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book awards
2/5/2010
Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died: An extract from A Scattering by Christopher Reid, the 2009 Costa Book of the Year
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"My old, obscure life has gone. I am sort of famous. Radios have been broadcasting, and newspapers have retailed, in their different styles, the story of my book: a set of elegies on the death from cancer of my wife in 2005. What began as an intimate expression of love and grief has become a public parade. Bewildering.
How did Douglas Dunn, whose Elegies, poems about the death of his first wife, in 1985 won the first Whitbread Book of the Year — the Whitbread preceded and developed into the Costa — cope with this? Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, also and perhaps not coincidentally about his dead wife, Sylvia Plath, was a later winner. Hughes had died by the time of his award: the ultimate evasive action. No local radio interviews for him!" - from
Christopher Reid on winning the Costa Award.
Late home one night, I found
she was not yet home herself.
So I got into bed and waited
under my blanket mound,
until I heard her come in
and hurry upstairs.
My back was to the door.
Without turning round,
I greeted her, but my voice
made only a hollow, parched-throated
k-, k-, k- sound,
which I could not convert into words
and which, anyway, lacked
the force to carry.
Nonplussed, but not distraught,
I listened to her undress,
then sidle along the far side
of our bed and lift the covers.
Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died.
Adjusting my arm for the usual
cuddle and caress,
I felt mattress and bedboards
welcome her weight
as she rolled and settled towards me,
but, before I caught her,
it was already too late
and she’d wisped clean away.
from A Scattering, by Christopher Reid.
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A Scattering
by
Christopher Reid
Arete
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lit obits
1/30/2010
Tributes to People's Historian Howard Zinn, 1922 - 2010
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The best human being I've ever known. The best example of what a human can be, and can do with their life. - Daniel Ellsberg from A Memory of Howard
Howard Zinn broadened the battle when he claimed conventional U.S. texts and school courses failed by celebrating wars, legislation, Presidents, generals and captains of industry. He stood history back on its feet when he told on how masses of American women and men, people of color and poor whites built the country first as slaves and indentured servants, and then as mill hands, assembly line workers and maids. He further antagonized traditional scholars by rejoicing in the disobedience of slave rebels, union organizers and radical civil rights and anti-war agitators. He found dissidents to be America's real patriots and democrats -- not the George Washingtons, Thomas Jeffersons and Andrew Jacksons who talked of liberty while they traded in slaves, and sent posses after those who escaped.
- William Loren Katz from Changing History
He really conveyed to everyone he came into contact with that there was no more meaningful action than to be involved in struggle, no more fulfilling or important way of living one’s life than in struggle fighting for justice. And so many people, myself included, but, you know, millions of people around the world, countless number of people, they changed their lives by encountering Howard Zinn—Howard changed their lives—reading A People’s History of the United States, hearing one of his lectures, meeting him, hearing him on the radio, reading an article he wrote. He really inspired people to create the kinds of movements that brought about whatever rights, whatever freedoms, whatever liberties we have in this country. And that really is the legacy that it’s incumbent upon all of us to extend and keep alive and keep vibrant. - Anthony Arnov from DemocracyNow!.
Anyone who believes that the United States is immune to radical politics never attended a lecture by Howard Zinn...What matters is not who's sitting in the White House. What matters is who's sitting in!" he would say with a mischievous grin. - Dave Zirin from Howard Zinn: The Historian Who Made History
His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives. When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.
- Noam Chomsky quoted by Mark Feeney and Bryan Marquard from Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87
No American historian has left a more lasting positive legacy on our understanding of the true nature of our country, mainly because his books reflect a soul possessed of limitless depth. Howard's People's History Of The United States will not be surpassed. As time goes on new chapters will be written in its spirit to extend its reach. - Harvey Wasserman from How the Great Howard Zinn Made All Our Lives Better
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People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present
by
Howard Zinn
Harper Perennial Modern Classics
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progressive books
1/24/2010
Johann Hari on P. W. Singer's Wired For War
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If virtually no American forces had died in Vietnam, would the war have stopped when it did – or would the systematic slaughter of the Vietnamese people have continued for many more years? If "we" weren't losing anyone in Afghanistan or Iraq, would the call for an end to the killing be as loud? I'd like to think we are motivated primarily by compassion for civilians on the other side, but I doubt it. Take "us" safely out of the picture and we will be more willing to kill "them". - Johann Hari from The age of the killer robot is no longer a sci-fi fantasy.
