Back to the question at hand

Upton Sinclair famously said about the success, the impact, of his 1906 novel The Jungle that he'd been aiming for people's hearts and he hit their stomachs instead. Sinclair, who for most of his life considered himself a socialist, would live over 60 more years, to age 90. He would write more than 90 books, both fiction and non-fiction. He would run for governor of California in 1934 as a Democrat and nearly win, defeated ultimately only after the business establishment bankrolled a dirty red-scare campaign against him. He would remain an activist fighting for progressive change all his long life. Yet he is known for The Jungle. And The Jungle is known not for its depiction of the horrors of wage slavery, which was Sinclair's intent, but rather as a muckraking polemic against the excesses and unsanitary conditions of the meatpacking industry. The book is credited with giving rise to a movement to clean up and regulate food production, leading eventually to a slew of laws and the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.

So ever since, The Jungle has stood as a sort of cautionary tale to writers hoping to craft fiction in the service of left politics. There's no point even engaging with meaty questions about how to write such fiction, how to get to readers in a way that touches their hearts, opens their minds, raises their consciousness about the foundational inequity of capitalist society and the need for revolutionary change and how to make such change--it's futile to bother wrestling with any of this, we're told, because the fate of The Jungle shows that even fiction written with this explicit intent will inevitably miss the mark. If it doesn't simply fall flat--which of course is what we're promised is the preordained fate of 99 percent of political fiction since the first rule of bourgeois aesthetics is that art cannot be political--if somehow it finds a readership and, even more miraculous, somebody thinks it's a halfway decent book, it will be misread, misunderstood, received as anything but the call to arms its poor misguided author thought she/he wrote.

Why even bother? Give us family dysfunction. Give us slick, satiric comedy. Give us irony. Cynicism. Despair. Give us individual tragedy, personal redemption. Because this is what people want to read. This is how they'll read your story even if it's not the story you thought you wrote. Otherwise they won't read your story at all. Because nobody wants to be preached at. No one picks up a novel to be told it's time to change the world.

This is pure cant, in my opinion. It's a rule, a dogma--a bourgeois rule, bourgeois dogma concocted out of whole cloth and recited as if it's merely a statement of natural law. Who says? The arbiters of bourgeois ideology say. Who are they? Why, everyone whose say gets a hearing in this country whose arts are more fully under the thumb of the capitalist ruling class than they are just about anywhere else.

Dump it. Discount it. It's noxious. You've breathed it in, sure, we all have, it's everywhere. Now clear it out of your system. Spit it out. Detoxify your mind and spirit. Open yourself to the possibility that literature can take another road. Which road, exactly? How far can it go? How fast? These are questions I've raised before and, though it took me too unconscionably long to take them up again, I'm now ready to give it a shot. I've been thinking about some specific books that have had a big impact politically--or might--or could--or didn't--and why not--and the more general questions thinking about these specific books raise, questions about the potential for revolutionary literature. I'll get to these thoughts and questions next.

Tra-la! It's Spring!

Everyone everywhere else in the country will probably want to clobber me for the New-York-centrism of this, but I gotta say it: I don't think anyone welcomes the coming of springtime with the joy and fervor of New Yorkers. Why would it be otherwise? We live in the most cityish city in the U.S. We don't have the hardest winters, not by a longshot, but a case can be made that winter here is hardest to endure for the way it combines with, well, everything else about living here, to sap the spirit. Especially toward the end.

But then.

But then we find we have traversed the long slog that is March and we have come out the other side. And suddenly I have blossoms gentling me outside my Manhattan office window.
And suddenly the masses pour into the out of doors, jumping for joy, practically, with the sheer relief of the thing. Great gobs of humanity jostling each other for every inch of park space, sidewalk, every open window, every tiny patch of what passes here for yards and gardens.

And suddenly mushrooms trumpet forth underneath a tree in my Queens neighborhood. I had to leave the cigarette butts in the picture, for they are just as much a part of the scene. Ma Nature, stubborn gal, goes about her business as best she can against the odds.
The planet staggers. The damage mounts. For today, though, we sing. Tra-la! It's Spring!

I'm heading out now to spend the rest of my lunch hour touring tulip sites.

UPDATE: What did I tell you?And yes, the tulips are here! (Two weeks earlier than last year, but I'm trying not to think about what that means.)

The Book of Grace

Boy, do I got cul-chah or what? Two theater outings in two weeks, after a long drought away from the boards. This is more like it!

Last night, having nabbed last-minute cheap tickets just a few days before its run closes, Teresa and I saw The Book of Grace at the Public Theater. This is Suzan-Lori Parks' latest play. It is intense.

The writing is marvelous, and comprises several dimensions. There are at various points clever wordplay, ideas and ideologies playing off each other, deep drama, startling humor. Three terrific actors, one of whom, recent Julliard graduate Amari Cheatom, I guarantee we will be hearing more from.

The play is on its most obvious level a family tragedy, but the personal links with the political in sometimes obvious and sometimes less clearcut ways. The setting is a Texas border town. One of the characters is a Border Patrol cop. Parks takes us where we need to go.

Not necessarily always as far as I'd have liked, politically speaking. There are points in the play, especially in a monologue by Cheatom's character Buddy/Snake, where some strong statements are made that bring out the broader context for the family drama, but then this veers off away from the larger platform of social-cultural analysis and back onto the smaller personal-psychological stage. This leeched a bit of the impact out of it for me, but the character study remained powerful enough to make this overall a provocative, stirring evening of theater. In fact, I must dissent from the reviews in which bourgeois drama critics have taken Parks to task for what they see as her jamming her characters into boxes as archetypes rather than creating fully fleshed out real human beings. I can't believe these guys saw the same play I did. The characters are fully wrought, beautifully so. Whereas I wish Parks had taken the politics a little further, these critics can't bear that there are politics in the play at all, and concoct a specious criticism with which to scold her for the crime of acknowledging the world. Don't listen to them, Ms. Parks!

