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lit obits
3/29/2009
Pioneer Historian and Scholar of African-American studies, John Hope Franklin, 1915 - 2009
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John Hope Franklin's 1947 book, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, was the seminal text on the black experience in the U.S. and is still heralded today as the authoritative text on the subject. Over a lifetime of scholarship, "Franklin helped ensure," writes Jane Stancill for The News & Observer, "that no American history book could be complete without the story of African-Americans, and that America could not be whole until it confronted its past of slavery and segregation." "I will always think of John Hope as the historian of the South who grasped the complexity of Southern public life as shaped by the horror of personal slavery," said the Princeton University historian Irvin Painter, "Franklin was the first great American historian to reckon the price owed in violence, autocracy and militarism." He was "the pre-eminent voice and witness for Americas sojourn from slavery to freedom", said the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Born in 1915, I grew up in a racial climate that was stifling to my senses and damaging to my emotional health and social well-being. Society at that time presented a challenge to the strongest adult, and to a child it was not merely difficult but cruel. I watched my mother and father, who surely numbered among the former, daily meet that challenge; I and my three siblings felt equally that cruelty. And it was no more possible to escape that environment of racist barbarism than one today can escape the industrial gases that pollute the atmosphere.
This climate touched me at every stage of my life. I was forcibly removed from a train at the age of six for having accidentally taken a seat in the “white people’s coach.” I was the unhappy victim, also at age six, of a race riot that kept the family divided for more than four years. I endured the very strict segregation laws and practices in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was rejected as a guide through busy downtown Tulsa traffic by a blind white woman when she discovered that the twelve-year-old at her side was black. I underwent the harrowing experience as a sixteen-year-old college freshman of being denounced in the most insulting terms for having the temerity to suggest to a white ticket seller a convenient way to make change. More harrowing yet was the crowd of rural white men who confronted and then nominated me as a possible Mississippi lynching victim when I was nineteen. I was refused service while on a date as a Harvard University graduate student at age twenty-one. Racism in the navy turned my effort to volunteer during World War II into a demeaning embarrassment, such that at a time when the United States was ostensibly fighting for the Four Freedoms I struggled to evade the draft. I was called a “Harvard nigger” at age forty. At age forty-five, because of race, New York banks denied me a loan to purchase a home. At age sixty I was ordered to serve as a porter for a white person in a New York hotel, at age eighty to hang up a white guest’s coat at a Washington club where I was not an employee but a member. - excerpted from Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin.
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book awards
3/26/2009
Avi Sharon wins Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for C. P. Cavafy's Selected Poems
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The Academy of American Poets has announced that Avi Sharon has been chosen by the poet and translator John Balaban as the 2009
Harold Morton Landon Translation Award winner for his translation of C. P. Cavafy's Selected Poems. "Avi Sharon's considerable gifts as a classicist are one asset;" wrote Balaban on selecting the work for the award, "his ear for poetry still another. Both talents merge in his new translation to offer us a Cavafy that is accessible in an almost conversational way, without losing its rhythmic current or its exquisite historical associations."
Candles by C. P. Cavafy translated by Avi Sharon:
The days of the future stand before us
like a line of burning candles -
golden candles, warm with life.
Behind them stand the days of our past,
a pitiful row of candles extinguished,
the nearest still sending up their smoke:
cold and melted, withered sticks.
I don't want to look; their image makes me sad,
it saddens me to recall their kindling.
I look ahead at the ones still burning.
I don't want to turn and see, with horror,
how quickly the line of the shadow lengthens,
how quickly the number of snuffed candles grows.
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book awards
3/22/2009
Thomas G. Andrews wins 2009 Bancroft Prize for Killing for Coal
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Columbia University has announced that Thomas G. Andrews and two other authors have won the Bancroft Prize for 2009.
The Bancroft prize has been awarded since 1948 to the authors of books of exceptional merit in the fields of American history, biography and diplomacy.
Andrews won the prize for Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, a study of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre of striking coal miners in Colorado.
"The Ludlow Massacre of 1914 has long been known as one of the most notorious events in all of American labor history", writes William Cronon, author of Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, "but until the publication of Killing for Coal, it was still possible to see this slaughter simply as an episode in the history of American industrial violence. In Thomas Andrews's skilled hands, it becomes something much subtler, more complicated, and revealing: a window onto the profound transformation of work and environment that occurred on the Western mining frontier in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anyone interested in the history of labor, the environment, and the American West will want to read this book."
The shooting started around nine o’clock on a bright, breezy morning in a broad valley where the broken foothills of the southern Rockies tumble down onto the high plains. No one has ever determined who shot first, but participants and witnesses all agreed that within seconds of the initial gun blast, bullets began to fly thick and fast. Occupying the high ground was a small detachment of Colorado National Guardsmen. Thirty-four strong, this force and the dozen other militiamen encamped in the flats below consisted mostly of men formerly employed as guards by the largest coal mine operator in the West, the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.
Seven months of shootouts and assassinations, executions and ambushes, had already earned the Colorado coalfi eld war the dubious distinction of being the deadliest strike in the history of the United States. On the morning of April 20, 1914, however, the conflict between Colorado state militia allied with the West’s largest coal producers and mineworkers organized under the auspices of the nation’s largest union erupted into open warfare, in what would become known as the Ludlow Massacre.
Returning the guardsmen’s fire were hundreds of striking coal miners of more than a dozen nationalities, all of whom resided in the Ludlow tent colony, “the largest of its kind in the history of this country,” according to a United Mine Workers (UMW) of ficial, John Lawson. Union leaders had named the 1,200-person camp after the railroad depot about a mile away.
The strikers, however, nicknamed it the White City, an apt description of the settlement’s gleaming canvas facades, as well as an ironic reference to the dreamlike buildings that had housed the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
The sounds of exploding powder and shrieking bullets echoed between piñon-covered canyon walls, rousing the many strikers who had decided to sleep in, following Orthodox Easter festivities that had run late into the night. Women grabbed the children and hid with them in cellars dug into the hard adobe soil below the colony. The men of the camp, meanwhile, took their weapons, hurried to defensive positions via a nearby arroyo and returned fire in hopes of drawing the assault away from the colony.
