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Translator, critic and BBC script editor, Barbara Bray, 1924 - 2010

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

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.

Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award to D. A. Powell

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

D. A. Powell has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for fourth collection of poetry, Chronic, published by Graywolf Press. The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award is given annually by Claremont Graduate University to honor work by a midcareer poet. The panel of final judges for the 2010 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards were Ted Genoways, Linda Gregerson, Paul Muldoon, Carl Phillips, and Charles Harper Webb. "D. A. Powell is one of the major poets of our time, and it’s wonderful to have the Kingsley Tufts Award recognize that", announced Graywolf Press senior editor Jeffrey Shotts. "Considering that Powell was selected by such a diverse committee of esteemed poets, that makes it all the sweeter."

[dogs and boys can treat you like trash. and dogs do love trash]

dogs and boys can treat you like trash.   and dogs do love trash
to nuzzle their muzzles.    they slather with tongues that smell like their nuts

but the boys are fickle when they lick you. they stick you with twigs
and roll you over like roaches.    then off with another: those sluts

with their asses so tight you couldn't get them to budge for a turd
so unlike the dogs: who will turn in a circle showing & showing their butts

a dog on a leash: a friend in the world. he'll crawl into bed on all fours
and curl up at your toes.    he'll give you his nose.    he'll slobber on cuts

a dog is not fragile; he's fixed.    but a boy: cannot give you his love
he closes his eyes to your kisses.    he hisses.    a boy is a putz

with a sponge for a brain.   and a mop for a heart: he'll soak up your love
if you let him and leave you as dry as a cork.     he'll punch out your guts

when a boy goes away: to another boy's arms.    what else can you do
but lie down with the dogs.   with the hounds with the curs.    with the mutts

- a poem by D. A. Powell published in the Boston Review.

The banks have had nine months to creatively increase the real cost of borrowing: Robert Manning on Credit Card Nation

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Just as we demand credit card users to act responsibly, we demand that credit card companies act responsibly too - President Obama's words on May 22, 2009 before signing the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act (CARD).

The CARD Act finally took effect on Monday, Feburary 22. It prohibits some of the worst industry practices including billing systems that generate finance charges on paid-off balances, some retroactive interest-rate increases and unrestricted marketing to consumers under the age of 21. But in the nine months since May, credit card companies have found new ways to increase their profits from consumer borrowing despite the CARD Act including annual fees, cutting credit limits, hiking interest rates and various hidden charges. On Tuesday, Robert Manning discussed the CARD act on DemocracyNow!. Robert Manning is the author of Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America’s Addiction to Credit. and the founder of the Responsible Debt Relief Institute.

This would have been a great bill when it was first discussed about seven or eight years ago, but in the depths of this recession and the fact that there is no usury law and there are not any fee caps, and the fact that the banks had nine months to creatively increase the real cost of borrowing,... most Americans...are going to be shocked at how limited the help is, offered by the CARD Act...It’s one thing to be able to be told how long it’s going to take you to pay off your bill. It’s another thing to find out that your interest rate’s been doubled from 15 percent to 29.9 percent...[and] it’s happened already in the nine months preceding the implementation of the act...This is a fee-driven industry now. The effort to disconnect risk and lending and transfer that risk to investors means that banks make more and more of their money...in late and penalty over-limit fees. Banks are going to be charging annual fees....Any benefit that you get is going to come with a fee. - Robert Manning, speaking on DemocracyNow!.

Robert McChesney and John Nichols the history and necessity of government subsides for US journalism

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Discussing their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert McChesney and John Nichols relate how for the first hundred years of American history, it was understood that the duty of a democratic state was to see to the existence of an independent, uncensored journalism. Journalism was seen as a public good. The government helped American journalism by the granting of subsidies. There was no assumption that independent journalism would be provided for by market forces.

There are two great components of free press in the United States in our tradition. The first great component is the one we all know about, that government shouldn’t censor content, it shouldn’t regulate journalists, it shouldn’t prohibit anyone from entering doing media, like any of us. And that should never be compromised. But the second great tradition of the American free press tradition is that it’s the first duty of the state to make sure free press exists. And that part has been lost in the shuffle. One of the striking things we discovered, Amy and Juan, when we did our research is we reread all the First Amendment cases of the US Supreme Court in the last hundred years, all the freedom of the press cases. And what was striking in Hugo Black, in Potter Stewart, in all the great cases, was the assumption that it was the first duty of a democratic government to make sure a credible Fourth Estate exists. Otherwise the entire governance of the country will collapse. You cannot have a democracy and self-government and the rule of law.

