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February 29, 2008

When He Was Lonely, He Thought of Death

I really wish I were in Tucson today, not just because it's beautiful and warm--it's supposed to be 80 degrees, mostly sunny, with 0% chance of precipitation--but because tonight the University of Arizona Poetry Center has arranged a memorial tribute for my dear friend and mentor Jon Anderson.

Jon died last October, and when I got news of his death, I wanted to write a blog entry, but I was just too busy. So now, while there's an appropriate moment, I want to say something about why this man was dear to me.

I met Jon in the fall of 1982, when I enrolled in his intermediate poetry class as a sophomore. I took the class because a friend told me I had to study with Jon--he was the best poet and the best teacher on the faculty. That is as may be; I feel lucky to have worked with almost all my teachers, who were, by and large, extremely talented and generous people.

But there was indeed something special about Jon. For one thing, he was so goofy and disorganized. I admit I found him alarming at times--he was a mess in many ways, not just disorganized but slovenly. Our class met once a week-- Tuesdays, I think--at 3:30 in the afternoon; Jon would show up and tell us, as if we couldn't see for ourselves, that he had just gotten out bed. (Back in the early 80s, people wore surgical scrubs as pjs a lot--not fancy ones, just the mint green kind. They worked well for that. Jon would show up to class in a pair of ratty 501s and a scrub top.) But one thing he said that first semester truly raised my eyebrows, and I will remember it my entire life.

At that time, Arizona's two senators were Barry Goldwater, a conservative born in Phoenix, and Dennis DeConcini, a liberal born in Tucson, which is how things used to break down: Phoenix was more conservative; Tucson more liberal. (Neither of Arizona's current senators, McCain or Kyl, were born in Arizona. This makes people like me parents--and me, frankly, even though I don't even live in Arizona right now--a bit skeptical of them.) Anyway, DeConcini is who matters in all this.

One Friday night Jon's young son Bodhi (short for Bodhisattva) had a friend stay over. In the middle of the night, the neighbors had some kind of domestic disturbance that required calling the cops. These two little boys--ten or so--thought it was great that the cops were around because it gave them a chance to be bad in front of authority figures who couldn't do a thing to them, and their way of being bad was to stand in the yard and chant, over and over,

Dennis DeConcini
had a 50 foot weenie;
he showed it to the woman next door.
She thought it was a snake,
and hit it with a rake,
and now it's only five foot four.

Jon told us all this! I was an 18-year-old Mormon, sitting in my seat, going, "Who the hell are these people?" But it's been almost 26 years since I heard that rhyme and I've never forgotten it; unless I get Alzheimer's, I'm pretty sure I never will.

I took five or six other classes with him throughout my undergrad and MFA coursework. I went to see him after my mission and he did something extremely generous and important: He read the poems I gave him and said, "Oh god, these really are good. I was worried that I was remembering your work as better than it really was because I like you. But these really are good. So here's the thing: You need to start calling yourself a poet. Don't say, 'I write poetry;' say, 'I'm a poet.' Because you are a poet." It was things like that that made me loyal and devoted to him, and willing to show up at his office hours--which some semesters he would have on Fridays at 6:30 p.m., to discourage anyone from showing up; but ever dutiful when it came to school work, I'd go anyway.

This is not to say he was always enthusiastic about my work; he said he got tired of reading all my poems about my mission, or "White Mormon Girl Visits Land of Inscrutables," as he put it. Once when I wrote another poem on just that topic and submitted it in workshop, he waited until everyone had commented on the poem, then glared at me across the table--he was seated at the head, I was at the foot--and said, "I despise this poem." That pretty much ended discussion.

After I graduated, I knew better than to ask him to keep in touch, so I'd just send him cryptic postcards (back in the day before email) every so often, because even if he would make no gesture to remain in my life, I wanted to feel that he was, somehow, still a part of my life. I quit that after too long, particularly when he told me that the postcards worried him--I felt sort of guilty for making him worry when his own life was so out of control (and it was).

