Bye Bye, DADT! + Niemeyer's 103rd

There's been so little to celebrate of late with the current administration or the now lame-duck Congress, and the capitulation on the tax cuts for millionaires-to-get-an-extension-of-unemployment insurance for the most vulnerable Americans, during the winter holidays no less, was a particularly bitter pill.  But today proved that the government will not end the year only on low notes.

Today brought one of the highest of the year thus far. Although Senate Republicans last week killed a bill to provide funding for 9/11 first-responders and the Defense Appropriation Bill, which had included a DADT repeal component, and this morning, with the support of five Democrats, quashed passage of the Dream Act for the children of undocumented immigrants, the Democrats with some GOP help today broke this sorry string by first voting 63-33 (a third of the US Senate was still voting no, but six Republicans, Collins, Brown, Murkowski, Olympia Snowe, Mark Kirk and George Voinovich, voted with nearly all the Democrats) to invoke cloture on a bill introduced by Joe Lieberman, then voted 65-31 this afternoon to repeal the 1993 Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) policy, which barred openly lesbian and gay servicepeople from serving in the US military. The House had already passed a DADT repeal earlier this week. President Obama, who had promised in campaign to repeal this odious policy, has fulfilled this promise, and is expected to sign the bill in the next few days.

For years before the 1993 policy, enacted under President Bill Clinton as a response to extreme reactions to his attempts to end the prior, harsher policy against LGBT servicepeople (Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was strongly against allowing openly gay LGBT to serve), brave active duty soldiers, veterans and gay activists had fought to allow LGBT people to serve openly in the military, and after the 1993 policy took effect, activists increased their efforts to repeal DADT, since like previous policies it consigned valuable members of the US military to dismissal, destroying their careers and livelihoods prematurely, based solely on their sexual orientations or others' perceptions thereof.

After this week's votes I, like all other LGBTQ people, and like all Americans, can say I have lived to see the day that this heinous, unequal policy and the one preceding it were repealed by my federal representatives, and signed into law by the President. Most impressive to me was that Congress's courage finally matched that of the American people, who in increasing numbers in recent years have come to believe this policy should be ended, and that of the military's leaders, officers and soldiers, who also agreed that it should be repealed.

Thank you to all those who fought tirelessly to end this policy, through protests, lawsuits, putting their careers and lives on the line. Thank you to all the LGBT people who protested, wrote their officials, wrote articles and blogs to push for the repeal, and to all the non-LGBT allies. Thank you to all those in the military leadership, from the Secretary of Defense to the Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs and present and past officers, who changed their views and did the right thing. Thank you to the rank-and-file, whose responses helped to shape the broader public discourse and the specific arguments used by those who still were unsure. Thank you to Congress, especially Speaker of the House Pelosi, and Senators and Majority Leader Harry Reid, Joe Lieberman, and Kristen Gillibrand, along with the handful of Republicans, for passing this bill. And, once President Obama signs it into law, we will be able to thank him for doing what he promised he would do, and what should have been done years ago.

***

On Wednesday, one of the great living architects, Oscar Niemeyer, an artist whose medium is sinuous concrete and steel, turned 103, and celebrated his birthday by inaugurating the newly opened site he had designed in 1997, the headquarters of the Fundação Oscar Niemeyer (Oscar Niemeyer Foundation), in Niterói, a city across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro.  The Foundation was created in 1988, but is only now debuting this spectacular, futuristic site, which is several kilometers to the north of another of Niemeyer's masterpieces, the space ship-atop-a-hill that houses Rio's/Niterói's Museum of Contemporary Art. Both the foundation's new headquarters and the Museum are part of a series of buildings and sites, known as the Caminho Oscar Niemeyer, in Niterói (formerly the provincial capital when Rio de Janeiro was the federal capital of Brazil), which also includes People's Theater of Niterói, Charitas Boat Station, and Plaza JK (Juscelino Kubitschek, Brazil's president from 1956-1960, and the visionary behind Brasília).  All are accessible after a short and picturesque ferry-ride from the city of Rio.

Though Niemeyer has designed notable sites and buildings all over the world, 600 in total, including some of the buildings at the United Nations (with Le Corbusier), he is perhaps most famous for his site plan and structures for Brazil's third and permanent capital, at Brasília, which he created at the behest of then-president Juscelino Kubitschek beginning in 1956.



Debuting in April 1960, Brasília unfolds on a vast plane in the hinterlands along a monumental axial plan devised in 1958 by Niemeyer. All of its iconic buildings are his designs, dating from the late 1950s forward: the Palácio da Alvorada, the Presidential residence; the Metropolitan Cathedral of Brasília; the National Congress Building; the Federal Supreme Court; the Palácio de Planalto Presidential offices; the Square of the Three Powers; the Itamaraty Palace, for foreign relations; and the Brasília airport.

