September 11, veganism, and memory

I spoke with my mom earlier today about the proliferation of September 11, 2001 news that’s out there at present.  Tenth anniversary and all.  She said, “it’s not like we’ll forget it.  Do we really need to relive it?”  She’s got a point, I think.  But for me, and for reasons that are somewhat vague, I haven’t ever let myself fully experience what I’ve been going through today, ten years later, with regard to 9/11.  I watched this.  It killed me.  The second part in particular.

There are anniversaries...and there are anniversaries. Summer in the year of 2001 is inextricably enmeshed, in my mind, with two major events: my decision to become vegan and the day that the planes flew into the towers in Manhattan.  I had decided, but now, in the retrospect clouded by the plumes of billowing smoke, the screams and melting metal, the people, desperate for escape and air, hurling themselves from hundreds of stories, I don’t remember the exact date that I became vegan. 

I remember that I sold my leather Fluevogs and my Doc Martins on ebay.  I cried to Jason; this felt like a kind of baptism, a kind of secular salvation for me, a woman who had been vegetarian since 1989 and had been volunteering at the Dakin Animal Shelter since moving to Massachusetts.

I got rid of wool.  I went into a major sulk over the loss of fresh mozzarella pizza at Pizza Paradiso in Northampton.  It must have been summer.  It was still warm; my windows were down and I was driving, speaking through tears to Jason about this decision to, as I said at the time, “make my life consistent.”  And it was an important decision, made on a day that I should certainly remember, but the particulars of it are lost to me now, enveloped in what must have come immediately afterwards, the attack, the video images played on a constant unending loop, the deaths.

Everyone keeps saying that there’s no way to forget that day.  And, while I can't forget it, I don’t necessarily remember it either.  That day, that beautiful, blue, warm and peaceful day, I woke up and, I suppose – because this is what I always do – I had coffee. Maybe I went running, but it must have been early, because I remember moving my car from one side of South Street to the other so that repairs could be made on the asphalt near my apartment.  And I remember that the radio was on in my car as I moved it, as always, tuned to NPR, and I knew, at that moment, that a plane had flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

I didn’t have a TV.  Seriously.  This was one of the last pretensions that I shed – and I shed it fast after that morning.  I had been taken with the belief that owning a television, that watching television, was something associated with lower life forms. So what happened next?  Here’s where memory fades, at least with regard to time.  I know that I watched the news with my downstairs neighbor Jamie.  I know that I talked to Jason, but I don’t remember the content of that conversation.  And I don’t remember how time unfolded for the rest of the day.

I know that I tried to call Stacy, my friend from Staten Island who lived in New Jersey, who was turning 32 on September 11, 2001.  I suppose that if one lives long enough in a world of mass murder, one’s birthday will, inevitably coincide with something like this.  For me, all there was, at least for a long time, was the coincidence of my birthday with the death date of Aphra Behn in 1689.  But then there was the shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007.  And my birthday, like Stacy’s, became forever associated with evil and the mortality of my species.

I tried to call Stacy that day.  The lines were blocked.  The world just stopped.

What I remember next is all out of sequence: driving to school.  Driving away from school; UMASS closed at 1 p.m.  Sitting down in the office of Stephen Clingman, my dissertation director, and trying not to cry.  He told me that it was ok.  I said that it most certainly wasn’t.

It was the only day during the five years that I was in Massachusetts, five years marked by impossible blizzards, feet deep snows, ice, extreme cold, that the university shut its doors and let its charges wander without cause.  The planes had flown from Logan.  We were free, and we were implicated.  I left the campus.  The gates at the parking garage were open; no one had to pay.  I went home and ran a 5K at the hospital grounds at Smith College.  It was Tuesday.  We raced weekly, but this day my heart nearly exploded because I felt that I had to run for everyone who had died, everyone who had never run before, everyone who had called out that morning only to die just a bit later.

And that’s all I remember.

In the years that have passed since September 11, since that singular September 11, I have closed my heart and my mind.  I have been annoyed at the perpetual remembrances, the constant calling to the fore the faces of the lost.  I know that there is worse evil in the world.  This holds no candle to the holocaust.  I know about what’s happening in Congo.  And then there is the moment, which is barely a moment.  Even as it is, even as it leaves an impression that I can’t shake ten years out.

 Since my country invaded Afghanistan in some misguided and ill-conceived attempt to right the wrongs of 9/11/2001, the statistics for just how many people have died are hard to find.  But my sense is that we’ve killed – many, many times over – the number of U.S. citizens that died that day.  In fact – and I hate to cite Wikipedia, but when it’s the best source that I find on the subject, I will – it seems that in terms of civilian deaths (think of civilians as those people who were working in the Towers that day), from 2001-2003 we leveled 23,600 people.  My mind wants to continue to forget.

Back to veganism: I think about my country, about what we do, about the narrative that we spin.  I watched a documentary today about the phone calls that were made from people in the towers as the towers were about to go down.  One mother said that she stopped listening to her son’s message, that she had created a message that he didn’t really say, because that message, the one that she’d invented, was more comforting to her.  And that’s the way with history: Ernest Renan said, in a lecture he delivered in 1882, "forgetting . . . is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation."  The narrative that we tell -- even in spite of concrete images and saved final voice messages -- is a narrative shaped by what we remember, certainly, but it's also a narrative of invention, of justification, built just as much on what we choose, consciously or not, to forget.

