Don DeLillo came into my life when I was 25. I had heard whisperings of his name by different folk artists I followed and my best friend would mention him and his work nearly every time reading was brought up in conversation. Sometime shortly after my 25th birthday, I wandered into Borders looking for something new to read and there he was, staring back at me in a 25th Anniversary edition cover: White Noise by Don DeLillo. I picked it up and haven't looked back since. White Noise was the defining moment in my adult life. I've always dreamed of being a writer and I lost almost all of that dream when I left for college. It wasn't until 25 that I found myself careening back towards it and White Noise was what threw me back at it full throttle. DeLillo has this way of defining and describing our most internalized fears as a person and as society that it feels as if he's talking directly about you. White Noise is the true embodiment of that. It didn't just make me want to be a better writer, it forced me to take notice of everything around me and realize that being an adult isn't what we've been told. It's not about the house or the car or the kids, it's not about the job or how much money you have (or don't), it's about finding the things in life that make us feel full and to appreciate, if only for a moment, the things that make us truly happy. I go back to White Noise once a year to remind myself how far I've come and to let me know I still have so much farther to go.
My first experiences with David Foster Wallace were stutter steps. Almost in the way that you don't see something until you're truly ready to see it. I tried several times to get through Infinite Jest but was never serious enough about it. Then last year I read DFW's biography 'Every Love Story is a Ghost Story' by D.T. Max and was determined to get through Infinite Jest next. It took me six months to read and I loved every word. The attention it took to read this book, following Wallace through footnotes and a magnitude of characters with fears and doubts as real as my own, brought me out of the haze of passive reading and propelled me into the world. Not just the world that Wallace creates but the real world with which he is trying so desperately to communicate. It opened up my eyes to the lives of other people in our simplest interactions. I read it at the age of 30. It was the alarm that woke me up to being an adult: putting aside the apathy and angst of childhood and becoming a part of society, as challenging as that can be day in and day out. Allowing the world to teach you, to hurt you, to change you is what will push us forward as people and as a society.
“I support the concept of radical inclusion and I believe the outcome of such would be a more productive movement of political resistance. As the allied sibling of a gay man, my awareness of LGBTQI oppression was acute and early. As a survivor of the plague years, the years between 1981 and 1996, I’m sad to say that I lost many friends, co-workers and an infinite amount of acquaintances. These experiences sparked in me a deep concern for LGBTQI rights. Riki Wilchins book ‘Queer Theory, Gender Theory’ is a call to political and social action. Ze defines the concept of transgender rights using a broad umbrella and states that all people who are visibly queer face common political problems, thus making natural allies. Ze argues that gender is a legitimate human rights issue and underscores the importance of it’s inclusion in the civil rights movement. Emphasizing that these rights not only require laws, governmental policies and judicial verdicts but also social rights; the right to be you without fear, shame, or omission. Foucault demonstrated for us how the church, state, and medicine have become the regulating bodies over peoples identities and sexuality, so much so that individuals have been coerced into willingly managing their own private behavior in ways they would not have ever done so before. The different and the marginalized have frequently been those who suffered the most under this new Science and are often those with the most to lose. Sadists, masochists, transsexuals, cross-dressers, the intersexed, homosexuals, and lesbians - all were deemed deviants in need of treatment. Riki also addresses the issue of internal discrimination causing fractures in the movement and stresses the need for movements of liberation to focus on flattening hierarchies not establishing new ones. Along the lines of Goffman, Riki describes how informal social control has and is placing limitation on individuals. Gender-based oppression is accomplished through the power of the state: police, courts, and laws but it is also accomplished and reinforced through peer pressure, ridicule, shame, and ostracism. If we wish to succeed in transcending gender lines we must not only change laws and policies but also social attitudes around gender harassment. Interestingly this book was published in 2004, a decade ago, yet it remains critically relevant today. There has been some external shift in public awareness and we can see that some progress is occurring. However, don’t be fooled, discrimination both formal and informal continues to abound. Internal fractures of the movement continue to abound as well: one can cite how feminists such as Shelia Jeffreys still wish to exclude trans women from the movement. Additionally, in most states, it’s legal to fire someone for being transgender, and transgender people can’t serve in the military. The time is now to heed the call of voices such as Riki Wilkins!”
