The Airing of Grievances: A Retrospective

I have thus laid my disappointments in The Laramie Project bare to the world and my personal Festivus has now ended; now, we need to take one step further than the regular Festivus airing.  It's time for me to reflect upon these grievances to determine which disappointments are legitimate and which are just my plaintive whining about how Tectonic did not write the play I would have wanted them to write.

I wanted to get my grievances out in the open with this series, sure, but I also wanted them to turn into something more productive (and less pathetic) than using the Internet to whine like a tragically middle class emo kid with a YouTube channel.  If I am to accomplish that, then I need to step back and look at these criticisms with a little more distance and a lot more insight.  I need to be radically reflexive, which means that I have to rigorously examine my own motives and interior monologue just as rigorously as anybody else's-- and I have to be consciously aware of that process.   If the Scripture calls us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, then our scholarship should call us to work out our conclusions with fear and loathing.  That means it's once more time to dig deep and think hard about fear, loathing, and The Laramie Project.   

Why?  If there is anything I've learned so far from this experience, it's this:  Understand where your own perspective and prejudices come from, and act in awareness of that knowledge.  Every time.  The most inadequate (and inaccurate) scholarship sometimes comes from a failure to understand one's own personal tilt or experiences informing their scholarship in ways they don't intend.  Some of the best scholarship comes from those who do.  And, since I'm in the precarious position of being personally and emotionally tied to this event and the play it produced, I need to be extra aware of how that changes my perspective.  Know thyself, Jackrabbit, and thou shalt improve thy scholarship.  I think the world would be a better place if everybody followed that advice, and since I kind of turned Tectonic over my knee for it, I had better do it with myself, too.

So, which of these ways in which I feel like Tectonic has disappointed me are perhaps legit, and which are merely a difference of opinion or personal taste?  That's a very important question to ask, so let's see how my summation of the Grievances holds up after the jump!  

Specters of Laramie in Tucson, Arizona

I had been back on the UW campus for less than twenty minutes when I found out about the Tucson shooting last week.  I was checking the news in the Union building when the alert popped up on my laptop screen.  The next morning, my brother Coyote and I spent most of the morning before I headed to campus and he headed to work watching the press conference.  I only hope that the Tucson community can continue to stand together and support each other as they bury their dead, and that they remain unified in the face of the media speculations about 'toxic rhetoric' and political cheap shots aimed at the other side.

During that same time, I spent a lot of time on the microfilm scanners in Coe Library reading civic commentaries of a different sort, and I started to see discursive echoes of the current Tucson troubles in the Boomerang  and Branding Iron archives.  As journalists and ordinary citizens grappled with the trauma of Matt's beating, I saw them asking similar questions about politics and rhetoric in 1998: to what extent is the national discourse to blame?  How much is the local community to blame?  To what extent should politics and this tragedy coincide in national discussion?  Should political parties be held accountable for their words and policies that might encourage such behavior?   Is the community to blame for the actions of the perpetrator(s), and how should we remember the victim(s)? 

And, now I see that the people of Tucson, Arizona are grappling with similar questions about their identity as a community in the old West.  CNN recently posted an article titled "Tucson Battles Wild West Image After Shooting," looking at everything from the desert landscape and tourist kitsch to the political climate in this Arizona town.  The tone of the article sounds extremely familiar to me:

 ...Tucson sees itself as an oasis of progressivism and diversity in a state that's gotten a national reputation for bigotry and anti-immigrant hate speech. It's the kind of place that hosts mariachi festivals, celebrates Cesar Chavez and asks cars to pull into parking spaces backward, for the safety of bicyclists.  

But after the Democratic congresswoman was shot and six were killed Saturday during a political meet and greet at a supermarket on the northwest side of town, this place of golf courses, taquerias and cactuses started to look at itself anew -- examining not only the causes of the shooting but the borders residents put between each other.  (par. 5-6, emphasis mine)

This same formulation shows up everywhere in the 1998 archives.  This same article on Tuscon even shows the town struggling to understand the shooter's place in their community as well, in almost the same words as Laramie once struggled to place McKinney and Henderson:

[Others] see the accused shooter, Jared Loughner, as mentally unstable. The event, they say, was an aberration -- not a reflection on this unique town, where the hot, dry air attracts arthritis patients seeking relief.

"It's the nicest place on Earth, as far as I'm concerned," said Mark Gardner, a New Yorker who spends the winter in Tucson because of the warm weather. 

Gardner is like many who end up in this city of retirees, immigrants and transplants -- where chain stores are dressed up like pueblos and corduroy-textured cactuses line the roads, their stumpy hands outstretched like hitchhikers. He came to Tucson with romantic visions of the American Southwest.

What he found wasn't far off.  (par. 11-14, emphasis mine). 

There is also speculation about whether or not the society at large should bear some of the guilt for the Tucson rampage, a question which was asked, often unfairly, of Laramie as well.  At the same time, the question itself is legitimate: is there such a thing as social or societal guilt for a member who acts alone?  From a religious perspective, that question has an interesting answer, and one that Stephen Prothero explores in regard to the Tucson killer this week on CNN's Belief blog.  He confesses, "I can't help thinking we have at least a spattering of blood on our hands."  Despite the controversial nature of that comment, I find part of myself wanting to agree with him. Not just about Matt, but about Arizona, too.  Maybe we're all somehow a little more fallen because of what happened, less innocent.  Maybe our social connection to the killer and victims made us all somehow present in Tucson, just as I was once in Laramie, and perhaps that comes with some kind of social or metaphysical guilt attached.  I don't really know. 

So, once again the national discourse is repeating itself, but it has settled upon a new political lightning rod from all the dry, electric static surrounding the nation's new hot-button topic: immigration.  Could the Tucson shooting find itself becoming the next symbol of social turmoil in the national discourse?

