Recent Changes

The rest of the opening paragraph is quite interesting and complex; it brings up many recurring themes, especially as they pertain to identity, that we should keep in mind as we continue to read. I think we should spend a good deal of time discussing this paragraph and linking it to later occurrences at our next meeting. Our reading should be through chapter 6, pg 131 in my addition, which is the end of My Pafology. Hope you guys enjoy it!
-Marcus
- Ulrike -
close reading, page 212:
But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression. So, I would not be economically oppressed because of writing a book that fell in line with the very books I deemed racist. And I would have to wear the mask of the person I was expected to be.
This passage is very essential to the novel’s theme of racism. Monk is “not black enough” for most publishers; he is a black man and hence the literary world expects him to write about being black. This is the mask Monk is talking about. In Everett’s interview I posted on the Wiki he says “But, here we are again, talking about race. I don't want to talk about race, I just want to make art.” As Marcus already pointed out, it is extremely ironic that we actually added Erasure to our reading list for the exact reason that Everett is an African-American writer, and after thinking about this for a while have come to ask myself why and if his ethnicity is important. Of course it is interesting and important when reading literature to consider aspects such as its historical background and the author’s gender, ethnicity or beliefs. These considerations are often helpful for interpreting a certain piece of art, and sometimes open up whole new contexts for discussion. But I also think that such approaches come with a certain danger, namely by creating certain expectations. Is it possible that we sometimes jump to hasty conclusions by keeping an author’s personal life and history in the back of our mind while reading? Sometimes, I like reading a book without looking at any information on the author or without reading the introduction or criticisms and reviews beforehand. It gives me the opportunity to form my own opinion and enjoy it as a piece of art for art’s sake. Even though this is not an approach that is used in any of my classes, it sometimes is appealing to me to wait before trying to fit a book into a certain genre. I think that is what Everett means, at least partly, when he says that he just wants to make art.
I’m of course open to any criticism or suggestions and different viewpoints :)
- Ulrike -
Degenerate Art / Entartete Kunst

"You Always Want the Heartwood..."
"You Always Want the Heartwood": Woodworking in Percival Everett’s Erasure
Adam Robinson
Wood is organic but woodworking isn’t. It is nothing more than a manipulation performed by a person. The existence of the hardwood store—where the wood is harbored —serves as a reminder of the remove at which modern craftsmen find themselves in relation to their ancestor woodworkers of centuries past. Today, wood is offered in an assortment of strange shapes that don’t resemble any natural log formations at all but are instead packaged to facilitate our daily building projects (Green xxvi). We can look at countless woodworking magazines and see that woodworkers are interested in making many of the same things, tables, clocks, ducks, etc. They put their personal stamp on their creations through ornament.
What appears to be more important for many woodworkers is the feeling of nostalgia that is evoked by the thought of creating something by hand from organic material.
However, Harvey Green—a professor of History at Northwestern—points out that our relation to more ‘ancient’ practices of working wood is not really a distant one. He reminds us in his book, Wood: Craft, Culture, History, that the organic nature of wood made it the significant material in the early part of the Industrial Revolution:
Before 1850, most machines—spinning wheels, looms, plows, rakes, shovels, hoes, churns—were made entirely of wood. Even at the outset of the age of steel, machines for home and factory production were mostly made of wood, with iron and steel fittings attached at areas of greatest friction and where the cutting took place” (xxv). The Revolution does change our relationship to wood, the lumber industry making wood another “machined mass-produced commodity (xxvi).
What’s good wood? Monk correctly tells us that the good wood is the heartwood (13). It is the center of the tree, a strong essentially dead piece of wood resistant decay. Finding it can prove tricky for it resembles its counterpart, the sapwood. The sapwood is the outer rings of the tree, the absorber of nutrients, but ultimately susceptible to infestation and decay. Monk wants the heartwood because of its consistency. Writers, too, want the stuff that will last a long time, or at least writers like Monk do. However, heartwood has its problems, at least metaphorically speaking, in that we don’t want everything that is created to stick around. Some things need to go away. Monk obviously shares this sentiment. We should also keep in mind one thing about heartwood, and wood in general, that Monk forgets to tell us: for the woodworker interested in visual presentation, as many are, consistency is not enough, color is what is key.
