Rod Amis - Unbound

NEW ORLEANS - 13 June, 2003: The moon looked nearly full on my walk home from work tonight. Without having a personal astrologer, something I've had for the majority of my life, I no longer know the exact day and time of fullness but I, nonetheless, feel its influence in my watery insomnia and the cast of things around me. Most people I know right now seem to be experiencing one level of trauma or another. Conversations are heated and freighted with hidden meanings. Arguments occur, furniture is smashed, the center does not hold.

In the readings of Edward Said I referred to last week, I have found the inspiration to analyze this latest stage of my life, the impulse to drift rather than command and wonder how it relates to my general paradigm of re-invention. Perhaps, in this autumn of my life, I am losing the will to metamorphosize and am finally taking myself as I stand.

A central question, reading the anthologized collection of Said's work, is how I rate myself as a "Man of Letters" - and if I can even aspire to that grandiose appellation. I have certainly spent the majority of my life tied to putting one word after another, with estimable success I reckon, but whether I have exhibited a facility for the task has always been an open question. Though, in my journalistic as well as this diaristic endeavor I have been called "most quotable", "heterodox", "universal" and "eccentric", the temporality of what I have accomplished as journalist and diarist has forced the output. In almost every recent instance, since at least the middle 'nineties, I have had to write multiple columns per week. It shows. My self-editing has too often been sloppy, even when the content of what I had to say (seemed to have) maintained a standard of insight, glibness and topicality. But then I shan't have the luxury of analyzing my own oeuvre as MPUTHUMI NTABENI has already attempted and some one of you will likely accomplish post mortem.

And that is the central issue: post mortem. I have been obsessed with it for years now and with the project of building my own monument in the form of this Web magazine, my Cathedral of Words. That has led to the wrestling with my creative output, the unrealized novel, the editorial function I've performed here for over seven years and the process by which this journal has evolved during that time.

One recurring debate as regards this effort, and my writing in general, has been whether I was most affective when I hewed toward emotional engagement, expression of rage and panegyric or when I took the Olympian and ruminative stance that this essay clearly exhibits. I have never participated in the debate, personally, because I feel I am unqualified to pass that level of judgment on my own writing. I have found merit in both approaches and have to desire no be more self-conscious than I already am. It's the very nature of this "Glass House" to navel-gaze on one level, while trying to keep the level of discourse multi-faceted enough to strike chords that anyone can find resonant.

I can only do what I do. Deadline pressure and my own estimation of what is appropriate for a given week make it impossible for me to determine, sans your feedback, what was a "home run" and what was merely a journeyman effort. That is as it should be, I suppose.

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Rod Amis

READING SAID HAS CERTAINLY HEIGHTENED MY AWARENESS OF THE CONUNDRUM PRESENTED BY THE PALESTINEAN ISSUE. It has made me aware of how I have personally self-censored my own consideration of the topic because

• Of the wealth of Jewish friends I've been afforded over the years and my sensitivity to how they might take issue with my making pronouncements, especially as an "outsider", to the historical circumstances of those involved;
• My past having been imprinted by my time living in the capitol of Egypt and my personal affinity for the Egyptian people - a problematic part of my personal history as regards this issue which I had decided not to interject into the debate; and
• My own lack of on-the-ground experience of Palestine. I have deferred to the opinions of other writers, on the main, who I felt could educate you and me about the situation.

Reading Said has made me painfully aware of how boyh hypocritical and cowardly my own stance has been. I have felt free to compose commentary on various international issues, for which I was equally "unqualified" to expound, while consciously shying away from this one.

For the most part, I have always referred to on-the-ground sources or my own experience of the nations and people in question when tackling other international questions - from Ireland to Cambodia and beyond, but I have seldom restricted myself to the form of self-censorship I have exercised on the question of Israel and the Palestinians. This self-imposed silence probably rates as a venal sin, but a sin nonetheless. I have abdicated the very role which I have used to define my discourse in other instances. As you must imagine, admitting this level of self-censorship is painful for me. It amounts to an admission of intellectual dishonesty, something I loathe.

Using the very phrase, "Rod Amis - Unbound" at the head of this column means that you should expect an unvarnished and fearless tackling of any and all topics. Yet, on the issue of Palestine/Israel I have been deafeningly silent even while I have been topical on other "hot spots", many of which I have made it my personal business to visit. The reasons I've listed above only scratch the surface of my own reticence on this topic.

So reading Edward Said, who seems most passionate when describing the circumstances of his own exile and alienation - topics that are my forte, I'd say - has put my feet to the fire.