I don't really know how to answer that yet, as this story is still just forming, but these events certainly show the same potential for that to happen.  In Laramie, that discourse created an extremely ambivalent response as some people cringed back from the old West motif and claims of intolerance while others took it to heart, indicting the culture.  Some then used that self-scrutiny to make Laramie, and the nation, a better place, and others rejected the notion altogether.

Maybe we know better now how to take these questions, these stories, and use them to create unity and social growth.  Or, maybe nothing's changed.  I don't really know how to make anything positive out of this observation, other than to note how social discourse and national memory seems to be following the same pattern.  What will be the outcome for national discourse, and what will happen to the Tucson community? 

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PHOTO CREDIT: Images of the spontaneous memorial at Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' office and at Oracle Road, Tucson, Arizona. Taken by Search Net Media, available via Flickr.

The Airing of Grievances, Charge 1

As it turns out, my brother Coyote, who still lives in Laramie, also has an angsty relationship with The Laramie Project. I had already sort of known this, of course; both he and my sister were living in Laramie back in 1998, too, and back in my "I hate this freaking play" phase in the Deep South, he and I had a few conversations about that.

But until this summer, I thought that his complaints just stemmed from his own personal knowledge of the incident.  Coyote, you see, knew both of the killers and Matt Shepard through various channels even though he didn't have any kind of deep relationship with any of them.  He was much better friends with "Sascha" and several other members of the LGBTA on campus.  And, since our conversations had mostly revolved around that social set, I had always thought that his main gripe against the play was just the "accuracy" issue. 
 
As it turns out, though, I was wrong; his dislike was more complicated than I had given him credit for.  Over dinner one night at a fancy bar and grill (where I was buying him his obligatory steak dinner), Coyote told me that he had watched the HBO version of the play and had some extremely pointed comments about its message.  He said he didn't like what the HBO version had to say about what Laramie was like as a community, and he didn't think that the message had any balance.  He was also surprised that I didn't completely disagree with him.  "On the whole, though, don't you think this play has done some good nationwide?" I asked him.   "I mean, people are actually willing to talk about issues like this now..." 

"Well, sure, yeah," Coyote said.  "I can totally see where this play has done a lot of good.  But, come on, Jackrabbit-- why did we have to be the ones to pay for it?" 

"So, you mean you feel like telling Laramie's story comes at a cost?"  I asked him.  

"Hell yeah," He answered through a mouthful of steak.  "This sort of thing happens all over the country, but I don't see any of them having to relive this story every time somebody puts on a play."  He waved his fork at me for emphasis.  "We can't escape it.  We can't even answer back to it.  How fair is that?"   

I couldn't keep my jaw off of the floor when he said that.  I had sort of been wondering the same thing for months: does the simple fact of telling Matt's story in the context of this community cause social damage?  Like Coyote, I know the kind of social good this play has engendered on the macro scale; but I also wonder, like him, what kind of unintended cost the microcosm of Laramie has had to absorb as a result.

And so, I hereby must proceed to the airing of my first grievance in this Festivus season:  

1.Contributing to the Delinquency of Narrative

Or, I could call it "Transporting an Underage Story Across State Lines," I suppose.  The point is this: in disseminating this story, Tectonic has left many in Laramie feeling like they have no control over their own identities, leaving some people to feel vulnerable or exposed, a point I've discussed before.  That may not necessarily be a bad thing, but let's work out the details to see where it leads...

A short primer of Academic code

So, all this talk about code switching has got me thinking...  what are the verbal and non-verbal codes of the humanities?

I mean, I know pretty clearly what things make a person's speech "western" or "conservative" or "evangelical" (which has a vocabulary entirely its own).   But, what about the world I spend most of my time in anymore-- the humanities?  What codes do we use here?   So, I've just been listening to people talk for the last couple days to see what short-hand people in my environment use in everyday speech.  What I found is pretty interesting, and highly amusing in a weird sort of way.

Okay, so here are some words I've heard used to code disapproval or rejection:

Fox News / Glenn Beck/Bill O'Reilley
black-and-white thinking; binary oppositions
NASCAR
bumper sticker logic/sloganeering
speaking in soundbites
speaking in code  (ironic...)
framing/ frames/ framed discourse
essentializing
Wal-Mart
fanatical
brain-stem
Bubba
paternalistic
Imperialist/Capitalist
Othering
objectify/objectification
marginalizing
monological
tendentious
literalist/fundamentalist
shrill

Here are words we use to code approval or congratulate ourselves:

provocative
polyvalent
synthesizing
subtle thinker/subtle thinking
hermeneutic
semiotic
measured/thoughtful
critical
meaty/deep
performative
intellectual
humanistic
measured
postmodern/posthuman/post-Christian
self-referential
has gravity/gravitas

Words we use to sound smart and identify with the academic club:

dialectic
abject
agency/being an agent
queering/queer (especially as a verb)
deconstruct
slippage
Foucaultian
gender (as a verb)
ecriture
linguistic turn
hybridity/ hybrid
interstitial
dialogic
discourse/discursive
historicize
signifier/signified/signifying
Bakhtinian (quoting Bakhtin is like academic gold.  The same goes for Slavoj Zizek.)
meta-anything
base/structure/superstructure
fetish/fetishize
Oedipal
sublime 
Lacanian
post-colonial
Other/Othering
paternalism
subaltern
subjectivity
langue/parole

Okay, so our words-- those we use of others, and those we use to describe ourselves-- can tell us a lot of what we think about ourselves.  The funny thing is that a lot of things in the first list is classist, and it's demeaning specifically to intelligence or social class.  Everything in the last two lists are, for the most part, come from a very useful and interesting critical language that has clear benefit in the intellectual arena.  But that's not how we use them in coffee-shop conversation.  They're our codes of belonging, our secret handshake.  Nothing makes you part of the smart set like puffing on about "subaltern identites" or "the sublime," especially if you can work a little Burke or Habermas or Zizek into that conversation, too. Besides, how much fun is it to say "Slavoj Zizek?"  Tons. 

