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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 IcÃar BollaÃn; 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.)
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, 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.)
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!
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.
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?
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”
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
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
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.