An unexpected added treat: after the play, there was a "talkback" with the playwright. We stayed for this and I'm especially glad we did because I found her comments on the background and process of writing this play really interesting. Particularly because I've been thinking lately about trying my hand at drama. It has always seemed a mysterious if not impossible form to assay, but something has been shifting, clicking, inside my artsy-fartsy little head and I'm starting to wonder whether I shouldn't try to get up the nerve to make an attempt.

Linking along

Saramago's blog sounds interesting. Or it was, anyway. He's signed off in favor of book writing.

Arundhati Roy on "Walking with Comrades" in the Dandakaranya Forests of central India. This is a long essay and I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but everyone keeps forwarding it to me with high praise so I thought I'd pass along the link.

The days of e-reader accessibility are coming closer. A new, cheaper, more usable one, the Kobo, is about to be marketed.

This enrages me. For obvious reasons, but also because we've been trying to work up a plan to visit the site, possibly during my summer days off.

Ricky Martin comes out. And yes, you're right that it took him long enough and yes we homos were wearied by his long closeting, but I also find myself wearied by self-righteous straight people who scoff as if coming out is now oh so easy.

Today is the second annual Global Day of Action for BDS--the movement for a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against the apartheid state of Israel in support of the Palestinian struggle. Join the BDS movement. Check out what people inside the Zionist entity, Jews as well as Palestinians, are doing to build the BDS call.

Finally, and most important, one more for Women's History Month: Sukant Chandan interviews Palestinian revolutionaries Leila Khaled and Shireen Said.

Making revolutionary art is not a crime

As Women's History Month comes to a close, I've been thinking about one of the greatest women revolutionaries of the 20th century, Jiang Qing, who was born in March of 1914. As a key leader of the Cultural Revolution, the momentous effort to eradicate creeping social inequalities in the second decade after the victory of Chinese Revolution, Jiang Qing made particular contributions in the realm of people's art. She had been an actor in her youth, and throughout her life remained concerned with the thorny questions of how to create art that, as I termed the goal a few blog posts ago, both soars and serves the revolution. For example, she championed the ballet Red Detachment of Women. I've always hoped I'll get a chance to see a performance of this beautiful work of proletarian culture. Maybe I will.

In 1966, at a mass rally attended by tens of thousands of workers in Beijing, Jiang Qing said:

To weed through the old to let the new emerge means to develop new content which meets the needs of the masses and popular national forms loved by the people. As far as content is concerned, it is in many cases out of the question to weed through the old to let the new emerge. How can we critically assimilate ghosts, gods and religion? I hold it is impossible, because we are atheists and Communists. We do not believe in ghosts and gods at all. Again, for instance, the feudal moral precepts of the landlord class and the moral precepts of the bourgeoisie, which they considered to be indisputable, were used to oppress and exploit the people. Can we critically assimilate things which were used to oppress and exploit the people? I hold it is impossible, because ours is a country of the dictatorship of the proletariat. We want to build socialism. Our economic base is public ownership. We firmly oppose the system of private ownership whereby people are oppressed and explotied. To sweep away all remnants of the system of exploitation and the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of all the exploiting classes is an important aspect of our great proletarian cultural revolution.

At her 1980 "trial" at the hands of the "market socialism" grouping that had wrested control in China after the death of Mao Zedong, Comrade Jiang Qing proclaimed, "Making revolution is not a crime."

Neither is making revolutionary art.

Jiang Qing: Live like her! Long live the spirit of proletarian culture that she embodied, fought and died for.

Women's History Month

One of the things that's gotten away from me lately is Women's History Month. I'd intended to note it with a series of blog posts and book pointers. Now it's nearly through and that's one more good intention unfulfilled.

Today the annual ceremony commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire takes place outside the Washington Square building that now houses NYU offices and labs. There, 99 years ago, 146 women died, inside succumbing to smoke and flames and outside after jumping from the ninth floor to escape. Check out my comments from last year about the ceremony, the history and the books. Next year is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle fire. I hope women workers seize control of this history and make big plans to mark the day the way it should be marked, with an orientation toward the class struggle, not as a salute to the (extremely racist and misogynist) New York Fire Department.

This Saturday, March 27, in NYC, we'll be doing something like that, albeit on a smaller scale, marching and rallying to demand an end to violence against women, imperialist war which always hits women hardest, and for jobs and housing. We gather at 12 noon at Union Square in Manhattan.

There's nothing small scale about the participation of women in the great revolutionary struggle now under way in Nepal. They are playing a leading role.

These photos, courtesy of Jed Brandt, are from earlier this month, the International Women's Day march and rally in Kathmandu, Nepal.

What a wonderful day that looks to have been.

Back soon, till then a little limn

I've found myself in an unexpectedly busy time. Busy on all fronts. But the miscellaneous category is what matters here, because it's from this category's spare moments and rare pockets of energy that I usually draw to pull together postings for this blog. For some reason the miscellany (chores of various kinds, medical appointments, etc.) has piled up lately and I just haven't had the moments or pockets to blog. I will soon.

Until then, check this out. A cogent, angry comment from Joy Castro on the character and consciousness of the literary powers that be.

And this. I haven't yet followed through on plans to feature excerpts here from the great new anthology Liberation Lit. I do still plan to do so, although it may be not in as systematic a way as I'd like. For now, consider this, to whet your appetite. It's from the long essay "Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel" by Liberation Lit co-editor Tony Christini. This is from page 575.

Misrepresentation 14--pre-eminence of the "subtle": "Subtlety of analysis is what's important," says [James] Wood. Not striking analysis, subtlety, which is another word for nuance--the establishment's all-time favorite word for the truncated range of its preferred fiction. Nuance is even more cherished than "limn." Subtlety--that by which never have so many nuanced so much to limn toward so little. Wood portrays the novel as sort of subtle styled character sketches of great sensitivity--a basic misrepresentation of the nature and scope of fiction, imaginative literature in full.

Seven years of imperialist war

I hope everyone who possibly can is getting themselves to D.C. this weekend to join the marching throngs.

First, tomorrow, comes the protest against seven long years of the criminal, murderous profiteering wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Next, on Sunday, the march for immigrant rights. There, the militant contingents will make clear that we're fighting for not just any "immigration reform," but full rights and legalization for all immigrants.