In a sense, I have no problem with the presence of this "club" per se.  That's the way society organizes itself, to be honest.  People with a common association share a common language.  But it's good to take a shot of our own medicine, apply some of that Lacan and Foucault to ourselves, and realize that our language is a tool that we use to manipulate the social order around us, too-- not just the people we don't like.  We use it to get a leg up on that other guy, the person with different political or philosophical beliefs that doesn't share our special vocabulary.  And that impenetrable wall of "discourse" that we erect can keep out those who have the brains and can argue back but don't know the lingo.  

So, perhaps we need to be wary of our motives when we employ the specialist language of our trade outside of the classroom: for unless we deconstruct our Oedipal tendencies and queer our postmodern  discourse, our phallocentric essentializing of the gendered postcolonial ecriture may threaten to objectify the Other into an abject body, subverting their subjectivity and historicizing them into a subaltern who cannot speak.  NASCAR.

 And ya know what's really funny?  That sentence almost works, in a bizarre, mind-bending sort of way.  *giggle.*


Oh, and if you have some free time, check out the Postmodernism Generator to see these codes put to work... in a really fun sort of way.

Codes and Community in TLP: Looking at Jed (and Jackrabbit)

So, we've been talking a little about how language is often a marker of certain social groups, that what we say, and how we say it, changes with one group to the next.  We code-switch into the codes of one social group into another.  When there's tension between those groups, like, say, the "town and gown" conflict in Laramie, choosing one's language is important because navigating between groups gets perilous.  And, if there's one character who is literally stuck in this divide in The Laramie Project, it's Jed Schultz.  

Jed interests me because I totally understand his plight.  Before I say anything else, let me assure you that Jed was a good kid when I knew him; he was always extremely outgoing and energetic, fun, easily overemotional, and he had a craving to fit in socially with the people he was around.  He also loves his parents.  Never doubt that.  I knew him a little bit from high school, but after I was baptized and attending The Baptist Church, I'd see him come to church with his dad occasionally.   I found him... interesting.  Jed still knew all the codes, from the shiny polyester button-down shirt and pleated slacks to the monogrammed Bible he carried in its nylon zip-up cover and handle, but he never seemed quite at ease.  Before that point, I had never known Jed to seem ill at ease anywhere. 

That sense of ill ease is where I can sympathize; I'm not in the SBC anymore, probably for the same reasons that he was uncomfortable in that church back then.  At the time of the first play, Jed was caught between two different societies, transitioning out of one and into another.  On the one hand, he was born into a Southern Baptist Convention culture with some pretty legalistic ties and proud of its religious independence and political conservatism.  I should know-- I was there.  On the other hand, he was heavily involved in theater in high school, which tends to be a fairly counter-cultural group anyhow, and then he was a theater major at the college.  Those two worlds can't be more opposite.  Again, I should know.  I spent most of my spare time in Fine Arts, just like Jed, and most of my friends were in dance, music or theater.  And in the course of the play, I think that Jed is trying to keep a foot in each world and having trouble figuring out where to stand.  His language, I think, betrays a little bit of that attempt to fit in.  Jed has to switch codes between different groups as he tries to navigate from one to the next. 

Home Again

Well, it's back again to Appalachia after about three weeks reveling in the grass and hills of my real home.  I flew back into town yesterday from Casper, and I'm now trying to get ready for the rest of the summer at a photon's speed-- teaching, studying for exams, copy editing, writing-- and it's so hard when all I see when my mind wanders is the sky on fire, and the way the clouds broke over Pilot Peak after the thunderstorm.... I'll have a lot to write about the whole trip-- about Montana as well-- which I'll do as I have time.   That time I spent alone in the smells and sights I love was extremely revealing to me.  I learned a lot about my family.   And I learned a lot about Laramie.  But mostly, as I stood alone in the wilderness and remembered what the fleshy heads of wheatgrass smell like in the chilly evening breeze, I learned a few new things about myself. 

Yesterday was, admittedly, a sad day for me when my red-eye flight left from Casper to DIA just as the sun was coming up. 
As my little jet plane skated over the tops of the clouds at a low cruising elevation,  I stared despondently out the window at the terrain beneath the wing: Pathfinder and Alcova reservoirs shining, like gold leaf, in the early dawn light, clouds lapping around the mountain peaks like the tide around islands, a lonely Interstate 80 stretching south in a double-thread towards Colorado.  I saw the prairie lakes, which had been dry since I was a teenager, bight as diamonds, scattered over the fields.  And then suddenly I saw it: a town divided in half by rail lines, a cruciform intersection of two wide roads, the Interstate skirting to the south and east.  War Memorial Stadium was unmistakable even at that elevation-- we were flying directly over Laramie, my last view of Wyoming for a long time to come.

And, as I snapped this picture of my final glimpse of home, I realized that I could see so many locations that continue to define me.  I could see what was left of the field where I found my faith, watching the stars with my best friend; it has mostly turned into subdivisions now, and the houses are so close that stargazing would be nearly impossible anymore.
I could also see the college where I grew too quickly into an adult.  I could see the Interstate winding to the little knot that tied in to Happy Jack Road, the place where I fell in love with my husband under a summer's sky on Pilot Hill.  And I could also see the exact spot where Matt was murdered at the place where two unmarked dirt roads nearly meet, like creases in a crumpled map.  All of them were tied together by the same relentless stretch of land-- not just in the land, but in my mind, too, and I couldn't pick one place over the other.  From the air, they're all part of the same long stretch topography marked in shades of green, brown and red. 

That moment made me realize once more how much my search to understand Laramie, and The Laramie Project, is really an attempt to understand myself, those darkened places in my landscape which I want to forget but to which I have to be reconciled.  I can never be a passive observer of this landscape because those valleys and clefts carved out by that tragedy are a part of me, too.

