ENG 100R, Fall 2019 Analytical Essay 4 In this essay, .docx

ENG 100R, Fall 2019
Analytical Essay 4
In this essay, you are expected to give your own independent,
interpretative position on the
question below and to support your thinking with close reading
and analysis. You will need to
synthesize both texts and make connections between them.
Utilize the skills we’ve practiced in
class, especially on the Reading Quizzes.
Texts:
Greene, Jayson. “How Do We Live With Music Made by
Problematic Artists?” Pitchfork,
https://www.pitchfork.com/features/overtones/ho-do-we-live-
with-music-made-by-
problematic-artists/.
Hsu, Hua. “When White Poets Pretend to Be Asian.” The New
Yorker, https://newyorker.com
/books/page-turner/when-white-poets-pretend-to-be-asian/.
Prompt:

We began the semester thinking about the personal histories of
two writers, Zadie Smith and
Jean Twenge, and the ways in which information they share
about themselves might be linked to
their research methods. We then thought about the influence of
historical thinking on the present-
day observations of Michael Greenberg and Jelani Cobb. For
Unit 3, our own histories factored
into the ways in which we encountered discussions of higher
education written by Alex Carp and
Katy Waldman. Our semester concludes thinking with Jayson
Greene and Hua Hsu about the
effects on listeners and readers of artists’ personal histories,
whether brought to light by
creditable accusations or obscured by false identities. Bringing
together our skill set assembled
throughout the semester – understanding the text, finding
authors’ assumptions, assessing your
role as a reader, and assessing the text as a whole – synthesize
the essays of Greene and Hsu,
along with your own thinking, to answer the following: To what
extent and in what ways does
an artist’s background influence the experience of their work?

Thinking to get started:
• What kinds of background details does Greene take into
account in “How Do We Live
With Music Made by Problematic Artists? What kinds of
background details does Hsu
consider in “When White Poets Pretend to Be Asian”?
• How does Greene feel/respond to the background details of
musicians in his experience
of their music? What assumptions does he make about the
reader’s experience? How
does Hsu feel/respond to the background details of poets in his
experience with their
poetry? What assumptions does he make about the reader’s
experience?
• Do the assumptions of Greene and Hsu apply to you? How do
you feel about the cases
they discuss?
• What do you think is necessary (or valuable) to consider about
an artist’s background?
Does this put you in agreement or disagreement with the
examples and arguments of
Greene and Hsu?
Details to remember:
Rough Draft: FOUR full pages, including header + title +
introduction. NO CONCLUSION.

Due: Mon 12/2, upload to Canvas before class. Bring laptop or
printout for Peer Review.
Final draft: FIVE full pages, added body paragraph(s),
conclusion, and substantial revision.
Due: Wed 12/11, upload to Canvas by 12pm. NO LATE
SUBMISSIONS ACCEPTED.
Formatting: Times New Roman, 12-point font, double-spaced,
1-inch margins
MLA style: heading, title, page numbers, parenthetical
citations, Works Cited
1 of 7 9/6/18, 10:08 AM
Hua Hsu, “When White Poets Pretend to Be Asian,” The New
Yorker
September 9, 2015 https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-
tumer/when-white-poets-p.
n 1991, literary magazines around the United States began
receiving
mysterious packages containing the poems of Araki Yasusada, a
deceased
and entirely unknown Japanese poet with a spectacular

backstory: he was a
lonesome Hiroshima survivor whose absorbingly spare lines
about the
bombing and his small life in its wake seemed to riff on Roland
Barthes,
Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Spicer, and other figures of the Western
avant-garde.
The poems were often accompanied by diary fragments, scraps
of paper with
translations and exercises or a sketch of his face. Prominent
journals
published and praised Yasusada s work, which was unusually
experimental
given his seeming isolation; there was a book in the works.
But there was no Yasusada. When pressure was applied to the
poet’s
biography, it crumbled: his entire life was a fiction, supposedly
crafted by an
equally obscure Japanese translator named Tosa Motokiyu. But
there was no
Motokiyu, either. You get the idea. The Yasusada poems
eventually pointed
back to Kent Johnson, a middle-aged white poet who was then
teaching in