I'm sorry to say that I can't be in D.C., although I will be doing some political grunt work here in NYC so at least I'm not total dead weight this weekend.

Next up: May Day in New York City. All out in solidarity with immigrant workers! That one I know I won't miss.

Fela!

Wow.

Last night I made it back to Broadway for the first time in a year and a half. And for what a knockout of a show.

Fela!

This posting will be brief because my brain isn't doing its job of accessing words very well after staying up so late, and because I don't have much time to devote to it. Don't let brevity mislead you, however. Fela! is a night of musical theater like none other I've ever experienced. It merits a lengthy concatenation of superlatives leaping from the music to the musicians to the singers to the choreography to the dancers to the set and lighting design to the story to the politics. All of it, every aspect of this triumphant production, knocked my socks off.

Fela! is based on the life and career of the Nigerian composer/musician/singer/activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti, who in the 1970s created the Afrobeat music movement and went on to become a major force in the Pan-Africanist left. His mother Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was a leader in the struggle against British colonialism and also in the women's movement. The musical depicts all of this--Fela's music, politics, and his mother's role and influence on the nation and on him--with great passion and equally great artistry.

I am now officially in awe of Bill T. Jones. I've long admired his work as a choreographer and dancer. He not only choreographed--and brilliantly, including, Read Red friends, a dance number having to do with books and reading, the dancers brandishing books as political weapons--but also wrote and directed this show. What an achievement. What a contribution.

Oh great

Just what I needed, another fascination.

One visit and, damn it all, I'm hooked.

Curse you, Meredith Sue Willis, for turning me on to the live hummingbird webcam! Though I do appreciate your thoughts on how watching it is and isn't like reading.

Two boys & the Easter Rising

I'm shocked to realize on this St. Patrick's Day that I seem to have never written here about one of my all-time favorite novels: At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill. I read it when it was published in this country eight years ago. I loved it. It slayed me. It left me a quivering mess. It stayed with me. O what a wonderful book can do.

To boil it down, which does this big book a definite injustice, it is the story of two teenaged boys in Dublin who fall in love at the same time they are swept up into the Irish republican struggle that culminates in the great Easter Rising of 1916. The two aspects of the book--tender heartbreaking love story and stirring portrayal of actual political-historical events--blend beautifully in just the way I wish more novelists would attempt. The scenes in which O'Neill depicts the main characters actually going through the events of the Easter Rising, moment by moment, are stunningly brought to life. All the passion, confusion, violence, rage and hope of the living struggle are there on the page. As are, equally, achingly, all the many dimensions of the boys' emerging love as they come of age and grapple with their gay identity amid their nation's great battles for independence from British colonialism.

This is also a novel of the highest literary achievement. The language throughout is stunningly grand, original, challenging, astounding. You open it and are at once whipped aloft as if by a whirlwind and there you stay, swirling about in the nether regions, the glorious heavens of grand innovation married to meaningful content, until you get to the last page and return to earth. Where you just might find yourself sitting and sobbing for a good hour or so, be warned.

When I read At Swim, Two Boys eight years ago, I was so enthused that I dug around and located the author's email address, then sent him a gushing fan letter. He was incredibly gracious in reply, writing a substantive, thoughtful and encouraging response. The next month he came to this country on book tour and I went to a reading where he signed my copy and we shared a brief but heartfelt conversation. I've held on to my feelings for his book and him ever since, along with a fantasy about asking him for a blurb if I ever manage to get my own novel published. Most of all, though, I cling to this brilliant, beautiful novel as a evidence of what literature can and ought to do.

For the valiant liberation soldiers who "bore their fight that the freedom's light might shine through the foggy dew," here is a tribute from the Wolfe Tones.

Rejection season

It's that time of year again. Yesterday's mail brought a rejection letter from the MacDowell Colony. Today's or tomorrow's will most likely feature another of the same, this one from Yaddo. Then I can look forward to a No from the New York Foundation for the Arts, due to arrive in early April.

These were my three attempts to cadge the means for the optimal writing situation during my vacation days this coming summer. The optimal writing situation being two or three weeks in some quiet, pretty place outside the city. I've been dreaming of a sojourn at one of the arts colonies. Courtesy of rich donors, the colony houses and feeds you and provides everything you need to forget about everything you deal with during your regular workaday life so your mind can just sort of waft off into the ether and the words emerge. There's nature! Birds, trees! A swimming pool, even, at Yaddo!

I've been to three previous residencies and at each I became practically a different writer: enormously, uncharacteristically productive. I wrote a big chunk of my first novel at the first. At the second I completed the final rewrite. And at the third, two summers ago, I began my second novel, writing 65 pages of what I first thought was dreck and have since discovered is a pretty decent start to the story. None of these stays was at a place nearly as fancy-shmancy as Yaddo or MacDowell. I knew I'd have scant chance at the big time, but I decided to try this time around. I knew right, it seems.

As for NYFA, that's simply a piece of cash. I've applied many times before and I know, as with the arts colonies, that there's little likelihood of hitting the jackpot. If I did, though, I'd use some of it to create my own little writer's retreat. A cabin on Lake George is what I fantasize, just Teresa and me. In the morning I write while she reads or cooks or putters about, in the afternoon and evenings we vacate ...

Well. Anyway.

As it happens, I've recently sent out a new batch of submissions to literary journals so there's another bunch of rejection letters I can look forward to. I have mixed feelings about most of them (the journals, not my submissions ... well, okay, my submissions too). They are none of them the journal of my dreams, they are all of them pretty mainstream, they none of them partake of the class struggle, literary division. But they're what there is. They're where my stories might get read, should anyone accept any, and I have a humbly stubborn little feeling that a secretary's stories deserve to be read.

Does that sound pathetic? Nah, it shouldn't. For here I sit in my urban aerie and as I finish eating lunch and turn back to the work of entering data, filing the records, scheduling classes, helping students with their endless registration difficulties, I'm also watching out the window mesmerized by the buds on the tips of the winter-stripped tree branches as they begin to fuzz out into something like spring. It's that season too, or nearly. Rejection I can take, especially while I watch this promise peeking forth.