Yeah, You Betcha Dere: the Power and Politics of Code Switching

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I want to know... whether they are deranged freaks, murderers who committed crimes in the name of the government, or whether they are forcing the Afrikaner to confront himself.  More to the point-- what do I have in common with the men I hate the most?...

I interview them one after the other in a quiet corner of the Pretoria Synod hall.  "You know, your whole body language and tone of voice change when you are with these men," says an English-speaking colleague.  "I couldn't hear what you were talking about, but there is a definite intimacy..."  I say nothing.  I did use all the codes I grew up with, and have been fighting against for a lifetime.  But now I want a good story and I want to understand them.  (117-118)

--Antjie Krog, talking about the Vlakplaas Five, in Country of my Skull 117-118)

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Choosing one set of codes over another can often involve power relations among certain classes or cultures.  Social codes can have political or personal cachet-- delineating who's in the club, who's on the outside, or who has the superior social role, for instance.  As somebody navigating through a culture whose cultural layers are also divided into linguistic layers, Antjie Krog's code switches-- and power plays-- often fall along linguistic lines.  She switches into the verbal and non-verbal intimacy of Afrikaans when talking to the Vlakplaas Five in order to gain their trust.  A certain inflection in Afrikaans over the phone is enough to provoke panic even before the death threat is pronounced.  And sound of an English accent against her Afrikaans is enough to put her at a rhetorical disadvantage in a philosophical debate.  The language you use and codes you employ-- or have employed against you-- can have a profound effect on one's social positioning. 

For an extreme example, my first teaching job in the deep South was on the coast, and one or two of my students spoke the Sea Island Creole dialect (also known as Gullah).  It's not a matter of bad grammar; Gullah has distinct western African parallels and, if  you learn the rules, it makes perfect sense.  But these kids were effectively told that their home English was not welcome at school because the grammar rules they followed were "wrong."  I only worked in an after-school tutoring program in the inner city for one afternoon because I couldn't stand listening to their otherwise well-intentioned and sweet volunteer teacher constantly scolding the kids for their "gutter"  English.  In short, the kids were forced to "talk white," as some of them put it, and they resented it.

I was torn on this.  On the one hand, my job was to teach college freshmen to express themselves in their own language.  For me, that means writing to their own community in an expressive, idiomatic Gullah.  On the other hand, I was also supposed to teach them how to write papers for college classes.  That meant teaching them the language codes of the university and forcing them to write in standard English.  I was supposed to teach them the language codes required to be a part of and an agent within the "academic" social set. So, I marked anything outside of standard English wrong-- and I felt like a heel while doing it. 

Although these are heavily politicized examples in America, almost every person has some experience with this issue of navigating through different social spheres with different language.  Many people speak completely different languages at home or work; others have a vocabulary for certain exclusive societies.  We have to switch in and out of these social circles linguistically to navigate.  Language is power. 

My own experience has been far more mundane than my students from the Sea Islands, as it's only an issue when navigating between my home culture and academia.  For instance, when I was in Montana a few years ago on my way to visit my grandparents, we stopped in a town we used to live in to visit some friends.  My parents caught up with two of their friends, the "Fosters" at an old cafe on the edge of town, a standard burger-and-steak joint with a fiberglass mustang out front.   Mrs. "Foster" has Blackfeet heritage and her husband was a retired rodeo bull rider.  They raised three plucky, strong-willed daughters whom I used to play with when I was little.  After my father cheerfully explained to Mr. "Foster" that I was still in school for my PhD, my mother joked, "In a couple more years she's going to be too educated to speak to us anymore."  Ouch.  The "Fosters" both laughed.  I looked over at my mother, set my jaw, and said in my best high line accent,

"Hey now, hold on dere-- I don' wan' no sheepskin 'f it means I can't be a normal person."

 The speed at which I unconsciously switched into this gear surprised me.  When my parents tried to suggest I was falling out of their collective society, the only way I felt I could respond was by changing my language to demonstrate otherwise.  Judging by the raised eyebrow and grin I got, I think Mrs. "Foster" (who was born twenty miles from my birthplace and whose accent is similar to mine)  got the point.   

In this case, my code-switching was mainly an issue of reinforcing my place in my community in a way my parents would understand.  But many times, this code-switching is more about power relations than belonging.  The powerful set gets to determine which codes are acceptable and which aren't allowed.  Think back to the Krog example I shared with you at top; Krog's Afrikaner accent puts her at a disadvantage with English South Africans, but it lets her move freely among the Vlaakplas Five because she's part of the group.  If you follow a different set, then you're out of power.  Although the writing is a little bit questionable, Ellen Cushman's book The Struggle and the Tools was an important first step to understanding the politics of language and code-switching from a compositional standpoint.  The community she studies is an inner-city minority community, and she follows its linguistic strategies (like code-switching) for survival against the local bureaucracy. 

But the struggle for power and language is everywhere-- not just the inner city.  Everybody wants to fit in somewhere, and everyone learns and uses the languages of certain groups to their own advantage.     Usually I unconsciously switch out of my Montana high-line accent when I'm talking to my professors, and I especially did it when Sarah Palin was running for VP back in 2008 because her so-called "Mooseburger" accent (and by extension, mine) had been branded by the literati as "ignorant."  I just couldn't stand the funny looks.

But I was surprised to catch myself babbling on angrily in my tepid Canadian wannabe accent in the middle of class shortly before the election was over.  The class discussion had wandered off-topic for a few minutes to politics, so the professor proceeded to explain how all people who voted a certain way (people like my father) were all a bunch of rifle-toting, truck-driving trailer trash with GEDs and questionable religious beliefs.  (Well, it was something along those lines.)  Even though I didn't respond back to his flaming remarks directly, I did spend the rest of class glaring a lot and sounding like a stage extra from Fargo while throwing out words like "ain't" and "ya know" and "you betcha."  Why did I do it?

