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progressive books
6/7/2010
Joe Meadors: I seem to have all the bad luck in the world when it comes to the Israelis.
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For second time, Joe Meadors was aboard a ship attacked by Israeli forces in international waters. He was aboard the Svendoni, one of the Free Gaza boats that was seized early Monday morning (not the Mavi Marmara where nine activists were killed); and he was a signalman on the
USS Liberty, the US Navy ship that was attacked by Israeli forces in international waters 43 years ago in 1967. Thirty-four Americans were killed and more than 170 were wounded in that attack.
Capt. William McGonagle: It appeared, from the ferocity of the attack, that the intent of the attackers was to sink the ship. Maybe they hoped to have no survivors, so that they would not be held accountable for the attack after it occurred.
Stan White: We didn’t know who was attacking us. They didn’t know who was attacking us. I don’t know how Washington can say, "Don’t go, because they’re friends of ours." So that’s the thing that’s always bothered me right there.
Dean Rusk: I never, myself, accepted the Israeli purported explanation. Accidents don’t occur through repeated attacks by service vessels and by aircraft. It obviously was a decision taken pretty high up on the Israeli side, because it involved combined forces. The ship was flying an American flag. Even if it had been unidentified from an Israeli point of view, it was a reckless thing for them to do. Suppose it had been a Soviet ship. That could have produced very large problems indeed.
James Akins: George Ball, the brilliant and courageous Undersecretary of State at the time of the '67 war, wrote about the attack on the Liberty subsequently. He said, "The ultimate lesson of the Liberty attack" was that it "had far more effect on policy in Israel than in America. Israel's leaders concluded that nothing they might do would offend the Americans to the point of reprisal. If America’s leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens, it seemed clear that their American friends would let them get away with almost anything."
- from the documentary Loss of Liberty.
Joe Meadors: They [Israel] claimed that they mistook us for an Egyptian tramp steamer. They claimed it was a mistake, and they apologized for the mistake. The US government accepted it. But then again, the US government has never conducted an investigation of the attack. War crimes were committed by both Israel and the United States during that attack, and we’ve been trying to get them investigated, but the US government just ignores our request.
Amy Goodman: Your thoughts about what happened last weekend in the early morning hours of Monday?
Joe Meadors: I was kind of apprehensive, given the history I’ve had with the Israelis. I seem to have all the bad luck in the world when it comes to the Israelis.
- from a DemocracyNow! interview with Joe Meadors.
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progressive books
5/30/2010
Historian Bruce Cumings on the rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula
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This particular incident [North Korea’s March 26 sinking of South Korea's Cheonan naval ship where 46 sailor's lost their lives] is just ripped out of context, the context of a continuing war that has never ended. Just an armistice holds the peace. But in the case of this particular incident, which happened very close to the North Korean border, we’ve had incidents like this...going back more than ten years. In 1999, a North Korean ship went down with thirty sailors lost and maybe seventy wounded. That’s a larger total of casualties than this one. And last November, a North Korean ship went down in flames. We don’t know how many people died in that. This is a no man’s land, or waters, off the west coast of Korea that both North and South claim. And the Cheonan ship was sailing in those waters when it was hit by a torpedo...I’m sure it’s a 95 percent case that the US and South Korea are right that North Korea fired this torpedo. Let’s say they did. The fact is, our government has not pointed out the background that I just pointed out, the sinking last November, the clashes in 1999 and 2002. This is a no man’s land, where the US and South Korea demarcated a so-called Northern limit line unilaterally. The North has never accepted it. The North says that this area is under the joint jurisdiction of the North and South Korean militaries. So you have an incident waiting to happen...Regardless of whether the North Koreans fired it or not, this incident is being blown way out of proportion. Secretary of State Clinton referred to it a couple days ago as unprovoked aggression, which of course is what we accused the North of when the Korean War started sixty years ago. I noticed in your clip she’s now simply calling it a provocation. I do think there’s probably an attempt on the part of the Obama administration to draw down the tension over this. But the fact is, you have a structure in Korea that’s ongoing since the Korean War, where these incidents can happen and you can have a ratcheted-up escalation that might result in a second Korean War. So it’s imperative to try to end this war and find a way to have a dialogue with the North, so that the Peninsula can be denuclearized and these incidents don’t come along every once in awhile and raise such a threat to peace.
- Bruce Cumings, from an interview on DemocracyNow!.