Just start with the American tradition first, our own tradition in the first half of the nineteenth century. We wanted to compute, you know, this federal subsidy from the post office, which primarily was the distribution arm of newspapers—that’s 95 percent of its traffic—and the printing subsidies in the first half of the nineteenth century. How significant were they? And so, we actually went back and determined what percentage of GDP they were in the first half of the nineteenth century. If we had the same percentage of gross domestic product today, by the federal government as a subsidy to journalism, how much would the federal government pay? And it was $30 billion. I mean, it was such an enormous investment by the federal government to create a free press. It wasn’t just a piddly side thing; it was, after military, the largest expense of the federal government for the first seventy-five years of our history, into the Civil War period. And then we went to look at other—you know, generally, when people ask about government subsidies, they think of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot. They think of all these terrible dictatorships. We said, well, that’s not really the relevant comparison for the United States. We should look at other democracies. What are they doing in Europe and in Asia, and even in third world countries that are democracies? And what we discovered is, all of them, or almost all them, have significantly large public media, community media and journalism subsidies. They vary from country to country, but they’re all enormous compared to the United States. And if you look at northern Europe, for example, this average country up there in Scandinavia or Holland or Germany, in US terms, if you put it to per capita basis and put it in the United States, we’d have to spend between $20 and $35 billion a year to subsidize public media and journalism to be equal to those countries.

- two selections from a DemocracyNow! interview with Robert McChesney and John Nichols.

Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died: An extract from A Scattering by Christopher Reid, the 2009 Costa Book of the Year

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

"My old, obscure life has gone. I am sort of famous. Radios have been broadcasting, and newspapers have retailed, in their different styles, the story of my book: a set of elegies on the death from cancer of my wife in 2005. What began as an intimate expression of love and grief has become a public parade. Bewildering. How did Douglas Dunn, whose Elegies, poems about the death of his first wife, in 1985 won the first Whitbread Book of the Year — the Whitbread preceded and developed into the Costa — cope with this? Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, also and perhaps not coincidentally about his dead wife, Sylvia Plath, was a later winner. Hughes had died by the time of his award: the ultimate evasive action. No local radio interviews for him!" - from Christopher Reid on winning the Costa Award.

Late home one night, I found
she was not yet home herself.
So I got into bed and waited
under my blanket mound,
until I heard her come in
and hurry upstairs.
My back was to the door.
Without turning round,
I greeted her, but my voice
made only a hollow, parched-throated
k-, k-, k- sound,
which I could not convert into words
and which, anyway, lacked
the force to carry.
Nonplussed, but not distraught,
I listened to her undress,
then sidle along the far side
of our bed and lift the covers.
Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died.
Adjusting my arm for the usual
cuddle and caress,
I felt mattress and bedboards
welcome her weight
as she rolled and settled towards me,
but, before I caught her,
it was already too late
and she’d wisped clean away.

from A Scattering, by Christopher Reid.

Tributes to People's Historian Howard Zinn, 1922 - 2010

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The best human being I've ever known. The best example of what a human can be, and can do with their life. - Daniel Ellsberg from A Memory of Howard

Howard Zinn broadened the battle when he claimed conventional U.S. texts and school courses failed by celebrating wars, legislation, Presidents, generals and captains of industry. He stood history back on its feet when he told on how masses of American women and men, people of color and poor whites built the country first as slaves and indentured servants, and then as mill hands, assembly line workers and maids. He further antagonized traditional scholars by rejoicing in the disobedience of slave rebels, union organizers and radical civil rights and anti-war agitators. He found dissidents to be America's real patriots and democrats -- not the George Washingtons, Thomas Jeffersons and Andrew Jacksons who talked of liberty while they traded in slaves, and sent posses after those who escaped. - William Loren Katz from Changing History

He really conveyed to everyone he came into contact with that there was no more meaningful action than to be involved in struggle, no more fulfilling or important way of living one’s life than in struggle fighting for justice. And so many people, myself included, but, you know, millions of people around the world, countless number of people, they changed their lives by encountering Howard Zinn—Howard changed their lives—reading A People’s History of the United States, hearing one of his lectures, meeting him, hearing him on the radio, reading an article he wrote. He really inspired people to create the kinds of movements that brought about whatever rights, whatever freedoms, whatever liberties we have in this country. And that really is the legacy that it’s incumbent upon all of us to extend and keep alive and keep vibrant. - Anthony Arnov from DemocracyNow!.

