Going Ollie Airwalk at the MLA

I have been properly upbraided for neglecting this site, and by a former student. Role reversal! So here begins A Thousand Words (more or less) Every Two Weeks (more or less).

My thanks to fellow scribbler and Facebook companion Tiffany Clemons.

Going Ollie Airwalk at the MLA

In the lobby of the Los Angeles Convention Center, the professors come and go, talking of job searches, book contracts, the fate of theory, salary freezes, and the New Orleans Saints, who are in the process of losing to the Seattle Seahawks, which is adjudged by this observer as an event more portentous than the flipping of the globe: say tenure requirements that include the 40-yard sprint.

The occasion is the annual get together of the Modern Language Association, and it is in competition with more than 2000 high school students attending the annual meeting of the National Black Students Association. They’re talking of Ludacris, T.I., and Nappy Roots, but also Toni Morrison and Kobe Bryant, who will be playing tonight at the Staples Center next door. Another competition is taking place in the plaza between the Centers: skateboarders and BMXers performing can-you-top-this stunts. We conference goers and high schoolers, hundreds of us milling around the entrance, are obstacles to get around. Think of us as moving traffic cones on a driving skills course.

I’m sitting on a stone bench watching them, reading up on digital parasites as the new subject of the post-humanist age, in preparation for a session called “Whither Posthumanism?” I think I’m seeing whither it has gone. The boarders are sixteen at most, crew-cutted and long-haired, all wearing baggie board shorts, T-shirts, and variations on the Nike Encore. The intensity of their concentration belies their apparent indifference to social propriety. I watch one kid do a maneuver I’ll later learn is a Pogo Fingerflip, which involves standing the board up vertically then flipping it lengthwise while the boarder jumps high enough to give the board time to land on its wheels. Another one catches air doing the Helipop (also known as a Backside 360 Nollie), whereby the board does a full 360, over a short flight of steps.

The session on “Whither Posthumanism?”, at the J. W. Marriott, a short walk from the Convention Center, is focused on ability difference. We learn, for example, that posthumanist critique takes aim at “techno-determinism,” which asks whether we are losing our minds to the new digital world. The fate of bodies is of special concern. If we live, as one speaker puts it, in “universal woundedness,” then it is no longer possible to speak of disability as a category, which undermines the whole logic of the categorical imperative by which we judge ability. We are all, in some way, wounded. This leads the designated responder to speculate that posthumanism is what comes after poststructuralism, because the languages we use to reject the disabled are themselves the products of an amputated way of thinking. Woundedness, he says, is built into our ways of dividing up the world, and he wonders if posthumanism will usher in a new linguistic “After People” creative regeneration in what we say about the Other. I wonder too. A few weeks later The Washington Post runs an article (“Video Diaries Reveal Life for Those Committed to St. Elizabeths,” January 28, 2011) which includes a video of the criminally insane reflecting on their lives. It prompts one commenter to ask whether the next article will feature a “griping [sic] documentary” on cockroaches.

The BMXers have a more challenging task. They must negotiate their way among the throng, performing their stunts, without “dabbing” (touching their feet to the ground) or colliding with us. Being a mountain biker, I can appreciate the skill this involves. One of their favorite tricks is to go flying over the steps that lead from the plaza to a walkway that passes the Staples Center; it is crowded with people walking between the Conference Center and the Marriott. One of the bikers told me that they’ll do timed runs around Staples, but I don’t tell him, because he’ll learn about it soon enough, that motorcyclists will do timed races around the beltways in cities like Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio.