There are no voices to hear or meld or misremember when it comes to animals.  Every day in the United States, the narrative that we imagine or excuse with regard to their lives and deaths is our own.  I became a vegan in 2001 on a day that I should remember but don't, because the reality of not being vegan was staring me squarely in the face.  And then September 11 encroached, called me forth to see the evil that spurs us onwards in a blind frenzy to win some impossible game.

I know many truths from that impossible year: we are still at war, an invisible enemy is supposedly vanquished, and many, many more humans have had to die.  And I am still a vegan, and this choice will continue to sustain me, will continue to bring me up against impossible murderous adversaries, real and imagined, remembered and forgotten, again, and again, and again.  Happy anniversary.

Vegetarian Vampires (again)

OK, so I'm working on this chapter.  And doing so is making me have to watch Twilight, which makes me want to put my head in the oven.

But seriously.  Here's the first bit.  There's much more, but if I put it all up, you'd probably not read it.  You may not read it anyway.  Which is fine.

Vegan Vampires: The Politics of Drinking Humans and Animals in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, and True Blood

I used to fancy that life was a positive and perpetual entity, and that by consuming a multitude of living things . . . one might indefinitely prolong life.  – Renfield, Dracula

It is, of course, impossible to discuss representations of vampires in Western culture without discussing Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula.  In fact, it is largely – if not wholly – because of Stoker’s novel that “vampires belong to a modern popular folklore that few will admit to believing but that has become part of a way of thinking about and ordering our vision of the world around us” (Hallab 9).  The veritable cottage industry that is the production of literary criticism about Dracula[i] has provided a vast array of theoretical readings of Stoker’s vampire’s symbolic significance within the context of Victorian era England.  As Mary Y. Hallab notes, Dracula has been read as “the tyranny of patriarchy, the power of the corrupt aristocracy or the nouveau bourgeois capitalists; he represents decadent foreigners, Slavs or Jews; he is a homosexual, a social outcast, even a mother, and he is dangerously erotic” (2).  Critics have read Dracula through every theoretical lens imaginable, from psychoanalytic, to Marxist, to feminist, to queer, to postcolonial, and the continued persistence of scholarship about the novel points to its literary, cultural, and psychological significance. 

In this multiplicity of perspectives, there is but one work that examines the novel’s politics of consumption via a vegetarian critical lens. “Love at First Beet: Vegetarian Critical Theory Meats Dracula,” a 1996 piece by J. E. D. Stavick, explores the novel in terms of the ways that it disrupts the food hierarchy present in Western culture, one that “privileges bloody meat, especially beef, over all other food” (24).  Slavick’s essay draws on the vegetarian critical theories of such authors as Julia Twigg and Carol J. Adams in order to trace a Victorian politics of meat – of which Jonathan Harker is very much a part, as he chronicles from the very beginning of the novel the kinds of meat he eats as he travels towards and inhabits Dracula’s castle.[ii]  Through an analysis of the ways that Dracula consumes those who consume meat, Stavick posits a vegetarian theoretical argument influenced by both Marxist and postcolonial theories:

The threat to English consumption is the threat of reverse colonization, which in this text is manifested in the vampire invasion of England by the powerful consumer “Other,” Count Dracula, who threatens England with his violation of the meat hierarchy. (26)

Taking Stoker’s Dracula – and Slavick’s vegetarian critical theorizing of it – as my starting point, I want to examine the vegetarian and vegan politics that are both implicitly and explicitly present in three contemporary popular cultural representations of vampires, Joss Whedon’s 1997-2003 television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stephanie Myer’s Twilight saga (2005-2008), and Alan Ball’s HBO series True Blood (based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels by Charlene Harris), which first aired in 2008. 

While Stoker’s vampire kills and feeds without remorse on human beings, his late twentieth and twenty-first century counterparts – Angel, Edward Cullen, and Bill Compton – refuse this seemingly essential component of vampiric existence.  Furthermore, while diets devoid of animal products were gaining prominence in Stoker’s nineteenth-century England “under the leadership of such enthusiasts as Sylvester Graham . . . and Ellen G. White” (Stavick 24), vegetarianism and veganism have flourished since that time, and have, as I have indicated earlier in this study, entered the mainstream popular cultural discourse in profound and often contradictory ways that disrupt hegemonic assimilation.  If the figure of the vampire changes over time to accommodate whatever “our society shuns, but secretly demands” (Thorne 4), then vampires that eschew both murder and the consumption of human blood – and in the case of True Blood’s Bill Compton, animal blood as well – point, perhaps, to “our age’s fantasies of non-exploitative tolerance” (Tyree 32).  A chronological examination of these three texts demonstrates how the vegan/vegetarian vampire trope shifts over time as well as how the terms “vegan” and “vegetarian” initially signify weakness, asexuality, or asceticism. But even as they become further and further removed from their original meanings, by the time we get to True Blood, vegan vampirism constitutes a fraught and powerful political stance, one that challenges and disrupts the hegemonic matrix of carnivorous, homophobic sexism prevalent in both True Blood’s fictional Bon Temps – where human beings reverse the discourse and consume vampires – and the very real United States. 

