Richard Jeffrey Newman

Which is a won­der­ful thing. Just sayin’

Fan­tasy On Trial (Again) | CarnalNation

Read this post; it’s scary. Here’s an excerpt:

The pros­e­cu­tion tried to get me to say that most peo­ple who fan­ta­size are sick, which I wouldn’t. They tried to get me to say that people’s fan­tasies indi­cate what they want to do in real life, which I wouldn’t. They tried to get me to say that Mr. Jones’ calls and emails were typ­i­cal groom­ing behav­ior. I pointed out the fun­da­men­tal flaws in their rea­son­ing: he had met “Missy” in a cha­t­room for adults, not for fans of Miley Cyrus or the Jonas Broth­ers. And after a thou­sand emails and phone calls, he never said any­thing like, “Let’s meet. We’ll have a great time. When are you free? I’ll send you money for a bus ticket.”

There were plenty of ques­tions about me: my cam­paign against the con­cept of “sex addic­tion”; my obser­va­tions that Amer­ica is pan­icked over highly dis­torted esti­mates of how many preda­tors troll for kids online (I quoted sci­en­tific stud­ies, includ­ing the lat­est one from Har­vard); whether or not I believed it was OK for adults and 14-year-olds to have sex (which I wouldn’t answer, not want­ing to obscure the fact that there was no 14-year-old in this case), and many, many more. That’s how I spent yes­ter­day afternoon.

This morn­ing, the jury gave their ver­dict. After­wards, in pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions, they told Mr. Jones’ lawyer that I was clearly an expert, warm and per­sua­sive, and that they had learned a great deal from me about psy­chol­ogy and sex­u­al­ity. They said they were trou­bled by the flaws I had pointed out in the prosecution’s case, and they laughed at the D.A.’s inabil­ity to rat­tle or insult me. Sev­eral said if they were ever in trou­ble, they hoped they’d be rep­re­sented in court as well as Mr. Jones had been.

But they found him guilty. They were afraid to believe him.

One word: pla­gia­rism. I spend a great deal of time at the begin­ning of the semes­ter, on the first day actu­ally, talk­ing about it, explain­ing it and mak­ing sure my stu­dents under­stand my pol­icy, which is: If I catch you will­fully try­ing to fool me by pass­ing off some­one else’s work as your own, you will fail for the semes­ter, no sec­ond chances. I lec­ture in excru­ci­at­ing detail – with more than a few exam­ples of stu­dents who were pass­ing (one was even get­ting an A) whom I failed because I caught them will­fully pla­gia­riz­ing – about why I take it per­son­ally when some­one tried to do this: because it means that he or she thinks either that I am stu­pid, that I won’t know the dif­fer­ence between her or his writ­ing, which I have been read­ing all semes­ter, and the professional-grade writ­ing that stu­dents inevitably hand in when they pla­gia­rize, or that I don’t care enough about my job actu­ally to pay atten­tion to the work that stu­dents hand in. I repeat this warn­ing sev­eral times dur­ing the semes­ter, with a shorter ver­sion of the same lec­ture, espe­cially when I assign any paper that involves even the small­est amount of research. I even tell my stu­dents how I am going to catch them. Most pla­gia­rism these days involves stu­dents cut­ting and past­ing stuff from the web, and if it’s on the web, I tell them, Google can find it. “Please,” I ask them, “don’t put me in the posi­tion of hav­ing to fail you. If you are hav­ing prob­lems with an assign­ment, come talk to me. As long as you are some­one who has been com­ing to class and doing the work – even if you’ve been get­ting D’s – I’d rather work some­thing out (an exten­sion, what­ever) to make it pos­si­ble for you to do the work than to fail you for plagiarism.”

Inevitably, though, there are stu­dents who don’t believe me or who think they are smarter than I am, and this semes­ter is no excep­tion. I have caught three pla­gia­rists in my Tech­ni­cal Writ­ing class, and it’s really piss­ing me off. First, the assign­ment they pla­gia­rized – writ­ing a set of instruc­tions, a descrip­tion and a process analy­sis – while not nec­es­sar­ily easy, is not hard to do well on if you take the time to do it right. Sec­ond, two of the stu­dents were clearly pass­ing; one of them was on his way to get­ting a B. (The other would have ended up with a D+ or a C, depend­ing on how he did on his final paper.) Third, the remain­ing pla­gia­rist does not have Eng­lish as his first lan­guage, and so the work he’s been hand­ing me has not only been sprin­kled with the kinds of gram­mat­i­cal errors one would expect from some­one writ­ing in his sec­ond lan­guage; even when his writ­ing was gram­mat­i­cal, it had a slight “accent” that betrayed his coun­try of ori­gin. So what did he hand me? A gram­mat­i­cally per­fect descrip­tion of a light bulb, as if I wouldn’t notice the difference.

All three of them are going to fail for the semester.

And now that I have vented, I am going to bed. I need the sleep.

Edited because of pri­vacy issues.