Apparently, the same principle applies to booksellers as well. Monk, while browsing through Border’s, searches for his books. He cannot find his experimental, academic books—re-workings of Ancient Greek tales—in the literature or contemporary fiction sections as he expected them to be. They are instead grouped in African American Studies.
I quote Monk’s reaction:
Someone interested in African American Studies would have little interest in my books and would be confused by their presence in the section. Someone looking for an obscure reworking of a Greek tragedy would not consider looking in that section any more than the gardening section. The result in either case, no sale. That fucking store was taking food from my table (28).
This is Monk’s mood when he discovers the latest bestselling novel, a novel so popular that Hollywood has paid 3 million to the author for the book rights. I am referring to Juanita Mae Jenkins’s We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.
Angered at what he sees as a stereotypical portrayal of Black America that has garnered undeserved success, Monk sets out to parody Jenkins’s novel and others like it. He produces My Pafology, later to be called Fuck, an over the top exaggeration of Jenkins’s novel.
Margaret Russett hits on a key idea that Everett’s novel is asserting: “Everett unhinges ‘black’ subject matter from a lingering stereotype of ‘black’ style, while challenging the assumption that a single or consensual African-American Experience exists to be represented” (360).
From his interviews about Erasure and the politics set forth in the novel, we can see that Everett is concerned with the double standard set for white and black writers. White writers freely, and often unconsciously, write on a wide range of experiences, while black writers are expected to write to some single idea of a ‘black experience.’ The public defers complete authority to a black writer, who may not feel comfortable speaking authoritatively about entire group of people. What some might perceive as a respectful gesture is in fact an insult.
Parody aside, it is interesting how a novel like Fuck, set in a Modern American city, is marketed and received as an exotic artifact. This relationship between reader and artifact is reminiscent of what Harvey Green considers the pre-industrial society’s superstitious, cautious relationship with the wilderness (230). The ‘hood’ is stigmatized as a wilderness or as the clichéd concrete jungle, something that should be entered with great caution. Portraying this particular experience becomes a benchmark for authenticity.
Russett asks the right question: “When can we say with confidence that a work of fiction has, or has not, met this obligation (dealing with racial themes)?” (361).
The bar needed for authenticity appears to reside somewhere in the extreme. For publishers, writers, or even teachers looking to maximize their delivery of authentic literature, they need to—based on these assumptions—find works that go heavy on the culture. Here a certain kind of language determines authenticity, so the work that includes the most cultural eccentricities, no matter how stereotypical or insignificant, is deemed the more authentic. If you want to hear about street life, you want to hear it from a street thug, problem being your preconceived ideas about what happens on the streets.
It is easy to see how things went awry so easily, but Monk does not help his cause.
Readers needed to see Stagg Leigh to ‘authenticate’ the book. His physical appearance hidden behind a white veil, Monk appears as Leigh on the Kenya Dunston Show. Monk as Leigh does not cooperate during the interview, refusing to talk much, but this does not damage the book’s reputation as an insightful look into the African American experience. Moreover, the identity of the creator is revealed / confirmed allowing readers to fully invest in the novel and its back story. Exotic objects require a good back story whether it is the novel written by an author with a felony or the wooden chair proudly displayed as the work of an Amish carpenter. These stories make ordinary creations extraordinary.
We have alchemy.
Harvey Green writes:
Artifice is the alchemy of woodworking. Hustlers, hucksters, and true believers once thought they could find a “science” for transforming base materials into gold, but they were mistaken. But wood can be transformed, if not in composition then in appearance and shape….We carve or otherwise transform the wood into shapes and forms that in turn motivate further activity, whether it is contemplation, awe, or obeisance to the Divine (229).
