part that gets told all the time, every day, on every news station. This is America, and most people love bootstrapping success stories almost as much as they love stories about how poor people/neighborhoods/schools just needed the “right people” to come along and help them out. But telling only those stories at the expense of telling the narrative of negligence on the part of the government, the people, and the corporations who are hurting these cities and these people? No, thank you. Screw going gently into that good night.

And, in the end, these are pictures that show the Rust Belt cities I love. That’s why I take them. But it’s not why I post them. I’m posting them because I want you to see what I love, and I want you to see that the question of what the United States does about its negligence of these places and these people is not some kind of abstract ethics question of the sort that Kohlberg might pose. It is a very real question on the political table, and claiming that these cities are “disappearing” is a verbal sleight-of-hand that allows people to pretend the issue is already moot, that the story is already told, the book is already written.

It’s not.

Every time people move away from the "dangerous" city and out into the suburbs, every time they push for "neighborhood" shops so they don't have to leave their safe little subdivisions, it's another blow at the bricks in these crumbling walls. It’s another shove further down the ladder for the people who live there and the people who love there. This is not just scenery. This is not the Coliseum or the Acropolis. This is life right here right now. If it’s not your life, then you have all the more obligation to pay attention. To act.


* In her discussion of ruin porn, bfp points out that "The one thing [the pictures] have in common no matter who has taken them is that there are never any people in them. And to me, that points to the problem. There are no people interacting with the ruins." I understand this objection. To some extent, I agree with it. But I'm not sure the alternative is better. Making it the equivalent of street photography, where photographers take pictures of Rust Belt residents without permission or payment? That's where I think the label of pornography would become legitimate, and it would be forced performance in such pornography, at that. I assume that this isn't what bfp meant, and that she was suggesting that photographers would ask permission to photograph their subjects…but in addition to "that's not what most street photographers do," I have some serious concerns about this approach creating a this-is-a-zoo attitude—which is very much present in some of the photography that does exist that includes shots of people.

That said, I don't take pictures of people because: 1.) I'm deathly shy. Unless said strangers are holding an interesting book, wearing Steelers apparel, or in need of help, my attempts to initiate conversations with strangers result in a complete failure to vocalize anything. 2.) This gets into why I take pictures the way I do and of what I do, which is a whole other post, but in short: I take pictures to capture the world the way I see it, and I feel very uncomfortable with what feels like writing my own definition onto people I don't really know. Taking pictures of strangers feels like forcing intimacy between us, even with their permission.

Cheap Trick, Poison, & Def Leppard

Concert ratings, much like cities, are in accordance with the criteria I create on the spur of the moment when I start writing the first one, but these are going to be in order, for reasons that may become apparent by the end.
Categories (1-10 scale, 5 is the "meh, whatevs" level):
A. how much I liked the artist prior to the show
B. venue
C. weather (because let's be real, it probably drastically affects my view)
D. star power
E. how much I like the artist post-show

Cheap Trick, Poison, Def Leppard
A. (in order of appearance) 5, 5, 5.5
B. Verizon Wireless Center (Noblesville) 6.5
C. 10 (July 2009)
D. 6, 8, 6
E. 6, 8, 6.5
Discussion:
Some fourteen months ago, I happened across notice that there was going to be a concert at the Verizon Wireless Center with Cheap Trick, Poison, and Def Leppard. I think Facebook might've told me via iLike, or some such thing. This, my friends, was my thought process. "Huh. I kinda like Def Leppard. Do they have songs other than 'Pour Some Sugar on Me'? I…don't know. Anyway—wait. [cue epiphany music] You know what? I'll see anything for $20. I've paid that to see terrible movies with terrible people. This is MUSIC. I am IN."

And as it turned out, the evening was absolutely perfect, weather-wise. Cheap Trick claimed they were the greatest rock band of all time, a declaration supported by this really cute and very excited chick who was very clearly their number-one fan. I know she was, because she knew the words to every song.

EVERY song, y'all. For Cheap Trick.

I knew the words to…one song.

Then Poison came on and they had green fire as part of their stage effects and I realized I know a lot more Poison than I thought and that hearing 25,000 people begging Bret Michaels to talk dirty to them is intoxicating like a double shot of single-barrel Jack Daniels: It's hot and perfectly blended and a high that has nothing to do with the pot smoke drifting on the air, the scent heavy like lilacs in early summer.

