A Little Bibliography: Op-ed statements on the Shepard beating

Matt's beating and murder in 1998 couldn't have come at a more timely point in terms of stirring up some seriously wicked national debate on GLBT rights.  When you look at some of the national discourse at this time-- questions about DOMA, Trent Lott's comparison between homosexuality and kleptomania, the ex-gay movement's advertising campaign--  Shepard's death was like dropping a piece of hot slag in the middle of a munitions plant.  That's where my frustration with the politics surrounding the Shepard case comes from: once everything exploded, there was no easy way to sort the productive from the non-productive dialogue, and for every passionate and reasoned call for change, there were so many others just spewing about their own brand of incandescent hate on both sides.

In a real way, even though I adore him as a playwright and I understand the source of all that fury, Tony Kushner's response to Matt's death was just as frustrating to me as Trent Lott's: neither seemed to think far enough beyond their own concerns to see the real human beings on the other side.  The fulminate rage in Kushner's rhetoric in his editorial makes me flinch.  For all his condemnation of those "savor[ing] the unsavory details" of the Shepard murder, Kushner just seems to me to use Matt Shepard as a grisly trope, a blunt object he can hit back at the Republicans with in retaliation.  If you're arguing for human rights and the equal dignity of all people,  I don't see the point of slapping somebody upside the head with a real human being.  I have the same problem with anti-abortion activists driving around in trucks with pictures of butchered babies on the sides: neither approach provides space for compassion, understanding or forgiveness-- and it certainly doesn't uphold the dignity of the real human beings whose lives are at stake. 

In any case, a few of the more notable responses I have attached here as a short bibliography if you're interested.  From a literary standpoint, obviously those by Kushner and Vidal will be of the most interest.  But the one that piques my own curiosity is Paul Capetz' meditation on the church as a ground of reconciliation between gays, lesbians and straight Christians.  His response is provocative, unwavering, and, knowing what has happened within the Presbyterian church (my current church home) since this was written, it's an interesting bit of prophecy.  He also recognizes the humanity on both sides of the debate and speaks in love even as he calls passionately for change.  Please, no matter your personal conviction, give his argument a fair read.  Full bibliography (with references to Wyoming letters, too) after the jump...

It's official: I've been delcared competent!

I got the news about two hours ago: I have officially passed my first PhD field exam in medieval literature! In other words, I have just been officially declared competent in something! Woo-hoo!  (Who would have figured?)  Actually, my advisor called it a "very strong pass."  I am so freaking happy. 

Anyhow, how hard was it to study for and pass this exam?  For your viewing amusement,  this stack of books represents all the books I had checked out of the library, which was about 60% of the material.  The rest are things I already own and are sitting on a shelf somewhere.

Thank the Lord that's over. Now, just two more to go!

Lost in Translation

You'd think that, as a literature major, I wouldn't be as resistant to symbols and abstraction as I am. I live in the realm of abstraction; it's a comfortable place, they know me here. I'm getting a degree in it, even. I'm so used to dealing with the realm of the metaphor and story, actually, that it can be really hard to turn that part of my brain off sometimes. "Will you just sit back and enjoy the movie?" my husband occasionally smirks at me. (Other times, he's worse than me. We laugh it off.)

It's not really myth or symbol itself that bothers me. It's seeing that process of myth-making firsthand that's been so disorienting. When a deceased person passes from a living, imperfect being to a myth, to me it almost feels like an annihilation of the individual who once lived but now can't speak for themselves. And yet, I'm a medievalist, for crying out loud, I've read saint's lives.  Sanctification, many times, is a process of forgetting; when the imperfections that made them a mere person are gone, then someone writes a text to exemplify their holiness. And that's how you make a saint in the early Middle Ages: forgetting, coupled with a narrative. No wonder that some of my favorite holy people are often the tenacious ones, the royal pain in the asses who spoke for themselves or left a record of their frailties: Perpetua, Augustine, Boniface, Leoba; Thomas á Beckett; Julian; John Donne. 

Abstraction anxiety?

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And a lot of it is my feeling that the media is portraying Matthew Shepard as a saint. And making him as a martyr. And I don't think he was. I don't think he was that pure.

