Coyote Crossing

Theriomorph sent this along, seemed like it oughtta go up here. Thanks, T.

There’s been a glitch in the RSS feed that has resulted in wonky in-feed links to pages with broken templates. That glitch should be fixed now. The feed address and everything else except the wonkiness will remain the same, so you don’t have to do anything. Thanks, to those of you who contended with this and went ahead and read the pages anyway, for your patience.

You know, I get being angry at so-called progressives who descended into the depths of misogyny to color their opposition to Clinton. Used to be I had a reputation online, deserved or not, for defending even the most odious of women from attacks based on their gender. I’ve also taken some heat, and imperiled a friendship or three, for calling out racism when I see it rearing its Putin-shaped head in progressive blogular airspace. The lack of internet access out here, and some of the changes I’ve been going through in my life, have kept me from spending a lot of time in blogospheric trenches the past few months. That’s a good thing for me and my blood pressure, because what with the complete uprooting in my life, still in progress, it’d be all too easy to blow a gasket at some cynical 22-year-old calling Clinton premenstrual, or at presumably somewhat older Clinton partisans calling Obama shiftless, lazy and/or untrustworthy. And how constructive would that be?

Some of the former have gone on to hurl sexist crap at Sarah Palin, which is a shame because there’s so goddamn much to criticize her over legitimately. As for the latter, their target of choice has not shifted. People who strain to debunk the apparently oversimplified rape kit issue, for instance, will completely overlook the similar, if far more profound, fact-tweaking necessary to support their position that Clinton had more votes than Obama. (Paul Loeb, one of the most thoughtful and anti-sexist progressive male writers in the US, takes that one apart authoritatively.) Based on that flawed narrative some unrepentant Clintonistas refer to Obama as having “stolen the nomination,” a stunning bit of coded language. One wonders, pace Katrina, whether a white male candidate would have been referred to as merely having “found” the nomination.

Last night a Nevada busboy, seeing me read from Obama’s iPhone app, informed me that Obama’s mantra “change” stood for “Come Help A N______ Get Elected.” At least one prominent and avowedly progressive feminist blogger now refers to Obama as “Opossum.” You tell me there’s a difference there involving more than subtlety of phrasing.

And if anything, the sexism directed against Clinton and Palin has been significantly more blatant, and significantly more widespread on the left side of the aisle. The Clintonistas were right to say that blatant sexism is much more socially acceptable than blatant racism. (Which doesn’t mean racism is fixed, or less of a problem. It just means that anti-racist activists have succeeded in moving the bar of acceptable discourse, so that genteel, educated racists usually say things like “Opossum” instead of using the more declassé slur.)

It’s all about who you’re willing to throw under the bus to get ahead. insulting all women because you oppose an individual woman’s politics is throwing women under the bus. Using clear racist dogwhistles because you oppose an individual candidate of color is throwing people of color under the bus.

And speaking out in support of Sarah “Drill Baby Drill” Palin in particular, just because of her gender, is throwing a whole lot more under the bus.

(Hat tip: Tmorph.)

Now that, my friends, is worth blowing a few gaskets over.

It may be that your political goals put a higher priority on tweaking the gender balance of the reactionary conservative cabal in power than on actually defending the planet. You’re welcome to that stance. But you make yourself an opponent of the environment by taking that stance. And Obama, for whom I will vote with significant reservations, isn’t perfect on the environment either. The oxymoronic “clean coal” and “safe nuclear” issues, which I will be posting on before long, themselves have a profound racist taint from an environmental justice perspective and I’m not sure that anything Obama can do will prevent that taint from being extended if he expands coal and nukes.

But the primary tenet of feminism is that women are ethically, intellectually, and politically the equals of men. To refrain from criticizing Palin’s ecocidal policies (among so many other things) based on her gender is an insult to the more than one hundred million women in the US who manage not to be power-mad Christofascist thugs. And failing to call her out on it just because she’s accepted the label “feminist” as part of the dissembling context of the most ridiculous Presidential campaign in recent US history not involving Lyndon LaRouche is, to my mind, to debase the work of millions of other feminists.

I was pleased with the way the Phantom Seed reading went in Riverside in Saturday. The new issue of Phantom Seed looks great, and there’s a serious pile of good writing there, as well as my pieces “Kessler Peak” and “Epilobium.”

The event drew a good crowd, and a number of talented writers showed up to take part in the open mike reading.

After the open mike I was part of a panel along with desert writers Rob Roberge, William Luvaas, Rice Baxter and Ruth Nolan, each of whom read some of their work. (I read this and this.) We then discussed, for a while, the notion of desert noir as a genre: does it exist? Is it distinct from Los Angeles noir, or a subcategory?