Accord­ing to one of my stu­dents, in a paper he wrote meant to talk about the dif­fer­ent approaches to his­tory in Max­ine Hong Kingston’s China Men and Island, edited by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, China has his­tor­i­cally been infused with a “racial ide­ol­ogy of male mas­culin­ity” and that is why so many “Chi­nese Amer­i­cans believe in racial inequal­ity.” I wish I could quote the entire two sen­tences for you; they are truly pre­cious. It’s not just the poor qual­ity of this writ­ing per se that gets to me, though, it’s that phrases like “racial ide­ol­ogy of male mas­culin­ity” appear all over the essays I have been get­ting from far too many of the stu­dents in the lit­er­a­ture class I have been teach­ing – as if the stu­dents were choos­ing one word from col­umn A, two from col­umn B, etc. in order to come up with a sen­tence that sounds so intel­lec­tu­ally pro­found that I won’t notice it doesn’t really mean any­thing. It is depress­ing and debil­i­tat­ing when the papers handed in by my fresh­man com­po­si­tion stu­dents are, in many ways, bet­ter writ­ten than the ones handed in by the stu­dents in an advanced lit­er­a­ture class.

I’m not sure what I feel like writ­ing about tonight, just that I feel like writ­ing. It was a hec­tic day. I woke up early to get a lit­tle bit of work done on my Shah­nameh intro­duc­tion – noth­ing new, mostly typ­ing up notes I took while I was in DC last Wednes­day – and then, after I dropped my son off at school and came back here to make myself break­fast, I rushed out to school to get some paper­work and email­ing done before my first class of the day, Asian Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture. I gave my stu­dents the assign­ment for The Joy Luck Club, which most of them have not yet fin­ished read­ing. That’s okay, though, since they will have two class peri­ods to work through the short essay ques­tions in groups before they go home to write the assign­ment up. If they don’t fin­ish the book dur­ing that time, it’s their own fault.

Teach­ing Asian Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture has been inter­est­ing. First, it’s not my field, which has meant that I’ve had to learn not just about the three eth­nic Asian com­mu­ni­ties whose lit­er­a­ture we will be read­ing – Chi­nese Amer­i­can, Fil­ipino Amer­i­can and Iran­ian Amer­i­can – but also about the field of eth­nic Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture in gen­eral. It’s nice, for a change, to be teach­ing some­thing that teaches me some­thing, but that is not actu­ally what inter­ests me tonight, sit­ting here in my office while my son goes to sleep and my wife takes a shower. The fact that I am teach­ing a course that is not in my field has started me think­ing about just what, pre­cisely, my field is. Because it’s been some time since I’ve felt like I have one.

In terms of cre­den­tials, my field is Teach­ing Eng­lish to Speak­ers of Other Lan­guages. That’s what it says on my Master’s Degree, and that cre­den­tial is largely why I was hired by the col­lege where I now teach. Indeed, I spent my first five to seven years there doing almost noth­ing else but the work of the ESL pro­gram that the insti­tu­tion was in the process of build­ing. I loved the work, though I have not taught ESL classes for some time now and don’t plan to any­time in the near future. Indeed, if I were to be com­pletely hon­est, I think going into TESOL was, in the first place, a way for me to avoid the fact that what I really wanted to do was write.

I fin­ished my TESOL MA in 1987, three years after I grad­u­ated from Stony Brook Uni­ver­sity with a dou­ble major in Eng­lish and Lin­guis­tics. In Fall 1984, right after my senior year, I enrolled in the Cre­ative Writ­ing MA at Syra­cuse Uni­ver­sity – this was before they had an MFA – where I stud­ied with Tess Gal­lagher, Philip Booth and Hay­den Car­ruth. I lasted just one year. I was 22 at the time, and I was sure that writ­ing poetry was what I wanted to do with my life. I fig­ured I’d make my liv­ing as a teacher, but it was as a writer that I intended to leave my mark. I t was not long before cir­cum­stances at Syra­cuse con­spired to make me real­ize how young I was, and how arrogant.

It was Philip Booth who sat me down towards the end of the Spring 1985 semes­ter and told me that, while I cer­tainly knew how to han­dle a line of verse, and while I also very clearly knew my way around a sen­tence, there was not yet a real cen­ter to my work, no set of con­cerns out of which my poetry grew. That absence, he sug­gested, would make it very hard to write the the­sis – a book of poetry – that I would have to write in my sec­ond year. What I needed, he said, was to live a lit­tle bit and there was just no get­ting around the fact that liv­ing would take time. So why didn’t I take some time away from school, he offered, and see what that did to my writ­ing. Mr. Booth’s words – I never got to the point where I felt com­fort­able call­ing him Philip – meant a great deal to me, and if I had to say now what I learned from them it would be that you don’t have to go to school to become a writer.