It took a little while to figure it out: even though I didn't want to challenge him openly in class,  I still wanted to create distance between him and myself, between his views and my world.  So I code switched out of an academic register and in to the social class he was mocking to show where my loyalties lay.  I linguistically walked out of the academic sphere, so to speak, and slammed the door behind me.  

So, people often switch in and out of groups by switching in and out of certain registers or the ways that they talk.  People can choose to identify with or against communities with their language.  This gets really interesting, for instance, if you start digging through The Laramie Project.  Who is identifying with whom? Can we get a sense of community or alignment based on the linguistic codes each one follows?  Are the interviewers or interviewees trying to place themselves within social groups, or without? 

Maybe. I'm not really convinced that you can, but we'll look few interesting spots in the two TLP plays in the next few weeks nonetheless, just to see what we can find.  We'll keep these ideas about language, and codes, and code switching-- belonging, maneuvering, advantage and disadvantage-- to see if we can find different languages, and codes, in The Laramie Project.

Code Switching as I Learned It from My Grandmother

Although it's probably not typical of my generation, estate auctions made up a large part of my social education when I was growing up.  The women of my childhood were all antique collectors, and an important part of our social lives was spent at auctions at private houses and fairgrounds.  These are nothing like Sotheby's auctions where the so-called "auctioneer" is actually some Art historian with a faux continental accent and most of the bidding is by agents.  These are rowdy, fast-paced events in dusty front yards or livestock arenas, with auctioneers in cowboy hats calling off numbered lots of everything from tack and harness to bent coffee spoons a flutter-tongued syllabary of their own making.  A good estate auction is a social event where friends from around the state catch up, ranchers and wives eye their competitors, and buyers vie with one another in a cutthroat, symbolic contest of subtle gestures for the highest bid.   It takes time to learn that non-verbal language, and it's easy to be misunderstood; for that reason, my grandmother made me sit on my hands when I was on the auction floor until I was about seven years old. 

There's such a feeling of freedom once you learn to become a free operator, however, and you learn how to maneuver through codes at the auction house.  I blushed with pleasure the first time I had the winning bid on a lot when I was about eleven-- a beautiful old copy of A Child's Garden of Verses in maroon calico, which I outbid a dealer for and I still have.  And I have to admit, I also felt a little rush of superiority several years ago when my college in the Deep South auctioned off their impounded bikes and I was practically the only student there who knew the ropes.  I had to explain the codes to the young men around me as they scratched their heads, unable to follow the bids.

Why I'm interested in all this will take some time to explain; for the moment, let's just start with the basics on learning the social context of language use and where I first learned it existed. 

Derek Hopkins explains the Auctioneering trade on NPR, The Way We Work (via YouTube)

Aaron McKinney's Tattoos, or the Ethics of Reading Humans as Literature

One thing that I've been wondering about is how little literary criticism has been written on The Laramie Project so far.  When I started thinking about the play, my initial impulse was to write an academic article.   (I've changed my mind since then.)   But when I started to pull together scholarly sources to start my research, I found that there wasn't too much to build from.  I started to wonder: why I can I find so few literary scholars writing about this play?  

For instance, when I did a search in the MLA Bibliography for The Laramie Project, I only got eight hits; six were articles of literary criticism, and one of those is Tigner's.  I tried the International Index to Performance Arts and netted another 4-5 scholarly articles, but they're mostly about documentary/nonfiction performance rather than the play as text.  That seems really strange for a play that has been as popular and culturally important for the last eight years as TLP has.  Just for comparison, Shaffer's play Amadeus had nineteen articles written and indexed in MLAB by 1988.  Why haven't all those gape-mouthed literary professors who teach this text (of whom I suppose I am one) been writing about it? Why are pens so silent in my own professional field? 

Maybe others aren't writing on this text as a literary object for the same reason that I'm a little reticent about writing on this text in an academic forum myself.  I don't like treating actual, living human beings as abstractions (which was probably clear with one of my previous posts).  It's one thing to talk about "Mozart" and "Salieri" as characters because, even though these people are real, the play itself is a total fiction.  I can even do it with Spiegelman's Maus because the conscious meta-narrative and the fictive animal story insulates the reader enough from the unspeakable horror of Vladek Spiegelman's lived reality to give him a more critical eye.  I have a much harder time doing the same thing with a person in The Laramie Project, especially when it's somebody I took classes from or saw in church.

Maybe other critics have the same hangups.  For instance, there are only 36 articles in MLAB for In Cold Blood, and they mostly seem to be focusing on genre or journalistic concerns  rather than treating it as a literary work.  Maybe we're all running into the same question: what are the ethics of reading a documentary work or "faction" (fact-based fiction) as a literary event?  Is it ethical to treat a real, live human as a symbolic construction, whether it be the Clutters, Gary Gilmore, or Russell Henderson?  Do you lessen the gravity of the situation if you talk about Aaron McKinney's failures from a literary, rather than a historical or cultural standpoint?

Or, to put it from a more practical standpoint: am I doing a disservice to Aaron McKinney (and, by extension, Matt Shepard) as a human being if I treat him like a literary construction?   

"Has Anything Changed?" cont.: The Tectonic Uncertainty Principle

In my attempt to think through the relationship of Tectonic Theater to the Laramie community, I've tended to focus on their relationship to the Laramie community as a whole:  are they reporting it like they are from the "inside" of the community in reflection or from the "outside" in judgment?  There's another way to think of the organization, however: as either passive observer, or active participant in, the events they're observing.  When Tectonic came into Laramie this second time, how much had they already changed the situation in Laramie with their first play?  For me, the answer is simple because I don't think that passive observation of a community is possible; you're always changing the environment you're observing.  Therefore, for me the question is not whether Tectonic Theater has had an influence in Laramie; the  question is how much, and whether or not Tectonic recognizes that fact in the second play. 