Rainy weekend roaming

The Lambda Literary Foundation has revamped its website. Gorgeous! And full of interesting stuff. If you noodle around long enough you might even come across my smiling face, in a photo with Dorothy Allison and others at Lambda's first LGBT writers' retreat several summers ago.

The Rainbow Book Fair is a couple weekends away, at CUNY's Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. I should make myself go.

Amusing, via the Guardian: what it's like to spend a week without reading.

Yes, I'm a bit out of sorts three days into these howling rains. But I don't think that's why I found Jennifer Schuessler's piece "Take This Job and Write It" in today's New York Times Book Review tedious. Jeez, do they have a cycle on which they pull these tired, smarmily anti-working-class homilies out of the bin for yet another airing? It's as if there's a checklist to work through.

1. Claim that few to no writers are actual workers: check
   
2. Make fun of "proletarian novel" of the 1930s: check
3. Dismiss all possible literary worth of working-class fiction: check
   
4. Aver magical disappearance of production work (somehow, even though things keep being produced): check
5. Assert that all labor has shifted to offices: check; and yet
6. Dismiss office work as not real labor: check; but just to be sure
7. Comment only on books "about work" that are actually only about management and administrative staffers in offices, not the vast majority of office employees who are wage workers doing data entry, clerical work, etc.: check
8. Just in case you haven't made your case, come right out and announce that fiction that is about work is incapable of qualifying as literature: check
   
9. Conclude with fatuous bourgeois-idological tautology about work and writing and writing about work: check

There's one more point that is never made explicit and it's an odd elision. This is that more and more, the fiction that gets published is written by people whose paid labor consists of teaching writing. MFA recipients teaching MFA students. What this means for the books we get is worth considering. If your whole life consists of writing, teaching about writing, and reading, if your work life is in this way so nearly unified with your creative life, surely this has a major effect on your creative output. If we got the chance to read more fiction by people who make their living in other ways, by wage workers above all--people who clean bedpans in nursing homes, who teach first graders, who drive buses or pick lettuce or, yes, type and file and enter data as so many of us do in this era of low-wage capitalism--what might that literature consist of? Ah, if only we had the chance to find out.

The Lacuna

I find it a peculiar challenge to sort out my reactions to The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, which I finished reading yesterday. Peculiar because usually I come out of a reading experience with a fairly clearcut opinion. Not always, but most of the time. Hence the need this time to sort. This is yet another occasion, though, when my lack of training or education in literary matters makes me feel a bit challenged. So please bear with me as I harumph about and try to figure out why I felt the way I did.

Which is lukewarm. I didn't dislike this novel, although I do have some specific criticisms, which I'll get to presently. But I think that if this novel had been something more than it managed to be, the things I didn't like about it would have receded into the background. The book could have risen above its weaknesses and won me over. I understood for certain that it had not--not won me over, not taken me over the way I want a book to do--when I found myself, not 10 minutes after finishing The Lacuna, opening another novel and reading the blurbs and thinking ooh this looks good. Yeah, I know, famous last words, but that's not the point. The point is why was I able to immediately break the spell of the Kingsolver book and move on to the next? The reason, alas, is that there was no spell to break.

I've read most of Barbara Kingsolver's novels. I think the only one I haven't read is her last before this one, something about straight people having sex, icky icky icky, I just didn't feel like taking that trip. But in general I think she's a fine writer. She is certainly that rare creature in the world of mainstream U.S. arts and letters, an artist who tackles explicitly political topics. She deserves credit for that. Truth be told, though, I've never loved a book of hers. I've never felt transformed, transported. And so it is once again, this time with The Lacuna.

I don't think it's a question of style or structure. She has a lovely way with a sentence and the story flows smoothly for the most part. The problem, I think, is a lack of passion. A remove where what's wanted is a plunging in.

The story is told mostly in the first person, primarily via the journals and letters of the narrator and main character, Harrison Shepherd, born in 1915 in Virginia to a U.S. father and Mexican mother. Brought by his mother to Mexico as a child, he lives there except for a brief spell of boarding school in D.C., until he's a young man, when, in his 20s, he returns to the U.S. Here's the thing: this character is a cipher. There's very little life to him. He is all about observing and recording.

For a big chunk of the book--its middle section, its core, its heart--the story comes to life. Because what he's observing and recording, what he is in effect reporting to us, is the story of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, their households, their lives, work, art, politics. And for the best chunk of that, the heart of the heart of the book, our observer/recorder/reporter is there in the house in Mexico City during the time Leon Trotsky lives there in exile. In fact, Harrison becomes Trotsky's secretary. In fact, he's there when Trotsky is assassinated.

All of this is fascinating. And lovingly told. But it did not draw me in to the ostensible protagonist's orbit. He remains a device for the telling of the real story, which is about Kahlo and Rivera and Trotsky. This might not matter if that were all there were to the novel. But there is a considerable number of pages to get through before we enter this middle section, and again a fair piece of story, an important piece of story in fact, afterward in the last third of the book, especially the final pages when Harrison becomes a target of the McCarthyite witch hunt--and so it does matter that this character never comes fully alive, remains more or less a cipher, a device through which Kingsolver tells a larger story. That larger story is vitally important. I found it frustrating that I never cared very much about the character who's supposed to be living it, because he never came much to life.

I think this is because the character, as drawn, has no convictions of his own. He lives with some of the most important, vital persons of 20th century politics and arts; he gets caught up in the swirl of the signal issue of the 20th century, the class struggle as played out in the anti-communist frenzy of the McCarthy years--good heavens, what drama, what wonderfully meaty stuff Kingsolver holds in her hands here--and yet, steadfast, almost stubborn, throughout the book's 500-some pages he continues to merely observe, record, report. There's some awkward authorial effort to sort of explain this toward the end, to sort of tease out the mysteries of his personality, his reticence and so on, but it's too little too late, and in any case unconvincing, in my view. He's gay, that is made clear, but it is also kept nearly entirely off the page, with only the briefest, shyest, most glancing references; this annoyed and very nearly offended me, I mean, come on, author of a previous novel that focused on heterosex, don't give me some nonsense about the times, I know something about the times because of the research I did for my own novel, I just don't buy the near total skittishness, it feels like the author's rather than the character's, it feels inauthentic and unimaginative.

