{"id":251198,"date":"2017-01-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-27T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sdnews.com\/local-author-challenges-perception\/"},"modified":"2017-01-27T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-01-27T08:00:00","slug":"local-author-challenges-perception","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/local-author-challenges-perception\/","title":{"rendered":"Autor local desaf\u00eda la percepci\u00f3n"},"content":{"rendered":"

Por Kit-Bacon Gressitt<\/p>\n

While a tide of new political activists is frothing across the nation, one seasoned revolutionary is quietly practicing his decades-long resistance in Mission Hills.<\/p>\n

Harold Jaffe, author and San Diego State University professor, continues his quest to challenge popular perception in his 24th book, \u201cGoosestep: Fictions and Docufictions\u201d (Journal of Experimental Fiction Books, November 2016).<\/p>\n

Jaffe has taught at SDSU for about 30 years, and traveled the world longer. He lives and writes in \u201cwhat remains of nature\u201d along a Mission Hills canyon.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are fewer birds now,\u201d he said in a recent interview with San Diego Uptown News. \u201cI think global warming is the prime suspect there. Wilderness being real-estated; land being contaminated; the weather being completely out of sorts; birds, when they migrate here in the winter, find the weather too warm. Without wildness, we\u2019re damned. We must integrate with wild creatures, otherwise this earth is going to be quickly damned.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is hope of a more natural state for human creatures that seems to pervade Jaffe\u2019s writing. If he can just jostle the reader enough without causing harm, the world might be a better place. His writing is sometimes subtle, sometimes not; it can leave the reader thinking \u201cWell, of course\u201d and other times deep in a quandary.<\/p>\n

\"Local
(l) Harold Jaffe in Paris; (r) \u201cGoosestep\u201d book cover<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jaffe questions a seeming endless list of contradictions and failures, from \u201cAmerican provincialism\u201d to news as \u201cpropagandized entertainment\u201d to \u201cthe fake moralizing that goes on in the country.\u201d This might sound heavy, even unpleasant to some, but Jaffe performs his persistent examination with compassion and humor, albeit a bit dark. He asks the reader to see things another way, to look a second time, without socially constructed filters.<\/p>\n

A segment of the first text in \u201cGoosestep,\u201d titled \u201cDouble,\u201d challenges the reader with conflicting perceptions:<\/p>\n

I see the homeless huddled against the steel-glass wall of the stock exchange.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t see the homeless huddled against the steel-glass wall of the stock exchange.<\/p>\n

I see for-profit prisons filled with colored poor.<\/p>\n

You do not see for-profit prisons filled with colored poor.<\/p>\n

The semi-invisible line defining (relative) civility is effaced.<\/p>\n

There is no semi-invisible line defining (relative) civility.<\/p>\n

Must the reader favor one view over the other \u2014 are they even opposites? \u2014 must a text be designated fiction or nonfiction?<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d Jaffe said, \u201cI think that in effect there\u2019s no difference except in proportion. Look at the so-called news. It\u2019s not news, it\u2019s ideology, it\u2019s propagandized entertainment. I think fiction and nonfiction have always been combined, even before the net. \u2026 I\u2019m emphasizing this to call attention to how the culture functions.\u201d<\/p>\n

He explained how he did this in a recent piece: \u201cThere was a [news] story about an Arab family displaced from Syria: Angry Muslim husband drops two children from a two-story window after wife confesses she wished she was a European woman. I looked into it. They were displaced for two years, living in Calais [France] in extremely difficult circumstances. She was very unhappy. She said something to the effect if she were a European woman she wouldn\u2019t have to live like this. These people were in forced exile, because Syria is being destroyed. It was a combination of frustrations and anger. So I tried to turn it just a little bit so we saw all sides of it, to get a sense of the feeling of anguish that the people had.\u201d<\/p>\n

As insightful as critical, Jaffe\u2019s writing reveals a profound empathy \u2014 an understanding that inhumanity is coupled to humanity, that pain abounds \u2014 and a commitment to art as his response. But art as activism, he said, \u201cis not, generally speaking, an American disposition.\u201d In the U.S., there is an effort \u201cto dissociate art-making from activism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut if the world is in pain,\u201d Jaffe said, \u201chow does art address it?\u201d<\/p>\n

It might be an unanswerable question collectively, but each artist \u2014 musician, painter, photographer, sculptor, dancer, writer \u2014 possesses tools and talents to take some action.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has to do with the first assumption, that the world is in pain,\u201d Jaffe said, \u201cand if an artist has any kind of feeling about the world, how does he or she address it? If you address it just plainly, you\u2019re likely to drive the reader away. But if you stylize it \u2014 you can stylize it \u2014 you can shock the reader into some kind of recognition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether Jaffe draws readers to his work or drives them away, it is probable that his words will linger with them \u2014 however long they might exist, which is another conundrum. Consider the last section of \u201cDouble\u201d:<\/p>\n

The world as we know it perishes \/ humans take selfies.<\/p>\n

The world as we know it does not perish, no one takes selfies.<\/p>\n

\u2014Kit-Bacon Gressitt writes commentary and essays on her blog Excuse Me, I\u2019m Writing, is a founding editor of WritersResist.com<\/a>, and has been published by Missing Slate, Ms. Magazine blog and Trivia: Voices of Feminism, among others. She formerly wrote for the North County Times. She also hosts Fallbrook Library\u2019s monthly Writers Read authors series and open mic, and can be reached at kbgressitt@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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