In a forms class I had with him as an undergrad, he gave us the assignment to write our own epitaph, and he even provided a model: his own, which he said he wanted to be

Here lies Jon
All gone

I fairly copied that, writing

Here lies Holly
By Golly

But I don't want to end with that. I want to end with my favorite poem by him, the one that's probably best known and most often anthologized. I realize I'm violating copyright here, but I'll try to mitigate that by telling everyone to go buy one of his books.

The Secret of Poetry

When I was lonely, I thought of death.
When I thought of death I was lonely.

I supposed this error will continue.
I shall enter each gray morning

Delighted by frost, which is death,
& the trees that stand alone in mist.

When I met my wife I was lonely.
Our child in her body is lonely.

I suppose this error will go on & on.
Mornings I kiss my wife's cold lips,

Nights her body, dripping with mist.
This is the error that fascinates.

I suppose you are secretly lonely,
Thinking of death, thinking of love.

I'd like, please, to leave on your sill
Just one cold flower, whose beauty

Would leave you inconsolable all day.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.

Read a follow-up on the Poetry Center's Tribute to Jon here.

Posted by holly at 8:07 AM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2008

Even If Prozac Doesn't Work for Everyone, I Still Think It Helped Us All

Continued from my post yesterday.

With the clarity of educated hindsight, I can look back at my life and see that I suffered my first serious bout of depression as a young teenager--serious enough that I ended up in the hospital, though not for depression. No, I was hospitalized because of the effects depression and sadness had on my body: I lost six pints of blood--half the blood in my body--through intestinal hemorrhaging, which the doctors, after conducting a slew of tests and subjecting me to unnecessary exploratory surgery, attributed to "stress."

This being 1978, I was told I had made myself ill, and that I better make myself well, or else next time, I'd probably die. No one offered me any counseling or therapy; and so I dealt with the whole thing the only way I could, which was to become anorexic and even more obsessive and weird about religion than I'd previously been.

Somehow or another, I did get better, mostly because the hospital scared the shit out of me: I didn't want to go back there, EVER, if I could help it. If staying out of the hospital required arriving at a sounder state of mind, well, then I damn well was going to do it.

Flash-forward to my mission, where I developed what a doctor would call a case of severe depression but which I prefer to call "religious despair" or plain old heartbreak, and which, when I came home and tried to discuss, pretty much everyone dismissed.

I got my first prescription for anti-depressants on my mission, and I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to get it. (Metaphorically speaking, that is. No one dragged me to the hospital; I took the train, quite decorously. I just was coerced and cajoled into doing it even though I really didn't want to.) I didn't want medication for SO MANY REASONS, one being that I really didn't trust doctors. Another was that I felt very strongly the spiritual aspect of my despair and heartbreak; I didn't see how medication could treat the pain in my soul--and truth be told, it never did; the one drug that worked only made it able for me to sleep and stop crying long enough that *I* could do something about the pain in my soul. But at least as important as all that was that in 1986, when I got that prescription, the Prozac revolution had not occurred and depression was seen not as an illness but as a sign of moral weakness.

So there's a way in which, even if Prozac doesn't work, I feel it has been a beneficial medication for the entire planet, in that the stigma of depression and of seeking help for depression has been so profoundly lessened.

Speaking personally, and in language I know is religiously loaded, for me Prozac was a godsend and I think it may have very well saved my life. By the time I finally went on it in 1990, I'd tried about half a dozen anti-depressants, not because I wanted them but because my therapist kept insisting I needed them. They were, invariably, AWFUL--most of them exacerbated rather than mitigated the effects of depression. Good lord.... I remember one made me feel all giddy and drunk during the day but gave me the most garish, horrible nightmares.... Another gave me cotton-mouth so terrible I could scarcely teach a 50-minute class unless I drank so much liquid during it I nearly wet my pants before it ended. And the ones that helped me sleep--because insomnia is a life-long affliction of mine that is always worse when I'm depressed--made me not only drowsy, but almost unable to get out of bed, which really upset me, because one of the ways I kept even a shred of self-esteem during the whole business was to make sure I got up every morning and did what I needed to do, every single day, no matter how miserable I was.

