Pete Shelley

He was hardly the first punk rocker to leave us, but he played guitar on the first (and arguably the best) indie punk 7″, Spiral Scratch by The Buzzcocks. I thought he was a wonderful songwriter: there was a time when I thought he was the best songwriter. Another Music in a Different Kitchen was constantly on my turntable when I was 19, and I thought of Pete Shelley as a friend, though he had no idea who I was… but in a way he did. I knew because of his songs that he was on some deep level like me.

When I found out he was queer a couple of years later, I better understood the connection. But that connection was about more than our both being a particular kind of different. He was a romantic and a depressive. He was smart. He made the kind of records I wanted to make.

And today, I was working on a blog post about how we treat celebrities when they die, and at just the moment when I was ready to publish it, I checked Facebook, because that’s what I do. The first thing I saw was that he’d died. Considering the subject of what I’d just been working on, it felt like something I had to write about: both because it seemed relevant and because of how much his music meant to me in a dark period of my life.

There was a time when the only music I wanted to listen to was Spiral Scratch. For days, I played no other music. This was back in the mid-80s, when I lived in a tiny studio apartment in Tucson. I’d listen to it before work. I’d put it on as soon as I got home. When the needle made it to the center on side 2, I would flip it over and play “Boredom” again. I counted 56 times through the whole record. I’ve never done that with any other record. It’s a good thing I lived by myself, then, but then maybe the fact that I was alone was part of the reason why I needed that record so much.

I can’t say that right now, this minute, I miss Pete Shelley. I haven’t listened to the Buzzcocks in a good long time, and I can’t pretend that we have any other connection besides the records. But I am pulling out my copies of Spiral Scratch, Another Music, Singles Going Steady, Love Bites, and A Different Kind of Tension as soon as I get home.

Thanks for the music, Pete. Thanks for the hours when your music sustained me. Thanks for understanding.

BuzzcocksSpiralScratch

Speaking Ill of the Dead

This week’s freshly-dead celebrity is being simultaneously vilified and sanctified.

One of my social media pet peeves happens when someone famous dies. Half or more of the posts on my Facebook newsfeed will suddenly be “RIP so-and-so, sad emoji.” This happens seemingly on a weekly basis, as so many people who’ve had a moment in the spotlight when I was young seem to be passing these days.

It can be a challenge to find the right words when a celebrity one admires passes on, and “RIP” is at least an acknowledgement of a death that feels significant. But those three letters, repeated ad infinitum and at every opportunity ends up feeling less like a tribute and more like a reflex: a meaningless formality. I’ve gotten crap from people for saying so, but my desire in pointing it out is actually to ask that the observance of these passings feel more personal, more weighty, more sincere, and perhaps, I admit, a little bit less prevalent.

The phrase “rest in peace” carries with it some unpleasant associations. As I understand it, the expression came into common usage centuries ago, borne out of fear that a lost loved one might have just been in a deep sleep or a coma. There are folk tales of some poor soul’s body being exhumed and the diggers discovering claw marks all over the inside of the coffin and hunks of flesh missing out of the deceased’s forearm, self-inflicted out of starvation and madness. Because of that, I read “RIP (insert name of deceased person here)” as “Gee, I hope we didn’t bury you alive!”

I know that’s not what people are thinking when they say it, but I can’t escape the association, because someone told me that when I was impressionable. It’s where my mind unfailingly goes.

We ritualize the remembrance of the dead as a sort of lay beatification of people who were not so nice in life. “Don’t speak ill of the dead,” we say, reflexively. As if it matters to them.

Maybe it’s just the thought that they can’t defend themselves, being that they’re no longer around. To my mind, lies of omission that make a person who’s passed seem better than we thought they were in life is still an attack, a distortion of the truth of who they were. We don’t remember the flesh-and-blood human by doing this, we create a chimera and give it the name of the person who’s no longer there to set the record straight.