I credit fellow University of Louisville grad student, Chris Hoerter, for clarifying a point concerning the headings for the pages of Everett’s novel. The heading spells Erasure, but each letter is crossed out except for the ‘A’ and ‘U’. Chris reminded me that the ‘A’ and ‘U’ can mean many things, one thing being the abbreviation for Gold on the periodic table. Though Monk is certainly playing with strange materials and formulas, the authentic act of alchemy is performed by the media who have taken a base object, an academic parody that is of no interest to anyone, and elevated it to ‘pure gold’ status. Monk’s only defense against this brand of alchemy would have been to label his work as a parody.
It points to a woodworking passage in the novel. Monk is in Washington D.C. caring for his mother, whose dementia is worsening each day. He builds her a nightstand. As he works the wood, he envisions his ailing mother injuring herself on the table’s corner and so he sands that corner down, creating two new corners. He keeps sanding until he has nothing more than a wobbly stool.
Monk makes adjustments for his mother, but not for his readership. Labeling a book as parody would make the attempt at parody no longer effective.
That’s the serious artist side of Monk. However, when we reflect back on that encounter at Border’s, we are reminded that Monk has a vindictive side and isn’t above financial reward. Is he surprised by the world’s reaction to his novel? We can’t know.
We do know that Percival Everett has convincingly challenged ideas about authenticity and authority through the actions of his protagonist.
Yet Everett's questions and challenges have been countered. In a review of Erasure that is both favorable and critical, Bernard Bell disapproves of Everett’s position:
Contrary to the popularity in the academies of anti-essentialist arguments by postmodern critics, the authority, authenticity, and agency identities of most African Americans emanate most distinctively and innovatively from the particularity of our historical struggle against slavery and its legacy of anti-black racism in the United States.
I don’t think that Bell and Everett are polar opposites per se, but they do speak from different positions. Everett feels little connection to the common experience posited by Bell, while Bell’s comments point to a feeling of disappointment in Everett’s political stance.
Both sides offer convincing arguments. There is surely a middle ground, but if one were to choose a side (if sides exist) it would be based solely on preference or belief.
Today I have gone with Everett, trying to determine the difficulty of confronting and overcoming issues of authenticity, authority, and race.
My final thoughts are directed toward Monk’s mother, whose “health and authentic identity,” according Bernard Bell, are being rapidly erased by dementia. As her condition worsens, her perceptions increasingly transcend our boundaries of thought, though they don’t yield any particular gain. But in a way, her unfortunate condition begs the question: Does it take a complete dissolution of our sense of self to see beyond constructed ideas like race and authenticity?
Works Cited
- Bell, Bernard. “Erasure.” African American Review 37.2 (Summer 2003): 474-477.
- Green, Harvey. Wood: Craft, Culture, History. New York: Viking, 2006.
- Everett, Percival. Erasure. New York: Hyperion, 2001.
- Russett, Margaret. “RACE UNDER ERASURE for Percival Everett, ‘a piece of fiction’.”
Callaloo 28.2 (Spring 2005): 358-368.
I thought I'd look up some stuff on Everett like interviews etc...
Everett and Monk

Both the frame story in Erasure and the novel-within-the-novel take note of the effect of television talk shows on American popular culture. Is this an issue that concerns you? Do you feel that talk show television has had a negative effect on American public discourse?
Talk shows are not the work of the devil. They are the work of greedy, stupid people. That's too easy. There is a lot to dislike about most talk shows and little to admire, but I don't find them all that important one way or another. They do serve as a window to the basement of our culture, putting on display the more disgusting human traits and behaviors. But that stuff is out there; what better place for it than TV.
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This is an article on the guardian.co.uk that I stumbled across due to the title:
Colour bind -
His new novel satirises ghetto culture and white attitudes - but Percival Everett's books still end up on the Black Fiction shelf
guardian article
paragraphs I found very interesting for discussion:
Like his creator, Monk is an academic engaged in a one-man war against the reduction of black experience to a set of stereotypical fictional tropes: the ghetto, the deep South, the angry pimp, the street hustler, the triumphant victim.
'I see it essentially as a book about the creation of art and all the impediments placed in front of some of us as we set out to do that within this culture,'
'What is most interesting to me about Monk is not his colour, but his selfless examination of himself. He does not want to be constrained or reduced by society's demands or expectations. He's alert to that all the time.' Monk Ellison is indeed a fascinating and not altogether sympathetic character, as indicative of his time and place as Ralph Ellison's Rinehart was to Fifties America.
