The Writer Who Wouldn’t Be Censored by Jesse Helms
Rob Hardin
Now is the time for all good people to inhabit their own words. To leech their language from the blood, to copulate with the tendrils of tentative identity. It’s time to speak through our scars from scary and scarified places. To cease posting pseudo-ironic lists for our smirking cronies. To stop writing blog entries that valorize hobbies or vilify hapless clerks.
So much depends on a red feelmarrow blazoned with brain-flecks and stiff beside the white lichens.
We should sing from a place of excruciating consciousness instead of rearranging the deck chairs of sleep, dream chimeras into being instead of “hitting the proverbial hay.”
Doug Rice is a writer whose intelligence strives to be naked. He chooses to dredge the self, which rots and reflects, from the hollows of poetry’s bones. He is fucker and fucked, is the subject, object and act.
II.
The year was 1992. My girlfriend had vanished and I’d been trying to find the portal she slipped through, until months passed and I grew lost in a project called resurrection. All I could do was conjure her by writing and composing. She became the illusion of solace; I kept seeing her torso, the back of her head, in crowds. I couldn’t read; I couldn’t even listen to my stereo. All music seemed made of the wail of loss and shame.
Then Kathy Acker called to tell me about a writer she’d discovered, a person named Doug Rice. Later, I shambled to the post office: Angled into my box and curled into the shape of a tube slanted a manila envelope. It contained a chapter from a book by the writer Kathy had mentioned. I hadn’t realized she was serious about the foont.
I found I could read that writer in that state. He knew about the presence that speaks through peril. The touch of the Ghost, the immanence of beauty’s imminence.
III.
Among the writers first championed by Kathy in the early 1990s, Rice stands out as the most courageous in commitment, productive in terms of intricately-thought output, and inclusive in terms of building a community.
At a time when so many academics were rockstar wannabes, who marketed themselves as “transgressive” while suppressing and even burying whatever books they thought might threaten their tenures, Doug remained fearless and unassailably ethical, devoting himself to work that not only jeopardized his position but crossed university lines.
He interbred with marginalized subcultures. Doug’s allegiance was evident not only in his own writing but also in his treatment of ours: in his acknowledgment of those who inspired him and support of those who deserved recognition. He didn’t vampirize isolated writers, as so many academics still do. Instead, he chose to champion them in public, inviting them to events he hosted at Kent and even publishing them himself, in a magazine he called Nobodaddies.
IV.
In his acceptance letter for a story of mine called “Insectary” (which described floor-thick colonies of hexapoda and paramites living in a suicide’s apartment), Doug told me he had to accept the piece after seeing a friend shudder while reading it. For him, the point wasn’t shock value. It was evocation, the condition of the power of the reader’s response.
Neurotransmitters and receptors are not limited to the brain, but travel throughout the body. Writing, for Doug Rice, is identity, is the body, and should elicit the body’s memory-response. He proves that in virtually every book he writes. Soft is hard is ware, and the where is there, in here.
V.
Doug began his book, Blood of Mugwump, with the fighting words, “I am cunt.” It was published in 1996 after being chosen by Kathy Acker and others for the Black Ice Books series — an imprint of the Fiction Collective, which was only marginally financed by the NEA.
With bravery of expression comes the prospect of being targeted. Like David Wojnarowicz and so many others before him, Doug soon found himself cross-haired by a senator who wished to strip the NEA of its funding. The book placed him under greater scrutiny at his job and earned him the undying scorn of the right. Doug never even let himself care.
Eventually, he moved to a new town and began teaching at a new university, but he never disguised who he was or toned down what he wrote.
His new book, Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist (Copilot Press), is as controversial as always and for exactly the same reason: Because he doesn’t care about controversy. If he wants to address us in a dress, he’ll wear it and make us aware. Between Appear and Disappear (Jaded Ibis Productions), which will follow in 2012, returns to “places of body memory muscle language,” in Doug’s words, pays homage to Acker and other sinewy mentors and incorporates photographs.
For the sake of those who missed it the first time, here is a video excerpt from the 90s Senate sessions in which Jesse Helms made an example of Doug’s first book.
During the weeks of those sessions, C-SPAN programmed repeated playings of highlights beyond each individual day. I recall sitting near a television in a restaurant, ostensibly tuned to the most banal channel possible, and being startled when Helms produced a copy of the book I was reading, held it between two fingers and denounced it as filth.
For a few strange nights, Doug would come home from teaching at Kent State, turn on the television and hear himself called a degenerate by Helms. Kent’s advisory board heard it, too.
And yet he kept teaching and writing.
Here’s to your dedication, Doug Rice.
This ventricle’s dedicated to you.
