organic food, Parker Posey, and commodity fetishism

Yesterday was the midterm for the film appreciation class, and as I lurked and prowled up and down the aisles of the giant lecture hall I made a startling discovery – one of the students looked like Parker Posey:

Yes, please.

One of the things about being a TA in a large class is that you barely have an opportunity to get to know your own students, much less those in other sections. In this case, however, the lack of contact is a good thing because there are only two possible outcomes of having such a student in my section:

1) The student's personality and affect would be like that of Parker Posey, in which case I would be overcome by uncontrollable feelings of lust and fascination.

2) The student's personality and affect would be unlike that of Parker Posey, in which case I would be terribly disappointed.

Disappointment and lust are beside the point.

The point is that after class I hung out with the professor who teaches it. Over the couple of years we've known each other, a friendship has grown between us that exceeds the realm of academia. So, we went back to his office and somehow the conversation turned to organic foods.

Apparently, he and his wife are members of the same farm co-op as my yin and I, and they had gone the previous weekend to the annual open house, which allows members to see how the farm operates, walk around the fields, and pick itty-bitty tomatoes. It isn't a wholly organic farm, and this was the point my friend and I found most interesting: from where does the mystical allure of organic food derive?

This dead German had some thoughts on this.

The whole "organic" food trend has bothered me for years, primarily because it seems to be more of a marketing ploy than anything else. During my conversation Monday night, however, I came to a clearer understanding. Marx had this notion of the commodity fetish, which is essentially the objectification of a relationship or process so that it can be sold on the market.

As far as I can see, the level of alienation (from our labor, from our selves, from our fellows) in our society has reached a point whereby we feel completely separated from the very food that gives us our sustenance and energy. The modern practice of industrial organic farming hinges upon this phenomenon.

As a society, we feel this disconnection from the plants that provide us with nourishment, but this is not a natural state of being for any organism. As a result, there is a demand to connect with the planet, and the market responds to this by a veritable cavalcade of products labeled "organic" and "natural." The sad irony, of course, is that by consuming these goods, we actually increase the distance between us and Mother Nature.

For example, an organic strawberry from California gets trucked across the country to Florida. Once it gets here, someone buys it, truly believing that he or she is acting in a responsible manner. But, inside this "organic" food there also lies all the karma it incurred in making that trip from one coast to the other. It takes tremendous resources to haul food back and forth, and yet our society tells us that we have the "right" to have whatever food we like, whenever we like it.

I fall victim to this tendency myself: Although I have yet to see a single blueberry bush in Florida, somehow they keep ending up in my yogurt.

North Carolina blueberry patch

The whole system is set up to hide these facts, and the imperative of Profit leaves farmers and consumers – even those with the most noble intentions – with little choice but to embrace the system.

To quote another student of Marx: What is to be done?

my best guess

As I Lay Dying (book rant)

My class has officially left Hemingway for the remainder of the semester, which means we will be spending the next nine weeks or so with William Faulkner. My last encounter was over a decade ago in Chapel Hill. I managed to make it through two novels in two semesters, hated every minute of the reading, and loved the fact that I had done so.

How I felt about a dead Mississippian in the late Nineties is beside the point.

The point is that I just finished reading this book, which has one of the most unbelievable opening scenes I have ever come across:

A woman is dying. Outside the window, her son saws away at the boards that will become her casket and holds each of them up for her approval. Mules die. A dozen narrators, one father, and a river washes the coffin away.

Streams of consciousness, broken legs and aborted abortions. Sexual assault, barns burned, the town of Jefferson. I was born in the town of Jefferson. It was snowing; Days of Our Lives was on:

I feel a strange kinship with the dead man, perhaps I've been too long in South Florida. I miss the twang, I miss the smell of autumn – no one there refers to it as 'autumnal' – how does one pronounce the word "Appalachian"?

It depends on where you're from. Inside and outside designate, simultaneously, the beginning and the end of the world. He's difficult to read, this dead man from Mississippi who wrote about a dead woman in Mississippi.