If Ellison's Invisible Man is an obvious influence, formally and politically, so too is Mark Twain, who provides the book's cryptic epigraph: 'I could never tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anyone would believe.'
These intertwining narratives are constantly fractured by a series of odd, and seemingly random, imagined conversations - with Rothko and Resnais, Rauschenberg and De Kooning, Wittgenstein and Derrida - which parody the kind of post-structuralist novels that Monk himself writes. Fortunately, Everett is one of those rare writers who can indulge in all manner of formal boldness while still seducing the reader with his storytelling.
More surreally disturbing still was the initial response to the book from certain American publishing houses. 'Doubleday came in with an eleventh-hour offer for the paperback rights,' Everett says, grinning mischievously. 'My agent rang me and said, "You're not going to believe this, but they want to publish Erasure as the inaugural book of an Afro-American imprint called, wait for it, Harlem Moon." I mean, did they read the book?' Did he not, even for a moment, I ask, consider taking up their offer and running with the prank as far as he could. 'I actually thought of it. It was tempting to have them invalidate themselves with their first publication but, you know, I really couldn't do that to my work.'
'I think I represent an impulse that is essentially modernist and is certainly not unique to African-Americans - a desire for a certain standard of creative excellence. I think that has all but disappeared - in music, in fiction, in culture generally. Once, to be a writer or a musician, you needed to learn your craft and have a certain talent, and then you needed to prove yourself and improve your craft each time you created something. That's gone now. It's been replaced by other impulses like this bogus notion of authenticity that bedevils music and fiction made by black people.
'I have nothing against ghetto novels or rural Southern novels,' he continues, warming to his subject, 'except that they are the only representations out there. When I see my books in the Black Fiction or Black Studies section, I feel baffled. I really don't know what those terms mean. Especially, when I look around the store and there is no corresponding White Fiction section.' (Everett's original title for Erasure was How Much is That Negro In The Window?; he's not saying whether he, or the publishers, balked at it.)
He pauses for a moment. 'But, here we are again,' he says, 'talking about race. I don't want to talk about race, I just want to make art.' He has succeeded in the latter, if not the former, which, ultimately, is all that really matters.
- Ulrike -
___

I thought I'd look up some stuff on Everett like interviews etc...
Everett and Monk
Everett Interview UP New England
--> Some of the questions I found particularly interesting because we have addressed/are about to address them:
The reader is tempted to see something of the author mirrored in the protagonist of Erasure: an African American writer of literary, "experimental" novels (even the subjects of the novels are similar). To what degree is Monk's character (if not his circumstances) rooted in your own experience? Have you yourself encountered the criticism of not being "black enough" as a writer?
Monk's experience is very much my own, though he of course is not me at all. Yes, I have been hit with the "not black enough" complaint, but always from white editors and critics. I find that curious.
What about the label "African American writer"? What sort of expectations or assumptions have you found go along with this tag? Are they different for black and non-black readers?
I am a writer. I am a man. I am black man in this culture. Of course my experience as a black man in America influences my art; it influences the way I drive down the street. But certainly John Updike's work is influenced by his being white in America, but we never really discuss that. I think readers, black and white, are sophisticated enough to be engaged by a range of black experience, informed by economic situation, religion (or lack thereof) or geography, just as one accepts a range of so-called white experience.
As a novel about race and publishing, Erasure arrives at an opportune moment: there have been a number of stories recently in the media (three or four in the New York Times alone) about black writers, readers, and the growing market for African American books. Do you think there is truly something new here? Or is it merely ever-changing literary fashion?
I don't know.
Both the frame story in Erasure and the novel-within-the-novel take note of the effect of television talk shows on American popular culture. Is this an issue that concerns you? Do you feel that talk show television has had a negative effect on American public discourse?
Talk shows are not the work of the devil. They are the work of greedy, stupid people. That's too easy. There is a lot to dislike about most talk shows and little to admire, but I don't find them all that important one way or another. They do serve as a window to the basement of our culture, putting on display the more disgusting human traits and behaviors. But that stuff is out there; what better place for it than TV.