In the early afternoon a bullet hit Private Martin in the neck, inflicting a fatal wound that “smashed” his face “as if hit.” Rifle fire also killed several strikers over the course of the day, including Frank Snyder. Just twelve years old, Frank had left the safe haven of his family’s cellar either in search of food or to relieve his bladder - on this as on so many things eyewitness accounts differ - only to have a bullet tear off his head; “practically nothing above his eyes” remained. At some point in the late afternoon or early evening—here recollections again diverged—Ludlow’s canvas dwellings caught fire under suspicious circumstances; soon the whole camp was ablaze. Two women and eleven children perished in their cellar hideout—asphyxiated when flames devoured the tents over their heads. Militiamen had also arrested and killed three men, including Louis Tikas, leader of the Greek strikers, who died of multiple gunshot wounds to the back.
The family names of the eighteen strikers killed over the course of the day—Snyder and Tikas, Costa and Valdez and Pedregone—hinted at the diverse paths they had followed to the coalfields, as well as their unusual success at forging a common cause despite differences in race, ethnicity, and nationality. Back in September, the Denver journalist Don McGregor—a swashbuckling figure who would later join Pancho Villa’s forces in the
Mexican Revolution—had described the creation of Ludlow’s sister tent colony at Walsenburg as “the outward sign of civil war, red and bloody, with its hates and its assassinations, its woes and its suffering.” On April 21, 1914, dawn’s rays revealed the horrible fulfillment of McGregor’s prophecy. Odd jumbles of metal furniture contorted by the heat, blackened coal stoves lined up like sentries on the plain, ethereal outlines seared into the ground where hundreds of tents had stood fast against rain and wind, snow, and gunshots for seven hard months—only vestiges remained of the hopeful strivings that had created and sustained the Ludlow colony.
Journalists rushed to telegraph and telephone offices while the fighting still raged. The Colorado Coal strike had already attracted national press coverage, but a pitched battle between the United Mine Workers of America and the forces of the powerful Rockefeller family was headline news. “Little children roasted alive,” as the irascible Mother Jones remarked, “make a front page story.” The next morning, papers carried the shocking news of the strikers’ deaths to millions of Americans, thus assuring Ludlow a place alongside Haymarket, Homestead, and Pullman in the annals of desperate struggle between Labor and Capital over who would bear the burdens and reap the rewards of American industrialization.
How had all this come to pass—what forces had changed a former Rocky Mountain frontier into an epicenter of class war? - from Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War by Thomas G. Andrews.
Two other winners of the 2009 Bancroft Prize were also announced in additon to Thomas G. Andrews:
Pekka Hämäläinen for The Comanche Empire, a reinterpretation of the Comanches in the southwestern borderland in the 18th and 19th centuries; and
Drew Gilpin Faust for This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, an analysis of the impact of death and dying in the Civil War.
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progressive books
3/11/2009
Economist Ha-Joon Chang on The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
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One of the world's foremost economists specialising in development economics, Ha-Joon Chang has recently published his latest book, Bad Samaritans The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. The book "blasts holes in the “World Is Flat” orthodoxy of Thomas Friedman and other liberal economists who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, today’s economic superpowers — from the U.S. to Britain to his native Korea — all attained prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in industry. We have conveniently forgotten this fact, telling ourselves a fairy tale about the magic of free trade and — via our proxies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization — ramming policies that suit ourselves down the throat of the developing world". - from the publisher's comments
Amy Goodman:
One of the people you take on big time in your book is Thomas Friedman. Your first chapter, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree Revisited: Myths and Facts About Globalization.” We only have a minute to go, but what do you think are the myths that need to be debunked in this country?
Ha-Joon Chang:
Well, basically, the myth is that America has been founded on the free market; the government has done very little; it has thrived under free trade. But actually, if you look at the history, this is actually the country that has succeeded most with protectionist policies. This is a country which has huge industrial policy, only that it’s called research funding in defense industry and research funding in health research. It actually spends, in proportional terms, a lot more money than Japan or European countries in supporting research and development, thereby steering the industries into certain directions. So let’s put it this way. I mean, this country has to basically come to terms with what it has done. I mean, it has been haunted by this ideology that, “Oh, we never did anything other than free market and free trade.” It’s time to give that up.
- from DemocracyNow!
Once upon a time, the leading car maker of a developing country exported its first passenger cars to the US. Up to that day, the little company had only made shoddy products - poor copies of quality items made by richer countries. The car was nothing too sophisticated - just a cheap subcompact (one could have called it 'four wheels and an ashtray'). But it was a big moment for the country and its exporters felt proud.
Unfortunately, the product failed. Most thought the little car looked lousy and savvy buyers were reluctant to spend serious money on a family car that came from a place where only second-rate products were made. The car had to be withdrawn from the US market. This disaster led to a major debate among the country's citizens.
Many argued that the company should have stuck to its original business of making simple textile machinery. After all, the country's biggest export item was silk. If the company could not make good cars after 25 years of trying, there was no future for it. The government had given the car maker every opportunity to succeed. It had ensured high profits for it at home through high tariffs and draconian controls on foreign investment in the car industry. Fewer than ten years ago, it even gave public money to save the company from imminent bankruptcy. So, the critics argued, foreign cars should now be let in freely and foreign car makers, who had been kicked out 20 years before, allowed to set up shop again.
Others disagreed. They argued that no country had got anywhere without developing 'serious' industries like automobile production. They just needed more time to make cars that appealed to everyone.
The year was 1958 and the country was, in fact, Japan. The company was Toyota, and the car was called the Toyopet. Toyota started out as a manufacturer of textile machinery (Toyoda Automatic Loom) and moved into car production in 1933. The Japanese government kicked out General Motors and Ford in 1939 and bailed out Toyota with money from the central bank (Bank of Japan) in 1949. Today, Japanese cars are considered as 'natural' as Scottish salmon or French wine, but fewer than 50 years ago, most people, including many Japanese, thought the Japanese car industry simply should not exist.
Half a century after the Toyopet debacle, Toyota's luxury brand Lexus has become something of an icon for globalization, thanks to the American journalist Thomas Friedman's book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. The book owes its title to an epiphany that Friedman had on the Shinkansen bullet train during his trip to Japan in 1992. He had paid a visit to a Lexus factory, which mightily impressed him. On his train back from the car factory in Toyota City to Tokyo, he came across yet another newspaper article about the troubles in the Middle East where he had been a long-time correspondent. Then it hit him. He realized that that 'half the world seemed to be ... intent on building a better Lexus, dedicated to modernizing, streamlining, and privatizing their economies in order to thrive in the system of globalization. And half of the world - sometimes half the same country, sometimes half the same person - was still caught up in the fight over who owns which olive tree'.