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[i] An MLA search for Dracula on June 8, 2011 pulls 677 articles.

[ii] Stavick notes Harker’s notations about what he eats.  For example, on the first page of the novel, Harker comments that he eats “a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good” (11), and later he consumes “egg-plant stuffed with forcemeat, a very excellent dish” (12).

Plant. Is. Food.

Jason Sellers, that guy that I've been living with for well over a decade, opened Plant today, so most of this entry will be me bragging about him.  Jason is one of those people who just seems good at everything that he does.  He's one of those people I often envy for what appears to be an uncanny ability to do anything well.  Here's a case in point: we were hanging out at the Bywater with friends a few weeks ago.  The Bywater is this really cool concept bar/recreation area on the French Broad River.  I call it a kind of summer camp with booze: in addition to the bar, there's about an acre of land with picnic tables, horseshoe and cornhole games, grills, and fire pits.  You can bring your own food and grill out, sit by the river, play the games.  You can bring your dog.  You can tube down from the Wedge, climb out of the water, and head into the Bywater -- at least that's what a whole cadre of folks had done the day we were there.  I haven't tried it yet, but I will.

As an aside, I worry a bit about the fact that the grounds are laid out as follows: bar, railroad track, river.  Sound like a recipe for disaster to anyone other than me?

No river, here, but you get my point, right?

There's a bimini ring toss game as well, the goal of which is to swing a ring tied to the end of a string in such a way that it lands on a hook attached to a wall.  This is not an easy task.  I stood there and threw the freaking ring over and over and never got it on the hook.  Jason took one practice swing, then a second, then got the ring on the hook.  And then did it over and over.  In exasperated and highly competitive frustration, I gave up and got another beer.

So it's this sort of thing that seems unnerving to me, Jason's ability to do things with such seemingly little effort.  But the truth is something altogether different -- and the ring toss example works to explain it.  I just kept throwing the ring, thinking that if I just threw it enough times, it would land on the hook.  Which it didn't.  If it had, I would have then gone back and then tried to replicate the process by which I succeeded. And that's my method with most things: produce a lot of scholarship, for example, hope that some of it is good, then go back and replicate the model on which the "good" is based, then get bored and move on to something else.  I hang pictures on the walls by trial and error, thereby leaving lots of holes, rather than measuring anything out.  I have a tendency to believe that many things that I do are good enough to suffice and don't necessarily need to be better, to be perfect.

I actually find it odd to write these things; I've always considered myself a perfectionist -- and perhaps in some ways I am...in the ways that have to do with appearances, with wanting to appear competent and capable of everything that I do.  But in many essential ways, I'm not.  I'm happy to let things slip; I'm happy, for example, to paint the bathroom walls without taping the trim, even if it means that I get some paint in the wrong places.  It saves time, even if it's not perfect.  And perhaps this is about being a bit of a risk taker, or being impulsive, or being just this side of dangerous.  Or perhaps it's just about being sloppy.

Not Jason.  Jason's the antithesis of sloppy.  Jason measures everything that he does, and he weighs all the options before acting.  He got that ring on the hook on the third try not only because he considered the problem of the ring and the hook -- the weight of the metal in his hand, the length of the thread, and his position relative to the wall -- before he let it go, but also because he paid careful attention to what he did wrong the first and second times; he doesn't come at things backwards, doesn't allow himself to continue to make errors.  He gets it right because he takes getting it right very seriously -- perhaps moreso than anyone else I know.  And once he gets it right, he keeps working to get it more right.  He got the ring on the hook, but maybe he could get the ring on the hook with his eyes closed.  Maybe he could get the ring on the hook using his non-dominant hand.

So back to Plant: Plant is vegan.  Plant is a restaurant based on an ethical principle to which Jason adheres absolutely and to which his business partners, Leslie Armstrong and Alan Berger, adhere as well.  And that ethic is, in fact, the driving impulse behind the place.  Jason had been a long time vegetarian when I met him in 1997; we became vegan after we moved to Massachusetts in 1999.  And Jason has always been a chef at heart, has always been interested in food and in the politics behind how and what we eat.  He went to culinary school at the Natural Gourmet in Manhattan in 2004, and he worked in the city at Candle 79 before moving with me -- very much against his heart's desire to stay in New York -- to Asheville, where he became head chef and kitchen manager at the Laughing Seed.

Leslie, Jason, and Alan.

Jason has been working to get it right for a long time, and he's succeeded in ways that seem inconceivable to me.  And I should know: I've been present for the entirety of his culinary journey.  The food that he's making now is the food he's always wanted to make.  It's delicious, savory, entirely plant based, and incredibly refined in both presentation and flavor combinations.  One of my friends declared, after eating lunch there today, that the space in which Jason works should be declared a holy pilgrimage site.

For Jason, getting it right is still something that can be improved upon; getting it right is just another place from which to start.  And I can't wait to see what happens now.

Oh, and Anthony Bourdain is coming to town, or so the rumor goes.  If he shows up, I'm sending him an invitation to Plant.  Bring it.