So I went to my grad­u­ate advi­sor and told him I wanted to take a year off from school to work on my writ­ing. I was not expect­ing his response. “If you want to go com­mune with your muse,” he sneered at me (and, yes, it was a sneer), “that’s your busi­ness, but you came to school – or at least I assume you came to school – to learn some­thing and that’s not going to hap­pen sit­ting alone beneath a tree try­ing to cap­ture the wind in a song!” This was dur­ing what I have heard peo­ple refer to as The The­ory Wars, when lit­er­ary the­o­rists and cre­ative writ­ing fac­ulty were, quite lit­er­ally, at war with each other over the legit­i­macy of their dif­fer­ent pur­suits. My grad­u­ate advi­sor was clearly in the the­o­rists’ camp, and I guess I have him to thank that not only did I take time off from Syra­cuse, but also that I never went back. I think I have led a much more inter­est­ing life than if I’d stayed at Syra­cuse and got­ten my MA, though it is also true that if I’d known then what I know now about acad­e­mia, and if I’d known then that I would end up as an aca­d­e­mic, I might have made very dif­fer­ent choices.

I haven’t been writ­ing and it hurts; it’s a tight­ness in my chest and a twist in my gut, and there is a part of me that wants to scream. Well, maybe not scream, but at least to grunt, let out some excla­ma­tion of frus­tra­tion that I have not been mak­ing poems, and I have not been work­ing – or only recently started work­ing again – on the fore­word I need to write for the trans­la­tion of the begin­ning of Shah­nameh that has been sit­ting on my desk more or less com­pleted for the last cou­ple of months. The other day, while I was wait­ing in a hotel lobby in Wash­ing­ton DC for a friend to call, I was able to get just a lit­tle bit of work done on that intro­duc­tion, but it wasn’t writ­ing. I was tak­ing notes on a book that has been sit­ting on my shelf for at least a month wait­ing for me to read it. It’s an inter­li­brary loan, and I am sure it is very, very over­due. (I find it funny that they abbre­vi­ate inter­li­brary loan ILL; when­ever I get an email telling me that a book I have requested has arrived, the sub­ject head­ing is some­thing like “Your ILL Request,” and it just makes me smile. I have a strange sense of humor that way.) Any­way, I was tak­ing notes on this book and just that lit­tle bit of work made me so happy. Because it was my work, not for school, not to make money, but just the work that I do, or one kind of work that I do, to make my life mean­ing­ful, to make mean­ing­ful and beau­ti­ful things to send out into the world.

The book is called Fer­dowsi: A Crit­i­cal Biog­ra­phy, and it’s by A. Sha­pur Shah­bazi. Fer­dowsi is the pen name of the poet who wrote Shah­nameh, an epic poem of about 50,000 cou­plets that tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran, from the nation’s mythopo­etic begin­nings to the moment right before the Arab Mus­lim con­quest in the 7^th cen­tury CE. Shah­nameh is often called Iran’s national epic, and for good rea­son. Not only do the sto­ries in the poem still res­onate in Iran­ian cul­ture, in ways that few poems or poets do in the West, but as the Ger­man scholar B. Spuler puts it in the excerpt of his work that Shah­bazi uses as an epi­graph to the book:

In the last analy­sis it was The Shah-nama […] that became the mile­stone for the self-affirmation of the Iran­ian iden­tity. [T]he impor­tance of the poems of Fer­dowsi (and sub­se­quently of later poets) for the preser­va­tion of the Iran­ian char­ac­ter can in no way be over­es­ti­mated. They pro­vided the entire Iran­ian folk – nobles, towns­peo­ple, arti­sans and peas­ants – with that “Ira­ni­an­ness” which despite all social dif­fer­ences united them, per­fectly mir­rored their image, and allowed them to iden­tify them­selves as fully and totally Iranian.

The book is called “a crit­i­cal biog­ra­phy,” at least in part because Shah­bazi arrives at his under­stand­ing of Ferdowsi’s life through a crit­i­cal read­ing of Shah­nameh. The poet left no note­books, no mem­oir and the infor­ma­tion that we have about his life from out­side the epic, as Shah­bazi shows, is entirely apoc­ryphal. Indeed, an inter­est­ing ques­tion raised by this book, though I doubt Shah­bazi intended this to be the case, is whether and why we ought to pre­fer a truth­ful account­ing of a great writer’s life to the myths and leg­ends that grow up around him, espe­cially when the work he is famous for is as impor­tant to a nation’s cul­tural iden­tity as Shah­nameh.

So, for exam­ple, the tra­di­tional story of the poem’s com­po­si­tion has the peas­ant Fer­dowsi labor­ing for 25 years to write the poem, hop­ing to earn from it a dowry for his daugh­ter. When, through the good offices of an inter­me­di­ary, he presents the poem to Sul­tan Mah­mud of Gazna, how­ever, the intermediary’s ene­mies among the Sultan’s advis­ers con­vince the ruler that the poem really is not worth all that much, espe­cially since Fer­dowsi is a Shi­ite and there­fore a heretic. Tak­ing his advis­ers’ advice, the Sul­tan pays Fer­dowsi only 50,000 pieces of sil­ver, not gold, an amount which Fer­dowsi sees as an insult. So, instead of tak­ing the pay­ment for him­self, he divides the money between two peo­ple who have served him. He then flees to another ruler’s court, where he attacks the Sul­tan in a satire of which only a small num­ber of lines sur­vive. Even­tu­ally, he returns home, though he con­tin­ues to live in con­stant fear of the Sultan.