Though I’m by no means an expert on noir as a genre, I do know a thing or two about desert writing in general and thus I managed to avoid having too many doe-in-the-headlights moments up there on the dais. After all, the important thing about any kind of literary thing is, of course, the umbrella of job creation, where intolerance of the kind of literary and economic freedom that noir rears its head in… well, I’m not the kind of writer whose parents gave him a pencil and said “go off and see the world.” I had jobs. And the desert is where we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on the desert, because it is right there. We’ve got to see the desert as opportunity, not a competitive, um, scary thing.

Also, turns out Rob Roberge and I lived a few blocks from each other’s houses in Buffalo, which was odd and pleasing to find out.

During the course of the panel discussion Bill Luvaas said something that has provoked in me a bit of subsequent rumination: that the desert, by its nature, inspires a grotesque realism in writing. Life is harsh, the summer will kill an unprotected person, the bones of the earth stick through the soil and the bones of the desert’s victims litter the earth. Other victims show up here as well: the California desert is famously a dumping ground for Los Angeles’ inconvenient corpses. Antisocial types ranging from the Manson Family to right-wing survivalists to freelance pharmaceutical manufacturers to avowedly benign eco-misanthropes find refuge here. The desert is Carl Hiaasen’s Florida with less water and fewer alligators.

Luvaas’ statement makes palpable sense, and yet he said something tangential, basically a throwaway line, that got things roiling in me over the next few days: he made sure we knew he didn’t mean “magic realism” when he said “grotesque realism.” It was this short:

“…grotesque realism. Not magic realism; grotesque realism.”

It was a short enough, ambiguous enough reference that I don’t know whether Luvaas meant to say the desert doesn’t inspire writing that could be called magic realism, and so I won’t claim to know his position on whether the desert can inspire magic realism , if he indeed has one. He is a reflective, intelligent man, and he’s surely thought about it. I just don’t have enough data to gauge where his thoughts have ended up on the topic.

I’ll just say that I turned on the tap when I got home tonight, filled a glass with water, and drank it.

The water comes out of the ground warm. It tastes sweet, and if you let a pan full sit out for half a day it will evaporate completely, leaving a remarkable amount of white salt behind. Live here for a few decades and your bones would be strong well-into old age, which would be good, because you need strong bones to get yourself to the urinal when you’re having your fifth kidney stone… wait, that’s gone off into the grotesque.

The water will form brilliant crystals inside you.

The water I drink now was, two days ago, 700 feet beneath the creosote bushes’ roots. It fell as rain before that. A fair bit of it flowed beneath the earth off the slopes of the nearby mountains in the last few years, or fell directly onto the gravely soil of this alluvial fan, sank into the earth after quenching the four o’clocks, the tortoises.

Some of fell as rain a thousand years ago, and has cured in the Ivanpah Valley’s deep stony sediments ever since.

Some of it — perhaps most of it — fell when the dry lake two miles west of here held water year-round, and tules sheltered flocks of waterfowl. Knuckle-walking monsters the size of moose roamed the valley. They ate pale soapy flowers that grew at the tips of contorted, elastic trees covered in dagger-leaves. Twelve thousand years ago, or twenty, great billowing storms sealed the Sierra Nevada in a mantle of ice and made this valley a green, temperate woodland with lions and bears. The last beast before me to drink this droplet in my glass may have been saber-toothed.

The locals claim that down beneath the gravel and silt, down 700, 800 feet where the well-drillers must delve to fill our taps, is a dark and silent lake, a gigantic pocket in the earth filled with clear water. My neighbor Fred, a blur of motion most days even in the afternoon when the temperature surpasses 110°, a number significantly lower than the sum of his age and mine, told me this by way of introduction to the town.

They found a catfish, he told me. When they drilled the well, there was a catfish down there. They got down 700 feet and they struck water and everything, and commenced to pumping and up it came, all banged up from the pump and the pipe and everything, and he didn’t recall whether they said it was still alive when it got to the surface.

Fred speaks in the laconic manner of a man who has seen it all and mastered most of it. He uses the phrase “and everything” the way other men breathe inward between sentences.

Fred’s story wasn’t the first time I’d heard of huge amounts of water down there. Across the valley is the Kokoweef Mine, center of and heir to the legend of the Lost River of Gold. My next-door neighbor lived in a cave up there, the owner of this little town told me when we met. For some years, she raised kids there, made a home there in the side of the mountain, while men worked to find the fabled opening to a 5,000-foot-high chamber, at the bottom of which the Lost River is said to flow black and silent to the Sea of Cortez. Deep black sands are supposed to line its banks, each cubic foot of sand assaying out to a small fortune in gold.

Tonight a bit of black grit came out of my kitchen tap, sank rapidly to the bottom of the glass. I examined it closely.

I’m going to be here, and I hope you will too.