So anyway, I'd try these anti-depressants for six weeks or so, realize I'd rather be plain old miserable than miserable AND suffering the side effects of these medications, and quit them. Until one day, my therapist told me that if I didn't go on Prozac, she'd have me hospitalized whether I liked it or not. I couldn't afford to spend a week doing nothing in the hospital, either in terms of my schedule or my wallet--I was a grad student, for christsake--so I went on Prozac.

And my god, did it help me. I can't believe there was a placebo effect, because if there were, I would have seen it with the other drugs. But it restored my sleep, almost by magic.... and it just gave me this small island of physical calm barely big enough that I could feel ever so slightly protected from some of the turmoil of my life, but oh, that was enough.

But the thing was, I didn't want to be on it. First of all, it was FREAKIN' EXPENSIVE: in 1990, it cost $2 a pill, and it WAS NOT COVERED BY MY LOUSY GRAD STUDENT INSURANCE. Sixty bucks a month or $720 a year is a hell of a lot to spend on medication when you earn only $9,000 a year. Secondly, I knew the drug was new enough that no one knew its long-term side effects, and I didn't want to find out the hard way that they blew. And finally, I didn't want a crutch. The point of all my searching and work, including all the therapy I had, all the painful decisions I arrived at and the drastic changes I made in my life (like leaving the church), was never merely to stop being depressed; it was to get as close as I could to enlightenment, to seeing the world and myself as cleared-eyed and accurately as possible, and to make my way through the world as effectively as I could.

Throughout the 1990s I'd go on it when I got desperate (for whatever reason: grad school, love gone awry, brain chemical whatever), then go off it when things got better. But I got tired of the cycle and decided I'd pursue any alternative treatment I could, including things like yoga and acupuncture and massage, all of which worked wonders for me, and seeing psychics and astrologers, which didn't always produce such great results. I was also lucky enough to find a terrific therapist who worked every bit as hard with me as I wanted to work, who supported my agenda for self exploration--she was great. I also read every last self-help book I thought would help me; some really did. After about five years of all that, I really did feel better.

So long about 1998 I swore anti-depressants off for good. And one thing that surprised me after that was how readily a doctor--a general practitioner, not even a psychiatrist, who specializes in mental health--would throw a prescription for Prozac at me anyway when I went to be treated for something other than depression. In 2000 I started having all these weird food sensitivities and allergies; one particularly bumbling fellow suggested I go back on Prozac, just in case it might help, but I said, "I'm not depressed; I'm allergic to something. Do you really think ingesting something else is going to help that?" Long about 2001 I saw a doctor who didn't want to give me a prescription for sleeping pills; he said he'd rather give me Prozac. I protested that I wasn't depressed; I was just having trouble sleeping. Finally he convinced me; I took the prescription and filled it--but it had lost its efficacy. It not only didn't work; it made me anxious and weird. At that point, I knew I'd never take it again.

So I feel simultaneously that Prozac is seriously over-prescribed, that it shouldn't be dispensed like aspirin, that it can only do so much, but that one of the things it can do is save lives--as I said, I think it saved mine. These studies I mentioned yesterday all stress that anti-depressants often work quite well for people who are profoundly depressed, and I don't want to forget that, or deprive those people (having been one myself) of what is potentially a very real source of very real relief. And I really do think the world is a better place since the invention of Prozac--as I say, it has revolutionized the way we see depression. But I think like anything it can be abused. And if studies like these are correctives to that abuse, well, it's a good thing they're being conducted.

Posted by holly at 9:03 AM | Comments (6)

February 27, 2008

Apparently Fake Drugs Work Just As Well, Unless You're REALLY Depressed

Here's a story that was all over British press yesterday but has yet to appear, so far as I can, in the American Press: According to a story from the Guardian, another from the Independent, and still another from the BBC, researchers at the University of Hull have concluded that anti-depressants are no more effective than placebos in treating all but the most severely depressed individuals.

