Read Red

A traitor to the cause

2012-01-08T11:58:00.000-05:00

That's me.

I've betrayed book lovers everywhere. Not to mention made myself a hypocrite, flouting my own blog posts decrying the trend.

Yes, that's right. I bought an e-reader.

While I'm admitting, let me admit this too: I'm glad I did. Ithink.

Once I was handed a gift of the moneyto get one, and the price dipped below a hundred dollars, and I finishedobsessively researching and comparing the various machines, and I quizzedeveryone I know who has used one, and I tried several out, and once I woke upone morning too many with a painful neck from lugging fat books day in day out,I decided. And once I decided I quickly made my move.

I got a device by Sony, which was the first manufacturer ofe-readers although it's now been eclipsed in sales figures and hype by others. Theversion I got is the company's latest, newest, called the Sony Reader WiFi, andI'm pretty darned sure I made a good choice. It's the only high-qualitye-reader that offers full online access and still has an e-ink screen. Theother newish readers with which you can go online all have shiny LCD screens,not good for reading for long periods. With e-ink this is not, of course, adevice for gaming or movie watching or any of that crap but none of that crapis what I want to do. I want to read, books, newspapers, whatever, and for thatthis contraption is perfect. It's set up very nicely for quick easy libraryborrowing, for quick easy downloading of free books from Google or ProjectGutenberg, for emailing, for reading periodicals, it handles any and everye-book format out there, and of course it lets you buy e-books. The latter Ihave not yet done. At this point I've got over a dozen books on my reader, and allare either free downloads, including TheCommunist Manifesto which I just love knowing I now have on my person atall times, or library loans.

A big disappointment, which has nothing to do with thisparticular device, is that it turns out there aren't that many e-booksavailable for library borrowing. One reason is that there just aren't that manybooks available in electronic format yet. OK, fair enough. The other, however,is more sinister. Publishers--that is, capitalists who make books for the purpose of making money--are refusing to sell more than minimal numbers of e-books to libraries.Afraid that library loans will cut into their profits, they're trying to forcepeople to buy rather than borrow e-books. And sure enough, I've found it quitetough to get the library books I want electronically. There are so fewavailable copies that there are long lists of people lined up waiting theirturn for every one of the scant e-books available. In my first online library session looking for books last weekend, Ispent about an hour and only managed to actually retrieve four books. Well I'lllive with that for now; after all it's not much different than thephysical-world experience of using libraries, where I've often walked in lookingfor one book, not found it but walked out with several other titles.

There are other frustrations. The touch screen is sometimestoo sensitive, sometimes unresponsive. I flew into a terrible howling rage onmy second day of reading on the device when it suddenly froze up completely. Icouldn't turn the page backward or forward, couldn't close the book, couldn'teven turn off the machine. I'd been deep into a reading session, engrossed in abook—my god, can you imagine suddenly not being able to keep reading! Nophysical book has ever done that to me, just closed itself up and not let mecontinue. It really made me crazy, and I started yelling that I was going toreturn it—I mean, really, what's the use of the thing if it blocks you fromreading?—but then finally after about 10 minutes, during which I'd beensearching online for what to do about the problem, it came back to life. Thathas not happened again since, and if it does I now know how to reboot thething. In any case I have one more week to decide whether I'm definitely going tokeep it. There's a 30-day return policy, and if it freezes up again I mightdecide to return it.

I'm not going to return it. Who'm I kidding? Because here's thething, the unexpected thing: I love it! I love its slim sleek metallic redpretty handle-ability. I love its near weightlessness. I love how easy it is toread on it.

Yes, it is. All my worries about how different e-readingwould be were, it turns out, unfounded. It required no getting-used-to period.There was no learning curve whatsoever. I started reading a book and it wasexactly like starting to read a book. I read a book. It was an identical experience to, you guessed it, reading a book.

It's worth keeping in mind, I think, that all these machines, e-readers, tablets, smartphones, all the touchscreen and related technologies, are in their infancy. The e-reader I got might be the third iteration of Sony's offerings, but in truth all e-readers are first-generation devices. No doubt considerably improved new makes will keep hitting the market. Those of another class who can afford to buy every new and improved version will continue to do so, upgrading every year or so, remaining always on the leading edge. Our class? We content ourselves with some variation on my approach: watching, waiting, then, if and when we feel the need and decide we can afford it, making our move, buying a good-enough commodity and living with it for as long as we can or until it dies and we're forced to either live without it or buy whatever we can afford again at that point. In fact, I'm currently at a similar stage with regard to my laptop. It's almost five years old, and true to the profiteers' planned obsolescence design, it's on its last legs so I'm searching for the cheapest available replacement that meets my needs. It won't be the newest shiniest one with the most bells and whistles. Over time, as ever newer and shinier models are marketed, mine will come to seem outdated and shabby even as it continues to perform the (really quite limited) functions I require, and no doubt I, for even socialists, at least the imperfect ones like me, are not immune to the marketers' want-want-want buy-buy-buy siren song, will wish for the latest, flashiest, coolest while continuing to make do with that lamentably minimal machinery, that which does what I need it to do.

World without women

2012-01-03T13:04:00.000-05:00

I'm in the 11th and last day of my holiday break, one of the few perks of university employment (the main other one being casual dress), and I can report that I read three books during these days off. Which would be a good thing if only I could report that they were three books I liked. Alas, that is not the case. Even though each was technically proficient, very well written, of high literary quality, engrossing, even, I found them all flawed in various ways. One flaw that all three books, each written by men, shared is their male-centric narrative orientation.

The worst offender goes beyond male-centeredness, in fact travels deep into misogyny. This is Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross. It's a strange, unpleasant, ultimately creepy, dirty-feeling experience reading such a book--a book all of whose main female characters, rather than fully fledged fully imagined complex individual human beings who act with agency and are portrayed with depth and dimension, are instead caricatures of womanhood's worst, that is, the wife. The wife, in all her irrational, hysterical, crazy, contradictory, impossible to please--for yes, each wife is seen only through the eyes of her husband with the exception of one brief passage that basically sets up this wife's coming murder as more or less her own fault--extremes. The wife, who drives the husband always to dreams of killing her, such dreams thickly interwoven with the husband's deep endless helpless love of this unfathomable mysterious creature, this sex object whose sole function is to frustrate his simple heartfelt desire to live a good life with her. Here with this book we find fully ripened, plucked, and offered up proudly the cultural fruits of patriarchal society: profound misogyny served up via very fine writing (hence how dirty I felt at the end, for even as I loathed this book I couldn't put it down), extremely creative literary work, interesting postmodern tricks of structure and meaning. Art, then. Misogyny as high art.

One specific aspect of Mr. Peanut that I found offensive, shallow and thoroughly inauthentic was its treatment of a female character's struggles with weight issues. The book I'd read just before this one also featured a very fat character, this one a man, and, I'm sorry to say, an even less true, honest or insightful depiction of the consciousness, feelings, self-image and motivations of a fat person. I'm sorry to say it because the book is Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks. I respect and admire Banks, have liked several of his books and adore one, Cloudsplitter, as among my all-time favorites. Here, however, it's not just on the fat front that I feel he fails. The fat character, the Professor, falls flat altogether. Since his part of the story is key, nearly as key as the central character called the Kid's, the Professor's never coming to life is a fatal difficulty, one from which this novel cannot recover. Which is too bad, because it's an interesting story Banks tells here, an interesting topic he takes on in telling the story of the Kid, a young white working-class man forced into homelessness after being convicted of a "sex crime." Banks is known for his portrayals of characters like this, indeed his exploration of what it is to be a man in this society, and I do think that with the Kid he has crafted a poignant, credible, thought-provoking portrait of a young man adrift in the currents of this vulgar, vile, materialistic, pornographic culture. I wish he'd left the Professor out of it altogether; I don't think he accomplishes what he meant to with this far less than successfully realized character. As for women, well for all intents and purposes, there are none. The very few female characters make only brief appearances and only stand in, at that, for some archetype. Worst, I was very disappointed in how Banks sets up the Kid's mother as pretty much the villain of the piece, her self-centered pathetic party-girl failure to, well, mother her son presented as a glib explication of how he got so, well, fucked up. Yeah yeah yeah blame the mother, it's always the mother's fault. What an unfortunately easy way out. I'm sad Banks took it.

I don't have anywhere near such serious criticism on the female front of the first book I read over the break, Zone One by Colson Whitehead, so it's a little unfair of me to include my comments about this book in this post. But I did somehow tumble my tuchas down into a land of all male authors over the holidays, a world without a woman's perspective anywhere to be found, so I'll go on here with a bit about this book. Which is, to my knowledge, the first zombie novel by a first-rate author of serious literary fiction. I've read all of Whitehead's fiction. I believe that his first novel, The Intuitionist, was such a masterpiece that it really wouldn't matter if he'd only written pure dreck since then, his reputation would stand on that achievement (and by the way the protagonist is a woman). Of course he has not written anything like dreck. His fictional output has been by my lights a little uneven, some books better than others, but always worth reading. As I think I've said before on this blog, Colson Whitehead is incapable of writing a bad sentence. This is a very fine artist. That much holds true for his foray into zombieland. From the opening page, his literary brilliance shines. Sentence by sentence, he wows. With insight, wordplay, ideas, cultural and social commentary. Yes, this too is a pretty male-oriented book, but although there are only a couple female characters and they don't get much to do or say, no characters except the main one, known as Mark Spitz, do, so I see no great sexist crime here. I do, sorry again to say, have a couple complaints. One is of a type I almost never make: the writing is too good. The language is so pretty, it soars and zings so, that it far outshadows the story itself. Actually, the story itself is brief and thin and the beautiful writing can't sustain it. The few times that plot intervenes and something happens, something shocking or gory, the impact is blunted by the angle of approach. Does this mean a great literary author can't write an effectively scary and horrifying zombie novel? Who knows, but in this novel the terror--the literal terror, I mean, the OMG a drooling undead thing is about to bite my face off--is muted. There is the existential dread, yes, and there is certainly the broad bemused consideration of the zombielike state of this society--yes, this is pretty much the point of the whole book. Surprised as I am to feel this way, though, I find that not enough. The symbolism overpowers the story, and the result is unsatisfying.

My other unhappiness about Zone One is the same one I've noted here before about other horror and sci-fi books and movies: I feel let down at the limits of postapocalyptic imagination. I mean, here we are, the world as we know it has pretty much ended, the bedraggled remnants of scattered humanity are left to try to save themselves, destroy the monsters and remake the world, and what do they do, how do they go about it? Why, the same old way they went about destroying the world in the first place. The corporations are in charge, working hand in hand with a dishonest, corrupt provisional government, the government and corporations arming and supplying the zombie hunters, and so on. I mean, really? There's no one left alive to think that there might be a better way of organizing things this time around? In the real world, the ever more appalling ravages of late-stage capitalism--which after all is what Whitehead is commenting about throughout the novel--are bringing on crisis after crisis, impoverishing more and more people, making life worse and worse, and all this will eventually lead to the ultimate crisis to which the only possible response will be socialist revolution. So why is it that in the fictional world of zombies, or aliens, or vampires, in all these fictional futures in which the accumulated ills of this society have led to an ultimate final crisis, nobody does what human beings without a doubt will actually do, that is get the idea to pull together, work together cooperatively, reorganize society in a new, better way? Why is this so far beyond the reach of the literary imagination? Not only would it be more plausible, I think it'd be a hell of a riproaring story too. The bourgeois undead vanquished by the living masses united in a revolutionary monster-demolishing front.

My year's best

2011-12-28T14:43:00.000-05:00

As every year, this year's list of the best books I readranges from new releases back through the previous two centuries. I've read 73so far, will probably finish one or two more by year's end, notquite up to my record-breaking 80 of last year but they do say there's more tolife than reading …

I have no doubt Medical Apartheid will be on 2012's list.However, I'm moving through it quite slowly. This is not a book you can rush.

Anyway. Here's the best of my 2011 reading life. Seventeen fiction,one poetry, one history. In no order.

Cellophane by Marie Arana

The Price of a Child by Lorene Cary

Spartina by John Casey

We the Animals by Justin Torres

Wading Home by Rosalyn Story

Mr. Toppit by Charles Elton

Pym by Mat Johnson

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Montecore – The Silence of the Tiger by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise by Georges Perec

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman

The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Poetic Injustice by Remi Kanazi

Century of the Wind by Eduardo Galeano

I'll be buying The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry

2011-12-22T16:57:00.003-05:00

I'm not a fan of the New York Review of Books, why would Ibe? Today, though, I found myself pointed there after hearing that the poetryworld has joined a battle prompted by a negative review of a new anthology.Negative, it turns out, is a euphemism. The review, by the venerable HelenVendler in the NYRB's November 24 issue, heaps scorn on The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry andreviles its editor, Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate RitaDove—and does so in a breathtakingly blatant racist spew, the latest in theendless chorus of yowls and yelps that issue like clockwork from the we-love-dead-white-menliterary establishment whenever and wherever other voices, especially those ofpeople of color, are brought to the fore.

In this, the latest such case, Vendler excoriates Dove for,among others, the crimes of (1) deeming such voices worthy of inclusion in acentury's collection; (2) asserting that Black women, in one passage that hasVendler sputtering with oppressor-lackey outrage, "can express themselvesin poems as richly innovative as the best male poets of any race"; (3) notingthe social-historical context of the poems; (4) celebrating the HarlemRenaissance. And (5)—this criticism deserves special attention because of its brazen white-supremacist sensibility—Vendler accuses Dove of "tippingthe balance" toward poets of color because they, according to Vendler, make up 15 of the 20 bornbetween 1954 and 1971 whose work closes the anthology. "Tipping thebalance" against whites, that is. That is, Dove is here indicted for the crime of daring to flip the standard equation. For when have any of thesecharacters ever been outraged by an anthology or section of an anthology inwhich most of the poets were white? Yeah, right.

Of course there are occasional feeble efforts to couch thecrux. To no effect. The thrust is so clear. The cheek of these people, you canalmost hear Grande Dame Vendler sniff … why, in my day those people knew their place …

I haven't linked to her scuzz because it's so offensive but you can get to it easily enough. Here is Rita Dove's reply, published as a letter to the editor in the latest,December 22, issue of the NYRB. And here, in an interview with Dove and poetJericho Brown on the Best American Poetry blog, Dove says in part:

I don't know if thisline of attack is a sign of despair or fury on part of some critics who definethemselves as white -- whatever that means in our mongrel society. Are theytrying to make a last stand against the hordes of up-and-coming poets ofdifferent skin complexions and different eye slants? Were we -- AfricanAmericans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans -- onlyacceptable as long as these critics could stand guard by the door to examineour credentials and let us in one by one?

Toward the end of her review, Helen Vendlerreveals much about the skewed thought processes that seem to inform thesecritics when she writes: "Of the twenty poets born between 1954 and1971 (closing the anthology), fifteen are from minority communities (Hispanic,Black, Native American, or Asian-American), and five are white (two men, threewomen).” My husband was in Germany tending to his sick mother when thereview came out, so I emailed him a scan. Half an hour later, he emailed meback. "I can't believe Vendler topped off her diatribe with bean countingso offensive, she’s put herself in league with Nazis and the Ku KluxKlan", he wrote. "Has she lost all historical perspective? Injuxtaposing 'white' with 'minority communities', counting among the lattereverybody who does not adhere to her imaginary Caucasian purity principles, sheincriminates herself. Just like the Nazis tagged every German as Jewish who hada Jewish grandparent, just like the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk ascribed to the'one drop rule', she lumps together everybody who is not 'rassenrein'[racially pure] white, including all those of the 'fifteen from minoritycommunities' who are of mixed racial heritage."

Heroes & martyrs, defiled

2011-12-16T13:01:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Harriet A. Washington's searing, infuriating,important book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Although you'd think itwould be naïve to be shocked by any given piece of information, any newrevelation, about the depraved depths this country's racism has reached, Ican't come up with any other word but shocking for what Washington presentshere. Over years of painstaking research that must have been extremelydifficult on many levels, she unearthed indisputable evidence of massivesystemic institutionalized crimes against Black people from slavery times rightup through today—crimes committed by and in the name of medical science, mostof which had been until now either forgotten or deliberately concealed. Thesecrimes are horrific. They range from unethical experimentation to malignneglect to forced medical and surgical treatments to intentional inducement ofillness or injury to outright murder to grave robbing and unauthorizedpost-mortem uses of the stolen cadavers for training and even entertainment.

In reading about this latter issue, how the bodies ofdeceased people of African descent have been taken without their or theirfamilies' consent and used for everything from medical-school education tocircus display—and not merely on occasion, no, systematically, such that mostU.S. doctors right up through to the present day can assume that these were thebones and tissue they trained on—I came across two particularly devastatinginstances that filled me with rage.

The first was in 1859. This paragraph comes in a discussionof how bodies were procured for 19th-century medical schools:

Newspaper descriptions of executions regularly noted that asa matter of course, the bodies of black, but not white, criminals were to bedissected. One account read: "The execution of Cook and Coppic, white men,Copeland and Green, colored, took place at Charleston [Virginia] on Fridaylast. … The bodies of Cook and Coppic were taken to Harper's Ferry in a trainwhich was waiting at the depot. The bodies of the negroes have been givento surgeons and medical students."

Cook and Coppic, Copeland and Green! Even before thereference to Harper's Ferry I recognized the names. For these are four of theheroes of the historic October 1859 raid on the U.S. Army arsenal at Harper'sFerry, planned as the initial attack in what was hoped would swell into a widespreadguerrilla war to end slavery and led by the great abolitionist John Brown.Black and white lived, planned, fought and died together—only to have thebodies of the Black heroes desecrated. You can find more details about thisdespicable final affront here.

Lest anyone think this practice is a thing of the past, Washington'sbook also reports this, perhaps even more upsetting: In 1998, almost35 years after 13-year-old Addie Mae Collins was murdered, one of the fourlittle girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Churchin Birmingham, Ala., two of her sisters arranged to move her grave to abetter-maintained cemetery.

However, workers who opened the grave recoiled in shock: Itwas empty, devoid of casket and corpse. Addie Mae's body, like so many buriedin black cemeteries throughout the South, is missing. No one can know withcertainty who took the body or why, but many are convinced that her body joinedthe untold thousands of anonymous black cadavers on anatomists' tables.

In the book's introduction Washington tells of how she waswarned off this project by various powers that be in the medical establishment.She courageously carried on and has made a major contribution to theanti-racist struggle.

On the town

2011-12-02T18:03:00.001-05:00

Last week my best friend was in town visiting so I got totake in some culture. Including:

1. Teresa, Rosemary and I saw the play Venus in Fur, writtenby David Ives and starring the extraordinary Nina Arianda. Amazing. This is oneof those rare instances when I agree with all the raves even though theyemanate from bourgeois sources. Well, not quite, for I've discovered, sinceseeing it and upon delving further into the critical commentary, that while theadoration of Arianda is unanimous opinion is more divided on the play itself,and furthermore that there are, it seems, varied interpretations of what it allmeans, what it's about, most of all what's up with that ending. Hmm. Somethinks the bourgeois sources have screwed up here after all. Arianda in allher glory aside, the play itself is, yuk yuk inside joke you'll only get ifyou've seen it, divine. Brilliant writing that had me on the edge of my seatstraining to catch every word only to be whipsawed about this way and that bythem up to the very last moment, and that moment is breathtakingly perfect. Hilarioustoo, as well as discomfiting in a good way.

Playwriting strikes me, every time I get to see a production,as a mysterious art. I always come out wishing I could do it but convinced thatI haven't a clue about how to try. Bravo to David Ives and, yes, to the mightyAphrodite herself, Nina Arianda.

2. Spent an hour or so later that evening at a grand oldVillage gay dive piano bar with a grand old name, Marie's Crisis Café. Fun,except for our chagrin at the group of young men who seemed to know only tunesfrom Disney musicals. Egads! This was the first time I've ever been there whenI couldn't join in on the singing, for Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, Sondheim,Bernstein, Gershwin, Porter and all that lot were, sadly, not in the house.

3. I took Rosemary to the Queens Museum for a perambulationaround the Panorama of the City of New York. It is a glorious thing. And shepermitted me to be in my glory, pointing here and there orienting her, showingoff my fabulous town.

4. We went to the Brooklyn Museum, where we were verysatisfied with the new exhibit Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in AmericanPortraiture. AKA The Gay Show. Really interesting on many levels.

Now my sister- and brother-in-law are in town from Texas andafter they come from Radio City Musical Hall where they're seeing the Rockettesdo their holiday thing, we're meeting for a sushi dinner at one of the bestJapanese restaurants in the city. Phew! Ain't I got fun?

NYPD versus the people's pages

2011-11-17T09:51:00.001-05:00

The more threatened they are, the more baldly their fascistic tendencies are revealed. They being the rich, who control the state everywhere in this awful country but perhaps nowhere more blatantly than here in New York where their head man, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, rules. The latest example? Well, let's head down to the Occupy Wall Street library where this city's police-state forces yesterday did their dirty thing again, and in a most flagrant manner. The valiant librarians having set up their bookshelves again, or at least as many of them as they'd been able to salvage, the NYPD moved in. They set up a line around the books. A line of armed thugs blocking access to books! And then yet again grabbed the books, dumped and trashed them, and hauled them away. It's all reported here.

That oughta motivate you, if motivation you need beyond the facts of life under what my late comrade Dave Axelrod termed crapitalism--racism, unemployment, homelessness--to get out into the streets for today's citywide mobilization by the 99 percent.

OCCUPY WALL STREET LIVES!

2011-11-15T09:54:00.001-05:00

The richest person in New York ordered his thugs to destroy the Occupy Wall Street encampment in the dead of night and so, starting at 1 a.m. today, they did their best to do so. Sweeping through, throwing everything into garbage trucks--that's everything, from clothes and sleeping bags to computers and cell phones to food and medicine--and arresting at least 150 people, the billionaire's brute force did its thing.

Including to the wonderful beloved OWS Library, caught in the process of destruction at left. All the books were tossed and destroyed, as described on the OWS library blog this morning.* That's some 5,000 books. This is what the opposite of democracy looks like.

'I made my own decision,' says the mayor, as if that's some bold brave wise assertion of his political independence. Of course he did--he's the richest person in the city! The richest person in the city rules the biggest city in the country. (And for any who still retained illusions about the role of the police, this ought to sweep away those illusions once and for all. The cops work for the rich.) What the boss says, goes. There's no one richer to boss the top boss around. Yes, here in the world headquarters of finance capital, things are positively feudal.

Yet history does not move backward. This is something the rich and their reactionary cohort never understand.How foolish, then, is billionaire Bloomberg, as the rich always are, if he thinks he's destroyed this burgeoning movement.

Occupiers are re-gathering as I write. Their lawyers are in court seeking an injunction. Supporters are pouring in. And in two days will come the biggest mobilization yet. Hey Bloomberg, you ain't seen nothing yet!

*Update: at least some of the books still exist. The Occupy Wall Street Library blog asks: where are the rest?
And one more update, as of November 16: the rest of it, that is, most of it, several thousand volumes, does appear to have been destroyed, damaged, and/or discarded.

I said I wouldn't ...

2011-11-04T16:49:00.001-04:00

... buy an e-reader until I could get one for around $50, and could borrow library books on it, and wouldn't be locked in to one single source for book buying or one single file type. I said I wasn't opposed to these devices on any principled or ideological basis, of course not, but that it pissed me off how they were only available to the moneyed few, of course it did, and also that I had various worries about what using them means for your reader's brain, how they changed the reading experience. None of my concerns has changed but the, ahem, material conditions have, enough, that I'm now on the verge of getting myself one of them thar doohickeys of some persuasion or other.

Price isn't quite down to $50 but e-readers have become considerably cheaper and I need not be quite as hardline about a firm figure for myself because I'm being offered one as a present. It's now easy to take out library books with all the devices. I have not found any report showing evidence of brain changes in reading--that is, just reading, reading a book in a linear concentrated fashion--on an electronic device as long as all you're doing is reading and you've got all the distracting features like hyperlinks turned off so you stick to the page and don't jump around here and there. It's the jumping around, as most of us do when we're in front of a computer screen, that leads to brain changes, new neuronal connections that are all about multitasking and short-term attention, with concomitant loss of neuronal connections that support deep concentration, imagination and creativity. I still have not had the chance to hold one of these contraptions in my hands, except for a minute or two at a store, no chance to sit for some time and read on one--so I still have no idea whether I'll actually like it, get used to it, find the same heaven on an e-ink screen as I have on so many thousands of paper pages over the years. I still find it hard to believe I will. But I've quizzed a number of friends who do have e-readers, all, by the way, my age or older, and they all say that while the device takes some getting used to, once you do the reading experience is indeed as deep, as engaged, as creative and dreamy as it is with a physical book.

So. I'm edging pretty goddamned close. I might even get one of the hybrids that also provide WiFi for newspaper reading and sundry other web portals.

