Notes On A Postcard From The Other America
They named their dog after Jean Genet, who was a sex criminal and left-wing radical. Charming. It turns out that Zambreno is heavily pregnant, which understandably makes traveling with a dog on one’s lap difficult. But it appears that she and her partner are motoring through Mordor:
I had to re-read that twice to make sure I understood. Ordinary people looked upon her with sympathy, not suspicion … and this pissed her off?! What kind of person responds to the kind glances of strangers like that?
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Read the whole thing. Or not. You’re not missing much if you don’t. I find it fascinating, and not in a point-and-mock way. What’s most interesting about it, at least to me, is not that a Brooklyn-based feminist writer believes these things about the country in which she lives, but that a magazine of some prestige finds worth printing the ranting of a woman so fragile that the sympathetic gaze of Middle Americans upsets her, and contributes to her “rage against provincial minds and Catholicism.” Kate Zambreno is not a marginal figure; she’s someone whose work is reviewed in major literary and cultural publications. Seriously, when you get past the hothouse-flower freakshow qualities of the boutique jeremiad, the more fascinating question is: Is this how the people in the American literary and academic establishment see the rest of us?
Or, to be more precise: Even if they don’t share Kate Zambreno’s extreme opinion, are they the kind of people who think that this construal of America as a Boschian hellscape filled with ogres who gorge themselves at The Golden Corral and then gape sweetly at pregnant strangers — do they think this is normal? That it has anything to do with the country as it is?
I think the answer is yes. Which explains the Fukishima-level meltdown they’ve had in the face of the Trump tsunami. I know regular readers think I’m virtue-signaling when I say repeatedly that I didn’t vote for Trump, but I only point that out because a lot of people come to this blog via social media links, and they don’t know where I stood during the campaign. So: I didn’t vote for Trump, but most of the people in my state did, and it was easy for me to understand why, even if I didn’t share their judgment. If you ask me, the best thing someone who wants to be a real writer can do is to get the hell out of Brooklyn and all these other culturally progressive bantustans that train your mind to think that unfashionable Ohioans at the rest stop who try to comfort a pregnant stranger in distress with a kind glance are the Enemy.
They named their dog after Jean Genet, who was a sex criminal and left-wing radical. Charming. It turns out that Zambreno is heavily pregnant, which understandably makes traveling with a dog on one’s lap difficult. But it appears that she and her partner are motoring through Mordor:
I have never been so sick in my life of public bathrooms—of wiping down seats, of the cheap toilet paper that gets stuck in your pubic hair, of waddling my uncomfortable strange body through doors, the same fast-food chains, everything almost identical. What slightly disturbed me on this trip was the amused or adoring or concerned gaze I received from so many strangers—who saw me as a very pregnant and sweaty woman in a short cotton dress with her little black dog, who saw me as very much a woman, an impending mother, something both visible and totally unthreatening, not the usual suspicious looks we sometimes got as city people in small Midwestern towns. I didn’t like it.
I had to re-read that twice to make sure I understood. Ordinary people looked upon her with sympathy, not suspicion … and this pissed her off?! What kind of person responds to the kind glances of strangers like that?
[clip]
Read the whole thing. Or not. You’re not missing much if you don’t. I find it fascinating, and not in a point-and-mock way. What’s most interesting about it, at least to me, is not that a Brooklyn-based feminist writer believes these things about the country in which she lives, but that a magazine of some prestige finds worth printing the ranting of a woman so fragile that the sympathetic gaze of Middle Americans upsets her, and contributes to her “rage against provincial minds and Catholicism.” Kate Zambreno is not a marginal figure; she’s someone whose work is reviewed in major literary and cultural publications. Seriously, when you get past the hothouse-flower freakshow qualities of the boutique jeremiad, the more fascinating question is: Is this how the people in the American literary and academic establishment see the rest of us?
Or, to be more precise: Even if they don’t share Kate Zambreno’s extreme opinion, are they the kind of people who think that this construal of America as a Boschian hellscape filled with ogres who gorge themselves at The Golden Corral and then gape sweetly at pregnant strangers — do they think this is normal? That it has anything to do with the country as it is?
I think the answer is yes. Which explains the Fukishima-level meltdown they’ve had in the face of the Trump tsunami. I know regular readers think I’m virtue-signaling when I say repeatedly that I didn’t vote for Trump, but I only point that out because a lot of people come to this blog via social media links, and they don’t know where I stood during the campaign. So: I didn’t vote for Trump, but most of the people in my state did, and it was easy for me to understand why, even if I didn’t share their judgment. If you ask me, the best thing someone who wants to be a real writer can do is to get the hell out of Brooklyn and all these other culturally progressive bantustans that train your mind to think that unfashionable Ohioans at the rest stop who try to comfort a pregnant stranger in distress with a kind glance are the Enemy.
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