Anyone who believes that the United States is immune to radical politics never attended a lecture by Howard Zinn...What matters is not who's sitting in the White House. What matters is who's sitting in!" he would say with a mischievous grin. - Dave Zirin from Howard Zinn: The Historian Who Made History

His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives. When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide. - Noam Chomsky quoted by Mark Feeney and Bryan Marquard from Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87

No American historian has left a more lasting positive legacy on our understanding of the true nature of our country, mainly because his books reflect a soul possessed of limitless depth. Howard's People's History Of The United States will not be surpassed. As time goes on new chapters will be written in its spirit to extend its reach. - Harvey Wasserman from How the Great Howard Zinn Made All Our Lives Better

Johann Hari on P. W. Singer's Wired For War

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

If virtually no American forces had died in Vietnam, would the war have stopped when it did – or would the systematic slaughter of the Vietnamese people have continued for many more years? If "we" weren't losing anyone in Afghanistan or Iraq, would the call for an end to the killing be as loud? I'd like to think we are motivated primarily by compassion for civilians on the other side, but I doubt it. Take "us" safely out of the picture and we will be more willing to kill "them". - Johann Hari from The age of the killer robot is no longer a sci-fi fantasy.

The Nato forces now depend on a range of killer robots, largely designed by the British Ministry of Defence labs privatised by Tony Blair in 2001. Every time you hear about a "drone attack" against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that's an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it "chooses". Fox News proudly calls it "the GI of the 21st century." And billions are being spent on the next generation of warbots, which will leave these models looking like the bulky box on which you used to play Pong. At the moment, most are controlled by a soldier – often 7,500 miles away – with a control panel. But insurgents are always inventing new ways to block the signal from the control centre, which causes the robot to shut down and "die". So the military is building "autonomy" into the robots: if they lose contact, they start to make their own decisions, in line with a pre-determined code.

This is "one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human warfare," according to PW Singer, a former analyst for the Pentagon and the CIA, in his must-read book, Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Defence in the Twenty-First Century. Humans have been developing weapons that enabled us to kill at ever-greater distances and in ever-greater numbers for millennia, from the longbow to the cannon to the machine-gun to the nuclear bomb. But these robots mark a different stage.

The earlier technologies made it possible for humans to decide to kill in more "sophisticated" ways – but once you programme and unleash an autonomous robot, the war isn't fought by you any more: it's fought by the machine. The subject of warfare shifts. - Johann Hari from The Independent, The age of the killer robot is no longer a sci-fi fantasy

Jamin Raskin on the Supreme Court campaign finance ruling which removes limits on corporate campaign spending

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

We’ve had some terrible Supreme Court interventions against political democracy: Shaw v. Reno, striking down majority African American and Hispanic congressional districts; Bush v. Gore, intervening to stop the counting of ballots in Florida. But I would have to say that all of them pale compared to what we just saw yesterday, where the Supreme Court has overturned decades of Supreme Court precedent to declare that private, for-profit corporations have First Amendment rights of political expression, meaning that they can spend up to the heavens in order to have their way in politics. And this will open floodgates of millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal, state and local elections, as Halliburton and Enron and Blackwater and Bank of America and Goldman Sachs can take money directly out of corporate treasuries and put them into our politics. And I looked at just one corporation, Exxon Mobil, which is the biggest corporation in America. In 2008, they posted profits of $85 billion. And so, if they decided to spend, say, a modest ten percent of their profits in one year, $8.5 billion, that would be three times more than the Obama campaign, the McCain campaign and every candidate for House and Senate in the country spent in 2008. That’s one corporation. So think about the Fortune 500. They’re threatening a fundamental change in the character of American political democracy. - Jamin Raskin from a DemocracyNow! interview.

"Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom", Tracy Kidder and Peter Hallward on Haiti

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted. - from the New York Times, Country Without a Net, by Tracy Kidder.

The noble "international community" which is currently scrambling to send its "humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.

Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.

Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day". Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.

It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered.

As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, points out: "Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses." Meanwhile the city's basic infrastructure – running water, electricity, roads, etc – remains woefully inadequate, often non-existent. The government's ability to mobilise any sort of disaster relief is next to nil. - from the Guardian, Our role in Haiti's plight, by Peter Hallward.

January 17 2010: See also from Common Dreams, Why the US Owes Haiti Billions – The Briefest History by Bill Quigley.

At 42, she was one of the best poets of her generation, Rachel Wetzsteon, 1967 - 2009

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

"At 42, she was one of the best poets of her generation", writes Adam Kirsch in memory and admiration of Rachel Wetzsteon who took her own life on Christmas day, 2009. "In a perfect world", Kirsch wrote earlier, "Rachel Wetzsteon would be one of the most popular poets of her generation. You would see people in the outdoor cafes along Upper Broadway reading copies of Sakura Park, her third collection, the way pilgrims to Greenwich Village carry Scott Fitzgerald or Edna St. Vincent Millay...Wetzsteon’s poems are odes to sharpened senses, to possibilities held open, and to the city whose own sharp openness seems like a standing invitation" (Adam Kirsch, from a Contemporary Poetry Review of Sakura Park by Rachel Wetzsteon).