But the main fault I find with the main character's failure to engage, even more than this bizarre coyness regarding his gayness, is his remove from the grand political passions that are after all the real focus of the book. Kingsolver, via Harrison in his journals and so on, paints affectionate portraits of Trotsky and Kahlo in particular. It's a bit much to believe that he works closely with these two larger-than-life but real-life human beings whose lives were all about their beliefs political and artistic, that he cares for them deeply, that he takes dictation from and types articles and letters for Trotsky, for heaven's sake--and through it all, somehow, fails to be swept up himself in all this whirling vortex of ideas, of thought, belief, conviction.

What's going on here? Actually, I think it's more complex than Kingsolver's failure to imbue her protagonist with passion or conviction of his own. In a way, I think, she had no choice but to draw him this way, because otherwise her portrayal of Trotsky wouldn't work. Her portrayal of Trotsky as a human being is delightful; he comes to life on the page in much the way I've always imagined him. Her portrayal of Trotsky the revolutionary, however, is deeply erroneous. The Trotsky of Kingsolver's imagination is more or less a social democrat. He is more or less in the camp of opposition to the Soviet Union as it existed in the Stalin years. This is Trotsky denatured, declawed, Trotsky Lite for left-liberal consumption. In fact Leon Trotsky was a roaring lion, leader of the Red Army, theorist of the permanent revolution, scourge of petty-bourgeois liberalism--and, most important, defender and supporter of the Soviet Union to the day he died. Trotsky never wrote off the USSR, never turned against it, never joined in the crude caricaturing of it as having gone down in some kind of "Stalinist counter-revolution." Yes, he struggled to the day he died to right (left) the course of events. But no--no--no--he never took the side of imperialism against the revolution.

In effect Kingsolver gives the impression that he did. She sucks the revolution right out of him. Imagine that! He comes off instead as a crinkly-eyed kindly old man of the sort who might be comfortable with the Moveon.org brand of liberal activism. Oy vey. From her de-Trotskying of Trotsky, then, it's a short, straight! and necessary line to a passionless, opinionless, nearly disembodied protagonist.

Well, it looks like I have in fact settled on an opinion as I talked myself through this. There is a hole in this novel. A frustrating blank where I'd wish to have found a raging roaring blaze.

This then, for me, is the lacuna.

On this International Women's Day

One thing I'm not doing on this day of solidarity with women of the working class and oppressed nations worldwide is to celebrate last night's Oscar wins for "The Hurt Locker," and especially not the fact that for the first time a woman won the directing award. Both director Kathryn Bigelow and the writer, who also won, used their acceptance speeches to hail and thank "our troops" around the world. How vile is that--and how much clearer could they have made it that for all its hype as merely about the horrors of war, this movie is one thousand percent on the side of the imperialist invaders and occupiers? Disgusting. All the more so as the Oscars come just two weeks before the seventh anniversary of the start of the Iraq war and coincide with the horrific criminal U.S. military offensive in Afghanistan. No, Ms. Bigelow, you're no sister of mine, lining up with U.S. imperialism's endless war, calling it art and making a tidy profit off it to boot.

Let's cleanse our palates to get rid of the nasty aftertaste from Oscar's war fest. How? By way of some books related to the origin of International Women's Day.

The German communist Clara Zetkin was the originator of IWD. Check out this book of her Selected Writings, in an edition that I grabbed from my shelves this morning, from 1984, with a foreword by Angela Davis.

Believe it or not, it was a struggle by women workers in the United States that prompted Zetkin and her comrades to propose this holiday: the magnificent 1909 strike of immigrant garment workers in New York City, known as the "uprising of the 20,000." There have been several novels that incorporate the 1909 shirtwaist strike, but I recommend the first novel directly based on it, published just a year later, in 1910. I pulled this one from my shelves this morning too: The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker by Theresa S. Malkiel.

Here's a shot of one of the leaders of that strike, a hero of mine, Clara Lemlich. During a mass meeting at Cooper Union that had gone on too long and was too dominated by male union officials, she famously strode up to the stage and, in Yiddish, shouted, "Enough talk! It's time to walk! Strike! Strike! Strike!" (or words to that effect) and thus the great battle began. By the way, if you want to see a pretty good reproduction of that historic moment, check out the 1996 movie "I'm Not Rappaport" with Ossie Davis and Walter Matthau. It opens with this scene.

I'll also take the occasion of this IWD to recommend again The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman by Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai, a member of the original revolutionary council, later the USSR's first female foreign ambassador, and author of the classic essay "The New Woman."

In the spirit of Zetkin, of Lemlich, of Kollontai, here is a 1930 Soviet poster, "Long Live International Women's Day." Interestingly, it is attributed to three artists collectively known as Brigade KGK3: Victor Koretsky, Vera Gitsevich, and Boris Knoblok.

100 years of women's resistance

Coming up, in NYC:

Thank-heavens-winter's-end-is-in-sight links

Tomorrow, March 4, is the National Day of Actions to Defend Education. Mobilizations should draw lots of students especially in California, where the battle to defend the state university system has been going on for several months, and New York City, where CUNY students are fighting to save working-class students' access to higher education. On both coasts and in many places in between, there will also be events demanding an end to the attacks on the public education system, on public-school funding, on teachers and teachers' unions, and on the essential right to a free, equal public education for all. Which has never existed in reality in this country, but now is under open assault from Washington on down.

With Women's History Month under way, check out this feature on Mujeres de Maiz, the Corn Women of East Los Angeles, at La Bloga.

Later this month at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn: the National Black Writers' Conference has an "amazing line-up" according to Tayari Jones, who is herself on the program.

An interesting review of Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, in the Monthly Review. Sadly, I've tried several times to read the work of China Mieville, who is one of the book's editors and one of today's hot SF writers, but have yet to be able to get very far into any of his novels, finding them uninteresting, boring. Which is what almost always happens to me with SF, though I will keep trying.