A couple months ago I bought John Sayles' new novel A Moment in the Sun, which has to do with the U.S. war in the Philippines at the turn of the last century. The book, published by McSweeney's, is unbelievably beautiful, just a beautiful physical object, stunningly designed with a sort of old-fashioned swirl of detail, and full of tactile delights as well. But goodness gracious it is gigantic. Physically huge, and it's been sitting on my dresser for these several months staring at me, daring me to even pick it up, let alone try to hold it to read with my tiny hands (have I ever mentioned that here, my bizarrely small hands for which I have to buy toddler-sized gloves so here we are yet another winter approaching during which I'll pine for a pair of grown-up gloves). Lug the Sayles behemoth with me to and from work to read on the subway? Perish the thought! I finally decided to wait till the holiday break, when I'll be off work for about a week. I'll read it then, at home, I figured, which'll at least avoid the lugging-around problem if not the how am I even going to hold this sucker issue. But lately I've realized, hey, I might not finish it during that week. What then? Back to the lugging it on the train problem.

Not if I get me an electronic machine that weighs under a pound and shines the words out at me from a six- or seven-inch screen. I can borrow a library copy onto the magic apparatus and finish the book thus.

Within the next couple weeks I think all the end-of-year new-model announcements will be done. Will I be able to rise out of the mire of indecision about whether I really do want to get one of these machines to own as a reading option, as well as about which one to buy if I do? I might. I really. Finally. Might.

Memorial & cultural tribute to Consuela Lee

2011-10-23T13:03:00.000-04:00

She was known as "the musician's musician." This coming Saturday, October 29, musicians, friends, relatives and admirers will gather at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem to pay tribute to Consuela Edmonia Lee.

Pianist, historian, teacher and tireless advocate of African American culture and education, Ms. Lee died almost two years ago. Since then, a foundation created in her name has been working to document and carry on the work of this peerless jazz musician. The memorial will take the foundation's work to the next level--and bring together an amazing roster of musical talents, her peers, friends and students, who will perform in tribute to her.

I'll be there, and anyone in the New York area, whether you knew this brilliant woman or not, anyone who's looking to learn more about the history of jazz and African American education while at the same time being treated to what is sure to be a thrilling concert, should plan to be there too.

Occupy Writers!

2011-10-19T15:52:00.002-04:00

The latest nifty show of support for Occupy Wall Street and the burgeoning worldwide protest movement is a newly formed entity called, ta-da: Occupy Writers. You can see a list of authors who've signed on at the OccupyWriters.com website. The list is long, and growing. It features writers I admire, including Tariq Ali, Dorothy Allison, Samuel R. Delaney, Ursula Le Guin, Marlon James, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ann Patchett, Martha Southgate, Monique Truong, Alice Walker. Almost more interesting are the names I wouldn't have associated with any, let alone any particularly progressive, politics, like Rick Moody, Peter Straub, Francine Prose, Caleb Crain. You get the idea--it's another unmistakable sign that something is stirring when such a range of writers rouses itself (okay, at least enough to sign on to a list on a website) to take a stand in solidarity with a protest against the corporate wrecking ball that's swinging at all of us.

The site features, in addition to the list of names, some actual writing about the occupation by some of these. I couldn't read any of it when I tried because, I believe, the site's getting overloaded, but I'll try again. Hope you will too. And for those of you who've got published books and want to add your name, send an email to info@occupywriters.com with your name and the title of one of your books.

Here's the simple declaration you'll be signing onto:

We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.

As well we all should.

Oh, and for those of you who indulge in this sort of thing, you can follow Occupy Writers on Twitter too.

Tomatoland

2011-10-14T16:51:00.001-04:00

There's a frustratingly short period—early August to lateSeptember, more or less—during which you can get juicy tasty fresh-off-the-vinetomatoes at the farmers' markets that are scattered around New York City. Someare organic; these eat up half your week's food budget. Even the non-organicones are pretty expensive. All are grown on small farms in New York state, NewJersey and Pennsylvania. If you, like me, yearn all year for a real tomato, youhaunt the farmers' markets during those six or eight weeks and fork over thecash to buy as many as you can afford, and then you eat them with everything,or alone, savoring the drip, slurping the seeds, until the tiny window hasclosed and you begin again your long slog through a year without tomatoes.

Because who the hell wants to eat those horrid red ballsthat pass themselves off as tomatoes in stores and restaurants? I refuse to buythem at the supermarket. At restaurants I always specify "notomatoes" with whatever I'm ordering. Whoever I'm with usually asks, ohdon't you like tomatoes? My answer is that actually I love tomatoes but whatthey're going to slice onto my sandwich or quarter into my salad is not atomato and I cannot abide the look feel or taste of the imposter.

If any of this resonates with you—and one thing I learnedfrom the book I just read is that many people throughout the land share mydisgust with the pseudo-tomatoes that agribusiness foists on us—I commend toyou Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook.It's subtitled "How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our MostAlluring Fruit" and Estabrook does a fine job of laying out the how, alongwith the when and where.

The why? That's easy: profit. Estabrook doesn't directlycall out the capitalist system as the real culprit behind the crimes of the Floridatomato industry. OK, fine, he just sticks to the facts. The facts, though, leadto no other possible conclusion. There can be no clearer case study of capitalism'sdestructive force than what he offers in this book.

It's not just about the de-tomato-ing of the tomato. Infact, that's the least of it. If it were just that the industry has transformeda glorious food into an insipid faux-food that would be bad but not as awful aswhat they've actually done. Which is poison great swaths of land in Florida.And water. And air. And people. Everyone who bites into one of thesefaux-tomatoes is ingesting great gulps of extraordinarily toxic chemicals.

However, the people being poisoned the worst—and that's just one partof the unbelievably nightmarish extremes of mistreatment, oppression andexploitation to which they're subjected by the tomatoland owners—are theworkers who toil in the fields in and around Immokalee. To his great credit,Estabrook devotes a large portion of his book to them. The conditions of theirlives and work, the hardships they face and the courage they've shown inorganizing and fighting back to demand their rights—he lays all this out in a compellingnarrative that is must reading for any partisan of the working class struggle.In fact, he dedicates the book to "the men and women who pick the food weeat."

I've followed the efforts of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers for someyears now, as have most people who align themselves with the cause of labor.It's good, though, even if you already knew about this fight, to read someof the specific stories Estabrook lays out, and meet some of the specificworkers whose tales he tells. It's good, too, to be reminded of just howextreme the situation of the Immokalee tomato workers is.

This extreme: If you have eaten a tomato bought at a U.S.grocery stores in the winter, you have been fed on the product of slave labor.

Read Tomatoland to get your red blood boiling and your red solidarity revved. Then head over here to see what you can do to stand with the workers.

I don't have a Twitter account ...

2011-10-13T12:29:00.001-04:00

... but if I did this is what I'd tweet after having paid money to watch this awful reactionary mess last night:

OMG Tree of Life worst movie ever! Endless boring pretentious backward religio-mystico claptrap!

That's few enough characters, right?

Hail the Occupy Wall Street Library!

2011-10-10T10:00:00.000-04:00

Check it out: not only does Occupy Wall Street have a library, which is growing, organized and respected by the participants--now the Occupy Wall Street Library has its own blog. Follow OWSL here.

I made another brief visit to the site Saturday evening when a bunch of us headed down there after the first day of the Workers World Party national conference. The place was packed--it seemed to me the protesters' numbers had doubled since the last time I was there three days earlier.

And occupations are springing up in hundreds of other cities. This thing is not going away. How lovely that reading material is being provided for the brave young protesters.

Death of a billionaire

2011-10-06T16:05:00.000-04:00

When you're worth $8.3 billion, it's only natural that youget endless gushing tributes in every capitalist media outlet when you die.There is no higher accomplishment in this society than amassing riches.Naturally, then, when a very rich person dies, he's lavished with over-the-topobits. Here's the thing, though. I find it a telling reflection of the deadrich guy's media savvy, and of the overwhelming, ubiquitous grip of bourgeoisconsciousness, that ordinary people are also getting sucked along into thelachrymosity. Bouquets of flowers laid in tribute at Apple stores all over theglobe. Heartfelt tributes posted on media websites and blogs, mournful tweetsflowing through cyberspace, and so on. And why? What did Steve Jobs contributeto society that so many people should be convinced that his death is a loss toall of us?

Maybe the extremely few who can afford his company'sproducts feel that his keen marketing sense and his sharp taste inmechanical design improved their lives. Others—many others upon whoserelationship to computer and communications technology the Mac and Appleproducts have had an impact, and that's most of us by now, regardless of whichcompany's hardware and software we use—might likewise believe we owe him a debtof gratitude.

All such ideas are mistaken. All are expressions of that bourgeoisconsciousness from which it is so hard to break free.

Steve Jobs was no more a hero than was Henry Ford, anotherindustrialist who became rich off the labor of others and is nevertheless tothis day presented, to schoolchildren and aspiring entrepreneurs alike, as oneof the Great Men of U.S. history. Ford was Great at exploiting workers. So wasJobs. That is axiomatic: you do not become a billionaire any other way. He madehis profits off the stolen value created by the people who manufactured hisproducts. Most of them, at this point, are unbelievably low-paid andsuper-exploited workers laboring in overseas factories for dozens of othercompanies that are subcontracted to create the various component parts that gointo making an iPhone or a Mac, an iPod or iPad.

There's more to the story than this, though, more than Jobs'extraordinary facility for reaping profits off the labor of other people. Notonly were his billions stolen money. His Great Ideas were, at worst, stolen(check out how he "invented" the mouse)—but even when not directlyripped off from the actual innovators, anything and everything he came up withwas not the result of some private individual aha moment, but rather arose fromcollaboration with many other people. The New York Times obituary more or lesscomes out and says this when it points out that his skill wasn't technical orscientific or even mechanical or decorative; rather, he was good at recognizingother people's good ideas, and by recognizing is meant understanding what wouldmake money and pushing others to do the work necessary to get the profits rolling. So okay, give him credit for what he deserves to be remembered for:Steve Jobs was a brilliant marketer, smartest of all at self-promotion astoday's outpouring attests.

What he did not do was invent anything, or even come up witha new idea. Rather, he built upon others' inventions and facilitated others'ideas. Then others—tens of thousands of others—created the products to which thoseinventions and ideas led. And others, millions, bought the products, from thesales of which Jobs became a billionaire while the actual creators, the workerswho made the products, got just enough to stay alive another day.

Even if it could be shown that Jobs did actually dosomething—design a particularly elegant piece of circuitry, say—the fact wouldremain that he did not do it himself. Some of capitalism's greatest lies arepromulgated regarding science and technology, where we are told that the GreatMan and the Lighbulb Over the Head are responsible for every advance. It justain't so. Here's a succinct rejoinder from Clifford D. Conner, author of A People's History of Science:

We all know the history of science that we learned from grade schooltextbooks: How Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was not thecenter of the universe; how Newton divined gravity from the falling apple; howEinstein unlocked the mysteries of time and space with a simple equation. Thishistory is made up of long periods of ignorance and confusion, punctuated oncean age by a brilliant thinker who puts it all together. These few tower overthe ordinary mass of people, and in the traditional account, it is to them thatwe owe science in its entirety.

This belief is wrong. A People's History of Science shows how ordinarypeople participate in creating science and have done so throughout history. Itdocuments how the development of science has affected ordinary people, and howordinary people perceived that development. It would be wrong to claim that theformulation of quantum theory or the structure of DNA can be credited directlyto artisans or peasants, but if modern science is likened to a skyscraper, thenthose twentieth-century triumphs are the sophisticated filigrees at itspinnacle that are supported by the massive foundation created by the rest ofus.

I started reading Conner's book a couple years ago but never finished it. All this to-do about the death of a billionaire makes me want to go back and finish reading it. I know just which bookshelf it's on.

All day, all week--occupy Wall Street!

2011-10-05T13:36:00.002-04:00

Well, that didn't prove to be much of a hiatus. I'm back.I'll be back with book talk soon, as soon as I finish one of the books I'mcurrently reading, an important exposé of one wing of agribusiness. I couldn'twait till then, however, so I'm reviving Read Red after its brief subsidence tosay: Hurray for Occupy Wall Street!

And for the many many other occupations that are springingup around the country.

I haven't gotten to spend much time at the occupation—I'llhead there again today after work for the aftermath of the big labor solidaritymarch—but I've heard and read and seen enough to know that it is a Very GoodThing. Don't let anyone, fake left or unabashed right or phony neutral, tellyou otherwise. Yes, the people taking part in this occupation have a range ofpolitical ideas, from liberal-reformist to libertarian to anarchist tosocialist revolutionary. So yes, there'sno one unified program. Yes, some of them are inconsistent or confused. Yes,their various tactics run the gamut from inspired to not so much. None of this matters.What matters is that a group of young people are in motion in a protest that,whatever its contradictions, focuses on the symbol of the capitalist system ofexploitation and oppression. Wall Street. And calls for a reversal of therobbery of the planet's wealth and resources.

It will be good to watch the occupation grow moremultinational, although if you've been told it's overwhelmingly white you'vebeen lied to as there are many people of color taking part; their numbers aregrowing and will continue to grow. It will be good to see its class characterturn more proletarian, although if you've been told it's a bunch of privilegedmiddle-class kids you've been lied to as there are many working-class studentsand unemployed people taking part; their numbers are growing and will continueto grow. It will be good to see the protesters continue claiming their right totake to the streets no matter how violently the NYPD attacks and brutalizesthem, as it has several times now, with nearly a thousand arrests on record. Itwill also be good to watch support expand, as the cops' vicious maneuvers areexposed over and over despite the bourgeois media's best efforts to cover them up, a lá

The Times has been relentless in its campaign to ridicule,demean and belittle the Wall Street protesters. One of my favorite, mostbizarre and laughably specious digs, made not only by the Times but by manyother bourgeois sources, goes something like this. 'These protesters claim tobe against Wall Street companies, against the system that manufactures goodsfor profit. And yet look at them using these very goods, look at them withtheir laptops and their smartphones, look at them utilizing the very high-techgoods made by the very companies they target as the enemy. Ha ha aren't these kidssilly hypocrites.' Really, New York Times? Really, that's your case? Thatsomeone who doesn't like the capitalist mode of production ought not to own oruse anything thus manufactured? Which is everything, every item of clothing,every toothbrush, sock, scissors, pen, every low-tech thing along with everyhigh-tech gadget—every thing is a capitalist commodity, so I guess we're all supposedto go wander the streets naked and starving rather than handle any commodityproduced by this vile system. You've got it backward, silly bourgeois stooges.We will, as someone you'll be hearing about a lot once said, use your verytools to dig your system's grave.

All of which we'll be talking about a lot this weekend atthe Workers World Party national conference. Where I hope to see many participantsfrom the Occupy Wall Street movement.

On hiatus

2011-09-14T10:02:00.000-04:00

It's nearly three weeks since I've posted anything here. And though I've read three books in that time, and have stuff to say about two of them, maybe all three, one of them I even fouled with notes on the pages as I read, something I rarely do--despite all that, despite my best intentions to come here and spout off, it's time to conclude that it's not going to happen. Not now, probably not at all for the next little while at least. I don't have the time or the focus, mostly because I'm writing a lot and there's no reserve brain space left to devote to Read Red. So this is to acknowledge that.

From what I've seen, three years is the standard shelf life for a blog. It may be that this one is fading out naturally. I'm not ready to say this is a final goodbye, though. I may pop back occasionally, Read Red may even come roaring back to full-fledged life. Can't say. We'll see.

As for me as a virtual entity, I'm content to see my online presence shrink. I quit Facebook several months ago and am glad I did. I've never had a Twitter account, having no interest in anyone's 140-character surface skim nor desire to spew my own. Such stories and poems of mine as were published in online lit zines over the years are still there. For honest to goodness interaction, I'm easy enough to find.

This is a good time in my life. In fact, I believe I'm having a second flowering as I swing through the second half of my 50s. For now, blogging isn't part of the bloom. If and when it is again, I'll be back.

While everyone else rushes around buying water & batteries...

2011-08-26T13:27:00.000-04:00

... I made a mad dash to three bookstores during my lunch hour. Yes, I have a lot to do over the weekend, including a must-do massive writing session but also many household chores. And yes, when I'm not writing or housekeeping and want to read, I've got the new novel that I just started, and it's highly doubtful I'll finish it over the weekend. And yes, even if I do finish it I've got huge to-read piles from which to pick my next book. And yes, if this hurricane does its worst and we're without power on Sunday, it's unlikely I'll be able to read much anyway as I'm not really a flashlight or candlelight kind of gal.

And yet. I felt compelled. I checked online, found quite cheap copies of three books I've been yearning after, ran here and there, got them. Take that, Irene! You don't scare me--I've got exciting new stuff to read!

P.S. I'll also be buying that water and those batteries on my way home today.

Happy 100th birthday, General Giap!

2011-08-26T10:32:00.002-04:00

The great hero General Vo Nguyen Giap, a military genius who helped drive both French and U.S. imperialism out of Vietnam, turned 100 years old yesterday. Happy birthday to him!

The world's workers and oppressed owe Gen. Giap eternal gratitude. As do I personally, in terms of my own puny life. For what he and his comrades did in the 1960s and early 70s played a big role in my coming to political consciousness and turning toward the class struggle as my life's path.

This is an abomination

2011-08-24T17:58:00.000-04:00

Just when I was starting to open my crusty old mind bit by bit to the idea of e-reading, just when I could almost conceive of myself trying to read a book on such a device, comes this.

Oh sweet Jesus. See how bad it is, it made me utter a locution like oh sweet Jesus!

Some bright young moneygrubbers--aka "a startup" in the Times story--are offering e-books that have soundtracks. "Instrumental music or ambient noise." And, "during livelier passages," "the patter of footsteps, a booming gong, a crackling fire or the tick of a grandfather clock."

Shoot me now. Or no, don't bother--these horrid monsters known as "Booktrack" are hell-bent on destroying my imagination, my reader's creativity, my quiet concentration, my fancy and fantasy, without which I'm as good as gone.

I'm not one of those doom-and-gloom "reading is dead" people. But capitalism is sure doing its best to take reading, what it really is, its beautiful ephemeral essence, and destroy it.

The cultural front

2011-08-21T16:38:00.000-04:00

I'm popping in here mostly with links because I'm in the midst of a writing project that's taking a lot of time and concentration, and will for quite a while to come. So. For now:

I suggest that you head over to author Carleen Brice's always interesting and informative site White Readers Meet Black Authors for this list of upcoming new books by writers of color. I see quite a few that I'm adding to my to-read list.

One book on the list, Martha Southgate's new novel The Taste of Salt, reminded me to post her piece for Entertainment Weekly on The Help. There is a lot of hard-hitting truth-telling commentary on both the book and movie written by African Americans, and I'd encourage readers to seek out and read it. Ms. Southgate's is particularly pithy. Also check out Color Online's post, which includes a link to the first chapter of The Taste of Salt.

Speaking of movies, and turning from the untruthful, inauthentic, reprehensible to several that seem to be more up our alley, author Zetta Elliott recommends two that sound really worth seeing: Gun Hill Road and Attack the Block.

There's also John Sayles' new movie Amigo, which is about U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. If you read the New York Times review, a mix of praise for Sayles' artistry, caution about his politics, and, worryingly, satisfaction with his evenhandedness, you know that this film pulls its punches more than those on our side of the class struggle would wish. Indeed, a Filipina activist friend of mine saw it and judged it "only okay." I'll probably see it once it hits my TV's on-demand system because it's not as if there's a glut of films about the U.S. invasion and occupation of the Philippines--I'd bet most people in this country don't even know it ever happened--but of course the best source for information about this history, whether served up via fiction or nonfiction, is Filipino writers and artists. I've read several novels by Filipinos this year. I'm going to see what Filipino films I can find.

Finally, there's this. The most gag-o-rific new book on the market, winning prominent reviews throughout the bourgeois media, is the horrifyingly yet aptly titled Class Warfare, subtitled Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools by the reactionary enemy of public education Steven Brill. Pun aside, this is indeed class warfare, but Brill and his admirers aren't the least bit honest about which class they represent and which they're waging war on. They pretend they care about the public schools. Nonsense. They care about the huge flow of private profit that would begin to flow (that is already flowing to charter-school outfits) if they could only crush the teachers' unions and end government funding of public education entirely. Plow through the front-page piece by Sara Mosle in today's New York Times Book Review, all three pages of it if you can stomach it. You'll search in vain for any mention of the real, the primary cause of so-called failed schools (in itself a completely dishonest and untrustworthy category, when failure is defined as it everywhere now is by the anti-public-school, anti-teachers'-union forces in power from the Education Department on down)--that is, you won't find any reference to funding and finances. Not until nearly the end of this review, and even then the only mention goes to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and to the disgusting federal "Race to the Top" that dangled financial reward to school districts that dismantle even the pretense of a system of equal education. Yet for any honest analyst, there can be no mystery. The scandal, the crime--indeed, The Shame of the Nation as the exemplary writer and equal-education advocate Jonathan Kozol titled his last book, which you've really got to read if you haven't already, but first read this recent interview with him--is quite simple. It's all about funding. Schools that serve a population that's poor, working-class, people of color, any or all of these, are under-funded. Drastically, outrageously, we're talking about no textbooks, no chalk, no chairs, no working toilets and worse. Schools that serve a population that's more prosperous and more white have way way more money to work with, and it shows. It's like the emperor's new clothes the way these commentators, these education "reformers" (read destroyers), harumph around analyzing why oh why this high school in, say, the South Bronx can't seem to send a better percentage of its graduates to college or even graduate a better percentage of its kids vs. why oh why this sparkly pretty clean high-tech-equipped high school in, say, Greenwich, Connecticut manages to graduate almost all its students and send them off to college, good colleges, too. Duh. What a difficult conundrum. Right.

OK, now that I've demoralized us all, let's try to pull ourselves back up with this: the new movie Precious Knowledge, which just played at the New York Latino Film Festival and will show on PBS next spring. It's about the struggle to create, and now to defend, ethnic studies classes in Tucson, Arizona. With young people and educators like those shown in this film leading the way, I feel sure that the fight to save our schools, while tough, will be won.

The Lonely Hunter

2011-08-12T15:14:00.000-04:00

Last weekend I finished reading Virginia Spencer Carr's 1972 biography of Carson McCullers, The Lonely Hunter. My understanding is that this is still considered the definitive McCullers study. I have no reason to challenge that, as all I knew about McCullers before reading this book was what I concluded about her sublime artistry after reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter earlier this year. Yet I can't say that I come away from The Lonely Hunter feeling that I have much new insight into McCullers as a person or artist.

No, that's too harsh. I do, of course, is some ways. I now know her life story, I understand something of how she approached writing, I have perhaps some slight sense of what it must have been like to be in a room with her. As in, she sucked all the air out of it. In a good way! Or not. See, if I come away with anything it's an appreciation for the largeness of McCullers' personality and the complexity of her character. I don't know that she had many dimensions but she certainly had more than the usual complement of contradictions.

Frustratingly, so does Carr's book. She straddles every possible fence. Page by page, paragraph by paragraph, sometimes sentence by sentence and sometimes even within sentences, Carr offers up so many clashing descriptions, analyses and judgments, her own and those of the many people she interviewed about McCullers, that the reader's head swirls not knowing which lead to follow, whose word to believe. McCullers was a prodigious drinker--she never really did anything but sip--she slurred her words--she was never really drunk. She suffered paralysis from a series of strokes--she faked paralysis for sympathy--it was real but psychosomatic. The portrait, overall, is deeply sympathetic which is fine, but it felt as if Carr at the same time tried terribly hard to maintain an evenhanded approach, as a result sometimes abdicating the biographer's responsibility to draw some conclusions.

Above all this applies to the question of McCullers', and to a lesser extent her husband's, sexual orientation. It's striking how quaintly, which is to say homophobically, discreet and judicious is Carr's handling of this issue throughout the book. It's a reminder of how little had yet changed even three years after the Stonewall rebellion that gave rise to the modern LGBT movement, when this book was published. On the one hand, she does not entirely shy away from the topic--how could she when everyone knows that McCullers had great female loves and her husband great male loves--and she even in some ways writes of this sympathetically. On the other hand, she was mired in all the old attitudes, and uses ugly old terminology like the word "invert" which I didn't realize anyone was still using in 1972. Most frustratingly, there are great swaths of the book given over to indirection--what no doubt was seen as discretion--when it comes to many of McCullers' relationships. She's passionately in love with a Swiss woman but it's all conveyed at such a remove that I couldn't see through the gauze to figure out what they really were to each other. Decades later she seems to be inseparably paired with a psychiatrist who's her therapist/friend/companion--huh? You may ask why any of this matters. Well, for a million obvious reasons. Even if one thinks, wrongly, her sex or love life irrelevant to her art, this is a big full biography, not merely a study of her as a writer, and the weird wobbly way that Carr at once addresses and shies away from the whole issue of who and how McCullers loved is very frustrating.

Then there's this. By all accounts, as related in Carr's book, Carson McCullers drank enormous amounts of alcohol pretty much constantly, and smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, starting when she was a teenager and on throughout the rest of her life. I found Carr's frequent attempts to discount the effects of all this substance use bizarre. More than once she asserts that McCullers was not an alcoholic. I'm no expert, but I don't know another word for someone who starts drinking in the morning and never stops, and does so every single day. For Carr to claim, as she does several times, that all this drinking had little to no effect on McCullers' behavior or, more interestingly, her creativity and creative output, strikes me as absurd. What's really incomprehensible is the biographer's failure to link the drinking and smoking to McCullers' continually precarious health. At the least, the writer must have destroyed her liver. Her heart, lungs and circulatory system had to be in awful shape too. Which leads to the other odd gap, Carr's strangely disingenuous and quite muddled reporting about McCullers' ongoing and increasingly complicated and debilitating medical ailments throughout her adult life. McCullers had her first stroke in her 20s, by which time she'd been smoking and drinking nearly a decade, and by the time she died of the final stroke at 50 she'd had several more in between, along with breast cancer, disabling pain and paralysis, and other serious illnesses. Carr never ever connects the writer's smoking to her health problems, nor does it seem anyone in her circle ever did or ever appealed to her to clean up her act. It's not as if the ramifications of all that drinking and smoking were unknown during her lifetime. They would certainly have been known, in 1972, to Carr.