Coetzee, the Nature of Likeness, and Animals

I have not been blogging, and here’s why: I’m teaching a graduate seminar this summer on the works of South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, the writer about whom I wrote the dissertation that later became my first book.  It is keeping me busy.  My initial interest in Coetzee occurred in a PhD graduate seminar – my first PhD seminar, actually – on the works of Nadine Gordimer and Coetzee.  The course was taught by Stephen Clingman, who later directed my dissertation.  Mad props to Stephen.

 

I took the class because, as an MA candidate, I had read Gordimer and liked her.  I had never heard of Coetzee.

Nadine Gordimer...

...and J.M. Coetzee

While my work has always focused on the African literature of one type or other and on the ways that postcolonial authors and literatures speak back to colonial power (disseminated via not only violence but also through language – often English – religion – always Christian – and education), Coetzee’s work, at least in terms of my reading of it, is more about the politics of refusing to engage with, well, politics.  Initially he was a perplexing source of interest for me, as I had always been inclined to think of myself as a champion of the marginalized (yes, arrogant...I was younger then) and as someone who was in possession of a feminist agenda that required me to be sincerely dedicated to writing about literature by women.  My MA thesis was on Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, and Tsitsi Dangarembga; I had every intention of furthering my work on Nwapa when I went to UMASS.

But my interest in Coetzee and my decision to write about him was based in large part on reading Disgrace, the 1999 novel for which he won his second Booker Prize (he was the first author to win this prize a second time), and The Lives of Animals, his 1997 Princeton Tanner Lectures, which were published the same year as Disgrace.  In essence, his fictional explorations of animal and human interactions, and his philosophical and dialogic musings via the character of Elizabeth Costello about animal rights, vegetarianism, and the limits of the empathetic imagination led me to formulate one of the key tenets of my study on Coetzee, that while we may never be able to “imagine” the interiority of the other – whether that other is animal or human – we should never cease to try to do so.  And, in trying and failing, we should nonetheless respect the alterity of that which cannot be imagined.

I love this poster for the film. Dog collars across the South African flag.  Perfect.

In other words, while I can’t really think my “way into the life of a bat” (77), as Costello claims that, as a writer, she can, I still think that I should respect the bat – * and even go as far as to consider that the bat and I are of the same order of being, deserving of the same ethical considerations.

* That’s my position; I have no idea if it’s Coetzee’s.

Coetzee’s texts engage with – and never firmly state a position – this idea in both Disgrace and The Lives of Animals.  His characters engage dialogically, raising issues but not handing down dictates and truths of any kind.  When Elizabeth Costello claims in The Lives of Animals that “we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them” (65), we get all kinds of outcry from the other characters in the story.  Her daughter-in-law Norma accuses her of rambling, of being confused.  Abraham Stern, a Jewish poet, refuses to have dinner with Costello after her statements, claiming “you misunderstand the nature of likenesses; I even say you misunderstand willfully, to the point of blasphemy.  Man is made in the likeness of God but God does not have the likeness of man.  If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews.  The inversion insults the memory of the dead.  It also trades on the horrors of the camps in a cheap way” (94). 

And this sort of dialogue – the unanswerable (to my mind) question about the nature of “likenesses” – spills out into a classroom when one is teaching these texts, as was the case with me last night.

I’ve taught Disgrace many, many times since first reading it; my copy is falling apart, full of notes, a complete mess.  You’d think that I would have said, at this point, all there is to say about the work.  And if I haven’t, surely someone else has, as there is so much literary criticism out there on Disgrace that it’s hard to believe there’s anything new to discover.  That being said, I found myself focusing on this question of “likenesses,” and that’s something I’ve never really done before in all the times I’ve read or taught the novel.  There are several reasons, I think, why I went with that lens and not some other.  One is the notion of context again, something that’s been with me since ASLE and the disappearance of Lauren Spierer.

On an intellectual level, ASLE was about presenting on contextual moral vegetarianism.  On an emotional level, it was about processing the narrative of a 20 year-old female University of Indiana student who had vanished, seemingly into thin air, right before I landed in town.  I’ve already written about my academic presentation, and I’ve already talked a bit about Spierer, whose ubiquitous image, appearing all over campus and town, on fliers, on billboards, in the windows of all the local businesses, is burned forever in my mind.  I still search the internet everyday for news about her.  But context is important in her case as well: she’s from a wealthy family, she’s white, blonde, pretty, which is not to say anything other than the media attention that her case gets and that the family can afford to give it is constant.  And I’m all too aware of “missing white woman syndrome,” which is my point exactly.

On July 5, a little over a month after she disappeared, there were numerous stories about a woman’s body found in a creek in Indianapolis, a body that was not Spierer. Several days later – and to find any follow up, one has to scroll through pages of headlines about the body that isn’t Spierer – the woman that was not was identified as Shaneice Nicholson.  And that was that.  Nothing else.  Mostly Nicholson is not Spierer.  Context matters.  But what do we make of such circumstances in terms of an examination of likenesses?