Still, I am not ready yet to provide you with an unequivocal stance on the topic. Rather, for now, I can only give you my own sense of my abrogation of a responsibility. Give me a bit more time on this one. I must be certain that what I wish to say is understood, if not accepted, as my best effort at addressing this important question - especially as it now has become a centerpiece problem for the empire I so resist.

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Organizations and individuals in New Orleans are organizing to help Rod fight his unjust arrest and charges. You can help, too. If you'd like to throw a house party, benefit concert, or other event, it would be mammothly appreciated. For information on how you can help our publisher meet his legal defense costs, send an e - mail with the SUBJECT LINE "FOR JUSTCE" by following this link. THE HONORABLE CONTRIBUTORS: (List Updated Each Publication Date) SCOTT SALIN, New Orleans, LA, USA MICHELLE and the Drag Queens of MAMA'S BLUES Revue, New Orleans, LA, USA Not to mention the un-named guests who contributed to the proceeds. SEAN CUSHMAN, New Orleans, LA, USA "DAVE", New Orleans, LA, USA

MUCH CAN BE MADE OF MY PENCHANT FOR "COMPULSIVE NEWNESS". I have made much of it myself. But I don't believe it's an exclusive obsession of my writing alone. The topic has been eloquently addressed by twentieth/twenty-first century writes as diverse and Rushdie, Naipul, Said and other marginalized writers forced to communicate in a language or discipline of a dominant culture which is explicitly not their own and has often been at cross-purposes with the concerns most dear to their hearts. Whether we can called that dominant culture "oppressive" or "alien" I leave for you determine. What I want to say here is that marginality has become a defining state for writers of color and for all-too-many people of mixed race and or heritage. It is the condition through which we apprehend the world, as exiles, orphans or dissidents, and from which we form our opinions. It is non-traditional, in that sense, and unique in the history of "Letters". It makes us creatures attached to the perspective of being a new breed of (social and political) critics and writers.

That is not to say that our perspectives are unprecedented. We stand on the shoulders of pioneering marginal writers who have preceded us. Wright, Baldwin, Ellison come to mind in my own case. But much of my formative literary tradition, "the canon", is wholly European/American and non-related to the personal experience of my own ancestry. I have been assimilated into a tradition that has nothing to offer in reference to my personal, blood experience. Twain, Bierce, Elliott, James, Durrell, Mann, both Millers, Mailer, Marquez, Roth, Russell are lodestones with whom I have little or nothing in common other than a love of the text.

Thus, the problem of my work - my central topic this week - has to do with that experience of marginality that must inform all that I produce here and have produced elsewhere, in one form or another. Even as, during my time as a technology journalist, I was lauded for "uncommon approaches and insights", I was also castigated by my editorial superiors for too often being "political" and/or "overly esoteric" in my approach to the issues of globalization and the (inherent) threats to "humanness", as I perceived them in being too celebratory about our headlong technological advances. Thank God for Bill Joy's essay in WIRED magazine. It pulled my feet away from the fire for a few months.

The central problem, for my superiors at the time, was that I could not ignore the social and political implications of our topic. I was editorializing when they expected that I would better serve their commercial interests by writing software reviews and the usual pap that IT managers and others expected from a so-called "technology journalist." I considered that writing down to my audience. My bad.

Importantly, in my view, it was necessary to write up. It was necessary to bring the full force of my (unexpected, since there were few read Black technology journalists then or now in that industry) marginal and "outside" vision to the issues at hand. I would have done my readership and myself a disservice if I had held back, I felt. I would have deprived the readership of my own unique voice and perspective and insulted them in the process.

That is a risky and often-misunderstood stance to take in a commercial enterprise, but it was the only one I had.

I can only hope that how this anecdote relates to the issue of "compulsive newness" is clear to you, my love. It is necessary, within this framework, to state why and how this issue of injecting the nature of the "new" experience of marginalized writers affects the "stream", as I've formerly claimed, of literature and intellectual discourse. For the better, I believe, but also how it can be seen as a form of dissidence until it gains widespread acceptance in that discourse. That is the question that we all need to decide about as we look at the new voices entering the stream of writing and what they mean to our appreciation of events, history and "the canon" as it evolves.

Edward Said writes:

A condition of marginality, which might seem irresponsible or flippant, frees you from having always to proceed with caution, afraid to overturn the applecart, anxious about upsetting fellow members of the same corporation. No one is ever free of attachments and sentiment of course. Nor do I have in mind here the so-called free-floating intellectual, whose technical competence is on loan and for sale to anyone. I am saying, however, that to be as marginal and undomesticated as someone who is in real exile is for the real intellectual to be unusually responsive to the traveler rather than to the potentate, to the provisional and risky rather than to the habitual, to innovation and experiment rather than the authoritatively given status quo. The exilic intellectual does not respond to logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still.