According to Friedman, unless they fit themselves into a particular set of economic policies that he calls the Golden Straitjacket, countries in the olive-tree world will not be able to join the Lexus world. In describing the Golden Straitjacket, he pretty much sums up today's neo-liberal economic orthodoxy: in order to fit into it, a country needs to privatize state-owned enterprises, maintain low inflation, reduce the size of government bureaucracy, balance the budget (if not running a surplus), liberalize trade, deregulate foreign investment, deregulate capital markets, make the currency convertible, reduce corruption and privatize pensions. According to him, this is the only path to success in the new global economy. His Straitjacket is the only gear suitable for the harsh but exhilarating game of globalization. Friedman is categorical: 'Unfortunately, this Golden Straitjacket is pretty much "one-size fits all" ... It is not always pretty or gentle or comfortable. But it's here and it's the only model on the rack this historical season.'
However, the fact is that, had the Japanese government followed the free-trade economists back in the early 1960s, there would have been no Lexus. Toyota today would, at best, be a junior partner to some western car manufacturer, or worse, have been wiped out. The same would have been true for the entire Japanese economy. Had the country donned Friedman's Golden Straitjacket early on, Japan would have remained the third-rate industrial power that it was in the 1960s, with its income level on a par with Chile, Argentina and South Africa - it was then a country whose prime minister was insultingly dismissed as 'a transistor-radio salesman' by the French president, Charles De Gaulle. In other words, had they followed Friedman's advice, the Japanese would now not be exporting the Lexus but still be fighting over who owns which mulberry tree.
- from the first chapter of Bad Samaritans The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang
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book awards
2/27/2009
2009 PEN/Faulkner Award to Joseph O'Neill for Netherland
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"New York is not what most people imagine it to be. Just as marriage, family, friendship and manhood are not. Netherland is suspenseful, artful, psychologically pitch-perfect, and a wonderful read. But more than any of that, it's revelatory. Joseph O'Neill has managed to paint the most famous city in the world, and the most familiar concept in the world (love) in an entirely new way."
- Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated
Born in Cork, Ireland, in 1964, novelist and non-fiction author of Blood-Dark Track,
Joseph O'Neill has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his latest book Netherland,
"a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger, and brilliantly achieved ambition: the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st century America from an outsider’s vantage point, and the complicated relationship between the American dream and the particular dreamers."
Now that I, too, have left that city, I find it hard to rid myself of the feeling that life carries a taint of aftermath. This last-mentioned word, somebody once told me, refers literally to a second mowing of grass in the same season. You might say, if you’re the type prone to general observations, that New York City insists on memory’s repetitive mower—on the sort of purposeful postmortem that has the effect, so one is told and forlornly hopes, of cutting the grassy past to manageable proportions. For it keeps growing back, of course. None of this means that I wish I were back there now; and naturally I’d like to believe that my own retrospection is in some way more important than the old S.V.P.’s, which, when I was exposed to it, seemed to amount to not much more than a cheap longing. But there’s no such thing as a cheap longing, I’m tempted to conclude these days, not even if you’re sobbing over a cracked fingernail. Who knows what happened to that fellow over there? Who knows what lay behind his story about shopping for balsamic vinegar? He made it sound like an elixir, the poor bastard.
- from Netherland by Joseph O'Neill.
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book awards
2/21/2009
Stephanie E. Smallwood wins Frederick Douglass Book Prize for Saltwater Slavery
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Unlike the ships, which plied back and forth, though, the human
commodities followed a relentlessly linear course: the direction of
their transatlantic movement never reversed. Ships traced circles.
Commodities traveled in a straight line.
For people who traveled not as emigrants seeking new lives in
new places but as commodities, transatlantic exile admitted none of
the return journeys, correspondence, and other means of contact
by which migrants shaped networks of social and information exchange
between their origins and destinations, the Old and New
Worlds. Atlantic slaves in diaspora did not lack connections to the
“Old World.” But the ties that bound New World slave communities
to their places of origin ran only in one direction. After one
slave ship departed from African shores, another always followed
in its wake, carrying new groups of captives. This diaspora was
nourished, then, only by the perennial flow of captives on the slave
ship’s one-way route of terror. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, it featured none of the regular correspondence and return
journeys that figured so significantly in the dispersals of voluntary
emigrants into the Atlantic system.
Both planters and slaves developed a keen awareness of the ways
the continual churning of the Atlantic trade in captives from Africa
gave specific shape to the slave diaspora in the Americas, particularly
in the significance they accorded to an American, as distinct
from African, place of birth.Writing of Barbados in the first decade
of the eighteenth century, John Oldmixon observed that there was
“a great deal of Difference” between persons who came to Barbados from Africa and their descendants born in the Americas.
“Those that are born in Barbadoes are much more useful Men,” he
explained, “than those that are brought from Guinea.”
It was a view shared by American-born slaves. Not only did
slaveowners favor “the Creolian Negroes”; so too did slaves born
in the New World “value themselves much on being born in Barbadoes,”
and “despise” African “New Comers,” whom they disparagingly
referred to as “Salt-Water Negroes.” Edward Long noted
the same in eighteenth-century Jamaica. Native-born slaves, he observed,
held “the Africans in the utmost contempt, stiling them,
‘salt-water Negroes,’ and ‘Guiney birds.’”
The “saltwater” defined the relentless rhythm of the slave ships.
But its pejorative connotation also hinted at what was problematic
about the perennial appearance of newcomers in immigrant communities
seeking stability and coherence. One could never completely
escape the saltwater, for even once an African captive’s own
middle passage had ended, the communities where that slave’s life
played out in the colonial Americas continued to be molded by the
rhythm of ships returning to deposit still more bodies. Through
their own terminology, the descendants of saltwater slaves articulated
their awareness of the problem of enforced emigration. In
speaking of “saltwater” origins, they gave a name to the interchange
between the slave ship and the slave community, between
the new African migrants continually arriving to take their place
alongside the survivors and the American-born children who were
putting down tentative roots in the new communities, between the
ongoing experience of forced migration and its collective memory.6
In place of the networks that link origins and departures, and transform
the emigrant into an immigrant, for African captives in the Atlantic
system reverberated the traumatic echo of commodification:
the return of the slave ship, the arrival of new exiles into American
slavery, the renewed imprint of the saltwater on the African diaspora.
