I was almost tempted to post a redacted version of William Burroughs menacing Thanksgiving video prayer yesterday. Burroughs recites a caustic litany of how hateful and genocidal the holiday is given our country’s history. And though it is all said in satire, with dry deadpan wit and classic Beat sendup against the powers that be, I knew I don’t post anything with the n-word in it, as is my policy editorially, but I also didn’t want to simply delete said usage to ‘tidy over’ the white polemic. The same problem holds true for Ginsberg’s “America,” and countless other white anti-racist texts that replicate racism (knowingly/unknowingly).
Yesterday I got to spend the day with someone who hates Thanksgiving as a holiday as much as I do. She’s also one of my favorite living writers: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door and most recently, the newly released Touching the Art. We met in Washington Square Park then sauntered in the sun down East Broadway, tipped across SoHo, before finally ending up in the East Village for some great vegan grub. Though we discussed many things, something that came up that I’ve heard MBS talk about before—it fascinates me deeply—is “the trick’s gaze.”