One day, some­thing hap­pens in Mahmud’s court that reveals to him the great­ness of Ferdowsi’s poem, and he repents of his ear­lier to deci­sion to under­pay the man. So the Sul­tan sends along with a suit­able apol­ogy, 60,000 gold coins, a 10,000 coin increase over the amount Fer­dowsi had orig­i­nally expected. Just as the couri­ers arrive with the money, how­ever, Ferdowsi’s corpse is being car­ried out of his house so he can be buried. Ferdwosi’s daugh­ter, accord­ing to this story, refuses the Sultan’s money, and so it is used to repair a local hostelry.

Shah­bazi shows that this story is com­pletely false. It is now gen­er­ally accepted, he points out, that Fer­dowsi was not a peas­ant, was never in Sul­tan Mahmud’s court and never had a daugh­ter. Yet which story is bet­ter, which one should be the story about Fer­dowsi that gets told? The one I have just told you, or the truth: that Fer­dowsi was a mem­ber of the landed gen­try, that he com­posed the Shah­nameh while liv­ing on his own income, that he had a son who died at a young age. It’s easy enough to say that what really mat­ters is the truth, but the lessons in the apoc­ryphal story are also truths that are impor­tant to tell and the way that Fer­dowsi and his daugh­ter behave when con­fronted with the dif­fer­ent pay­ments from the Sul­tan embody val­ues it is worth emu­lat­ing, or at least hon­or­ing. I’m not sug­gest­ing that we should accept false­hoods as his­tory, but one of the things I like about Shahbazai’s book is how the false­hoods become part of the his­tory, part of Ferdowsi’s biog­ra­phy, even as he (Shah­bazi) claims to be arriv­ing at as accu­rate a fac­tual biog­ra­phy of Fer­dowsi as can be gleaned from the text of the Shah­nameh itself.

But I started writ­ing about how painful it is to be not to be writ­ing, which is ironic, of course, because I am writ­ing this blog post, and I will admit that sit­ting here in my bed, half lis­ten­ing to the TV pro­gram my son is watch­ing in the next room, peck­ing away at these keys is mak­ing me feel bet­ter. Except that my foot is start­ing to hurt with the onset of another gout attack. I’ve been in the mid­dle of one now for a cou­ple of days, the result of hav­ing lost a decent amount of weight in a short period of time because of a liver detox­i­fi­ca­tion reg­i­men my doc­tor put me on. The pain is start­ing to dis­tract me and so I have lost track of where I wanted to take this blog post next, but it does make me think about the degree to which writ­ing seems to reduce the pain. Or, since I am sure it does not actu­ally reduce it, the way writ­ing is able to take my mind away from the pain, and so I am won­der­ing about the con­nec­tion between the pain I feel when I am not writ­ing, the pain of my gout, and the way writ­ing seems to alle­vi­ate both.

I think it was in Elaine Scarry’s book The Body In Pain that I read about how peo­ple expe­ri­ence pain as some­thing alien, some­thing other, some­thing not of the body. Which is ironic, of course, since it is the body that is in pain. The prepo­si­tion is sig­nif­i­cant. Metaphor­i­cally, it sug­gests that pain is some­thing phys­i­cal we can be in, like a lake, or a car, or the world; and yet, if Scarry is cor­rect, and if I under­stand her – or my mem­ory of what she wrote – cor­rectly, we expe­ri­ence pain as some­thing inside of us that we need to get out of us, some­thing that can­not be inte­grated into who we are. It can be forced on us, as in tor­ture – and the first part of Scarry’s book is a dis­cus­sion of tor­ture – but it is not some­thing that we can inte­grate, that we can make a part of our­selves, the way we make plea­sur­able sen­sa­tions wel­come within us, make them part of who we are in the world.

Lan­guage (I think this is Scarry too) is not just the one way we can give pain mean­ing – lan­guage, after all, is how we give every­thing mean­ing – but it is the only way we can make the real­ity of our pain com­pre­hen­si­ble to some­one else. Indeed, per­haps on some level we need to make our pain com­pre­hen­si­ble in ways that we don’t need to do with our plea­sures. After all, it is – at least for me – per­fectly pos­si­ble to keep one’s plea­sures entirely pri­vate, not to name them, and still find them immensely sat­is­fy­ing. It is not that way with pain. To deal with pain, espe­cially but not only emo­tional and psy­cho­log­i­cal pain, I need com­mu­nity; I need to be able to tell some­one, and while I some­times may be the only one I tell by writ­ing about it, that is never an entirely sat­is­fac­tory solu­tion. I need to know there is some­one else who under­stands me or who has at least tried to under­stand me.