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book notes
5/12/2010
How the hell did it happen? - Daniel Okrent on how Prohibition democratized drinking and made the income tax possible
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In 1920 could anyone have believed that the Eighteenth Amendment, ostensibly addressing the single subject of intoxicating beverages, would set off an avalanche of change in areas as diverse as international trade, speedboat design, tourism practices, soft-drink marketing, and the English language itself? Or that it would provoke the establishment of the first nationwide criminal syndicate, the idea of home dinner parties, the deep engagement of women in political issues other than suffrage, and the creation of Las Vegas? As interpreted by the Supreme Court and as understood by Congress, Prohibition would also lead indirectly to the eventual guarantee of the American woman's right to abortion and simultaneously dash that same woman's hope for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Prohibition changed the way we live, and it fundamentally redefined the role of the federal government. How the hell did it happen?
- from Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent
On how Prohibition democratized drinking
The saloon was a male-only place. That was always the case...Prohibition changes everything. The saloons become speakeasies, and because it is an outlaw operation, it begins to behave in outlaw ways. Women start to come because it's an exciting thing to do. They're accommodated. That means they have to put in tables, because you can't just have the women standing at the bar, so table service begins. Music shows up for the first time. If you have men and women drinking together, you have to have music. Jazz, the outlaw music, is rising at that very same time. There were no bars in the pre-Prohibition era that had live music. It just didn't happen.
On how Prohibition made the income tax posible:
Going back as far as the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s and then the beer tax that was brought in during the Civil War to finance the Civil War, the federal government had been dependent upon the excise tax on alcohol to operate.
In some years, domestic revenue, as much as 50 percent of it came from excise taxes. So the Prohibitionists realized that they couldn't get rid of liquor so long as the federal government was dependent upon liquor to get its revenue and to operate. So they supported the income tax movement, and in exchange, many of the populists who were behind the income tax movement supported Prohibition.
In 1913, the 16th Amendment is passed. The income tax comes in. The federal government has another means of supporting itself. And at that point, the Prohibitionists who had been operating state by state by state decided we can now have an amendment to the federal Constitution because the government is no longer dependent. There's another source of revenue.
- two excerpts from Prohibition Life: Politics, Loopholes And Bathtub Gin, a Terry Gross, Fresh Air interview with Daniel Okrent.
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progressive books
5/6/2010
"We have more than an oil slick out of control, we also have these big corporations out of control." - Marine toxicologist Rikki Ott on the BP and Exxon Valdez oil spills.
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As a former commercial salmon "fisherma'am in Alaska," marine toxicologist Riki Ott experienced firsthand the devastating effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Exxon did everything it could to reduce its liability. Exxon never paid for long-term damages. It only paid for short-term damages. So this is really something to watch out for. It’s one thing to say we’re going to hold- the President- listening to him say, we’re going to hold BP accountable to our laws. Our laws are pretty darn weak. For starters, they’re will only going to protect directly damaged parties. So fisherman, I’m sorry, but in our community, as I’m sure down in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, the fisherman buy groceries, good restaurants, put children in school, by clothes. If the fishermen don’t have money, where- it damages all the shoreside industry as well. So, there’s collateral damage to businesses that won’t necessarily be compensated under the law. And unfortunately, the Exxon Valdez case set president in the Supreme Court that these big companies don’t have to pay much on the issue of punitive damage. It got knocked way down. So it’s more like a business expense. These big companies will go on making business, drilling for oil, and fishermen are going to go bankrupt. That’s certainly what we saw in Cordova.
Exxon got away with not reporting cleanup workers’ health problems. There over 6,722 workers reported upper respiratory illnesses, I discovered in toxic tort lawsuits. And there is an exemption to the Occupational Safety and Health Act that says these industries don’t have to report colds and flu. So instantly, all this coughing and these cold and flu-like symptoms become colds and flu instead of probably what it really is which is a chemical-induced illnesses. This is work related. So we really need to close that loophole in OSHA.
- two excerpts from a DemocracyNow! interview with Rikki Ott.
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progressive books
4/24/2010
"This is too important. We cannot leave this to governments": Cormac Cullinan on the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights
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South African environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan on the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, one of the key initiatives to come out of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth
in Cochabamba, Bolivia:
What the declaration is, essentially, is—it’s intended to complement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of—on the Human Rights. So the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights only recognizes that human beings have got inherent rights. In other words, it says just because you exist as a human being, you have these rights, regardless of whether your country or government tries to take them away from you.