Six pills packed with talcum powder, one cellar, a seven year-old waits outside. A man impersonating a pharmacist commits rape atop a pile of sweet potatoes. I remember the words of my professor on the first day of class:

"Perversion... Depravity... Disturbing..."

triangulating two years ago

Two years ago read like this:

do
not
fall apart
do not break
do not listen to
too much Exile on
Main Street do not feed
emotions do not forget to
juggle do not watch too many
documentaries on the origins of
the American space program do not
kiss do not eat less than 60% raw foods
do not not meditate do not conflate counter
cultural social formations with the Romantic lurking

inside do not forget to submit the appropriate papers to
the proper authorities before 18 February 2009 do not
masturbate do not do not do not take yourself too
seriously do not stay up too late do not have sex
do not get lost in the stories do not rationalize
do not know just enough to be dangerous
do not get too Oedipal do not commit
additional metaphorical incest
do not recycle doppelganger
themes from two
summers
ago

And it's helpful for me to remind myself from time to time... If we don't remember the people we were, how can we really know the people we've become?

for(e!) country clubs

Note: The purpose of the following is in no way to cast dispersions or call into question the moral character of those who live in country clubs. Instead, it is meant to draw attention to the underlying conditions and social realities necessary for such clubs to exist, as well as some of their implications.

1

I have some friends who are spending a few months in town, and during this time they've rented a condo overlooking the golf course at a local country club. More than once, they've described their agitation regarding the constant mowing, as well as the use of untold toxic chemicals on the grass.

It seems an odd contradiction: the ostensible beauty and ease of club life, the manicured green lawns, and the well-maintained grounds are dependent upon the poison in the workers' sprayers and the ceaseless emission of fumes from the small engines of lawn mowers, weed eaters, and hedge trimmers.

2

This brings me to my second observation: the strange social dynamic between the people who live at the clubs and the legion of workers necessary to keep them running. This ranges from the hourly workers mentioned above to less obvious examples like personal trainers and nutritionists. Employees – even independent contractors – are expected to call the members by "Mr. _____" and "Mrs. _______" rather than addressing them by their first names. Even if a member asks to be called by his or her first name, an employee should still address the member by last name; otherwise another member might hear and run the risk of being offended.

This type of dehumanization is not the intent of the people who live there, however. In fact, in my (limited) experience, they seem exceedingly warm and friendly. Rather, it appears inherent in the country club schema because it is modeled after a certain model of economic relations. One group of individuals make and maintain an excess of money, while another caste of individuals provide the labor necessary for the first group to "maintain their lifestyle." I've hear this euphemism ringing in my ears a lot recently, but stripped down to essential nature it means simple one things: I want to accumulate more capital. (See Marx and surplus labor value for details.)

3

Through a seemingly random series of coincidences, I ended up going to one of these clubs earlier in the week. Besides myself, their was a second individual tagging along, and as we walked up the steps towards the clubhouse she commented on what a positive thing these places were because they provided people with "community." I had two reactions to this.

On the one hand, this idea is completely accurate, and there is no doubt that the social activities and parties and whatever else goes on inside of country clubs provides their members with a feeling of belonging. On the other hand, though, these clubs depend upon the cannibalization of more organic communities, which were called "neighborhoods" in the 20th century. It's one of those eerie demonstrations of the internal contradictions of capitalism: the pursuit and stockpiling of wealth causes people to value it over actual relationships; but, once gone, the system then has to produce and manufacture "community" as another commodity to be bought and sold on the market place.

4

Finally, there is the phenomenon of the guard gate. The word community (at least for me) connotes ideas like inclusion, acceptance and fellowship; and I suppose this, more than anything else, it what made the comment regarding community seem so strange to me. One must buy his or her way into a country club, and the guard gate is the material embodiment of this principle of exclusion. This attitude seems incompatible with the idea of a truly local community with all its variety of culture, religion, ethnicity, and money.