And so I won­der about the degree to which com­mu­nity, the human need for com­mu­nity and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, is rooted in pain, and I won­der if the pain I feel when I don’t write is my body remind­ing me to reach out, that I need to reach out. Because that is what I do when I write. No mat­ter how deeply inter­nal and per­sonal and inte­rior the moti­va­tion to write may be, no mat­ter how soli­tary the act of writ­ing is, every­thing I write is also an invi­ta­tion to com­mu­nity the goal of which is not so dif­fer­ent from the way Spuler describes the Shah­nameh as being “the mile­stone for the self-affirmation of the Iran­ian iden­tity.” Some­times, espe­cially when I feel like no one reads what I write, that thought fills me with a deep sad­ness, because I know I will keep writ­ing any­way, even if no one else ever reads a word I put down on the page. Now, though, I am filled instead with a giddy hope­ful­ness, and that makes me happy.

I think this speaks for itself: http://​www​.tonight​showwith​co​nanobrien​.com/​v​i​d​e​o​/​c​l​i​p​s​/​s​h​a​t​n​e​r​-​d​o​e​s​-​p​a​l​i​n​-​0​7​2​7​0​9​/​1​1​3​9​6​65/. (I am sorry, but I don’t know how to embed this video from the NBC website.)

Two days ago, I received a let­ter from Milk­weed Edi­tions reject­ing my sec­ond book of poems, which is called All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown. In explain­ing his deci­sion, the edi­tor wrote, “Although I rec­og­nize here an orig­i­nal and com­pelling per­sona, I felt that the pre­pon­der­ance of first-person poems with an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal slant lim­ited the poten­tial appeal.” In other words, if I under­stand him cor­rectly, he thinks that the first-person nar­ra­tives dom­i­nat­ing the book will make it hard both to sell and to get a decent level of crit­i­cal atten­tion. Whether or not that is true, his per­cep­tion of the man­u­script is accu­rate – it is made up almost entirely of first-person nar­ra­tives – and, given that accu­racy, if he can­not find within his own aes­thetic sense and/or his sense of where poetry is these days and/or his sense of the mar­ket enough enthu­si­asm for pub­lish­ing my book, I think his rejec­tion is a fair and rea­son­able one. It’s also ironic, because CavanKerry Press, pub­lisher of my first book of poems, The Silence Of Men, rejected All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown because there was not enough of an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal slant. “I’ve seen this a lot,” CKP’s pub­lisher told me. “A poet whose first book is deeply per­sonal will often write a sec­ond book that is just the oppo­site. You’ve writ­ten a good book; it’s just too imper­sonal for our list.” This rejec­tion (more irony here) also seems to me to have been fair and rea­son­able. For while All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown is, to me, deeply per­sonal and auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal, it pos­sesses and explores those char­ac­ter­is­tics dif­fer­ently than The Silence Of Men does, and if CKP’s list is slanted towards the kinds of poems that are in The Silence Of Men, then it makes sense that CKP would also reject my sec­ond book.

I have a lot of respect for the work that small press edi­tors and pub­lish­ers do, not just because it is so often un– or under­paid work – which it is, and which is some­thing that any writer who deals with them needs to under­stand and appre­ci­ate – but also because pub­lish­ing books requires a com­mit­ment to under­stand­ing, artic­u­lat­ing and either implic­itly or explic­itly defend­ing one’s own aes­thetic sense in a highly sat­u­rated and com­pet­i­tive mar­ket­place. Espe­cially when it comes to poetry. Some­times it seems to me that every­one and her or his aunt or uncle in the United States thinks that he or she is a poet whose work the world absolutely must have between the cov­ers of a book or burned onto a CD or DVD. More to the point – at least in my expe­ri­ence – more than a few of the peo­ple who think this way haven’t read (or at least write like they haven’t read) a sin­gle book of con­tem­po­rary poetry. To be a small press edi­tor and/or pub­lisher in this kind of envi­ron­ment is to sub­mit one­self to a mind-numbing onslaught of lan­guage, which takes a level of com­mit­ment that most lit­er­ary peo­ple I know, includ­ing myself, can­not and will not make; and that com­mit­ment ought to com­mand our respect, even when it means that a given pub­lisher decides not to pub­lish a book we have written.

Please don’t mis­un­der­stand me. I think any­one who wants to write poetry should write poetry. The impulse towards poetic expres­sion is a pow­er­ful one; wit­ness the way peo­ple turn to poetry in times of dif­fi­culty, from per­sonal tragedies like the death of a loved one to national tragedies like the Sep­tem­ber 11^th attacks. More­over, the good that poetry does for the peo­ple who write it, and for the peo­ple who read it, what­ever kind of poetry it is, is not some­thing that can be mea­sured by either the dol­lars and cents that a pub­lisher com­mits to putting a book out or the unpaid hours that the poet sweats through try­ing to make her or his lines bespeak the par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence he or she wants to com­mu­ni­cate. Still, there is a dif­fer­ence – actu­ally, there are prob­a­bly many dif­fer­ences – between being some­one who writes poems and some­one who wants to pub­lish books of poetry, not the least of which is that once you decide you want to pub­lish books of poetry, you have made the deci­sion to treat your work as a com­mod­ity. You have entered, whether you like it or not, the world of (usu­ally very small) busi­ness; and so I have to con­fess that the let­ter from Milk­weed Edi­tions is one I should never have received. Instead, I should have writ­ten to them and with­drawn All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown from con­sid­er­a­tion because a third press had already agreed to pub­lish it.