“Saltwater”: this fragment of the slaves’ language put a name to the crooked lines (social, cultural, epistemological) that shaped
their Atlantic world. It affords an analytical and conceptual category
that defines the Atlantic in historical time and place in a fresh
way. It places the emphasis not on the African “background” of
American slavery, on migration (focusing on captive Africans as
“migrants” instead of “slaves”), or on the “middle passage” as a
metaphor for all that was wrong with New World slavery. Instead,
the concept of saltwater slavery illuminates what forced migration
entailed.
The social geography of black life in the Atlantic arena was demarcated
by the blurred and bloodied boundaries between captivity,
commodification, and diaspora. Slaves did not so much leave
one behind and enter another as proceed involuntarily, propelled
always by agendas and agents other than themselves. With no itinerary
and no directional control over their movement, captives had
no clear cognitive map to guide them through the transition from
land to water, the shift from smaller to larger ships, or the passage
from coastal waters to open sea. The migration of the black captives
was an unforgiving journey into the Atlantic market that never
drew to full closure.
Considering the “saltwater” dimension of slaves’ lives allows us
to piece together a picture of a place, a time, and an experience that
does not otherwise figure in the archival record. Such an analysis of
what happened to captive Africans in the Atlantic offers something
we cannot get at simply by including Africa in our histories of African
America or by singling out African captives as involuntary migrants
or by naming the Atlantic crossing the middle passage. Here
is a history of American slavery that begins in Africa and the Atlantic,
in the saltwater slavery of peoples in motion, a diaspora shaped
by violence encompassing the African, Atlantic, and American arenas
of captivity, commodification, and enslavement. - excerpted from Saltwater Slavery by Stephanie E. Smallwood.
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lit obits
2/20/2009
Sudan novelist Tayeb Salih, 1929 -2009
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Born in 1929 in the Northern Province of Sudan, Tayeb Salih achieved immediate fame in 1966 when his novel. Season of Migration to the North was first published in Arabic in Beirut. Described as being among the six finest novels of modern Arabic literature
by Edward Said, Season of Migration to the North was declared "the most important Arabic novel of the 20th century" by the Arab Literary Academy in Damascus in 2001 and in 2003 it became the first Arabic book to appear in the Penguin Classics series. The translator, Denys Johnson-Davies, wrote the following in his introduction to the 1989 edition:
Season of Migration to the North, a novel written in Arabic by someone almost unknown at the time, quickly became something of a cult work. It is now a book which is featured in university courses and about which doctorates are written. No other modern Arabic work of fiction, not even any of the novels of the recent Nobel prize winner, the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, has achieved the literary status of Season. Its ability to transcend language and culture barriers is evidenced by the fact that it has been translated into languages as diverse as Norwegian and Japanese.
Season has been variously described as an "Arabian Nights" in reverse, or as a story of a modern-day Othello who seeks to turn the political tables on the West by bedding as many of its women as he can. It is also, of course, one of the few intelligent novels written by a Western or non-Western writer about the East-West conflict. Complex and structurally sophisticated, Season tells the story of Mustafa Sa'eed, a brilliant young Sudanese student who is sent to England to complete his education. In England he seeks to wreak his vengeance on the colonialism of which he is a product by exploiting the fascination he possesses for a series of women he seduces. His long years in England end in dramatic disaster. Later he chooses to make a new life in a small Sudanese village at a bend in the Nile, where he marries a local woman, tills the expanse of land he has bought, and brings up a family. Here, at the beginning of the novel, a young villager who has just returned from his studies in England meets Mustafa Sa'eed, finds out about the older man's tragic and dramatic past and not unnaturally is fascinated by someone in whose footsteps he appears to have been treading. Thus the nameless narrator sets about the task of telling Mustafa Sa'eed's story -- and, in doing so much of his own. The events of that story, broken up in terms of time and place, occur in the main in the beautifully evoked Sudanese village and in the London of between the two world wars...
One of the outstanding characteristics of Season is its sheer readability. It is therefore interesting to learn that Tayeb Salih has first set out to write a straightforward thriller and "had no idea about the twists and turns the story was going to take". The novel remains one that possesses the structural tightness, pace and excitement of the best of thrillers. His narrative skill is well shown in the way in which, like a Dashiell Hammett or a Raymond Chandler, he lays clues and whets the appetite for "twists and turns" yet to come. A striking example of this is his mention, on the first few pages of the book, of Mustafa Sa'eed's room of red brick with green windows and a rectangular roof like the back of an ox, which is attached to his village house. It is only towards the end of the book that the narrator enters this room, as though into an Aladdin's cave, in the hope of finding something that will solve for him the riddle of its owner's life. Another instance is to be found in the short passage about Mustafa Sa'eed as a boy travelling on the train from Khartoum to Cairo and meeting a priest. Mustafa Sa'eed informs us that the priest tells him something to which at the time he did not pay much attention. When we are not told then and there what this something is, we as readers either forget about the remark or conclude that the author himself has forgotten about it. But, four pages later, Mustafa recalls that the priest had said to him: "All of us, my son, are in the last resort travelling alone." Again and again in the novel there are references to journeying, to voyages by land and sea, and to the fact that people, like the scenery, are merely landmarks one passes on one's way…
Another important element in Tayeb Salih's writing, one that is missing in most of modern Arabic literature, is his humour and sense of the ridiculous. Many Arab readers have been shocked by the frank eroticism of some of the novel, especially the long scene, surely one of the most delightful in all fiction, in which four elderly villagers, among them the much married and outspoken woman Bint Majzoub, reminisce bawdily about the joys of sex.
Tayeb Salih's writing has attracted enthusiastic appraisals from such writers as Kingsley Amis and John Berger, and on its appearance in English translation; Season of Migration to the North, was chosen by the fiction critic of London's Sunday Times as her favourite novel of the year. Described as a piece of writing that narrows the gap between prose and poetry, it is one of those few novels that demand to be read more than once. – for the full introduction, see Migratory Minds at arabworldbooks.com.