Illinois. (Full disclosure: I once met Johnson on a train, an
encounter he later
wrote a poem about.)
A similar fiasco, albeit smaller in scale, began playing out this
past weekend,
when snippets from the 2015 edition of “The Best American
Poetry”
surfaced on the Internet. Edited by Sherman Alexie, this year’s
selections
include a poem titled “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient
Tigers,
Poseidon, Adam and Eve,” by someone named Yi-Fen Chou. A
biographical
note identifies Chou as the nom de plume of a middle-aged
white poet from
Indiana named Michael Derrick Hudson. Whenever one of his
poems is
rejected “a multitude of times under my real name,” Hudson
writes in his
I
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-tumer/when-white-
poets-p

2 of 7 9/6/18, 10:08 AM
author bio, he uses his Chinese-sounding pseudonym and sends
it out again.
He claims that “The Bees” was passed over forty times as the
work of
Michael Derrick Hudson, but needed only nine submissions
under Yi-Fen
Chou’s name before it was accepted, by Prairie Schooner. There
was no
artistic reason for the subterfuge, he confesses. He is not James
O’Keefe
with a rhyming dictionary, launching some hidden-camera sting
on the
liberal poetry establishment. Instead, there’s a half-hearted
allusion to the
work of Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet who assumed
imaginary
identities, or
“heteronyms.” Hudson thought about doing the same thing, he
writes, but
“nothing ever came of it.”
What makes this current round of Orientalist profiteering
different is that the

Best American series went forward with Hudson’s inclusion in
their
anthology. In a statement published on Monday on the series’
blog, Alexie
describes what happened. Overseeing an operation like the Best
American
series, he writes, involves an overwhelming amount of work,
with nearly two
thousand poems to be read, reread, or merely skimmed. “It’s
possible that I
read more poems last year than any other person on the planet,”
he
guesses—less a boast than a justification for human error. He
had entered
into this endeavor with a desire to tweak the canon, if slightly,
by promoting
works by women and people of color whenever possible. He
acknowledges
that he gave “The Bees” a closer read “because of the poet’s
Chinese name.”
Once the poem was accepted, Hudson admitted that there was no
Chou, but
by then it was too late. Alexie kept “The Bees” in the
collection. His only

justification for pulling it, he concludes, would have been to
save himself
from the public embarrassment that has now ensued.
Perhaps there was no high road to be taken here, but as
unsatisfying as it is
to reward Hudson—a poet who, in the parlance of literary
criticism, acted
dickishly—Alexie did the right thing. His admiration for the
poem didn’t
change. What changed was that he was forced to detail and
rationalize the
3 of 7 9/6/18, 10:08 AM
way he reads and what he reads for. And it’s the way, frankly,
that many of
us read, regardless of background, identity, or politics: we bring
our own
dreams or baggage to bear upon whatever we have chosen to lay
our eyes on.
We might abide by different critical cues, but we are all looking
for
4 of 7 9/6/18, 10:08 AM

When White Poets Pretend to Be Asian I The New Yorker
poets- p .
something. And when culture turns into an extended game of
“gotcha,” it
can be an act of self-preservation to assume that everyone is
always acting in
bad faith.
The more revealing aspect of Alexie s response is his account of
what
attracted him to “The Bees” once Hudsons calculated hunch had
garnered
the poem “a close read.” The poem wasn’t obviously “Chinese,”
however you
might interpret that, Alexie explains. Instead, it referenced
“Adam and Eve,
Poseidon, the Roman Coliseum, and Jesus.” It was, in other
words,
“inherently obsessed with European culture.” Alexie goes on,
“When I first
read it, I'd briefly wondered about the life story of a Chinese
American poet
who would be compelled to write a poem with such overt and

