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book awards
10/10/2009
I've had to learn to live by writing, not the other way round. Herta Müller wins Nobel prize in literature
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I've had to learn to live by writing, not the other way round. I wanted to live by the standards I dreamt of, it's as simple as that. And writing was a way for me to voice what I could not actually live. - Herta Müller speaking to an unidentified journalist.
She is an excellent author with truly fantastic language, on the one hand. On the other she has the capacity of really giving you a sense of what it's like living in a dictatorship, also what it's like to be part of a minority in another country and what it's like to be an exile. She is talking about really big issues like that. - Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, speaking about Herta Müller following the announcement that she had won 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The cemetery was made of rocks. There were boulders on the graves.
When I looked down on the ground I noticed that the soles of my shoes were turned up. All that time, I had been walking on my shoelaces. Long and heavy, they were lying behind me, their ends curled up.
Two staggering little men were lifting the coffin from the hearse and lowering it into the grave with two tattered ropes. The coffin was swinging. Their arms and their ropes got longer and longer. The grave was filled with water despite the drought. Your father killed a lot of people, one of the drunk little men said.
I said: he was in the war. For every twenty-five killed he got a medal. He brought home several medals.
He raped a woman in a turnip field, the little man said. Together with four other soldiers. Your father stuck a turnip between her legs. When we left she was bleeding. She was Russian. For weeks afterwards, we would call all weapons turnips.
It was late fall, the little man said. The turnip leaves were black and folded over by frost. Then the little man put a big rock on the coffin.
The other drunk little man continued:
For the New Year, we went to the opera in a small German town. The singer's voice was as piercing as the Russian woman's screams. One after the other, we left the theater. Your father stayed till the end. For weeks afterwards, he called all songs turnips and all women turnips.
- an excerpt from The Funeral Sermon, the first story in Herta Müller's first book, Nadirs (Niederungen, 1982). Click here to read The Funeral Sermon in its entirety.
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lit obits
9/30/2009
Milton Meltzer, 1915 – 2009
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"Meltzer was one of the first in a new wave of nonfiction writers who brought lively and passionate writing, grounded in original source material, to middle-grade students and young adults, without talking down to them." – Lisa Von Drasek, Children's librarian at the BankStreet College of Education (from the New York Times obituary written by Dennis Hevesi).
Meltzer's first title was published in 1956 — written at the same time the historic case of Brown v. Board of Education was making its way through the courts, before Rosa Parks decided to challenge the laws of Jim Crow, long before the term political correctness had been uttered. He chose as his subject the struggle of African Americans to achieve freedom and equality. Meltzer's goal was to interest the broadest possible audience and to present information in such a way that even a casual reader could be persuaded to dig more deeply into the subject. In conceptualizing this project he browsed his own library and found two volumes that had the kind of visual appeal he sought — one on life in America and another on science and invention; both books used a highly pictorial, oversized format.
Writing a book of social import, especially a book about real people and events, suggests a particular understanding of audience. From the beginning, Meltzer saw his readers as people anxious for a truly inclusive historical record, as well as people hungry for information. In this volume, as in all of his nearly one hundred titles, Meltzer made available to readers what has come to be a hallmark of his work — original sources including photos, documents, drawings, and even advertisements. Mentored by his co-author Langston Hughes, the book served up what Ossie Davis, in his introduction to another of Hughes and Meltzer's books, Black Magic (1967), calls "art in action." - Wendy Saul, from her profile of Milton Meltzer written on the occasion of his receiving the Laura Ingalls Award in 2001.
THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT COURAGE. NOT THE COURAGE IT takes to go into battle, but the courage to organize resistance to war when a fever for it inflames the country, and the courage to refuse military service under pain of being called a coward and enduring the threat of prison or even execution. In the 1980s, refusal to register for the draft within thirty days of a man's eighteenth birthday could bring penalties of up to five years in prison and a ten thousand-dollar fine. Yet of the twelve million or more young Americans required to register for the draft by the middle of 1984, five hundred thousand had not a much higher proportion than in the early years of the Vietnam War.
At eighteen, or approaching that age, men had to decide whether to register for the draft. Facing that decision, a surprising number of the "me" generation who were coming of age during the eighties were saying, "Not me." It appeared that an antidraft, anti-intervention movement had resurfaced-a sign that a considerable number of young people would no longer blindly follow our leaders into war.
If you ask, "What war?" the box score on mass violence around the world provides the answer. Let's take just the early 1980s:
- Forty-five of the world% 164 nations were involved in wars. Estimates of the number of people killed range from one million to five million.
- There were ten conflicts in the Middle East Persian Gulf, another ten in Asia and Africa, seven in Latin America, and three in Europe. Five of these were conventional wars between nations and twenty-five were internal guerrilla struggles.