Type in the content of you
Thoughts on the opening of Erasure
“My journal is a private affair.” This first clause of the novel presents significant information as to how we should read the book as a whole; what we have is a private journal, and we would ask ourselves why and how we’ve come across this. It was meant to be found, or this portion would not have been included in any private journal entry; this means that the journal is already not private by nature. It, in fact, has entered into the realm of public viewing. It is art, a novel perhaps, but it will at least be chosen according to an audience. We, the readers, then, are now part of the private affair of the journal that is not so private, nor meant to be private. This fact is also indicated by us starting at a certain point in the author’s life. We don’t know the author’s name yet, beyond it being Percival Everett, because the cover is the real beginning of the novel. It is a novel, so it says on the cover, called Erasure, by Percival Everett. Presumably, we already know he’s black, either by reputation, seeing his book in the “African-American Literature” section of Borders, or by his picture on the dust jacket—all of these are used to indicate the “protagonist’s” race within the story.
The rest of the opening paragraph is quite interesting and complex; it brings up many recurring themes, especially as they pertain to identity, that we should keep in mind as we continue to read. I think we should spend a good deal of time discussing this paragraph and linking it to later occurrences at our next meeting. Our reading should be through chapter 6, pg 131 in my addition, which is the end of My Pafology. Hope you guys enjoy it!
-Marcus
r page here.
- Ulrike -
Degenerate Art / Entartete Kunst
What many people do not know is that Hitler himself was an artist, and produced many artworks during his lifetime. Several times he tried to get into an Art School in Vienna (Wiener Kunstakademie).
The link above leads you to a webpage that even features some of Hitler's work.
- Ulrike -
So, I checked up on some people mentioned in the book.
page 37

Kollwitz: Why is it that bloody-minded men are such prudes? Why are they so hostile to sexuality and images of the body?
Klee: You're referring to mustache boy.
you did. (Klee left with his family in 1933) I couldn't Kirchner.
Klee: ferkelFerkel Kunst. (German for "piglet-art")
Kollwitz: Pardon?
Klee: That's what he calls what we do.
Kollwitz: Imagine the smell of those ashes.
Klee: Indeed.
Note: On the webpage I linked about Hilter and Art it actually says that Hitler wasn't strictly against nude paintings:
"Contrary to the belief that Hitler was uptight about things such as nudity, he allowed painters and sculptors to produce both male and female nudes. Male nudes were depicted as responsible, heroic and powerful while females were neat, clean, and full breasted while having a flat belly, long-muscled thighs, and slim shanks. They were sometimes depicted as Nordic, perhaps because many people prefer the natural beauty of Nordics, but were sometimes brunette as well. It should be noted that contrary to historical propaganda, Germany is not a Nordic nation but a predominately Alpine one, though it has a small Nordic minority, and this has been the case for several centuries. It is therefore most probable that the artists and people were praising an ideal in the depiction of their minority population rather than positing a notion of national superiority in this image." Link
Käthe Kollwitz's Wikipedia
Käthe Kollwitz's Art
Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz (July 8, 1867 – April 22, 1945) was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war.[1][2] Initially her work was grounded in Naturalism, and later took on Expressionistic qualities.[3]
In 1933, after the establishment of the National-Socialist regime, the Nazi Party authorities forced her to resign her place on the faculty of the Akademie der Künste. Her work was removed from museums.
{kathe-kollwitz.jpg}
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page 60

Ernst Barlach (January 2, 1870 – October 24, 1938) was a German expressionist sculptor, printmaker and writer. Although he was a supporter of the war in the years leading to World War I, his participation in the war made him change his position, and he is mostly known for his sculptures protesting against the war. This created many conflicts during the rise of the Nazi Party, when most of his works were confiscated as degenerate art.
{barlach.jpg}
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page 49
Klee: What are you thinking about?
Kollwitz: Why is it that bloody-minded men are such prudes? Why are they so hostile to sexuality and images of the body?
Klee: You're referring to mustache boy.