What we’re saying is that everything has inherent rights. By virtue of the fact that the earth exists and all other creatures and mountains and rivers exist, they must also have inherent rights. At least the right to exist, to play their part in the evolutionary processes of Mother Earth. So the problem is, because we’ve only recognized human rights, we’ve created an imbalance. So human rights trump everything else, because they don’t have rights. And we’re trying to redress that balance by recognizing the rights which surround human rights…Democracy used to be something that happened between diplomats behind closed doors, etc. Now we are saying—you’re seeing people saying, “This is too important. We cannot leave this to governments. We have to take responsibility for addressing these issues.” So this is about people saying, “We’d like the UN to take this up, but even if it doesn’t, we are—this is what we believe, and we’re going to work on these issues right now.”…
[The Universal Declaration of Human Rights] essentially came out the horrors of the Second World War and people feeling that something had to be done, this can’t go on anymore. And we’re in a similar position in history. We are sitting here saying climate change is threatening humanity and many species, etc. And what ‘s happening through these very formal negotiating processes between governments aren’t fast enough and don’t go far enough and don’t address the root causes. And so, this is an initiative which comes out of a similar period of crisis to say we’ve go to cut to the chase: what is wrong is our relationship with Mother Earth, and we must heal that. So a lot of this declaration is about human responsibilities to Mother Earth, as well as the rights of Mother Earth.
- South African environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan from an interview with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! See World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change for the entire week of DemocracyNow! coverage of the conference.
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lit obits
4/6/2010
Anarchist, poet, publisher and chess-player, John Rety, 1930 - 2010
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I asked him when he first became an anarchist? ‘During the war in Budapest’ he said after many minutes of expressive thought ‘I think I was part of the resistence( aged 9!). I pressed him further ‘ Didn’t you know if you were part of the resistence?’ ‘Well’ he said ‘ I was running around delivering packages to people hiding in ruined buildings so i think i must have been’. Our movement has suffered a sad loss – a very fine, honest, funny, steadfast human being has died. JOHN RETY. - from John Rety has died by Ian Bone.
Open-mindedness and catholic taste do not always go with intense political commitment, but in John’s case they did. His short introduction to Well Versed is one of the wisest short statements you could find about the place of poetry in our time: “A choice of poems cannot be divorced from one’s view of life ... There is real love, there is real anger, there is biting satire, and there is also celebration when it is called for ... [These] poems hint at a new age when the ethics which exist behind closed doors might suddenly, as by quantum leap, take over the public domain.” - from Tribute to a well-versed soul by Harry Eyres.
Anarchist, poet, Hearing Eye publisher and chess-player, John Rety died on February 3 aged 80.
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lit obits
4/4/2010
"Literature was another victim of the war": Miguel Delibes, 1920 - 2010
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"I write what I hear," Miguel Delibes, the Spanish novelist, once said. After winning the country's foremost literary prize when he was just 27, for more than half a century Delibes's hauntingly stark, gritty prose style captured the essence of Spain's rural and provincial life, and earned the writer massive popular and critical acclaim.
The author of 20 novels and over double that number of non-fiction works, Delibes's writing career effectively began with his wholly unexpected victory in the Nadal Prize in 1948 for his first novel, La sombra del ciprés es alargada. At the time a near-penniless journalist in his hometown of Valladolid, Delibes only discovered he had won as he was reading off the evening's dispatches on his newspaper's teleprinter.
"The prize was a unique opportunity; [normally] you couldn't publish anything," Delibes said later. "In the years after the Civil War, Spain had been struck dumb. All the writers had either been killed, exiled or had fallen silent. Literature was another victim of the war."
Slowly but surely, Delibes's unmistakeably concise, bleak writing helped rebuild Spain's literary legacy, both in the novels that appeared with unremitting regularity every two years, and in his five-year editorship of one of Spain's leading provincial newspapers El Norte de Castilla. "Journalism showed me how to put the maximum amount of information into the minimum number of words," Delibes said. As a liberal in Franco's dictatorship, journalism also showed him how to manipulate an apparently simple text so it would get past the censors with minimum interference... - from the obituary of Miguel Delibes by Alasdair Fotheringham published in the Independent.
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book awards
3/24/2010
The beautiful brain of Sherman Alexie: War Dances wins 2010 Pen/Faulkner Award
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Sherman Alexie has won the 2010 Pen/Faulkner Award for fiction for his book of short stories, essays and poems, War Dances. He is the first Native American author to win the prestigious prize.
Are Indians pressured by the marketplace to write certain kinds of stories?
It's the corn-pollen, four directions, eagle-feathers school of Native literature. People are more interested in our spirituality than anything else. Certainly, I've never received that kind of pressure because I never wrote that kind of stuff, but there are a lot of people out there selling their spirituality.