- In 1981, the forty-five nations involved in conflicts spent more than $528 billion on their armed forces. The United States and the USSR and its satellites were the major suppliers of their military weapons.
Facts, facts, facts. "We are the best informed people on earth ' " said the poet Archibald MacLeish of his fellow Americans. "We are deluged with facts, but we have lost or are losing our human ability to feel them."
…School histories emphasize the importance of war. But they ignore, for the most part, the story of resistance to war. Yet resistance does have a history, and surely we should know something about it. No wars fought by the U.S. have ever had the full support of all Americans. And some of the wars-both a long time ago and very recently-were met with open and powerful resistance.
It's impossible to think of any other subject that can match this in importance-for today and for our future.
- excerpted from Ain't Gonna Study War No More by Milton Meltzer.
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book awards
9/23/2009
I knew I had no hope of winning: Simon Van Booy wins Frank O'Connor Short Story Award for Love Begins in Winter
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"I was very nervous coming to Cork for the Frank O'Connor Festival," Simon Van Booy said in his awards ceremony acceptance speech at Cork last week.
"But I stopped being nervous when I read the other short-listed books. I was shocked by the quality of the work, and I knew I had no hope of winning."
Nevertheless, the 34 year old London born author took home the €35,000 prize, the richest in the world for a short story collection.
"Simon Van Booy's stories in Love Begins in Winter are as immediate and elusive as the dreams they resemble. Marked by an intense inwardness, their characters' lives intersect and evolve in constantly surprising ways, carried forward by a prose as melodious and continuous as one of the Bach Cello Suites played by the narrator of the title story."
-- John Koethe, author of Ninety-Fifth Street and Sally's Hair
I wait in the shadows.
My cello is already on stage. It was carved in 1723 on a Sicilian hillside where the sea is very quiet. The strings vibrate when the bow is near, as though anticipating their lover.
My name is Bruno Bonnet. The curtain I stand behind is the color of a plum. The velvet is heavy. My life is on the other side. Sometimes I wish it would continue on without me.
The stage lights here in Quebec City are too bright. Stars of dust circle the scroll and the pegs as I am introduced in French-Canadian. The cello belonged to my grandfather who was accidentally killed in World War II.
My grandfather's kitchen chair is also on stage. I can only put weight on three legs. The wicker at the center of the seat is ripped. One day it's going to collapse. When the chair arrives at the concert hall a day or so before a performance, a frantic music director will call with bad news: 'my chair has been utterly ruined in transit.'
An eruption of applause and I take the stage.
Who are all these people?
One day I will play without my instrument. I will sit up straight and not move. I will close my eyes and imagine life taking place in the houses outside the concert hall: steaming pots stirred by women in slippers; teenagers in their rooms wearing headphones; somebody's son looking for his keys; a divorcee brushing her teeth as her cat stares; a family watching television—the youngest is asleep but will not remember his dream.
When I clasp my bow, the audience is suddenly very quiet.
I look out at their faces a moment before I begin.
So many people and yet not one single person who knows anything about me. - from Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy
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book awards
9/15/2009
I saw my soul become flesh: Jean Valentine wins Wallace Stevens Award
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I saw my soul become flesh breaking open
the linseed oil breaking over the paper
running down pouring
no one to catch it my life breaking open
no one to contain it my
pelvis thinning out into God
- Annunciation by Jean Valentine from Door in the Mountain.
The Academy of American Poets has selected Jean Valentine as the 2009 recipient Wallace Stevens Award. The $100,000 prize recognizes "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry".
Looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake: you can see your own outline, and the shapes of the upper world, reflected among rocks, underwater life, glint of lost bottles, drifted leaves. The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet. This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way.
- Adrienne Rich
Red cloth
I lie on the ground
otherwise nothing could hold
I put my hand on the ground
the membrane is gone
and nothing does hold
your place in the ground
is all of it
and it is breathing
- Red cloth by Jean Valentine.Originally published in The Nation.
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lit obits
9/14/2009
Iconic poet and punk rocker, Jim Carroll, 1950 - 2009
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I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation. The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty. - Patti Smith on Jim Carroll from a telephone interview.
Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and Burroughs who chronicled his wild youth in “The Basketball Diaries,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60...
Mr. Carroll led a chaotic life that combined sports, drugs and poetry. This highly unusual combination lent a lurid appeal to “The Basketball Diaries,” the journal he kept during high school and published in 1978, by which time his poetry had already won him a cult reputation as the new Bob Dylan...
Jim Carroll music career started by accident when Ms. Smith brought him onstage to declaim his poetry with her band providing background. Encouraged by the response, he formed his own band. It caught the attention of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who arranged a three-record deal with Atlantic Records...
