Felix Macnee

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Wayne Thiebaud, Cake Slices, 1963. From the Allan Stone Gallery.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DUMMY

by Felix Macnee

Alysia loved my family, and loved visiting New Orleans. It was always nice having her around because of her enthusiasm for everything, the details of life, the little things that made each new moment different from those that had come before.

She and I were walking to the French Quarter one crisp, chilly day in January, and she was picking out the details of architecture that fascinated her, under-radar beauties such as the Water Department logo of a crescent moon that adorned the worn metal discs in the sidewalk.

She and I passed a bakery and on a whim she suggested we get a cake.

“That’s brilliant,” I said. “Why not just get a cake for no reason?”

“Yeah,” she said, “for no reason!”

This was what I loved about her. An adherence to spontaneity.

“Why do we always have to have some special occasion for a cake?” I said, belaboring the point.

“What kind should we get?”

“How about German chocolate?” I said. “Nothing like the classic chocolate cake!”

We were about to pay for it, but Alysia stopped me:

“Hey,” she said, “why not have them write something on it? I mean, why not? How about a joke?”

“Yeah, that’s good …” I said.

“How about ‘Happy Birthday, Dummy’?”

“That’s great!” I said. “Brilliant! A cake for no reason, and a stupid inscription!”

“Right!” she said.

We brought it home, and later that evening I remembered it was my birthday.

–Felix Macnee

Open Letter: A Pre-Post-Mortem

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OPEN LETTER: A PRE-POST-MORTEM

by John Halle

As of this writing, the “Open Letter to the Left Establishment” is inching towards its goal of 5,000 signatures. It has not “gone viral” compared to certain dancing parrots and singing dogs, though it should be kept in mind that this response was achieved without very much exposure on the web from large “gatekeeper” sites.

In particular, while we did, of course, send it to them, none of the high traffic progressive sites, alternet, commondreams, or truthdig made any mention of it. Nor was it placed on high traffic blogs such as firedoglake or openleft, to say nothing of the so-called access blogs Daily Kos or Huffington Post.

Of those medium traffic left sites which did run it, Znet allowed it on its front page briefly and then removed it within less than a day-displacing it with a response by Bill Fletcher now front-paged on the site for three days. In comments attached to it, Znet editor Michael Albert claims to have signed the letter “by mistake”-failing to mention that he didn’t merely sign it but posted it on his own website.

Counterpunch ran it on its weekend edition-albeit far down on the page-just below a story about the unveiling of a new organ in Ithaca.

Truthout ran it on its front page, and it continues to maintain its place there four days after as the most read story on the site.

The mostly hands-off reaction might have come as a surprise given that the letter included the signatures of a cross section of left luminaries, many of whom are routinely featured in these same outlets- Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Cindy Sheehan, Cornel West among others. Novelist Russell Banks and non-fiction author Mark Kurlansky also signed on. Also coming in over the transom, as it were, were unsolicited signatures from Emmanuel Wallerstein, Frances Fox Piven, Jean Bricmont, Nell Painter, Steven Zunes, Paul Buehl and even Michael Lerner.

But for those with a sufficiently skeptical view of such matters the blackout from the great majority of the establishment left media was predictable.

For as a basic rule, no institution or individual takes kindly to its authority being challenged-and that includes those which claim, as many leftists do, to be anti-authoritarian.

I should stress that challenging the authority of left individuals and the media which provided outlets for them was not the main purpose of the letter, which was, as we make clear, to advocate for the support of the kinds of protest actions against the Obama administration which are now desperately necessary. Nor, speaking for myself, was it pleasant to do so given that some of these were key figures in my own intellectual and political development. Furthermore, in the main, I think these outlets, including those sites mentioned above, generally do a good job, and so it does not serve the interests of the left to have their authority undermined.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the Obama campaign and the first two years of his administration, a near complete collapse of objectivity raised serious questions with respect to the credibility of numerous high profile figures and media organs of the left. Challenging some of them therefore, became a regrettable necessity. More seriously, it has also been necessary due to the fact that many of these figures continue to refuse to do what the letter urges them to do: namely to actively support protests against the Obama administration”.

This has been demonstrated by the two responses to the letter which have been received since its posting by Bill Fletcher and Tom Hayden. For rather than refute the charge that both remain incapable of offering strong and unqualified support to demonstrations of the size and intensity required, they confirm it. Thus, Hayden describes the civil disobedience action at the White House scheduled for Dec. 16 as “somewhat justifiable” although questioning whether “it was a smart idea to begin with.” Nothing could better typify the kinds of half-hearted, tepid and qualified response which has played a major role in the demobilization of protest for all to many years. Fletcher’s response, however, goes one better: failing even to offer any endorsement or mention the protest at all! Furthermore, almost the entirety of the response is based on misreading, either careless or deliberate, in which the letter is claimed to “call(s) upon those named in the first paragraph to criticize the policies of the Obama administration.” It does nothing of the kind, of course. The first sentence of is “a call for active support of protest” not criticism of which there is always more than enough to go around.

Nothing could better demonstrate the necessity for challenging the authority of these two as leading voices of the left. It it s therefore convenient that when it comes to Fletcher and Hayden and the remainder of the recipients of the letter, this task was easily accomplished by simply noting some (though by no means all) of the most destructive aspects of the Obama presidency and addressing the recipients as “supporters”. That they were supporters is, of course, the undeniable fact of the matter though it should be kept in mind that their support was to a greater or lesser degree “critical” lying along a spectrum of which the following two quotations can be seen as indicating the two extremes.

“Barack Obama is clearly a reform president committed to improvement of peoples’ lives and the renewal and reconstruction of America.” (Katrina van den Heuvel)

“Putting Obama in the White House would not by any means ensure progressive change, but under his presidency the grassroots would have an opportunity to create it.” (Norman Solomon)

The first of these was typical of much that was written at the time. It is obviously absurd on its face, and the less said about it the better-though mention should probably be made that it gives the lie to the pretentious and corrosive claim that the left constitutes a “reality based community.”

The second encapsulates the positions of the more sober and rational Obama supporters, most notably those associated with the Progressive Democrats of America. Here the claim was at least superficially reasonable, but by now has shown by events to have been almost completely false. As should be obvious, protest is only now starting to develop, and compared to the peak of millions on the streets in March of 2003 remains virtually non-existent.

The reason for this vacuum has to do with a virtually unbreakable law of left organizing which operates roughly as follows: when a Democratic President enters office, those membership organizations which had been on the outside now see themselves as having a seat at the table. This is achieved through movement leadership being offered positions-albeit low to midlevel positions-in the administration. When they are not actually invited into the administration, elite levels of the left establishment see themselves as having “access” to some these figures, with the result that organizations, media outlets and high profile figures which would otherwise be organizing grassroots protests are now counseling patience, tolerance and, at the very least, “critical” support.