There are several things about this that I think are important. One is that this story is not being reported by the US press. I read the stories in the British Press yesterday but didn't write about it until today because I wanted to give the US Press time to get around to noticing it. This morning I checked the NY Times, the LA Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today, and couldn't find a mention of this story in any of them. OK, it's a study by a British university, but they're American drugs, taken by a hell of a lot of Americans. This story was important enough in the British press that it was the lead story for the Independent and the Guardian. I think it merits attention in the US Press.

Another is that the researchers didn't conduct new studies; as the Independent put it, they simply "conducted a meta-analysis of all 47 clinical trials, published and unpublished, submitted to the Food and Drug Administration in the US, made in support of licensing applications for six of the best known antidepressant drugs, including Prozac, Seroxat – which is made by GlaxoSmithKline – and Efexor made by Wyeth." Still, according to the Guardian,

The review breaks new ground because [study author] Kirsch and his colleagues have obtained for the first time what they believe is a full set of trial data for four antidepressants.

They requested the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.

The pattern they saw from the trial results of fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Seroxat), venlafaxine (Effexor) and nefazodone (Serzone) was consistent. "Using complete data sets (including unpublished data) and a substantially larger data set of this type than has been previously reported, we find the overall effect of new-generation antidepressant medication is below recommended criteria for clinical significance," they write.

So, by the findings in all studies submitted to the FDA, the drugs were effective enough for some people, and their side effects not unpleasant or dangerous enough, that the FDA approved the drugs.

But in subsequent matters, such as reviews to determine whether or not Britain's National Health Service would cover the cost of prescribing the drug, not all the relevant data were released, because the drugs did not meet the standards required by the NHS. And only more favorable studies have been published.

This is deceit. Which is why the Independent has a story today announcing Drug giants warned: tell the truth on medicines and another discussing The drug industry's long and ignoble history of secrecy. Of course, the drug industry is denying pretty much everything, and dismissing the study from Hull "'just one study' which should not be allowed to undermine the wealth of research showing that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants are effective."

And still another important thing in all this is my own history with anti-depressants, but I think I'll wait to discuss that tomorrow.

Posted by holly at 10:31 AM | Comments (3)

February 26, 2008

Hey, Leader Dude!

Not only willing but happy, as ever, to be months if not years behind the times in terms of my entertainment consumption, I recently watched Downfall, the 2004 movie about HItler's last days in his bunker. I found it really compelling and can understand perfectly why I was anxious to see it when it was released in US theaters three or four years ago, though I also don't feel it hurt me to watch a bunch of other things first.

One thing that made it so outstanding was the performance by Bruno Ganz, the actor who played Hitler--it was scary and horrifying and convincing, and compelling for precisely those reasons. (IMDb's bio for Ganz, by the way, states that he is the first German actor ever to portray Hitler, which seemed unlikely to me, so I googled the question, "What actors have portrayed Hitler?" and got a slew of hits, including a page listing someone's idea of the top ten onscreen Hitlers and a list of all actors who have played Hitler--turns out a number are German. But I'm still sort of marveling that I could find an answer to that question so quickly. Isn't the internet amazing?)

Anyway, one of the things that struck me was the way everyone called Hitler "Mein Fuehrer" (which, I learned also via the internet, means "My Leader"). Not once did anyone call him "Herr Hitler" or "Herr Fuerher," analogous after all to "Mr. President," a way of addressing a leader that makes more sense in German than in English: in German you actually say things like "Herr Doktor" or "Herr Professor" or whatever; but in English we don't say "Mr. Doctor" or "Mr. Professor" or any such thing except "Mr. President." No; it was always "Mein Fuehrer," except for a few times when kids or women called him "Uncle Hitler." Even his mistress called him "Mein Fuehrer."

Can you imagine? Can you imagine calling your political leader "My leader"? I mean, it's one thing to say, "I'm going to write to my senator," or "I'm so glad Rick Santorum is no longer my senator!" But that's different; I referred to Rick Santorum as "my senator" not because I embraced his occupation of that position, but to differentiate him from the 98 senators from other states, and to remind myself that I had to do my part to make sure Rick Santorum STOPPED being my senator.