Furthermore, the signifying capacity of the guard house goes much further in keeping out "undesirables" than the pistols on the guards hips could ever do. We've come to take these tiny air conditioned shacks for granted, but if we pause for a moment, the idea of having armed guards posted outside our homes speaks to just how much community we've lost. The notion that we could get it back through sidearms and controlled displays of potential violence seems patently absurd to me:

Did I miss the cup?

For Whom (doesn't) the Bell Toll?

Last night we finished talking about this book, which may have very well supplanted The Sun Also Rises as my favorite work in the Hemingway oeuvre:

It's his largest work, and considered the fact this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Papa's death, it's probably safe to say he will never write anything longer. (Probably.)

But length is beside the point.

(Probably.)

So to speak.

The point is that this novel, like so many of his others, is full of phalluses, would-be phalluses and has-been phalluses. I do not think it would be an overstatement to say Ernest's love of the phallus was earnest. Why else all the double entendre and saber rattling? From the "mounted" policeman hoisting his "baton" at the end of The Sun Also Rises to the virile hero of To Have and Have Not, whose cocksmanship is not the least bit diminished by his loss of an arm.

In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan is the stud in question, making love to rape trauma survivors by moonlight and blowing up bridges in the daytime. I do not know of another author who has so thoroughly and eloquently explored the utter incompatibility of love and warfare, and to me this is his lasting contribution to the field of literature. Unfortunately, my time is next to nonexistent this morning (and tomorrow morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after...) so I will have to limit my diatribe to two main points.

First, the first two-thirds of the novel has this simply unbelievable pacing. The reader, like Robert, is held in this stasis. The climax of the bridge is held nearby, but out of sight, and its presence permeates every sentence. Its promise of death and climax is both invisible and undeniable, which creates the sublime tension within, between, and amongst Robert and his peasant allies.

The reader, like Robert, wants to stay there, but the pull of the narrative (or for Robert, the call of duty) draws us unrelentingly forward. We know that the bridge means death, a metaphorical crossing over to the other side, but cannot help moving towards it any more than one can fight gravity. A good Lacanian might say it is the approach of the Real; a poor Lacanian (like myself) might call it the everpresence of the Divine – an incarnation of Kali in the form of girders, concrete and steel.

The second noticeable thing is how the novel constructs and conceptualizes courage. The innumerable references to cojones signal this as a specifically masculine trait, but theorizing how this occurs is actually one of the more nuanced aspects of the book. Pilar, for instance, is clearly courageous, but it is too facile to simply dismiss her as being a masculinized heroine. She retains her sexual agency throughout the novel, and in spite of her problematic relationship with her husband Pablo, it's difficult not to read her as one of the most courageous characters. Furthermore, the cave (where much of the narrative takes place) is clearly her domain. A rather obvious metaphor for the womb, Pilar maintains control over this space, so much so that Robert is forced to sleep outside in the snow.

As for Robert's foil, Pablo himself is ultimately shown to be courageous, returning to the safety of Pilar's cave/womb in the beginning of the novel's denouement. "I suppose if a man has something once, always something of it remains," she says. This observation is one of the novel's most important because it establishes that courage, in some way, is an essential characteristic. Even if lost, it will ultimately return, and this understanding is crucial to the final pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Without this information, it would be possible to conceive of Robert giving in to his suicidal ideation, but Robert maintains his resolve and faces his approaching death with courage:

"Robert Jordan lay behind the tree, holding onto himself very carefully and delicately to keep his hands steady. He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could feel his heart beating against the pine needles of the forest."

Unlike doubting Arjuna, Robert has no Krishna to guide him.

Anyway, this is merely a thimbleful of what the novel means to me, and I can only imagine that subsequent readings (this was my first) will yield further insights. For the time being, though, it seems as if the daunting task of choosing a topic for my final seminar has been made... time will tell.

Crazy Heart (film rant)

So, approximately fourteen months after it was fashionable to do so, I finally got around to seeing Crazy Heart. It was immensely watchable and Jeff Bridges, as usual, was phenomenal. But two days later there's still something about the film that keeps hounding me.

a good man named Bad (?)