I didn’t con­tact Milk­weed because I’d allowed my record-keeping to become sloppy and so I’d actu­ally for­got­ten I’d sub­mit­ted the book to them; and so I am relieved that Milk­weed rejected my book, since it means I do not have to deal with the awk­ward­ness of hav­ing to choose between two very fine pub­lish­ers. The world of small presses is not like the world of com­mer­cial pub­lish­ers, where the bid­ding war that can result from hav­ing more than one edi­tor eager to pub­lish your book can be a very good thing. There is not enough money in the small press world to make such a bid­ding war pos­si­ble. I may have only a ver­bal com­mit­ment from the press that has accepted All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown–which is why I am not nam­ing that press in this post; our agree­ment will not be offi­cial until I have a con­tract, and a lot can hap­pen between a hand­shake and a con­tract – but pre­cisely because of the aes­thetic and other kinds of un– or under­paid edi­to­r­ial com­mit­ments I was talk­ing about above, the ver­bal com­mit­ment I have with this press means some­thing to me, and so it is a com­mit­ment that I want, all else being equal, to honor. If all goes accord­ing to plan, I will be very proud to pub­lish my book with this press, as I would have been proud to pub­lish with Milk­weed, or with CavanKerry Press. But here’s the final irony: The press that accepted my book did so for pre­cisely the rea­sons that Milk­weed rejected it, because of “the pre­pon­der­ance of first-person poems with an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal slant,” which the edi­tor feels will help to gar­ner All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown some seri­ous crit­i­cal atten­tion, while at the same time mak­ing the book some­thing that peo­ple will want to buy. Go figure.

Got this from Andrew Sul­li­van, where it is attrib­uted to Kar­roubi, one of the oppo­si­tion can­di­dates in Iran’s recent election:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEfk1lDImMI&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

Here’s the translation:

1 (Girl in street): Defend­ing civil rights
2 (Boy next to old man): Coun­ter­bal­anc­ing poverty/deprivation
3 (Boy push­ing away dona­tion box): Nation­al­iz­ing oil income
4 (Man stand­ing on rooftop): Reduc­ing ten­sion in inter­na­tional affairs
5 (Boy sit­ting next to satel­lite dishes): Free access to infor­ma­tion
6 (Girl sit­ting besides her mother): Sup­port­ing sin­gle moth­ers
7 (Girl with cast): Knock down vio­lence against women
8 (Boy): Edu­ca­tion for all
9 (Boy infront of man lock­ing car): Increas­ing pub­lic safety
10 (Girl on rooftop): Eth­nic and reli­gious minor­ity rights
11 (Man on rooftop): Sup­port­ing NGOs
12 (Girl in front of wall): Pub­lic involve­ment
13 (Boy and girl): We have come for change
14: Change for Iran

Now, a cam­paign ad is a cam­paign ad, and it’s very easy to be cyn­i­cal about them. Just imag­ine for a minute, though, in the con­text of Iran, how chutz­padik–it’s a Yid­dish word mean­ing auda­cious, ballsy, and it’s the only one that fit my response to see­ing the ad – it was for an Iran­ian politi­cian to say he wants to accom­plish these things; and notice as well the promi­nence given to two issues related specif­i­cally to women’s status.

So I thought I was going to start my series on clas­si­cal Iran­ian poetry with Shah­nameh, Iran’s national epic, because it is what I am work­ing on right now, but Pres­i­dent Obama’s video­taped Nowruz mes­sage to Iran, in which he quotes the 13^th cen­tury poet Sa’di, has forced me to change my plans. Those lines, The chil­dren of Adam are limbs to each other/having been cre­ated of one essence, are among the most famous lines of poetry in the world, though few in the United States have ever heard them. They are inscribed on the wall of the Hall of Nations in the UN build­ing in New York City, and the sen­ti­ment they express, which you find through­out Gulis­tan, the book from which they are excerpted, helped in 16^th cen­tury to cat­alyze a sea change in the way Chris­t­ian Europe viewed Mus­lims and Islamic cul­ture, from one that was gov­erned by the mutual hatred of the Cru­sades to one that accepted as real the pos­si­bil­ity that Mus­lims were no less human, and believed in human­is­tic val­ues no less strongly, than the Chris­t­ian Euro­peans themselves.

Before I talk about the lines Obama quoted, how­ever (I will have more to say about Sa’di and the rest of his work in another post) I want to acknowl­edge the impor­tance of the mes­sage itself, not just because he sent it – and if you don’t know much about US-Iranian rela­tions beyond the facts of what we called the hostage cri­sis and the after­math of the Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion, you might not real­ize just how sig­nif­i­cant the sim­ple fact of send­ing such a mes­sage is – but also because of how he said what he said. First, the message:

I am going to assume that most of what I have to say about this has already been said else­where on the web, but since it sets a con­text for talk­ing about the poetry that Pres­i­dent Obama quoted, I want to say it any­way. First, note that he says he wants to speak directly to the lead­ers and peo­ple of the Islamic Repub­lic of Iran, sig­nal­ing that he con­sid­ers the country’s cur­rent lead­er­ship legit­i­mate and they are the peo­ple with whom he needs to talk about resolv­ing the dif­fer­ences between our two nations. Note as well, how­ever, that he has cho­sen to send this mes­sage on the occa­sion of Nowruz (also here and here), the Iran­ian New Year, a hol­i­day that is dis­tinctly not Mus­lim – it is Zoroas­trian and there­fore rooted in the tra­di­tions of pre-Islamic Iran – and that the Islamic Repub­lic has on occa­sion sug­gested it would like to replace with an Islamic hol­i­day. Indeed, the Islamic Repub­lic actively pur­sues the dele­git­imiz­ing of Iran’s pre-Islamic past on a num­ber of fronts, one of which was an attempt after the 1979 rev­o­lu­tion to dis­credit Fer­dowsi, the author of Shah­nameh and Shah­nameh itself.

When I was in Iran this past sum­mer, to give you an exam­ple I saw with my own eyes, we vis­ited the ruins of Perse­po­lis (also spelled Per­spo­lis, which is closer to how the word is pro­nounced in Per­sian), which was built by Dar­ius I in 518 CE and was the cap­i­tal of the Achaemenid Empire. One of the most remark­able things I learned when we were there was that doc­u­ments found in the trea­sury indi­cated that the ancient Iran­ian kings not only had some­thing like what we would call work­ers com­pen­sa­tion for their employ­ees, but also poli­cies that per­mit­ted men to have paid leave from work when their wives were preg­nant so they could help out at home. On the wall of the build­ing that was prob­a­bly the harem, how­ever, and which is now a museum dis­play­ing arti­facts found on the site, there is a procla­ma­tion issued by the gov­ern­ment of Iran assert­ing that, while it is of course won­der­ful that peo­ple can come to see the great works God made it pos­si­ble for the ancient Iran­ian kings to pro­duce, we should not for­get that they were tyran­ni­cal despots who exploited their peo­ple, the clear impli­ca­tion being and that it has only been through the Islamic Repub­lic that Ira­ni­ans have found true free­dom. (Other evi­dence of the essen­tially humane nature of the ancient Iran­ian kings also exists, but since that is not the point of this post, I will allow the irony in what I have just writ­ten to speak for itself.)

Whether or not Per­si­dent Obama was aware of the irony of send­ing his mes­sage to the Islamic Repub­lic on Nowruz, I don’t know, but like most well-constructed ironies this one can be read two ways, either as evi­dence that he didn’t know what he was doing and that his mes­sage will there­fore fall on deaf ears, or that he knew pre­cisely what he was doing and was send­ing the Islamic Repub­lic the mes­sage that while he intends to do busi­ness with them as the legit­i­mate polit­i­cal lead­ers of Iran, that does not mean he will kow­tow to the world view they would like to impose on the peo­ple of their nation. My own sense, though, is that it doesn’t mat­ter whether or not Obama and his peo­ple knew any­thing about what I have just writ­ten; the prac­ti­cal effect of his mes­sage, specif­i­cally his appeal to the com­mon humanty that binds us as the con­text within which to talk about the dif­fer­ences between us, puts the Islamic Repub­lic on notice that they can­not depend on the US being an easy enemy any­more – by which I mean an enemy they can eas­ily avoid talk­ing to because we fit very neatly into the “enemy” slot in their rhetoric, which is where the Bush admin­is­tra­tion kept us firmly ensconced for the eight years they were in power.

More to the point, Obama’s mes­sage, includ­ing his brief quote from the poet Sa’di, had to have spo­ken very pow­er­fully to the Iran­ian peo­ple, first because the mes­sage of shared human­ity is one they have heard all too rarely from the US not only in the last eight years, but ever. From long before the US and British spon­sored coup in 1953 that unseated Moham­mad Mossadeq, the duly elected prime min­is­ter of Iran, so that they could rein­state Shah Moham­mad Reza Pahlavi (the NY Times report is here; and an allegedly unedited ver­sion of the CIA report is here) – all pretty clearly in the inter­est of retain­ing access to and con­trol over Iran’s oil – Ira­ni­ans have seen their aspi­ra­tions for democ­racy thwarted time and time again by out­side influ­ences. To the degree that Pres­i­dent Obama is seri­ously comm­nit­ted to engag­ing Iran on equal terms – by which I mean in a way that respects and hon­ors the inte­grty of their much-much-older-than-ours cul­ture, his­tory and even their pol­i­tics (a sub­ject that is far more com­pli­cated than almost any report­ing I have ever seen done on the sub­ject here in the States – and I am cer­tainly no expert) – and to the degree that he can demon­strate that com­mit­ment with con­crete action, he is com­mit­ting the United States to a rad­i­cal change not only in the way we deal with Iran polit­i­cally, but also in how we see Iran more broadly – since, after all, the way our media cov­ers Iran will absolutely fol­low the stance our polit­i­cal lead­ers take towards Iran. (As an aside: I was very sur­prised by how many of the Ira­ni­ans I met when I was there this past sum­mer think that the aver­age Amer­i­can thinks they are all some ver­sion of what is meant by the phrase “anti-American ter­ror­ist.” They see how they and their coun­try are por­trayed here; and they – not the gov­ern­ment, but every­day peo­ple – despair of ever being seen by us on their own terms.)