Gold Leaves

Someone ought to write about (I thought
and therefore do) stage three of alchemy:
not inauspicious metal turned into
a gilded page, but that same page turned back
to basics when you step outside for air
and feel a radiance that was not there
the day before, your sidewalks lined with gold.

Five-Finger Exercise

When things get hot and heavy this weekend or one August
twenty years from now, and I start tapping hexameters
up and down the shoulder-blades of my beloved (insert
auspicious, trustworthy-sounding, stolid but fun name here
for I can conjure none), I hope I do it right,
never losing sight of the skin whose golden toughness
allows the counting, never moving my fingers so briskly
that I can't hear his breathing, and never forgetting, even
in the lonely heights of sublimest inspiration—
What is your substance?... O rose ... and grey and full of sleep—
to flip the warm flesh over and whisper, It had to be you.

- two poems by Rachel Wetzsteon published in The Corland Review.

You have to decide which side you are on: there is always a side. Commitment does not exist in an abstraction; it exists in action: Dennis Brutus, 1924 - 2009

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

For almost half a century Dennis Brutus was at the forefront of the campaign to bring down the apartheid system in South Africa, the place where he was born and which gave him the awareness of racism, poverty and injustice that has informed his work ever since. In 1963 Brutus was shot by the police in South Africa and later imprisoned for 18 months alongside Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. After being exiled from his homeland, Brutus became a prominent political organizer, who in 1970 led the successful campaign to expel apartheid South Africa from the Olympic Games. While working as a university lecturer in the US, he also became a pioneering advocate of postcolonial studies within academia, helping to introduce African literature as a category within the curriculum....

Without doubt, there is a certain Audenesque quality about Brutus's own poetry, in particular in his ability to move from personal feeling to the spirit of the collective - the shared hopes and fears of people who are usually on the receiving end of history. To use poetry as a means of fighting back against the forces of oppression and exploitation is for Brutus not just an intellectual choice but an existential cry from the heart for social change to come sooner rather than later:

In the dark lanes of Soweto,
amid the mud, the slush, the squalor,
among the rusty tin shacks
the lust for freedom survives stubbornly
like a smoldering defiant flame
and the spirit of Steve Biko moves easily.

Auden's poem "Spain 1937" is a particular point of reference in another poem by Brutus - "Love; he Struggle." When Auden writes "To-morrow he rediscovery of romantic love ... but to-day the struggle," Brutus paraphrases this radical postponement with his own dialectic of personal freedom and political necessity:

Conched, contrapuntal our concord
Day's breath wracks our peace,
Our dreams disrupt in blustery discord
Buckling to winds' capricious buffet we desert our calms
- Ah love, unshoulder now my arms!

Like the early Auden, Brutus also sees his role as that of a public poet, "the world's troubadour" as he describes himself, one who seeks to give a voice to those whom the system has silenced. There is therefore in Brutus's poetry an implicit sense of radical dialogue with people whose lives remain outside the focus of the established media. This is where the real struggle s taking place, and it is within this context of solidarity with the dispossessed that Brutus has always situated himself as a writer:

An old black woman,
suffering,
tells me I have given her
"new images"
- a father bereaved
by radical heroism
finds consolation
in my verse.
then I know
these are those I write for
and my verse works.

- Ronal Paul, from a review of Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader that originally appeared in Socialism and Democracy, issue 21, and has been reprinted if full at AfricaResource.

The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom - an extract from Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award winning book

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

A "rising star of Zimbabwean literature" according noble laureate to J. M. Coetzee, Petina Gappah writes (in her own words) "about ordinary people living in a situation rendered extraordinary because of politics. I hope the stories tell you something about the Zimbabwean character", she says, "the resilience, the tenacity, the humour. The desire to survive."

An excerpt from An Elegy for Easterly, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award winning book by Petina Gappah.

The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom. They look at Rosie's own lips that owe their reddish pinkness to artifice, they think, and not disease. Can Rosie see what they see, they wonder, that her newly made husband's sickness screams out its presence from every pore? Disease flourishes in the slipperiness of his tufted hair, it is alive in the darkening skin, in the whites of the eyes whiter than nature intended, in the violently pink-red lips, the blood beneath fighting to erupt through the broken skin. He smiles often, Rosie's bridegroom. He smiles when a drunken aunt entertains the guests with a dance that, oustide this celebration of sanctioned fornication, could be called obscene. He smiles when an uncle based in Manchester, England, calls on the mobile telephone of his son and sends his congratulations across nine thousand kilometres shortened by Vodafone on his end and Econet on the other. His smile broadens as the son tells the master of ceremonies that the uncle pledges two hundred pounds as a wedding gift; the smile becomes broader still when the master of ceremonies announces that the gift is worth two hundred million dollars on Harare's parallel market. He smiles and smiles and smiles and his smile reveals the heightened colour of his gums.. - from An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah

David Cortright on Obama's shallow understanding of the priciples of Just War Theory

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

"I found the Nobel speech disappointing," David Cortright wrote to Chritopher Hayes, The Nation's Washington, DC editor. "To use the Nobel dais to justify the use of military force is unseemly. The president's characterization of the historic role of US military power was distorted, and his interpretation of just war theory was incomplete." David Cortright has had a long history of public advocacy for disarmament and the prevention of war begining with the time he served in Vietnam and organized his comrades against the war. Currently the Director of Policy Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, David Cortright has also been the executive director of The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy and co-director of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. In 2002 he helped to found the Win Without War coalition in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His full text to Chritopher Hayes:

The president asserted that US military policy has helped to "underwrite global security." More accurate would be an admission that many of our adventures have created global insecurity. Vietnam, the wars in Central America in the 1980s, the invasion of Iraq, countless interventions by the CIA--these and other actions have sown suffering and insecurity. The US has supported democracy in some settings but very often we have subverted democracy and overthrown legitimately elected democratic regimes, in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), etc.

The president invoked just war principles but showed a shallow understanding of the criteria. The most important principle of just war theory is a presumption against the use of force, a belief that war is almost always unjust and can be justified only under the most dire circumstances and only if strict ethical criteria are satisfied. He mentioned a few of the criteria, without probing them in depth, but did mention the standard of 'probability of success.' Under that criterion, the war in Afghanistan cannot be judged just, since there is very little probability that the war can be pursued to achieve military victory, however that is defined.

The president's assertions about Afghanistan did not acknowledge the fact that war is an inappropriate means of combating terrorism. The Rand Corporation study of 2008 on how terrorist groups end found that military force was responsible for ending terrorist groups in only 7 per cent of the cases. Political bargaining (43 per cent) and effective law enforcement (40 per cent) were the primary factors accounting for the end of terrorist groups. The military's own counterinsurgency doctrine calls for a campaign that is 80 per cent nonmilitary. The US effort in Afghanistan is the reverse, more than 80 per cent military.

Peace demands responsibility and sacrifice, yes, but it is built primarily through nonmilitary means. The president mentioned some of these, but he failed to mention that US foreign policy systematically undervalues these approaches. In Afghanistan the US is spending far more on military approaches than on development and humanitarian assistance. -- David Cortright quoted by Christopher Hayes in A Practical Peace Advocate on Obama's Nobel Speech from The Nation magazine.

More on Just War Theory and Reassessing U.S. engagement in Afghanistan by David Cortright:

The initial United States military operation in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was widely considered a just war, a classic case of self-defense. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral message in November 2001 acknowledging the “right and duty of a nation and the international community to use military force if necessary to defend the common good by protecting the innocent against mass terrorism.” Today’s mission is more complex and uncertain, however, and demands a new ethical assessment. Its fundamental goals are the same, defeating Al Qaeda and preventing global terrorist attacks, and are certainly just. The related objective is also just: helping to build capable governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan that can meet the needs of their people and protect against violent extremism. The question about both objectives is not whether they are just, but whether they can be achieved through the application of military force. It is a question of means rather than ends. U.S. military involvement in the region is based on three fundamental strategic assumptions: first, war is a necessary and appropriate means of defeating Al Qaeda and preventing global terrorist strikes; second, the Taliban is equivalent to Al Qaeda and thus a legitimate target of military attack; and third, NATO must fight and win a counterinsurgency war against the Taliban and related jihadist groups. The first two assumptions determined policy decisions in the weeks after 9/11, and they have remained at the heart of U.S./NATO strategy ever since. The third assumption evolved over time and drives the current long-term military commitment. In recent years a fourth strategic dimension has entered the equation—the extension of military operations to Pakistan. Each of these assumptions is highly questionable strategically and poses serious ethical dilemmas. -- from the opening paragraphs of No Easy Way Out Reassessing U.S. engagement in Afghanistan by David Cortright.

Obama's rejection of Landmine Treaty lacks vision, compassion, and basic common sense

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

"President Obama’s decision to cling to antipersonnel mines keeps the US on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of humanity. This decision lacks vision, compassion, and basic common sense, and it contradicts the Obama administration’s professed emphasis on multilateralism, disarmament, and humanitarian affairs." - Steve Goose, Arms Division director at Human Rights Watch

"We cannot understand this shameful decision. We cannot understand the Obama administration’s decision to not be transparent in this ‘review’ process of the landmine policy and we definitely cannot understand President Obama’s decision to continue with the Bush policy." "This decision is a slap in the face to landmine survivors, their families and affected communities everywhere – especially because in just a few short weeks, he will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." - Jody Williams, 1997 Nobel Laureate.