The Obama administration is, in fact, somewhat striking, no doubt to the displeasure of the left establishment, for the weakness with which it implemented this well-worn co-optation strategy. That said, there were at least some within it who could be pointed to as “our friends”. Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor remains a favorite of organized labor as does Jared Bernstein. Steven Chu was initially seen by environmentalists as likely to function as a strong advocate for a sane policy on Global Warming, as was Science Advisor Steven Holdren. Human rights icon Samantha Power, now signing off on predator drone attacks in Pakistan on the National Security Council, is another. These and others (even including the exiled Van Jones) continue an unending flow of apologetics for the administration, some fraction of which are still taken seriously by some of the recipients and which have been sufficient, it would seem, to maintain the illusions among labor, environmental, and human rights organizations of access to the administration.

All this is directly relevant to purpose of the letter in that the perception of access to “friends” on the inside ensures that the organizational infrastructure which is necessary to organize protest withers, leaving it to outside marginal groups the necessity to build this infrastructure from scratch.

As noted, all this should have been obvious to those who lived through, or at least read about, the Carter and Clinton administrations where the dynamic of co-optation was refined to something close to a science. So when we confronted it anew under Obama, we should have seen it, and the events which followed, for the inevitabilities which they were and be prepared to confront them. We did not because those who should have been warning us had an investment in the Obama campaign and Obama brand, and what they felt it represented, and were thereby unwilling or unable to do so. The legacy of false claims and unrealistic expectations lives on in the continuing failure of many of these figures to advocate for protest on the scale and intensity which is required.

An awareness of this fact, as indicated by the 4000 signatories, is slowly percolating through the rank and file left. But since the left establishment gatekeepers will not allow expressions of it to surface on those high traffic sites which they control, it will need to develop further before it reaches a breaking point. When this occurs institutional leadership personified by figures such as Hayden and Fletcher is correctly seen as a major obstacle to the progress of the protest movement. At this point the rank and file will begin to develop their own institutions independent of what have become, for all practical purposes, fatally compromised institutions and spokepersons.

Or, a more happy development, would be if those left establishment figures we address, and others we do not, were to do as signatory Doug Henwood does gracefully in his statement in support of our letter. They should own up to their past mistakes, and show by their words and actions that they are now committed not to support, critical or otherwise of the Obama administration, but to active and militant opposition to its policies.

There is no good reason, it seems to us, why they could, or should, not do precisely that.

And should they do so, we will welcome them with open arms.

–John Halle

John Halle is a former Green Party Alderman for the city of New Haven, Connecticut, and is on the faculty at Bard College in New York State where he teaches music theory and is active as a composer. His political writings can be found at his website johnhalle.com.

Tom Hayden vs. John Halle: An Exchange

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TOM HAYDEN vs. JOHN HALLE:

AN EXCHANGE

An Open Letter to the Left Establishment is currently being circulated here. Tom Hayden’s response to that Open Letter is published below and is followed by John Halle’s rejoinder.

______________________________________________

First, Tom Hayden writes:

So I started reading this letter which sounded pretty good and it looked like I signed it, so I read further and discovered that it was to as a member of a group I didn’t know I belonged to called the “Left Establishment.” As I kept reading, it was a vile, toxic diatribe ending with a demand that I, along with the rest of the “Left Establishment”, endorse a demonstration this week in Washington featuring civil disobedience at the White House fence.

To whomever sent the letter, I have to say I’m sorry that I just don’t respond positively to nasty invitations. I hope you can understand. Calm down and tell me who you are before the conspiracy theories mushroom.

Actually, I thought the Dec. 16 action seemed somewhat justifiable in light of current events – the WikiLeaks releases and erupting divisions within the Democratic Party. And I love the people who plan to get arrested. Maybe a big crowd will show up, but not because it was a smart idea to begin with. Mid-December is not the best time to turn out masses of people. But stuff happens, and now many people are boiling.

My personal best to those who are being arrested. They include a former Pentagon official, former CIA agent, a former New York Times reporter, and a mother who lost a son to war and was radicalized as a result. The lesson for me is that people can change from hawks to doves, from spies to whistleblowers, if organizers organize and events reshape their perceptions. That’s the lesson of WikiLeaks, that folk on the inside sometimes come find their situation intolerable and break away from old thinking.

Civil disobedience is a moral expression, and can be a personal healing. Sometimes it ignites a larger movement, or inspires other individuals to step up. We need more of it.

But I also think we need an outside/inside strategy that shifts public opinion more and more against the war. We need to persuade the undecided, not simply to create images of dissent. The peace movement will grow steadily in the months ahead, on its own, but also in its relation to other compelling causes, among them: Wall Street regulation, clean energy/green jobs, and the steady shift towards an unfettered market philosophy over our lives. Civil disobedience can light a flame, but the case for thoroughgoing radical reform must be made on our streets, our workplaces, our religious institutions, and yes, within the Democratic Party – whose overwhelming majority support progressive objectives. Members of the Progressive Democrats of America, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, are vital elements of our movement.

I would like every person who signed this letter to read it again, and be kind enough to retract their signatures or explain why.

This is not the time to inflict internal damage on a community which is already weak enough. It’s important to get a grip.

The peace and justice community is a fragile form of social ecology, with diversity being an essential quality. Everyone is entitled to a different approach, but there also is an essential unity that can be achieved, unless a malign force is introduced.

I have been working every day since 2002 to end these wars. I will never stop. I supported Barack Obama for president in 2008, and am glad I did so. At the time I also said progressives should disagree with him on Afghanistan, NAFTA, global warming and Wall Street, and I have pursued progressive alternatives every day. I have been so busy on the WikiLeaks crisis since August that I just haven’t had time to drop by the White House and pick up my marching orders.

TOM HAYDEN
Director
Peace and Justice Resource Center

______________________________________________

John Halle responds:

Dear Mr. Hayden,

You refer to our letter urging you to strongly support militant protest against the Obama administration as “vile” and “toxic”.

These words are misapplied.

Rather these are adjectives appropriately directed at the policies of the Obama administration, those which we mentioned, and provide documenting links to, along with others which we don’t. (For many of us, the omission of the Obama administration’s disgraceful policies with respect to Israel and Palestine was regrettable.)

We note that you do not attempt to defend any of these noting merely that you remain “glad . . . that you supported Barack Obama for President.”

Rather, the main focus of your response is protest directed against Obama’s expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in particular, the civil disobedience action on Dec. 16 which you refer to as “somewhat justified.”