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progressive books
2/4/2009
Bill Moyers interviews Pierre Sprey and Marilyn Young on Bombing Civilians
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BILL MOYERS:
Very often in the White House, the most momentous decisions are, at the time, the least dramatic, the least discussed. And they don't make news, or history, until much later, when their consequences bubble to the surface downstream. There are observers who think that could prove to be the case with a decision made within hours of Barack Obama's swearing in last week.
It started as a few lines in wire reports - a bit of buzz on the web - then a story here and there in the weekend papers. Unmanned American drones like this one, called Predators, honing in on villages in Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan, striking like silent intruders in the night, against suspected terrorists.
Early accounts of casualties varied from a dozen to more than 20 dead and wounded. One Pakistani security official told THE WASHINGTON POST that perhaps ten insurgents had been killed, maybe even a high value target, a senior member of al Qaeda or the Taliban. Then the TIMES of London quoted locals who said "...three children lost their lives" when the missiles destroyed several homes.
Since last August, 38 suspected U.S. missile strikes have killed at least 132 people in Pakistan, where allegedly we are not at war.
In next door Afghanistan, the number is much higher. For seven years American and NATO forces have been chasing Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and the Taliban, not only with Predator drones, but with guided missiles and bomber raids as well. According to the United Nations and the organization Human Rights Watch, aerial bombing has killed or wounded more than a thousand civilians, what the Pentagon calls, "collateral damage."
The death of civilians has brought sharp criticism, including from some of our NATO allies and the president of Afghanistan. They believe the bombing is turning people in both Afghanistan and Pakistan against the West, actually undermining an effective campaign against terrorists.
The bombing of civilians from the sky is an old and questionable practice, argued over since the moment the military began to fly. It was deliberate strategy in World Wars I and II. American presidents approved it in Korea and extensively in Vietnam, again in the first Gulf War, then in Bosnia and Kosovo, and six years ago during the campaign of "shock and awe" over Iraq.
But what lifted those reports last weekend out of the routine is the simple fact that for the first time the air strikes occurred on President Obama's watch. As he said during his campaign, and as Secretary of Defense Gates reaffirmed this week, Obama is escalating America's military presence in Afghanistan. He may increase it to as many as 60,000 troops this year.
When I read the first story about the Predator strikes last weekend, I thought back to 1964, and another president...After an encounter in the Gulf of Tonkin between American destroyers and North Vietnamese torpedo boats, President Lyndon Johnson ordered bombing raids over North Vietnam...LBJ said we want no wider war, but wider war is what we got, eleven years of it.
Now military analysts and historians, including my two guests are wondering aloud - could Afghanistan become "Obama's war," a quagmire that threatens to define his presidency, as Vietnam defined LBJ's?
Marilyn Young is a professor of history at New York University. She's published numerous books and essays on foreign policy, including
Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, The New American Empire and
Iraq And The Lessons Of Vietnam. She is the co-editor of a collection of essays to be released next month titled Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History.
Pierre Sprey is a former Pentagon official, one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's famous "whiz kids" who helped design and develop two of the military's most successful airplanes, the F-16 Falcon Fighter and the A-10 Warthog Tankbuster. But in the late 1970s, with a handful of Pentagon and congressional insiders, Sprey helped found the military reform movement. They risked their careers taking issue with a defense bureaucracy spending more and more money for fewer and fewer, often ineffective weapons.
You will find an essay with his shared by-line in this new book, AMERICA'S DEFENSE MELTDOWN, published by the Center for Defense Information...Marilyn, what did you think last weekend when four days into the Obama administration we read those reports of the strikes in Pakistan?
MARILYN YOUNG:
My heart sank. It absolutely sank. It had been very high. I had been, like I think the rest of the country, feeling immensely encouraged and inspired by this new administration and by the energy and vigor with which he began. And then comes this piece of old stuff on approach to a complicated question that in comes in the form of a bomb and a bomb in the most dangerous of all places. And, yeah, my heart sank, literally.
BILL MOYERS:
Our military, Pierre, says it's sure that it's striking militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And that they're not targeting civilians. Can they be sure? From your experience, can they be sure?
PIERRE SPREY:
I'm sure that their purpose is to strike militants. I have no doubt of that whatsoever. But with the weapons they use and with the extremely flawed intelligence they have.
...
I'd be astonished if one in five people they kill or wound is in fact, a militant...You can't tell with a camera or an infrared sensor or something whether somebody's a Taliban. In the end, you're relying on either, you know, some form of intercepted communications, which doesn't point at a person. It just, you know, points at a radio or a cell phone or something like that. Or, most likely, you're relying on some Afghani of unknown veracity and unknown motivation and who may, may very well be trying to settle a blood feud rather than give you good information.
BILL MOYERS:
But don't these drone planes and Predator missiles provide a commander-in-chief, a President of the United States, with enormous political convenience for being able to order military action without risking American lives?...
PIERRE SPREY:
A very dangerous option because it's so convenient and because at home it's politically acceptable because our boys aren't dying on the ground, it gets us into tremendous trouble, which, of course, in general is true of bombing...Bombing is always politically popular relative to sending infantry and killing our boys.
BILL MOYERS:
Aren't these drone planes and these Predator missiles effective? Don't they get the bad guys, even though they might kill a few civilians?
PIERRE SPREY:
Their importance is enormously exaggerated, as is their glamour. A Predator is a very large radio-controlled model airplane with a 48-foot wingspan and a snowmobile motor in the back. It only goes about 80 miles an hour. And it stays up for 10, 15 hours and carries a missile. And when they launch the missile, the missile is not pinpoint accurate. You know, if it's a house, reasonably often it hits the house it's aimed at.
And when it does, it usually kills a bunch of other people around.
MARILYN YOUNG:
And it's true, you can aim at this table. But the question is who's sitting at - well, they might want to aim at this table. But, you know, who's sitting at the table? And you don't know. Or actually you do want to hit Pierre but you don't want to hit the two of us. Unfortunately, pieces of what hit him hit us. And we are severely injured or dead. But really Pierre is what you wanted and Pierre is what you got. And this is supposed to be a triumph. And it seems to me that it is a triumph in the most abstract sense. And if you are on the ground as one of these things come at you, the material meaning of being bombed becomes very clear. And that's not ever discussed or taken into account...What it feels like to be bombed, not to be in the crosshairs going down but to be on the ground looking up. And the footage that we have in the sense we have of drones is of someone 10,000 miles away pushing a button and, wham, there it goes. But nobody's sitting there on the ground looking at what happens after it goes up.