But back to class: we were discussing Disgrace and I brought up Lucy Lurie’s assertion to her father that “there is no higher life.  This is the only life there is.  Which we share with animals. . . .  That’s the example that I try to follow. . . .  I don’t want to come back in another existence as a dog or a pig and have to live as dogs or pigs live under us” (74).  I confess that I sort of share this sentiment; I pointed to this passage because it’s how I think as well: since I can’t know that there’s a higher life, I’d like to live assuming that this one is the one that matters and that I have an obligation to live it, at least insofar as I’m capable, in a way that, as Lucy says, “shares some of [my] human privilege with the beasts” (74). 

One of my students countered, “I like David’s comment better.”  David responds to his daughter by saying, “yes, I agree, this is the only life there is.  As for animals, by all means let us be kind to them.  But let us not lose perspective.  We are of a different order of creation from the animals.  Not higher, necessarily, just different” (74).  So this student’s ideological positioning countered mine (as both were expressed in Coetzee’s novel) and led me back to the question of likenesses yet again.

Disgrace plays with the concept of likeness; the narrative is filled with pairs of words that are similar, yet different – compliant/pliant, moderate/moderated, demand/command – as both the narrator and David Lurie weigh which is appropriate in any given context.  But the novel most clearly presents the philosophical difficulty of establishing likeness via the violence done to the bodies of two racially different women – not unlike Lauren Spierer and Shaneice Nicholson – and in white professor David Lurie’s (possible) realization that the “undesired” sexual intercourse that he forces upon his racially mixed student Melanie is something for which he must seek forgiveness.  This realization comes, if it comes at all, after his white daughter is raped by three black men.  And it comes, I would argue, after he feels empathy for two sheep destined for slaughter by Lucy’s black tenant Petrus. 

If we see Lucy’s rape as more violent – of a different order – than David’s “not rape, not quite that, but undesired” (25) “seduction” of Melanie (which the narrator describes as an event during which she “decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of a fox close on its neck” (25)), then that may be because the narrative’s free indirect discourse is focalized through David. His white male ego is that which orders the fictional world, but his is a position with which Coetzee is not necessarily comfortable.

And if we’re able (as David may be) to see, ultimately, the likenesses between the slaughter sheep, Melanie (the rabbit being slaughtered in the above metaphor), and Lucy (who describes her experience as a kind of slaughter: “you’re a man you ought to know.  When you have sex with someone strange – when you trap her, hold her down . . . isn’t it a bit like killing?  Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards . . . doesn’t it feel like murder, like getting away with murder?” (158), it is through our ability to empathize.  And it’s through our willingness to accept that beings that look very different – in terms of their races and species – are actually very much alike indeed.

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In other news: Russell Brand and Kristin Wiig have been named PETA's sexiest vegetarian celebrities of 2011.  I love both of them, so I guess that's ok.  Right?  This past weekend, I downloaded -- and have been listening incessantly to -- the soundtrack from Get Him to the Greek, which is a fake album by Aldous Snow's (Russell Brand's) fake band Infant Sorrow.

I am totally serious.

ASLE, Animals, Contextual Moral Vegetarianism, and Me

Part 2: Things go Dark and Creepy

Now that I’ve ruminated about all the productive and positive things that happened at ASLE, here’s a bit about what I presented: an essay on the role of contextual moral vegetarianism in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi. To be clear (again), ASLE is about literature and representations of the environment in literature, but, perhaps, because I have had limited experience in the real world, literature functions for me as a way of accessing the real world, and this is one of the main themes that I incorporate in my teaching: that nothing one reads in a fictional work of literature is any less true than what one reads about and learns in a history class.  As Nobel Prize winning South African author Nadine Gordimer states in “Living in the Interregnum,” her 1981 James Lecture presented at the Institute for the Humanities, “nothing I say here will be as true as my fiction.”

In Life of Pi, the title character is an ethical vegetarian…until he’s stranded for 227 days on a lifeboat, adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, his sole companion a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. In terms of my essay, it’s largely based on a bit of theoretical shifting that is a part of the realization that being vegan/vegetarian makes no sense in certain contextual situations (duh, right?).  What is one to do, for example, on a lifeboat in the middle of an ocean?  Such a scenario is the extreme case, but Pi’s ability to contextualize his diet, to partake of sea creatures (and possibly even to partake of the flesh of another human) situates vegetarianism and veganism as dietary choices that can only be made in certain (privileged) circumstances.

 

Here’s the start of the essay:

Perhaps nowhere is the conflicting nature of the Western rhetoric of species preservation more apparent than in much of the current debate surrounding vegetarianism.  In conjunction with the twentieth and twenty-first century Holocene extinction spasm has occurred the rise and commercialization of a vegetarian diet as an ethical imperative and as a presumed reaction to and proposed remedy for environmental destruction – including species decimation.  Arguments in favor of such an ideology often cite, among other factors, the environmental damage done by factory farms and the depletion of arable land as a result of overgrazing.  Despite Anthony Bourdain’s limited claim that "vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit,” arguments in favor of a vegetarian diet focus on a politics of compassionate consumption, the health benefits of eschewing meat, and the positive environmental impact to which such a diet contributes.  Bruce Friedrich offers one such argument: the amount of land used to satisfy the food requirements of a vegan for one year is 1/16 acre; for a meat eater, the figure is 20 times as high.  Similarly, “it requires 300 gallons of water to feed a vegan for a day.  It requires about four times as much to feed a vegetarian, and 14 times as much to feed a meat eater.”