This action, and other protests to come, are not “somewhat” but absolutely justified on any reasonable moral, practical and political grounds.  They need strong unqualified support, from you and the others who claim to speak for the left,  not the provisional, weak endorsement you provide here.

You then accuse us of undermining the “fragile social ecology” required for growth of the peace movement.

Again, this is a charge which is not appropriately directed at us but at you.

For citizens do not protest only when they feel their protests are “somewhat” justifiable.  They do so when they are aware of the fact of the matter: that protest against this and numerous other Obama administration policies is now, and has been for some time, an urgent necessity.

We hope that you reconsider your continuing failure to come to terms not only with the catastrophe which is the Obama administration but also for the damage which your insufficiently critical support has inflicted on the only force which has the capacity oppose it:  mass, organized, and militant expressions of popular protest.

We therefore thank you for this response which demonstrates far better than we could why you are a deserving recipient of our letter.

Best Regards,

JOHN HALLE

______________________________________________

Tom Hayden served 18 years in the California Legislature. He has taught at numerous colleges and is the author or editor of 18 books and hundreds of articles for publications. He currently leads the Peace and Justice Resource Center.

John Halle is a former Green Party Alderman for the city of New Haven, Connecticut, and is on the faculty at Bard College in New York State where he teaches music theory and is active as a composer. His political writings can be found at his website johnhalle.com.

An Open Letter to the Left Establishment

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Flickr photography by Snapies.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE LEFT ESTABLISHMENT

An Open Letter to the Left Establishment

This letter is a call for active support of protest to Michael Moore, Norman Solomon, Katrina van den Heuvel, Michael Eric Dyson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher Jr., Jesse Jackson Jr., and other high profile progressive supporters of the Obama electoral campaign.

With the Obama administration beginning its third year, it is by now painfully obvious that the predictions of even the most sober Obama supporters were overly optimistic. Rather than an ally, the administration has shown itself to be an implacable enemy of reform.

It has advanced repeated assaults on the New Deal safety net (including the previously sacrosanct Social Security trust fund), jettisoned any hope for substantive health care reform, attacked civil rights and environmental protections, and expanded a massive bailout further enriching an already bloated financial services and insurance industry. It has continued the occupation of Iraq and expanded the war in Afghanistan as well as our government’s covert and overt wars in South Asia and around the globe.

Along the way, the Obama administration, which referred to its left detractors as “f***ing retarded” individuals that required “drug testing,” stepped up the prosecution of federal war crime whistleblowers, and unleashed the FBI on those protesting the escalation of an insane war.

Obama’s recent announcement of a federal worker pay freeze is cynical, mean-spirited “deficit-reduction theater”. Slashing Bush’s plutocratic tax cuts would have made a much more significant contribution to deficit reduction but all signs are that the “progressive” president will cave to Republican demands for the preservation of George W. Bush’s tax breaks for the wealthy Few. Instead Obama’s tax cut plan would raise taxes for the poorest people in our country.

The election of Obama has not galvanized protest movements. To the contrary, it has depressed and undermined them, with the White House playing an active role in the discouragement and suppression of dissent – with disastrous consequences. The almost complete absence of protest from the left has emboldened the most right-wing elements inside and outside of the Obama administration to pursue and act on an ever more extreme agenda.

We are writing to you because you are well-known writers, bloggers and filmmakers with access to a range of old and new media, and you have in your power the capacity to help reignite the movement which brought millions onto the streets in February of 2003 but which has withered ever since. There are many thousands of progressives who follow your work closely and are waiting for a cue from you and others to act. We are asking you to commit yourself to actively supporting the protests of Obama administration policies which are now beginning to materialize.

In this connection we would like to mention a specific protest: the civil disobedience action being planned by Veterans for Peace involving Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Joel Kovel, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, several armed service veterans and others to take place in front of the White House on Dec. 16th.

Should you commit yourselves to backing this action and others sure to materialize in weeks and months ahead, what would otherwise be regarded as an emotional outburst of the “fringe left” will have a better chance of being seen as expressing the will of a substantial majority not only of the left, but of the American public at large. We believe that your support will help create the climate for larger and increasingly disruptive expressions of dissent – a development that is sorely needed and long overdue.

We hope that we can count on you to exercise the leadership that is required of all of us in these desperate times.

Best Regards,

Sen. James Abourezk
Tariq Ali
Rocky Anderson
Jared Ball
Russel Banks
Thomas Bias
Noam Chomsky
Bruce Dixon
Frank Dorrel
Gidon Eshel
Jamilla El-Shafei
Okla Elliott
Norman Finkelstein
Glen Ford
Joshua Frank
Margaret Flowers M.D.
John Gerassi
Henry Giroux
Matt Gonzalez
Kevin Alexander Gray
Judd Greenstein
DeeDee Halleck
John Halle
Chris Hedges
Doug Henwood
Edward S. Herman
Dahr Jamail
Derrick Jensen
Louis Kampf
Allison Kilkenny
Jamie Kilstein
Joel Kovel
Mark Kurlansky
Peter Linebaugh
Scott McLarty
Cynthia McKinney
Dede Miller
Russell Mokhiber
Bobby Muller
Christian Parenti
Michael Perelman
Peter Phillips
Louis Proyect
Ted Rall
Cindy Sheehan
Chris Spannos
Paul Street
Sunil Sharma
Stephen Pearcy
Jeffrey St. Clair
Len Weinglass
Cornel West
Sherry Wolf
Michael Yates
Mickey Z
Kevin Zeese

SIGN THE PETITION HERE



SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: RUTH DEBORAH REY

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CHANGE OF ADDRESS
by Ruth Deborah Rey

If it is true that only
five hundred thousand
people died in the camps
and that the others,
the other Jews, that is,
moved away to Israel,
the States, or to the East,
I do not understand why
not even one of them
sent a change of address
to those they left behind;
the ones that still, even
today, weep over the
loss of them and the horror
they were subjected to
that – supposedly – is not true.
I wonder why, if she was one
of those who simply moved
to the East and did not die,
my Mother … why my Mother
never even sent me a pretty
postcard from where she
is living now.

(“Change of Address” was originally published in Raving Dove. This poem is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)

Ruth Deborah Rey, born in Amsterdam in 1938, has from the time she was a little girl worked in radio, (later) television, publicity and the theatre, as an actress, broadcaster, entertainer, scriptwriter, translator and editor in the Netherlands, Canada, and the USA. Today, retired, she finally has the time to be a full-time writer and editor. She lives at the French Atlantic coast with her husband, two dogs, and five cats. Rey is recognized by the Dutch Foundation 1940-1945 as a participant in the Resistance during the German occupation.