While there is no evidence that landmines are designed like toys to attract children, children are attracted to landmines because they are easily attracted by unknown objects. The results can be deadly. Children in heavily mined areas may become so familiar with mines that they forget they are lethal weapons, a reversal, as one mine expert noted, of "the common perception of the 'hidden mine'". In northern Iraq, "rural children commonly use mines as wheels for toy trucks and go-carts; in Cambodia they play boules with B40 anti-personnel mines." Even where children recognize the danger of mines, "there can not be an automatic assumption that such knowledge will deter them from tampering with mines. Especially among young boys, the risk element itself may prove a fatal attraction. In Afghanistan they compete in throwing stones at PFM-1 'Butterfly' mines, the winner being the child whose stone causes the mine to detonate; similar behavoir has been observed in other mined regions. - from After the Guns Fall Silent: The Enduring Legacy of Landmines.

Those who saw him hushed: Let the Great World Spin, the National Book Award winner by Colum McCann

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

"There's hardly a line in the novel about 9/11, but it's everywhere if the reader wants it to be", said Colum McCann speaking about Let the Great World Spin, the book which won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction. Set around Philippe Petit's 1974 World Trade Center tightrope walk, Let the Great World Spin is an allegorical story inspired by 9/11, "a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s." A short excerpt:

Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke–stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper.

Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky.

He could only be seen at certain angles so that the watchers had to pause at street corners, find a gap between buildings, or meander from the shadows to get a view unobstructed by cornicework, gargoyles, balustrades, roof edges. None of them had yet made sense of the line strung at his feet from one tower to the other. Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary. It was the dilemma of the watchers: they didn’t want to wait around for nothing at all, some idiot standing on the precipice of the towers, but they didn’t want to miss the moment either, if he slipped, or got arrested, or dove, arms stretched. - an excerpt from Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Robert Jensen: Of Turkeys and Holocausts

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately -- the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. - an excerpt from How I Stopped Hating Thanksgiving and Learned to be Afraid by Robert Jensen. Read the entire article at Counterpunch.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908 - 2009, his works as a practical anti-racist manifesto

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

"I don't know if everyone read the works of Lévi-Strauss as some sort of practical anti-racist manifesto, infinitely more efficient than big Satre-like declarations. But for me, his works had this effect. Given my working conditions, what I was doing, I was bound to be touched by his work. There was his beautiful text "Race and History", which was an important text and theoretical manifesto. What I see as even more potent, are the analysis operations themselves, which abstract from absurdity the things that were most stigmatized in particular by racism: things like rituals, wedding practices, or sexual traditions, etc... Without Lévi-Strauss's intention to rehabilitate anyone, the mere fact of making science was also a political act. In that way, it's the new figure of the intellectual who doesn't speak about everything, as a prophet would. Max Weber says: "A prophet is the one answering in a total way to total questions." Philosophers such as Satre are still admirable and can be also important: "The prophet speaks when nobody knows what to say anymore." Periods of crisis, etc. But at the same time, we were a bit tired of that kind of discourse, as prophets can often speak in the void, at the wrong time. So, someone telling us: "See, we can understand. We can analyse. There are conceptual tools, for understanding things that seemed incomprehensible, unjustifiable, absurd..." I think it was a very important thing." - Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on Claude Lévi-Strauss from youtube (translation).

"Lévi-Straussian structuralism turned on the notion that the human brain is essentially a computerlike organ operable only by a binary code. And Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that this basic binary logic is always the same everywhere, a universalist argument if ever there was one, framed in terms somewhat narrower than what anyone has ever attributed to Chomsky. And yet Lévi-Strauss--a student of Franz Boas, Ferdinand de Saussure and Karl Marx--understood his emperical investigations, collectively, as a demonstration of relativist, semiotic and Marxian principles. That is, his work tracks the same binary oppositions (up/down, high/low, in/out, hot/cold) across cultures and through history, but it also shows that those basic building blocks of human existence can be put together in any number of patterns, that they can be mobilized to very different ends. In Lévi-Strauss's opus, then,one encounters basic similarities in the context of larger differences: The irreducible element of culture are everywhere the same, but cultures are everywhere different." - from The Trouble with Nature by Roger N. Lancaster.

Power exercised by man over his fellow man is always a usurpation, Francisco Ayala, 1906 - 2009

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Born in Granada on March 13, 1906, novelist and sociologist Francisco Ayala was one of Spain's leading intellectuals for the second half of the twentieth century. Ayala died Tuesday at age 103. He had long outlived the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco which had led him to flee into exile in 1939 and influenced, in the words of T. Rees Shapiro, "the enduring theme of his literary career -- the toxic effect of power". Although Francisco Ayala taught at leading American universities for over 20 years, very few of his works are available in English. He was the author, however, over 50 books and was the winner of many prestigious literary awards including the Cervantes Prize in 1991 and the Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters in 1998.