-- Sherry Johnson, in TLP (2001): 64

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Although thinking of what has happened to Matt as a translation to sainthood is admittedly anachronistic, the process that Sherry dislikes above is nevertheless a good fit: forgetting, coupled with a story, makes Matt something more than human and less than human at the same time. He's a symbol or a myth. When that happens in a story like TLP, where's the real person? To where, and as what, does he get translated to?  And I also wonder: where does that very human impulse to translate the flesh and blood of a real person to symbol come from? Sherry Johnson fears that impulse, I would say, for all the wrong reasons; she merely believes that Matt isn't a good candidate based on the slander and hearsay she's picked up around town. I'm just as hesitant, but I'm more concerned about the ethics of making a man into a myth in the first place. Is it fair to the deceased? Or, is it what they would want?

Hinting at Spring...

Female Cardinal, originally uploaded by Wyoming_Jackrabbit.

March is already here in Appalachia, and already the trees and birds are itching for a spring that never quite seems to arrive. The swollen buds on my magnolia Jane out in front of my house are straining at the seams, but we've already had two snow flurries this week and may see more. Most of the wildlife-- myself included-- seem a little impatient for warmth, for flowers and greenery.

This female cardinal is one of my co-vigilants waiting through the last of the Lenten veil of snow to melt and for Spring, like Easter, to arrive with the dawn. On Tuesday we had already gotten about a half an inch of snow, so she was hiding out under some shrubbery next to the library looking for berries. I hope you enjoy her!

20/20's exposé on the Shepard killing online: blech

If you'd like to get a taste of what that 20/20 piece mentioned in The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later actually said, ABC has graciously left the website for the program up so you can read for yourself right here.  I haven't checked this against my transcript of the actual news program yet, but it makes the same argument.  Since this program aired,  Bill O'Reilley has repeated it, Newsbusters has promulgated it, WBC has run with it, congress people have referred to it, and many Laramie people feel this is the true version of events.  Feel free to see what you think.

Not to prevent you all from thinking for yourselves on this one, but I obviously think it's all pretty terrible; the reporting is awful, I'm not sure I trust their motives, and they're a little too willing to take McKinney and Henderson's story as truth (which has changed since the report, I might add).  There are, however, a few important points brought up nonetheless.  Shepard wasn't an angel; he was a kid battling his own personal demons, something his mother's been pretty open about.  The police did focus on robbery as a motive for a little bit.  And McKinney and Henderson really were that lousy of human beings.   Those facts, however, don't change a damn thing about the reality of how or why those two men thought that bludgeoning an openly gay kid for his shoes was a good idea. 

Oh, and I also found a very, very interesting academic article on the 20/20 program as well.  If you have access to JSTOR you can download it:

Charles, Casey.  "Panic in the Project: Critical Queer Studies and the Matthew Shepard Murder."  Law and Literature 18.2 (2006): 225-252. 

It's heavily over-theorized and a LOT of fun.  Check it out!

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4490600

Fear, Loathing, and "The Laramie Project": Hindsight

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He who learns must suffer

And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget

Falls drop by drop upon the heart,

And in our own despite, against our will,

Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

--Aeschylus, Agamemnon; tr. Edith Hamilton

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Okay, so all bets are off: this is memory stuff no longer any fun.  It seriously sucks.  

Just like I did with my first posts on my personal memory, I wanted to look back through my memories of 2000 to 2009 and see if I could find any similar lapses in memory like I saw in my first stories.   This little exercise, however, has led to some seriously personal introspection that I didn't want to have to do.  If you therefore don't want to read any extremely personal and depressing revelations about the Jackrabbit, then by all means read no further in this post.  Consider yourself duly warned.  

 Anyhow, I figured that, since these memories were more recent, I wouldn't have quite the same problems of recollection I had earlier.  I discovered that this wasn't necessarily the case; the more recent memories have just as many vagaries, and regarding one very important omission, there's more.  Here are some things I discovered that I fudged, left out or misrepresented in my previous recollection:

Comps, Day 2: *whimper*

Day 2 of my exams is here, and I'm getting some serious cabin fever. My entire house looks like a library threw up. I'm getting cramps in my thumbs from hitting the space bar on my computer. And I'm kicking myself for actually suggesting to a committee member that I was interested in Patristic theodicy.  As it turned out, he took me seriously.  Damn. 

For your viewing enjoyment, here is a picture of where my mind's at-- not in sixth century Ravenna, not in Geatland, and certainly not in Purgatory.  It's west of Meeteetsee, playing in the snow.  

So, just for grins and giggles, here's a picture of a whitetail buck giving you the raspberry.  When my father and I got this shot, we were pleasantly surprised at how nicely he posed for us-- normally whitetails are spooky things.   

I have him on my screensaver with a bunch of other photos, and when I get sick of writing, I put them on the screen to soothe my battered graduate-student psyche...