OK, all well and good.  But despite such statistics, vegetarians are the “enemy” and vegans are “Hezbollah.” (by the way, that’s the worst analogy ever in the history of faulty analogies.  Seriously: hez·bol·lah [Arab. khes-bah-lah]–noun a radical Shiʿite Muslim organization in Lebanon engaged in guerrilla warfare against Israel. veg·an [vej-uhn; especially Brit. vee-guhn]–noun a vegetarian who omits all animal products from the diet).  So, if this is the general perception (and I kinda think that it is), how do we crazy animal rights people convince the rest of the world that being veg matters or is helpful (or is healthful or that being compassionate to animals – the ones that aren’t pets – is necessary)?

 

Intermission.  Consider Scott Adam’s assessment in Dilbert for more on the crazy:

Oh, and by the way, a big fat fuck off to Anthony Bourdain, who capitalizes on being a vegan hater.  Anyone can cook with meat; it takes talent to cook without it.

The Ramones tee-shirt notwithstanding, he’s still a dillweed. 

Here’s Deane Curtin on the subject of contextual moral vegetarianism – and Deane Curtin is a major source for my thinking in this essay: In Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World, Curtin has claimed that he can imagine saying “to a dominant white culture, which has perfected the global food market and excelled at industrial farming, that we have an obligation to be vegetarian,” but he notes that

as a ‘contextual moral vegetarian,’ I cannot refer to an absolute moral rule that prohibits meat eating under all circumstances. There may be some contexts in which another response is appropriate. Though I am committed to moral vegetarianism, I cannot say that I would never kill an animal for food.

Mostly, I tend to agree with Curtin’s statement that in the West, we white folks have a moral obligation to be veg – and I also recognize the racial implications of such an assertion.  I’d argue a bit differently, that perhaps race may be a part of the contextual picture, but socio-economic status is probably a bigger factor.  Carol Adams deals that the contention that veganism/vegetarianism is a particular form of racism – an argument often posited in order to support the cultural significance of a subordinate (read as “nonwhite”) population’s ancestral and familial connections to a meat eating – by linking the oppression of nonwhite groups to the oppression of animals.  And that’s an argument I get as well – and I’ve written about that idea all over the non-blog world, so I won’t rehash my sentiments here. 

In terms of who should be and who has a contextual right not to be veg, I prefer not to make pronouncements beyond the fact that I’ve never understood the reasons offered by people who have given me (almost always uninvited) their opinions as to why not.

But I also understand the contextual argument, particularly given all kinds of racial, socio-economic, and global circumstances that do not support vegetarianism or, on the more extreme end, veganism.  For example, Curtin goes further to discuss the Makah nation of Washington State; the Nation asserts that it has a right to hunt gray whales, a species that was removed from the Endangered Species List in 1994 (Curtin 137).  For the Makah people, whaling’s cultural significance has become a key aspect of their cultural renaissance.  Despite the United States government’s allocation of 20 gray whales to the Makah over a four-year period, however, animal rights and environmental activists have protested Makah whaling and denounced the practice.

OK: so back to ASLE.  Here’s me trying to discuss this contextual vegetarian ethos, and then there’s this bumper sticker displaying a precise example of such an ethos:

I can’t find any information that links this organization, the Fur Harvesters of North Bay, Ontario, to native peoples, even though the image on the sticker is of a stylized image of a native person, a trapper, disenfranchised by the whites who invaded North America (there are links on Fur Harvesters’ web page for such things as “furisgreen.com” and “Origin Assured," which, while arguing for the green and sustainable nature of fur, convince me of absolutely nothing).  

The image, for whatever it’s worth, capitalizes not only on the concept of context, of native people’s cultural history of hunting and trapping but also on the (false) belief that hunting and trapping is a way of protecting women from harm.  By such logic, if one hunts and kills animals, one is less likely to hunt and prey upon and kill women (little old ladies in this case).  The sexual politics of fur.  What a problematic phrase, in oh so many ways.

But there is much evidence to support a counter-argument, that there are connections between the killing/abuse/hunting of animals and the killing/abuse/hunting of humans – predominantly women and children.  So let’s start with Ed Gein a hunter, who gutted his female victims like deer. 

I get that Gein was batshit cuh-raaz-ee, so perhaps his example is not exactly representative. 

But here’s an article in Newsweek on the subject of the links between animal cruelty and the murder of humans and another from PETA on the connections between animal abuse and domestic violence.  Lastly, CBS News has this 2009 story of a deer hunter who shot and killed six other hunters – one of whom was female. 

Canadian author Margaret Atwood's novel Surfacing makes clear the connections between hunting and trapping animals for fur in Canada and the objectification of women and nonwhite minorities: “‘Do you realize,’ David says, ‘that this country is founded on the bodies of dead animals?  Dead fish, dead seals, and historically dead beavers, the beaver is to this country what the black man is to the United States’” (46).  And later, when the unnamed narrator doesn’t understand David’s joke that “a split beaver” (141) should emblazon Canada’s flag instead of the maple leaf, he responds, “where’ve you been living?  It’s slang for cunt” (141). The narrative that kids who hunt animals grow up not to hurt women or other members of society, well, that’s specious logic at best, no matter what the context.