Leaving aside this odd reticence from a fuller treatment of McCullers' lifestyle as related to her physical health, I was intrigued by the whole question of how she created what she created under the influence as she most assuredly always was. I've always discounted all the silly saws about writers and drinking, I've always thought that being drunk or high cannot ever really feed creative work and must always in the end impede it. I myself (not of course that I'm comparing myself to great writers like McCullers, just relating my own experience) could never write after drinking even a little. I must have a clear mind to come up with the words. I must be alert, as fully lucid as possible. In contrast, if Carr's portrayal is to be believed, McCullers felt herself too restricted, somehow, felt her mind too tightly bounded, to be able to enter the creative dream state necessary to write fiction when she was in full control of her faculties. She felt that only by drinking alcohol could she relax, loosen up, and open the portals to the half-trance state that fiction writers must enter. Fascinating. If true.

Just married

2011-08-05T10:07:00.004-04:00

Well, we went and did it: yesterday Teresa and I, after almost 23 years together, got married at the New York City Clerk's Marriage Bureau in lower Manhattan. It was a fun and interesting experience being there with all the working-class folks, opposite-sex and same-sex couples alike, who opt to wed this way for various reasons personal, political, and mostly, I'm guessing, financial. When we'd picked up the marriage license the day before Teresa and I had both gotten weepy, especially as we watched several gay couples come out of the chapel (yeah, that's what they call the little room where they perform the ceremony) and pose for their newlywed pictures. It's not about aping the hets, it's not about endorsing the patriarchy, it's about claiming a legal right that had been denied; the sheer fact of this achievement hit home as we watched these couples celebrate and we got all shook up. (My thoughts on this immediately after the law passed are here; my article in Workers World newspaper the week after is here.) After that I was terrified that I'd bawl all during our ceremony but happily it turned out instead that we both smiled, in fact started laughing, as we said our I Do's and exchanged rings.

Then we posed for lots of pictures with, and taken by, our dear friends Monica and LeiLani who'd accompanied us and signed the marriage license as our official witnesses.

Headed uptown to Sheridan Square, where we posed at the Gay Liberation Monument by sculptor George Segal.

Crossed the street and took a picture in front of the Stonewall Inn, where the modern LGBT movement began with the great rebellion of June 1969.

Headed inside the Stonewall for a celebratory drink and toast to the struggle. Strolled down Seventh Avenue to the Pink Teacup, a soulfood restaurant and one of my all-time favorites for all those years it was a tiny jam-packed hole in the wall and now even more wonderful since it relocated to much bigger digs. There we met a few more friends for dinner, delish and delightful. A grand time was had by all.

Today's the honeymoon: we're going to a movie! Then it's back to real life. Tomorrow, a poitical meeting; Sunday paying bills and doing laundry; Monday wage work. Yesterday, though, yesterday was a keeper.

That was the month that was

2011-08-03T15:27:00.000-04:00

The last three weeks of July were eventful, and also not, both of which account for my almost total absence from the blogosphere. I was on vacation as scheduled, the first half visiting my best friend in the California desert, having a wonderful time, the second half back home which was not so great. I got back just in time for NYC's annual horrible 100-degree-plus heat wave, which coincided with the only four days Teresa was able to take off to vacate with me. We'd had lots of lovely stuff planned--the High Line, Governor's Island, Bear Mountain, Coney Island--but since it was impossible to be outside and since we couldn't find a decent movie at which to cool off, we ended up imprisoned in our bedroom, the only room in our apartment with air conditioning, for most of our precious few days together. Also in the midst of that there was a death in my family, and while my feelings about this were not standard they did require attending to, so the sticky heat took on an added layer of sad musing memory processing, a sort of strange solitary version of sitting shiva if you like, as well as an added week off which I'm now amid, this first week of August.

I've been reading throughout, of course. Not as many books as I usually race through on my summer vacation, which is partly because of what else I was doing and partly because I've been moving through a very fat book very slowly for almost two weeks now. That one is The Lonely Hunter, Virginia Spencer Carr's 1972 biography of Carson McCullers. I'll probably post some thoughts about it once I've finished. Of the four other books I read, here are quick comments on two.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Published in 2001, this is a novel I'd steered clear of for what proved faulty reasons. I'd been given it as a gift some years back, and read the first five or 10 pages but decided not to read on, as I was turned off by the use of the word "terrorist" to describe the guerrillas who burst in upon and take hostage the attendees at a fancy-shmancy private opera recital at the vice president's mansion in an unnamed country that is clearly supposed to be Peru during the time of the Fujimori presidency and the armed struggles led by theTupac Amaru and Shining Path revolutionary groups. I never thought of picking Patchett's novel up again until a couple years ago when a comrade of mine, a communist revolutionary through and through, asked me if I'd read it and, when I told her I hadn't and why, said that I'd made a mistake and should read it. She said this novel, far from painting a one-dimensional hostile portrait of the hostage-taker characters, provides a deeply compassionate, deeply sympathetic portrayal of the rebels in all their humanity. She was right. I was swept into and very moved by the story, and found Patchett's writing lovely. Delicate and deep. I'm glad I finally got back to this one.

I also read Four Fish: the Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg, which I'd had on my to-read list for a while and impulsively bought at an airport bookstore. It was a fast read, and mildly interesting, but that's about the best I can say. Overfishing along with industrial development and environmental despoilage are leading/have led to catastrophic destruction in the world's rivers and seas, driving some key species to the brink of extinction and in the process destroying livelihoods and communities while, most important of all, depriving the world's tables of vitally important, formerly abundant and sometimes cheap foods. OK, well, I knew this already, but I'm glad I read up on the history of how all this happened and the particulars of the current situation. The four fish of the title, by the way, are salmon, tuna, bass and cod. The problem is that Greenberg either hasn't the foggiest notion of or is unwilling to take on the real culprit--capitalism, and in particular late-stage high-tech imperial-age capitalism--and therefore the solutions he offers up amount to mild, silly nostrums. In the course of which he--like Michael Pollan in his writings and all the other well-meaning but fundamentally helpless, unhelpful liberal-bourgeois commentators on current food issues and agribusiness--throws around terms like artisanal and sustainable and argues for small-scale settings and high-priced commodities as the way forward. Neither of which, a small scale of production or a high price of sale, is any solution at all for the great mass of billions of poor and working people. The only viable solution in the long run, and as it fast approaches the short run too, is an internationally coordinated effort to restore and revive the world's fisheries, manage fishing so as to conserve and protect the fish while also providing healthy non-toxic fish for the masses to eat, etc. etc. -- the very idea of which is inconceivable under capitalism, when the sole driving force is the quest for profit. Any analyst who can't or won't address this has little to offer.

I can't close without also noting an aspect of Greenberg's book that infuriated and disgusted me: his use of the word "man" to mean people or humankind. Really? Aaarggh!#$%! I've complained before about other writers who persist in using this absurd, insulting sexist language--and here we are, well into the 21st century, and they can't stop. Assholes! The word "fisherman" is lame enough--the word is "fisher," and any man who refuses to use it for any reason is a simple sexist as well as a simpleton--but much much worse is the repeated, relentless reference to our species as "man." I make allowances when I encounter this usage in older works--reluctantly, but I do. In a current book of popular science? No excuse. So offensive.

Daljit Nagra

2011-07-30T16:35:00.000-04:00

I just read a brilliant poem in, of all unlikely places, the New Yorker. It's titled "A Black History of the English-Speaking Peoples." The poet is Daljit Nagra of whom I'm an instantaneous fan. I'm definitely going to get his most recent book, Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy Machine!!!. First, though, I'll reread the New Yorker poem once or twice. There's much meat to it. It's amazing in terms of craft and structure, but mostly its language and especially its broad, profound political sweep and scope blew me away. The poem begins with the poet in the audience at a Shakespeare play--King Lear, I think, though I'm not 100% sure I understood the allusions--at the modern reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, and it spins outward with his thoughts as they're spurred to range upon empire and history. I am, as I've confessed before here, spectacularly uneducated and ignorant in poetry, but as they say I know what I like and I like this very much.

Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger

2011-07-08T14:54:00.003-04:00

Last week I read a fantastic novel. Montecore-The Silence of the Tiger by Jonas Hassen Khemiri. This one has everything I look for in fiction: an engaging story, original and multidimensional characters, deeply political themes, painful honesty, roaring humor. On top of that, the writing is incredibly—often uproariously—creative on several levels. And Khemiri plays with form in innovative ways that, for all the innovation, still allow full access for the ordinary reader and stay far removed from the usual apolitical antisocial ironical above-it-all airs so often assumed by metafiction.

Montecore tells the story of a North African (Algerian born, orphaned in the liberation war, raised in Tunisia) man who moves to Sweden after he and a Swedish woman fall in love. They marry and raise a family, and it's the firstborn, a son who grows up to become a writer, who's mostly, or may or may not be, the narrator of the father's story, along with someone who may be the father's oldest friend, may be the father himself, or both, or neither.

The story—of the father, Abbas, a photographer, and his son, Jonas—is in its essence the story of racism in Sweden, and of the hard lives of immigrant workers trying to survive in the face of this most unwelcoming society. How this racism, in the early years barely camouflaged behind the society's bland herring-and-snow exterior and later bursting out into organized mass murderous violence against African, Asian and Latin American immigrants, stymies Abbas's every attempt to pursue his artistic dreams. (What an artist he is! I'm crazy about his series of photographic depictions that capture the essence of Sweden: photo after photo of frozen stripped bicycles toppled over into ice heaps, frozen piles of vomit on snowy sidewalks, and the like.) And it's about how this racism creates in his son as he comes of age all the rage and will to rebel against oppression that the father spends nearly his whole adult life suppressing. And how it alienates, heartbreakingly, the two from each other.

It's also a story about language, first languages and adopted languages, about words and communication, and how deeply all this is tied up with identity, in particular national identity, and how language is a weapon in the hands of the smug racist majority forcing the immigrant minority always into outsider status. Khemiri is brilliant at weaving in, frequently with wild hilarity but also, increasingly as the story proceeds, with piercing poignancy, Abbas's endless and endlessly futile attempts to master Swedish, and of course we're also made to see that he could have become utterly fluent and it still would have made no dent in that racist walls that press in against him more and more.

In this regard, I must do something I too often forget: hail the translator. Rachel Willson-Broyles does some amazing work here. She somehow manages to take Khemiri's novel, written in Swedish and full of twisty-turny language, malapropisms, tricky turns of phrase, and both explicit and implicit commentary on the Swedish language, its racist uses, its relation to the anti-racist struggle, etc., and convey all that in English.

Two other points. One is that of late we're so inundated in this country with Swedish mysteries, suspense novels, detective novels, we're so overwhelmed with supposed evidence of that country's writers' excellence in this genre, that a deeply literary political novel that exposes some of the most important truths about the deeply racist horrors in that country is very very welcome. I'm grateful that this one was translated and published here, and I hope more of Khemiri's work soon will be. The other point, perhaps obvious but still needs to be said, I think, is that although Montecore is about a North African immigrant to Sweden and the racism he encounters there, it could just as easily be about the United States and immigrants here from any number of countries. Every word of it will ring true to anyone who has lived this experience, knows someone who has, or has the slightest awareness of the anti-immigrant racism that the U.S. ruling class has so assiduously whipped up over the last two decades or so. So Khemiri has, in my view, not only stripped away the lovely lies about lovely snowy Sweden, he has also provided an accurate assessment of commensurate horrors in the United States.

All in all, a powerful offering. It'll definitely be on my "best of" list for this year.

Against the Fourth of July with Eduardo Galeano

2011-07-03T11:10:00.000-04:00

I've now read the magnificent Memory of Fire trilogy in its entirety, having finished Century of the Wind in time for this weekend's national celebration of jingoism, neocolonialism, militarism and mass murder. Thank you Eduardo Galeano, Uruguay's literary/historical gift to the world, for documenting the truth about U.S. imperialism and what it has done to the peoples of the Americas.

For U.S. imperialism, born two years before the turn of the 20th century, is necessarily the main focus of any honest treatment of the story of the Western Hemisphere in that century. Galeano is above all honest. So in this book he takes as his task, unpleasant to say the least though it must have been, to ferret out the hidden history and guide us step by step through what happened, when, where, to whom--by whom, at whose behest, funded by whom, these last questions leading always back to Washington and Wall Street.

As with the first two books in this series, Genesis and Faces and Masks, which I wrote about here and here, Century of the Wind consists of a series of vignettes ranging over all of Latin America and the Caribbean and occasionally touching down in the U.S. as well. Each is a small story about something that happened. Something that actually happened--at least one source for each is provided--yet about which something like 99 percent of the people in this country are unaware. Like the repeated U.S. invasions of Nicaragua. If you only count actual U.S. troops officially entering the country, that's happened eight times--yes, count 'em, U.S. soldiers have invaded the small Central American country of Nicaragua eight times. But of course the official admitted military incursions only tell half the story. If you also include "unofficial" U.S. invasion and occupation of Nicaragua--that is, by the National Guard, by paid U.S. mercenaries, by U.S.-paid Latin American mercenaries, by Latin Americans trained at the Pentagon-run School of the Americas a.k.a. School of the Assassins, and by private corporate-provided forces--the scope of the picture enlarges hugely.

Here's one example from the book. A vignette from 1909, headed with Galeano's typically mordant wit "Inter-American Relations at Work."

Philander Knox is a lawyer and a shareholder in the Rosario and Light Mines Company. He is also secretary of state of the United States. The president of Nicaragua, José Santos Zelaya, does not treat the company with due respect. He wants Rosario and Light to pay taxes. Nor does he respect the Church enough. The Holy Mother has judged him to be in sin ever since he expropriated her lands and suppressed tithes and first-fruits and profaned the sacrament of matrimony with a divorce law. So the Church applauds when the United States breaks relations with Nicaragua and Secretary of State Knox sends down some Marines who overthrow President Zelaya and put in his place the accountant of the Rosario and Light Mines Company.

Wow. Among the many striking things about just this single vignette are the fact that those profiting from the foreign companies robbing Nicaragua's resources were one and the same as those running the U.S. government. The fact that the Church was in complete cahoots with the imperialists. The fact that the U.S. intervention was brazen. The fact, which sort of blew my mind although I know it's mere coincidence, that exactly 100 years before the U.S. backed and engineered a coup that ousted a progressive president named Zelaya who was working to lessen the deep poverty of Honduras by redistributing agricultural land albeit on a modest scale, the U.S. had staged a coup against a president named Zelaya who was working toward similar reforms in the neighboring country of Nicaragua.

Another fact stands out. Along with the history of relentless exploitation, invasion, occupation, along with the mass graves and slaughtered Indigenous people and slave labor in mines and fields--there was also, always, resistance. There was always, as there today continues to be, organizing by the workers and poor. There were, as there are today, heroes. There were, as there will be again, revolutions. So in these pages we meet Sandino and Marti, Zapata and Villa, Torrijos and Bosch, Arbenz and Allende and Parra, and of course Che and Fidel and even Ethel and Julius, and many others whose names were less familiar to me who I'm grateful to Galeano for teaching me about.

On this July 4 weekend, reading Galeano spurs us to remember these additional facts:

The U.S. military has carried out over 144 "interventions" in Latin America and around the world.
The number of secret, hidden, unacknowledged interventions and those carried out by entities other than the official arms of the U.S. military reaches the thousands.
Today U.S. troops occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, and have killed over a million people in those countries. U.S. bombs rain down on Libya, Yemen and Somalia. The U.S. arms and funds the apartheid Israeli state's ongoing occupation of and war against Palestine. U.S. secret forces kidnap, torture and murder unknown numbers of people via "extraordinary rendition" operations in an unknown number of countries.
There are currently over 700 U.S. military bases around the world.

I love a backyard barbecue as much as the next gal. Ditto for the beach. Fireworks are pretty. Hooray for three-day weekends. But as you relax and enjoy, don't forget the truth and don't allow yourself to get swept up into this holiday's hypocritical celebrations. This country was founded and built on invasion and genocide against Indigenous people, kidnapping and chattel slavery of African people, wage slavery of workers, racism, union-busting, subjugation of women. Its riches derive to a great degree from all the invasions, interventions, occupations around the world a key part of whose history Galeano presents in Century of the Wind.

So no, don't support the troops. Fight to bring them home, all the hundreds of thousands of them. Don't fly or salute the flag: it is the symbol of U.S. imperialism, and regarded as such by our sisters and brothers around the world. Fly the red flag instead, the flag of solidarity, unity, class struggle and revolution.

And read the Memory of Fire trilogy. It'll help fire you up for the work that lies ahead.

The cultural crap heap

2011-07-02T19:00:00.000-04:00

In a bad start to what I hope will be a relaxing three-day weekend, Teresa and I made the terrible mistake of renting the movie Burning Palms, written and directed by Christopher Landon. Stay away from this one! It's the most offensive piece of racist, misogynist and anti-gay--that's right, this pig managed a three-fer--cinematic trash I've seen since I don't know when. I don't want to spend much time and energy on it after losing almost two hours of my life to its utterly disgusting assault (and why did I, you might justifiably ask, to which I'd answer we kept looking at each other in disbelief, saying, oh come on, he's pulling our legs, he's building up to making some point, pitiful, right, but we were in denial, we just couldn't believe it could really be as horribly Nazi-ishly bad as it was), but I just have to make the record here. Burning Palms is a big bag of cultural fascism.

Women who love to be raped, seek out their rapists and beg for more? Oh yeah, got it. Women who become deranged after a single instance of slightly kinky sexual acts and mutilate themselves? Sure, check it out. Women who upon being confronted by nasty affronts immediately crumble and commit suicide? Yeah, you like watching dead women, self-loathing women, women begging to be raped? Hey, this is the movie for you. While you're at it, take a quick trip to West Hollywood to gawk at the cartoonishly shallow simpering self-centered idiotic gay men to which stereotype Landon manages to attach an equally cartoonish racist depiction of an African child adoptee.

Hate women, gay people, people of color? Check out Burning Palms. Otherwise, stay the hell away from this stinking pile of shit.

If more evidence were needed for how desperately we need a ramped-up movement creating and promoting progressive people's art and stomping to its death the anti-people--especially the racist, anti-woman, anti-gay--so-called art beloved of the bourgeoisie, here it is.

I'm weak

2011-07-01T16:23:00.000-04:00

Today was payday and in one week my vacation starts and well I'm a weak-willed human being unable to stick to my library-only resolution as I ever more frantically labor to amass a big old to-read pile from which to choose vacation books. To put it another way: I picked up some half-price titles at the Strand on my lunch hour today.

Now I'm admiring and caressing them:

Toxicology by Jessica Hagedorn
The Major Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ludlow by David Mason
The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble
Riding the Trail of Tears by Blake M. Hausman
Leche by R. Zamora Linmark

Over the three-day weekend I'll probably finish (and possibly blog about) the novel I'm currently reading, Montecore-The Silence of the Tiger by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, a fantastic book. Then I've got piles upon piles to pick from next. How great is that?

Bloombergville

2011-06-29T17:15:00.000-04:00

No, the richest person in town, who by no coincidence at all is also mayor, hasn't managed to get the whole city named after him, not yet at least. What he and his class, the Wall Streeters who rule New York, have done is bit by bit, year by year, pushed through round after round of budget cuts, program closings, layoffs and other attacks on the working class and oppressed of this country's biggest city. They've just done it again, passing a so-called austerity budget that will make life harder for millions of people.

This time, though, they weren't able to duck and hide and finish their dirty work behind closed doors. This time there was Bloombergville.

For the last two weeks in June, through heat humidity and smog, through wind rain and chill, breathing an endless bouquet of auto and truck exhaust, harassed and moved from corner to corner by the cops, a hearty angry determined band of activists maintained a 24-hour encampment near City Hall to demand that City Council reject the Bloomberg/Wall Street/Democratic/Republican cuts—cuts to a budget that has a $3 billion surplus, in a city that routinely hands over billions of dollars in tax breaks to big business.

They called the encampment Bloombergville, an echo of the Hoovervilles that sprang up during the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was an exciting, vibrant phenomenon. Its population ranged from a few dozen at some points to several hundred at others. Many were young, high school and college age, but there were also many older folks, ranging up to veterans of the 1960s Freedom Rides now in their 70s and 80s. Union members along with the unorganized.

They organized themselves beautifully, in a fascinating demonstration of democracy in action, putting together committees to make sure everyone had food and water, to find area bathrooms, to furnish the sidewalk with yoga mats and sleeping bags and rotate lying-down time, to stay safe and secure. They made a lot of noise, too, banging buckets and beating drums and chanting and singing. Finally, last night, on the eve of the City Council vote, they marched around City Hall and demonstrated outside the bank building (!) where the Council's offices are—and went inside, where 13 protesters sat in and were promptly dragged off to jail.

Here are a few pictures I took last night with my camera phone. The first is one of my favorites. See how they created a real community, complete with a free library! Long live the spirit of Bloombergville! I'm sure many more will be sprouting up, here and around the country, in days to come.

We the Animals

2011-06-28T17:56:00.000-04:00

Last week I predicted that I'd tear through it and be blown away by it. Today I pronounce myself prescient. Didn't take much; anyone who's read any of his work knows going in that We the Animals is going to be a rare reading experience. And so it is. Justin Torres's writing is raw, piercing. It's unbearable yet un-put-down-able.

In a series of short takes, each scene unstitched with a surgical precision that leaves the reader stunned and short of breath, Justin lays bare the complex dynamic of pain, love, rage and laughter that is the family of the first-person narrator, a young boy, youngest of three brothers. These are rough waters. It seems at times it'll be a miracle if he makes it to shore. You so much want him to.

Along with the exquisite artistry of his writing, deep emotional insight, and profound humanity, Justin offers here something that I particularly value. In his depiction of what it would be too glib to label dysfunction in an oppressed working-class family barely getting by, he lays bare some of what this system does to those it exploits most. How the desperation of never having enough—money, respect, time, support—plays out in violence, drink, love expressed as its opposite, hurt all around.

Capitalism, it seems to me, gives love a hard go of it. I think there is an accurate reflection of this in We the Animals.

By the way, I've taken the liberty here of referring to the author by his first name because, as I've mentioned before, I know him a little, having spent a week with him a few years ago at a writing retreat. In an interview in the PR material, Justin makes the point, as so many authors must, that this is fiction, not memoir. It is nevertheless true, as he also says, that the book's framework—the family he portrays, its circumstances— is based on his family. He may not have lived through every story told in these pages, but he sure went through some stuff.

It reminds me again of how many wondrous talented writers and artists are out there who never get a chance to fulfill their potential. We are all so lucky that here, in Justin Torres, is one who made it to where he ought to be.

The book is out the first week in September, which is also when Justin's book tour starts. I've already marked my calendar for his first stop here in New York, at the New School on September 12. He'll also be going to San Francisco, Boston, D.C., Syracuse, Austin, Iowa City, Portland, and Los Angeles, so get yourself to hear him read if you can.

Now I can get married. No I do not thank Governor Cuomo

2011-06-25T00:14:00.000-04:00

I'm writing this late Friday evening, an hour or so after the New York state legislature finally passed the marriage equality bill, legalizing same-sex marriage. This is a great victory--for which full credit goes to our community, to our 42-plus years of fighting, organizing, mass mobilizations, our struggling angry strong proud LGBTQ people. No credit is due to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In fact, the way that this vile vicious union-busting anti-worker anti-poor program-cutting reactionary maneuvered his way into the position of appearing as the hero, the leader, the great man who handed us this law is in my view the most brazen display of demagoguery mounted by any politician in a long time. Here he is--one day after forcing the state employees' unions to sign off on a raft of terrible givebacks, in the throes of attacking the working-class students of SUNY and CUNY by cutting budgets and raising tuition, here he is gutting social programs left and right, pushing the kind of assault against the working class of New York state that not even the last Republican governor could get away with--and lo and behold he gets to portray himself as the great liberator. What an act--hey everybody, says the guv, don't look at what I'm doing to wreck and ruin you, no, look over here, look at my beautiful rhetoric. I'm the guy who gave you gay marriage!

Well no he didn't. We won this with our many years of fighting. And we should none of us offer up any thanks to this demagogue, nor let this achievement distract us from all the evil he is doing. Let's celebrate tonight! Tomorrow let's get back to organizing to fight back against him!