The other rea­son that Obama’s use of lines by Sa’di would have res­onated very pow­er­fully with the Iran­ian peo­ple is the degree to which Sa’di and his work is loved and revered in Iran­ian cul­ture to this day. I will write more about Sa’di in a future post. For now, suf­fice it to say that his posi­tion in the Iran­ian lit­er­ary canon is not unlike Shakespeare’s place in our own. More to the point, Iran is a cul­ture that loves its poets and its poetry; it is hard for peo­ple in the US, where poetry is so lit­tle appre­ci­ated unless it is couched in the melodies of pop­u­lar song, to imag­ine the degree to which poetry is a liv­ing part of the cul­ture in Iran. One very rough anal­ogy might be to think about some­one like the early Bob Dylan and how pop­u­lar his songs were – and maybe still are – in pro­gres­sive cir­cles and then expand that pop­u­lar­ity to include pretty much the entire pop­u­la­tion of the United States, and not just because peo­ple liked his tunes, but because they iden­ti­fied with the way he spoke truth to power; and then imag­ine Bob Dylan’s words not just as part of every child’s school­ing, but as the pri­mary text used to teach peo­ple how to read English.

As I said in my intro­duc­tory post, I am not an expert on Iran­ian lit­er­a­ture, and so I make no claim that what I have just told you about Sa’di is 100% accu­rate and up-to-date – indeed, it’s fas­ci­nat­ing to learn the degree to which Sa’di’s rep­u­ta­tion has risen and fallen depend­ing on the polit­i­cal cli­mate in Iran – but I think my anal­ogy is gen­er­ally true. More­over, it is indis­putably true that there is a long tra­di­tion in Iran, and other coun­tries in that region, such as Pak­istan, of poets being the peo­ple who speak truth to power. In fact, the lines from Sa’di that Obama quoted, won­der­fully lib­eral and human­is­tic as they are, come from a story in Gulis­tan that is far more rad­i­cal, cer­tainly for the time it was writ­ten, than those two lines would sug­gest. Here is the full story, though I am now going to switch to my own trans­la­tion. It’s the tenth story in the first chap­ter, “Pade­sha­han” (“Kings”), in Gulis­tan. First, though, some vocabulary:

• A darvish (dervish in Eng­lish) was a kind of wan­der­ing men­di­cant, and they were usu­ally Sufi and con­sid­ered holy men.
• The Propeht Yahia is John the Baptist.

Story 10

An Arab king who was noto­ri­ous for his cru­elty came on a pil­grim­age to the cathe­dral mosque of Dam­as­cus, where he offered the fol­low­ing prayer, clearly seek­ing God’s assis­tance in a mat­ter of some urgency:

“The darvish, poor, own­ing noth­ing, the man
whose money buys him any­thing he wants,
here, on this floor, enslaved, we are equals.
Nonethe­less, the man who has the most
comes before You bear­ing the greater need.”

When the king was done pray­ing, he noticed me immersed in my own prayers at the head of the prophet Yahia’s tomb. The monarch turned to me, “I know that God favors you darvishes because you are pas­sion­ate in your wor­ship and hon­est in the way you live your lives. I fear a pow­er­ful enemy, but if you add your prayers to mine, I am sure that God will pro­tect me for your sake.”

“Have mercy on the weak among your own peo­ple,” I replied, “and no one will be able to defeat you.”

To break each of a poor man’s ten fin­gers
just because you have the strength offends God.
Show com­pas­sion to those who fall before you,
and oth­ers will extend their hands when you are down.

The man who plants bad seed hal­lu­ci­nates
if he expects sweet fruit at har­vest time.
Take the cot­ton from your ears! Give
your peo­ple jus­tice before jus­tice finds you.

All men and women are to each other
the limbs of a sin­gle body, each of us drawn
from life’s shim­mer­ing essence, God’s per­fect pearl;
and when this life we share wounds one of us,
all share the hurt as if it were our own.
You, who will not feel another’s pain,
you for­feit the right to be called human.

Because I plan to write more about Sa’di in a future post, I am going to let this story speak for itself, except for two things: First, given that Sa’di lived in a monar­chy, con­sider how much courage it would take to say such things to a king who had the power of live and death over you. Sec­ond, con­sider how rad­i­cal it would be in a monar­chy to sug­gest to the king that he should rule as if he and the weak­est of his sub­jects were actu­ally part of the same body – the metaphor is a good deal more com­plext than you might think on a first read­ing – and then con­sider the ways in which that metaphor res­onates today, not only in coun­tries like Iran, with gov­ern­ments that are in many ways hos­tile to their own peo­ple, but even in our own nation, where our gov­ern­ment is sup­posed to be “of the peo­ple, by the peo­ple and for the people.”

My next post, unless some­thing else hap­pens to dis­tract me, will be about