For these and his many other works, Niemeyer was awarded the 1988 Pritzker Prize for Architecture. He continues to design buildings and sites; one of the newest is the Prince of Asturias's Cultural Center, in Avilés, Spain, which also debuted on Wednesday.  Parabéns e feliz aniversário, Oscar Niemeyer e que foram muitos anos mais!

Niemeyer, with his wife (to his right) fans, at the event.

 Niemeyer and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói

Fundação Niemeyer site from a distance (photo by Fábio Barros)

 Prince of Asturias Cultural Center, in Avilés, Spain

Some Talks & Music (Garcia, Cadava, McGurl, the Drawers)

I'd actually forgotten that I'd posted a blog entry to start May off, so I was about to apologize for just now acknowledging the month had arrived, but it's been slamming me and beyond classes and my syllabi I barely can keep up with what day it is, let alone month. I thought this week was going to be slower, but it's been just as rough, but June is, thankfully, just around the corner....

Amidst all the reading, I have attended a few events at the university, all of which have been edifying in different ways. Starting backwards, tonight I went to hear the musician Paulinho Garcia present a short (1 1/2 hour) tour of Brazil.  Truthfully, as all who know me will readily acknowledge, anything having to do with Brazil gladdens me immensely, and this didn't fail in that regard. The interactive performance felt like the best way to end a busy week. Garcia, a native of Belo Horizonte and 3-decade long resident in the US, was introduced by my great colleage Ana Thomé-Williams (above at right, with Garcia) also from Brazil, who had also helpfully created a slideshow featuring not only a map of Brazil but featuring song authors, titles, and lyrics, to which we could all sing along with Garcia. And sing people did as Garcia walked us through the samba (giving us information on its origins in Bahia and before that the Congo region, and word's Bantu etymology), then several different sertanejo (from the sertão, the harsh scrubland interior or backlands of the northeast) forms, and then the choro and chorinho, then a caipira (another type of folk song--and the source of the word, on through bossa nova.  Tracing it via songs and musicians, he sang (beautifully, touchingly) Ari Barroso's "Aquarela do Brasil," Luiz Gonzaga's "Asa Branca," Tom Jobim's "Andança," Pixinguinha's "Lamento," Zequinho de Abreu's "Tico-Tico no Fubá" (one of the earliest Brazilian songs to achieve fame in the US, and which made Carmen Miranda famous), Pixinguinha's "Carinhoso" (so achingly moving), Renato Teixeira's "Romaria" (which Ana graciously led us through in chorus), Tom Jobim's and Vinícius de Moraes's "Eu sei que vou te amar," Jobim's and Vinícius's "Chega de Saudade" (from Marcel Ophuls's Orfeu negro/Black Orpheus), João Bosco's and Aldir Blanc's fairly contemporary "Coisa Feita" (with its strong Afro-Brazilian storyline), and finally, to end the event, Ana and Garcia sang the always stirring Carnaval melody, "Tristeza," a snippet of which I captured on camera. Afterwards I chatted briefly with Garcia, who was explaining the ins and outs of Brazil to some undergraduates and other attendees, and I ran into a former student, from my earliest days at the university, who was doing really well. I also spoke with a young math student from Belo Horizonte, who suggested I tell a friend now conducting research in Niterói, just across the Guanabara Bay from Rio, about the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics that sits between Rio's Botanical Garden and its Tijuca Forest. How on earth could you get any work done in such a remarkable setting? I'd like to find out.

Exactly before the Brazilian musical event, which constituted what felt almost like the second half of a Cartesian exercise, I attended a lecture by Eduardo Cadava (in the yellow shirt, with Sam Weber (at left) who teaches English and many other subjects at Princeton. Professor Cadava gave a rich, truly absorbing talk entitled "Marx Before Literature," in which he sought to explore, among many questions, why Marx so often turn not just to literary language, but to literature. This tour, intellectually demanding in the best way, ranged over any number of theorists (Benjamin, Blanchot, etc.) and literary figures (Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Roque Dalton, among others), in order to rethink productively Marx's relationship to literature and literature's relationship to Marx. Or, to put it another way, that there could be no Marx before literature, and we could not understand literature before Marx. Cadava's reading of "before" involved, if I may venture to characterize it so, an almost phenomenological relationship (before in temporal, spatial, affective, etc. terms), an "encounter," as he put it at the end of the talk. Among the many notes I took, some stand out, and all, if rightly transcribed, should be ascribed to Cadava: that at moments of revolution, Marx said, "a person becomes lyrical"; that when he first went to college, as he confessed to his father, he was drawn to "lyric poetry"; that his return to poetry occurs in his letter withdrawing from it, which he stages in a literary fashion; Marx's memorials to literature constitute the "entirety of his corpus"; his work is a kind of and form of "mourning for literature"; that in their critique of the young Hegelians, Marx and Engels wrote the offenders "into" their own Quixote, as it were; that Sub-Commandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatistas, noted to Gabriel García Márquez that Don Quixotewas one of the best books of political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth; that literature "names the event of absolute freedom"; and that resources from revolution "come not from the present but from the future." Of course there was so much more, with a propulsive, compelling argumentative throughline that left me thinking as I raced over to the other event; I shall have to return to my notes, and to Cadava's work, and to Marx and, of course, though I never leave it, literature itself.