That said, I want also to clarify why I do see this as a victory. It might seem surprising, coming from a revolutionary socialist. It's certainly true that as a communist I am no fan of the patriarchal institution of marriage, rooted as it is in class society, based as it is on the subjugation of women. I've never understood why any revolutionary would get married, except discreetly if they felt they had to for practical reasons like getting onto a spouse's health plan. However, this here is a different matter. This here is a matter of an oppressed group having been barred from access to a legal right. It is, simply, a matter of equality. Marriage may be an estate rooted in sexist society--but that's marriage as it traditionally was, heterosexual marriage whose essential purpose was to codify paternity, ensure patrilineal inheritance, and enforce male ownership of women. But marriage today is also a conferral of legal recognition--a conferral of over 1000 rights and privileges under the law. To be banned from access to that recognition and to those over 1000 rights and privileges is sheer discrimination. Which is why the fight to win same-sex marriage is a basic civil-rights struggle.

And why the passage of this law is something to celebrate. In fact, when I got home tonight after a meeting and turned on NY1 and watched live as the state senate acted on the bill, and I saw on the split screen that they were also covering the crowd that had gathered in Sheridan Square outside the Stonewall Inn, waiting to hear the news, I really regretted not realizing folks would be down there, not having gone down to the Village, not being there with my people cheering and dancing and singing and crying a little. No one should underestimate the very real joy so many people feel tonight. Finally, a measure of justice. Finally, some recognition of our relationships. Of our love.

On the other hand. Yeah, you're right if you say it's all symbolic. For it is--getting married in New York state carries with it precious few if any practical actual benefits. Not as long as the Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, remains federal law. DOMA means that even if same-sex couples get married in any one of the several states that now let them, the federal government will not recognize the marriage, and in fact the horribly onerous anti-gay tax penalty that now accrues to employees whose same-sex spouse is covered on their health plan will go on.

Thus, there is much more to this fight. Ultimately, this state-by-state nonsense must be transcended. No oppressed minority can win its rights this way. This is, and should be, a national fight. And marriage is, and should be, a federal right. As is the overall right to freedom from discrimination in housing, employment public accomodations, and so on -- that is, the basic right that we have been fighting for all these years and that we still lack in most of this country. There is still no federal law banning anti-LGBT discrimination.

So yeah, the fight goes on. It's fitting that we are now in the weekend of the annual LGBT Pride events here in New York, when we come out in our hundreds of thousands and mark the anniversary of the great 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. Sunday we'll march down Fifth Avenue as we always do, and we'll show our pride and joy and strength while we raise all our demands. Anger and celebration in equal measure: it will be a good day. We have a right to savor this small step forward.

As for me, I'll be heading down to City Hall with Teresa, my lover of 23 years, soon after the new law takes effect, some time this summer. We'd actually decided a while back to get married, and had been trying to plan a few days to take a quiet trip to Connecticut, the nearest state that allowed same-sex marriage. Now we don't have to go to all that trouble. Now we can just take the subway downtown. We're not going to make a big to-do out of it. We're both still too queasy about all that marriage has meant in its long history as an oppressive sexist institution. We both know we won't get any practical benefit from taking this step. But we decided that, as fighters for liberation, when the movement we've been a part of succeeds in breaking down even a small part of the social barriers, even if mostly, for now, symbolically, it is correct that we should step forward and claim this newly won right. We should take our place among our sisters and brothers saying this is ours, we've won it, we're taking it. It's a statement we've got to make.

Summer reading

2011-06-19T12:13:00.000-04:00

It's been an up-and-down, mostly middling, first half of the year reading-wise. Now things are looking up.

I'm about to start reading Century of the Wind, the final book in Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy about the history of the Western Hemisphere. I happened to finish the first volume just before Columbus Day, and the second just before Veterans Day, and I'm guessing I'll finish this third in time to offer up its evidence against the celebration of imperialism and jingoism that is the Fourth of July. Sure looking forward to that.

When I finish the Galeano, I'll move on to another book that I'm looking forward to with wild thrilled anticipation, We the Animals, the first novel by Justin Torres. I'm ecstatic to have procured a review copy in advance of the September 6 publication date, and I expect to rip through its pages speedily and giddily. How can I be so confident? Well, I read several chapters in early draft form four years ago when Justin and I were both fellows at the first annual Lambda Literary Foundation LGBT writers' retreat in Los Angeles. Early draft? I remember that everyone in the workshop was hard pressed to offer any criticism or suggestions, the writing was so exquisitely fierce and stunning. I also loved Justin himself. He's a beautiful person. His has not been a life of middle-class white privilege as is the case with so many of the first-novelist products of the MFA factory to whom we're serially subjected, nor is he unconscious politically as they so generally are, and his fiction reflects this. I'm so happy he's getting the recognition he deserves, and so happy his book tops my to-read pile.

Congratulate me: I still haven't used up the bookstore gift certificate I got last holiday season. I did take a big chunk out of it this past week when I picked up A Moment in the Sun, the new novel by writer and filmmaker John Sayles. It's a big fat book--perfect for summer vacation, issued in a gorgeous edition by McSweeney's--that takes on the history of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. I'm going on faith that Sayles, whose movies are all politically progressive and mostly pretty good, does justice to the topic. Hope I'm right; this will be some literally heavy lifting for naught if it turns out my faith is misplaced.

Speaking of vacation--yay! It looms! I've got about three more weeks to work, then I'll be off for three weeks. It may not be the reading-est vacation I've ever had, as I'll be visiting a friend on the West Coast for a hunk of it, but then again that may not interfere as she's a big reader too and we may spend nice chunks of time in quiet companionship reading poolside. Sounds like heaven, no? So here are some of the volumes, mostly fiction but some non, that I've amassed with my gift certificate and in my libraries rounds, from among which I'll be making my vacation reading selections. In no particular order except that first place must always go to genius:

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (I suddenly realized recently that I'd never read this, to my shame)
Caramba! by Nina Marie Martinez
Malinche's Children by Daniel Houston-Davila
The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
Stonewall by Martin Duberman
Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe
The Famished Road by Ben Okri
L'Assommoir by Emile Zola
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington
Cellophane by Marie Arana
Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman

Finally, a note about the novel I just read. Pym by Mat Johnson. Damn! This is one rollicking raging biting piercing angry hilarious book. It is about--well, the story itself is a wild quasi-spec-fic tale most of which takes place on Antarctica where an all-Black team has gone in quest of, variously, pure water, adventure, fame, fortune, love, revenge and the truth, but what it's about is Blackness and whiteness and the racism upon which this country was founded, built and currently rests. This is a work of high imagination, incredible invention, cutting humor, and most profound meditation on "race" and racism. You should read it.

Gaza: Symbol of Resistance

2011-06-18T11:39:00.000-04:00

I referred to it earlier this year, in the context of the popular uprisings in Egypt and other Arab countries and the promise they hold for boosting the Palestinian struggle, but now that I actually have a published (as opposed to pre-publication proof) copy in my hands I want to draw attention to the new book Gaza: Symbol of Resistance, edited by the brilliant Joyce Chediac and issued by World View Forum.

This is an important book. This is a unique book. This is an informative book and this is one of those rare books that are intended to contribute to the struggle, and succeed in doing so. You should buy and read this book.

Why? Because the people of Gaza are suffering, they are suffering terribly, bombed, blockaded, consigned to terrible conditions without adequate food, water, means of sanitation, medicine--and because this suffering is sponsored by your tax dollars, which fully fund and sponsor the Zionist state's ongoing war against the Palestinian people, whose land it has occupied for 63 years.

Here is the truth, written by partisans for Palestine, about Israel's bombardment and occupation of Gaza in December 2008-January 2009, about what came before, about the endless vicious attacks since. Most important, two truths you'll never get from the bourgeois press: what's really behind this criminal campaign against the people of Gaza, and what the people of Gaza themselves are doing, saying, thinking. For me, it is the heroism of our Palestinian sisters and brothers in Gaza--their resistance, their defiance in the face of what would seem to be unbearable conditions and relentless pressure, their steadfast refusal to deny their own history or abandon their right to self-determination--that comes through strongest in these pages and is most inspiring. This is why the title is so apt.

There's another reason I'm so glad this book is out and why I hope it gets out to many readers, especially now as we approach the big LGBT Pride march here in New York City. Every year on the last Sunday in June, hundreds of thousands gather to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion that gave rise to the modern gay movement. This year, spurred in large part by a political struggle that's broken out, a new contingent, organized by LGBT Palestine solidarity activists, will be marching: Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. QAIA has already marched this month, in the Queens and Brooklyn Pride parades, where they and their message urging our community to stand with our Palestinian sisters and brothers were well received. Now it's on to the big event next Sunday.


At Queens Pride

The political struggle I refer to is over the right of pro-Palestinian queer groups to meet at the LGBT Center on 13th Street in Manhattan. I blogged about this issue when it first broke out in early March. Sadly, since then the position of the Center's officialdom, after a number of flip-flops, has gone from bad to worse. Its latest and supposedly final edict was to permanently ban all groups having anything to do with "the Israel/Palestinian issue." This fake equating of "both sides" is of course patent nonsense--the ruling is nothing more or less than a racist attack against Palestinian queers and their supporters, and a craven cave-in to the most brazen reactionary forces who mobilized a racist pressure campaign on the Center's board and director, a campaign to whose every demand these sorry stooges have acquiesced. Well, the friends of Palestine know a thing or two about mobilizing themselves, and this struggle is far from over, won't end, in fact, until the Center is once again a free, open space for all of our community. For more on this whole matter, check out Queers for an Open LGBT Center. On their site, every step over the last few months is documented, allied groups are listed, and plans--including a protest at this Monday's annual fancy-shmancy Garden Party and then the contingent at next Sunday's big march--are offered.

Betwixt & between

2011-06-09T13:43:00.000-04:00

The blogging slowdown continues, as is surely apparent. I've also recently closed my Facebook account, so my live-time online presence, such as it was, is shrinking. I never did tweet or follow anyone on Twitter—could there be anything more annoying, more pointless, trivial, hollow, time-wasting?—and although I was a more or less active Facebook user for the past couple of years, my engagement was always steeped in ambivalence. My FB postings were generally judicious, I think, not too crazy, impulsive, inappropriate or offensive--I am a highly flawed individual but I'm not a dickhead or a weiner (yeah, I went there)—but they always made me queasy nonetheless. Not only did it feel creepy to repair to this virtual lounge whenever I had something I wanted to express and express it to virtual people, especially for someone like me who's always been reserved in person with all but my closest friends (and yeah, to them I'm a wild, un-shut-uppable ranter), creepy so that I almost always regretted posting, always felt embarrassed or out of control, but more than that I could never quite figure out the answer to this question: Why bother? Why bother the couple hundred or so people I'd somehow accumulated as "friends" with my random effluvia? Why post or pass along endless news items, political analysis, Youtube videos and the like when there are plenty of other people doing it already? As for the flip side, reading all those other folks' equally random effluvia and/or endlessly repetitive news etc., logging onto FB and scrolling through the posts (and mind you, this was even after adjusting my settings so that many didn't show anyway) came to feel like punishment. Like slogging through a daily flogging to which I ultimately couldn't find a reason to keep subjecting myself. Important political news and developments? I'm on enough lists and read enough news that most things I should see make their way to me already. Personal info and updates? If we really know and care about each other, even virtually, you'll call or email me. Ultimately, I couldn't come up with any reason to keep returning to an imaginary land of irkdom and jerkdom except to spin my wheels when what they need is to stay in contact with the road and transport me forward.

So goodbye to all that. Not to all this, lit-blogging, yet, but who knows. The original impetus for starting Read Red, almost three years ago now, had to do with my frustration at the dearth of truly left literary news and analysis on the internet. This dearth remains in effect, to the best of my knowledge, at least in English. The ubiquity of bourgeois consciousness, unconscious though it generally is especially in the minds of good-hearted progressive-oriented commentators, bloggers, reviewers et al, remains unchanged. My frustration unabates. However, my need to comment, my desire to do what I can to carve out a class-struggle space in the literary blogosphere, no longer compels quite so compellingly as it did at the start. It might just be fatigue. I mean, how many times can I yelp and yowl about the endless assault of literary and other offenses? It might just be personal fatigue unrelated to matters literary or bloggish. Hell, it might just be that I need a vacation (one month till VDay).

It might also be—no, it definitely is—that I've got to knuckle down, as I've scolded myself so many times before, including publicly here on this blog, and get this damned novel finished. I've got to brush aside impediments. FB was one, an absurd time waster like online games used to be. Is Read Red another? Not if I maintain the slowed down pace I've reverted to this spring. As long as I only post here when I've actually got something halfway meaningful to contribute to the conversation, I think this blog justifies itself, both in a broad way in terms of fulfilling its charge of offering a communist take on literature and personally while not sucking my writing energy away from the story I'm trying to get onto the page.

So I'm here. I'll be back. As for all that other crap, if you need me you know where to find me.

Even the Rain

2011-06-06T16:16:00.001-04:00

I saw a provocative and important movie this past weekend. Even the Rain, about a year old, available, at least on my cable system, on demand for five bucks. It's about a film crew that's come to Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the year 2000 to make a movie about the arrival and subsequent actions of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish colonizers in what are now the Americas. The movie they are making has a progressive slant; it shows the horrors inflicted on the Indigenous inhabitants by the invaders; it does not portray Columbus and the rest as heroes; it highlights the efforts of Bartolome de las Casas and the now lesser-known Antonio Montesinos against these horrors. And yet, for all their good intentions, the European director/writer, producer, crew and most of the actors, from the moment they arrive for the shoot, themselves engage in the same racism, exploitation and oppression that they're supposedly committed to exposing when it's safely 500 years in the past. Ironies abound, but really irony is the wrong word because there's a bourgeois disengagement to artistic irony, a trap into which Even the Rain does not fall. Rather, I should say that this film does a great job, careful but clear, of depicting a latter-day invasion—not physically cruel, brutal or violent but nevertheless oppressive and exploitive in many ways, and clueless about its oppressiveness, utterly insensitive—an invasion in this case by a moneyed force, that is, a movie production.

Although that alone would be interesting enough, there's much more. For the film crew arrives just as the great water wars of Cochabamba are hitting a fever pitch. No one—actors, director, producer, crew—remains untouched as the Bolivian peasants and workers organize, take to the streets, shut down the city, battle street by street to defend a most basic, precious right. The fulcrum of it all, of the struggle and of the movie and of the movie within the movie, is the character of Daniel. He and his daughter have been hired for the movie, he playing the pivotal role of Hatuey, the Taino rebel who led the resistance to the invaders and was crucified for it. At the same time, Daniel is a leader of the actual real-life struggle to block imperialism (it was the U.S. company Bechtel) from stealing the people's water and forcing them to pay for it. This struggle coincides with and interrupts the shoot, and it forces the producer and director to make hard decisions about what matters most—a movie or a struggle for justice, an investment or a human being.

The acting in Even the Rain is very good, especially that of Juan Carlos Aduviri as Hatuey and Luis Tosar as Costa the producer. The director is Icíar Bollaín; I'm not familiar with her work but would gladly see more of her movies. The writer is Paul Laverty, who also wrote Bread and Roses about the Justice for Janitors strike in Los Angeles and the great great The Wind that Shakes the Barley about the Irish republican struggle. The movie is dedicated to Howard Zinn, a signal of the filmmakers' orientation toward truth telling.

A final note. I mused a bit after watching Even the Rain about why the filmmakers hadn't simply made a movie about the Cochabamba water wars and how the peasants and workers drove Bechtel out of Bolivia. Wouldn't that be a great, exciting, dramatic movie, and don't we desperately need movies that show the class struggle in action? So is this one more case of foregrounding European central characters (the Spanish moviemakers of the movie-within-the-movie) onto a story that is not theirs, of telling a story of Indigenous resistance through European eyes? In one way, yes it is, it's undeniable, that's what this film does. In another way, though, I think the artists behind Even the Rain deserve some leeway, some credit, even. I think they very consciously framed the story the way they did, not to provide some through-privileged-eyes surrogate viewpoint, but rather to make a particular point about how what Columbus started is still going on. How Europe (now joined by the U.S.) continues to rob the riches and resources of Latin America and the Caribbean (and Asia and Africa)—in the most pernicious, overt ways, as with Bechtel's water grab, and also in less obvious or extreme ways, as with the moviemakers-within-the-movie paying extras $2 a day, putting them through physical and psychological hardship, swooping in to spend the least possible money for the highest possible later profit, all the while trying desperately to ignore the class war swirling all around them.

Silver Sparrow

2011-05-23T17:40:00.008-04:00

As anyone who reads this blog with any regularity knows, I'm a fan of novelist Tayari Jones. I read and raved about her first two novels, Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling. I follow her blog ardently. I admire her, not only as an author but as someone who makes it her business to encourage and mentor young writers, particularly people of color, women, LGBT folks, working-class writers, everyone, in other words, who doesn't get much encouragement from the literary establishment. I have it on good authority that she's a great teacher, too, tough as all get-out in that way great teachers have of dragging the best out of you, not letting you settle for less, and then when the best emerges giving you all the strokes you deserve.

Back to her writing. It's superb. However, from my vantage point, as I belabor constantly hereabouts, that's not enough. I require something more from fiction, something beyond beautifully crafted sentences. I require engagement, some meaningful level of grappling with social and political issues, with reality, and I mean more substantial reality than kitchen-table talk or interpersonal angst. Tayari Jones' work engages with the world. I don't know if she thinks of herself as a political writer, and most reviews of her work don't characterize her that way, and that's cool, in my book you don't have to be a Political Writer to be a political writer, see what I mean? You have to contend in some way with the realities of life in this society (or whatever society you're writing about), and she does so with great skill and insight.

So yay! She's got a new novel out! Silver Sparrow, just released by Algonquin.

And yay--I'm going to the book launch Wednesday night at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. Reading, Signing, Frolicking, as it's described on the author's website, where you can find the other dates in her book tour. I'm bringing some friends, and we're going to try to get there in time to find seats, which might be hard because I have a feeling it'll be a full house. No matter. I'll be glad to stand.

In fact, I'll be sitting much of the next day, on a plane as Teresa and I fly to Texas to spend an extended holiday weekend with her family. Which means this is probably the last post for at least a week, probably more. I probably won't get to read Silver Sparrow until some time after we return--I don't think I'll take it on the trip because I don't want to start it on the plane only to be ripped away from it for the better part of a week visiting with family--but I'll be happy knowing it's waiting for me back home in Queens.

Update: I attended and maximally enjoyed the book launch on May 25. It was packed, it was exciting, and Tayari was incredibly thrilling. She's not only a great writer but a great reader, and so smart, and so funny, and the only reason I'm not mentioning that she's also gorgeous and charming and charismatic is because that would be against my principles since all that should matter is the art...anyway, it was a great, I'm so glad I went, and I'm looking forward to reading her book very soon.

Now I'm back from six days in Texas, or rather inside the air conditioning of Texas, since it was way too hot to step outside. It was a lovely time. But I ate way too much, and especially way too much meat--yep, when in Texas--so now it's back to being sensible. And to work. I'll return with new lit talk as soon as I can.

You're right if you think I'm no fan of Philip Roth

2011-05-20T17:28:00.000-04:00

but grossed out as I am by the big literary award he won this week, that's not why I haven't been blogging. There's no particular reason, actually, except that I haven't had a chance, am working on other things, and haven't had anything pressing to say. As I predicted would happen at the start of this year, I've been posting here much less often, and that'll probably continue. I'm not giving up on this fun little outlet quite yet, though, so do keep checking in now and then.

In the meantime, take it away, Mr. Sulu.

The un-Stieg Larsson

2011-05-13T17:29:00.000-04:00

That's how I think of Cara Hoffman after reading her very good and deeply provocative debut novel So Much Pretty. I was going to head this post "the thinking woman's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" or something along those lines as a shorthand for what I think this novel accomplishes in earnest compared to what Larsson's by some accounts purports but by my read fails to. I didn't use such a heading because I don't want to offend the many people, including friends of mine, who not only like Larsson's novel and its two trilogy followers but think they are anti-sexist works of fiction. I respect those who think that. I myself, however, didn't react that way to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (and have no interest in reading the other two). I found it a run-of-the-mill thriller/murder mystery, terribly clunkily written, not particularly interesting politically or in any other way. The lists of ghastly statistics about violence against women that precede each chapter seemed to me a lazy throwaway that I guess could be charitably interpreted to have been meant but completely failed to substitute for any meaningful exploration of this issue in the text itself. Writing about a misogynistic crime is hardly in and of itself any sort of contribution to the struggle against male supremacy. Sheesh, books and movies that feature awful acts against women are a mainstay of this culture, violence against women is in fact frequently offered up for misogynist titillation and, sadly, in Dragon Tattoo, can certainly be read that way. Especially when folded into a plot replete with the whole gamut of hot-sexy-crazed-babe-fucking-brooding-misunderstood-deeply-decent-male-hero cliches as they are, Larsson's depictions of crimes against women can be read as deeply offensive, exploitive and sexist (not to mention trite) business as usual in the thriller genre. Sorry, but, again, by my lights lists of statistics can't and don't substitute for substance, and unless something deeper is offered simply recounting gruesome anti-woman crimes is at best fatuous, at worst itself sexist and offensive.

OK, so how do you write about violence against women in a way that takes the reader on a much more profound journey? That makes the reader feel the horror and the ubiquity of this society's utter, definitive even, misogyny? That forces the reader to feel this—the woman reader to, shuddering, feel everything she's already felt and known, the male reader, I'd imagine, to gain a new level of understanding–and to think about it and about what can or might or should or must be done about it? That does all this without providing any graphic depiction of the disturbing, disgusting crime against a young woman that is central to the story—that is, without offering any opportunity for depraved titillation? That on the contrary builds real empathy for the victim as a person, a human being in all her fullness before the crime? That takes us inside her consciousness only for fleeting moments of the agonizingly long months of her ordeal, and yet in this brief passage contributes more to the case that a society-wide upheaval is needed to end violence against women than any of Larsson's lists ever could?

You do it the way Cara Hoffman does in So Much Pretty. I'm not talking about the plot, although that is well handled. [SPOILER ALERT STARTS HERE.] I knew what the crux of this story would be—the two basic thrusts of the plot, which are the abduction, repeated gang rape and eventual murder of a young woman, Wendy, and the shockingly violent retribution of another young woman, Alice—fairly early on, certainly by about halfway through the book. Hoffman certainly crafts the plot skillfully, but this is a novel whose underlying questions carry the real weight. Questions like: what kind of society does what this society does to women? and how can it be stopped? and what is or is not a moral or ethical or otherwise justifiable response?

For me, as a communist, the answers to the latter questions have to do with issues of consciousness and education, and with mass organizing and community control. For the teenager who ultimately takes matters into her own hands to mete out what she sees as justice to the young men who she believes are the culprits and who, she knows, are unlikely ever to be brought to any other kind of justice, no options except unilateral individual action seem viable. I'd trace this, at least in part, to the tacit lesson she took from her parents, doctors who left New York City and a life of community medical work and moved to a rural, depressed town in upstate New York—who opted out, in other words, removed themselves from any direct social engagement, any directed effort together with others to help or fix or change anything. This is me now, not the author, it's me saying united collective action rather than individual is the way forward. But Hoffman does weave in enough stuff to chew on, via the parent characters and some others, their friends, about their various choices and conflicts and thoughts and ideas and arguments, to indicate that it's just these issues, or at least that it's partly these issues, that she's posing as challenges we need to take up. The bottom line is that this is a successful novel, a disturbing, truthful work.

'The organization of which you are an exploitee'

2011-05-08T13:28:00.001-04:00

After reading a quite serious novel, which I will blog about soon but which was unsettling enough to first require some space, some head-clearing, I turned to and quickly devoured a wild little book of subversive mayhem: The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise by Georges Perec. Perec was a mid-20th-century French writer of experimental literature. I first heard of him a few years back when a new English edition of his book A Void was released. That one's an entire novel written without using the letter E. While something like that could easily be mere gimmickry, and while in my opinion there's nothing inherently interesting or meaningful politically about a project like that (unless there is of course, I mean unless the content takes on the class struggle in some way), still it piqued my interest and has been on my to-read list for a while. Because I do have a weakness for sly hilarity, and A Void sounds like that might be on offer.

Not having any academic or theoretical literary training, I know very little about experimental writing. I know it excites some folks, often younger folks who are fed up with conventional fiction, who seek work that breaks away from established standards and norms. I sympathize with that yearning. Yet I haven't read anything that convinces me that experimental fiction is by virtue of its formal departures revolutionary or contributes in any way to the revolutionary struggle. I have in fact read interesting counter-arguments, that such work is, thanks to its inaccessibility to most people, irrelevant at best and at worst just a less stodgy contribution to bourgeois culture. Myself, the few times I've dipped my toes in ex-lit waters, I found it arid or impenetrable or boring or irrelevant.

Not this time. I loved The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise. I don't care at all about its genesis--experiments with computer programs, as outlined in the translator's introduction--in fact, I wish I hadn't read the introduction, for I'd never have imagined any remotely mechanistic origin for this witty gritty little spew of a book. No matter, for however the idea evolved the story's crazily revolving locutions could only have been cooked up in the labyrinth of Perec's evidently wonderfully skewed, demented mind. And it is a story. A story about an office worker trying to ask his boss for a raise. Told without sentence or paragraph breaks, without punctuation or capital letters. Without pause or breath. A breathless endless and endlessly futile quest as the worker in his heart of heart well knows, telling himself at one point

do not lose heart after all you make a decent living do you really need a raise if you cut out the unnecessaries heating clothing transport if you have lunch in the canteen every day and dine on boiled lettuce you should be able to make both ends meet in any case it's a well known fact that boiled lettuce sharpens the mind

Lots of commentary about work and big business sneaks into what at first glance might seem like an impossibly repetitive, minute, circular narrative about a guy going to his boss's office to ask for a raise, along with lots of comic detail about fish bones and bad eggs and measles and circumperambulation. So yes, there is social satire built in, yes the sum of this small gem is more than its kooky parts. And yes, I thoroughly enjoyed whizzing along on the ride. Fun! Everyone deserves some!