In film studies there's this notion of the difference between plot and story. Plot includes all the images and sounds that the spectator actually encounters over the course of a narrative, whereas story refers to all the things not seen, not heard, that are necessary for constructing and maintaining coherent meaning(s).

I've decided that the gap between the plot and story in Crazy Heart is what I find so troublesome. Specifically, the relationship between Bridge's character and his love interest Maggie Gyllenhaal.

true love, not Grit

Apparently thirty-something, educated, professional, single mothers really go for sixty year-old, overweight, over-the-hill, alcoholic has-beens.

Or is he a never-was?

Either way, it's beside the point.

The point is that their (apparent) affection was both predictable and totally unbelievable. The scenes between them were sweet, took the obligatory turn for the worse, and ended in the compromised happy ending so prevalent in the bio-pic genre. My main difficulty wasn't the narrative's lack of originality, though, but rather the veracity of the romance.

One simple question: what did Bad offer Jeanie?

She seems too wise and experienced to be taken in by him, and there is nothing in her character's portrayal to lead one to believe that she is after his waning fame or non-existent wealth. Furthermore, the melodrama depends on a surplus of "authentic" emotion to fulfill its objectives, which makes me hesitant to read Jeanie as not really loving Bad, or being cynical about their relationship, or conceiving of him as a potential father figure. For the film to work at all, one must assume their feelings for one another were genuine.

But the plot is unable to sustain this story, and the scenes fail to establish what qualities or experiences fostered this deep affection between them. Obviously he is attracted to her youth, but what did she get out of it?

Security?

No.

Reliability?

No.

Vitality?

No.

What Jeanie got, besides the trauma of losing her son, was sex with drunkard as old as her father. Bad, on the other hand, got a new lease on life, a new career, and some sense of redemption for the price of a single royalty check delivered in the final reel.

This exchange of money was far and away the most problematic aspect of the film, implying that all the damage caused by Bad could be transubstantiated in the closing minutes, absolving him of his past karma and freeing up to move into the future. It's a strange moment where the ideology of the Dollar, sexual politics, and the American faith in new beginnings converge against the backdrop of the Western horizon...

And suffocate in the diesel fumes of the tour bus.

What a difference a bay makes...

Yesterday my yin and I went sailing with her second cousin, his wife, and my yin-in-law. It was my first, and last, free Saturday for quite some time, and the next two weeks promise to be a blur of wedding preparations, thesis revisions, garlic-infused music festivals, presentations on Hemingway, lectures on La jetée, unintentional rhymes and potential unavoidable insomnias.

But, for now, this is beside the point.

The point is that yesterday was my second time ever on a sailboat, and I couldn't help but think about the similarities and differences between them. If one were to balance the former against the latter, it would look something like this:

similarities to the left, differences to the right

In fact, other than the salt water, the jib line and mast, almost nothing was the same. I tried writing about it this morning:

[Nancy, San Francisco, summer 2005. One on, one off, an airport security checkpoint. She's unable to find her license, but she looks for it at the bottom of the brown plastic bottle once filled with small white pills. Apparently there's no cure for aerophobia.

I remember how embarrassed I felt. I remember how I wanted to go out our last night but she was too sick to leave the house. I remember worrying and wondering and knowing how she must appear to my family – how I refused to see what was so obvious to everyone else.

That day on the bay, which might have been so beautiful, was awkward and strange – just like every day with her. It's still stupefying that I could have ever mistaken such sadness and tragedy for love, that I could have ever called that sham of a marriage the rest of my life. To have had that experience and survived it is truly a gift because it has allowed me to know how dark, flawed and imperfect life and love and relationships can be...

But yesterday, now, what a difference a bay makes...]