This week, I’ve been observing this phenomenon applied to former President George Herbert Walker Bush, who died this past Friday, November 30th. I’m also seeing a raft of postings online about how terrible a person he was. The truth must be more complex than either view.

If there is any shred of truth to the idea of a “Deep State,” there has been no more public representative of it that Bush 41. I remember him speaking to a gathering of Wall Street CEOs on September 11th, 2001, in the immediate wake of two planes striking the old World Trade Center towers, another flying into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashing into an empty field in Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania, foiled by passengers from reaching its destination, the Capital Dome.

The message of his speech, imprinted as indelibly in my memory as the image of claw marks on the inside of a coffin, was that “we need to unfetter our intelligence services.” Against any potential enemy of the state, the intelligence community needs to be given free reign to act.

My thought then was that this country would move in the direction of empowering the state against the needs of the individual. There is nothing about the history of this country since that contradicts that insight.

There’s been a debate for the last decade or so as to whether there is an actual guaranteed right to privacy, despite the clear assumption of it’s existence in the 1st, 3rd, 4th and 5th Constitutional amendments, and allusions to it in landmark court decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, and Lawrence v. Texas. Bush 41 publicly iterated the intention to infringe on that right within hours of the attacks, both in what he spoke about and who he spoke to.

I won’t go into other knocks against the man being repeated all over the web, other than to echo one that is of particular importance to me as an transgender woman, and someone who lost a brother to HIV/AIDS during the 41st Presidency: his utter silence and inaction as the plague was ravaging the country. That lack of response feels like innate homophobia and a callousness that renders his call for a “kinder, gentler nation” hypocritical.

Yet, much of the mainstream media has presented a much different picture of the man, speaking of his civility, even his warmth, and calling him a moderate. I think there’s validity to that last, at the very least. He was a Republican President who had the will to raise taxes. In these times, that seems like remarkable courage. He paid for it with any potential for a second term as President. It seems to me that he acted with intention for the good of the country.

The reactions I’m seeing among those who knew him suggest that he was likable. I suspect that if you knew him at all, your impression of him was likely to be positive.

Once again, there has been a huge amount of discussion along these lines in the media: I don’t feel the need to recapitulate all of that here. This post is already longer than I would like.

We’re all much more complex than any one person can know. Those who know us best don’t know everything. We all have dark little corners in our souls and little points of light that shine only in certain directions, along with the larger, more obvious facets of ourselves others can either see or dispute. To reduce someone, like this week’s celebrity example, to only the nice things one can say about them, or only the complaints we have against them, or, Cthulhu help us, “RIP,” seems criminal. I want all of the gritty realism. I want to remember whole, complex human beings once they leave this world. That’s how I want to be remembered, all of the good in me is negated if one denies the bad.

In the words of another massively complicated, now-deceased celeb, just gimme some truth. All I want is the truth.

Anna Komnene

It’s been pointed out that I haven’t posted much about my research into the Eastern Roman Empire of late. There’s a reason for this: I’ve gotten hung up reading The Alexiad, written by the Roman princess Anna Komnene in the Twelfth Century CE: a history of her father, the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, and his reign.

The problem is the relationship I’m having as reader to Anna Komnene as an author. She’s a huge personality, clearly brilliant, and every bit a member of an old-world, long-standing ruling class family. I’ve found the time I’ve spent with her words compelling, difficult, frustrating, and ultimately rewarding. I still haven’t finished it, so I won’t go far into the content of the book here. I’ll write about that once I’ve made it to the end. But I can talk to you about my experience of reading the book so far.

I’m intrigued with the contemporary perspective. She talks in the introduction about her uncle, who died of exhaustion: he was so tired he developed a tumor. As a result of such misunderstandings, I was willing to accept her as an at-least-somewhat unreliable narrator due to her medieval worldview. But there are other problems, including chronological errors throughout the book, which I wouldn’t have been aware of if I hadn’t been checking the end notes as I read.

I understand she was working within limitations: she was banished to a convent, and while primary source materials were available to her, it appears that she may not have been able to reconstruct timelines dependably. So much for the chronological inconsistencies.