The ultra-reactionary chokehold

2011-05-06T17:07:00.001-04:00

Playwright Tony Kushner has done some good work. His most famous plays, the Angels in America cycle, were some of the first mainstream drama to draw attention to how the AIDS crisis was devastating the gay community in this country. His musical Caroline, or Change, which I saw in 2004 during its all too brief Broadway run starring the soaring, searing Tonya Pinkins and the incandescent Anika Noni Rose, is an honest, tough-minded yet tender treatment of race, racism, and Black-Jewish relations in the 1960s South. Kushner is not a radical. He is thoroughly at home in the mainstream. Basically he is a left social democrat, a devotee of what he sees as the potential of bourgeois democracy while acknowledging its shortcomings, and also aware of other possibilities and even of the ubiquitousness of anti-communism in this country and how it has damaged and distorted culture. This brief take on his political sensibilities, based on having read a number of his pieces and interviews with him over the years, is offered to lead in to commenting on the current dust-up drawing much notice here in New York.

At its meeting this past Monday, the board of trustees of the City University of New York voted to cancel the honorary degree that John Jay College had planned to bestow on Tony Kushner at this month's graduation ceremony. The reason: the playwright is not sufficiently rabidly racistly violently Zionist.

He is a Zionist. A left-liberal Zionist, the sort who says "I love Israel" and expresses his "strong support for Israel's right to exist," but does oppose the occupation and criticize what he sees as its worst extremes in the treatment of the indigenous Palestinian population. Kushner has acknowledged at least some of the crimes committed during the creation of the state of Israel. Yet "the occupation" that he opposes is the post-1967 occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, not the larger occupation—that is, the theft of the entire land of Palestine, on which is imposed the Zionist state, a state that is by definition racist, exclusionist and illegitimate.

Never forget this: Tony Kushner, or I, or any U.S. Jew, can move to Israel at any time and get automatic citizenship. Simply because we're Jews (and, by the way, regardless of religious practice, smart move since most Jews are atheists). By contrast, no Palestinian-American—not a young person whose parent or grandparent was forced out of the family home, nor an elder who was herself/himself driven out of the house by the terrorist thugs whose murderous ethnic cleansing campaigns were crucial to the creation of a Jewish state—not a single Palestinian is permitted to return home to live. Think about that. I, someone with no tie whatsoever to "Israel," someone whose ancestry goes back to Eastern Europe for hundreds of years and to Spain for hundreds of years before that, could pack up and move there tomorrow. And be welcomed as an automatic citizen. But my Palestinian sister whose parents still keep the key to their stolen home in a precious box, who still yearn for home, who still grieve over their forcible expulsion from the land their people had lived on for untold generations—she is barred from returning. (Here I'll point again, for any who have not yet read it, to Susan Abulhawa's wonderful novel Mornings in Jenin, which conveys this reality in a gripping literary tour de force.)

So. Here's a famous playwright who despite all that proclaims his love for Israel. Who says he is "moved and excited by its culture, its meaning in Jewish history" (which is to my way of thinking a reprehensible sentiment since its meaning in Jewish history is a blot, a shame, a stain, a crime against humanity, a turning away from a tradition of righteous struggle and solidarity against oppression). Who does criticize some of its crimes, as indeed do many Israelis, but does not at all part ways with Zionism itself, or with a fundamental support for the Zionist state's right to exist. Who, furthermore, explicitly does not support the BDS—Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions—movement, an international effort to bring pressure on Israel to end the 1967 occupation even though that in itself is a moderate demand and the BDS tactic a time-honored one honed during the struggle against that earlier apartheid state, South Africa; but no, even so, Kushner opposes BDS. Here, in other words, is a friend to Israel. But in the landscape of U.S. culture, where the ultra-right has an ever tighter grip on consciousness and culture, even that is not good enough.

And so CUNY pulls his honor. And Kushner cries foul. In his letter to the board expressing his dismay at the action, he asserts his "strong statement of support for Israel's right to exist, and my ardent wish that it continue to do so." He decries the BDS movement, explaining: "I have never supported a boycott of the state of Israel. I don't believe it will accomplish anything positive in terms of resolving the crisis. I believe that the call for a boycott is predicated on an equation of this crisis with other situations, contemporary and historical, that is fundamentally false, the consequence of a failure of political understanding of a full and compassionate engagement with Jewish history and Jewish existence." You can read his whole letter here. I've included these several sentences, with which I could not disagree more—and the latter of which seems to me to smack shockingly of a Jewish exceptionalism that objectively aligns with the base racism of the Zionist ideology rather than conveying any meaningful point about the history of European persecution of the Jews to which he's obviously referring and to which Zionism was and remains a backward, reactionary response; his view, apparently, is that apartheid in Israel cannot be compared to apartheid in South Africa because those imposing apartheid in Israel had terrible things happen to their grandparents in Europe—I include his own words expressing his unfortunate views to show how far from anti-Israel Kushner is. As he indeed took pains to show. Which underscores how extreme is the chokehold of reaction in every realm of this culture.

Now Facebook groups spring up. PEN, that bastion of anti-communist bourgeois liberalism, enters the fray. No one asks why reactionary investment bankers and bosses sit in control over CUNY, the college of New York's working class funded by the workers' taxes; why the majority of the board is white when most students are people of color; why tuition is no longer free and is in fact about to go up drastically again, making college an unreachable dream for more young workers.

CUNY should belong to the people of New York City. Militant students are right now organizing to take it back, fighting alongside staff and teachers against the vicious funding cuts and layoffs dictated by the banks. This will be a long, hard struggle, but it can be won. When it is, when CUNY is in the hands of the working class, I'll love to see who that new improved CUNY chooses to receive its honorary degrees.

Morals, Marx & May Day

2011-04-29T12:39:00.000-04:00

As often seems to happen after I read a good book, I've had an unsettled period, a couple weeks of neither-here-nor-thereness reading-wise. I've pulled out of it and am now engrossed in a fine novel. First, however, I spent the better part of a week trying to get through a book—and I did try! I violated my own rule about how many pages to give a book before giving up on it, gave it well over 100 pages before crying uncle!—that had sounded like it might be a fun and interesting follow-up to The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore. I responded to a publicist's promotion and received a free review copy of The Moral Lives of Animals by Dale Peterson. I'm thinking I should stop doing this—not that I have that often, two or three times now, but each time the book's been a disappointment that I've forced myself to stick with much longer than I would have had it not been a review copy, plus I feel obliged to blog about it where I'd otherwise have probably kept silent as I do about many books I read or try to read.

Well then. While I read Bruno Littlemore as primarily a commentary on human society, the novelist did also fold into the story some provocative ideas about animal (or at least chimpanzee) consciousness, mentation, and, yes, morality. So I hoped that with The Moral Lives of Animals I'd get a chance to pick up and run with some of these ideas. Didn't happen. The book's a dud. In several ways. You know how you'll sometimes read a magazine article that makes a cogent point or two about a particular issue, and then a year or two later you'll see that the writer has expanded the article into a book, and you'll read the book and think, jeez, she/he should have left it an article? Peterson's book feels like one of those—a good idea for an article-length piece, destroyed by expansion into a tedious book—only, oops, as far as I can tell it never was an article. So it's a book that should have only been an article. I could recap Peterson's main points in a paragraph or so, or, in conversation, in a minute or two, and then back up his points with some of the buttressing evidence in another few paragraphs or, in conversation, another five or 10 minutes. You know: we human beings are not unique; we are animals too; we share most or all of our physiological and psychological characteristics with other mammals; there is wide and deep evidence of moral behavior among other mammals; and of emotion; and of social cooperation; these characteristics and behaviors developed over millions of years because they have evolutionary value; and so on. There just doesn't seem to be anything new or any particular contribution here.

Over the last several years there's been a slight but steady stream of news reports about scientific studies providing evidence that unselfishness or altruism or kindness or cooperation, some quality along this spectrum, is an essential human trait, constructed by evolution and proven by way of animal-behavior studies. These reports naturally intrigue and encourage me; they're the sort of thing I'd hoped to find in this book. Some of this is in here, but there's so much bloat, obfuscation, repetition and dross that it's obscured. Bummer. This is my second unsuccessful try at such a read. My last was one of Frans de Waal's books, which I had to give up on very early because I got pissed off at a gratuitous anti-Soviet comment right near the beginning. If you feel compelled to insert an attack against the first group of people who tried to build a socialist society at the very beginning of a book that is purportedly about the evolutionary benefits of empathy and cooperation, I don't feel compelled to keep reading your words.

Which reminds me to note that most of these books, Peterson's and de Waal's definitely among them, even as they assert what seem to be mildly progressive points, are thoroughly grounded in bourgeois consciousness and imbued with bourgeois ideology. This is important to remember especially with reference to evolutionary biology, a field upon which these writers heavily rely and that's rife with not only potential for reactionary use and abuse but much actual reactionary use and abuse. There is a whole wing of evolutionary biology, arguably its biggest, dominant wing, that's devoted to "proving" all sorts of sexist, even misogynist, theses. This is the sort of "science" that lets an asshole like Lawrence Summers assert, as he did in a 2005 speech as president of Harvard University, that the female of the species is underrepresented in science and engineering because of a "different availability of aptitude at the high end." In other words, um, women are stupid—and, hey, there are studies of chimpanzee behavior that prove it. So. Any and every bourgeois-liberal book of social science heavily based on the work of evolutionary biologists must be approached with this in mind.

When it comes to morality, there is in fact a human-specific angle that none of these writers appreciates or acknowledges. I speak of course of class. Morality is a vague and amorphous enough concept, but it becomes even less meaningful in a consideration devoid of class analysis. For a Marxist, there is no broad blanket moral code shared among everyone, worker and owner alike. How could there be, when our interests are so thoroughly opposed? Thinking about these issues, this morning as I was getting ready for work I pulled from our bookshelves my old, well-worn copy of Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky. It's got to be 30 years or more since I read this collection. Seems like a good moment to give it another going-over.

While I was at the shelves, I noted a book on Teresa's to-read pile and may ask her if I can have a go at it now. Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster. Title, topic and glowing blurbs aside, I have no idea what this one really is. I know what I wish it to be: that rare bird, an honest-to-goodness non-revisionist not-anti-communist Marxist work on questions of science and society. Whether it delivers, we shall see.

All this talk of morals and society leads me to a moral imperative. And that is to march this Sunday, May 1, May Day, for worker and immigrant rights. There are actions in cities around the country. Find yours and stand with our sisters and brothers to fight back against all the attacks on our rights, and especially in solidarity with immigrants who are being deported in record numbers by the Obama administration. Here in New York, meet up at noon at Union Square, where we'll rally before marching to Foley Square to join up with other groups for a mass demonstration of worker unity. Here's a bit of the May Day press conference this past Tuesday at New York City Hall. (That's my lover Teresa Gutierrez of the May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights in the yellow jacket.)

What hole have I been hiding in?

2011-04-24T11:41:00.000-04:00

OK, yes, I've been dealing with some minor but pesky health issues and yes, menopause has destroyed my sleep which in turn makes it a huge effort to do, well, almost anything beyond dragging myself to work every day, and yes, I've been trying to get some writing done...the result of all of which is that I haven't been following literary news very closely, or pushing myself to get to literary events, which is mostly fine but not entirely. Nothing excuses how out of touch I've become with developments in LGBT fiction. Never fear: I'm on it! I'm going to do my best to get to the May 12 reading at Bluestockings bookstore by some of this year's Lambda Literary Award finalists. (Here's a list of all the readings in various cities.)

And I'm all over this. The Lambda Literary Foundation just awarded its Mid-Career Novelist Prize to Susan Stinson and Alex Sanchez. Neither of whose work--oh the shame, the shame--I have read. An omission I am correcting as we speak. I've actually already had some of Sanchez's books on my to-read list, especially since last autumn's spate of LGBT youth suicides drew my attention to Young Adult books for our precious queer kids. I read some, but not yet his, and this award reminds me to get to that soon.

And Susan Stinson--what fucking hole have I been hiding in not to have known of or read her work? Sure, you never know whether you're going to like a book, and absolutely, I have been misled many times by glowing blurbs and even awards. But I've just spent some time on her website and I gotta tell you (and don't tell Teresa), I think I'm in love. Based on her own characterizations of her work and what she explores in it, and the lauds of some pretty impressive others. And based on the short piece, "Drink," featured on her homepage. Hot damn! It's dazzling! Her latest novel, Venus of Chalk, just took a top spot on my to-read list.

I was one of the fellows at the first annual Lambda LGBT Writers' Retreat in Los Angeles four summers ago, and I tried for a while to stay in the loop. Obviously, my efforts lagged. With limited time and energy, it's usually write or hang with writers and writing has to take priority. Still, as I've been thinking about lately since this spring's round of rejections dashed my hopes for an arts colony residency in July, while writing is a solitary business it's not good to be too isolated. There's a certain stimulation, a certain quickening of the blood and loosening up of new ideas, that happens, or can, in the company of writers, at least interesting, exciting, progressive writers. LGBT writers exploring some of the same terrain I'm trying to. So, to Alex Sanchez and Susan Stinson: congratulations, looking forward to reading your work, and thanks for spurring me to get back out into the world a bit.

Hazel Dickens has left the picket line

2011-04-23T20:59:00.002-04:00

Hazel Dickens, one of the great musical artists of the U.S. working class, died yesterday. She was 75. Sister Dickens sang well and long and loud on behalf of the workers and poor, especially the miners and mining families of Appalachia. For anyone who's ever mined or known miners and miners' families, which includes those of us like me who've never been near a mine but have done strike solidarity work over the years, hers is the voice of the class struggle in mine country. And will always be. Here's a clip of Hazel Dickens singing at a 1989 benefit for the Pittston strike. I suggest you watch the whole thing.

There are many other good YouTube videos, but really, just go buy some of her CDs. And to see her sing a fuller version of "Which Side Are You On?" to another group of strikers, watch Barbara Koppel's great documentary Harlan County USA. (Correction: Hazel Dickens sings "Black Lung" in the movie. Florence Reece sings her song "Which Side Are You On?" Even more reason to watch this great 1976 film.)

Hazel Dickens presente!

Viva PalFest!

2011-04-19T10:48:00.000-04:00

The third annual Palestine Festival of Literature is under way and is by all reports a great success.

Every year the occupying Israeli state does its best to disrupt this gathering of writers and poets from Palestine and around the world, and every year the festival participants persevere and come together for what looks like an amazing few days of working, thinking, talking together. (Every year I wish I was there too, but that's another story.) Among this year's participants: Alice Walker, seen here at a workshop.

Photo from PalFest

I'm going to copy the list of writers at the festival, many of whose names I must confess I don't know, and try to read some of their work. Here's a taste from Day Two. Viva PalFest! Viva Palestina!

On the political arts front

2011-04-18T09:39:00.000-04:00

Coming up in July in the Philippines: an international conference of progressive culture. The theme is "cultural work as an integral part of the struggle of the peoples of the world against imperialism."

The initiators describe themselves as "artists/cultural workers who are active within the International League of People's Struggle, an international formation of more than 200 organizations from more than 40 countries promoting, supporting and developing the struggles of the peoples of the world." In their invitation they explain:

As artists ourselves, we have come to understand the importance of the role of art in the progressive movement and want to promote its value far beyond simple entertainment. We aim to examine and develop the ways in which art and culture are an integral and indispensable part of the revolution we all desire. This conference will be a unique opportunity for creative people from around the world to come together, share their work, and discuss the role of art in the struggle for fundamental social change.

Sounds like heaven! Spread the word.

The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

2011-04-13T16:38:00.000-04:00

I just read a great novel: The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale. Hot damn, this is one juicy read, packed with extravagant language, exuberant ideas, an outlandishly wild and wonderful plot and, unlikely as this is, deep emotion. As they say: I laughed, I cried. And thought, and am thinking still. This one will stay with me for a while.

You know how much I hate to agree with the powers that be when they grant this book or that their imprimatur, and that goes quadruple when the author is yet another young white man with an Iowa MFA. Grr. Bah! Usually I can tell by just such raves, combined with what I infer about the book's story, slant, theme, and so on, that there's no there there for the likes of me. This time, though, despite this novel's provenance smack-dab dead-center snuggled in the literary establishment's slimy embrace, my interest was sufficiently piqued that I was willing to check it out.

Wow am I glad I did. I just spent one rapturous reading week burrowed deep into a bildungsroman whose hero and narrator is a chimpanzee. A talking, walking, reading, thinking, writing—well, dictating, for his hands are ill-suited for pen and paper and he's not a very good typist, so he speaks these, his memoirs, to a young college student amanuensis—chimpanzee whose travels and travails take him deep into the heart of starkness, the perverse unnatural void that humanity, the ape that would be king, has made of itself and threatens to make of the world.

Though I don't want to overstate it and portray this as a political novel exactly, let alone one that explicitly aligns itself with our side of the class divide, there is much worth chewing on here. Bruno's tale—which entails both the extremely eventful, boisterous, rollicking narrative of his exploits and his exploitation, and his book-long lifelong reflection on our animal selves, individual and group relations, love, commerce—is packed with social commentary. Along with his own woeful yet fleetingly joyous story, in the course of 576 fast-flying pages dear Mr. Littlemore offers abundant thoughts and observations about a range of aspects of human society, from television to education to sex to politics to many apposite zingers about this debased, commodified culture. Mordant, hilarious, sad, sharp, and rife with allusions literary, historical, zoological, linguistic and more, these musings are the heart of the book.

I took The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore out of the library. If I owned it (and I'd almost say it's worth the expense just for the section on the Gnome Chompy), I'd start lending it around. Or maybe not since I like to keep my favored books nearby to gaze at and fondle. Whatever way you get your hands on it, do try to. I haven't steered you wrong yet, have I?

A call for pro-worker writing

2011-04-11T17:48:00.000-04:00

I don't usually do this, in fact I don't know whether I ever have before, but today I'm posting a call for submissions from a literary journal. It's a journal I like, partly because they've published my work, but that's the least of the reasons it makes me happy that this comes from the cream city review. This journal is based in Milwaukee, at the University of Wisconsin campus there--in other words, ground zero for the attacks on public employees and union rights. It's a great thing to see a literary publication taking a stand.

Check it out:

CALL FOR SPECIAL SECTION ON WORKERS' RIGHTS

cream city review is pleased to announce a special section for our upcoming Spring 2011 issue: “Dispatches from the Front: Labor and the Fight For Worker’s Rights”

http://www.creamcityreview.org/ submit/

Do you have a recent, related experience that you would like to share with the world, whether protesting at the Capital in Madison or working in your community to support the rights of workers? We are seeking submissions of personal narrative, poetry, art, even fiction, that seeks to document the ongoing protest over the dissolution of workers' rights in Wisconsin.

Ideally, we are looking for local Wisconsin voices that represent a wide range of communities and identities, but will also consider work from those in solidarity from around the world. We also welcome voices of protest from communities impacted by other recent policy enactment in Madison (cuts in health care, education, etc…). Preference will be given to voices that have fewer resources for having their voice in print; cream city review will also seek to juxtapose those voices with work from published writers/journalists that offer a personal perspective on their experience.

We invite writers and artists to submit their work via our online submission manager at

creamcityreview.org/submissions

Please select the appropriate genre for your work, i.e. “Labor poetry” or “Labor visual art,”etc. Submissions selected for this special section will be published in or around May/June 2011. Deadline for submissions is May 1, 2011.

Founded in 1975, cream city review is a biannual literary journal, edited and published by graduate students at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. We receive support from the Graduate Program in Creative Writing, private donations, and a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board. The journal is distributed nationally and internationally by Ingram Periodicals and can be found in independent and chain booksellers in the United States and Canada. More information can be found at www.creamcityreview.org

Photo courtesy of Workers World

Studying the clouds

2011-04-05T12:52:00.000-04:00

As I believe I've mentioned from time to time, I'm not exactly a live-in-the-moment kind of gal. More of a dread-the-next-moment type. My catalogue of worries, personal and political, is endless, expectation of doom, personal and political, certain. In this I am a terrible communist indeed, and it's a constant struggle to push down my innate pessimism. In my own defense let me say that I do make this effort earnestly, I do foment revolutionary optimism in my own psyche daily, so I hope I get some credit for that. Then too, there's this contradiction: I am also an inveterate fantasist, a daydreamer. In the midst of everything else, I'm quite capable of stopping to, if not smell the roses, confabulate imaginary flowers. For my feverish little brain is always concocting all sorts of story lines, for me, my family, my comrades, my class, the struggle, the planet--story lines that are, come to think of it, fully imbued with hope. Perhaps, then, the pessimism is merely the surface layer. Perhaps my daydreaminess reveals a fundament of optimism after all.

These musings are occasioned by the book I've just started: The Cloud Collector's Handbook by Gavin Pretor-Pinney. This is a delightful little volume of education and enlightenment about, yes, clouds, in all their beauteous variety. Its purpose, like that of the Cloud Appreciation Society, which Pretor-Pinney founded, is to get us to look up. To stop, stand still, look up and marvel. The photographs are stunning, the pages are informative, and the writing is delightfully droll. I think I'm going to have a ball with this one, and I just might take up the challenge and begin keeping a record of cloud sightings.

"Cloudgazing," the author notes, "is the preferred pastime of daydreamers, wonderers, and poetic souls the world over." If I've just outed myself as among this company, so be it. I think cloudgazing, like its cousin stargazing, like birdwatching or flower appreciation (hey, I think the orchid show is coming soon!) is a wholly defensible activity for a revolutionary socialist. It's restorative. It lightens the load and bolsters resolve, or at least that's how it works for me. There's this, too: the clouds belong to everyone. They're one realm the greedy bosses are incapable of appropriating for their own profit. When I look up and appreciate their snowy formations, I know that my sisters and brothers around the world, all the billions of oppressed and exploited masses, can do the same. We share the cloud-filled skies, as one day we'll share the earthly world's riches.

A life of tender rue

2011-04-02T12:04:00.014-04:00

My best friend is a schoolteacher and a big reader like me and we talk about books a lot. She recently read and recommended Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum. She didn't rave. She was in fact rather restrained. But she said that the main character is a teacher and that as a teacher she'd found it very well done. Since she knows that my mother was a schoolteacher too and that between the two of them, my mom and my friend, I've been deep in the lives of teachers my whole life and know something about the shape of those lives, she thought I too might enjoy this book.

I more than enjoyed it. It's divine. After reading it, I called my friend and told her I'd loved it and asked why she'd been so subdued in her recommendation. She said that she'd been unsure whether someone who's not herself a schoolteacher could appreciate the exquisite job Shun-Lien Bynum does. How well and truly she depicts the dailyness of a teacher's life. Which is exactly what this talented young writer achieves. But what I found more miraculous is how she evokes a teacher's consciousness as she moves through her life, during and outside the school day. For teaching, I think, more than any other job, defines, consumes, is the worker. I work as a secretary but a secretary is not who I am. A teacher is who my friend is, and who my mother was, awake and asleep, winter and summer, teaching or sleeping or grocery shopping. This teacher-ness is conveyed beautifully in the linked stories that make up Ms. Hempel Chronicles.

As a communist reader, I often lament the dearth of books that focus on characters at work, that is, characters as workers. For most of us spend most of our waking hours at work. Work takes up the biggest chunk of our lives. Why don't more books delve into this? Yeah yeah we all know why; see almost every post on this blog ranting against bourgeois culture. Here we have a fine counter to my lament. I don't know whether the author herself would see it this way--that this is a book about a worker, in some sense the ur-worker in terms of how much of the worker's life is spent at work, for teachers spend more hours per day and per week working than any other worker I know of, this is one of the secrets that only teachers and those who share their lives know, the long long day at school and then the nightly and weekendlong work grading papers, writing report cards and so on--but to me this is a big part of Shun-Lien Bynum's accomplishment. This portrayal of what life is like for the workers known as teachers. (Note to the governors of Wisconsin, Ohio, New York, California, the billionaire mayor of New York, and every other politician currently trying to whip up public opinion against teachers so they can keep paying the banks our billions of dollars in tax money instead of a living wage to these most important workers: fuck you, you scum of the earth pigs from hell who've never done a real day's work in your lives!)

It's not only the work itself that comes through in these pages. It's the joy, the pain, the tender rue, unique to the teacher's life I believe. One thread throughout these Chronicles is Ms. Hempel's chronic sense of underachievement, her feeling that she's somehow missed the main event of her own life and is doomed instead to forever usher others forth toward theirs. This is the teacher's own version of that horrid vicious anti-worker sexist old saw, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." There's no truth to that nasty saying, the inverse is in fact true, that teaching is a special talent, a calling, even, that very few have or can ever hope to master. Still, I think (based on my second-hand experience of two teachers' lives) that many teachers, even (as in the case of my friend and my mom) superbly gifted and universally beloved teachers, wrestle with this demon in their own psychic life, a nagging gnawing refrain of what-ifs, what if I'd gone to medical school instead of teaching junior-high science, what if I'd written that novel instead of teaching high-school English, what if I'd become a cartographer instead of teaching fifth-grade geography, a mathematician instead of teaching fractions to third graders. Ms. Hempel Chronicles reminds me in some ways of the superb Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. The two books both have a schoolteacher main character. They share a linked-stories structure. But where Strout's book was full of ragged painful rage and regret, in Beatrice Hempel we have a more subtle gentle thread running through the pages, the bittersweet love-hate relationship teachers have with their work, their lives.