affectionate
European classical and Christian imagery, and I marveled at
how interesting
many of us are in our cross-cultural lives, and then I tossed the
poem on the
maybe’ pile that eventually became a yes’ pile.”
Alexie is a sharp and self-aware Native American writer and
filmmaker, and
he didn’t necessarily mean to suggest that a Chinese person
raised in
America wouldn’t gravitate toward Western themes. (Isn’t that
how
assimilation works?) But his phrasing reminds me of the odd
standard often
applied to marginalized voices: in this case, there was
something refreshingly
noteworthy about a Chinese poet writing about non-Chinese
things.
Consider the comparative privilege of the white artist, whose
experiences are
received as “universal,” even if that artist chooses to assume the
guise of the
other. Ezra Pound’s flawed “translations” of Chinese poetry, for
example,

became a key foundation for modernism. The only limitation for
such an
artist, really, is the extent to which it can all be explained away
as an avant-
garde game if things get too weird.
Proper, canonical, “serious” literature is built upon this
flexibility of
perspective, but the privilege of such perspective is rarely
extended to those
poets-p
poets-p
5 of 7 9/6/18, 10:08 AM
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-tumer/when-wliite-
poets- p .
on the margins, whose work is often perceived as
ethnographic—and for
whom there is typically only one way to be “authentic.” Maybe
Hudson was
right to believe that a Chinese name would distinguish his work
in the world

of American poetry journals, which are not generally filled with
Chinese
names. But, conservative paranoia of quotas aside, the
marketplace spoils for
someone named Yi-Fen Chou are fairly meagre. If a Chinese
name were all
it took, there would be far more authors with names like Yi-Fen
Chou at the
bookstore.
Perhaps, too, spoofing the Chinese struck Hudson as a relatively
safe
masquerade, likely to provoke less generalized rage than, say,
the fake
autobiography of a purported ex-gangster or a Holocaust
survivor. Or maybe
it was simply more efficient. When it comes to such hoaxes, it
seems
somehow easier to fake Asia, a land still distant and inscrutable
to many
Americans; while other hoaxes work because of their
thoroughness and care,
the Asian-themed sort often get by with only a few details, as
long as those

poets-p
poets-p
6 of 7 9/6/18, 10:08 AM
poets-p.
details seem just “Asian” enough. After all, imitating the sound
of Asian
languages is something of a national pastime, from Mark Twain
and Bret
Hartes “Ah Sin” to Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar’s “Cream
of Sum
Yung Guy.” In 2013, a Bay Area news report about an Asian Air
crash listed
the pilots’ names as Ho Lee Fuk, Wi Tu Lo, Sum Ting Wong,
and Bang
Ding Ow, presumably because these names appeared
sufficiently believable.
When I first learned about the Yasusada hoax, years after it
happened, I
wasn’t sure what to think about it. First I had to sort through
how I felt,

which was confusing enough. I was mostly surprised that these
kinds of
things don’t happen more often. Hoaxes frequently help us test
the
boundaries of our assumptions and orthodoxies, codes of taste
and propriety.
We learn something about the world we’ve made each time this
happens: the
limits of empathy, the blurred line between love and theft,
maybe the extent
to which a white woman can convince herself that she feels
black.
Nowadays, many of the hoaxes and interventions that get
attention are those
that call into question our investment in “diversity.” An array of
recent,
misguided conceptual stunts from the artist Joe Scanlan and the
poets
Vanessa Place and Kenneth Goldsmith, for example, seem to
suggest that we
can simply intellectualize our way through the racism of the
present.
Yasusada’s hoax caused a minor rift in the poetry community,
and nobody

came out of it looking particularly good. There were those who
defended
Johnson, in part because he had littered Yasusada’s Japanese
biography with
easily fact-checked clues that suggested it was all made up.
There were also
those who considered the poems acts of radical empathy—
including some
readers in Japan, who found the testimonies of an imagined
Hiroshima
survivor an apt tribute to a moment of national devastation.
Ultimately,
though, the accolades were rescinded, the book deal quashed.
Hudson isn’t solely to blame here. What his case points to is the
extent to
poets-p
7 of 7 9/6/18, 10:08 AM
poets- p .
which our understandings of difference remain superficial.