The Nato forces now depend on a range of killer robots, largely designed by the British Ministry of Defence labs privatised by Tony Blair in 2001. Every time you hear about a "drone attack" against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that's an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it "chooses". Fox News proudly calls it "the GI of the 21st century." And billions are being spent on the next generation of warbots, which will leave these models looking like the bulky box on which you used to play Pong.
At the moment, most are controlled by a soldier – often 7,500 miles away – with a control panel. But insurgents are always inventing new ways to block the signal from the control centre, which causes the robot to shut down and "die". So the military is building "autonomy" into the robots: if they lose contact, they start to make their own decisions, in line with a pre-determined code.
This is "one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human warfare," according to PW Singer, a former analyst for the Pentagon and the CIA, in his must-read book, Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Defence in the Twenty-First Century. Humans have been developing weapons that enabled us to kill at ever-greater distances and in ever-greater numbers for millennia, from the longbow to the cannon to the machine-gun to the nuclear bomb. But these robots mark a different stage.
The earlier technologies made it possible for humans to decide to kill in more "sophisticated" ways – but once you programme and unleash an autonomous robot, the war isn't fought by you any more: it's fought by the machine. The subject of warfare shifts. - Johann Hari from The Independent, The age of the killer robot is no longer a sci-fi fantasy
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Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by
P. W. Singer
Penguin Press HC, The
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progressive books
1/23/2010
Jamin Raskin on the Supreme Court campaign finance ruling which removes limits on corporate campaign spending
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We’ve had some terrible Supreme Court interventions against political democracy: Shaw v. Reno, striking down majority African American and Hispanic congressional districts; Bush v. Gore, intervening to stop the counting of ballots in Florida. But I would have to say that all of them pale compared to what we just saw yesterday, where the Supreme Court has overturned decades of Supreme Court precedent to declare that private, for-profit corporations have First Amendment rights of political expression, meaning that they can spend up to the heavens in order to have their way in politics. And this will open floodgates of millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal, state and local elections, as Halliburton and Enron and Blackwater and Bank of America and Goldman Sachs can take money directly out of corporate treasuries and put them into our politics.
And I looked at just one corporation, Exxon Mobil, which is the biggest corporation in America. In 2008, they posted profits of $85 billion. And so, if they decided to spend, say, a modest ten percent of their profits in one year, $8.5 billion, that would be three times more than the Obama campaign, the McCain campaign and every candidate for House and Senate in the country spent in 2008. That’s one corporation. So think about the Fortune 500. They’re threatening a fundamental change in the character of American political democracy. - Jamin Raskin from a DemocracyNow! interview.
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Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus The American People
by
Jamin B. Raskin
Routledge
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book notes
1/16/2010
"Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom", Tracy Kidder and Peter Hallward on Haiti
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Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted.
- from the New York Times, Country Without a Net, by Tracy Kidder.
The noble "international community" which is currently scrambling to send its "humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.
Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.
Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day". Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.
It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered.
As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, points out: "Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses." Meanwhile the city's basic infrastructure – running water, electricity, roads, etc – remains woefully inadequate, often non-existent. The government's ability to mobilise any sort of disaster relief is next to nil.
- from the Guardian, Our role in Haiti's plight, by Peter Hallward.
January 17 2010: See also from Common Dreams, Why the US Owes Haiti Billions – The Briefest History by Bill Quigley.