PIERRE SPREY:
And what happens on the ground is for every one of those impacts you get five or ten times as many recruits for the Taliban as you've eliminated. The people that we're trying to convince to become adherents to our cause have turned rigidly hostile to our cause in part because of bombing and in part because of, you know, other killing of civilians from ground forces. But we're dealing with a society here, that's based on honor, you know? The Pashtun are very ancient people.
BILL MOYERS:
This is the tribe in the southern part of the-
PIERRE SPREY:
Well, it's not a tribe. It's a nation. This is 40 million people spread across Afghanistan and Pakistan, you know, who don't even recognize that border. It's their land.
BILL MOYERS:
Forty million?
PIERRE SPREY:
There's 40 million of them. That's a nation, not a tribe. Within it are tribal groupings and so on. But they all speak the common language. And they all have a very similar, very rigid, in lots of ways very admirable code of honor much stronger than their adherence to Islam.
PIERRE SPREY:
They have to resist, you know, being invaded, occupied, bombed, and killed. It's a matter of honor. And they're willing to die in unbelievable numbers to do that.
BILL MOYERS:
Are you suggesting that these strikes could be contributed to the destabilization of Pakistan, one of our allies?
MARILYN YOUNG:
It's clear that they're doing that. I mean, there never was before an organization called Taliban in Pakistan. This didn't exist as an organization. It does now. It's unclear to me as well the relationship between our punitive enemy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban. That's unclear. And it's, it's very unclear what American policy will be with respect to either group. Mainly what's unclear is what our goal is in Afghanistan. It's really unclear.
BILL MOYERS:
Well, we went there to get Osama bin Laden after 9/11 and to free Afghanistan from the brutal grip of the Taliban, religious extremists who were wrecking misery and creating a base there for al Qaeda, right? That was-
PIERRE SPREY:
And we failed miserably on both missions, you know? al Qaeda's obviously flourishing, undoubtedly stronger around the world than it was when we started this in 2001. And what did we liberate the country from?
We certainly caused the Taliban to withdraw. We didn't defeat them. They withdrew. And Afghanistan turned into a battleground for warring huge, extremely violent drug gangs. All these provincial governors, all these people we call warlords euphemistically are large-scale drug gangsters...And the country was ripped apart by them. And that's why the Taliban is coming back
BILL MOYERS:
You saw the story in "The Washington Post" this week from Secretary of Defense Gates who says, you know, we're not longer going to be involved with these gangsters you talk about, with a corrupt government of Karzai in Kabul. We're going to concentrate instead on doing something about the mess you just described by waging a war that will ultimately defeat the insurgents. That was, in effect, his message. New strategy.
...
Involvement with the civilian government.
MARILYN YOUNG:
And we'll focus on the provinces. And there is also an implication from earlier stories that there will be an effort to buy off various warlords to try and import some of what was done in Iraq into Afghanistan. The problem is the focus remains a military solution to what all the other information I have says is a political problem. So I don't care how you slice the military tactic, so long as your notion is that you can actually deal with this in a military way, you're just going to march deeper and deeper into what Pete Seeger used to call the Big Muddy or I guess in Afghanistan it's pretty dry. It would be some other expression. But the point is if you can't figure out a political way to deal in Afghanistan then you can only compound the compound mess that Pierre talked about.
PIERRE SPREY:
Yeah, the military approach is always and the conventional think tank approach and the General Petraeus approach is, first, we'll establish security...And then we'll fix the government...That doesn't work. In fact, that's already failed. And the more we try to fix the security situation, the more we will drive these people, particularly the Pashtun, into implacable opposition. And whether the military solution is more bombing from Predators or from F-16s or more special forces on the ground, you know, attacking villages and inadvertently killing lots of civilians, it doesn't matter. As long as security comes first, the mission will fail because these people are sick and tired of a government that's oppressing them and a foreigner who's killing them.
BILL MOYERS:
There was a photo the other day of a protest in Pakistan, a few days after a drone attacked. The banner reads, quote, "Bombing on tribes. Obama's first gift to Pakistan." Now, that's part of the blowback, isn't it?
PIERRE SPREY:
That's incredibly dangerous...I mean, I don't think people in America have any sense of how dangerous that is. By bombing into those areas, those traditional Pashtun areas, that the Pakistani government long ago made a pact, you know, at the founding of the state of Pakistan to never invade those areas and to leave the Pashtun to govern themselves. And we are forcing the Pakistanis to break that pact, both on the ground with their army. And we're breaking it by bombing the Pashtun in Pakistan. That is taking a weak and also rotten Pakistani government and crumbling it. That's putting them on the horns of a dilemma that they don't need. Why is that so dangerous to us? Because this is a nuclear armed country. And when they fall apart and fall into the hands of people like, people that are running Afghanistan, you could have a nuclear war with India, you know? I mean, we're talking about not just blowback but we're talking about catastrophe could result.
MARILYN YOUNG:
You know, the thing that gets me, Obama appoints George Mitchell and he says what we're going to do is listen. What we're going to do is figure we're just going to listen. And in his first press interview on that Arab TV network, which was a brilliant move I thought, he talked about respect.
...
He used the word "respect" repeatedly. And it's an excellent word to use and an important one. He, it's not impossible to say we're going to pause in Afghanistan and listen. We're going to think about it. We're going to figure it out. We're not going to move militarily at this moment until we know what we're doing.
BILL MOYERS:
But suppose, Marilyn that somebody from the Pentagon came to the White House right after the inauguration and said, "You know, we've had this drone attack planned. And we've spotted these insurgents whom we think really are militants--"
...
"and killers in their own right. And we want to - we want you to approve this raid." And suppose he had said no four days after the inauguration and that had been leaked. You know what would have happened on all of the right-wing talk radio shows in.
...
And maybe "The Washington Post" and editorial page and others like that. He has no backbone, right? I mean, wasn't he in a sense, trapped by this option?
MARILYN YOUNG:
Yeah, but that's, that's you know, he's read history. He should at least or he should have been very familiar with the Johnson administration. That's exactly the trap that Johnson walked into. And it's not necessary. I have this odd notion that the American public is actually, in the main, adult enough to listen and think and to respond to a president who says, I'm going to tell you what's going on. For eight years there has been miasma, lies, deception, bizarre behavior. We're going to change that and not just economically and not just domestically. But we're really going to see what we're doing everywhere. That means I did not approve a military move I was urged to approve because I want to know what I'm doing. And I'm sure my fellow citizens will join me in wishing to know what it is the United States is doing militarily before it does it.