One more arena for my old-fartness: for the young and cool, appparently, blogs are passé.

The New York Times chief book reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, likes Lionel Shriver's new novel So Much for That because it's not didactic! and it shows the problems of the health-care system for "regular middle-class families"!!! Oh goody. Because a novel that forthrightly addressed the issue and, ye gods, how it affects the vast majority, the working class and oppressed, those who don't qualify, apparently, as "regular," well gee who would want to read a novel like that?

Chile

I'm happy to have come across, via Fuck Yeah Marxism-Leninism, this statement from the MIR of Chile, which is "completely in agreement with the necessity, legitimacy and justice that the people open the doors of the supermarkets and distribution centers to get their necessities." Not only are we in this country being subjected to a 24-7 propaganda war against the Chilean masses and their right to try to survive in the wake of Saturday's horrible earthquake, we're even being assured that to the extent that the damage and death toll in Chile don't seem to be as bad as in Haiti, it's thanks to the wonders of the Pinochet fascist years. No kidding, that's the Wall Street Journal's line. In contrast, the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left) tells the truth: "To expropriate the exploiters is a people's right."

To the comrades of the MIR, still standing, stalwart and strong 36 years after the U.S.-backed coup that murdered President Salvador Allende, killed tens of thousands of workers and activists, and was meant, but failed, to crush the workers' movement of Chile: thank you! My heart is with the Chilean people as it is with the people of Haiti.

And to MIR General Secretary Monica Quilodran (left), greetings and solidarity as we head toward International Women's Day, established 100 years ago, in 1910, by the Socialist International at the initiation of the German communist Clara Zetkin.

Black History Month: Fanon

By coincidence as Black History Month drew to a close I finished reading Fanon by John Edgar Wideman. This is a miracle of a book. My critical capacities fall far short of what would be required to give this book its due, in a blog posting, an essay, hell, another entire book which is what it might take to approach it from every necessary angle and convey an adequate sense of its depth. With that apology up front, then, these few words will have to do, and the first of them is simply to urge you to read this vital book by this masterful writer.

Don't approach Fanon expecting a biographical or historical novel about the great revolutionary, theoretician, writer and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. What Wideman is up to here is much more complex than that; of course it is, for, as anyone who has read any of his stories or other novels knows, his is never a linear approach. By which I don't mean that here he ignores Fanon or treats him with anything less than his due--in fact on one level, one strand of the book is a sort of love letter to Fanon, a heartfelt call to the world to remember and pay tribute to this hero of the anti-colonial struggle, to all he did and tried to do and sacrificed--but that Fanon takes on even more. The book takes on, really, nothing less than the state of the world these nearly 50 years afer Fanon died of leukemia in a U.S. hospital. The state, especially, of the African American nation. These are pages shot through with pain and anger, with harsh truths, with bitter hopelessness and yet also tender love and even an iota of hope.

There aren't many pages. It's a slim book. Yet it took me a good two weeks to read where other books of this length have taken me a day or two. The reason is that it is extremely dense--I mean this in a good way--each word, each sentence, each paragraph and page packed with meaning, with literary, historical and political allusion, with often dazzling wordplay, so that the reader must pay very close attention. You can't rush through sentences like these.

There are many many riffs on all sorts of things that you wouldn't think are connected but that in Wideman's hands somehow come clear as all parts of the whole, the whole being this wretched racist society and culture. And there are passages that are straight from Wideman's own life, about his brother who is serving a 28-year prison sentence, his elderly and wheelchair-bound mother, his own often despairing quest to make meaning of it all as a writer. Yes, this, or much of it, is meta-fiction. I had to look that up to make sure I'd gotten the term right, and I think I have: Wideman breaks with and/or brings front and center to expose the conventions of fiction writing, for instance bringing himself, the author, in as a character.

These sorts of devices are usually not my cup of tea. Not because there's anything inherently wrong with them, but because in practice they're usually bound up in novels of utter irrelevance. Fanon is the exception. This book is all about the ills of this society. It is, unless I very badly misread it, a cri de coeur, a cry from the author's heart, to fix things before it's too late. It is an offering, a clear-eyed vision of the wreckage from a writer who is unable to look away and dares us to join him in confronting reality. This book wants, as Wideman writes in nearly so many words on one of the final pages, to save a life.

A couple weeks back I posted some thoughts and questions about left literature. What it ought to consist of, what it ought to aspire to, whether it can or ever does have any actual concrete effect in terms of the class struggle. I do intend to return to that subject as soon as I can for continued general consideration, but here now is a specific book to wonder at from the perspective of these questions. Wideman's Fanon raises provocative problems. If because of its stylistic approach a book might be difficult for many people to read, is it still useful or relevant? If a book is honest and angry but is hardly oriented toward struggle, is it still a contribution to the struggle? It's hardly my place to offer any firm answers in the case of this book but I can offer my strong suggestion that you read it, because I do feel on firm ground in saying that it is the work of a literary master. It gripped me. Shook me. Made me grateful to spend a couple weeks in the presence of a deep and brilliant mind.

It also made me want to go back and read more of Fanon's own work. I read The Wretched of the Earth many years ago, in high school or college. It's time to revisit it.

I just ate blueberries ...

... and my tongue is dyed a deep purple. You're welcome.

Also I'm writing, a new story that came upon me as I woke up this morning as well as revisions on another that's almost done. Also lots of household chores this weekend, laundry, groceries, etc., and oh god the tax returns, so the comandante can be out in the world doing the important work of organizing the fight to fix it. All this is by way of saying don't expect much blog action, possibly for several days.

For art that soars AND serves the revolution

The following excerpts from The Liberation of American Literature by V.F. Calverton, originally published in 1932, have now been presented as the opening to the new anthology Liberation Lit just published by Mainstay Press.

Revolutionary art has to be good art first before it can have deep meaning, just as apples in a revolutionary country as well as in a reactionary country have to be good apples before they can be eaten with enjoyment.