I’ve written too much and still managed not to say anything about Lauren Spierer, who’s still missing.  And then there’s Crystal Grubb, who isn’t missing anymore. Yep, context – here as well as in matters of vegetarianism/veganism – matters. 

ASLE, Animals, Contextual Moral Vegetarianism, and Me

Part 1:

On Saturday, I flew back from Bloomington, Indiana, where I had presented a paper at the ASLE convention – the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.  On the plane beside me sat a Bosnian guy who looked exactly like Morrissey circa 1987; he talked to me about living in the U.S., about his brother who’s still in Bosnia and likes to hunt.  He’d never heard of Morrissey. 

He didn't look like this version of Morrissey, but I freaking love this photo.

But I digress…

ASLE: the focus this year was “Species, Space, and the Imagination of the Global.”

I presented a paper called “The Politics of Eating Postcolonial Animals: Contextual Moral Vegetarianism and Life of Pi,” which is an excerpt from a chapter titled “Safari, Zoo, and Dog Pound: The Place of Animals in the Postcolonial Environment” in my book. 

Yes, I know.  Shameless.  But, hey, buy my book.

OK, so before I go into further details about that presentation, there are things about the conference in general and about my inability to successfully or appropriately participate in an academic conference that need explication.  And, perhaps, I can come to terms with certain aspects of my personality that make me a bad academic, at least in this aspect of my professional life.  First, a bit about ASLE.  This organization has been in existence since the mid-1990s, and is the preeminent scholarly organization for folks who explore environmental issues in literature and, more often than not, in life.  The conference strives to make as small a footprint as possible, implementing such measures as “creating a vegetarian banquet with several interesting menu choices featuring local and/or organic foods as much as possible, including local beers and wines,” and “minimizing décor for the banquet and using artificial, reusable planters, linens, and other reusable décor items.” (This info courtesy of the conference website) 

This year’s conference actually featured two panels about veganism, called “The Vegan Challenge to Posthumanism” (parts 1 and 2), and animal studies in general was a primary focus of much of the work that was presented.  However, despite the seemingly obvious fact that the conference theme indicated a more global focus – and, indeed, there were panels, like mine, that examined the environment from a postcolonial perspective – the “global” was not really a major part of the agenda.  The overarching and traditional discourse of ecocriticism as a theoretical perspective – and ASLE is the entity that codified that discourse into scholarly legitimacy – has been and remains entrenched in American literature written by white (often male) authors, and such was certainly the case this year in Bloomington.

The big names in the field were all there, and, by and large, the big names focus on Western writing.  American literary scholar and godfather of ecocriticism Lawrence Buell was honored for his foundational work (and my friends and co-presenters Colin Christopher and Ali Brox got to eat lunch with him -- and he is, by all accounts, a seriously nice dude), but South African author Zakes Mda was a plenary speaker, as was Helen Tiffin, a prominent postcolonial scholar whose most recent work is Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment.  And Cheryll Glotfelty, who co-edited the foundational Ecocriticism Reader with Harold Fromm (remember him from an earlier entry?  He’s the guy who, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, trashed vegans) shook my hand: her book was sitting right beside mine on the University of Georgia Press table.  So the paradigm is shifting, albeit slowly.  At the author’s reception, I was situated in a corner near the back of the room (Colin said, “nobody puts Baby in a corner…”), and there was much joking about my marginalization.  But it’s all ok.  It’s fine. 

And good things happened for me, so I’ll toot my own horn for a bit: Byron Caminero-Santangelo, who moderated my panel, introduced me as “the preeminent Coetzee scholar working in the U.S.,” which made me feel really good – even if I’m not sure his assessment is 100% accurate.  Still, it made my day.  People bought my book and asked me to sign it; the University of Georgia Press representative told me that she sold out of it, which may or may not be impressive, as I think she only brought about five copies with her.  But, hey, selling any academic books counts as a success.  And I met people like Dan Wylie and the aforementioned Cheryll Glotfelty as well as a bunch of really cool folks from the University of Kansas and elsewhere.  And a woman approached me after my presentation to tell me that Carol J. Adams had included my video in her famous Sexual Politics of Meat slideshow.

I really liked Bloomington; it’s such a real college town, with all kinds of neat little shops and an overwhelming number of places where a vegan can eat.  I ate at Roots on the Square twice and at a Vietnamese fusion place called Basil Leaf Bistro.  After my presentation, a group of us went to a place called Scotty’s Brewhouse, a sports bar with a menu the size of a short novel, in which there appeared such items as burgers with peanut butter, deep fried pickle chips, and lots and lots of items buried beneath cheese and bacon.  But, of course, there was a veggie burger, so that’s what I had, as did the one other vegan in the bunch.  He and I had been betting on what our options would be, noting that in the case of such places, it’s either a veggie burger or some sort of Portobello concoction. And with the check at the end of the meal, we got little boxes of Red Hots, which, sadly, aren't vegan.  They contain beeswax.  Who knew?

But I am bad at conferences.  And all the good things that happened at this one don't really counter that fact.