Editor’s Note: When I asked Ms. Rey’s permission to publish today’s poem she said she was glad to let me publish it, “even though the poem is one of the saddest I ever wrote.” I think this response says a lot about the kind of person, and poet, that Ms. Rey is. Living a life touched by the Holocaust, some might succumb to darkness, and their poetry might be reflective of such. But Ms. Rey lives a life of light, and her writing outshines any darkness that has touched her. She is quoted as saying “I speak my soul. I write.” I am inspired by Ms. Rey’s optimism, her shining light, and the adept way in which she speaks her soul.

Want to read more by and about Ruth Deborah Rey?
The Blue Blog
Raving Dove
Author’s Den
LitList

Two Poems by Letitia Trent

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Landscape Featuring Oklahoma

Our story is broken only
when the tent preachers land,
giving grandma a use for that fancy fan,
making all the bad women
vomit up money. Otherwise, I spend
most days pulling ribbon from the kitten’s
belly. Sometimes the husband
takes up hobbies, like disassembling
radios, and scatters the wire-furred
pieces on every empty surface.
I hammered one of his stray dials
to the cupboard and now
I can imagine the creamed corn
talking to me without
looking crazy. I tuck away
the hope that this is just
an independent movie—
the bad teeth bleach clean,
spackled pockmarks peel.
Times like these, the idea
of children  plays double-duty
as wish and shiver. They never work,
but people keep making them anyway,
like hand-held sewing machines
and herbal lozenges. Even the lawn,
sun struck mid-summer, wants to die
a little quicker but can find nowhere
high enough to jump from.

[“Landscape Featuring Oklahoma” first appeared in Black Warrior Review]


Ju On (dir. Takashi Shimizu, 2000)

Mother, when I return
you are still here, scuttling in the rafters, knees
busted, blue, blood
in your teeth, just like in life,

like after a fight, when you’d yawn
to pop the fluid
from your ears. Your mouth

snaps opened
and closed. You do now
the things you did

while alive, only slower,
the chores you hated, now over
and over, your hands

around an invisible broom,
sweeping the spotless floor
or crawling

down the staircase
on your palms and shins
toward the mailman’s knock and shuffle
of envelopes in his satchel

or a car in the driveway, the sound
of gravel and small rocks popping. You always wanted
to catch any movement

out of the house. Remember the cricket
in the well between oven
and wall? It was small and slipped

away when you cupped
hour hands to keep it. You stomped,
you shoved
the broom handle

and never caught it to stop it
from coming or going
without your permission. Now,
I always know

where to find you. Under the floorboards,
in the cupboards, in the pink
insulation. I can call you

when I need you, like a cat
you’ll come to a kiss
or your name, Mother,

Mom, Ma, come
down. I don’t want
you to miss this. You

cannot get
past the Welcome
Mat, you hiss

at the long knife of light
from the warm outside, but I
can get away now, look

I am half
in the doorway and half
way out.

[“Ju On (dir. Takashi Shimizu, 2000)” first appeared in Folio]


Letitia Trent’s work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Fence, Prick of the Spindle, and Juked, among others. Her chapbook The Medical Diaries is available from Scantily Clad Press and her newest chapbook, Splice, will soon be available from Blue Hour Press. She currently lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.

An Uneasy Revelry: a review of Before Saying Any of the Great Words

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An Uneasy Revelry

by Okla Elliott

“Unease in the ochre-filled skies, unease in the silky /labyrinth of the gut, unease / in the artist’s double, triple nibs”

—David Huerta, “Song of Unease”

Since many American readers may not be familiar with David Huerta, let me introduce you to the poet, before I go on to discuss this career-ranging selection of his poetry and Mark Schafer’s excellent translation of it. Huerta has written nineteen books of poetry and has received nearly every literary award a poet can win in his native Mexico. He is associated with the Neobaroque movement in Latin American literature and with postmodern language poetry. In 2005, he received the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for lifelong contribution to Mexican literature. Suffice to say, he is one Mexico’s (and the Spanish language’s) major poets. He is also well known as a political columnist, translator, and activist. But fame and recognition are not enough to convince a discerning reader, and one ought not to be impressed by awards but rather by the work itself.

The first poem I’d like to look at, “Machinery,” is a good example of both Huerta’s strength as a poet and the difficulties Schafer had to overcome in translating him. It is a longish poem (65 lines), so let’s only look at the opening movement:

What’s the use of all this I ask you your fever your sobbing
What’s the use of yelling or butting your head against the fog
Why crash in the branches scratch those nickels
What’s the point of jinxing yourself staining yourself

The odd syntax and the overflow of poetic energy are well represented in the English. My only complaint is that in the first line, the English allows for a double reading such that the speaker asks the “you” his question and perhaps asks “your fever” and “your sobbing,” while also allowing “your fever” and “your sobbing” to still be the “all this” of his question—all of which is a really pleasant possible double reading, but which is unfortunately not in the Spanish. The Spanish reads “Para qué sirve todo eso te digo tu fiebre tu sollozo.” The verb is decir (“to tell, to say”), thus allowing for the more literal “What’s the use of all this I tell you your fever your sobbing” but which does not eliminate the possibility of a double reading, since the issue isn’t really so much the verb as the indirect object “te” in Spanish that is placed before the verb instead of after it in English, thus eliminating the possible double-meaning in Spanish and creating it in English. Basically, what we have here is an example of why Umberto Eco calls translation “the art of failure.” Spanish grammar clarifies what the English cannot without major alteration to either the sense or syntax. And so my complaint is not with Schafer’s translation but rather with the onerous task of translation itself. Schafer meets with dozens of these sorts of impasses throughout the book and generally finds innovative ways around them, and when no way around exists, he limits the loss in joy from the original, as he has here. (My complaint, I trust most will agree, is rather nitpicky and perhaps entirely unimportant in some readers’ minds.)

Let’s now look at “Sick Man” in its entirety, which exemplifies the productive strangeness of many of Huerta’s poems. Here, illness disrupts reality and language, making technically nonsensical language carry an emotional resonance that a more direct psychological realism could not:

The nighttime dog eats
two rings of blood
but the twilight dog chases him away.
The diamonds in his chest
burn and scatter.
The daytime dog licks
the entrance to his chest
but the nighttime dog
knows the way out.
All the dogs
want a backbone of diamonds.
Two rings of fresh blood spin around.
His chest finds itself increasingly alone
with the scent of barking.