I was sold.

"I'll see almost anyone for $20" was definitely in the top ten list of good realizations I've had. (Also included in that list would be, "Never buy Mexican snacky cakes sold at gas stations.")

Def Leppard was totally fine, by the way. They came out, they played their stuff, we got rocked. Would've been worth it for them alone, but somehow…Poison was just more fun. Star power. It matters.

albuquerque

Albuquerque
the rankings: A-6; B-7; C-9; D-8; E-9
why I was there: SW TX ACA/PCA conference
hours spent there: 55ish in February 2010

award: Cecilia's is the only thing that boosted Albuquerque from a 3 on food because everything else I had was mediocre except for the coffee which was terrible. But the sopaipilla burger I ordered on the "what the hell is that? guess I'll find out" grounds was mm-mm-good. Hamburger patty wrapped in a tortilla with lettuce, chopped onion, and, most importantly, red chili sauce that was really and truly spicy, that left my lips with the tingly slightly-swollen feeling you get from spicy food or prolonged making out. Win.



discussion:
Honestly, Albuquerque didn't do much for me. Weird Al to the contrary, it's just not that cool. I know multiple people who were there and every one of them swore that it was awesome, they'd move there, it rocks.

Clearly, we visited different versions of this city, cause for me, the best thing about Albuquerque was getting out of it and going for a drive down Route 66. Now, Route 66? If I were Keanu Reeves, I'd totally bust out a "whoa…" about Route 66, because I loved it.

Used-to-be-towns give way to can't-believe-people-still-live-here-hovels shakily standing their ground next to giant-effin'-casinos. Still so much highway without any of those. Red rocks and sandstone cliffs and sharp curves and tumbleweed. Buildings crumble back into the pinky-red earth that was ripped open to create them, testaments to what the American spirit and progress and ingenuity can do—and who and what they leave behind—as the glare of sunlight both whiter and warmer than it is anywhere else bears silent witness to it all.

In the middle of nowhere, on my way to Acoma Pueblo, the Sky City, I jerked the wheel of my Kia Soul (funny name for a car that didn't have any) to the left and stopped in one of those used-to-be-towns because a dog barked at the dust my Soul kicked up as I drove past. I got out of the car thinking I would take some pictures, but then without realizing I was going to, I opened the gate with a sign on it that said "come in, stranger!" One of the dogs was washing my face with his tongue while the other wriggled ecstatically against my boots when a woman said, "Don't get visitors out here much."

She showed me the property, told me about the neighbors (I'd thought the rusted-out trailers across the way were abandoned, but she only wished they were), walked me through her restoration of a stucco-walled cabin about eighty years older than my own historic house, and asked me about contemporary feminist theory. We were so busy talking—we talked for almost two hours—I didn't take any pictures.

Sometimes I wonder if it really happened.

oh, the places you'll go (or at least, that I went)

I have created a set of arbitrary and largely unhelpful categories, based upon which I decide whether a city is worthwhile. Obligatory disclaimer of "I only spent a short time in these places and don't actually know anything about them and I'm sure they're lovely if you just know where to go yadda yadda yadda." I'm not restricting myself to doing these in order, because linearity, unlike particularity, is not really part of my nature.

Categories (which will be scored on a 1-10 scale where 5 is neutral, a.k.a. the nonexistent norm):
A. yummy eats
B. oooh, pretty
C. ability to navigate/find things (i.e., with both hands and a compass, could I find it, or was I lost in the hood?)
D. the locals (or the people I encountered; I don't know if they live there cause I'm not a stalker like that)
E. stuff in the general area to do (other than playing pick up stix)

"Race," Writing, and Difference

"Race," Writing, and Difference
Edited by Henry Louis Gates

This book is a hot mess.

And yet, like the protagonists described in every song I know of with that title…it still kind of works.

The book consists of a collection of essays by various people, with an introduction by Gates. Those parts? They're the mess. At the end, though, there are responses to the collection. Those responses are the hot, in more ways than one; every one of them, from Tzvetan Todorov's denouncement of the entire project as falling short of its goal to Gates's response to the responses, has undertones (and sometimes overtones and midtones) of outrage, as they argue over what the goals of the project and individual essays within it were—and debate the actual outcomes of it.