I get nervous and weird, afraid to mix and mingle, intimidated by all sorts of things.  And I’ve presented, at this point in my career, at zillions of the damn things.  More often than not, my strategy is to attend my panel and maybe one other and then to hide out in my hotel room the rest of the time.  ASLE was particularly tough on me: this is a conference that started off small but has exploded over the past several years, so in terms of sheer numbers, it’s scary for someone like me who much prefers smaller venues – like the postcolonial studies conference that I attend nearly every year in Savannah, Georgia. 

Despite the fact that I don’t really feel overly intimidated by the academic rock stars that attend and present at these venues, the sheer number of those foundational figures present at this conference gave me pause.  Oh, and the fact that Greg Garrard has groupies – and that I think I might be one – is also problematic.  

Greg Garrard. I know, right?

The concept of “academic rock star” has always seemed both impossible and hilarious to me – we are all English professors or graduate students – but in my limited world, the way that certain of us achieve the role of public intellectual feels very powerful, and it’s both a heady and intimidating experience to encounter such beings.  And we all aspire to be like them.

But perhaps what was more difficult was – and always is for me – the tension that I feel between a lived ethic or a lived activism and a theoretical presentation about how environmental or vegetarian or vegan issues are presented in works of fiction.  And that tension seems to be even more pronounced at a conference like ASLE, which is, at least in theory, all about the environment but which, in reality, is all about talking about fictional representations of the environment. And, more often than not, such talk is of a very specific environment at that, one that is accessible to those of us able to participate in the fiction that what is meant by “environment” is a pristine and untouched wilderness available to us as an object for privileged consumption.

OK, perhaps I’m not being entirely fair.  I’ll say more in part two, about my paper, about contextual moral vegetarianism/veganism, and about Lauren Spierer, a young Indiana University student who has been missing for over three weeks and whose image, on posters, billboards, and fliers was absolutely everywhere in Bloomington.  And I’ll say more about this bumper sticker, seen in a movie theater parking lot:

Yeah, after presenting my paper, I went to see Bad Teacher.  Like I said, I'm bad at conferences. 

Plant and Dracula

Well, I've been away from this blog long enough to have forgotten how to sign in...  The end of the semester nearly killed me (it often does), and I'm just now surfacing from beneath it.  It was the year of service for me: I directed the Graduate Program in English, served on the Liberal Studies task force, the International Studies advisory committee, both the college and university Program Prioritization committees, and was the Secretary of the Faculty, which means that I was also de facto on a bunch of other committees...  And I directed two fabulous MA theses and have been a reader for several more.

I won't be secretary of the faculty next year, so that's a huge obligation lifted.  I hope to be able to start researching and writing again, as I've pretty much taken the whole year off (wrote one book review during 2010-11).  So far, this summer I've written an article on Margaret Atwood's Surfacing -- a piece for which I'm getting paid (!) -- and that's it.  The vegan body project is my next priority, though, and I've just finished reading an article called "Love at First Beet: Vegetarian Critical Theory Meats Dracula," which was written in 1996 by J. E. D. Stavick.  If I'm going to write about our contemporary vampires' less bloody diets, it seemed wise to start with Dracula, the bloodiest progenitor of all his touchy feely descendants.

Stavick's essay is the only scholarly thing out there that looks at Bram Stoker's Dracula from the perspective of vegetarian critical theory, and this piece is also heavy (if not particularly adept) in its use of postcolonial theory.  Take the following statement, which pretty much sums up the argument: "the threat to English consumption is the threat of reverse colonization, which in this text is manifested in the vampire invasion of England by the powerful consumer 'Other,' Count Dracula, who threatens England with his violation of the meat hierarchy" (26).  That hierarchy, as defined by Stavick and others, is dependent on the privileging of "bloody meat, especially beef, over all other foods" (24).  It's an interesting and, for the time, original analysis.

Mmmmm.  

So I promise to write more.

But in the meantime: Plant!  And by Plant, I mean Jason's restaurant, which is coming along nicely.  Here's the latest from the Mountain Xpress:

Planting a Different Seed

It didn't take long for the building at 165 Merrimon Ave. recently vacated by Beans and Berries to get snatched up. Longtime Laughing Seed chef Jason Sellers is joining former Rosebud Video owners Alan Berger and Leslie Armstrong to open a completely vegan restaurant there that they’ve decided to call "Plant."

Why Plant? "Because 'plant' is food to us," Sellers says. "It's the most rudimentary expression of what food is. It's sustenance and the core of our expression. Everything here will be plant-based."

To the partners, Plant expresses a philosophy of animal-product-free living and a celebration of good food.

"We're thrilled," Armstrong says. "It's so exciting to be able to take all of the things that are important to us and create this new entity. And, to be able to partner up with Jason ... how much better could you get?"

***

"We will serve flavor-sophisticated, multiculturally influenced food, using techniques that we like the best to intensify flavors based on what's available to us at the best time," [Sellers] says. "The emphasis is food from the ground up. It's exciting for us to be unique among restaurants in Asheville, as well as unique among vegetarian restaurants in Asheville."

If you're having a hard time envisioning what all of that really means, you may not be alone. That's because the chef, trained at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York, tightly intertwines his culinary creations and his life philosophies. Fortunately, Sellers is not all talk.

***

I. Can't. Wait.  :)