Biscayne Bay, 2011

San Francisco Bay, 2005

regatta on the horizon, 2011

regatta off Alcatraz Island, 2005

the captain, 2011

the captain, 2005

my yin an I with our new singing bowl, 2011

i

m
age
miss
in
g
Nancy and I, 2005

4 questions, 1 answer

How does one measure the distance between then and now? How does one account for the things not seen? How does one understand the connection between that bay and person in 2005 to the bay and person in 2011? Does the truth lie in the missing images or the images missing?

Little more than pixels and memory:

the precision of one matched
by the infidelity of the other.

on common ancestors, misnomers and A Farewell to Arms

Last night, before class, I took a long hard look at the paper towel dispenser. There was nothing particularly special about it – no sensor, no hand waving, just your typical self-feeding dark brown monstrosity. On the side, however, was a red wheel with a label above it that read:

"Emergency Feed"

I thought to myself: Is this really the appropriate use of the word "emergency"? Can there ever really be a paper towel emergency? And if so, would being unable to dry your hands qualify? Wouldn't "auxiliary" or "supplemental" or "additional" be a more appropriate description?

But this is beside the point.

The point is that yesterday was marked by this linguistic tenor, ranging from a very queer reading of Rope for my afternoon film class:

To last night's discussion of A Farewell To Arms and all the types of reading that permeate the novel: reading bridges, reading horses, reading letters, reading situations.

To the documentary my brother recommended about India, which cleared up this aching curiosity I've had about Sanskrit for the past couple of years:

The similarities between Sanskrit and Latin, Sanskrit and Greek, Sanskrit and German, Sanskrit and English, Sanskrit and [insert your language here], have been well-known and well-documented since at least the 18th century. In my metaphysical pursuits, I've seen numerous teachers deploy this linguistic kinship to great effect, using it to establish an underlying similarity between old and new, familiar and exotic, mundane and transcendent.

Unfortunately, and in spite of its emotional resonance, I've always found this line of persuasion tremendously unsatisfying because it seemed to rely implicitly on a logic of biblical linearity:

Language A begat Language B begat Language C...

This made it difficult to understand how Sanskrit ever got out of the Indian subcontinent. To my knowledge, the people of India had little presence in Europe before the common era, so how could they have any substantial impact on Latin or Germanic languages? Huge linguistic shifts often seem to go hand in hand with war, conquest and conversion, but unlike those of Christianity or Islam, the cultures of India have been largely unmotivated by evangelical concerns. How did it get there?

The documentary had a fascinating answer.

Apparently, Sanskrit didn't come from India – it was brought there by Aryan invaders from Turkmenistan. The path to this knowledge (like all worthwhile paths to knowledge) takes numerous twists and turns, but the short story is this: The Rig Veda (the oldest of the Vedas) has an entire mandala dedicated to a divine concoction known as soma, which the gods were known to consume in "copious" quantities.

The plant needed to make soma, however, doesn't grow in India, and the search for its origin led back to an abandoned Zoroastrian temple, where some mad Russian archaeologist has found urns that contain residue from the presumed soma plant mixed with poppy, cannabis and ephedra – drink of the gods indeed!

When I heard this, it made sense. It wasn't as if Sanskrit begat this begat that, but rather that the Sanskrit used by the Aryans was a common ancestor of both India's classical Sanskrit and Rome's Latin. From this central location, it then spread westward towards Europe and eastward towards India. It's an evolutionary rather than biblical understanding of the genealogy of language, and it does a lot to explain why we have these similar words popping up all over the place.

Now, if I could just get a handle on why some languages use phonetics and others use characters...

on temporal anorexia

The cold spoon of indecision
taps three times

(tap

tap

tap)

Hemingway in my lap
clocks knocking at the door:

Have I been here before?

Sri Krishna said:

The soul never takes birth
and never dies at any time
nor does it come into being
again when the body is created.

But am I nothing more than a soul?

Imagine Bhagavan, hammock-bound,
swinging from the tree of Skakyamuni
magic eight ball in his hand:

Perhaps the soul is

jealous of beauty
jealous of creation
jealous of dissolution

Nothing more than circles

stacked

one

the Other.