That threatening bark is perhaps the threat of debilitation at illness’s hand, the fear of death, the crushing loneliness of serious illness. And the synergistic confusion is (and isn’t) the impenetrable meaningless of death/illness. I don’t mean to shrink Huerta’s poetic language to prosaic interpretations, since he could just as easily have written a straightforward thought-piece on illness and animal imagery, had that been what he intended to communicate, but I think the above-mentioned notions are some of the things he is after. Also, notice the perfect use of the title to force our understanding of the poem. I likely would have thought the poem was only mediocre if it were, for example, titled “Dogs.” His title (“Hombre enfermo” in the original) adds an emotional valence to all the words of the poem that would otherwise be mere pretty language without emotional import. This technique of title-as-lens is one Huerta uses to great effect throughout the book.

Schafer tells us in his introduction that he has two goals in mind with this book. “On the one hand, I want to offer English-speaking readers an overview of Huerta’s poetry since he published his first book, El jardín de la luz, in 1972. On the other hand, given that Huerta is alive and well, writing and publishing prolifically, I want to give readers ample opportunity to revel in his more recent work.” And revel is exactly what the reader does.
The publication of Before Saying Any of the Great Words is another in a long line of great contributions Copper Canyon Press has made to American poetry. In a post-monolingual world, and especially in the USA, which is quickly becoming officially and unofficially bilingual, I hope Huerta’s work will be read widely. Works in translation have a long tradition of influencing English-language poetry—from the Earl of Surrey, who invented blank verse in order to translate Virgil’s Ænead (which was metered but not rhymed)—thus allowing for Shakespeare’s plays to exist as we know them—to the importing of such forms as the sonnet from its Italian progenitors or the couplet from the French, and so on. What better time than now, in the age of globalization, for us to learn from our literary compatriots who live in other countries and write in other languages? I would therefore suggest Before Saying Any of the Great Words not only for classes on Latin American literature but also for poetry workshops, working poets everywhere, and anyone interested in the marvelously rich culture of Mexico.

***

[The above review was originally published in Florida State University’s The Southeast Review in a slightly different form.]

Andreas Economakis

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Fish

by Andreas Economakis

When he was thirteen years old he used to wander down to the little creek that slipped through the woods in front his mom’s house to fly fish. He never caught anything but he liked the whole experience, being down there with his dog, the velvety brown water reflecting the light and the clouds and the gnats and the trees amidst the clean forest smells of fermenting leaves and damp dirt and worms. He would cast tiny handmade flies into the moveable water and jerk them back up with the fishing rod, imagining a big spotted trout leaping out of the sweet water in pursuit of his bait. But no big spotted trout ever leapt out or even nibbled on his line and he got to thinking that maybe the creek had no fish in it, that maybe it was a dead creek. It didn’t bother him too much actually, it was kind of a relief, until that one afternoon when the dog started barking like mad.

The boy looked upstream and saw something big and silvery floating his way, barely moving but still alive. He waded out into the creek, he doesn’t know why, some things are hard to explain, and a big pale trout with bleached eyes flowed softly right up to his legs, on its side and gasping for air. The boy bent down and cradled the fish softly. It looked like it had been poisoned, all discolored and sickly, its cataract eyes glazed over and milky white. The fish shook for a brief second and went still in his hands. The dog stopped barking almost like he knew the fish had died a strange death. The boy waded back to shore holding the fish and the dog backed away, whimpering like his master had a stick and was gearing up to hit him. “What’s wrong dog?” he asked out loud and the dog turned and ran away.

The boy looked toward the stream for a moment and then walked to his pole. He picked up the fly end of the line, held the fish by the gills -they were brown like winter leaves not healthy pink- and holding his breath to keep the stink of decay and poison from his lungs he passed the hook through the trout’s fat cartilage lips. The fly stuck to the fish’s mouth like a girlish ribbon or a fancy pacifier. It looked so strange. It was so very dead.

The boy started back up to the house with his catch, his dog spying him from behind the trees, frightened like he’d never seen him before. The boy entered the quiet house and dropped the fish into the kitchen sink. Maybe because he didn’t want the trout’s death to mean nothing or maybe because he was on auto-pilot, he’s not sure, he pulled out a sharp little knife and stabbed the fish in its belly. Green-brown guts spilled out onto his fingers and clogged the drain. The stench made him gag and he almost vomited, but he continued until all the innards sat curdling in a frothy pool in the metal sink. When he was finished he pulled the tap and sent the slimy guts spinning down into the grinder.

The boy placed the dead fish in a rusty tin tray and doused it with olive oil and lemon slices and oregano. He turned the oven on and placed the fish inside before turning to the cupboards to pull out all that was necessary for a big family meal, a happy family meal with his mom, just him and his mom. A half hour later the fish was ready and looking quite good though the smell was one of decay and ruin. Right then his mom entered the kitchen. She had just woken up and looked the worse for wear and tear after a lonely 2-gallon night in front of the TV. She burst into tears when she saw the beautiful meal her son had prepared for her. She was so elated and overwhelmed that she turned hastily to go get dressed and accidentally smashed her face on the door, crumbling to the ground with a black eye and a sore jaw and a teardrop on the dirty cream-colored linoleum floor. She picked herself up like a work-horse and staggered off with a bitter smile and stubborn wet eyes to her room to change, not wanting to spoil this for her little baby.

The boy stood frozen for a moment. He then walked up to the fish and smelled it again. He turned and looked at the teardrop on the linoleum floor. He picked up the dead trout in its tray and walked out to the creek, the dog close behind all a wonder, all nervous energy. He slid the fish into the gurgling water. The trout slowly swam away with the lemon slices, all cooked now and ready to go.

–Andreas Economakis

Excerpt from the author’s current novel in progress: “Requiem For A Cat”.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

I Was a Male Chat-bot: The Turing Test, Artificial Intelligence, and Gender Online

Posted on by Chase Dimock


Three summers ago, I made ten dollars an hour plus commission portraying “Jessica”, an online shopping assistant program designed by InQ serving the WhiteFence.com website. On WhiteFence.com, a customer can purchase phone, cable, internet service, and other products specific to their address. If any questions about the products or ordering procedure were to arise, the customer could initiate an online chat with Jessica simply by clicking on her picture in the upper right hand of the page. Jessica looked the part of an intelligent and congenial assistant with blond hair pulled back, a collared white shirt, and a pair of stylish librarian glasses. However, this image of Jessica rarely resembled the individual who answers questions as Jessica. In fact, in the first two months of the WhiteFence.com account, all of the agents working as Jessica were males of ages 20-40. The InQ office was filled with Jessicas working on different websites such as bellsouth.com, sprint.com and vonage.com, all corresponding to roughly similar pictures of the blond, attractive woman ready to answer all your questions. As agents, we were encouraged to maintain our “Jessica” identity at all times. Jessica provided a human face for the website, a form of branding which personalizes an online experience usually marked by anonymity. The overwhelming majority of customers fully bought into the Jessica masquerade, often typing personal testimonies of their trials and tribulations in trying to get their phone connected and appealing to Jessica’s implied sense of personal concern and warmth. Jessica was always sympathetic, but she was also a saleswoman, trained to guide customers to the latest long distance plans and rebates so she could make a fifty cent commission on each sale.