Last night, I went to see UCLA professor Mark McGurl (at right, at the lectern) whose recent study historicizing MFA programs and their effects on American literature, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard University Press, 2009), I'd noted on this blog before. I can only say that his talk readied my brain for Cadava's. Titled "On the Future of Literary Institutions," it represented excerpts from a larger current work dealing with posthumanism, literature and culture, among other themes, and leapt off from Wai-Chee Dimock's critical book Through Other Continents, which seeks to rethink scholarly understanding of work via another scale than the current historicist models, or historically materialist ones, which is to say, according to what Dimock calls "deep time," or scientific and other larger, longer paradigms. As with Cadava's talk I don't want to wrongly summarize McGurl's, but it was provocative in the best way, and after roving through the issue of "big historicism" and citing Quentin Meillassoux's concept of "ancestrality," which I'd never heard before, McGurl focused specifically on the problems of vastness, the horror of getting lost in time, not through privation but through "troubling plenitude," and ways in which the horror genre in particular had interrogated and dramatized these fears. He then spoke about the reciprocal relationship between the fictions of H. P. Lovecraft, with their desire, as in the "Call of Cthulhu" (which I taught last spring), to address the issue of scalar instability and all that that indexed (the social, political, cultural, racial-ethnic, gendered, sexual, etc.), and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and his work on infinity, Everything and More. McGurl argued that while Lovecraft was "attacking institutions from the outside," Wallace, as the product of the sorts of institutions to which Lovecraft could not gain entry, "was attacking them from within," while also conservationally (as opposed, say, to conservatively), defending them against neoliberalism, in part by allowing them a scaled down, containable temporality and scope, and by dramatizing their necessity in his plots. He went on to note how last summer, after Wallace's suicide, readers created a community, Infinite Summer, around reading Wallace's book, creating the sort of "connectedness" that, McGurl suggested earlier, these vaster paradigms and scales, also created, beyond the scope of families, more obvious affiliations, and so forth. This led me to ask a question about Andy Warhol's A and Kenneth Goldsmith's durational texts, such as The Weather, particularly in terms of the way that both celebrate--to put it simply--plenitude, vastness, a lack of authorial control and of the very institutions, down to genre itself, that would contain them, and yet how, interestingly enough to me, both have come to constitute "institutions," one a kind of genius of proliferating art forms and concepts, the other the impresario of "conceptual writing" itself. I'm not sure I fully grasped McGurl's answer, though he did relate both works (and their authors) to strategies of the avant-garde, but I remain curious about how, especially in the case of Goldsmith, one might think about this issue of ancestrality, particularly if one were to carry the concept of his text through to its logical end, which is to say, to record, over an (infinite) time span, of extended duration, weather reports from a particular signal. Would this not bear out, in terms of people connecting through the text itself, its relations to and in discourse, an example of ancestrality in practice?  I made a note to return to McGurl's great study when I have a break of extended sort, but also to dip into Wallace again and, if I can bear him in anything but tiny doses, the often repellant Lovecraft.

And finally, two nights ago, I went to a public conversation sponsored by the university's Center for Writing Arts, entitled "Partnership of the Picture and the Word," that featured four quite highly regarded comics artists/graphic novelists: Chris Ware, Ivan Brunetti, Jeffrey Brown, and Anders Nilsen (r-l above, Ray Pride at far left) I was familiar with the work of all but Nilsen, and had even suggested Ware as a possible visitor a few years back. Film editor and writer Ray Pride conducted the conversation, inving all four artists to spell the audience about their work, working methods, ideas about art and their own artistic practices, and more. I've periodically read Brown's work (I've used a snippet of it for a class I've taught) and regular follow Ware, but I think this was the first time I've seen either live, or several graphic artists conversing with each other, for that matter. One of the elements of their conversation I found most enlightening was when they spoke about writing in pictures, or, as Ware put it, "making pictures" versus, as sometimes is assumed, a process parallel with cinema, which he characterized as "taking pictures." Each talked about his influences, how they developed stories, their publishing experiences, and the changing appreciation for graphic art and novels today. I was glad to see so many people turn out, and am now interested in how a conversation between someone working primarily in a graphic format, someone still primarily using text (the majority of fiction and creative nonfiction writers, playwrights, and poets), and someone bridging the two, might turn out. I'd also love to see what they'd say about the new digital formats in relation to their work; with Chris Ware in particular, what might a page on an iPad look like, and could it be even more dynamic--in 3 dimensions as opposed to 2, than it already is?