In Mr. Ayala's novels, characters trudged through lives of moral and political chaos. "Death as a Way of Life" (1964), initially published in Spanish a few years earlier as "Muertes de Perro," describes a South American country under a totalitarian government. Another of his works, "Los Usurpadores" ("The Usurpers," 1949), was a collection of short stories he wrote in Argentina and examines the immorality of the abuse of power.

In one story from the collection, "The Bewitched," a Spaniard during the Middle Ages spends his life fighting bureaucracy and trying to gain an audience with the king. When he is finally granted a visit with the monarch, he finds the ruler so mentally and physically handicapped that he can't speak coherently, let alone govern a country. Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was reported to have called the story "a masterpiece of Hispanic literature."

"The Inquisitor," another notable story in "The Usurpers," focuses on a grand rabbi who converts to Catholicism and is so fanatical in his prosecution and devoted to proving the purity of his faith he doesn't spare his only daughter from arrest when she denounces his work.

The book's theme, Mr. Ayala wrote in the introduction, was "power exercised by man over his fellow man is always a usurpation." - from the Washington Post obituary by T. Rees Shapiro.

If you think you'll to be rich someday, why resent million-dollar bonuses: Barbara Ehrenreich on Positive Thinking

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Barbara Ehrenreich on positive thinking as a system of social control:

When bad things happen to people you say, "Well, it's really your attitude that has to change."...You take people who have been really victimized, and I use that word advisedly, with cancer and with lay-offs from unaccountable corporations. And then you tell them, "Well, you just have to change the way you think." And that's very clever.

On the connection between positive thinking and the subprime-mortgage meltdown:

I have traced how positive thinking became the corporate culture in America. It was mandatory to be positive. So you had companies who would literally fire people for being negative, negative in the sense of maybe raising too many questions, maybe expressing a doubt. One example is the man who was the head of the real estate division of Lehman Bros. in 2006 and told his CEO that he thought the whole housing thing was a bubble and they should start getting out, and he was fired for that.

On positive thinking as an ideology that discourages indignation about extreme economic polarization:

If you think you're going to be rich someday, why would you be resentful of million-dollar bonuses or $10 million CEO salaries, you know? You're going to be there, so it would be against your own self-interest to stand up for your class interests.

On the alternative to positive thinking:

One of the major sources of misery in the world is poverty. We can do one of two things. We can tell poor people they need to change their attitudes, and there's a whole industry of that kind of thing -- motivational speakers that tell people to get over their bad attitudes towards wealth so it will just come to them. Or we can say, "What's the cause of this? How are we going to get together and do something about it?" And I come down on that side. - excerpts from an interview between Emily Wilson and Barbara Ehrenreich from AlterNet.

Four Canadians tortured in the name of fighting Terror, Kerry Pither wins Ottawa Book Award for Dark Days

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Dark Days tells the story of a Canadian national security investigation gone wrong through the eyes of four of its targets: Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, Maher Arar and Muayyed Nureddin. The book chronicles how all four men were accused of terrorist links, detained overseas and subjected to brutal torture while being interrogated with questions from Canadian agencies. No evidence was ever produced to back the allegations against them and all were eventually released and returned to Canada.

"Most Canadians know about Maher Arar, but few know the extent to which there was a pattern behind his case -- that what happened to him happened to at least three other Canadians too," said Pither.

"All of these men are still working for justice, to clear their names and move on with their lives. For Arar, it's waiting for the Obama administration to accept responsibilty for its role and clear his name, and for El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin it's about waiting for an apology from the Canadian government for its role in their ordeals," said Pither. "And for all of us, it's about ensuring the changes are made to stop this from happening again." - from the Dark Days Book Launch

The lock slid open and the door swung into the cell. Ahmad had to jump out of the way. The guard ordered him out and led him back upstairs into a room, where he tied a piece of rubber over his eyes.

Then the interrogation started. Someone said they’d received information about him and read out the names and addresses of his family in Toronto, the make and colour of his car, and its licence plate number. They knew his address, the man said, and read it out to him. He had the wrong apartment number, so Ahmad corrected him.

Then the beating started. Ahmad was punched in the face and kicked at. The men in the room screamed insults at him, his family, and his faith.

One of the interrogators leaned in and told Ahmad that they were going to bring Rola, the woman he’d been going to Damascus to marry, in and rape her, there, in front of him.

Ahmad was terrified — did they have Rola? He knew this kind of thing happened in Syria. He pleaded with them, saying that he had told them the truth.

“No,” the man yelled. “We need to hear something new!”

“I can’t invent something,” said Ahmad.

“No,” the man replied. “You can invent something.