The way that the customers personally related to and trusted Jessica’s authenticity consistently astounded me as I sometimes lost sight of the avatar I impersonated only to be reminded by the femininity they projected upon me. Some customers so thoroughly believed this domestication of the internet, that they contributed their only gestures of intimacy, sometimes  referring to me as “Jessie” in their conversations or even as “Miss Jessica”. Other individuals continued to chat with me long after their purchase was completed, including one notable individual who asked me on a date after a long story about needing to purchase internet service for his new apartment now that his girlfriend kicked him out. Other lonely hearts have been more forward as Jessica has seen her share of lewd comments, come-ons, and outright sexual harassment. Although not a woman in real life, I nonetheless felt than just a sense of disgust in principle, but felt an affect of violation at these comments as if she has become an extension of myself. While my mind fell in and out of the mode of gender impersonation, any customers who seized upon gendered power assymmetries in the conversation immediately interpolated me as a subject into Jessica’s body and I felt the sense of degradation that a real Jessica should have felt, and no doubt, what millions of real women experience regularly in their jobs.

Conscious of the fact that not only am I not truly “Jessica”, but I am also not even a female, this experience raised questions about how age-old conventions of gender performance have been infused into online communication . While most customers fully trusted the fact that that blond-haired woman named Jessica was on the other end of the conversation, a small percentage doubted not only my identity, but my reality as well. Jessica is given a set “script” of answers to frequently asked questions and detailed product descriptions to send that one could obviously not be able to improvise on the spot. In this sense, Jessica is a collaborative artificial intelligence where the intelligence of the individual and the programmed information of the computer merge. This shift from the discourse markers of corporate language and my own personal construction of phrases raises suspicion in the eyes of the customer, who frequently demanded to know if I am real before they allowed me to help them. While most customers were content to just have the answers to their questions, a good-sized portion insisted upon verifying my identity (and sometimes proving I was an American and not in an Indian call center) before they would allow me to help them. Performing as Jessica, I was burdened with having to prove my reality as a human or an American while still masquerading as a female. For these customers, interactions with Jessica took on the properties of a 21st century Turing test in which they felt compelled determine both my gender and humanity through only my responses online so as to determine whether or not the entity on the other end possessed a legitimate and trustworthy store of knowledge on cable TV and internet service.

In 1950, British Mathematician and cryptologist Alan Turing published the paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” which has since become the cornerstone in the modern scholarly discourse on Artificial Intelligence. Turing begins his paper around the hotly debated question “can machines think?”. He is notably reluctant to define what it is to “think”, wishing to avoid providing a definition that could either be used as an inflexible referent that gains credibility on the strength of his reputation alone or initiating a semantics battle over the definition which would obscure the point of the paper. Turing instead proposes a hypothetical model for determining the intelligence of the machine without debate over the essentials of thought and consciousness, which has subsequently come to be termed the “Turing Test”. In this model, which has been proposed in many variations, usually consists of an individual who is placed in a room where he is to give questions and commands to an entity placed in another room. The entity in the other room, which could be a human or machine, sends back answers to the questions that are first interpreted by a human test conductor and given back to the one who wrote the questions. After several rounds of questions and conversation, the interrogator is then asked to determine whether or not he has been communicating to a machine or a person. In some versions, both a machine and an individual can answer the questions at the same time and thus a comparison can be made. If the individual who asks the questions cannot determine if he is talking to a machine or not, then Turing concludes that the machine could be termed intelligent. For Turing, intelligence in this context is not evaluated in of itself, but instead as far as it relates to the subjective judgment of the individual. A machine possesses intelligence as far as the individual cannot tell it apart from the intelligence of a human being.

I will not make the error that many scholars in the humanities make by attempting to enter into a debate in the sciences for which they are ill-equipped. Instead, my primary interest in Turing’s model is in how questions of gender identity informed his test of Artificial Intelligence and how his theory understood how intelligence and knowledge becomes an embodied phenomenon Turing’s inspiration for his theory was based on a parlor game called “The Imitation Game” in which individuals guess the gender of a hidden individual based on responses to questions. Turing defines it by the following:

“It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator(C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either ‘X is A and Y is B’ or ‘X is B and Y is A. The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:

C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A’s object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:

“My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long.”

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as “I am the woman, don’t listen to him!” to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make  similar remarks”.

Turing’s model relies upon the subject of speculation being closeted. This closet, which can be seen by the interrogator, presupposes the content of either a female body, a male body, or in the case of the AI test, a machine or computer of some sort. The ability to detect the contents of the closet depends on the player’s ability to visualize a presence, knowing that something must be there to send the notes. Even when the machine is nothing but a box that can produce a tickertape, we project our sense of agency upon it. Because the mind works with sound images and visual signifiers, we cannot possibly imagine pure information without a visualization of authorship or some origin of the words. Therefore, we must attribute some sense of our selves via personification onto the product that produces the information in order to understand it

With the goal of the game as to fool as many people as possible, gender performativity becomes the ultimate modus operandi for victory. Without the context of voice or handwriting due to a neutral individual or teleprinter reading the responses, the only way to prove gender results from the content and phrasing of the information given. Per Turing’s example, if a woman were to have short hair, it would be in her best interest to lie and talk of long hair if she believes that the audience would expect a woman to have long hair. Therefore, the actual woman may not be bodily woman enough to correspond the signifier of woman formulated in the mind of the interrogator and must perform to what the interrogator pictures as a woman so as to prove her own authenticity

Just as Artificial Intelligence uses repeated programmed responses contoured around the expectations of the user to appear natural, so too does a woman’s gender appear natural as it countlessly repeats the same gestures and affects that we have come to associate with authentic femininity. The more a gesture is repeated, the more natural it feels until that gesture becomes ingrained in the unconscious as instinctual when it is in fact learned behavior. Thus, gender performance is both an unconscious involuntary process and a tactical employment of signifying acts of masquerade as advanced by the early psychoanalyst Joan Riviere in her essay “Womanliness as Masquerade”:

“Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it — much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods” (36).

