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Bruce Robbins is a contributor to the minnesota review.
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Published Spring 2006
 
Robbins on Fred Pfeil
The title story of Shine On spends some quality time in
the mind of a small-town ambulance and bus driver, also occasionally
a worker in a morgue, who is trying to make sense of his son's fear
of nuclear attack, his own love for his family, and his aspiration
to something more than what he's been dealt. One of Fred Pfeil's
many avatars, the ambulance driver wonders if "what we all know
is this: it's not good enough being asleep and we don't want to
die, but it's not enough the way we are, and where's whatever it
feels like we're always just about to find? On the wings of what
beauty, ease, grace?" It's a thing you felt about Fred, whether
you were reading him or talking to him, both of them high-energy
acts: like the lefty he didn't know how not to be, he was always
thinking that it's not enough the way we are. Unlike most of us,
he was also sure we were just about to find something that would
fill in the nameless emptiness – a morsel of justice, tangy as the
taste of good food. Working as hard as he did, he also knew what
it felt like to be carried on those wings of beauty, ease, and grace.
Whether he was being an activist or a writer that day, he could
make the folks lucky enough to be around him feel the same thing.
Toward the end of his so very intense and accomplished life, he
was more of an activist than a writer. And a very active one. After
Fred's funeral in Port Alegany, his old friend John McClure acted
out Fred's imitation of himself in a state of hunger: a pigeon staring
wildly at the ground, darting its beak out, pulling it back and
instantly pecking in another direction. The hunger was really about
sharing – food, feelings, words, and especially actions. Fred is
the reason I started to go to demonstrations again. Once I carried
the prop bag when he and his group did their Abu Ghraib skit in
the streets of New York. But he did that skit and others in a lot
more places. He also wanted his ashes scattered in more than one
place, though the Pennsylvania hillside suits him. He paid a price
for the intensity. He wasn't at home as much as he would have liked.
But when he was at home, he was really there, as he was really there
– you knew that – wherever he was, in whatever he said. And the
effects of his political work in all those other places shine on,
as his words do, even if you can't take that work down from the
shelf as easily as Goodman 2020 or White Guys, What
They Tell You To Forget or Shine On. Imagine those other
shelves, that other kind of library. Fred would want you to.
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MR BOOKS
Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.
Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.
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