So, to start, all of you Trekkies out there understand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, right?  Here it is in a nutshell:  you can't observe an aspect of a particle in space without changing something else about it.  For instance, if you can pin down a particle's momentum, you know nothing about its position because your observation of its momentum precludes knowing its position.  And, since you have to "poke" a particle to know where it's at, you have to sacrifice knowing its momentum just to know its position.  It's the damnable, frustrating fact of life for quantum physicists:  you simply can never be a passive observer; to some extent, just by observing you are always a participant, you always interfere and you can therefore never know everything.    

Scatter Plots, cont.: Who's speaking?

So, I've spent the last few posts looking at how Tectonic fudges around a few data points from our survey of Laramie, WY in order to make the pattern more uniform.  For a long time, this really bothered me.  Could that have been a necessary evil, however?  Let's take a look now at how the background politics of who's speaking actually might necessitate covering up some background information for the good of the play-- and a fair representation of the community.

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And it was... it was just... I'm fifty-two years old and I'm gay.  I have lived here for many years and I've seen a lot.

-- Harry Woods, in TLP (2000): 63

When I came here I knew it was going to be hard as a gay man... but I kept telling myself: People should live where they want to live... I mean, imagine if more gay people stayed in small towns.  But it's easier said than done of course. 

-- Jonas Slonaker, in TLP (2000): 22-23

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These two voices speak to more than the experience of just a semi-retired actor and a university admin specialist.  They're the voices of those who can speak to both their own personal experiences as well as the experience of gay men in the Laramie community at large.  And within that community, they each have a unique story to tell about their life within the community as a whole. That's how I'd like to finish out with this discussion this week-- looking at how these voices speak for more than just one side of Laramie, and with more clarity if we let them be a little less specific...

Angstademic Discourse

[Hello all! As of today, the Jackrabbit will be spending most of her weekend furiously typing on her first round of PhD field exams in medieval literature. So while I'm collapsing into a nervous wreck over Boethius, Beowulf, The Pearl poet and/or Chaucer, please enjoy the melodious tones of this silent scream into the Bloggosphere...]

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 So, the good news is this: I found out last week that I am going to be talking about The Laramie Project at an interdisciplinary academic conference focusing on "memory and trauma" as their theme.  I'll present the paper in March as part of a panel on issues of narrative trauma, representation and recursive storytelling (this would take a lot of time to explain.)  Anyhow, my personal experience with The Laramie Project and questions regarding trauma and memory are going to be placed alongside narratives of natural disasters and displacement, civil war, and victims of seemingly motiveless violence.  And among all this, I'm supposed to come up with something theoretical and pithy about The Laramie Project that will make the collective cogs in the audience members' heads hum pleasantly, a good performance of academic gymnastics.  And at the moment, the prospect of this makes me think just one thing: Ugh.      

So, at first I was thrilled to finally talk about all this in an academic forum.  Then a couple days later I started to experience a little bit of doubt, and that doubt has turned into some outright panic about having to discuss this in person to academics.  I'm worried: is anything I'm doing here actually worthy of being considered academic?  Or, on the flip side, is anything I'm doing here actually worthy of being considered authentic writing?  What's going to happen if I pull whatever-the-hell-this-is into the academic sphere where it can be theorized to death? 

A bigger question might be this:  what the hell IS this thing I'm writing?  Can I even remotely call this a foray into an academic discussion? And, should I?

Down the Rabbit-Hole: It's my memory, darn it!

So, I've been looking back on the first four parts of my personal memory this past week, ruminating on the way I've told this memory.  A few weeks ago, before the Christmas break, I checked that memory against some kind of official record (newspaper articles and my student papers) and teased out a few inaccuracies in my personal memory.  I also gave a few suggestions as to why some of those inaccuracies probably crept into my memory.  I suggested that the kind of story I'm telling (in this case, largely a coming-of-age story) was dictating to a certain extent what details I recalled and the order I told them in.

When I looked back at my personal memory a second time, I think I may have found a second narrative framework (called a schema in psychology) that may be unconsciously dictating the form of my memory, and it's not a very surprising one: The Laramie Project.  And for some reason, this annoys the heck out of me.  Let me give you a run-through and see what you think...

Walking in My Own Footsteps and Finding they Don't Fit

So, after three and a half weeks back home in Wyoming with family, I boarded a plane in Casper, Wyoming to fly back to my home in Appalachia last Friday night.   The weather, unfortunately, prevented me from making the five-hour trek to Laramie through the Shirley Basin, so I never got to visit the campus again like I hoped.  That was the same cold weather snap (one night plunged to -25 degrees Farenheit) which wreaked havoc on our airplane the day of our departure, and between the cold in Casper and the storms in Atlanta, I spent about nine extra hours sitting on uncomfortable vinyl chairs in various airport terminals trying to think.  For some reason, this visit was a lot harder than on previous years; certainly the lack of my grandmother's presence was a huge factor, but something else about this visit was on my mind as well.

When our plane finally departed from DIA and rocketed its way into the sunset, I snapped a picture of the view on our way out.  This was my last sight of the American West for a long time to come: an endless patchwork swath of snow-dusted farmland, fields, and prairie stretching off into the distance, Laramie and Cheyenne somewhere north of our plane's wingtip.  As I looked out the window and craned my neck backwards for a last glimpse of the Rockies, it suddenly occurred to me what the problem was: I didn't really feel like my life fit here anymore.  In a sense, I was getting utterly homesick for a place that, in a real sense, wasn't even my home anymore.  I've lived in the South for eight and a half years now, which is six months longer than I had ever lived in Wyoming.  I've been in college now for eleven years, in an intellectual environment that has almost nothing to do with my family's lived experience.  How on earth do I reconcile these two halves of my life-- my Western self, my internal wilderness and land-centeredness, and my Humanities self, the one that lives in a middle-class land of intellection and abstraction?  How can I retrace my own footsteps every year back to the land I call home and make that journey make sense?