Under this definition, the woman performs the gender of femininity in order not to call attention to how her actions may disrupt or threaten the masculine agency of the man she addresses. In this dynamic, the woman is defined as “the Other”, a collection of undefined qualities that are merely the opposite of what the male associates with his sense of agency. There is thus no definition for woman as a genuine, independently define identity, only the false masquerade of typical feminine acts that covers this otherness with familiar gestures. In a similar dynamic, technology and computers occupy a roughly concept of otherness. Just as woman in a simple binary is situated as the opposite of “man” as we think of mankind as masculine, so too do we pose the machine as the other of man. Although we like to believe we have referential qualities for what “man” signifies in opposition to “machine”, the definition of machine lacks its own signifiers that would signify it in its own right other than the lack of humanity. Therefore, there is no “machine” outside of “man” just as there is no “woman” outside of her relationship with “man”. The technology of intelligence employed by the woman and the machine both becomes technologies of masquerade under which there is no authentic face but the expected face projected by the masculine subject onto the veneer of the mask itself. In this relationship, woman and machine are united in the category of “Other” and must perform themselves to the expectations of the assumed male spectator. Thus, the imitation game provides a model for which we can see that the process of signifying intelligence implies a masquerade and that the test for machine intelligence and gender intelligence is the same exact test. There is no difference in the Turing Test between the two imitation games; they are the same test of successfully covering one’s otherness to appeal to the spectator’s expectations of what entails intelligence.

The performance of Jessica online represents not only a contemporary reconceptualizing of Turing’s Test, but that it also constitutes the reality of signifying artificial intelligence and gender intelligence online as the same process in the same body. In other words, Jessica can be viewed as half a gender performance and half a performance of humanity. Because these are not separate performances, but that instead the performance of gender is always already a performance of humanity, I was constantly reminded of the works of Donna Harraway and her Cyborg Manifesto. For Harraway, the cyborg represents a deconstruction of the binaries present in gender relations, specifically the binary of control and lack of control over one’s body. Harraway argues that “Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines” (34). The cyborg represents the way in which modern technology has not only influenced the evolution of the individual and society, but also how it has now become inseparable from the human, a melding of DNA and binary code in which we cannot conceptualize our selves without the intervention of technology. The cyborg is formulated when an individual has incorporated technology into their body and the day to day functioning of the body so depends on this technology that it feels as though it is a natural appendage of the body complete with its own circulation and nerves. The body starts to feel through technology This can take the form of physical prostheses like contact lenses or surgical implants, technologies we use supplement the capacity of our bodies, or even technologies of bodily depiction like the use of Photoshop to retouch pictures where our standards for the bodily strength and beauty become distorted by our ability to create biologically impossible but natural-appearing images of the body.

Under this reading, Jessica can be partially interpreted as a cyborg. While my co-workers and I all joked about being Jessica and pretending to be a woman, it was clear that nobody actually thought of themselves as Jessica nor did they change their behavior to perform consciously what they would consider gendered speech. Instead, Jessica is best seen as a collaboration between the computer program of Jessica and the individual agent logs into her identity when they receive chats. As part Artificial Intelligence, Jessica the computer program is designed to pop up on the screen of a customer who has stayed on a single page beyond five minutes as well as remain a seductive icon of help that one can click on, on the upper right of the web page. The agent portraying Jessica had no ability to initiate chat at all; it is only Jessica as AI that could initiate chat with a prerecorded offer of help under the guise of having been initiated by a live person. Once the customer responds, the agent is then notified of the request and can begin to click Jessica’s pre-typed script and FAQs to send to the customer as well as free type responses on their own. Through the combination of pre-programmed script and improvised answers, the agent and the program mutually collaborate to create the intelligence of Jessica. On a rudimentary level, Jessica may be considered a cyborg so far as she as presented to the consumer as neither wholly a person nor wholly a computer program but instead a technology of artificial and human intelligence stamped with an attractive blond face as to pose as purely a product of human intelligence. Neither Jessica the computer program nor the operator logged on as Jessica can do their job without one another; they inhabit one virtual body composed of human flesh and binary code. The cyborg body of Jessica is composed a technology of gender which projects the picture of Jessica on the screen into the mind of the customer to constitute an image of whoever chats with them on the other end of the conversation. The pixels of the computer image of Jessica takes over the DNA of the real chat operator who becomes infused with the elements of Jessica in the mind of the consumer.

However, Jessica proves somewhat unsatisfactory as a cyborg in that her identity as a cyborg is only comprehended by the agents who portray her. For the customer, Jessica is designed specifically to erase the potentially threatening notion of artificial intelligence of technology and to allay consumers’ fears of shopping online in a world obsessed about identity fraud and scams.  Posing specifically as a gendered human, Jessica represents how individuals online ignore the how technology has pervaded our existence and rendered us all cyborgs. The consumer clings to and insists upon knowledge of “real” existence of Jessica so as to verify the veracity of the information they are given, somehow suggesting that if it had come from the program and not Jessica herself, that somehow the computer had developed the ability to formulate it without someone first having given the computer that information. Thus, there is a fear of technology having too much agency that the image of Jessica assures them has been tamed and domesticated.

The privileging of “real” biological identity offline transports the Turing Test to the 21st century in which individuals determine intelligence based on the information broadcast over the internet by an individual performing identity. This Turing Test of determination of true identity through the use of language is further complicated in Jessica’s interactions with customers. In the dynamic established in chat exchanges between Jessica and the customer, a slightly modified version of the Turing Test is realized. The main adaptation comes with the ever-increasing role played cyberspace in the model (thus the machine) as both the means of conversation and thus the moderator. In the original Turing test, the interpreter of the information submitted from the closet is a human being, yet in this model, the machine is the moderator. The machine is both the moderator and possibly the object submitting information from the closet at the exact same time. While the customer must still necessarily visualize the source of the information that he is fed, he is already conscious of the presence of machines as he is communicating through a computer. Therefore, the customer himself must rely upon a certain level of artificial intelligence in the form of his computer so as to be able to access the information in the first place. Despite the lack of consciousness in the part of the customer, the interaction between Jessica and himself cannot be defined a man talking to man, or machine talking to man, but instead cyborg communicating to cyborg. As I have spoken of earlier, internet communication inherently changes the way in which we communicate because we cannot express certain ideas in words or merely lack written proficiency. Just as gender is affected through online communication as performance, so too is the humanity of the individual typing.  Customers often find typing to be cumbersome or they feel unable to express their questions and thus they frequently ask to speak to Jessica on the phone. There is some element of their own humanity that they feel becomes depersonalized or incommunicable through the computer-mediated communication.