What expectations do you encounter from readers?
It's so funny -- because I'm a public Indian figure, people assume I have all these magical Indian powers, like I'm some sort of healer or shaman. That also extends to just being a writer in general -- I think people assume that just because somebody's good with metaphors, he's a better human being. It's not true. I'm just better with metaphors than 99 percent of the population, and that doesn't make me magical, it just makes me fairly smart.
In your experience, do white Americans have a different sense of history -- both of events, and the significance of those events in contemporary culture -- than American Indians?
White Americans have a short memory. This country really hasn't entered puberty yet -- white Americans' political thoughts are really young, and the culture is really young. The one general statement you can make about America is it's young, and wildly immature, and incredibly talented. Like some twelve-year-old kid who really pisses you off, because he's really good at everything and he knows it.
What can be done to bring the U.S. from this immature point to maturity?
I don't know. I'm one of those people who thinks that the world is getting better and better. I wouldn't want to be an Indian a hundred years ago -- somebody would be shooting at me. I wouldn't want to be a woman forty years ago, and I wouldn't want to be a black person twenty-five years ago. I think the world is getting better, and it's getting better because of liberal social policies. I don't think there has ever been a conservative social policy that helped anybody, except those who enacted it. I don't believe in any -ism particularly, I believe in fighting conservatism. Conservatives didn't want women to vote, didn't want Indians to become citizens.
- an excerpt from an Atlantic Unbound interview with Jessica Chapel.
WORLD PHONE CONVERSATION, 3 A.M.
After I got home with yogurt and turkey dogs and Cinnamon Toast Crunch and my brother-in-law left, I watched George Romero’s “Diary of the Dead,” and laughed at myself for choosing a movie that featured dozens of zombies getting shot in the head.
When the movie was over, I called my wife, nine hours ahead in Italy.
“I should come home,” she said.
“No, I’m O.K.,” I said. “Come on, you’re in Rome. What are you seeing today?”
“The Vatican.”
“You can’t leave now. You have to go and steal something. It will be revenge for every Indian. Or maybe you can plant an eagle feather and claim that you just discovered Italy.”
“I’m worried.”
“Yeah, Catholicism has always worried me.”
“Stop being funny. I should see if I can get Mom and me on a flight tonight.”
“No, no, listen, your mom is old. This might be her last adventure. It might be your last adventure with her. Stay there. Say hi to the Pope for me. Tell him I like his shoes.”
That night, my sons climbed into bed with me. We all slept curled around one another like sled dogs in a snowstorm. I woke, hour by hour, and touched my head and neck to see if they had changed shape—to feel if antennae were growing. Some insects hear with their antennae. Maybe that was what was happening to me.
EXIT INTERVIEW FOR MY FATHER
· Did you, when drunk, ever get behind the tattered wheel of a ’76 Ford three-speed van and somehow drive your family a thousand miles on an empty tank of gas?
· Is it true that the only literary term that has any real meaning in the Native American world is “road movie”?
· How many times, during any of your road trips, did your children ask you, “Are we there yet?”
· In twenty-five words or less, please define “there.”
· Sir, in your thirty-nine years as a parent you broke your children’s hearts, collectively and individually, six hundred and twelve times, and you did this without ever striking any human being in anger. Does this absence of physical violence make you a better man than you might otherwise have been?
· Without using the words “man” or “good,” can you please define what it means to be a good man?
· Do you think you will see angels before you die? Do you think angels will come to escort you to Heaven? As the angels are carrying you to Heaven, how many times will you ask, “Are we there yet?”
REUNION
After she returned from Italy, my wife climbed into bed with me. I felt as if I hadn’t slept comfortably in years.
I said, “There was a rumor that I’d grown a tumor, but I killed it with humor.”
“How long have you been waiting to tell me that one?” she asked.
“Oh, probably since the first time some doctor put his fingers in my brain.”
We made love. We fell asleep. But, agitated by the steroids, I woke at 2, 3, 4, and 5 A.M. The bed was killing my back, so I lay flat on the floor. I wasn’t going to die anytime soon, at least not because of my little friend Tumor, but that didn’t make me feel any more comfortable or comforted. I felt distant from the world—from my wife and my sons, from my mother and my siblings, from all my friends. I felt closest to those who’d always had fingers in their brains.
I didn’t feel any closer to the world six months later, when another MRI revealed that my meningioma had not grown in size or changed its shape.