PIERRE SPREY:
I would applaud, I would have the utmost admiration...For any leader, even for a senator or congressman who had the guts to say exactly what you just said. But it's not in the cards. And we knew it wasn't in the cards when during the campaign Obama subscribed to the fact that we're in a war on terror...This is not a war on terror. You know? And anybody who starts from the premise that it's a war on terror is heading straight into disasters error.
...
BILL MOYERS:
I don't understand that because George W. Bush defined this as a war on terror. And I think Obama must be using the same invocation, you know?...This is all part of the war on terror. He said it in his inaugural address.
PIERRE SPREY:
Yes, he said that. I was appalled. You talk about our hearts sinking.
PIERRE SPREY:
9/11 was not an act of war.
...
It was a criminal act. It was a simple.
...
criminal act by a bunch of lunatic fanatic violent people who needed to be tracked down and apprehended and tried exactly as you would with any other lunatic violent person, like we do with our own domestic terrorists, like the guy who bombed the Oklahoma federal building...Exactly the same thing we did to him is what we should have launched on a huge basis, of course, on a huge international police basis and not called it.
MARILYN YOUNG:
And there would have been totally international support.
PIERRE SPREY:
It's not a war.
...
We, by calling it a war, we have glorified al Qaeda. We have glorified the cause of violent radical Islam. All that tiny minority have become heroes. And we made them heroes. We made their propaganda. We made their case for them.
BILL MOYERS:
Let me read you an excerpt from the official White House statement on foreign policy under President Obama. Quote, "Obama and Biden will refocus American resources on the greatest threat to our security, the resurgence of al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They will increase our troop levels in Afghanistan, press our allies in NATO to do the same, and dedicate more resources to revitalize Afghanistan's economic development." There you have a very clear statement of their intentions that we're going to concentrate on the war. And in fact by the end of this year there'll be 60,000, not 30,000 American troops in Afghanistan. And there's no indication the strikes, the air strikes that are killing civilians are going to stop.
PIERRE SPREY:
And the 60,000 will be useless...You know, the Russians at the peak of their invasion - who dealt with the Afghanis a good deal more brutally than we did - had over 150,000 and a trained a 250,000 man Afghan army. And they lost. 60,000 is a recipe for failure, defeat, and ultimately a disgraceful withdrawal by the United States. One way or another, no matter how nice a face we put on it, we'll be kicked out of there just like we were kicked out of Vietnam.
BILL MOYERS:
Speaking of Vietnam, and you've written so much about this, we have a conversation between President Johnson and, your old boss, Secretary of Defense McNamara about bombing. Take a look at this.
ROBERT McNAMARA [SOT]:
If we hurt them enough it isn't so much that they don't have more men as it is that they can't get the men to fight because the men know that once they get assigned to that task their chances of living are small. And I, myself, believe that's the only chance we have of winning this thing. And when they see they're getting killed in such high rates in the South and they see that supplies are less likely to come down from the North, I think it will just hurt their morale a little bit more. And to me that's the only way to win, because we're not killing enough of them to make it impossible for the North to continue to fight. But we are killing enough to destroy the morale of those people down there if they think this is going to have to go on forever.
..
BILL MOYERS:
Now, Secretary McNamara and President Johnson were talking about a different kind of bombing from the drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan and a lot more of it. But do you see a historical parallel there?
PIERRE SPREY:
Absolutely.
MARILYN YOUNG:
The notion that you will break the will of the enemy, I - that's such a depressing clip. I just can't - I mean, it just sinks me right back into the moment when all that was going on. Winston Churchill is held up as a great hero because he defies German bombing and says we will fight them everywhere. They can't break our will. And he is considered a great hero. McNamara is incapable of reading that same spirit back into his enemy. Instead, he assumes that he can bomb them into submission. And it's the same notion now that you can scare them, break their will. And the drone, this precise thing, is maybe, in the minds of those who use it, even more scary because you don't see us but we see you. And zap we gotcha. But it's, again, an effort to deal with a political issue with force. And it doesn't work.
BILL MOYERS:
Pierre, as I said in the introduction, you helped develop a couple of very effective fighter planes. Is there a moral dimension to this use of drones that you didn't see in a more conventional kind of weapon?
PIERRE SPREY:
There's a moral dimension to every kind of bombing that destroys civilians, particularly bombing that destroys more civilians than military people. You can't avoid it. There's nothing notable about the drones that changes that. And the moral dimension is very simple. And it dates back to the original theologian of bombing, Julio Doue, a rather fanatical Italian from World War I who first hypothesized, wrongly, that you could destroy an enemy's morale, exactly what you said, and win victories without any ground armies if you simply bombed them enough. And secondly, that the bombers would always get through, that they would always defeat fighter opposition and antiaircraft opposition. Both propositions have been provided in history over and over and over again to be not only wrong but thumpingly wrong.
BILL MOYERS:
Has civilian bombing ever been effective, Marilyn?... MARILYN YOUNG:
No. I don't think ever... PIERRE SPREY:
You know? Churchill tried it. Churchill, by the way, after that brave stand to resist the Germans, turned around and, for politic reasons, just like our leaders, decided that it would be a great idea to simply area bomb Germany. What that means is to kill civilians. And they deliberately set out to kill German civilians on the same premise of Julio Doue that we would kind of kill them into submission. And it failed miserably.
BILL MOYERS:
Does it seem to you that President Obama believes he can escape the outcome in Afghanistan that George W. Bush did not escape in Iraq?
MARILYN YOUNG:
Right. I think he does think he can escape it. I think anybody would imagine coming into fresh into power would imagine he can make it happen better. If he didn't believe that, he would not have said - he would not have signed off on the drone attack. So I think he thinks he can escape it. And by fiddling within the same set of tactics that the Bush administration did. And isn't it any - there's no new thinking going on.
...
PIERRE SPREY:
He's surrounded by people who tell him, you know, "Boss, you know, all we need is, like, 30,000 more people here to secure the nation. And we need to get rid of Karzai because he's a problem. And we got a few more Band-aids here, and it'll all be fine." So-
BILL MOYERS:
We couldn't keep up with who we were getting rid of in Saigon, you know? I'm serious about that.