And elsewhere, when talking about all of his departures from people and places, Said wrote something that is emblematic of my own existence, traveler that I have always been. Listen:

... Something about the invisibility of the departed, being missing and perhaps missed, in addition to the intense, repetitive and predictable sense of banishment that takes you away from all you know and can take comfort in, makes you feel the need to leave out of some prior, but self-created logic, and a sense of rapture. In all cases, though, the great fear is that departure is the state of being abandoned, even though it is you who leave.

I have never been able to express, myself, that feeling Said so succinctly encapsulates in the preceding passage. I, who fear abandonment most of all, have never been able to admit that sense of abandonment I feel every time I get onto an airplane, leaving comfort and friends behind, perhaps never to return.

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16 June, 2003: I have moved into a loft on the top floor of a warehouse with a woman and two cats. The cats are solid black and seem somehow to be familiars. The woman, on the other hand, is a mystery - as most women are to me. (Recall the duration of my celibacy, my dear.)

Our place has problems, of course, as all large places do. If I get to stay here, having done many construction and renovation jobs in this town, I'll take care of those.

My prospective new roomie said that she would roller-skate around the place when she first moved in. It's mammoth. An artist's loft in every sense of the word. There is a sculpture studio next door. We have thousands of feet of space, if she accepts me. The warehouse windows, the wide-open spaces, remind me of the film "Flashdance".

I learned on my first night here that she had moved to New Orleans from San Francisco by way of Berlin. There are so many San Francisco transplants here, I've learned.

I noticed a copy of Celine's Death on the Installment Plan on the floor of my room here and knew I was in the right place. I am reading it while washing dishes at the sushi restaurant. My co-workers wonder why I keep laughing out loud while reading.

Strangely, for the first time in New Orleans, this feels like HOME.

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YOU KNOW BETTER THAN MOST, MY LOVE, that I have always been an insomniac. Tonight what keeps me awake is the impending arraignment hearing in court here in New Orleans. I have not heard from my attorney about the possibility of my charges being quashed. I have to go for another of those humiliating drug (piss) tests in the morning.

I am listening to Tupac. I am thinking about what it means to be a Black man in America and how much I can now relate to everything Raheem has written in these pages. I am thinking about how my mother told me, the first time I heard the word "nigger" - as a child - and asked my mother what it meant she told me that White people in America would always hate me. I am feeling injured, violated, alien, exiled, afraid.

I know that the prudent thing would be to sleep now but my brain is raging.

People say that they sympathize. Some say that they even empathize. It doesn't feel like it right now, my darling. I feel alone. I feel totally alone. Exile.

But I shall continue to put the best face on things. Do I have an alternative?

18 June, 2003: Tonight was my first night doing bike delivery for a local Middle Eastern food restaurant, another peon's job. I barely made enough money to cover beer, kicking down to my new roomie as promised and a pack of smokes. I have to curb my own enthusiasm about the great jobs I have. I've cobbled together five days worth of work, part-time mostly, and need to cobble-together an equal number of jobs or starve to death. Meanwhile, my attorney is clamoring for more money and the hearing is on Monday. I have to pray that at least one of the people who have pledged money to my legal assistance fund actually come through or I'm sunk. Working in restaurants, I won't starve - even though the nature of the work, and my last ordeals, have cost me ten pounds during the last month. When I was booked, I weighed one hundred and ninety pounds. I'm already down to just under one hundred eighty. It's been all of a month. This is the best diet plan going.

My hair is still wet from tonight's workout. I think I'll have to get shorn, as it's summer in New Orleans. My pal, Shawn, has hair clippers, so that's a no-brainer. I just dread those "Are you a jazz musician?" queries that come every time I lose my mane.

My outer thighs burn from this new exercise regimen that comes with the job. I'll bike around tomorrow just to work out the toxins. Sweat is my new friend. Keep me in your prayers, my love, as I keep you in mine.

Things I Need This Week

1. More money for my lawyer.

2. To prevail at the arraignment and finally make an end of my legal travail.

3. One good job instead of this cobbled-together collection of crappy ones.

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Thanks for coming back this week.

"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching..."
Rod

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ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was also a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote on Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

Last year he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. (Think: The Boy.) Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. Right now our Resident Philosopher has left the pantheon of New Orleans bartenders and still doesn't know when he'll have a "permanent residence" that he likes.. He's decided that maybe it's time to be an entrepreneur again. Working with "employees" and Bosses doesn't suit his temperament. In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.

Rod lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. This town is eroding his normal sense of driven purpose. He wants to live somewhere civilized when he grows up. Wish him Luck.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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