That’s why
Hudsons blasé attitude matters. It makes a mockery of whatever
“life story
of a Chinese American poet” the name Chou might have stood
in for. It
ridicules the ambient self-doubt that trails most people from the
margins
who enter into spaces where they were never encouraged to
belong. As
though it were all just a game, meant to be gamed. As though it
all came
down to a name and losing your accent. Maybe Hudson,
somewhere within
his heart, actually felt less empowered than the imaginary rival
he spun into
reality, a fictional creation whose Chinese name would deliver
him places his
own could not. Within that possibility is the most perverse
fantasy I have
ever read.
“Small Fry,” Reviewed: The Unjustly In “The
Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s Overlooked Victorian Lydia Ki
Mesmerizing, Novelist Elizabeth Motherf

Discomfiting Memoir Gaskell Road Nc
By Katy Waldman By Hannah Rosefield By Sarah
□
Hua Hsu began contributing to The New Yorker in
2014 , and became a staff writer in 2017. Read more
poets-p
poets-p
How Do We Live With Music Made by Problematic Artists?
pitchfork.com/features/overtones/how-do-we-live-with-music-
made-by-problematic-artists/
Music is physical: We take it into our bodies, we allow it to
vibrate our skulls. In this way, it is
far more intimate than visual art; after all, we respond to sound
in utero well before we respond
to sight. We store memories of music in our limbic system, next
to all of our most treasured
and traumatic experiences. It moves within us.
This is the realm of the subconscious, and listening to a
recorded song is not unlike a lucid
dream. In both states, your brain waves even out and you
become pliant and suggestible, a
wide-open expanse of receptivity. Our primal reactions to both

happen deep beneath our
“good” and “bad” sorting mechanisms. This makes us easy
marks, ripe for subtle
manipulations—and to all the confusions and private torments
that result from them.
Right now, I have an abuser’s song stuck in my head. It feels a
bit like a violation, the presence
of this song and everything it brings with it. But the fault is all
mine: I opened the door, invited
the song in, showed it around. I had all the warnings you would
need, but the song was there
on my phone screen—all I had to do was touch it, so I did. And
then, just like that, the song took
up residence in me. Now it follows me around.
By now, most music listeners know this experience: The song
suddenly hurts to hear, the
sweet voice in our heads turns sour, a song that pleased us now
haunts us. Everyone’s
fulcrum is different, set off by their own experience. But the
effect is the same: Something you
thought you knew about an artist, or something you knew
without fundamentally
acknowledging, explodes from the periphery into full view.
Suddenly, the uneasy space you
maintained between the sounds an artist made and the life they
lived crumples, forever and
finally.
Most of us don’t know what to do when this happens, but we
fervently pretend that we do. We
flood social media channels with our late-breaking outrage, we
declare the artist “cancelled.”
Some of us hug the artist closer, taking it upon ourselves to
defend them from perceived

attacks, even if this means stepping around obvious facts about
their behavior like shattered
glass. In the past two years, as the cultural flames around artists
and their art have burned
hotter, our reactions to transgressions have grown increasingly
convulsive.
Leaving aside, for a moment, the question of what society does
with the people—questions of
restorative justice and justice for survivors, the virtues of de-
platforming, or a million other
debates that slip far outside the private arena of headphones—
where does this music go once
it has entered our lives? It doesn’t simply leave us. It can’t.
Whether it’s XXXTentacion, the late rapper who was charged
with domestic battery and
assault, or R. Kelly, who was tried and acquitted on child
pornography charges in 2008 and has
been accused of soliciting sex from minors and keeping women
in his home against their will ;
1/4
https://pitchfork.com/features/overtones/how-do-we-live-with-
music-made-by-problematic-artists/
https://www.theringer.com/2018/9/4/17821274/steve-bannon-
the-new-yorker-festival-deplatforming
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/xxxtentacions-reported-victim-
details-grim-pattern-of-abuse-in-testimony/
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/arts/music/14kell.html
https://pitchfork.com/news/r-kelly-accused-of-grooming-minor-
as-his-sex-pet/
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jimderogatis/parents-
told-police-r-kelly-is-keeping-women-in-a-cult