Then things got worse. Ahmad was ordered to strip down to his shorts and lie on his stomach on the floor. In pain from the beating, he moved slowly. The men yelled at him to move faster as he struggled out of his shirt and pants. When Ahmad was lying down, the men grabbed his hands and handcuffed them behind his back, then lifted his feet up and tied his wrists to his ankles with a rope. He was like a sheep ready for slaughter, Ahmad says.

Ice water was poured all over his body, then he was whipped on his feet, legs, knees, and back with a thick metal cable. The pain was sharp and fierce, but the first strokes were the worst. After a few lashings, Ahmad’s feet and legs went numb, but that was what the dousing with ice water was for – to bring the feeling back. He could see the interrogators’ shoes from under the blindfold. The ones without the cable kicked him in the face and his back and legs.

Ahmad begged the men to stop, asking why they were doing this to him. They just laughed. “They were asking me to repeat my story, and I kept repeating what happened, and they said, ‘That’s not what we want to hear.’ They kept threatening me and mocking me and said they were going to inflict permanent injury – they said I wouldn’t be able to have kids later on.”

Ahmad lost track of how often he was taken down to his cell and back up for more torture but remembers that eventually he couldn’t walk and had to be dragged up and down the stairs. In his cell, without the blindfold, he saw his legs were covered in blood. His feet were too swollen to fit into his shoes.

“After I just couldn’t take it any more, I told them, ‘I’m willing to say whatever you want me to say,’” Ahmad recalls.

The men asked him about people he knew in Canada – including Abdullah Almalki and Maher Arar. - excerpted from Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror by Kerry Pither (read a longer excerpt at kerrypither.com).

The Potato that Became a Tomato, Playgiarist Raymond Federman, 1928 - 2009

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0800

You're born a playgiarizer or you are not. It's as simple as that. The laws of playgiarism are unwritten, it's a tabou, like incest, it cannot be legalized. The great playgiarizers of all time, Homer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Diderot, Rimbaud, Proust, Beckett, and Federman have never pretended to do anything else than playgiarizing. Inferior writers deny that they playgiarize because they confuse plagiarism with playgiarism, not the same. The difference is enormous, but no one has ever been able to tell what it is. It cannot be measured in weight or size. Plagiarism is sad. It cries, it whines. It always apologizes. Playgiarism on the other hand laughs all the time. It makes fun of what it does while doing it. - Raymond Federman on playgiarism from An Interview With Ray Federman

No single writer of our age has captured the true spirit of Diogenes more than Raymond Federman. No, not even his old friend Samuel Beckett whom he idolises and quotes at every opportunity. But then Federman was the very first Beckettian. When his Ph.D. board challenged Federman that Beckett was a charlatan, he retorted angrily “You’ll see, Beckett will win the Nobel prize for literature in ten years time”---he predicted the exact year! Federman integrates all of the essential modes of cynical discourse: action, laughter and silence into his prolific writing. The victim who refuses to see himself as a victim, was given in that small closet not only the gift of life, but the gift to make others laugh---laugh at a world that he knows to be truly absurd, laugh at himself, laugh at The Laugh That Laughs At The Laugh. - from Raymond Federman: Cynic by Ian Cutler, author of Cynicism From Diogenes To Dilbert.

THE POTATO THAT BECAME A TOMATO

Oh! the potato
the po ta to
the po to ta
the pa to to
the to pa to
the ta to pa
the po to ma
the pa mo to
the po ma to
the ta po mo
the po mo to
the po to po
the pa to ta
the ma to po
the ma pa to
the to mo pa
the mo ta to
the to to ma
the ma to to
the to ta mo
the to ma ta
the to ma to
Ah! the tomato

ACRO BATICS
Y
O U
give a work out
to your essential muscle
and all your other muscles
essentially
also get a work out
*****
***
*
therefore
exercise your
essential muscle
as often as possible
so that
IT
stays
I N
g
o
o
d
shape
to make
all your other
muscles also profit

- two of five anti-poems by Raymond Federman

I've had to learn to live by writing, not the other way round. Herta Müller wins Nobel prize in literature

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0800

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.

Milton Meltzer, 1915 – 2009

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0800

"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.

I knew I had no hope of winning: Simon Van Booy wins Frank O'Connor Short Story Award for Love Begins in Winter

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0800

"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

I saw my soul become flesh: Jean Valentine wins Wallace Stevens Award

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0800

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.

Iconic poet and punk rocker, Jim Carroll, 1950 - 2009

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0800

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)

Wallace Shawn on The Quest for Superiority

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0800

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!

Michael Parenti on Italian American Identity

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0800

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.

Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0800

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.

Slavoj Zizek on occupation by bureaucracy and the quiet slicing of the West Bank

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0800

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.