Which leads me, finally, to my ambivalence about this book's end. (Spoiler alert: stop here if you'd rather read the stories without knowing their destination.) I was saddened, and initially disappointed, to discover in the last piece that Ms. Hempel had left teaching. Oh no, oh damn, I thought. Why not let her work her life away at this hardest, most frustrating and most rewarding of all jobs? Like my mother did, like my best friend is doing as she counts down toward retirement, like so many do, for so little recompense monetary or otherwise, for the love of it when you come down to it, trite though that sounds. I felt let down. Betrayed, even, although that's probably putting it too strongly. On reflection, however, I'm satisfied. Partly because this too is the truth: that many many young teachers leave, especially nowadays faced as they are with the disgusting reactionary regime of forced testing, rigid curricula, ever expanding work loads and class sizes. And I realized, okay, I can accept that this particular teacher's story ends thus. The other reason I came to terms with Ms. Hempel no longer being a teacher is that in this last story she runs into a former student and, through their conversation and her swirling memories and feelings, she and we see her as her students saw her, see how important she was to them, how good she was at what she did, which she never really knew. So there is a note of another kind of rue at the book's close--unless I'm reading too much into it, me with my oversized regard for teachers colored by my love of my best friend and my mother--another sort of what if. What if she'd stayed? What other lives might she have helped shape? It made me wish Ms. Hempel had had a chance to get a pep talk from my mom or my friend, champion complainers about the horrors of their lives as teachers the both of them, but both of them chained to it by true love for their true calling. Maybe these real-life teachers could have persuaded this fictional one to stick it out. Maybe not. This is the hypothetical the end left me musing on, and I can live with that.

When a pointless read is done

2011-03-28T16:48:00.000-04:00

Last week I picked up T. Coraghessan Boyle's newest novel, When the Killing's Done, at the library. While it was an adequate diversion for a couple of reading days, mostly it reminded me of why I'd never tried another of his many novels after having read one of his first almost 20 years ago. That book, The Road to Wellville, has to do with the founder of Kellogg's cereal company and of that industry around the turn of the last century. I'm not from Battle Creek but I am from Michigan, and partly because of that the novel piqued my interest, and kept it well enough to read the whole thing through. But I remember it left me with a hollow feeling. I remember feeling as if I had been entertained a bit, not nearly as much as the performer had intended with all his pratfalls and slapstick. I remember feeling that I had just taken a meaningless trip along the surface of something, never dipping underneath to anyplace deep or meaningful.

And so it was again with this latest read. Boyle is an adequate crafter of sentences, and of plot. But his characters are flat. What passes for internal monologue in a book all of whose chapters are written in close-third-person narrative is more like cartoon-balloon "thoughts" than the multidimensional many-layered consciousness through which real humans move and which more interesting writers convey. Nor do we get any meaningful sense of the main characters' motivations. No light shines to let us see beyond the membrane of glibness that wraps all speech and action.

Boyle is a master surface skimmer, and if it's possible this applies even more to the novel's themes than its characters. The story is about a clash between, on the one hand, scientists and conservationists working to defend, restore and maintain endangered species and the eco-balance of a fragile island environment and, on the other hand, animal-rights activists who oppose any such intervention when it entails killing animals of invasive species. The topic intrigued me, it's part of why I checked out the book. Believe me when I tell you I know absolutely nothing more about it after finishing the novel than I did a week ago. I certainly don't know anything at all about the history of these issues, the various movements and how they developed and what class forces they represent, not from this novel that supposedly drops the reader right in the midst of it all. Even without all that, without much information or history or context, I'd have settled for some level of insight into the complexities, confoundments, confusions, the knots and gnarls inherent in this sort of clash of commitments. I didn't get that either. For a writer all of whose books are tagged to some historical or current event or personage—in recent years you've got Kinsey and his sex researchers, you've got the immigration issue, you've got Frank Lloyd Wright and his circle—Boyle seems to have remarkably little to say.

His writing reminded me of no one else as much as Stephen King. Truthfully, though, King's books are more socially conscious than this, and if King's writing doesn't sparkle any shinier, at least his stories do make you feel something, care about somebody.

The haunting

2011-03-25T11:40:00.000-04:00

Today, on the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 workers, I'd wanted to post the opening scene of the 1996 movie I'm Not Rappaport. The scene recreates the November 1909 mass meeting of shirtwaist factory workers at the Great Hall of Cooper Union where the all-male union leadership tried to clamp down the surging demand for struggle, only to be overwhelmed by it when the militant Clara Lemlich rushed the stage and, in Yiddish, called for a strike. That was the start of the Uprising of the 20,000. Unfortunately, try as I might, I can't seem to manage to get the video to post here. So if you're interested in watching the scene, follow this link.

Lemlich herself worked at many sweatshops. She'd no sooner be hired than she'd start organizing, and the bosses would fire her. That happened to her at the Triangle, which is why she was no longer working there on March 25, 1911.

Judging by the police barricades set up for blocks, a big crowd is expected for today's commemoration of the Triangle fire centenary. Indeed, from earlier this morning there've been reminders everywhere. As I emerged from the subway at Union Square this morning, I saw people gathering with some kind of shirtwaist imagery, presumably each shirtwaist to honor one of the dead, and they'll be marching in to the ceremony. The sidewalks around the area are chalked up with reminders of the anniversary, ephemeral memorials to the 146. The ceremony itself will feature music, speakers, tolling bells. All this is good. All this is right. To honor. To remember. What is not right is, among other things, the speakers' list. It includes many politicians, chief among them the richest person in New York City and current assailant against the teachers' union and all NYC workers, AKA the mayor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg. How dare he desecrate the memory of my sisters who his brothers the sweatshop bosses murdered! I don't know whether New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is speaking but I'm guessing he is too--and if possible this might be even more of an affront than Bloomberg's presence, as (the Democrat) Cuomo is currently engaged in a self-declared effort to crush the unions in this state.

And so on. Still, thousands of workers will also come, and their presence will lend heartfelt meaning to what would otherwise be a frustratingly hollow commemoration without concrete connection to the real legacy of Clara Lemlich, the shirtwaist workers, and the ghosts of the Triangle. I'll go too, on my lunch hour, to distribute fliers about the May 1 rally for worker and immigrant rights. For me, though, thinking about the Triangle fire is not unique to today. I work not 20 steps away from the building that housed that sweatshop. Every work day I walk past that corner, every work day I walk down the street that on that day 100 years ago was littered with the bodies of women who'd leapt to their deaths, every single day I think about them, and this has been the case for most of the last 30 years. You might say I'm haunted by the Triangle sisters. There's a plaque there, and frequently tourist groups stop and view it, and I often have to tamp down the impulse to harangue them with a rant about the real meaning of that event, which is not about fire laws contrary to the plaque's focus but is about the class struggle. Well I have succumbed to the urge once or twice and let loose a no doubt crazy sounding harangue. I won't today. Today I'll stand and pay my respects and pass out leaflets and listen to the bells and resist succumbing to some maudlin haunted sentimental bilge and instead look to the living struggle, from Egypt to Palestine to the Philippines to Wisconsin, the living struggle that every day avenges these sisters' deaths by capitalism.

Yesterday after work I headed downtown and got there in time to march from City Hall to Wall Street with thousands of students and union members in the "State of Emergency Protest-Day of Rage Against the Cuts." Tomorrow I'll attend an International Working Women's Month event in Harlem. My own activism is extremely limited lately, shamefully so, but when I can make it to activities I do, even if it's just to add another living body to the mass. Which also helps me shake off the haunting. For today, and every day, what the ghosts of the 146--Lizzie Adler, Becky Ostrovsky, Golda Schpunt, Isabella Tortorelli and the rest--cry out for is not ceremonies, not class collaboration. They cry out for justice, which is revolution.

Poetic Injustice

2011-03-22T21:51:00.000-04:00

I've been looking forward to reading the new poetry collection Poetic Injustice-Writings on Resistance & Palestine by Remi Kanazi, a young Palestinian-American poet and activist. Come next payday I'll order it.

I've heard Remi's work several times when he's performed his poetry at rallies in solidarity with Palestine but, bummer, I couldn't make it to his big book release event earlier this month uptown, which featured, along with him, an amazing lineup.

It's not just coincidence that I'm thinking again about how much I want to get this book into my hands. Today the criminal apartheid state of Israel carried out a renewed murderous bombing attack on a civilian area of Gaza. At least 10 Palestinians were killed. While the U.S. launches missiles against the sovereign African nation of Libya, riveting much of the world's attention on, and rage against, this latest outbreak of brazen imperialist war, Washington's Tel Aviv pets take the opportunity with no one looking their way to launch another round of their own killing.

Yesterday I ran up to Times Square after work and caught the tail end of a protest demonstration against the war on Libya. Then today we hear of this latest bit of dirty work by the Zionist state.

I am not of the poetry-can-save-the-world party. I am of the we-must-make-revolution-to-save-the-world party. But I do think poetry (and fiction) can help buoy and strengthen the revolution makers, and also help draw new fighters toward the revolutionary path by contributing to the awakening of consciousness. My sense is that Poetic Injustice is this sort of literature. I'm looking forward to finding some quiet afternoon to sit with it and hear its truths.

The Grapes of Wrath

2011-03-16T15:18:00.000-04:00

In the latest in my occasional turn toward books I'd somehow never gotten to before, I just read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. This is a flawed book, more politically flawed than I realized as I was reading it. More on that, criticism from the left, in a minute. First a word on criticism from the right.

I've often come across references to The Grapes of Wrath in various writings by esteemed literary critics. They generally condemn the book as bad literature. Poorly written, bombastic didacticism. The consensus seems to be that this book is a cartoonish exercise in blatant communistic propaganda, contrived, sentimental, manipulative, designed to trick the reader into sympathizing with the poor downtrodden workers and to support union drives and strikes.

As I expected I would, upon finally reading the book myself I find this position absurd. Blatant propaganda? I'll say—by the bourgeoisie's literary experts, who always condemn any work of fiction that depicts capitalist exploitation, engenders sympathy for its victims, sides with the struggle against it. What a crazy reach it is for any critic to pan it, for it's beautifully written, in some places soaringly achingly stirringly beautiful. There are stunningly lyrical passages, there is an intense propulsive narrative drive, there are finely wrought characterizations. Most of all there is a powerful, deeply effective portrayal of human suffering and, at the same time, of courage and dignity and solidarity . It's this latter aspect, the fact that the novel sides with the poor and suffering masses, that incurs the wrath and enmity of the commentators, for this is the highest literary sin.

So much for the criticism from the right. Wrong wrong wrong as always. What of the left?

I was aware as I read, especially as the story developed and the ever more suffering Joad family moved along on its journey of hope and horror, that there was a narrow, even distorted, emphasis in this portrayal of the Dust Bowl migration from Oklahoma and surrounding states to California during the Great Depression. The focus is entirely on the Joads and their like: white former landowners and sharecroppers forced off their land and driven West in search of jobs. Nowhere in the tale, not on the road and in the stopping-off places along the way nor in the camps, Hoovervilles and orchards of California, do we see anyone except the Joads' cohort. No Mexicans—in the Southwest and California! No African Americans, an oppressed nation that was in fact in the midst of its own Great Migration, a major wing of it from the South to California, at exactly this same time. No, in this novel just about everyone's white. Just about everyone has endured the same tragedy of losing the small stakes of land that they'd held for several generations. And all these white former farmers are competing only with each other for the same jobs in the growing fields. I knew this was by no means a complete picture but I guess I sort of thought well, this is a snapshot of one particular part of what was going on, there were after all plenty of families like the Joads and so this is their story, one specific aspect of the broader overall story. I noted, too, some places where Steinbeck seems to go out of his way to take account of the national question. For example, several times he has a character note that a family ancestor had stolen the farmland from its Native inhabitants. Likewise, he points out that California itself is stolen, from Mexico. The characters use racist language a few times; it makes them look bad and I sort of assumed this was Steinbeck's intent.

I gave him too much credit, as it turns out. A quick skim of some left commentary reveals that there was a racist strain to Steinbeck's ideology, that he created white Dust Bowl migrant literary heroes in part because he saw them as superior to the Asian and Mexican agricultural work force that was already in place and that had been long engaged in unionization struggles. He saw the new white arrivals as replacing the workers of color, and this, the triumph of white labor—not of labor as a whole, of the multinational united working class—was what he looked toward.

Oh crap. How can we call this a novel of the working class when its author purposely omitted the most oppressed quarters of the class from his vision of the proper direction of the class struggle? Is it possible for a work of fiction to embody contradiction, to have both strengths and weaknesses, to be in some ways a contribution and in some ways backward? At least one critique I recently read allows no such wiggle room, going so far as to liken The Grapes of Wrath to Gone with the Wind. The latter is an out-and-out paean to the slaveocracy, penned in homage to the pro-KKK movie Birth of a Nation; does Steinbeck's novel similarly serve as an explicit tribute to white labor as against Black, Latino and Asian labor?

I imagine there is also a body of feminist critique of this novel. I can easily guess what the charges would be, and that I'd probably agree with them. And yet. The character of Ma Joad, hedged in to the most traditional sex role as she is, hit me hard. Her indomitable will to survive, her strength—and she is by far the strongest character in the story, her compassion but also her capacity for violent confrontation.

A masterpiece of class-struggle fiction? A historically inaccurate racist sexist literary lie? A lot to think about, a lot to learn.

Rape, reporting, & race

2011-03-10T14:36:00.004-05:00

Yesterday the New York Times ran an appalling story about a gang rape in east Texas that left me sickened and shaken. The victim was an 11-year-old girl. There were, according to the Times report, 18 rapists. Eighteen! They included some star high-school athletes as well as some sons of locally prominent families. At least one of them videotaped the assault with his cell phone, and the video was shown around by the bragging rapists, and that's how the crime eventually came to light and they were brought to justice.

These facts weren't the only appalling thing about the Times piece. The story itself descended into the worst despicably sexist terms in its characterization of the child who was so terribly brutalized and defiled. The newspaper found it necessary to comment that she was known in the neighborhood for wearing inappropriately mature clothes and makeup, and for hanging out in the wrong places. Yes that's right—the report implies that this 11-year-old child was a slut, she was asking for it, she deserved to be destroyed. This aspect of the report was picked up quickly by a number of commentators, who have denounced the Times for its disgusting blame-the-victim insinuations.

But there's another aspect I want to raise. Because after my first read and my first reaction, which was rage and horror, I cooled down a little and started to think, started wondering. I referred above to "facts"—but I know better than to rely on the bourgeois press for the truth. I used the phrase "brought to justice"—but I know there is no justice under capitalism, and especially not in rape cases, not for the victims of sex assault, nor for the young men who might be arrested and charged whether they did it or not. Yes, I'm talking about race: what I started wondering most of all was just who these 18 alleged rapists were. So I did a quick search and found some other, earlier, local articles about this case.

Almost immediately, a series of mug shots appeared on my screen. Young African American men. The victim's picture of course isn't available but I'm guessing that she too is Black because if she were white we'd have heard much more about this case much sooner; quite possibly we'd have heard about a lynching. As it is, knowing that all the alleged rapists are Black makes this a story not only about what we Marxists call the woman question, but also about the national question.

Now reread this from the Times piece: "The video led the police to an abandoned trailer, more evidence and, eventually, to a roundup over the last month of 18 young men and teenage boys." A roundup of African American youths.

The rape of this child was a heinous crime. It's almost impossible for me to believe that this roundup by the Cleveland, Texas, police, a force made up overwhelmingly of white men, is not another crime—a racist crime; that is, that some of those arrested are innocent, picked up for the crime of being young Black men. And that they'll be railroaded into prison where they'll join so many other young Black men locked up for the crime of being poor and oppressed. So now there will be two crimes, that against the child and that against those who had nothing to do with it but were rounded up.

This is not the Glen Ridge rape. That case was beautifully analyzed in the 1997 book Our Guys by Bernard Lefkowitz, which I read and highly recommend. In 1989 in Glen Ridge, an affluent white New Jersey suburb, a bunch of star athletes gang-raped a mentally challenged girl--and almost the whole community united to defend and protect them. The victim and her family were made pariahs. The rapists were treated as heroes or, at worst, good guys who made a minor mistake. Not one of them ever served serious time.

Here, in contrast, we have cops rounding up Black youths. If there have been confessions, we have the likelihood that they were coerced. That some of them might be false confessions. That some of those rounded up didn't do it. This is the United States of America. There is no way that justice will be done. (Nor do I think that any trials, convictions and imprisonments of those who actually did commit the rape will constitute justice, for none of that will address or redress any of what's wrong with this society, any of the real causes of these crimes.)

Don't get me wrong--I remain enraged and shaken about the unspeakable crime that was committed. I can't stop thinking about the 11-year-old girl and how she'll manage to survive on into adulthood. If she'll manage to survive. Both the brutal misogyny of the crime and the sexist reporting of it make me want to scream and shout. But I won't join the rush to judgment against those accused. Because when Black men are accused of rape, especially in a case like this when so many are accused at once, and in small-town Texas no less, you can be assured that racism too is involved.

There is a long history of Black men being made into poster images for rape, whether the victim is Black or white, and of rape charges being used to justify racist violence and scapegoating. This goes back to slavery times and then the Klan and Jim Crow with the terrible lynch law era. Then there was the Scottsboro case. And more recently, the case of the Central Park jogger, for which the NYPD rounded up a bunch of Black youths who were demonized and caricatured as, basically, animals who had carried out what the media called a "wilding"--and who, despite their protestations of innocence were tried, convicted and imprisoned only to be exonerated years later after losing most of their youth to prison.

I recently read Jeffrey B. Perry's excellent book on Hubert Harrison, the first of a projected two-part biography of this great Black radical of early 20th-century Harlem. In the book Perry repeatedly returns to the lodestar of Harrison's political life: the principle (and practical necessity) that fighting racism must be paramount, that as long as white supremacy reigns there can be no class unity. A socialist revolutionary must always remember this. The Cleveland, Texas, rape case is the latest reminder.

It's International Women's Day

2011-03-08T09:47:00.000-05:00

And I don't have time to mark it in any meaningful way. Damn. Let me do this instead. Let me hail my sisters in the thick of the still ongoing Egyptian revolution. And my Filipina sisters of Gabriela. My Colombian sisters fighting the death squads. My sisters in the Basque country. My sisters in the Iraqi and Afghan resistance. My Palestinian sisters. I hail the women who, around the world, lead the class struggle--including, right here at home, the schoolteachers and other public employees of Wisconsin who've been showing the way forward for the U.S. labor movement.

Happy International Women's Day. Down with the patriarchy! Kick the ass of the ruling class!

Whose Center is it?

2011-03-03T18:13:00.003-05:00

One evening in 1981, or maybe it was 1982, I attended a meeting in a falling-apart former NYC public-school building on 13th Street in Manhattan. At this meeting, 15 or 20 activists began organizing a protest against a series of racist offenses against Black gay men at Blues, a bar in the Times Square area. The protest, which took place a few days later, was great, a big angry march and a wonderful expression of LGBT anti-racist unity.

The building where we'd met would later become New York City's LGBT Center. Now, all these years later, it's a big, beautiful, well-financed hub for all manner of social, political, and every and any other kind of gathering imaginable by and for our community.

Except Palestinians, apparently. Or their allies in the struggle against Israeli apartheid. Solidarity is no longer welcome at what once was a center of unity.

In mid-February, in a breathtaking and shocking accommodation with a small cohort of rabid racist Zionists, LGBT Center Executive Director Glenda Testone unilaterally canceled an event that had been scheduled to take place at the Center this Saturday, March 5, to mark Israeli Apartheid Week. She did so without any consultation with the event's sponsors, the group Siege Busters, although this group has met regularly at the Center, and with the bizarre excuse that the planned meeting would somehow violate the Center as a "safe space."

Safe for whom? For a handful of racists, apparently, those who would deny access to Palestinians and who apparently wield inordinate power.

The response has been rage and outrage. Letters, calls, and a petition that's now garnered thousands of signatures. Lots of Jewish LGBT people, myself of course included, have joined this chorus, whose initiators include novelist Sarah Schulman and professor and writer Judith Butler.

I have not yet heard what the next steps in the response to this outrage by the Center will be. But this is not the Center we started to create that night 30 years ago with the Blues bar protest. This must not stand.

For more information, check here and here and here. And sign the petition demanding that the Center reverse its exclusionary decision here.

UPDATE: Tomorrow, March 5, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., there will be a demonstration to protest the LGBT Center's ban on anti-occupation queer meetings and activists. I'll see you there, in front of the Center, 208 West 13th Street, just west of Seventh Avenue.

I read a lovely book: Wading Home

2011-02-27T12:23:00.000-05:00

While some white men make offensive art and win fame, acclaim and riches (see previous post), many women and people of color keep making beautiful, original, meaningful art that the marketplace never rewards, or even notices.

I had had the novel Wading Home by Rosalyn Story on my to-read list for a little while when, earlier this month, I heard that the novel's publisher, Agate, had announced it was making the e-book version available for free for the last two weeks of February, Black History Month. Why would a publisher take such a drastic step, a step that denies it any income? Agate's Doug Seibold has a lot to say about the injustice of the treatment of books by and about African Americans in general, and of this novel in particular.

In fact, to its publisher’s embarrassment, Wading Home has gotten hardly any attention at all--despite the hundreds of advance reader’s copies we distributed months before it was published, despite the efforts of PGW’s excellent sales force, despite the author’s appearance at BEA, despite how the book’s publication coincided with the fifth anniversary of Katrina. And despite the fact that I’ve had a hard time finding any other such novels from trade presses--novels by black writers addressing this event, which had such a huge impact on how both black people and others think about the lives of black people in this country today. Next to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Katrina and its aftermath may have been the most consequential event of the last decade. You wouldn’t know it by the response of the book publishing industry.

Please go read the full statement on the Agate website, because this is an impassioned, thoughtful, cogent, angry piece that deserves to be read. It contains much truth about the racism of the publishing industry.

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I don't own an e-reader and, for now, at least, have no interest in getting one. So I couldn't take advantage of Agate's offer, but it did spur me to move Wading Home to the top of my to-read list. It wasn't easy to find a copy, but I finally did, at the Strand, and I read it last week.

This is a lovely, moving, accomplished piece of fiction about one of the most important events in U.S. history, the greatest single catastrophe in U.S. history--Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans, a catastrophe suffered mostly by African Americans and yet one whose stories so far have mostly been told by white writers. The stories that find their way to publication, that is, or to be more precise as Mr. Seibold points out, that are published and reviewed and spotlighted. A couple of years ago I read the novel City of Refuge by Tom Piazza. I liked it very much, in fact I listed it as one of my best reads that year, and I wasn't the only one. It got a lot of play, a lot of attention. Unlike Wading Home.

Was City of Refuge, by a white author, a better book than Wading Home? Now that I've read Story's book, I can answer: absolutely not! Of course not! It is an absolute injustice that it's the Black writer's book that remains relatively obscure.

And what an excellent, deeply felt and beautifully written book this is. I was swept into it from the opening pages. I cared about the characters. I wept in several places. There is a humanity here, a compassion, a sweep in its view of family and community and history, that resonated for me. And there is political consciousness, truth telling, honesty. All the qualities I value in fiction.

Wading Home also contains some of the finest writing about the natural world that I've read in a long time. Much of the plot has to do with a Black family's land in rural Louisiana, its history down the generations back to slavery times, the risk of losing it, and what this land means for those alive after Katrina. Usually, as a reader, I'm not big on nature descriptions. For some reason they tend to bore me, I tend to gloss over them. That wasn't the case with this novel. Somehow, Ms. Story's depiction of Silver Creek, the vegetation and wildlife, the smells, the sounds, the feel, gripped me in a way such passages rarely do. I really felt transported to that precious place. Which in turn drew me even deeper into the story, the stories of Julian and Simon finding their way home after Katrina.

This book deserves a large audience. It is an indictment of capitalism, of all the ways this racist system distorts and damages everything in this society including the arts, that it remains largely unread.

I saw a misogynist movie: Black Swan

2011-02-27T11:08:00.000-05:00

The other day I relented on my bedbug ban on NYC movie theaters and went to see Black Swan. My my what a swamp of sexist--no, I've got to go further for this film is not merely sexist, it is full-on misogynist--ideas and imagery. What wrecks, what weak sad pathetic wrecks, and not just that, what vicious competitive violent destructive self-destructive confused insane and sexually lunatic yet frigid barely human beings we gals are, according to screenwriters Mark Heyman and Andres Heinz and director Darren Aronofsky. As artists, we're not nuts in the standard way male artists are permitted to be nuts in the movies, the Agony & Ecstasy/Lust for Life/Pollock way. No, for us it's our very femaleness that predetermines our downfall. To drive the point home, they made sure to include a hot lesbian sex scene, an overwrought masturbation scene, a standard-issue monster mother, lots of blood and crazy red eyes and on and on, climaxing in attainment of artistic perfection achieved only and simultaneously with death.