The critic Stephen Holden described Mr. Carroll in The New York Times in 1982 as “not so much a singer as an incantatory rock-and-roll poet.” Like Lou Reed, he had a mesmerizing power, evident on songs like “People Who Died” from “Catholic Boy,” a poetic litany of his dead friends that became a hit on college radio and part of the soundtrack for “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.” - from the New York Times obituary by William Grimes.
It must be strange to just fall from the stage
and snap a bone that is so close to the brain
And be attended to by so many down below
I saw a doctor tie you up from so far above
And you start sinking just like light through a black floor
You’d start sliding like burned skin [sounds like "to a side door"]
But crow, when you throw yourself under
Singin's hard when you can't lose control
They don't know, to them in the dark you don't whisper nothin'
And they're' all gonna try and rip the wind from your soul
Musta been hard to be a cashier in a bookstore
And to be surrounded by the history of your true loves
And you'd get naked between the deep shelves in the back room
And have your brain get tan by sharp fluorescent light tubes
And you start spinning like the pillars in the temple
You'd start screaming just like Sister Aimee Semple
But Crow, when you throw yourself under
The streets are hard when you cannot lose control
They don't know, to them the dark don't whisper nothin'
And they're all gonna try and rip the wind from your soul . . . Crow
It was so sweet when you brought donuts to the junkies
[Hey, you'd?] give us something we'd go slip into our coffee
And we'd start reading lines from poems that didn't matter
You covered me with blankets in the Chelsea Hotel lobby
And I’d start reachin' for the scar along your belly
They'd start takin' us ‘cause winning is their hobby
But Crow, when you throw yourself under
The streets are hard when you cannot lose control
They don't know, to them the dark don't whisper nothin'’
And they're all gonna try and rip the wind from your soul . . . Crow
- Crow, a song Jim Carroll wrote about Patti Smith (from Catholic Boy by the Jim Carroll Band, 1980)
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progressive books
9/3/2009
Wallace Shawn on The Quest for Superiority
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Best known as co-author and player in My Dinner with Andre and his performance in several Woody Allen films,
playwright and actor Wallace Shawn has just published his first book of nonfiction titled Essays. Catch him reading from “The Quest for Superiority” on DemocracyNow!:
“My feeling of superiority, and the sense of well-being that comes from that, increases with the number of poor people on the planet whose lives are dominated by me or my proxies and whom I nonetheless can completely ignore. I like to be reminded of those poor people, those unobtrusives, and then I like to be reminded of my lack of interest in them. For example, while I eat my breakfast each morning, I absolutely love to read my morning newspaper, because in the first few pages the newspaper tells me how my country treated all the unobtrusives on the day before—deaths, beatings, torture, what have you—and then, as I keep turning the pages, the newspaper reminds me how unimportant the unobtrusives are to me, and it tries to tempt me in its articles on shirts to consider different shirts that I might want to wear, and then it goes on, as I turn the pages, to try to coax me into sampling different forms of cooking, and then to experience different plays or films, different types of vacations…”
In other words, the stories in the newspaper about Afghanistan are partly true and partly false, but they’re presented in a context that basically makes me feel alright about treating the people there as non-equals, which obviously we do if we send an unmanned drone and we are thinking of killing some person who we think is an enemy and we kill fifteen members of his family. We wouldn’t do that to people who we thought were our equals. For example, friends. Even if there was someone that we despised or who wanted to kill us in the middle of their family, we wouldn’t kill the whole family. We just wouldn’t. And the New York Times helps me to take that as totally normal. - Wallace Shawn on DemocracyNow!
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progressive books
8/30/2009
Michael Parenti on Italian American Identity
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It would do well if we could bring more of a social content to our ethnic identity. The Italian-American Political Solidarity Club has just published a book whose title urges as much: Avanti Popolo: Italian-American Writers Sail Beyond Columbus. The book urges that on Columbus Day instead of celebrating conquest we should acknowledge those who fought for the rights of all immigrants and for social justice.
Indeed Italian Americans need to bring substance to the symbolic politics that have been fed to us. We do not need another statue to Columbus. Some such as Diane Di Prima, Tommi Avicolli-Mecca, and Juliet Ucelli have organized "Dumping Columbus" readings and other events that challenge the iconic image of the Great Navigator and instead commemorate the Native Americans he enslaved and murdered.
Philip Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer (of German Protestant lineage) edited a book, The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism, that reclaims some of the history of radical Italian-American immigrants, labor leaders, union organizers, antiwar activists, and political protesters, a history long neglected or repressed.
To frame the Italian-American experience within a context of struggle for social justice and economic survival is to give it a dimension that goes beyond nostalgia and sentimentality, and flies in the face of the stereotypes that weigh down upon us Italians. Thus do we not only realize more of ourselves but we connect to more of the world, especially to the class realities that compose so much of life yet remain too often unmentioned and unnoticed.