I think recent events show that the United States is capable of electing and following really shitty leaders who then dupe us, quite easily, into embracing (at least aspect of) totalitarian government, betraying human rights, waging ill-conceived wars of aggression and sacrificing some of our most cherished freedoms. But I can't imagine us ever revering those leaders enough to call them, to their faces, as a sign of veneration and loyalty, "My President" or "My Vice-President." (god forbid!) Why, even in that horrible nightmare I had about dating W, I don't think I ever called him anything--not George, not Mr. President, not Mr. Bush, not Darling, and not even more appropriate titles like "You Fucking Asshole" and "Mr. Evil Incarnate."

And then there's the whole salute thing, the whole "Heil, Mein Fuehrer," the way Hitler liked to be greeted. Can you imagine? The movie is based partly on a memoir by Traudl Junge, who was Hitler's youngest secretary at the time he committed suicide. Can you imagine greeting your boss by raising your arm in a stiff salute and saying, "Hail, My Leader"?

I don't think Americans are capable of that. Having recently watched No End in Sight, and being able to remember the way my family and most of my Mormon friends supported Bush and the Iraq war in 2003, I know we can be responsible, through our leaders, for a lot of short-sighted, ill-conceived, selfish and evil things. But I think one of our saving graces--perhaps our only saving grace--is that we have a certain skepticism, not only of our leaders, but of veneration of leaders, that makes us unable to treat them with that much unquestioning loyalty, and eventually we do what we can to get rid of the bastards--even if we let them cause a hell of a lot of damage during their tenure in office.

I try to imagine some American saying, "Hail, My Leader" to the president and I can envision only two scenarios. The first is something like a scene from The West Wing where some White Staffer says, "Good Morning, Mr. President," but there's no salute. The other thing I come up with is some skateboarder waving at Barack Obama and saying, "Hey, Leader Dude!"

And frankly, that gives me hope.

Posted by holly at 2:57 PM | Comments (6)

February 22, 2008

Fourth Album, Seventh Tree

Here's a review of an album I'm going to buy when it's released next week: Seventh Tree, by Goldfrapp.

I have all three of Goldfrapp's previous albums, courtesy of Matthew in Belgium. I like Black Cherry and Supernature, their second and third albums, respectively, just fine, I guess, though I think the cover art for BC is amateurish and Supernature is a little too poppy disco-y for me--when Ms. Goldfrapp starts channeling Olivia Newton-John a la "Physical," I can't help but grit my teeth a little.

It's the first album, Felt Mountain, that I love. Imagine if the Cocteau Twins had been asked in the early 80s to do the soundtrack for some James Bond movie set in space. FM is sultry and sexy and spacy and ethereal and just creepy enough to be intriguing and edgy rather than grating. I'm hoping that this album, which the reviewer labels "psychedelic folk" and which apparently features vocals as incomprehensible as those of Elizabeth Fraser, has some of those features. I'll let you know. In the meantime, if you haven't explored any Goldfrapp, now might be a good time.

Posted by holly at 11:54 AM | Comments (1)

February 21, 2008

Grilled Cheesy Goodness

As a child, I was always disappointed when my mom said we were having grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. I wasn’t distraught and ready to cry, the way I was when she announced that we were having tuna sandwiches, or downright nauseated and hysterical the way I was when she served that HORRIBLE tuna casserole made with some creamed soup and potato chips. (I always knew canned tuna was unfit for human consumption, even before studies revealed that it contains all these horrible toxins like mercury, and it occurs to me every so often that whatever the difficulties of adulthood, one very nice benefit of being a grownup is that, barring some torture scenario, no one can ever again force me to consume a meal made with canned tuna.)