This makes me tired. This endless onslaught. And reminds me why I've nearly given up on the movies. This is the best Hollywood can do. This is what passes for cinematic art in this country. Black Swan and Aronofsky are nominated for Oscars. Don't even get me started on the whole list of nominees, at least one of which, The Social Network, is a deeply sexist movie about a bunch of millionaire misogynist assholes; one of which, The Kids Are All Right, shows how all lesbians really need is a good male fuck as all it takes for a lesbian in a longterm committed relationship to lunge for heterosex is for a heterosexual male to stroll into her life; one of which, The King's Speech, asks us to empathize with the multibillionaire head of state of British imperialism; one of which, Inception, is so laughably moronic, vapid, unimaginative, derivative, flat, shallow and all-around uninteresting, that is, the exact opposite of its hype, that when I watched it with some friends a few months ago, we kept asking each other if this could possibly be the same movie about which we'd read all those rave reviews.

I was left similarly nonplused after seeing Black Swan. Could I be the only one who found this movie offensive and misogynist? I'm glad to find I'm not, having googled the title of the film and the word "misogynist" and found quite a few articles accusing it of same. I suppose there's some small comfort in that, though I'd much prefer not having to wade through this swamp in the first place.

Ah Aronofsky. I loved his first two works, Pi and Requiem for a Dream. I found The Fountain, while weirdly fascinating for its utter over-the-top madness, a stunningly hot mess of a movie, a failure in every way, and politically reprehensible to boot with its portrayal of a conquistador as a hero and its weepily Victorian female swoonily romantically dying throughout the whole long slog. The Wrestler was unoriginal, predictable, sentimental claptrap, albeit watchable since, admit it, who can turn away from what has become of Mickey Rourke's face, but that didn't save the movie. I doubt I'll ever give another Aronofsky movie a chance. He's insulted me, as a viewer, an artist and a woman, once too often.

Politically correct

2011-02-22T14:42:00.000-05:00

Rising out of the drear 1950s, led by the civil rights movement which in turn gave rise to the anti-war movement and the women's movement and the gay movement, inspired by the anti-colonial uprisings and wars for national liberation in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific islands, on through the 1960s and into the 1970s, there was in this country a flowering of political consciousness. As we all know. It is now most often referred to with the all-encompassing term "the 60s." To the bourgeoisie and all those in the grip of that class's ideology, which most definitely includes the liberal intelligentsia, "the 60s" is now a term of opprobrium. To those of us who are partisans for the class struggle and against racism, sexism, LGBT oppression and all forms of bigotry and exploitation, "the 60s" is or should be shorthand for everything righteous—rebellion, revolution, activism—for rejecting the norms of capitalism and fighting toward a new way of organizing society. This latter, our view of the 60s, is also known by another term, especially as regards education and the arts: politically correct.

Those of us of the 60s/70s generation of activists did indeed come to understand some things as correct and some other things as incorrect by the lights of our politics. That which seeks to advance the struggle, that which conveys the reality of oppression and exploitation, that which upends the old hierarchies and gives voice to those whose voices were heretofore suppressed, this is correct. The old ways of seeing, doing, explaining, steeped as they are in bourgeois consciousness and backward, reactionary ideology, are wrong. Incorrect. Offensive. Above all, untrue. Based on all the false old assumptions, all the lies and justifications of the chattel-slavery-subjugation-of-women system that built the wealth of this country's capitalist class. By our lights, all this needed, and of course still needs, correcting. This is a noble and necessary endeavor.

It is also a frightening challenge to the status quo and for that reason has been subjected to a 40-year-long onslaught of taunts, derision and every other possible means to flip the truth into its opposite. The problem isn't racism, sexism, oppression, exploitation, we're told. The problem is all these uptight rigid purveyors of the whip of political correctness, which is portrayed as an assault on freedom of expression. How dare these people—and for these people read people of color, women, LGBT people, workers, the disabled—how dare anyone trespass on anyone else's freedom to be as incorrect as they please? Is this a free country or what? And so they've managed, the bourgeoisie and its witless mouthpieces, to turn reality on its head with the well-worn Big Lie tactic of endless repetition. And so "politically correct" joins "the 60s" (and especially its literary sub-genre "the madness of the 60s," which I've ranted about before) as A Bad Thing. None of this is surprising. Not the ruling class's efforts to shore up its image and beef up its propaganda; not the bosses' vicious, mendacious attacks against any and all who do try to tell the truth; and, saddest of all, not the efficacy of these efforts. Hardly anyone proudly, boldly claims the mantle of politically correct anymore. Most run scared of being so named, and if so named turn somersaults to defend against the accusation.

Which brings us to the latest round of doings in the literary world. First, by way of noting that "the 60s" is a broad term and can be stretched decades to make a point, I must quickly mention a book I read about in this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review. It's a "madness of the 60s" memoir—set in the 80s! Apparently it tells the poignant tale of a young woman who was so misguided as to travel to Central America and join a bunch of wacky internationalists doing solidarity work in support of the anti-imperialist struggles there. The men she worked with were of course louts. The women were, like her, naïve and confused, and motivated by their pitiful devotion to the loutish men rather than any of their own opinions or political ideas. None had the slightest inkling of what they were doing, and all were completely misled by the Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans fighting the Reagan administration's overt and covert military intervention. The reviewer loved it. I expectorated onto the review.

But the main event I want to point to is a bold, courageous initiative by poet Claudia Rankine, begun at the AWP conference in D.C. earlier this month and still under way online. AWP is the big daddy of literary conferences, put together by the organization of college writing programs and attended by many thousands of poets and writers, almost all of them associated with a writing program in one way or another. I went once, a few years ago when it was here in NYC and the staff very kindly allowed me to attend for free as a worker, rather than student or faculty, at a university. That once was enough, for the whole thing was far too drenched in academia for me. Not my scene. Still, thousands of folks attend, and in a literary culture where it's virtually impossible to be published without an MFA and the only way for writers to make a living is by teaching, I can understand why they do. Once in a while something noteworthy occurs, as it did this year.

I've read a number of accounts of it and I'd urge you to do the same. Basically, at one of the poetry panels, Claudia Rankine's presentation consisted of having Nick Flynn get up and read Tony Hoagland's poem "The Change," then her reading her response to the poem, then her reading his emailed response to her response. Google the key names and you'll find lots of blog postings including several that have the full texts. You'll find that Hoagland's poem includes blatant racist language and imagery. You'll find that Rankine's response is deep, incisive, painful, and so full of truth that … that, yes, sure enough, in his response, Hoagland accused her of "political correctness, with its agendas of rightness, perfection, enforcement, and moral superiority." He also calls this brilliant African American poet "naïve," explains the nuances of U.S. racial history to her, and avers that his poem "is not 'racist' but 'racially complex.'" Hoagland's stunningly, yes, racist and sexist condescension becomes even more breathtaking when you reread and think again about Rankine's thoughts, which are nothing if not complex. "Who let America in the room?" she asks. She says she "could taste the vomit of Reconstruction and slavery in the back of my throat"—but only after acknowledging that she knows what she's opening herself up to by daring to speak up about any of this.

I don't like using the word racist because of you use it it means you are an angry black person. Angry black people are the old black and everyone knows that's pathological. … The old black is positioned in a no-win situation where to express an opinion based on what you see, experience, feel or deduce rsisk falling right into some white folk's notion of black insanity.

This is one brave truth-telling artist. Further, in the wake of all the commentary that's been swirling since AWP, she is not shying away from pursuing the issue. She recently posted an open letter on her website, calling for people to submit their own "thoughts on writing about race." She poses a series of provocative questions as "a few possible jumping-off points." They include:

If you write about race frequently what issues, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages do you negotiate?
If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?
Do you believe race can be decontextualized, or in other words, can ideas of race be constructed separate from their history.

Rankine will post responses received by March 11 on her blog.

Finally, one other item under the Politically Correct rubric. I was planning to write about this but I've gone on too long as it is so I'm just going to point you to this article. Headed "Let's say goodbye to the straw-feminist," it's Cordelia Fine's response to a slew of reactionary reviews of her book Delusions of Gender. In that book, which I've now added to my to-read list, she dismantles the sexist underpinnings of the increasingly dominant strain of evolutionary biology and psychology, the Steven Pinker school of biological determinism as regards innate sex differences, i.e. trucks vs. dolls or, as per Lawrence Summers, home ec vs. science. These reviewers to whom she responds in this piece accuse Fine of political correctness, that most dreaded of offenses. Kudos to her for taking them on.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

2011-02-18T12:20:00.000-05:00

Last week I read another old book and hit another home run. (I'd just read Great Expectations and loved it and now plan to read more Dickens soon, perhaps reread some because I'm not sure which I read in high school.) This time it was The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. It's embarrassing to admit I'd never read it, or any of McCullers' work. I don't know why that is, it's just one of those weird lacunae in my reading resume, but boy am I glad to have corrected the omission and boy now do I ever want to read her other books.

For this is a magnificent novel. So humane, so political, so full of consciousness about oppression, rage at this society, yearning for liberation. Wow. It's not the writing, for sentence by sentence, word by word, McCullers is not a dazzling stylist. It's what the words add up to. What she says with them.

How could I not love a book that devotes several pages to a Depression-era African American doctor's soliloquy on Marxism and the need for revolution? That depicts the soul-weariness of a would-be union organizer who can't get anyone to listen to his radical message? That shows a poor teenaged girl's constricted options and wide-open dreams?

From Richard Wright's 1940 review:

Tto me the most impressive aspect of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race. This cannot be accounted for stylistically or politcally; it seems to stem from an attitude toward life which enables Miss McCullers to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.

And from May Sarton's:

This book is literature. Because it is literature, when one puts it down it is not with a feeling of emptiness and despair (which an outline of the plot might suggest), but with a feeling of having been nourished by the truth. For one knows at the end, that it is these cheated people, these with burning intense needs and purposes, who must inherit the earth. They are the reason for the existence of a democracy which is still to be created. This is the way it is, one says to oneself - but not forever.

I'm going to try to swing by the Strand soon, to pick up a used copy of The Lonely Hunter, Virginia Spencer Carr's biography of McCullers. I've just got to know more about the artist behind this masterpiece of working-class literature.

From Hubert Harrison, for Black History Month

2011-02-16T21:58:00.000-05:00

Last month I noted a new book I wanted to read, the biography Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 by Jeffrey B. Perry. I've got it in my hands now and I hope to read it soon. I was leafing through it, fondling it in that excited way I do with new books, and found in the front matter some quotations from the works of this great but sadly now little remembered leftist leader. Here are a couple of them, in honor of Black History Month.

On U.S. "democracy":

As long as the Color Line exists, all the perfumed protestations of Democracy on the part of the white race must be simply downright lying. The cant of "Democracy" is intended as dust in the eyes of white voters. ... It furnishes bait for the clever statesman.

On imperialist war:

During the war the idea of democracy was widely advertised, especially in the English-speaking world, mainly as a convenient camouflage behind which competing imperialists masked their sordid aims. ... those who so loudly proclaimed and formulated the new democratic demands never had the slightest intention of extending the limits or the applications of "democracy."

I was stunned by one other page in the front of the Harrison biography. It has a photograph of Harrison's gravesite, which has no marker and just appears to be a mass of untrimmed dry grass. The caption notes that this great leader "lies buried in an unmarked shared plot in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx." Woodlawn Cemetery! This is the site of a current struggle by a group of workers, all Black and Latino men, fighting against unmitigated, brutal, vicious racist treatment by the bosses--just the sort of struggle Hubert Harrison would have been in the thick of. This struggle has been going on for some time but now it's hit a new, urgent stage. The members of Teamsters Local 805 are fighting for their very jobs and right to union representation. There's been a lot of community support for the Band of Brothers, as the Woodlawn workers call themselves, with a series of solidarity marches and rallies. Last weekend, the Latina group Mujeres por la Paz visited the Woodlawn gravesite of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and, styling themselves the Band of Sisters, demanded a union contract and no layoffs for their brothers the Woodlawn workers.

The next action for the Band of Brothers is this Monday, Feb. 21, when supporters will rally at Woodlawn to show the cemetery bosses that these workers are not alone. I'm going to pass along the information about Hubert Harrison and his unmarked grave to the Woodlawn workers.

Victory to the Band of Brothers! Hubert Harrison presente!

Could this be the start at last of labor's upturn?

2011-02-16T21:17:00.000-05:00

Tens of thousands of workers and students have been demonstrating outside and staying inside, occupying the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison to stop the governor's move against collective bargaining rights for public employees. We can never know what's to come, we none of us have a crystal ball, but I do know that they're calling the plaza outside the Capitol "Liberation Square" in honor and emulation of the sisters and brothers who rocked Egypt--and that, just as in Egypt, there is no turning back.

The current round of attacks on government-employee unions, especially on the teachers' unions, should be understood as an assault not only on the working class's right to public services, the services to which we are entitled and for which we pay with our tax dollars, or toward which our tax dollars should be going instead of to the Pentagon and to bailing out the banks--not only as an assault on our right to services, and not only on the labor rights of public employees, especially teachers who are being outrageously scapegoated when they ought to be national heroes--not only all this. But more specifically, the current wave of assault on public-employee unions is a racist and sexist bludgeon. Most government employees, especially teachers, are women. A great proportion of these workers, especially city and federal employees, are Black.

With this reactionary, cynical and, by the way, completely bipartisan political rampage against public employees, from California to Wisconsin and Michigan to Florida and New York, the bourgeoisie might finally have gone too far. Labor, the sleeping giant, might finally be forcibly awakened.

On Wisconsin!

Thawra!

2011-02-11T17:46:00.000-05:00

That means revolution in Arabic, and all over the world today the workers and oppressed are hailing the sisters and brothers who are making revolution in Egypt. This is a beautiful day for the class struggle. No one can say where it will go from here, but it's for sure that no one can undo what has been done. The only direction is forward. The Arab masses are in motion. With their courageous action they have won a great victory by overturning the U.S.-puppet Zionist-aligned Mubarak regime. My heart is full of joy and gratitude to them. Long live Egypt! Long live Palestine! Onward to revolutionary victory! Thawra thawra hata nas!

Should a socialist indulge in schadenfreude?

2011-02-09T13:32:00.000-05:00

Of course she should, can and does, in terms of big important events on the stage of the worldwide class struggle, for example the impending doom of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Anyone whose allegiance is with the workers, the poor, the oppressed, anyone who stands in solidarity with the fight for national sovereignty and against imperialism can't help but derive great joy from the increasing misery of the U.S.-puppet regime and the class of thieves and murderers it serves.

But hereabouts we're supposed to be about the arts. It's on not the world stage but the actual stage—the Broadway boards—that the events occasioning my question are unfolding. I'm talking about the ever unraveling travesty that is writer-director Julie Taymor's latest work of musical theater, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. As anyone who follows the theater even a little, and everyone who lives in New York where the whole mess has been front-page news for months, knows, this musical has major-league tsuris. The elaborate production design and attempts at unprecedented special effects make this the most expensive show in Broadway history. Trouble is, all the high-tech gadgetry, all the spectacle, can't compensate for an essentially lousy play. Even if they somehow could, the gizmos and doohickeys don't work. The whole months-long saga of tryouts, of rejiggering the book and music and choreography, which in this case means acrobatics more than dance, has been marked with repeated serious problems, especially mishaps with the flying contraptions including several injuries to actors, at least one very serious.

About that—worker injury, worker endangerment—I feel nothing close to schadenfreude. I feel rage. At Taymor and at the deep-pockets producers who've sunk $65 million dollars into what from all accounts (more on that in a minute) can scarcely be termed a work of art yet who, for all their money, can't manage to make it safe for the people doing the on-stage work. I'm enraged, too, at OSHA and New York state and city worker-safety officials, who should have long since stepped in to force the profiteers to fix this thing or shut it down. And I've got, if not rage, a lot of disappointment in and questions for Actors Equity and the other stage workers' unions. The Broadway unions, like the rest of the labor movement, have been under siege for a long time, and it's hard not to see their apparent inaction here as evidence of the state of their decline. Granted, they may be working behind the scenes to push for better on-stage safety. They should have been doing much more, much more publicly--mounting picket lines, making demands, building a solidarity movement, reaching out to the huge New York population of workers, union members and theater lovers. Instead, as unions in other industries have done for the last 30 years since the UAW's original Chrysler give-back contract, they seem to see their duty as supporting the bosses' profit-taking in hopes of keeping the enterprise open and saving jobs.

As to those jobs, all of them, onstage and back: I have only sympathy, fellow-feeling for the actors, singers and dancers subjected to these conditions. Conditions—unsafe physically and debased artistically—that theater workers feel compelled to grin and bear, grateful to have any job at all. This is a terribly unstable industry for its workers. There is no joy like landing a job, whether it's a lead role, in the chorus, downstairs sewing and mending costumes, up in the rafters working the lights, or in the box office selling tickets. Once you've got a show, you want it to stay open, naturally. On Broadway as in a coal mine or any other site of wage labor, no matter how dreary, how dangerous, you need that job. Oh god, as they sang in A Chorus Line, I need this job. At what cost, though? It might not hurt a theater worker's future prospects to have Spider-Man on the resume, but there will be no prospects after a broken neck from a fall due to defective equipment. On Broadway as in the mines, the bosses will always stint on safety in favor of profits.

Here's where schadenfreude comes in. I do take pleasure from this week's round of uproariously bad reviews for the Spidey musical. I am glad that these profit-takers in artist ("pardon me, I mean artiste," as the Times' critic Ben Brantley purred) garb are being humiliated. They should be ashamed.

Now, I'm not utterly starry-eyed about Broadway. Lots of shlock has passed that way. Much, maybe most, of the musical theater is mediocre, unmemorable. Much is objectionable from my political viewpoint. Hardly any, including a lot of the old musicals that I'm still sentimentally attached to and whose music still stirs my corny old heart, meets the mark for the best of what I wish from any art. In recent decades, the whole industry has become such a pure profit monster, with ticket prices rising so out of reach of most workers, that I guess it'd be silly to hope for something true and good and beautiful, new and creative and with, god forbid, something to say about society. All that said, though, this derivative cartoon cardboard cutout stunt is a new low for the New York stage and I'm glad for whatever potshots are thrown at its perpetrators.

Earlier I referred to "all accounts" because I base my broad characterizations of the awfulness of this so-called musical on what I've read in various reviews and commentaries. I have not myself seen it (even if I wanted to I couldn't afford a ticket) yet I feel safe, and justified, in the conclusions I've drawn about this stinker. I've made a long study of reading reviews, of books, movies and stage productions. It's more art than science, I suppose, but I think I've got it down, how I take into account the source, class slant, artistic standards and so on, breaking it all down so that I'm generally able to get a pretty good sense of the piece in question and what I'd think of it. Often I conclude that a negative review is wrong or am intrigued enough to want to see for myself. Or the opposite, I read through a rave and know to stay far away. I'm sure I'm not always right but one thing I have to admit is that the mainstream critics are not always wrong either, even if they're right for the wrong reasons. Such is the case, I believe, with the Spiderman musical. I'm sorry for the workers whose jobs—and safety—depend on its success but I'm not sorry for the miscreants whose worship of commerce over art are responsible for its becoming, already, a legendary failure.

I want to say one more thing about what Broadway can do. You might think that it's so in the grips of big money and old thinkers that it's incapable of mounting any but the most conventional works of musical theater. That we must look elsewhere for innovation, particularly politically conscious work. And mostly I'd say that's true, that exciting new work, in the musical theater as in drama as in books or movies or any other art form, is doubtless being created in countless corners by impoverished unknowns, and that most of it has no chance of ever seeing the light of day, at least as long as art remains locked down under capitalism. Once in a while, though, somehow, a bright light shines through.

Such was the case with Caroline, or Change, which I was lucky enough to see in early 2004 before it closed after an all too brief run on Broadway. This musical by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori was unlike any I've ever seen. Innovative—hell yes, with talking washing machines, and scenes that conflate and compress time and space. Musically successful—OMG yes, with a near-operatic score that ranges wide and strikes deep. Artistically challenging and politically meaningful—since seeing this show I know that there is no topic that the genre of musical theater could not take on, no subject that is out of bounds, no approach that is out of reach. As I've admitted before, I'm a corny old sucker, and many's the old-school musical that reduces me to tears, but they're sentimental tears, triggered by various varieties of shtick. At the end of Caroline, or Change, by contrast, I was shaken deeply, to my core, by the important story it told, the profound issues it raised—and, not least, by the unbelievable and shamefully underappreciated brilliance of Tonya Pinkins in the starring role. I remember that as I rose and walked down the stairs from the balcony and out onto the street and over to the subway, as the minutes after the final standing ovation during which I'd sobbed my eyes out passed, as it turned into five minutes since the end, then 10, then 15, I was still trembling, I still felt undone. That it was the last thing I thought about as I fell asleep that night, and the first when I awoke next day, and for many days after that. That it haunts me still. This is what the musical theater can do.

Great Expectations

2011-02-05T15:36:00.000-05:00

Yes we remain enthralled by the uprising of the Egyptian workers and students and have the greatest expectations of where it will all lead. My confession, though, is that I haven't yet been to any of the street demonstrations here in solidarity with them because I'm down with the flu. And that, while I have been following the news, I've also been doing what I do when sick, which is read and watch junk TV. As for the junk TV, um, don't ask and I won't have to tell. As for what I'm reading, it's an oldy but goody that I've meant to get to for some time: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It is tremendously entertaining, a rip-roaring good story told with wit, charm and marvelous language. Who knows, this may set me off on a Dickens phase. Most of his books are available in cheap paperback editions--this one in my hand cost $4.95--and I could certainly do worse when in need of a good read.

Leading in to the Dickens, and as I was nursing my lover Teresa through and thereby catching her flu, I made my quick way through two volumes provided by their publishers as free review copies. (There, I've met my legal obligation.) The first is a slim volume of tiny poems by Andrew Rihn titled America Plops and Fizzes. There are 50 of them, two or three to a page, each page faced with an illustration by David Munson, most of them unflattering images of the bosses and bankers. It's all to my liking--the take, the quirk--but, unschooled poetically as I've confessed myself to be, I feel ill equipped for any meaningful comment. In lieu of my own, then, let me commend you to the publisher's comment, following, and then to a recent interview with the poet.

When Jack Kerouac deviated from the traditional haiku form, he began calling his poems "pops." Andrew Rihn deviates even further, to the edge of formlessness, adding a new entry into the rubric of "American pops." With short, sudden flashes, the reader is given glimpses of pop culture--the celebrity, the sloganeering, the fetishism. These poems remind us that we are all tethered to something dark, violent, and absurd that lies hidden below the surface of late capitalism.

Next I read Wingshooters, the new novel by Nina Revoyr. She is a favorite of mine; I loved all three of her previous novels. This one continues her exploration of issues of racism, identity, the clash of communities, but far afield from her previous usual setting of Los Angeles. The story takes place in rural Wisconsin, in 1974. I'm not sure why it didn't quite grab me the way Revoyr's other work has--it may simply be that I was getting sick--but it's an important story and I'm glad to see that it's getting stunningly good reviews all around. What I found most interesting was the way this novel forced me to view that time and that place in a new light. I'd never have thought of Wisconsin as a backward place, especially not that late along in the 20th century. Somehow I had a vague sense of it as a more enlightened spot, no doubt substituting Madison and Milwaukee and the Progressive Party and Father Groppi and other flotsam of information and misinformation lodged inside my brain for the more various, complicated and nuanced truth of the whole state, whose rural precincts, as Revoyr portrays them here, were redoubts of backwardness and racism. This is a terrible tale that culminates in horrid violence--what amounts to a lynching and its aftermath--and Revoyr makes the reader see how all of it is perpetrated by solid citizens who are roundly respected, admired, loved. It made me think of the assassins of Medgar Evers and others of their ilk in the 1960s South, of how an apparently benign paragon can at the same time be a racist terrorist murderer. That this is 10 years later and many miles to the north shouldn't make the story all the more shocking, but it does, and it's a good contribution that Revoyr brings it to light with Wingshooters.

The Internationale in Arabic

2011-01-28T16:22:00.000-05:00

There's no real visual, but as the rebellions in Egypt intensify the sound alone is exciting: our sisters and brothers sing the great worldwide communist anthem The Internationale in Arabic. If this doesn't bring goosebumps of class-struggle excitement you haven't been watching Al Jazeera, so head on over there to witness the workers and youths taking history into their hands.

As the Arab masses rise

2011-01-27T15:16:00.000-05:00

These are exciting days as the masses of workers and the poor take to the streets in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and, most likely, soon, in other countries as the revolutionary fervor whose explosion has been building for so long spreads across national borders. Repressive regimes aligned with imperialism have held down the struggle in most countries of the Arab world for decades now. That situation, contrary to the fantasies of the ruling classes, both comprador and imperialist, was never going to hold forever. Now breaks the dam. There's no telling how far this will go.

One thing all the Arab masses hold in common is their devotion to the national liberation struggle of Palestine. There's no doubt that these current upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa are providing tremendous strength and encouragement to the Palestinian people—and fomenting equally tremendous fear and trepidation in Washington and Tel Aviv. It's a great time, then, to share the news of a new book that makes a significant contribution to building solidarity with Palestine inside the United States.

