Mostly, this week I decided to run things that make me feel good on an experiential, instinctive level. I kept jokingly thinking, “It’s Thanksgiving! Here’s what I’m thankful for,” as I was putting the pieces together.
It’s funny, though — so much of how we approach the idea of Thanksgiving is bound up in temporal vicissitudes. The way we talk and think about this American tradition — what it even means to have an “American tradition,” really — has changed so much even within my own lifetime. And I can’t approach it in my own mind any way but cumulatively. I know it’s pretty en vogue, in our ironic culture, to focus on the myriad negative aspects of traditional American holidays, especially one so wrought with a history of racism, war, violence, and mundane human unkindness — you can’t talk about depictions of Pilgrims and Native Americans without that, right? And yet, there are all sorts of other aspects to this holiday, too. There’s the obvious god/family/football, there are more difficult ideas of cultural exchange, more nuanced questions about what beautiful things can grow out of ugly actions or attitudes. These might all be less-popular foci right now, but I don’t think they will always be. That’s kind of what time does — forces us all to continuously develop different ways of understanding the same events and ideas.
And all the pieces this week deal with Time in some way. MANDEM’s gorgeous multimedia piece — which I love instinctively, reactively, the red hair and the layered quality of the image, the distressed surface(s) and the handwriting — is titled Notes from a Time Traveller’s Journal, and includes the line, “Still we pesist, building ourselves a better past.” Feels rather timely, in the way that Thanksgiving is one example of the human tendency to stylize historical complexity in a reductive way. But also, maybe a better past doesn’t mean a prettier or more comfortable one: maybe it means a past that helps us figure out how to grow?
Similarly, Bradley Harrison’s review of Roger Reeves’ King Me locates a large portion of the book’s ingenuity in its ability to recreate historically-based narratives from new perspectives (a horse witnessing a vicious, racist murder, for example) — and then troubles even those perspectives. And, although the review may not say it explicitly, a large portion of the favorable analysis of King Me seems to result from the way Reeves’ text weaves historical personalities seamlessly into contemporary consciousness. Maybe a better past is one from which we allow ourselves less distance?
I was really excited, too, to bring y’all both poetry and fiction: Romani-American author Jessica Reidy is currently working on a novel that has a book of poems embedded withi it. The novel, Zenith, is about a Romani burlesque dancer/fortune teller who becomes a Nazi hunter. The opening is violent, difficult, bad-ass: contmporary readers look into the consciousness of a woman who would likely have been effaced from history altogeter: Romani were targets of genocide under Hitler, a fact which is consistently omitted from history texts and classroom lessons, as well as from “Holocaust films” and other popular culture representations of Hitler’s Third Reich. Interestingly, though, this woman — trying to decide whether to kill the Nazi at her feet — is preoccupied during the narrative with her own histories — her own life up until this point, the history of her culture. These themes are echoed in Reidy’s poems, also included in this week’s Infoxicated edition — cultural memories, personal memories. Perhaps a better past is one that insists upon the nuances of both? That refuses the comfort of reduction and rhetorical simplification? Reaches for the human in absolutely everything?
It’s Thankgiving, and I know what I’m thankful for.
Beatitudes,
Fox