I’m about to head inside for my next session, “The Currency of the Category ‘Creative Nonfiction,’” when I notice a group of boarders conferring near the sign that reads, “No Skateboarding, Bicycling, Inline Skating, or Roller Skating.” They break, like football players from a huddle, and one of them, a tall, lanky kid, with hair flipped to one side, wearing a black Nine Inch Nails T and black cargo shorts, skates a few feet away, pivots to face the steps, and stops. His eyes give away exactly what he’s thinking; they undergo a near physical transformation as he gathers his nerve. And then he pushes off, three hard kicks with his right foot toward the steps. At the very brink he executes an Ollie, which raises the front of the board off the ground. He grabs the rail (the side of the board) and, harnessing the laws of physics in a way never taught to him in school, launches himself into the air, like an F-16. The board’s trucks (wheel assemblies) catch the railing, and like Shaun White in the half pipe he slides to the bottom, catches air, grabs the board’s rail, lays back just enough to angle the nose up, and lands on the back wheels. He wobbles a bit—for a split second I think he’s going to flip—but steadies himself, stands up, kicks the back end out, and to the grating scrunch of plastic wheels against concrete comes to a complete stop. As a finishing flourish, he stands the board up with a swift kick, ala Marty McFly, grabs it by the front truck, and walks back to the huddle, grinning.

The currency of the category creative nonfiction is, as one speaker puts it, hard to locate on any literary values metric. Right now it’s wildly popular, like the stock of Silicon Valley startups in the 90s, and it’s taught under that name in colleges across the country. That’s my own metaphor, and I’m troubled by it, because as a practitioner I hope I’m not riding a bubble. I’m more intrigued by another speaker’s observation that CNF differs from fiction, not in the obvious requirement that the essay must be grounded in fact, but in the way that facts are represented. The baseline of CNF is to use the techniques of literary writing to understand something that actually happened. Writers reflect and interpret, and their reflections and interpretations begin at what the speaker calls the “actual.” This is the name she gives to the singular fact that initiates the reflection and interpretation that grow into the essay. Joan Didion has written of how a single photograph of a mob scene in an airport in San Salvador launched her book, Salvador. I found myself reflecting on the names of donors to a restoration of Coit Tower, carved into the steps leading to the top of Telegraph Hill, which led me to write about the architectural wonders of San Francisco.

But the actual, she says, is no more than a “shadowy image.” The body, the whole concatenation of events we experienced, now tucked away in memory, is lost to us. At best we have access to an indistinct outline, piecemeal remembrances; someone said something to us and we think we remember what it was word-for-word, but we probably don’t. So the “creative” in CNF seems to involve more than the mechanics of literary technique; or, perhaps more to the point, the mechanics become the midwife to a creative reconstruction of the story of which the actual is its shadow. I like the idea, because it justifies the creative but doesn’t authorize the fictive to give the story point. We still have to write the truth.

In my notes, beside the words “shadowy image,” I’ve written, “Plato?” She doesn’t mention the Allegory of the Cave, but the connection seems pretty clear, especially when I come downstairs into the lobby of the Marriott and see what’s on the TV monitors. On one, President Obama is speaking from the podium in the White House press room. The sound is turned down, but the caption reads, “Obama addresses nation on shootings in Tucson.” On the other TV, the Jets are wrapping up their victory over the Colts in the NFL playoffs.

I’ve often wondered whether the allegory, which says that we live in a cave and know only the shadows projected on the wall cast by an unattainable light from outside, was Plato’s invention or Socrates’s. It sounds like something Plato, curmudgeonly sequestered in his garret, nursing old wounds, would come up with. Socrates would have been hanging out at the plaza, and might have even tried to do a Nosehook Impossible or an Ollie Airwalk, though where he’d come up with the money for an Anti Hero Nothins Free is beyond me.

So, shadowy images. “What is truth?”, Pilate asked? I know the answer to that: sticking the landing.

As I walk in the dying afternoon toward the 7th Avenue subway stop, a BMXer whizzes past me, expertly dodging and weaving among the pedestrians, like Ali dancing around the ring. He approaches the street corner and at the last second comes to a near full stop, hops down over the curb, darts between two cars, and wheelies back onto the sidewalk. He blends into the crowd, only his bobbing and weaving blue Lakers baseball cap a clue to his whereabouts.