It also seems to me that she considers the official narrative and contemporary affairs of state as she writes, which I can’t fault her for. It still made me trust her less as an authoritative voice. Causing your reader to be skeptical is a huge challenge to overcome in a work of nonfiction, and I was definitely skeptical about certain things I read.

But the main problem I’ve had is that I’m not sure what to make of Anna Komnene as a person. She was clearly, as I’ve said, brilliant, perceptive, and an engaging writer as well, but she was caught up in the politics of her time, about as high-born a person as there could have been. I admit that I am leery of such people. I have socialist leanings both politically and in how I view class generally. I was prepared to set those prejudices aside, but I was daunted by the way she speaks about her father: how gifted he was, how resourceful, how strong, what a great soldier, how handsome, how pious. It all began to seem like too much. After one such hagiographic passage, I set the book down for a couple of weeks.

To be fair, she doesn’t avoid talking about Alexios’ failures, and she avoids mitigating or excusing them. On reflection, I think she did her best to meet the challenges of writing about her father within the limitations of her circumstances. I still suspect she doesn’t tell the whole truth, and it’s taken me a fair amount of processing to make peace with that.

I also let myself in for a little bit of disappointment by imagining that this book would contain story elements I didn’t end up finding. That’s my shortcoming. I wanted more description, more relationships, a stronger story arc. I think I was looking for a style of writing that didn’t exist in her day. Modern narrative writing is richer in the sorts of details that for the most part Anna either only barely touches on or skips entirely.

The book is mainly accounts of wars and battles Alexios fought, with a paragraph here and there of surprising granular detail. There’s a brief conversation between Anna and her mother. Elsewhere there’s a description of the workings of a particular weapon. It’s for those moments that the book has held my attention most. They’re sparsely strewn throughout the narrative, and when I come upon them, the world of the story becomes much more vivid.

I have to remind myself that she wasn’t there for most of the events The Alexiad covers: not yet born at the beginning, a child in the Imperial creche for much of the time she writes about. She clearly held her father in the highest esteem, and probably heard stories of the events she writes about from him or those around him. It’s unfair of me to judge her for that.

Having understood these things, I am having a much easier time with her book. When I finish, I’ll say more.

Happy Thanksgiving

I’m traveling today, and my suspicion is that not too many eyes will fall upon these words, as this is not the sort of day when people surf the web looking at blogs by fledgling writers. I will keep this short, in case these words do reach you somehow. I don’t want to keep you.

I live in Massachusetts, where this whole tradition began, under a dark, bloody cloud. I’ve attended the National Day of Mourning in Plymouth. I know some of the history of King Phillip’s War and its aftermath. So much of the history of this country I call home is built upon horror and hatred, wholesale misery and profound suffering.

For my family, as it likely is for yours, this day has been and continues to be about togetherness and appreciation, and maybe a little bit about overzealous eating. I embrace this tradition, because it’s a good and important thing to do — to honor family and to be thankful.

But we should also remember King Phillip, and the churchgoing Indians who were the first and most devastated victims of the war that bears his name. We should remember a time two hundred years later, when Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé, ran for their lives across the frozen Northwest, starving at the same time that American families were having Thanksgiving feasts, thanking the Lord for the bounty they had, not even knowing the name of King Phillip. If they thought about Chief Joseph at all, those thoughts were not in any way warm with gratitude, or tinged with remorse.

They should have been.

Perhaps we can hold some humility in our hearts along with our joy? Perhaps we can also hold to some vision and some intention towards a better, more inclusive, more compassionate future? We can’t change the past, but what if we do these things?

  • Remember your loved ones, and in that context, remember the value of human life.
  • Share what you have with those around you. This is the spirit of family that I remember as the central tenet of so many Native American tribes.
  • Remember the price that has been paid for this bountiful life. It is the debt that goes with the gratitude of the day.

May you be blessed, and may you recognize your blessings and where they’ve come from.

In that spirit, I thank you for your attention to these words.