whether it’s former Real Estate guitarist Matt Mondanile, who
was accused by multiple women
of sexual misconduct and emotional abuse; whether it’s Jesse
Lacey of Brand New, who
allegedly sexually exploited his underage fans, or former Das
Racist member Kool A.D., who
was recently accused of sexual assault by four women—living
with music in your mind from an
abuser sometimes feels like being saddled with someone else’s
bad dreams. How do we
make peace with these bad dreams once they have become ours?
Of course, the dream analogy only goes so far. Dreams happen
to us. We have no agency in
them, which is partly why we are considered blameless for their
content. If you had a
disturbing dream, you would probably have no trouble
confessing it to a friend—perhaps the
two of you could take turns decoding what it meant. You might
both marvel at the lawlessness
of the subconscious.
But music doesn’t happen to us. We choose to take it in. Music
is a consumer choice even
when it doesn’t feel like one—even though it perhaps uniquely
doesn’t feel like one—and it is
best-suited to the subterfuge of implication-free engagement.
You are listening to trapped air,
rendered into code and recreated in your brain. Home listening
feels so private; how could
listening to this song have any ramifications for anyone,
anywhere else?
Most of us manage to avoid thinking about our music as a
consumer good, at least most of

the time. Part of this has to do with the nature of internet
commerce, which has proven
extremely adept at sanding away friction points until your
purchasing decisions have all the
forethought of a sneeze. Spotify, Apple, and Amazon move
mountains to ease consumption,
and they do it so effectively that it’s frighteningly easy to
pretend that this friction—carbon
footprints, packed warehouses, unprecedented monopoly, pick
your late-capitalist poison—
never existed.
But music in particular has the trickiest relationship to
commerce. Amazon may have eroded
the value of a book, but ebooks didn’t completely replace
physical ones. The music industry,
meanwhile, never quite convinced listeners that stealing digital
music was harmful. So they
abandoned the sale of discrete units and remodeled themselves
around streaming, a model
that looked and felt exactly like the stealing customers were
already doing. In other words, they
removed ownership entirely. We rent our music now, and then
give it back to the cloud when
we are done.
Music listening has always been private, but in another era, you
might have at least had to
venture outside to procure it. Twenty years ago, if you wanted
to buy the music made by a
known abuser at a store, you would have risked some hot,
focused shame. Streaming,
meanwhile, with its blend of radio dial and kitchen faucet,
removes shame from the equation.
You touch a song title, and it starts playing for you—and only
for you. Turn off the sharing

features on Spotify and you are free to move about cultural
infinitude in silence, without fear of
judgment. As as result, the gap between streaming an artist and
purchasing their music
directly feels enormous. It is the difference between liking a
political candidate’s post on
Facebook and knocking on someone’s door to canvas for them.
2/4
https://pitchfork.com/news/matt-mondanile-accused-of-sexual-
misconduct-by-multiple-women/
https://pitchfork.com/news/two-alleged-victims-of-brand-news-
jesse-lacey-detail-years-of-sexual-exploitation-of-minors/
https://pitchfork.com/news/kool-ad-formerly-of-das-racist-
accused-of-sexual-assault-by-four-women/
This makes the insolubility of the art-versus-artist problem even
more difficult in music. When
you choose to expose yourself to the songs of an abuser, you are
also subjecting yourself to a
sustained whisper campaign for their inherent virtuousness, for
the empathy, the tortured
humanity, lying within them. Seeing humanity in all humans,
even murderers and abusers, can
be a powerful and clear-eyed practice. It might be what some
have called “radical empathy.” It
may even be music’s highest function, if we allow it to
happen—permitting the existence of
beauty within deep ugliness, persuading us to remember that all
humans share the mystic and
strange impulse to make music, or to partake in it.
And yet, passively accepting abusers’ songs about themselves
when their victims are given no