I didn’t think grilled cheese sandwiches tasted bad; I just didn’t think they tasted good. They were so bland, like a bowl of unsweetened corn flakes. Why ever eat them? OK, I know they were cheap and easy, but so were plenty of other things that tasted way better in my opinion, like Cap’n Crunch, or frozen green beans, or popcorn, or zucchini, or peanut butter and honey on saltines, or bacon and eggs, or a can of ravioli, or oatmeal with lots of brown sugar, or a big dish of ice cream. Fact of the matter is, I still feel that way about a few thin slabs of bright orange longhorn cheddar melted between two slices of white bread slathered with margarine. Why eat such a thing? I think I went four full decades without ever cooking myself a grilled cheese sandwich, though I ate a hell of a lot of cheese crisps, as we called quesadillas--something about substituting a flour tortilla for white bread and dumping plenty of salsa on top just made the cheese taste better.

A few years ago, after I started trying to eat like a vegetarian, I one day had a hankering for a cheeseburger, but as I was trying to live without meat and don’t much care for those veggie burger things, I tried to imagine how I could have a meat-free cheeseburger. “If I melt good cheese on good bread, that might satisfy this craving,” I thought, and realized that what I was imagining was simply a fancy-schmancy grilled cheese sandwich. And I began experimenting with different breads and different cheeses, and a old staple entered my diet in a new form.

As far as bread goes, I like a white sour dough with enough body that it crisps up nicely when grilled. I’m fond of a nice sharp cheddar, though I don’t like the way it looks as much if it’s really orange. I’ve tried various holey cheeses (like swiss) and even a few soft cheeses--a sweet bread with a nice spreadable goat cheese is pretty yummy.

Yesterday I had an exceptionally tasty grilled cheese sandwich. Lately Wegmans has had this really wonderful sourdough bread studded with walnuts and dried cranberries; I paired it with an imported genuine gruyere. When I grill a sandwich, I put butter in the pan rather than on the bread; it seems less greasy that way. And when it this particular sandwich was done cooking, it was so gorgeous I just had to take a photo.

Yumm! I’m hungry just looking at it.

Posted by holly at 7:10 PM | Comments (7)

February 19, 2008

What Surfaces in My Nightmares Lately

Ever since I read about this huge sargasso sea of plastic debris two weeks ago, it has haunted my nightmares. I find myself surrounded by plastic garbage and unable to clear a path out of it. After awaking from another such dream, I decided to try to exorcise the dream by writing about it too.

I just don't understand our reliance on plastic. Yesterday I went to Wegmans and they were offering samples of apples--in little plastic cups. Why couldn't they just spear them on toothpicks? And the cups weren't being recycled--they were being dumped in a garbage bag full of other trash.

I don't think we should totally give up on plastic; it has its place. I admit I like having plastic rather than glass bottles for things like hair products. I remember once dropping a glass bottle of shampoo in the shower. Not cool! But I don't see why SOAP needs to come in a bottle. What's wrong with bar soap? Why this whole body wash thing?

We have to use less plastic, and we have to be better about recycling what we create. Because turning the ocean into plastic soup is dangerous and gross--in fact, one scientist has called plastic the scourge of sea life.

Posted by holly at 9:09 AM | Comments (4)

February 13, 2008

He's the One Everyone Wants

A friend just sent me a link to this video. I watched it grinning like an idiot, and when it ended, I cheered and clapped. Human beings and dogs are both amazing creatures.

The dog's name is Rookie, by the way, and Rookie's companion is named Carolyn Scott.

Posted by holly at 1:18 PM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2008

Nightmare on My Street

I don’t feel I need to offer an excuse when I don’t blog for a while, because A) I didn’t sign no freakin’ contract to blog according to any schedule and B) I am an adult and can do what I want and C) I don’t think my failure to blog for a few days or weeks really causes anyone any suffering--I’m not vain enough to imagine I’ve attracted that kind of fandom and it’s a good thing because I don’t want that kind of responsibility.

But sometimes I want to reveal, just for the heck of it, what I’ve been doing instead of blogging, or why I didn’t quite feel like blogging. So here it is: I’ve been traveling, and while on my travels, I had a nightmare--not a nightmarish travel experience like the one involving the two little girls in the back of the minivan; this trip actually went pretty smoothly, transportation-wise--but an actual nightmare that left me confused, perplexed, and, dare I say it, ashamed.

