re 28: the opening is a call to awakening and awareness, as i read it, so part of what she’s doing is saying “look around you: the inside of your culture is just as ‘black’ [or 'mixed'? the color 'copper' is intriguingly ambivalent here] as the portion you’ve marked for outsiders.” nevertheless, as long as they’re drawing lines, she’ll kindly take hers out of bounds. whether or not you recognize her right to make the gesture is, i guess, what the comments thread is about for the most part.

i’m curious about your use of “feigned” and “cultivated.” Isn’t she describing how any of us creates a world and identity? How hard does she have to work to quantify working-classness or alienation? I read her as describing how she learned to speak — a big difference from making a “confession” about faking anything.

So I totally recommend reading W.T. Lhamon’s _Raising Cain_. It’s so thoroughly readable. If you’ve never dug into the blackface scholarship, you wouldn’t expect to enjoy it, but Lhamon makes it an easy task. Much easier to get along with than Lott, for instance, though I respect that book too. Anyway — one thing that appeals to me about it (and in this it’s aligned with something like Roach’s _Cities of the Dead_, which is also a marvel) is that it leans a little more toward performance studies than straightforward lit crit. I found, teaching a bunch of the blackface stuff in a seminar a couple years ago, that the performance studies students had an easier time with things similar to patti’s “confession” than english lit students did. Thirty years on from Greenblatt, English students still distrust the notion of “self-fashioning.” It’s authenticity everyone wants! A bad by-product of the culture wars, I think.

Than again, it’s one of my performance studies colleagues (someone I’ve only met once but would love to know better) who’s written a piece that haunts me every times I want to let the culture off the hook for having kept some of this junk alive as long as it did: you can catch it here if you have access to muse. (rachel — you may want to check out his discussion of bamboozled in particular; best i’ve seen.)

The upshot of his consideration of “racist/racial kitsch” is this: “while authenticity is subject to a great deal of skepticism in Bamboozled, the shamefulness of inauthenticity is never questioned,” which in part limits the film. what nyongo looks for instead is a form of creative response to shame that transforms it into something else, some form of protection even: to “achieve a kind of prophylactic invulnerability to the object that says ‘Shame on you! Shame on you for being black!’ We do not, at this late date, need yet newer formulations of pride to negate this shame. The point may be to locate, within the transformations of our shame, a way out of scapegoating, and thus, out of the bloodletting that accompanies with such monotonous reliability our attempts to regain our innocence.”

With this in mind, I’m struck by how much of Patti’s song is about a teenage pregnancy that resembles her own (okay, I know we were trained not to read like this, but her continual offering up of an autobiographical narrative — long before “Piss Factory” — has been part of her schtick all along and has to be accounted for somehow) and also by the lines about “love” in the middle:

I was lost in a valley of pleasure.
I was lost in the infinite sea.
I was lost, and measure for measure,
love spewed from the heart of me.
I was lost, and the cost,
and the cost didn’t matter to me.
I was lost, and the cost
was to be outside society.

For anyone who’s followed the early interviews and the beginning of the career, this should mark a turning point from her early suggestions of conflict between her own gendered self-determination and what the pregnancy and birth did to her, as well as a marked shift in tone from early discussions of giving up the baby.

This has been a helpful discussion for me, people.

I taught the album Easter as a text a long, long time ago, and I tried to contextualize the song within the album as a whole by walking the students through the liner notes where she talks about Rimbaud and his sisters and their crazy Easter vision. (Is that in the liner notes? maybe it’s in Patti Smith Complete, which I also taught that semester. dunno. can’t find my cd to double check.) I tried to explain how the level of outsiderness conveyed by the word was part of an attempt to align herself with Rimbaud/Jimi Hendrix/Jesus Christ as a cultural martyr, and how this is an impossibly complicated gesture, because she’s trying to be an insider/outsider and there’s this huge clashing of high culture aspiring to low culture chic going on. (Maybe I could do better now, especially with Smith’s confession that she cultivated her outsiderness to the point of feigning working-classness via her use of slang. Wow. That’s huge. And a little galling.)