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Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment
by
Peter Hallward
Verso
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lit obits
1/2/2010
At 42, she was one of the best poets of her generation, Rachel Wetzsteon, 1967 - 2009
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"At 42, she was one of the best poets of her generation", writes Adam Kirsch in memory and admiration of Rachel Wetzsteon who took her own life on Christmas day, 2009.
"In a perfect world", Kirsch wrote earlier, "Rachel Wetzsteon would be one of the most popular poets of her generation. You would see people in the outdoor cafes along Upper Broadway reading copies of Sakura Park, her third collection, the way pilgrims to Greenwich Village carry Scott Fitzgerald or Edna St. Vincent Millay...Wetzsteon’s poems are odes to sharpened senses, to possibilities held open, and to the city whose own sharp openness seems like a standing invitation"
(Adam Kirsch, from a Contemporary Poetry Review of Sakura Park
by Rachel Wetzsteon).
Gold Leaves
Someone ought to write about (I thought
and therefore do) stage three of alchemy:
not inauspicious metal turned into
a gilded page, but that same page turned back
to basics when you step outside for air
and feel a radiance that was not there
the day before, your sidewalks lined with gold.
Five-Finger Exercise
When things get hot and heavy this weekend or one August
twenty years from now, and I start tapping hexameters
up and down the shoulder-blades of my beloved (insert
auspicious, trustworthy-sounding, stolid but fun name here
for I can conjure none), I hope I do it right,
never losing sight of the skin whose golden toughness
allows the counting, never moving my fingers so briskly
that I can't hear his breathing, and never forgetting, even
in the lonely heights of sublimest inspiration—
What is your substance?... O rose ... and grey and full of sleep—
to flip the warm flesh over and whisper, It had to be you.
- two poems by Rachel Wetzsteon published in The Corland Review.
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Sakura Park: Poems
by
Rachel Wetzsteon
Persea
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lit obits
12/27/2009
You have to decide which side you are on: there is always a side. Commitment does not exist in an abstraction; it exists in action: Dennis Brutus, 1924 - 2009
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For almost half a century Dennis Brutus was at the forefront of the campaign to bring down the apartheid system in South Africa, the place where he was born and which gave him the awareness of racism, poverty and injustice that has informed his work ever since. In 1963 Brutus was shot by the police in South Africa and later imprisoned for 18 months alongside Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. After being exiled from his homeland, Brutus became a prominent political organizer, who in 1970 led the successful campaign to expel apartheid South Africa from the Olympic Games. While working as a university lecturer in the US, he also became a pioneering advocate of postcolonial studies within academia, helping to introduce African literature as a category within the curriculum....
Without doubt, there is a certain Audenesque quality about Brutus's own poetry, in particular in his ability to move from personal feeling to the spirit of the collective - the shared hopes and fears of people who are usually on the receiving end of history. To use poetry as a means of fighting back against the forces of oppression and exploitation is for Brutus not just an intellectual choice but an existential cry from the heart for social change to come sooner rather than later:In the dark lanes of Soweto,
amid the mud, the slush, the squalor,
among the rusty tin shacks
the lust for freedom survives stubbornly
like a smoldering defiant flame
and the spirit of Steve Biko moves easily. Auden's poem "Spain 1937" is a particular point of reference in another poem by Brutus - "Love; he Struggle." When Auden writes "To-morrow he rediscovery of romantic love ... but to-day the struggle," Brutus paraphrases this radical postponement with his own dialectic of personal freedom and political necessity: Conched, contrapuntal our concord
Day's breath wracks our peace,
Our dreams disrupt in blustery discord
Buckling to winds' capricious buffet we desert our calms
- Ah love, unshoulder now my arms! Like the early Auden, Brutus also sees his role as that of a public poet, "the world's troubadour" as he describes himself, one who seeks to give a voice to those whom the system has silenced. There is therefore in Brutus's poetry an implicit sense of radical dialogue with people whose lives remain outside the focus of the established media. This is where the real struggle s taking place, and it is within this context of solidarity with the dispossessed that Brutus has always situated himself as a writer: An old black woman,
suffering,
tells me I have given her
"new images"
- a father bereaved
by radical heroism
finds consolation
in my verse.
then I know
these are those I write for
and my verse works.