- a selection from Italian American Identity: To Be or Not To Be by Michael Parenti.
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progressive books
8/20/2009
Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia
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Author David Vine's book Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia is the first major book to reveal how the United States and the United Kingdom conspired to kidnap and expel the Chagossians, the indigenous people of the Indian Ocean island Diego Garcia. In 1971 the Chagossians were deported to the slums in Mauritius and the Seychelles. They live there to this day where they struggle to survive fight to return to their homeland. "The story of the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, and the cruel displacement of the island's people, has long been hidden from the American public," wrote Howard Zinn. "We owe a debt to David Vine for revealing it to the larger public." "A very good, original book on an important and intellectually challenging subject," wrote Chalmers Johnson, "the ruthlessness and hypocrisy of the American government in its forced expulsion of an indigenous people in order to build the supersecret military base at Diego Garcia."
Rita felt like she’d been sliced open and all the blood spilled from her body.
“What happened to you? What happened to you?” her children cried as they came running to her side.
“What happened?” her husband inquired.
“Did someone attack you?” they asked.
“I heard everything they said,” Rita recounted, “but my voice couldn’t open my mouth to say what happened.” For an hour she said nothing, her heart swollen with emotion.
Finally she blurted out: “We will never again return to our home! Our home has been closed!” As Rita told me almost forty years later, the man said to her: “Your island has been sold. You will never go there again.”
Marie Rita Elysée Bancoult is one of the people of the Chagos Archipelago, a group of about 64 small coral islands near the isolated center of the Indian Ocean, halfway between Africa and Indonesia, 1,000 miles south of the nearest continental landmass, India. Known as Chagossians, none live in Chagos today. Most live 1,200 miles away on the western Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles. Like others, 80-year-old Rita lives far from Mauritius’s renowned tourist beaches and luxury hotels. Rita, or Aunt Rita as she is known, lives in one of the island’s poorest neighborhoods, known for its industrial plants and brothels, in a small aging three-room house made of concrete block.
Rita and other Chagossians cannot return to their homeland because between 1968 and 1973, in a plot carefully hidden from the world, the United States and Great Britain exiled all 1,500–2,000 islanders to create a major U.S. military base on the Chagossians’ island Diego Garcia. Initially, government agents told those like Rita who were away seeking medical treatment or vacationing in Mauritius that their islands had been closed and they could not go home. Next, British officials began restricting supplies to the islands and more Chagossians left as food and medicines dwindled. Finally, on the orders of the U.S. military, U.K. offi cials forced the remaining islanders to board overcrowded cargo ships and left them on the docks in Mauritius and the Seychelles. Just before the last deportations, British agents and U.S. troops on Diego Garcia herded the Chagossians’ pet dogs into sealed sheds and gassed and burned them in front of their traumatized owners awaiting deportation.
The people, the descendants of enslaved Africans and indentured south Indians brought to Chagos beginning in the eighteenth century, received no resettlement assistance and quickly became impoverished. Today the group numbers around 5,000. Most remain deeply impoverished. Meanwhile the base on Diego Garcia has become one of the most secretive and powerful U.S. military facilities in the world, helping to launch the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (twice), threatening Iran, China, Russia, and nations from southern Africa to southeast Asia, host to a secret CIA detention center for high-profile terrorist suspects, and home to thousands of U.S. military personnel and billions of dollars in deadly weaponry.
- a selection from Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia by David Vine.
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progressive books
8/19/2009
Slavoj Zizek on occupation by bureaucracy and the quiet slicing of the West Bank
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When peace-loving Israeli liberals present their conflict with Palestinians in neutral, symmetrical terms – admitting that there are extremists on both sides who reject peace – one should ask a simple question: what goes on in the Middle East when nothing is happening there at the direct politico-military level (ie, when there are no tensions, attacks or negotiations)? What goes on is the slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians on the West Bank: the gradual strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parcelling up of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land (which goes from crop-burning and religious desecration to targeted killings) – all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regulations.
Saree Makdisi, in Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, describes how, although the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is ultimately enforced by the armed forces, it is an "occupation by bureaucracy": it works primarily through application forms, title deeds, residency papers and other permits. It is this micro-management of the daily life that does the job of securing slow but steady Israeli expansion: one has to ask for a permit in order to leave with one's family, to farm one's own land, to dig a well, or to go to work, to school, or to hospital. One by one, Palestinians born in Jerusalem are thus stripped of the right to live there, prevented from earning a living,
denied housing permits, etc. - a selection from Quiet slicing of the West Bank makes abstract prayers for peace obscene by Slavoj Zizek.
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