The book is Gaza: Symbol of Resistance. The editor and driving force behind the book is Joyce Chediac, a Lebanese-American and longtime Palestine solidarity activist and journalist who has traveled to and reported on Palestine and Lebanon. In Chediac's introduction and in articles by her and more than a dozen others—covering the 2008-2009 U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza, the aftermath and the current situation—the book documents Israel's war crimes in the Gaza Strip and narrates how Gazans withstood siege and war, refusing to give up the right to choose their own government.

The book is intended as an organizing tool, and, as noted on the back cover, it's special because:

• It gives a comprehensive and lively narrative of the recent history of the Gaza Strip which does not assume previous knowledge.

• It provides hard facts from the UN's Goldstone Report on Israel's 2008-9 war on Gaza.

• It contains eyewitness testimony from participants in three Viva Palestina humanitarian convoys, which broke the blockade of Gaza and delivered aid.

• It reviews a history of African-American solidarity with Palestine.

• It explains why the Egyptian government enforces the Israeli blockade of Gaza while the Egyptian people oppose it.

• It gives voice to Palestinian forces censored out of the establishment media, including Hamas, and Palestinian activist groups that explain how best to support their cause.

• It incorporates statements from Jewish people who oppose the torture of Gaza, including Israeli soldiers who fought in Gaza, Israeli military resisters and Jews from the U.S.

• It gives the facts on why the giant U.S. media conglomerates won't give the Palestinian people fair coverage and are actually tied in with arms makers who make huge profits off Israel's aggression.

It's a great book, the first of its kind. (Full disclosure: I helped a little with proofreading, and have a small piece in it, but if I hadn't I'd still be thrilled about its publication.) You can order it from Leftbooks.com, or on the book's own website, where you can also read more about it.

Long live Palestine! Victory to the Arab revolution!

Just to show I'm still here

2011-01-26T11:07:00.000-05:00

It's another snowy (but never, dammit, a snow) day. Here's the view from my office windows as I contemplate heading back out into it to rustle up some lunch, which, like an idiot, I failed to pack today.

I'll be back here with something more substantive, books-wise, as soon as I can.

Mao Zedong on literature and the revolutionary class struggle

2011-01-19T15:19:00.000-05:00

Some excerpts from Mao's talks at the May 1942 Yenan Forum:

"To defeat the enemy we must rely primarily on the army with guns. But this army alone is not enough; we must also have a cultural army, which is absolutely indispensable for uniting our own ranks and defeating the enemy. ...

"In the last analysis, what is the source of all literature and art? Works of literature and art, as ideological forms, are products of the reflection in the human brain of the life of a given society. Revolutionary literature and art are the products of the reflection of the life of the people in the brains of revolutionary writers and artists. The life of the people is always a mine of the raw materials for literature and art, materials in their natural form, materials that are crude, but most vital, rich and fundamental; they make all literature and art seem pallid by comparison; they provide literature and art with an inexhaustible source, their only source. They are the only source, for there can be no other. ...

"Although man's social life is the only source of literature and art and is incomparably livelier and richer in content, the people are not satisfied with life alone and demand literature and art as well. Why? Because, while both are beautiful, life as reflected in works of literature and art can and ought to be on a higher plane, more intense, more concentrated, more typical, nearer the ideal, and therefore more universal than actual everyday life. Revolutionary literature and art should create a variety of characters out of real life and help the masses to propel history forward. For example, there is suffering from hunger, cold and oppression on the one hand, and exploitation and oppression of man by man on the other. These facts exist everywhere and people look upon them as commonplace. Writers and artists concentrate such everyday phenomena, typify the contradictions and struggles within them and produce works which awaken the masses, fire them with enthusiasm and impel them to unite and struggle to transform their environment. Without such literature and art, this task could not be fulfilled, or at least not so effectively and speedily. ...

"In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine."

Read the whole here. I'll be posting more on how literature can serve the class struggle as soon as I can.

Hubert Harrison

2011-01-16T13:17:00.000-05:00

On Monday, Martin Luther King Day, there's an event scheduled at Left Bank Books in Manhattan that I can't but wish I could get to. It's a talk by author Jeffrey B. Perry on the life and work of Hubert Harrison.

Harrison, termed "a genius buried by history" in the event's title, was a leading leftist radical in the early 1900s, an intellectual and activist, an important figure in Harlem and beyond. I know of him because when I was writing my first (lamentably unpublished) novel, and was doing research for a chapter that takes place in 1913 and involves the great Paterson silk strike of that year, I came across his name. Harrison was one of the speakers at a major strike rally, and I ended up writing about that, and a bit about him, in that chapter.

Until I saw the flier for Monday's talk, I did not know of Jeffrey B. Perry's book Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918. I'm bummed that I can't get to his MLK Day talk but I'm so excited to learn about this book, and I'm going to get it and read it as soon as I can.

"While a hostile relative rewrites my life: 'Who is, and is not, my family'"

2011-01-16T12:59:00.028-05:00

Earlier this month Leslie Feinberg, author of the beloved novel Stone Butch Blues and other works of fiction and non-fiction, pioneer of the transgender liberation movement, and, by the way, a comrade of mine for 30 years, issued a statement headed "While a hostile relative rewrites my life: 'Who is, and is not, my family.'"

Here are the opening paragraphs.

"In autumn 2010, Knopf published a 'transgender' themed young adult novel. The author, Catherine Ryan Hyde, is an estranged relative of mine.

"The analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Hyde’s young adult fiction novel will come from those who are living the identities, and oppressions to which she has applied her imagination.

"However, as part of the media coverage and publicity tour for the release of the young adult novel, Hyde claims much of her expertise and authority for writing her 'transgender'-themed young adult novel as based on my life and identity.

"The author is a relative with an axe to grind. When she claims me as kin in order to counter-narrate my life, I am forced to get up out of a sick bed in order to respond in writing.

"Since I became acutely ill in October 2007, it has been very hard for me to write, or to speak. So it is opportunistic and unconscionable that a hostile relative would take this opportunity to re-tell my life in a way that changes my sex, mis-describes my gender expression, and closets my sexuality. Hyde also attempts to silence me politically as a revolutionary, reasserts the dominant legal control of the biological family, and ignores and disrespects my chosen family."

To read the entire statement, please click on this link.

Update: Please see Leslie's additional comment, headed "Free to narrate novels, but not to counter-narrate my actual life in publicity tours," which you can find here on the Lambda Literary Foundation website in the comments section below LLF's posting of Leslie's original statement.

Why I did not love Little Bee

2011-01-11T16:45:00.000-05:00

I just read Little Bee by Chris Cleave. This book, which is now a couple of years old I believe, has received oodles of adulation. It's not a bad book, it's a decent book in many ways, but for me it fell short of the hype. For a number of reasons, but mostly these:

1. Although the story concerns a Nigerian woman who is an undocumented immigrant to England, a refugee from what the novel repeatedly refers to as "the oil wars," it is strangely apolitical. Yes, it is warmhearted and humane and yes, it implicitly rebukes the anti-immigrant campaigns and exposes their racism. These are not minor attributes, and so my comments are not meant as a big rant against a book that does more or less have its heart in the right place. But you finish reading this novel without a single piece of actual information about recent events in Nigeria, about the role of the oil companies in those events or for that matter which specific oil companies they are, or about what specifically these "oil wars" consist of beyond some vague narrative about villages being invaded and destroyed. It is such an invasion and such destruction from which the title character, Little Bee, has fled, but because the story is told from her individual perspective we are left without any broader context or understanding of the forces that have destroyed her life and her family's and her village's. Above all, how is British imperialism implicated? The reader has no idea. Certainly no idea of the long history of British colonialism in Nigeria or how British colonialism and its depredations led directly to Nigeria's current situation—nor, for that matter, do you really get a sense of what that situation is. You do get a very ugly picture of Nigerian soldiers. In fact, it is Africans who carry out the most terrible deeds depicted in this novel. The British who are portrayed negatively don't do or say anything nearly as terrible as the Africans.

2. Nor does any African (except dead ones, in Little Bee's memory) do or say anything fine and good to/for/about Little Bee as do the British characters, especially the main one, Sarah. This is a novel about human connection, about the coming together of, the coming of understanding and love between two women of different nationalities and classes and life stories, a petit-bourgeois white woman and an African refugee teenager who has lost everything, and about how the white woman's child is loved by both and serves sort of as the conduit between them. This is the level on which it reaches the reader, this is why, I think, so many people have loved it, and sure, that's all okay. Ultimately, though, especially at the novel's close, I was taken aback at how wholly this is the novel's message, this we-are-all-the-same-this-is-one-world message that is neither new nor unique nor informative nor challenging in any way, let alone any sort of contribution literarily or politically. Furthermore, the novel's final passages are troubling and, at least for me, leave an unpleasant taste. (Spoiler alert here.) At the end, Little Bee not only is going to lose her freedom and probably her life, and at the hands of Nigerians who, rather than the British imperialists, are the really bad bad guys in this novel, but she does so in the process of saving the little white child of the white woman who's tried to save her. Worst of all, Cleave has this young Nigerian woman, who has survived atrocities and witnessed the torture and murder of her beloved sister, invest the white child with all the hope and optimism and dreams of a better world:

I smiled down at Charlie, and I understood that he would be free now even if I would not. In this way the life that was in me would find its home in him now. … I smiled back at Charlie and I knew that the hopes of this whole human world could fit inside one soul.

Sigh. See what I'm saying here? What an ending, with the African woman sacrificing herself for the beloved white child who represents all that is pure and good, all hope for the future. (This in a scene on a beach that's filled with Nigerian children.) It's redolent of colonialist and orientalist and all that sort of literature, especially coming as it does as the coda that closes the story.

It's not inconceivable that a white British author could write a novel with an African protagonist that takes on globalization and migration and the wreckage wrought by imperialism and neocolonialism and make a real contribution with it. I just don't think Chris Cleave has done so with this novel. On the other hand, there are many fine fine Nigerian novelists who have told and are telling their own nation's stories. Readers looking for politically conscious, relevant fiction by and about Nigerians would do well to look to these artists, from the great, essential Chinua Achebe to younger voices like the terrifically talented Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Huck & Fagin, Twain & Dickens

2011-01-07T11:32:00.000-05:00

I tried to write and post something here yesterday about the new edition of Huckleberry Finn being published by NewSouth and the storm of criticism it's aroused because of the publisher's decision to remove the word n----- from every page where it appears in Mark Twain's novel. But I decided to hold off as it became clearer to me just how complex this issue is. I still don't think it's about censorship. And I do think the editor's stated concerns, about teachers and students being put in the position of saying that horrid word when reading passages aloud, and about parents worrying about its effect on their children, merit grappling with. But as I read more and more reactions to the revision--including author Tayari Jones' comment on replacing that word with the word slave, "I find it peculiar that the concept of human chattel is not too harsh for young readers, but a six-letter word renders this work obscene"--one fact above all stood out. To a person, every African American writer commenting on the NewSouth revision opposes it. That, in my view, is decisive. This wave of commentary was for me educational and thought-provoking.

Then I started wondering whether there had been objections to Twain's language at the time of the book's original 1884 publication, or during his lifetime which lasted 26 more years. That was the time of Jim Crow, of the rise of the KKK, of lynch law terror in the South and racist riots in the North, and also of the founding of the NAACP, the anti-lynching crusades of Ida B. Wells, the activism and early writings of W.E.B. DuBois. Amid all this, did anyone challenge Twain on what he called the character of Jim in the book? And if so, how did he respond? While this current controversy plays itself out, who knows, maybe some literary scholar will pipe up with that information. Maybe not. But then I wonder: what about now? What if it wasn't a question of someone other than the author making a revision but the author himself, miraculously come back to life, having to respond to the various issues parents, teachers and children have raised about the book over the years? Would he even consider replacing that awful word? Would he apologize?

These might seem like silly questions, but they come to mind because, and this whole controversy reminds me that, over the holiday break I taped and watched the movie musical Oliver! Rather, I watched part of it. The character Fagin in that movie is such a broad stereotypical anti-Semitic caricature that I recoiled in horror and couldn't bring myself to keep watching after the first couple scenes with the Fagin character. I was shocked that as recently as 1968 a big-budget mainstream movie could get away with this flagrantly offensive portrayal. After I turned the movie off I got online and googled "Oliver Twist + Dickens + anti-Semitic" and spent about a half-hour reading some fascinating literary history having to do with a great author, a great novel and offensive epithets.

It seems that when Oliver Twist was first published in 1838, it drew almost immediate protests about the Fagin character from England's Jewish community and supportive progressives. Fagin is a lowlife London thief, a fence, a miser, and an exploiter of orphaned homeless children whom he employs as pickpockets. He is described as "disgusting" in the book, and in the movie musical he certainly is. He's dirty, with oily scraggly hair and beard, filthy clothes, etc., and just in case you don't get the point the actor Ron Moody invests him with a Yiddish accent during the song-and-dance numbers (though strangely not in dialogue). In the pages of Oliver Twist, this repulsive, greedy criminal is referred to sometimes by name but very often—over 250 times—as "the Jew." Hence the protests, by what was in those days in that place a very impoverished and oppressed community.

Now get this: Dickens responded! He was terribly upset at being called an anti-Semite. First he was defensive, writing a long letter that quite literally argued that some of his best friends were Jews. Then he got to work and revised the novel. In fact, he revised it time after time over the ensuing years, removing the anti-Jewish references and adjusting the Fagin depiction. He was at work on yet another revision at the time of his death.

Which version did I read in high school? I think it must have been the later revised one, for not only do I not recall Fagin being referred to as "the Jew," but I know no such novel would have been in my high school's curriculum. In fact I'm sure my mother would have objected and protested and demanded it be removed from the reading list, just as some parents now object to Huckleberry Finn. I somehow still knew that the Fagin character was a Jew, and that the portrayal was anti-Semitic even with all Dickens' clean-up work, and in fact it turns out that Oliver Twist is widely considered the most anti-Semitic work of literature in the English canon, with Fagin beating out even Shakespeare's Shylock for offensive stereotyping. The thing is, the book we read now, the edition we most all of us have read if we've read Oliver Twist, is not the original book as it was published. Nonetheless it somehow retains the original's essence literarily, culturally, politically, perhaps because it was the author himself who revisited and reworked it.

Let me be clear: I'm not drawing any direct comparison between the Twain book and the Dickens, or the words they utilized, what they meant and mean, and certainly not between Fagin, a vile character, and Jim, a fine one. Or for that matter between the writers and what they were trying to do. The one just reminded me of my recent brush up against the other. There's a whole other tangent, too, that I won't go off on now but might some other time. It made me doubly sad to have to turn off Oliver! because I so love musicals and I was so enjoying this one. "Food, Glorious Food," "Where Is Love," "As Long as He Needs Me," and many other great numbers. All destroyed, perverted by the Fagin nastiness. Stymied from enjoying it, I got to thinking about the musical theater, which arose in this country about a hundred years ago and might be fairly said to be a Black/Jewish/gay art form, and how it has been used and abused, its delights and offenses over the years. As I say, perhaps for another day.

Reading red in 2011

2011-01-05T16:42:00.000-05:00

I've been threatening (promising?) for some time to slow down on blog postings and, as anyone who checks in here regularly will have noticed by now, it is coming to pass. This partly has to do with a more constrictive schedule that results in using my lunch hour for running around rather than blogging, but mostly it has to do with other variables. Like how much I look at other blogs (less than I used to), how much I read book reviews and other literary commentary from the standard bourgeois sources (much less than I used to), how much I follow literary/cultural news (much much less), and above all how much time I spend writing--much more, which is a very good thing, but as a result of which something's got to give and that something is Read Red.

This is not the end, I don't think. It's a turn, I think, and an acknowledgment as I lean into it. Gone are the days of several posts a week. I think. Who knows, as soon as I say it I might turn around and give the lie to it, but I don't think so, because my dear desire is to tune out a fair amount of what's been distracting me. I wrote most days during my winter work break. I regained a certain momentum. I don't want to lose it. So I'll be seeing you less than before.

The up side, blog-wise, I hope, is that when I do blog it will be because I have something substantive to say. Over the last few days I collected a handful of links, thinking, well at least I'll throw them up just to keep the blog alive, but that's pointless, is it not? Just passing along the same little news items, factoids, rants and outrages that everyone else is already passing along? Nah, I don't think I'll go that route for now. If there's a link or news to be shared it'll be because I've got something to say about it. Something red, which after all is the purpose of this blog. Otherwise it'll be commentary on books and other cultural and/or political matters and thoughts about same. Stick with me and together we'll see how it goes.

Here's a better, truer image of Latinas

2010-12-29T18:06:00.000-05:00

On New Year's Day, the new president of Brazil will be inaugurated. Her name is Dilma Roussef. She is a leftist and a former political prisoner.

She also, obviously, has some great ideas about her own safety. Check her out in the photo below, in a recent motorcade, surrounded by an all-female security detail.

Now that's the kind of image of--and the truth about--women that we like to see.

A dirty rotten shame

2010-12-29T17:59:00.000-05:00

That's the best way to describe what Hollywood is doing to Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's best-selling 2003 novel The Dirty Girls Social Club.The novel is a fast fun read, a delightful, funny but also sharp and poignant story of six Latina friends who first meet in college and stay close in the years after as each goes her own way. It takes on a lot of issues, including racism, class questions, homophobia and more, all the while remaining fully entertaining. I read it after my lover Teresa, who is Chicana, recommended it. We've loaned it to a lot of friends over the years too. And we've always wondered when it would be made into a movie, the way Waiting to Exhale, to which it has often been compared, so successfully was. It seemed a natural for Hollywood.

Well. We were right, Hollywood did take notice, but oh damn, to no good end, it appears. In a series of furiously righteous posts on her blog in recent days, Valdes-Rodriguez has blown the whistle on the producers and writers who are putting together an NBC-TV series called Dirty Girls based on her novel, having bought the rights from her a while back. Anyone who's interested in being enlightened about not only the horror that the bottom line can do to literature, but, most important, the absolutely disgusting pandering to racist stereotyping of Latinas that is, based on the evidence Valdes-Rodriguez presents, the essence of the TV show being developed, should spend some time reading her blog posts from the last week.

These posts start with "Afro-dectomies and other Hollywood secrets," and "Every Latina a slut, and other Hollywood secrets revealed," followed by the author's ideas about how she would have, how the producers ought to have, adapted the novel for TV--and then comes news that she's been slapped with a cease and desist order, and that CAA has dumped her as a client. Valdes-Rodriguez is fearless, however. She won't shut up! Other posts take on the twisted distortions the studio has wrought on her book's characters, including "From a powerful columnist to fired, unemployed drunk living in a residential hotel" and "How my normal lesbian character was made pathological for Hollywood."

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez has been wronged. She deserves great respect for blowing the whistle on the culprits. But the wrong goes far beyond the damage and pain to her as an author, as she well knows and expounds upon in her blog posts. This is about U.S. culture and cultural stereotypes and how (now this is me talking) capitalism distorts and destroys art in its drive for profit, how the profit drive dictates defaulting to the cheapest, sleaziest, shallowest, most racist and sexist norms in place of anything approaching art, any depth or dimension or truth. It's another cultural crime. I salute this courageous author for refusing to keep silent about it. And if this show does indeed make it onto the NBC lineup--which would come as no surprise from the folks who gave us the Seinfeld episode about setting fire to the Puerto Rican flag--we'll all have to step up and do our part to support the protests that will undoubtedly ensue.

Christmas at the apartheid wall

2010-12-25T23:08:00.000-05:00

From Palestine Today

It's a good day to send solidarity greetings to the Palestinian nation.

Toward a new year of the three Rs

2010-12-22T11:49:00.000-05:00

That's reading, writing and revolution.

Till then, though, there's nothing like stating the obvious: blog posts are slowing down bigtime as this old gal slides toward winter-holiday-hibernation mode. I have a week off but I'm still at work today and tomorrow, in fact working hard for my piddling wage as deadlines loom, but that's about as far as I'm able to tax my brain at this point. I have read several books since last I wrote about one and if I had it in me I'd comment on them here, but sorry, no can do. Let me offer a little of this and a little of that in lieu of substantive original content.

Six books are on the shortlist for the Prize for Arabic Fiction 2011. I'm not knowledgeable enough to assess anything about them, in particular about their class character which is what interests me most, nor about the judges or the character of the prize. My best bet, I believe, is to search out which, if any, have been translated into English and read them.
Here's an interesting online lit mag that originates from Australia: Polari--An International Queer Creative Writing Journal.

This last offering is a couple weeks old but it still pops to mind and makes me burst out laughing at odd moments. It's from the TV show Raising Hope--I really need to blog about the TV I watch, in particular these shows that purport to be about working-class folks, so yes let's put that on the to-do list, shall we?--and the actor uttering the immortal line here, in case you don't recognize her, is Cloris Leachman. Here's wishing sound sleep and slow times for you and me in the coming days.

Oh joy

2010-12-16T15:00:00.001-05:00

Hey guess what? That faculty committee that's in the process of disbanding did one last good deed and gave me a nice big bookstore gift certificate after all, for the fifth year in a row. Oh joy oh gladness, and oh boy oh boy now I can look forward to months of obsessive strategizing about how to spend it. Fiction? But I'm so often let down, it's much safer to borrow novels from the library. Non-fiction? But I read so little of it, proportionately, wouldn't this be kind of a waste? Fancy-shmancy coffeetable books of the sort I could never otherwise afford? Mmm I dunno, really? Gifts? Yeah, that's what I should do. What I would do if I were the kind of person I aspire to be, theoretically.

Meanwhile my library shenanigans proceed apace. Last week's pile has already shrunk. I've read two, both good. Started two that I quickly gave up on. Took those four back and picked up four more. This time I'm not going to list them; looking at last week's list I'm a bit embarrassed. I mean, Rick Moody? What was I thinking? Yes, that's one that I returned after an ever so brief stab at reading it.

So look, here's the thing. I'm just hanging on for seven more days, till I get to head home and crash for 11 days. I might be coming down with a cold--which actually would be a good development, to get sick before the holiday break instead of during it as I usually do. Or maybe I'm just too pooped to participate. The thing is, I read too damned much. I never thought I'd say such a thing, but it just might be true. It looks like I might hit 80 books read by year's end. Which means I just might have tipped over into, if not crazy-cat-lady land, at least the realm of get-a-grip-get-a-life-before-it's-too-late. For, no matter how much I love to read, it's really not worth dying for, and if I don't get my wobbly mass up out of a chair and move it about a bit, these books might kill me. No, I have no serious health problems, but yes I'm in that age where people suddenly croak from heart attacks for which there was no warning. I don't want to be one of those people. I can just picture the sad, shaking heads, the clicking tongues: "If only she'd taken a walk instead of reading that 80th book."

So. One goal for my holidays is to get into an exercise mode, even if ever so modestly. Another is to think about this blog, and where it ought to go from here on out. I have been thinking again about some of the questions I used to raise a lot and lately not so much, about the uses of literature in relation to the class struggle. Maybe if I can lift my eyes from the page, and lift my butt from the couch, and raise mine eyes to the skies, a cogent thought or two will make itself known. If it does, you'll be the first to know.

My Year's Best

2010-12-14T17:05:00.000-05:00

That's my year, not the year. For although I did read a few 2010 books in 2010 and in fact one of them was my absolute best read (really of the last several years), this list reaches back as far as 1941.

Of the 76 books I've read so far this year, then, here are the ones that lit up my life.

Best book
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Other non-fiction
Genesis by Eduardo Galeano
Faces and Masks by Eduardo Galeano
Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco

Poetry
Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith

Fiction
After Tupac and D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson
Blood on the Forge by William Attaway
The Disinherited by Han Ong
Fanon by John Edgar Wideman
Erasure by Percival Everett
Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson
I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett
Palestine's Children by Ghassan Kanafani
Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
Shadow Country by Peter Mathiessen
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Adichie
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

My holiday break book hoarding frenzy has begun

2010-12-10T13:11:00.001-05:00

Not that my holiday break has begun, no, that's still two weeks away. And when it comes it will only last 10 days. There's no rational explanation for my annual panicky rush to amass piles of books at home before the break starts. Like clockwork the craziness has begun.

I just came back from the university library, where I picked up:

Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong
Daughters of the Stone by Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa
The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin
My Hollywood by Mona Simpson
The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst
Some Sing, Some Cry by Ntozake Shange & Ilfa Bayeza

I'd checked online before heading to the library, and so had also planned to get these two books which supposedly were on the shelf: Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans and How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu. However, they were not in fact on the shelf. Most likely they were still in the back room where new titles rest; I started to go there to find them but then realized I could barely carry the pile I had, so I let it go for today. I shall return, though, in hopes of snagging these two before the break.

No doubt I'll find myself at several other libraries too, before these two weeks are through. Probably won't do any buying. The faculty committee that had set me up with a hefty bookstore gift certificate for these last several years has deliberated itself out of existence and with it vanishes, lamentably, my main source of book-buying funds. Ah well, our employee benefits continue to shrink--among other takebacks, the portion of health-insurance premiums I have to pay is rising again as of the new year--so I guess hanging on to this sweet books perk would have been too good to be true.

Here's a mood booster for ye

2010-12-10T09:59:00.000-05:00

All hail the student protesters of London! Here's hoping inspiration crosses the ocean.

More lit talk soon. Cheerio!