Life in the confession booth

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With what fruit, then, O my Lord...  do I confess, not only in your presence but to men also by these writings, what I now am, not what I once was?

--Augustine, Confessions Book X, Ch. 3

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So, I've been thinking hard over the last few days about a weird change I've been noticing about myself this past semester: I'm telling everybody I can corral for ten minutes about what happened when Matt was murdered.   And, I'm starting to wonder: is this necessarily a healthy thing?  It really started with my minister friend back in August.  We were having a theology discussion at a local bar (yes, we do that sort of thing) and he was trying to come up with topics for a lecture series on campus. 

"What about a roundtable on theology and homosexuality?"  He asked innocently.   I leaned over the table and thumped my finger on his legal pad. 

"Absolutely not.  You might as well lob a grenade in the middle of our campus as do that," I answered.

 Later, I apologized and explained to him why I was a little sensitive to that issue, and he was really surprised.  Then, when the Laramie Project: 10 Years Later came to our town, I told "Joe" the entire story, and then the cast.  It's sort of snowballed from there.  Each time scared the utter heck out of me, but then I've felt so much more...  liberated, I guess.  And I keep doing it. 

Reactions have been mixed.  Some people just sort of edge slowly for the door, like I'm going to pounce on them.  One colleague suggested that I needed a vacation.  And then one of my classmates just opened up and shared with me the trauma in her own life she's been silently packing around for seven years, and I was stunned.  She and I have started talking a lot. 

So I find myself in the twenty-ninth year of my existence in the middle of an all-out confession fest.  Why?  I have never really felt impelled to air out my dirty laundry for the world.  In fact, one of the hardest things for me has been that  whole "Confess your sins to each other" business in the Book of James (there's a reason Protestants don't like that book.)  But I'm starting to wonder just a little bit about this little glut of storytelling: is all this some kind of exhibitionist tendency, or is it something more-- or something worse?

On Myth and Bull$%!t

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Myth is a reality immeasurably greater than concept. It is high time that we stopped identifying myth with invention, with the illusions of primitive mentality, and with anything, in fact, which is essentially opposed to reality... The creation of myths among peoples denotes a real spiritual life, more real indeed than that of abstract concepts and rational thought. Myth is always concrete and expresses life better than abstract thought can do; its nature is bound up with that of symbol. Myth is the concrete recital of events and original phenomena of the spiritual life symbolized in the natural world, which has engraved itself on the language memory and creative energy of the people... it brings two worlds together symbolically.

-- Nikolai Berdyaev, from Freedom and the Spirit (1927-28)

[I got this quote courtesy of fellow blogger Steve Hayes.  Thanks again!]

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I was sitting in my Anglo-Saxon class a little while ago as we translated "The Battle of Maldon" together and discussed it in class.  If you're never read "Maldon," it's a fascinating poem.  The setup is that a group of Vikings under Anlaf sailed down into East Anglia in 991 and demanded a paid settlement with Aethelred their king in return for keeping the peace.  Aethelred refuses, so his nobleman Byrhtnoth takes a force of men to the shores of the river Blackwater to head them off.  We don't have all the poem to know how it ends, but history tells us fairly clearly: Byrhtnoth is buried in Ely Cathedral in eastern England-- without his head.  We can figure out the rest based on the fact that the East Saxon kings made a point of paying off the Vikings with the Danegeld for many years afterward. 

My professor for the class is also my dissertation director, and he's worked a lot with Anglo-Saxon texts that have to do with history and storytelling.  As we got to the point where Byrhtnoth dies from a spear-wound, lots of people start making "last stand" speeches before jumping into the fray.  "It's just like a faculty meeting, isn't it?" My professor jokes.  "Everybody has to jump in and get their say, only in 'Maldon,' the speeches get shorter and shorter instead of the other way around."  We all laugh.  But then our thoughts turn to the depiction of the battle, and our conversation left me thinking about the nature of myth once again.

Down the Rabbit-Hole: Hindsight

 Whoever said that hindsight is 20/20 probably never studied memory.   If anything, hindsight needs bifocals and blinders.  On the one hand, memory is extremely susceptible to the decay of time; the details slowly get effaced, warped and rearranged.  But there's also problems in the way we record memories in the first place.  You see, ever since I did some digging into the cognititve/ psychological aspects of autobiographical memory for the class I teach, I've become extremely sensitive to the vagaries of memory and the way in which we schematize our stories for different purposes.  In layman's terms, we have to fit our memories into stories-- and the story format we use to make our memories make sense can change the details we remember.  For instance, Schacter's The Seven Sins of Memory and Memory Distortion are great reads for the general reader-- but they'll make you a little bit hesitant about what you say you "know" you can remember.  On a more abstract level, James Young's book The Texture of Memory gives a wonderful case study of how we put those memories to use and build a sense of our histories and identities.  His book focuses specifically on Holocaust memorials, and it's fascinating.

One of the little exercises I have my students do in class is to research a personal memory; they do interviews to get three different perspectives on the same event and then compare them to see where the differences lay.  A lot of times the differences are just a matter of emphasis, but many find substantial errors in one version of their memory.  One student a couple years ago discovered that her childhood memory of a fishing trip was, in a phrase, a complete fish story.  She put people in the story who weren't there, changed locations, events... everything.  She concluded that she had told the story so many times since she was a kid that the story became what she remembered and not the actual event.  She was extremely interested to discover this so many years later. 