“You’re looking good,” my doctor said. “How’s your hearing?”
“I think I’ve got about ninety per cent of it back.”
“Well, then, the steroids worked. Good.”
And I didn’t feel any more intimate with the world nine months after that, when one more MRI made my doctor hypothesize that my meningioma might only be more scar tissue from the hydrocephalus.
“Frankly,” he said, “your brain is beautiful.”
“Thank you,” I said, though it was the oddest compliment I’d ever received.
I wanted to call my father and tell him that a white man thought my brain was beautiful. But I couldn’t tell him anything. He was dead. I told my wife and my sons that I was O.K. I told my mother and my siblings. I told my friends. But none of them laughed as hard about my beautiful brain as I knew my father—the drunk bastard—would have.
- three snippets from War Dances by Sherman Alexie.
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book awards
3/13/2010
It's terrible to be possessed by brittle things: Elena Fanailova's The Russian Version wins the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry
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"The Russian Version obliterates the stereotype of what Great Russian Poetry should sound like," wrote Idra Novey, Chair of the Best Translated Book Poetry Panel. "Fanailova has the candor and compassion of Akhmatova and a gift for striking metaphor that might bring Mandelstam to mind. She is also ruthlessly quick to fire 'from the hip,' as she says in the title poem, and her aim is impeccable."
The Best Translated Book Award is administered by the University of Rochester's Three Percent, an organization that promotes international literature. Only about 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation according to the Three Percent website. That figure includes all books in translation, for works of literary fiction and poetry, the number is closer to 0.7%.
It’s terrible to be possessed by brittle things.
How can you learn here who taught people to draw
Stars between eyebrows, butterflies over the gristle
Of throats, weeping eye between breasts.
And anyway, who taught them to live with strange
Chasms, with their nocturnal beasts,
With this yawning, this singing, this delirium –
unreachable
Even with open palms outstretched: take them
If you are not afraid of such embraces.
If the faces floating up from an amalgam
Of sploches, from the molding, black, silvery depths
Don’t frighten you.
- from The Russian Version by Elena Fanailova
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lit obits
3/7/2010
Translator, critic and BBC script editor, Barbara Bray, 1924 - 2010
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Barbara Bray, who has died aged 85, was one of the most significant links between British and French literature in the 20th century. She was the principal translator and an early champion of Marguerite Duras, who was her close friend, and also translated the work of Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Anouilh and Alain Robbe-Grillet. As a young and influential script editor at the BBC in the 1950s, she fostered the work of many writers including Harold Pinter and, perhaps most importantly, Samuel Beckett, who became her personal and intellectual partner for more than 30 years.
- from the obituary for Barbara Bray published in theGuardian by Andrew Todd.
Barbara Bray, apart from introducing Harold Pinter to Samuel Beckett, was also the BBC radio script editor who found and commissioned both men when they began their careers in radio drama, Beckett with All That Fall in January 1957 and Pinter with A Slight Ache in 1959.
Barbara Bray recalls: "the (BBC) Third Programme asked Sam to write them a radio play and though he never worked to commissions he said he would if he could. All That Fall aroused such interest among the general public and among writers that we thought it would be a good idea to introduce the public to Beckett's prose works. While we waited for him to write Embers we selected things from his works and there happened to be an invasion of Irish actors in the London theatre then. So we got people like Pat Magee and Jack McGowran to read bits from the so-called trilogy."
What then was the original reaction of the general public to the works of these two men both destined to become Nobel Prize winners? Barbara Bray explains:
"Pinter's first radio plays were met with remarks concerning the ravings of a lunatic, and similar things were said concerning Samuel Beckett readings, but after the second or third readings people began to get intrigued and began to get an ear for it as you do with music. New music is at first strange to you, then you listen to it a few times and you begin to get the hang of it. We did all Harold's radio plays on the Third Programme. Harold would write many of his plays first for radio, then they would become television plays and then stage plays. The tide was turning when authors realized that if they were going to distinguish themselves, it was going to be as much with their words as with their action."
Barbara Bray was one of the first producers to realize that such a change was taking place as, in the wake of John Osborne's Look Back In Anger (1956), the nature of the relationship between author and public was dramatically being transformed. She remembers: "the focus of drama switched back to the classical Shakespeare period when the word was more important than the action or at least as important as the action and where the stress was largely on the function of words in drama."
- from When Harry Met Sam by Declan McCavana.
Barbara Bray, editor and translator and four time winner of the Scott Moncrieff prize for translation, was born November 24, 1924 and died February 25, 2010.
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