I'm going to try to briefly summarize the primary points each writer makes in her or his response, then discuss how accurate I feel these criticisms of the volume to have been.

Todorov: Argues that the essays are reifying the construct of race and fall into the trap of portraying contemporary critical theory as infallible or at least not in need of deconstruction. Also, people are too mean to Enlightenment philosophy when they accuse it of creating racialism. Writers didn’t do their homework, as evidenced by their failure to refer to "the critical school of thought which long attempted to explain literary differences by racial differences" (375).Accuses Gates of racialism. Criticizes essays as a whole for academic language and inaccessibility. Says there's too much focus on the Other in European literature in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Notable remark:

"In proudly describing ourselves as antiracist, we can give ourselves a good conscience at almost no expense. What else, then, do I recommend that we do? Certainly not endorse the racist credo just for the sake of making a more unconventional choice, but, at the very least, become aware of the problem and carefully question the commonplaces of contemporary good conscience." (378)

Houston A. Baker, Jr.: Suggests that Gates is confused in his goals and desires, having stated a desire for the vernacular but then editing a volume which has almost none of that present. Annoyed that Appiah dismisses physical features as "mere" physical differences in his reliance on genetic science to show that race is not a biological construct, because those physical features are what others react to. Argues that this "we're all the same" insistence ignores reality and obscures racism. Charges several writers with having created a "whitemale confessional" (388). Says that the base argument of many writers and activists is the "we're just as good as" model, which is a fundamentally losing model. Extremely lengthy consideration of Caliban and how if we see Caliban as not a defective version of Prospero but his own individual, he has value in that.

Notable remark:

"[The] signal shortcoming of 'Race,' Writing, and Difference is the paucity of Caliban's sound. The issue chooses instead to repeatedly sound (perhaps, of academic necessity) 'subtle' phonics of academic discourse." (389)

Harold Fromm: Pretty much says that Gates can bite him, then reams Pratt for committing the same error she criticizes in colonial literature. Claims she is using academic discourse as a colonizing mechanism to further her own individual aims and ends by urging that "'Physician, heal thyself'…be the first moral exhortation of the day" (398).

Notable remark:

"[Here] I was, daring to use words without quotation marks, actually believing that I referred to something identifiable when I spoke of black people, Americans, musicians, and whatnot, and being told that it was all just my own narcissistic and preemptive fantasy." (396)

Pratt's response to Fromm: Okay, fine, Fromm has some points about academic discourse, but why's he picking on me? What did I do differently? Who am I colonizing, anyhow? How is it better to have stable categories? Going well till the baffling "can't we all just get along/let's do something completely different" ending which fails to suggest what the different might be.

Notable remark:

"[The] name for such interventions is not colonialism, it is critique—or, ,if you like, critical inquiry. They are attempts to change the culture one lives in." (400)

Gates: Primarily responds to Todorov and somewhat Fromm. Argues for necessity of undermining essentialism. Calls Todorov out on his definition of racism as "the display of contempt or aggressiveness toward other people on account of physical differences," pointing out that that definition is limited and specious (403). Accuses Todorov of creating a straw-man argument in opposition to Gates as a way of attempting to re-legitimatize literature canon. Refutes pretty much all of Todorov's claims about racialism and racism.

Notable remark:

"Todorov can't even hear us, Houston, when we talk his academic talk; how he gonna hear us if we 'talk that talk,' the talk of the black idiom?" (409)

Whew. All right. Now that we have that all out there, let's take a look at some of the claims. I think Gates does a pretty good job of responding to Todorov's claims about what he says in the introduction; Todorov seems to be working from some definition of racism where not being racist equates to "well it's not like I've lynched anybody today," and I'm too tired to play racism bingo today, so we'll just let that one lie. I couldn't resist giving you his baffling discussion of how being antiracist is popular and easy, and the resultant solution that is not, you know, actually acting against racism but is instead to…what? Reconsider whether racism might be a good idea after all? But that's enough of that.

So. I'm going to limit this to considering two particular points that were brought up by Todorov, Fromm, and Houston (because otherwise we'd be here all day, especially if I started talking about essentialism, cause that is a whole lot of complicated—a hot mess, you might say, or at least, I might).