It might have had something to do with the martinis I downed while out with my friend C the first night of my visit, or it might not.... I’d rather blame it on the martinis, frankly, than imagine that this dream really expressed something going on in my own head. So here’s what happened.

I was in some TV show with Tori Spelling, and my role required me to jump off some really tall structure onto one of those bouncy castle things you can rent for your kid’s birthday party. Tori and I were supposed to stand an equal distance from the edge so that we both had plenty of room to bounce on the inflated thing that would break our fall, but she was a space and a glory hog and insisted on jumping off right in the middle, which meant that I was forced far to the side. The fall hurt me; I was cut and bruised. (I don’t know how a bouncy castle thing could inflict cuts, but that’s the logic of dreams for you.) I was sad, sore and angry, so I called my boyfriend.

Who turned out to be George W. Bush.

I was mildly horrified when he showed up, and couldn’t figure out how I had started dating him. I was even more horrified when he turned out to be a decent boyfriend--not all that interesting, granted, but solicitous of my well-being and nice enough while he was around. We never discussed politics or our personal lives, which meant that we never acknowledged that he was married and the president of the United States, or that I despise him. The only indications that he was president, in fact, were the body guards waiting out in the street by his limo while he was in the house with me, and the huge delivery of groceries and other goods that arrived at my home immediately after his departure.

So that’s why I have been silent: I’ve been on planes and trains and in hotels, and I’ve been trying to purge myself of the disgust I felt upon realizing that my mind, even when aided by plenty of vodka, could actually concoct a scenario in which I’m dating George Bush. I don’t know if sharing this dream will increase or mitigate the shame. We'll see.

Posted by holly at 11:29 AM | Comments (5)

February 11, 2008

Finally, I Finish "The War"

My habit of watching stuff on TV months after everyone else has seen it continues.... I just finished watching Ken Burns’ documentary on World War II, aptly titled The War.

I am quite glad I waited to watch this, as I had time to gather opinions from others who watched it as it was televised, particularly from my friends who, like me, are very interested in military history. They said pretty much the same thing: “It was good, but not great. I thought I would LOVE it, and I didn’t. I only liked it."

So I sat down to watch it with lowered expectations, and because I expected less, I was pleased and surprised when I ended up liking it A LOT--maybe I didn't LOVE it, but it was close.

There were a few moments where I got to feel smart, because I knew what was coming: I am interested in the Battle of the Bulge--the name just arouses curiosity, and it began on my birthday--so I knew what was going on when the narrator mentioned that German troops started moving into the Ardennes in December 1944. (Though I admit I never made it through all of Band of Brothers--just found it too tedious and didn’t care for some of the actors.) I thought I knew the significance of the USS Indianapolis, since I had read all about its sinking, and the horrible blunders that led to about 900 men, originally hopeful of rescue, bobbing along for days in shark-infested water without food, potable water or lifeboats. (The reason the grisly old shark hunter in Jaws hated the animals so much was that he was a survivor of the Indianapolis, which is often called "the worst naval disaster in US history," though more men died on the USS Arizona--I guess it's that whole fighting off sharks thing, which could have been avoided had anyone paid attention to the fact that the Indianapolis didn't show up at dock when it was supposed to, that makes it worse.) I did not know, however, that when it was torpedoed and sunk, it was returning from delivering the first atomic bomb to Tinian.