The presence of Jessica’s picture helps to alleviate this anxiety as she is employed to make it appear as though the customer is talking directly to a human being instead of sending their words out into the anonymity and incomprehensibility of cyberspace. The Turing Test’s set-up is realized in the interaction as the customer is presented with the possibility of a jovial woman being in the closet sending him the information instead of some anonymous machine. However, despite the fact that all of the WhiteFence.com Jessicas were men, there was no premium placed by the supervisors on the agents to perform a feminine language. Instead, the standardization of the language came from the scripts on products and ordering procedure formulated by the supervisors. Instead of being consciously gendered, the scripts were imbued with salesman-type phrasing, attempting to make the products appeal to as broad of an audience as possible. The use of language centered on an ultimate tone of neutrality and diction at the level of the average consumer that one could easily read and understand through text alone.  Yet, at the same time, very few customers ever doubted Jessica’s femininity despite the relative neutrality of scripted answers and the males supplying the free-scripted answers. The only context of femininity provided for the chat is the little aforementioned picture of Jessica on the screen and the prefacing of every piece of information with “Jessica says”. This consistency of iteration results first from the use of scripts. Because the tone of the scripts are carefully processed and edited, there is a consistent tone of salesmanship that overrides any feminine or masculine tone. Secondly, the consistency is also derived from the mere repetition of the name Jessica before every piece of information submitted. Every time Jessica speaks, the program gendered the statement by reminding the customer that it came from Jessica. Thus, the language use becomes gendered not by any inherent quality, but merely by the customer expecting to read inflections of gender in it and in the process producing them himself.

This acceptance of the gender of Jessica raises the question of why the female gender is preferable to the male for representing the company and why individual customers trust her information. As I have alluded to beforehand, Jessica functions as a sort of brand name for the website on which she is featured. Jessica provides and image that humanizes a product such as a website which is composed of complex computer science of which the average consumer lacks knowledge. The employment of a female face to personify a section of cyberspace refers back to the act of masquerade. The female who has been labeled as an “other” shares a relationship with cyberspace as “other”. Otherness in this context can be especially threatening for the customer as the computer functions in ways it cannot comprehend. While Jessica functions to answer questions that the consumer could very well look up in the FAQ page, Jessica’s feminine gender represents the masquerade of difference that masks the feared otherness of technology and woman. The feminine gender is already imbued with the process of masking otherness through performances of sensitivity and empathy rooted subconsciously in the mind of the customer. Here, the otherness of machine is hidden under the same mask of gender in order to familiarize what cannot be fully understood. As a brand, Jessica as woman inherits a lineage of female icons adorning products and familiarizing them to the consumer. Just like an Aunt Jemima, Betty Crocker, or Mrs. Butterworth, Jessica infuses a touch of femininity into the website that she adorns. These corporate icons suggest personification of a product that consists of little more than a bag of flour and sugar. The image of the completed pancake on the box is not enough to simplify the abstraction of the product before it is cooked. The end product must have an author, a genial, motherly cook whose know-how produces delicious pancakes that you too can make. In this same way, Jessica’s simulacra of bodily presence of the website seizes upon the need for the customer to see embodiment online.

The privileging of the situatedness of intelligence through gender in the eyes of the consumer is evidenced by the one account in the company that does not use the Jessica moniker. InQ’s account with Gamefly.com, a website like Netflix for video games uses the name “Mike” for its employees. While most of the Gamefly.com agents were in fact men, the customers reacted negatively to and doubted Jessica’s advice because they assumed that a female would not know enough about video games. Jessica was subsequently fired and replaced by Mike who proved much more effective with the customers despite the fact that the scripts remained the same and the account used the same exact chat agents. The only change in the dissemination of information was changing Jessica’s name to Mike and removing her picture. The Turing Test set up of customer and agent is reflected here as the customer situates intelligence through “masculine know-how”. The customer determines the intelligence of the information he is given based on his own criteria for intelligence. He necessarily presupposes a man in the closet on the other end of cyberspace as the signifier of intelligence. Once he is presented with the suspicion of femininity, the information no longer qualifies as “intelligence” and is thus branded artificial, or in this case, female. For the customer, intelligence is an embodied phenomenon where the presence of the body indicates an understanding beyond mere instruction. As a male is presupposed to “know how” to play video games, (the complicated sequencing of pushing buttons) his bodily presence signifies this know-how that corresponds to the signifier of video-game intelligence in the consumer’s mind. Despite the fact that this process of video game playing cannot be communicated online, its know-how is symbolized by the name Mike and thus anything he recommends on the website carries an authenticity that a woman who delivers the same advice cannot signify.

Jessica extends the common yet unfortunate practice of using attractive women in customer service positions so as to seduce the wandering eye of the male consumer and lure him into a power dynamic where he thinks he is in control due to his perception of superiority over women. This practice is merged with cyberspace that is imbued with connotations of the frontier, a wild yet virginal area prime for the conquering male to insert himself. The presence of Jessica as an attractive female further raises the sexualization of the cyberspace frontier, putting a human face on unconscious sexual drive. The presence of Jessica allows the customer to trust the information he is given in that her intelligence is validated through this masquerade of self and machine as woman. Such a process is evident with the sheer amount of sexual harassment that the average Jessica must fend off. Yet, this sexual power dynamic is a mere mask on the actual power dynamic at place which feminizes the consumer through the monopolistic economic control of the cable and phone companies over the individual which are sold on the site. Jessica thus softens and sexualizes the monstrous nature of technology’s power over the consumer.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MAYA ELASHI

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

IN A BIBLICAL GARDEN
by Maya Elashi

i saw the messiah this morning.
He was wearing a white kaffiya and riding a donkey
southeast, towards Jerusalem.

He didn’t look at me
though he knew i was there with two cameras: moving and still
He didn’t want any pictures taken
and i, in dissappointment, respected that it’s

not an everyday experience i said to myself as he faded into the multitude

now, my heart alone holds the image developing
still
i’ll keep walking the path they followed up and over the hill.


Maya Elashi is an Irish Jew. A Kabbalistic Hebrew Pagan Priestess to The Goddess. She is a gardener/herbalist, as well as a teacher of English and Hebrew. Maya plays and prays for peace in the Middle East (and worldwide).

Editor’s Note: Just in time for the Hanukkah holiday, and the holidays in general, comes this piece from Maya Elashi. A piece that, in both its brilliance and simplicity, captures both a moment in time and a spiritual experience. I recall seeing Maya read in a barn in Santa Cruz many years ago. She shared an exceptional long poem that was very well received by the audience and that ended with her singing a line from Tom Petty, “Oh my my, oh hell yes, honey, put on that party dress!” Maya has been one of the most influential people in my writing life, and was the first person to be completely thrilled that I was leaving the law to pursue a career as a poet and teacher. It is a true honor to share her work with you here today.