Most of the literature of the world has been propagandistic in one way or another. ... In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape.

That the attempt to be above the battle is evidence of a defense mechanism can scarcely be doubted. Only those who belong to the ruling class, in other words, only those who had already won the battle and acquired the spoils, could afford to be above the battle. Fiction which was propagandistic, that is, fiction which continued to participate in the battle, it naturally cultivated a distaste for, and eschewed. Fiction which was above the battle, that is fiction which concerned only the so-called absolutes and eternals, with the ultimate emotions and the perennial tragedies, but which offered no solutions, no panaceas--it was such fiction that won its adoration.

... Except in the United States, revolutionary critics have often been harder task masters from the point of literary quality than aesthetic critics
... .

The revolutionary critic should demand as much of the art he endorses as the reactionary ... [great revolutionary] films are great not because they are [only progressive in ideology] but because they are great first in their formal organization, and then greater still because of the social purpose which they serve.

The revolutionary ... critic does not aim to underestimate literary craftsmanship. What he contends is simply that literary craftsmanship is not enough. The craftsmanship must be utilized to create objects of revolutionary meaning. Only through this synthesis does the revolutionary critic believe that art can serve its most important purpose today. Revolutionary meanings without literary craftsmanship constitute as hopeless a combination from the point of view of the radical critic as literary craftsmanship without revolutionary purpose. ... Most of the literature of the world has been propagandistic in one way or another, including even that of William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. ...

This much should be clear, however, and that is that [revolutionary] writers are not to be confused with literary rebels. Literary rebels believe in revolt in literature; left-wing ... writers believe in revolt in life ... [and] are more interested in social revolt than in literary revolt.

Unlike Ibsen, [revolutionary writers] do not ask questions and then refuse to answer them. Unlike the iconoclasts, they are not content to tear down the idols and stop there. Their aim is to answer questions as well as ask them, and to provide a new order to replace the old one. Their attitude, therefore, is a positive instead of a negative one.

I love this! (Except the male generic, but what are you going to do, have to bear it in a piece from that era.) I love the assertion that revolutionary art must be good art, and the assertion that it must be art that serves a purpose, both combining, by my read, to create the obvious conclusion that fine art that serves the cause of the class struggle is both possible and necessary. I also love Calverton's digs at the ruling class and its passion for fiction that purports to be above the fray.

Finally, I'm quite taken with the distinction he makes between literary and social revolt. It resonates with me since more and more I find myself alienated from not only the petty-bourgeois hipster establishment's latest literary idols whose work I find barren and irrelevant, the most recent and obvious example being Bolaño, but also from the self-styled radical literati's focus on supposed innovation in form. They posture as if stylistic experimentation automatically equates to or is even necessarily allied with a revolutionary social orientation, as if supposedly radical departures from artistic norms aren't equally as tied to the status quo as the most stunted, stifling, tired old crap--unless they aren't, that is, unless they explicitly and purposely and serve-the-people aren't. Literary revolt can and sadly often is petty bourgeois to the max. Same soda, new bottle. Which is not, of course, me taking a stand against innovation. But let it be in the service of the masses, let it be for social change as the highest good. I think that's what Calverton's saying at the end there, and I'm with him all the way.

Black History Month: Langston Hughes & Stalingrad

Langston Hughes' poem "Good Morning Stalingrad" was published in his 1943 collection Jim Crow's Last Stand. Along with being Black History Month, February is also the month when, in that year of 1943, the Soviet people defeated the Nazis after a months-long battle and siege and at unbelievable sacrifice. The victory at Stalingrad was the beginning of the end for the fascist forces. Hughes' poem reminds us how workers and oppressed people worldwide hailed the Soviet Union for this heroic feat. Here's the poem.

Good Morning Stalingrad

Goodmorning, Stalingrad!
Lots of folks who don't like you
Had give you up for dead.
But you ain't dead!

Goodmorning, Stalingrad!
Where I live down in Dixie
Things is bad -
But they're not so bad
I still can't say
Goodmorning Stalingrad!
And I'm not so dumb
I still don't know
That as long as your red star
Lights the sky,
We won't die.

Goodmorning Stalingrad!
You're half a world away or more
But when your guns roar,
They roar for me -
And for everybody
Who want to be free.

Goodmorning Stalingrad!
Some folks try to tell me down this way
That you're our ally just for today.
That may be so - for those who want it so.
But as for me - you're my ally
Until we all free.

Goodmorning Stalingrad!
When crooks and klansmen
Lift their heads and things is bad,
I can look way across the sea
And see where simple working folks like me
Lift their heads, too, with gun in hand
To drive the fascists from the land.
You've stood between us well,
Stalingrad!
The folks who hate you'd
Done give you up for dead -
They were glad.
But you ain't dead!

And you won't be
As long as I am you
And you are me -
For you have allies everywhere,
All over the world, who care.
And they
Are with you more
Than just today.

Listen! I don't own no radio -
Can't send no messages through the air.
But I reckon you can hear me,
Anyhow, away off there.
And I know you know
I mean it when I say
(Maybe in a whisper
To keep the Klan away)
Goodmorning, Stalingrad!
I'm glad
You ain't dead!

GOODMORNING, STALINGRAD!

Lucille Clifton

Poet Lucille Clifton died yesterday. She meant a lot to a lot of people, including me. Her poetry was full of depth of feeling, and raw, real words, and it engaged the raw, real world. It was accessible in the best sense of the word--it meant something, something you could wrap your head around. It's awful news that she's gone, and so young, only 73. Here is one of my favorites.

i am accused of tending to the past

i am accused of tending to the past
as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother's itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning languages everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.

Alternate history

A week or so ago I read Fire on the Mountain, Terry Bisson's thrilling alternate-history novel that answers the question: "What if John Brown had won at Harper's Ferry?" This book by the leftist speculative fiction writer Bisson was first published in 1988. PM Press issued it in a new edition last fall to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the raid on Harper's Ferry.