One thing I really liked about the series was its use of Eugene Sledge, whose memoir With the Old Breed is one of my favorite books and has been called by a number of military historians “One of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war” (Paul Fussell) and “one of the most important accounts of war that I have ever read” (John Keegan). I teach it often and students find it profoundly moving and almost life-changing--you read it and you realize how much you don’t know, how much you’ll never know, how much separates combat veterans from those of us who either merely read about such things or simply don’t want to know. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Here’s one of the passages we often refer to in classes, about the fighting on Okinawa:

The mud was knee deep in some places, probably deeper in others if one dared venture there. For several feet around every corpse, maggots crawled about in the muck and then were washed away by the runoff of the rain. There wasn’t a tree or bush left. All was open country. Shells had torn up the turf so completely that ground cover was nonexistent. The rain poured down on us as evening approached. The scene was nothing but mud; shell fire, flooded craters with the silent, pathetic, rotting occupants; knocked-out tanks and amtracs; and discarded equipment--utter desolation.

The stench of death was overpowering. The only way I could bear the monstrous horror of it all was to look upward from the earthly reality surrounding us, watch the leaden gray clouds go skudding over, and repeat over and over to myself that the situation was unreal--just a nightmare--and that I would soon awake and find myself somewhere else. But the ever-present smell of death saturated my nostrils. It was there with every breath I took.

I existed from moment to moment, sometimes thinking death would have been preferable. We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war. During the fighting around the Umurbrogal Pocket on Peliliu, I had been depressed by the wastage of human lives. But in the mud and driving rain before Shuri, we were surrounded by maggots and decay. Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.

.... We didn’t talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans. The conditions taxed the toughest I knew almost to the point of screaming. Nor do authors normally write about such vileness; unless they have seen it with their own eyes, it is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane. But I saw much it there on Okinawa and to me the war was insanity.

I was also struck to see Paul Fussell lose his composure and tear up. Fussell is an old acquaintance of mine; at least, that’s how I think of him. I first encountered him in an undergraduate creative writing class on poetic forms, via his first book, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (which is still in print 40 years after its original publication). But it was his book about World War I, The Great War and Modern Memory, that made me a fan of his analyses of the literature and actual events of modern warfare. In print, Fussell comes across as unsentimental and cynical--or, in his terms, “a pissed-off infantryman.” He is notorious for a very provocative essay called “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.” I put that essay in a special place when I discuss his work, preferring to focus on the other ways in which he has “given the Second World War a uniformly bad press, rejecting all attempts to depict it as a sensibly proceeding or to mitigate its cruelty and swinishness” (Fussell, “My War”). If you watch many documentaries about war, you see him all the time, and the voice of that pissed-off infantry man is so strong, and he’s so stoic in most of his appearances, that it was shocking to me to see him begin to cry.

One other thing I liked about the series was that it serves as a good antidote to an attitude I have encountered a time or two in my classes: the sense that the real war was fought in Europe, that the only war that mattered was the one against the Nazis. A student in my class actually said once, when we read Sledge, “It’s good to learn about the war in the Pacific, because you just don’t hear much about it. It’s pretty obvious that it really wasn’t that important.”

“I’d have to disagree with that,” I said. “After all, World War Two started and ended for us in the Pacific.”

“World War Two started in Europe; everyone knows that,” he said.

“We didn’t enter the war until Pearl Harbor, remember?” I said. “The Japanese attacked us, and then we declared war on both Japan and Germany. Germany invaded Poland in September, 1939, but we didn’t enter the war until December 1941.”

“Well, at the time, people weren’t as concerned about the war with the Japanese,” he insisted.

“Yes, they were,” I said. “My dad was nine when the war started, and he was obsessed with Guadalcanal. My mother was four when the war started, and she had nightmares about the Japs coming to get her. Plus we rounded up all people of Japanese descent and put them in internment camps, remember? We didn’t do anything to people of German or Italian descent, even though those countries were our enemies too. And don’t forget who we dropped the atom bombs on.” But he just wouldn’t budge. To him, the war in the Pacific didn’t have the veneer of nobility conferred after the fighting by the liberation of the inmate of the Nazi death camps--the full horror of which American politicians, military planners and the press downplayed, even after the Russians, who found them first, issued reports on them--so it wouldn’t matter as much to history, and couldn’t have mattered as much while it was going on.

Anyway. I found the series worth my time. I was moved and informed by it, and I hope that if you haven’t seen it, you’ll take the time to watch it.

Posted by holly at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)