Kollwitz: You were lucky to leave when you did. I couldn't bring myself to abandon my home. But back to the subject. That monster and those like him are as threatened by those silly nymphettes of Muller as they are by Kirchner.
Klee: ferkel Kunst.
Kollwitz: Pardon?
Klee: That's what he calls what we do.
Kollwitz: I've lost my son in the first war and I fear that I will lose ,y grandson in this one. And all because of a man who is afraid of his pee-pee.
Klee: And other people's pee-pees.
Kollwitz: They've established a new bureau. The Commission on the Value of Confiscated Works of Degenerate Art. They're selling our works to foreigners. They sold them for nothing and burned the rest. I want the ashes of the bonfire to mix with my paints.
Klee: That's a lovely idea.
Kollwitz: Imagine the smell of those ashes.
Klee: Indeed.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
page 60

-Marcus
r page here.
- Ulrike -
Degenerate Art / Entartete Kunst
Degenerate Art
Under the Hitler Regime, the Nazis banished the works from many contemporary artists with the gola to prevent the "corruption of art". Everett mentions several German artists in Erasure that experienced this kind of persecution.
Hitler and Art
Hitler's Art
What many people do not know is that Hitler himself was an artist, and produced many artworks during his lifetime. Several times he tried to get into an Art School in Vienna (Wiener Kunstakademie).
The link above leads you to a webpage that even features some of Hitler's work.
So, I checked up on some people mentioned in the book.
page 37

Ernst laughs.
Well, I know Wikipedia isn't that good aof a scholarly source, BUT I thought the passages beneath are good summaries on both artists during the Nazi Era.
Paul Klee Wikipedia
Paul Klee's Art
I LOVE his paintings by the way!!!
Paul Klee (German pronunciation: [kleː]; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a Swiss painter and a German painter.[a] His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism.
...
From nearly the start, the Nazi movement denounced the Bauhaus for its "degenerate art" and in 1933 the Bauhaus was finally shut down. Emigrants did succeed, however, in spreading the concepts of the Bauhaus to other countries, including the “New Bauhaus” of Chicago.[42] Klee also taught at the Düsseldorf Academy from 1931 to 1933, and was singled out by a Nazi newspaper, “Then that great fellow Klee comes onto the scene, already famed as a Bauhaus teacher in Dessau. He tells everyone he’s a thoroughbred Arab, but he’s a typical Galician Jew.”[43] His home was searched by the Gestapo and he was fired from his job.[44][4] His self-portrait Struck from the List (1933) commemorates the sad occasion.[43] In 1933-4, Klee had shows in London and Paris, and finally met Picasso whom he greatly admired.[45] The Klee family emigrated to Switzerland in late 1933.[45]
Paul Klee Wikipedia
{paulklee.jpg}
Ernst Barlach (January 2, 1870 – October 24, 1938) was a German expressionist sculptor, printmaker and writer. Although he was a supporter of the war in the years leading to World War I, his participation in the war made him change his position, and he is mostly known for his sculptures protesting against the war. This created many conflicts during the rise of the Nazi Party, when most of his works were confiscated as degenerate art.
Ernst Barlach Wikipedia
Ernst Barlach's Art
Ernst Barlach (January 2, 1870 – October 24, 1938) was a German expressionist sculptor, printmaker and writer. Although he was a supporter of the war in the years leading to World War I, his participation in the war made him change his position, and he is mostly known for his sculptures protesting against the war. This created many conflicts during the rise of the Nazi Party, when most of his works were confiscated as degenerate art.
{barlach.jpg}
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Ernst Kirchner's Art
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (6 May 1880 – 15 June 1938) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th century art. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a breakdown and was discharged. In 1933, his work was branded as "degenerate" by the Nazis and in 1937 over 600 of his works were sold or destroyed. In 1938 he committed suicide.
{ernst_kirchner_soldier.jpg}
--> It's interesting that Everett chose Max Klinger, since he died in 1920 and hence didn't even experience the rise of Hitler
Max Klinger (February 18, 1857 - July 5, 1920) was a German Symbolist painter, sculptor and printmaker.
Ernst Klinger Wikipedia
Ernst Klinger's Art