- Ronal Paul, from a review of Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader that originally appeared in Socialism and Democracy, issue 21, and has been reprinted if full at AfricaResource.
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Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader
by
Dennis Brutus
Haymarket Books
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book awards
12/19/2009
The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom - an extract from Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award
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A "rising star of Zimbabwean literature" according noble laureate to J. M. Coetzee, Petina Gappah writes (in her own words)
"about ordinary people living in a situation rendered extraordinary because of politics. I hope the stories tell you something about the
Zimbabwean character", she says, "the resilience, the tenacity, the humour. The desire to survive."
An excerpt from An Elegy for Easterly, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award winning book by Petina Gappah.
The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom. They look at Rosie's own lips that owe their reddish pinkness to artifice, they think, and not disease. Can Rosie see what they see, they wonder, that her newly made husband's sickness screams out its presence from every pore?
Disease flourishes in the slipperiness of his tufted hair, it is alive in the darkening skin, in the whites of the eyes whiter than nature intended, in the violently pink-red lips, the blood beneath fighting to erupt through the broken skin.
He smiles often, Rosie's bridegroom. He smiles when a drunken aunt entertains the guests with a dance that, oustide this celebration of sanctioned fornication, could be called obscene. He smiles when an uncle based in Manchester, England, calls on the mobile telephone of his son and sends his congratulations across nine thousand kilometres shortened by Vodafone on his end and Econet on the other. His smile broadens as the son tells the master of ceremonies that the uncle pledges two hundred pounds as a wedding gift; the smile becomes broader still when the master of ceremonies announces that the gift is worth two hundred million dollars on Harare's parallel market. He smiles and smiles and smiles and his smile reveals the heightened colour of his gums.. - from An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah
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An Elegy for Easterly: Stories
by
Petina Gappah
Faber & Faber
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progressive books
12/12/2009
David Cortright on Obama's shallow understanding of the priciples of Just War Theory
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"I found the Nobel speech disappointing," David Cortright wrote to Chritopher Hayes, The Nation's Washington, DC editor. "To use the Nobel dais to justify the use of military force is unseemly. The president's characterization of the historic role of US military power was distorted, and his interpretation of just war theory was incomplete." David Cortright has had a long history of public advocacy for disarmament and the prevention of war begining with the time he served in Vietnam and organized his comrades against the war. Currently the Director of Policy Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, David Cortright has also been the executive director of The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy and co-director of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. In 2002 he helped to found the Win Without War coalition in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His full text to Chritopher Hayes:
The president asserted that US military policy has helped to "underwrite global security." More accurate would be an admission that many of our adventures have created global insecurity. Vietnam, the wars in Central America in the 1980s, the invasion of Iraq, countless interventions by the CIA--these and other actions have sown suffering and insecurity. The US has supported democracy in some settings but very often we have subverted democracy and overthrown legitimately elected democratic regimes, in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), etc.
The president invoked just war principles but showed a shallow understanding of the criteria. The most important principle of just war theory is a presumption against the use of force, a belief that war is almost always unjust and can be justified only under the most dire circumstances and only if strict ethical criteria are satisfied. He mentioned a few of the criteria, without probing them in depth, but did mention the standard of 'probability of success.' Under that criterion, the war in Afghanistan cannot be judged just, since there is very little probability that the war can be pursued to achieve military victory, however that is defined.
The president's assertions about Afghanistan did not acknowledge the fact that war is an inappropriate means of combating terrorism. The Rand Corporation study of 2008 on how terrorist groups end found that military force was responsible for ending terrorist groups in only 7 per cent of the cases. Political bargaining (43 per cent) and effective law enforcement (40 per cent) were the primary factors accounting for the end of terrorist groups. The military's own counterinsurgency doctrine calls for a campaign that is 80 per cent nonmilitary. The US effort in Afghanistan is the reverse, more than 80 per cent military.