I thought I'd try the same thing by researching a little bit to see if I can find holes in my own narrative.  Now that I've told my story and have had a bit of time to reflect upon the version I told you, here's a list of the places where I think my mind might be playing tricks on me.  Some of them aren't very important.  Others make a lot of difference.  I'll be interested to see what others think:

Some Thoughts on Myth

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The myth is, then, not necessarily false.  It might happen to be wholly true.  It may happen to be partly true.  If it has affected human conduct a long time, it is almost certain to contain much that is profoundly and importantly true.  What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truths from its errors.  For that power comes only by realizing that no human opinion, whatever its supposed origin, is too exalted for the test of evidence, that every opinion is only somebody's opinion.  And if you ask why the test of evidence is preferable to any other, there is no answer unless you are willing to use the test in order to test it.

--Walter Lippmann, in Public Opinion (123)

[W]hen we have a theory about who we are, and the data goes against that theory, we throw out the data rather than adjust the theory. We are hardwired as human beings not to contemplate our own complicity in things.

--Jeffrey Lockwood, in an interview with Tectonic Theater

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The beginning of The Laramie Project starts with some of the stories we tell each other about who we are and what it means to live there:

REBECCA HILLIKER:  There's so much space between people and towns here, so much time for reflection...  You have an opportunity to be happy in your life here.  I found that people here were nicer than in the Midwest, where I used to teach, because they were happy.  They were happy that the sun was shining.  And it shines a lot here... (7)

I know these stories so well because they're mine too-- conservation, self-reflection and space...    But then there's this odd moment in the middle of all this mythmaking when Seargeant Hing starts telling his story about Laramie:

SEARGEANT HING:  It's a good place to live.  Good people, lots of space.  Now when the incident happened with that boy, a lot of press people came up here.  And one time some of them followed me out to the crime scene.  And, uh, well, it was a beautiful day, absolutely gorgeous day, real clear and crisp and the sky was that blue, that, uh...  you know, you'll never be able to paint, it's just sky blue-- it's just gorgeous...  (8)

I know what he means about the sky.  That's why I used to love Maxfield Parrish's paintings when I was little-- because nobody else could quite get that barren, cobalt blue sky to turn out just right.  But this moment for me was utterly surreal when I first saw the play-- the way that Hing's narrative of that "good place to live" with its blue sky, so blue you don't understand unless you've seen it, just sort of blends in perfectly with the Shepard tragedy.  The one story has totally infiltrated the other.  I had a sense of horror the first time I heard these lines, a horror only slightly lessened by my satisfaction at hearing the reporters called "stupid"  just a moment later.  It felt like our story had been hijacked.  That's not who we are at all, I wanted to call out.  That's not the way the story goes. 

I've moved beyond that first reaction to a more ambivalent stance.  Hing couldn't tell his story about Matt Shepard without telling Tectonic who he was, so his myth of blue, blue skies and Shepard's murder site just run together. Anymore, that relationship goes both ways; you can't tell the story of Laramie anymore, it seems, without Matthew being a part of it:

JEDEDIAH SCHULTZ:  If you would have asked me before, I would have told you Laramie is a beautiful town, secluded enough that you can have your own identity... a town with a strong sense of community-- everyone knows everyone... Now, after Matthew, I would say that Laramie is a town defined by an accident, a crime.  We've become Waco, we've become Jasper...(9)

What I'm contemplating right now is this: how easy is it for your myths to change?   And when should they have to?

Owning it: Some Thoughts on Henderson and McKinney

[This was a post I was saving for later, but due to some recent questions from a generous commenter, I thought I'd like to share them now. Thanks, kbxmas for some hard questions! --Jackrabbit]

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...I'm not going to step away from that and say, "We need to show the world that this didn't happen."  I mean, these people are trying to distance themselves from the crime.   And we need to own this crime.  I feel.  Everyone needs to own it.  We are like this.  We ARE like this.  WE are LIKE this.

--Zubaida Ula, in TLP (2001): 60

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Zubaida makes an important point about the Laramie community: "Everyone needs to own this crime." It's a statement I've tried to take to heart recently.  Whether either of us like it or not, Zubaida and I both belonged to a community which produced a McKinney, a Henderson, and a Matt Shepard.  It also helped mold the two of us into what we are.  As much as we might value our unfettered individualism out west, communities like Laramie are heavily interconnected, and each person has to claim some knowledge of and responsibility for another.

Another problem is that this realization flies in the face of a western plains ideal: each person is only responsible for themselves and their own.  For that reason, there's a tendency to deny the fact of that interconnectedness of the community when it comes to personal responsibility.  "Why should we have a black eye over this?" many of us might reason.  "I didn't murder Shepard, and I didn't approve of it.  You can't force this on me."  I've heard that same argument from my family on several fronts, and the argument is always the same: I am not the perpetrator.  If I didn't personally do it, then I'm not personally responsible for it.  We don't want to own it even if it's woven into the warp and woof of our identities.   

But, don't we have a responsibility to own this?  Don't we have to embrace our identities so that they don't define us in ways we can't control? 

Why the hell am I doing this again?

Okay, right now nobody is actively crawling this blog yet, which means that I'm more or less still blogging under the covers with a flashlight and nobody's listening.  So, in this moment of silence, I'm starting to panic: do I want to pull the plug on all this?   Do I really want to bear my soul to the cold scrutiny of the Internet?  Moreover, while the Internet is deep enough to allow some anonymity, Wyoming is not.  I swim in pretty shallow waters back there, and there's no good place to hide.  I can only run so fast before my own story catches up with me.  If I'm as honest with everyone as I really want to be, I will have to give everyone enough information to finally corner and catch the Jackrabbit if they want to.   And, while getting picked up by the ears and getting unmasked won't harm my career, it'd certainly strain my relationship with my parents, who would hardly approve of this sort of thing: good plainsmen don't air their family's dirty laundry for just anybody to hear.  So far, the risks seem to outweigh the reward. 

So please excuse me while I scream and wring my hands a little backstage before the curtain goes up.  Somebody tell me, why the hell am I doing this again, please?...