First, there is the discussion of language and accessibility. This, I think, is particularly interesting in a volume entitled "Race," Writing, and Difference that has a surprisingly narrow discussion of writing, more discussion of colonialism than race, and barely a nod to difference. It might seem like that's a brutal criticism; it's not. The book may well be mis-titled, but so are many others. What I was expecting, though, was some discussion of how literacy, forced education, and formal education interplay with ideas of race and difference. I probably would have liked that more, but, you know, judging a book by its cover is ill-advised and all that.

While I'm all for writing in the vernacular (you've probably noticed that by now), or at least the approachable…sometimes that's not possible. And for the subject matter of most of these essays, that simply wasn't possible. So that might be an accurate critique on the part of the responders, but it should be phrased as an initial critique of the subject matter, rather than treating terminology, phrasing, and topic as separable items.

This brings us to the second point, which is indeed about subject matter. Todorov points out that the contributors focus extremely heavily on colonial texts of the 19th and 20th centuries, a criticism that Houston echoes when he discusses whitemale confessionals, and an accusation that (I think) lies at the base of Fromm's finger-pointing at Pratt (but I could be wrong about this; Fromm's contentions are difficult to discern).

To this criticism, I say: Word, y'all.

See, I have a confession to make. It's this: I never read Heart of Darkness. I didn't even watch Apocalypse Now, which I'm told is based on Conrad's novel. Back in senior year of high school, I was supposed to do both, but instead I stared out the window, read the copy of Brave New World that was on the bookshelf behind me, and wrote a story about aliens. I tried reading it, but got to the point where I was told that Marlow "resembled an idol," and was annoyed. Then I read Marlow's interminable speech and got to the point where he referred to Africa as previously having been a "blank space" and put the book down and never picked it back up. Moby Dick was after that, and I never read that one, either.

This might make more sense if I summarize the plot of nearly every book on our reading list in A.P. high school English: White guy is sad. Life ain't all it was cracked up to be. Disillusionment. But wait! Conflict with women/people of color/creature-as-stand-in-for-women-or-people-of-color/nature-as-stand-in-for-women-or-people-of-color. OMG. What to do? Oh! I know! Reestablish dominance! There we go. Whew. That was close for a moment there. Anyways, back to business as usual.

By that point in high school, I was seriously tired of reading whitemale confessionals (this is a fantastic term and one that I wish I'd had before). Hemingway. Conrad. Hawthorne. Steinbeck. Eliot. Twain. Fitzgerald. Melville. Thoreau.

The thing is…how many essays do we really, truly need that rehash the same content without providing us anything new? Conrad is mentioned in at least four, perhaps more, of the essays in this book. Conrad shows the colonialist mindset! Conrad shows the postcolonial mindset! Conrad fetishes black people! Conrad highlights the flaws of racialism! Conrad...blah blah blah. While I don't think that Fromm's insistence that Pratt in particular was "colonizing" was supported by sufficient evidence or argument, the fact remains that education, and particularly the literary and art canons, are used to further hegemonic dominance and as paintbrushes for the whitening of history. And so I have to ask: How much is that furthered when every time we talk about race and literature, we talk about the same authors, and oftentimes the same ideas about those authors?

Pratt says that these "interventions" are "attempts to change the culture one lives in." But in academic culture, reinterpreting Twain, Conrad, et al., is part of the standard, the norm, not a change. Some (most) years, Twain and Conrad are in favor. Sometimes, they're out. But they keep coming back, and panning them isn't academically dangerous or risky. In fact, it's about one of the safest things there is. So yeah, as Todorov noted, it's easy to say you're antiracist. I'm going to go ahead and differ on him on the solution, though.

How about we try doing what Gates initially suggested, and look at literature created by black folks? How about we try engaging in an actual critique of some of these books, where instead of constantly revolving around the question of how the Other is portrayed, we question how white maleness is constructed? How about instead of talking about white men, white women as property of white men, black men as threats to white men, and black women as existing only in terms of sexuality, we look at the entire context and see what else is there? Cause y'all, if that's all that's there, why the hell are we still talking about it? We already know. Done and done, checkmate, end game, finis.

Gates edited this volume in 1986. Since then, some people have done it different. But not a whole lot.