Peace demands responsibility and sacrifice, yes, but it is built primarily through nonmilitary means. The president mentioned some of these, but he failed to mention that US foreign policy systematically undervalues these approaches. In Afghanistan the US is spending far more on military approaches than on development and humanitarian assistance.
-- David Cortright quoted by Christopher Hayes in A Practical Peace Advocate on Obama's Nobel Speech from The Nation magazine.
More on Just War Theory and Reassessing U.S. engagement in Afghanistan by David Cortright:
The initial United States military operation in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was widely considered a just war, a classic case of self-defense. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral message in November 2001 acknowledging the “right and duty of a nation and the international community to use military force if necessary to defend the common good by protecting the innocent against mass terrorism.” Today’s mission is more complex and uncertain, however, and demands a new ethical assessment. Its fundamental goals are the same, defeating Al Qaeda and preventing global terrorist attacks, and are certainly just. The related objective is also just: helping to build capable governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan that can meet the needs of their people and protect against violent extremism. The question about both objectives is not whether they are just, but whether they can be achieved through the application of military force. It is a question of means rather than ends.
U.S. military involvement in the region is based on three fundamental strategic assumptions: first, war is a necessary and appropriate means of defeating Al Qaeda and preventing global terrorist strikes; second, the Taliban is equivalent to Al Qaeda and thus a legitimate target of military attack; and third, NATO must fight and win a counterinsurgency war against the Taliban and related jihadist groups. The first two assumptions determined policy decisions in the weeks after 9/11, and they have remained at the heart of U.S./NATO strategy ever since. The third assumption evolved over time and drives the current long-term military commitment. In recent years a fourth strategic dimension has entered the equation—the extension of military operations to Pakistan. Each of these assumptions is highly questionable strategically and poses serious ethical dilemmas. -- from the opening paragraphs of No Easy Way Out Reassessing U.S. engagement in Afghanistan by David Cortright.
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Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas
by
David Cortright
Cambridge University Press
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progressive books
11/26/2009
Obama's rejection of Landmine Treaty lacks vision, compassion, and basic common sense
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"President Obama’s decision to cling to antipersonnel mines keeps the US on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of humanity. This decision lacks vision, compassion, and basic common sense, and it contradicts the Obama administration’s professed emphasis on multilateralism, disarmament, and humanitarian affairs." - Steve Goose, Arms Division director at Human Rights Watch
"We cannot understand this shameful decision. We cannot understand the Obama administration’s decision to not be transparent in this ‘review’ process of the landmine policy and we definitely cannot understand President Obama’s decision to continue with the Bush policy."
"This decision is a slap in the face to landmine survivors, their families and affected communities everywhere – especially because in just a few short weeks, he will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." - Jody Williams, 1997 Nobel Laureate.
While there is no evidence that landmines are designed like toys to attract children, children are attracted to landmines because they are easily attracted by unknown objects. The results can be deadly. Children in heavily mined areas may become so familiar with mines that they forget they are lethal weapons, a reversal, as one mine expert noted, of "the common perception of the 'hidden mine'". In northern Iraq, "rural children commonly use mines as wheels for toy trucks and go-carts; in Cambodia they play boules with B40 anti-personnel mines." Even where children recognize the danger of mines, "there can not be an automatic assumption that such knowledge will deter them from tampering with mines. Especially among young boys, the risk element itself may prove a fatal attraction. In Afghanistan they compete in throwing stones at PFM-1 'Butterfly' mines, the winner being the child whose stone causes the mine to detonate; similar behavoir has been observed in other mined regions. - from After the Guns Fall Silent: The Enduring Legacy of Landmines.
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Banning Landmines: Disarmament, Citizen Diplomacy, and Human Security
by
Jody Williams
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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