voice at all—and more, when their victims usually disappear
into the cracks of society, often
hounded by death threats from the artist’s massive fanbase—
might also be a form of enabling,
or even empowering, toxic behavior. We cast votes for artists
with the invisible flow of our
attention spans, and their implications are nearly impossible to
track. Deciding where to draw
or redraw our lines is always messy, retconned, and incomplete.
It is murky right up until the
point it suddenly seems crystal-clear and undeniable.
Take Spotify, for instance, who are in the actual work of pricing
these assets, of grouping and
monetizing cultural goods. Earlier this year, they tried to half-
extricate themselves from that
marketplace with a widely criticized removal of R. Kelly and
XXXTentacion’s music from
playlists. The widespread approbation they won is a good sign
of just how clumsy and messy
decisive action can look in practice—XXXTentacion’s publicist
famously asked if and when the
streaming service would take similar actions against Dr. Dre,
Michael Jackson, David Bowie,
the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and others who had once been
accused of misconduct. Spotify CEO
Daniel Ek wound up apologizing for the move—we “rolled this
out wrong,” he told a conference
gathering, and the streaming service hastily restored XXX’s
music to one of their major
playlists, making his music seem both radioactive and
indispensable in the process.
In treating R. Kelly and XXXTentacion’s music like so much
tainted lettuce to be recalled,
Spotify underlined just how hard it is to regulate cultural goods.

Marketplace regulation
presumes a shared understanding of what those goods are
supposed to do—food isn’t
supposed to make us sick, brake systems aren’t supposed to
suddenly cut out on the freeway.
But what does music do? It moves us, we crave it. But scientists
have even less idea why we
need music than painting or writing, which at least point to
basic societal functions. Some
studies diagnose music as a fragment from our religious
impulse, while other theories
diagnose music as a neurological twitch in response to our fear
of death. No one knows what
this stuff is for, exactly, but we all agree that we need it.
As a result, finding ethical ways to consume music is
confounding. In the end, aesthetics and
morality simply don’t talk to each other. One can spoil the
other, the way acid curdles milk. But
music makes a terrible container for ethics. It leaks, it loses
specific meaning, it can be
conscripted by anyone to mean anything. Music made with
beautiful intentions can easily be
made to serve evil, and songs that seem to drip malice can also
find their way into the most
unlikely redemption narratives. Stripped of context, a sound can
be tender, gentle, beautiful,
soothing; the person making it might have none of these
qualities.
3/4
This slipperiness means there are precious few ways to
“regulate” the world of art, or the

behavior of the people who make it—the reforms that might
have a true impact on their
behavior lie far, far outside aesthetics: Readily available
resources for mental health and for
domestic abuse survivors would be nice; reform of the carceral
state even better. It’s not hard
to imagine that, given a few years, reforms like these would
make themselves felt in the world
of the artists who capture our ears, and who invade our dreams.
But these are questions of
legislation, and they disappear when the music envelops us.
The only thing that we can be certain of is that this will happen
again. Two years from now, or
two weeks from now, or in two hours, we will learn, again, that
we are in an intimate
relationship with a piece of music made by someone who has
done or said things we cannot
abide. Once that happens, we will again feel the panic of
implication, the disorientation. We
can take arbitrary actions, if they make us feel better: We can
choose to not play their music
anymore, we can decry their actions for our friends and family
to see. But the music itself will
not stop whispering to us. We will keep these bad dreams.
Perhaps we should learn to be alive
to their presence, to acknowledge the ways they have moved
and changed us. Proximity to
these bad dreams, and our refusal to divest ourselves completely
of them, might help to
remind us of the messy ways we are connected, even when we
feel that we could not be more
alone, encased in headphones, in a cavern of our own making.
4/4
How Do We Live With Music Made by Problematic Artists?

ENG 100R, Fall 2019 Analytical Essay 4 In this essay, .docx

ENG 100R, Fall 2019 Analytical Essay 4 In this essay, .docx

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