...
PIERRE SPREY:
It's - same thing's going to happen when we get rid of Karzai because the people behind him are worse. And they will be worse. And Obama is going to be in exactly that situation, surrounded by a bunch of Robert McNamaras, except not so smart.
BILL MOYERS:
So do you believe "The New York Times" was accurate the other day when it said Afghanistan could quickly come to define the Obama presidency?
MARILYN YOUNG:
I hope not. I cannot tell you how much I hope not. I think - he's got so much he wants to do. And he has so many good things he wants to do. And he starts out, you know, really marvelously, trying to do those good things. And if he is deflected, as Johnson was, that would be, well, it's this sort of tragedies that America's good at. It turns out to be as much a tragedy for the people we're supposedly engaged with as it is for us.
PIERRE SPREY:
I'm pessimistic on that. I'm more pessimistic than Marilyn...He's already so committed through his campaign of reinforcing Afghanistan and continuing the path we've been on unless he finds an act of enormous political will and courage and a way of explaining it to the American people that, you know, we've engaged on a path that's wrong and that's not going to work. And I'm about to reverse course. That's really hard to do...And if he doesn't reverse course, it's the same quicksand. It's deeper and deeper, step by step.
MARILYN YOUNG:
See, suppose that Osama bin Laden stayed where he was. Suppose he did. I mean, the acts of terror occur or they don't occur and they're deflected or they're not deflected no matter where he's living, right?
...
So the question of why we're in Afghanistan looms very large indeed.
...
Since it doesn't seem to relate in any way I can really name with precision American security.
BILL MOYERS:
Two important books, "Bombing Civilians: A 20th Century History," with Marilyn Young, and "America's Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress," with an important chapter from Pierre Sprey. Thank you both for being with me on the Journal.
-- excerpted from The Bill Moyer's Journal.
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lit obits
1/31/2009
John Updike, 1932 - 2009, David Margolick on John Updike's Adieu to Ted Williams
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"Updike on Williams is a stirring spectacle. It always is when one genius lionizes another." In the wake of the recent death of author extraordinaire John Updike, "the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit novels highlighted a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism so vast, protean and lyrical as to place him in the first rank of American authors" (Christopher Lehmann-Hauft),
David Margolick revisits his classic essay on Ted Williams' final game and appearance in Fenway Park, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu", first published in The New Yorker on October 10,
1960 (John Updike, Hall of Famer).
John Updike was twenty-eight years old. "While the Boston press was out in force, the national press apparently was not. Updike was prescient enough to know that something monumental was afoot: not only was one of baseball's greatest careers coming to a close, but also a storied, stormy marriage: Williams' tortured 20-year long union with Boston's fans and newspapermen. Updike took his seat -- not in the press box but in the stands, along with everybody else."
"The obituaries and appreciations rightly praise Updike for his incredible versatility, as a novelist, poet, and short story writer, critic. They don't mention "journalist." But the piece is filled with those elusive details journalists so prize. Some are timeless, immutable, like the loneliness of ballplayers on the field. Many others are evanescent. Like the best journalists, Updike wrote incipient history: anyone keen enough to spot certain things will spot certain things destined to disappear. There's the forgotten feel of baseball played before small crowds on August weekday afternoons. And batters who still held bats with their bare hands. And fans who smoked cigars. And black players who were still so rare that you still felt the need to call them black. And superstars, Williams most notably, who, unprotected by agents and public relations men, still spoke their minds, and paid dearly for it."
Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.
Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the smoke of Williams' miracle. Fisher continued to pitch, and escaped further harm. At the end of the inning, Higgins sent Williams out to his left-field position, then instantly replaced him with Carrol Hardy, so we had a long last look at Williams as he ran out there and then back, his uniform jogging, his eyes steadfast on the ground. It was nice, and we were grateful, but it left a funny taste.
One of the scholasticists behind me said, "Let's go. We've seen everything. I don't want to spoil it." This seemed a sound aesthetic decision. Williams' last word had been so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution, that already it felt a little unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle collapsed. But the game, though played by clumsy midgets under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over. Williams' homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4-3. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlin Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled. Vic Wertz, pinch-hitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases. Willie Tasby hit a double-play ball to the third baseman, but in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex-Red Sox infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first baseman and into the Red Sox dugout. The Sox won, 5-4. On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York. So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.
- from Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
by John Updike.
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book awards
1/28/2009
2008 Costa Book of the Year Award to Sebastian Barry for The Secret Scripture
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"Sebastian Barry has created one of the great narrative voices in contemporary fiction in The Secret Scripture. It is a book of great brilliance, powerfully and beautifully written." -
Matthew Parris, chair of the Costa Book of the Year Award judges.
A "very wonderful night," - Sebastian Barry, as he accepted his £25,000 prize at the award ceremony.
How I would like to say that I loved my father so much that I could not have lived without him, but such an avowal would be proved false in time. Those that we love, those essential beings, are removed from us at the will of the Almighty, or the devils that usurp him. It is as if a huge lump of lead were lain over the soul, such deaths, and where that soul was previously weightless, now is a secret and ruinous burden at the very heart of us.
When I was ten or so my father in a fit of educating enthusiasm brought me to the top of the long thin tower in the graveyard. It was one of those beautiful, lofty slim buildings made by monks in a time of danger and destruction. It stood in a nettled corner of the graveyard and was not much remarked on. When you had grown up in Sligo it was just there. But no doubt it was a treasure beyond compare, put up with only a murmur of mortar between the stones, each one remembering the curve of the tower, each one set in with perfect success by ancient masons. Of course it was a Catholic yard. My father had not got that job because of his religion, but because he was deeply liked in the town by all and sundry, and the Catholics did not mind their graves being dug by a Presbyterian, if it was a likeable one. Because in those days there was often much greater ease between the churches than we give credit for, and it is often forgotten that under the old penal laws in vanished days the dissenting churches were just as harried, as he often liked to point out. At any rate, there is seldom a difficulty with religion where there is friendship. And it was only later that this distinction in him made any difference. At any rate I know he was exceedingly liked by the parish priest, a little perky darting man called Father Gaunt who loomed so large later in my own story, if a small man can be said to loom large. -
from The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
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