It's short -- all too short, more of a novella that sketches the outlines of the story than a fully formed exploration -- and thus it's tantalizing and at the same time a bit frustrating. On the other hand, there's something to be said for this approach. Basically it opens the reader's mind, leads her onto an imaginative pathway that is only partially lit, then leaves her to keep dreaming about the might-have-beens. Not only dreaming, though, for while it's true that there is there is an inescapably bittersweet quality to this exercise, Fire on the Mountain also functions, or at least it did for me, as a boost, a tonic, a balm. Ultimately, the reader is left not only to mourn what might have been but never was, she is turned not only backward in sadness--but the reader is reinvigorated to fight for what must be, she is turned forward toward a future of necessary struggle, certain of victories to come.

The introduction to the new PM Press edition is by Mumia Abu-Jamal, who informs us in the first line, "I am, by any measure, a sci-fi head." Who knew? Furthermore, writes Mumia:

I admit to more than being a sci-fihead. I'm hopelessly sentimental, so much so that to read Fire today wrings tears from me, not just at the sheer beauty of his prose, his fertile turn of phrase, but above all for his vision, one born in a revolutionary, and profoundly humanistic, consciousness. ... This is a splendid work of imagination, guaranteed to make your spine tingle.

It did just that for me.

Slavery was a mere moment ago in U.S. history. In a very real sense, in tangible, measurable ways, its effects are present in every aspect of the here and now. Conversely, then, it makes sense that if some key moments had turned out differently -- as here with Bisson's conceit of speculating about the effects of a victory for Tubman (for in his version she is not ill, does not miss the raid, which makes all the difference) and Brown -- everything that followed would be different too. Some of the most exhilarating moments in the book arrive when the reader comes up against some passage that depicts some of these stark differences. And not only in this country (two countries in the book). The whole world is different. Which makes perfect sense.

And reminds us that the whole world can -- and must, and will -- be different. That action, mass action by the workers and oppressed, can -- and must, and will -- change everything. It is in providing such a reminder, I think, that Bisson's book finds its highest worth.

Tomorrow in Philly for Mumia

Tomorrow afternoon --Saturday, Feb. 13, from noon to 5 p.m. -- at the Abiding Truth Ministries Church in Philadelphia, supporters of death-row political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal will gather for a teach-in to take up the challenge of how to step up the campaign to save this precious brother's life. Philly is an easy car, bus or train ride from pretty much anywhere in the entire mid-Atlantic region and the NYC area. The task, in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision that could quickly result in the reinstatement of the death penalty and even the setting of a new execution date, is urgent.

More information here. And for any who haven't read it, do check out Mumia's book Live From Death Row, with an introduction by novelist John Edgar Wideman.

Where is the 'great Irish novel' of today?

Where, he asked, are the books dealing with the Irish experience over the last decade and a half? ... "You can't save the world with a novel, but it can put a tiny featherweight on the scales."

In the Feb. 11 Guardian, Irish writer Julian Gough slams current Irish fiction for social-political irrelevance. This caught my eye, especially given what I've been thinking about as outlined in yesterday's post.

Once more unto the breach

I've fulminated often enough here about the U.S. literary establishment's nonsensical dogma that true art can't be political. Anyone who believes that this cant itself is anything but pure politics, in ideological service to reaction, is naive to one extent or another. I don't mean that as an insult or taunt, because this particular type of naivety is practically bred into us as readers and writers brought up and schooled in this country, pounded in most of all to those who write, who study or want to study writing, so that it's very hard to shed it. And who wants to shed it? Who knows enough to even question it? Unless she's already oriented toward or searching for a political approach to art, or, even more radically, an artistic approach to political struggle.

I've been thinking about all this again, and about some specific questions the whole topic raises, because of some stuff I've read here and there lately. For one thing, I've been slowly making my way through the long, fascinating essay "Fiction Gutted" by Tony Christini in the new anthology Liberation Lit. This piece is, on one level, a carefully constructed response to the recent book How Fiction Works by critic James Wood. But it's much more than a polemic against Wood, it seems to me. In "Fiction Gutted," Christini tackles the whole edifice of establishment literary rules, standards, mores, idols, enemies, and exposes it for what it is: a supremely political structure resting on a reactionary, anti-struggle foundation. And this isn't merely one leftist's interpretation. There's ample evidence, for example, of how the ruling class, the government and especially the CIA intervened with all their might to effect the massive shift that changed the entire artistic scene in this country from what it was in the 1930s (pro-labor, pro-socialist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, with many of the great artists of the time directly involved in and devoting their creativity to the great struggles of the day, including organizing their own unions) to what it became in the 1950s and under intense covert and overt pressure has remained to this day (pro-status quo, utterly captivated by bourgeois consciousness, thoroughly imbued with anti-communism).

I expect I'll return to "Fiction Gutted" with more comments, and excerpts from it too, in coming posts, because it's such a sharp retort to Wood et al. But there's a flip side that I want to at least start addressing. Because though the upholders of bourgeois artistic norms hold the reins of culture, there are others, on our side, who wish that another kind of art could break through. Art that explicitly sides with the workers and oppressed. Literature that speaks of, speaks to the great struggles. It's my understanding that FG's author and Liberation Lit editor Christini, for one, thinks that left writers should be writing fiction that is set in the here and now—about the war in Iraq and the fight to stop it, for instance, or about joblessness or people losing their homes or mountaintop removal or any of the other evils of this society that ought to be brought front and center to people's consciousness, all the wrongs against which we should be organizing. Other progressive writers and bloggers have been asking why there is so little if any fiction of that sort being published in this country, whether the only politically engaged fiction that stands a chance of publication is stories that take place in either another time or another country and therefore seem somehow safe to the powers that be in this country. Others ask whether any fiction, earnestly politically oriented or not, can ever have anything to do with the actual material struggles, can ever have any actual effect, move anyone to take action, effect any measurable shift in consciousness.

Must fiction locate itself in the here and now to be of use in the struggles of the here and now? Is there any contribution that historical or, say, speculative fiction can make? Can fiction that does engage with today's struggles find a way to publication? If so, can such books make any difference? Has any novel ever actually mattered in the real world of the class struggle, and can any novel matter for our struggles today—that is, can a novelist intervene, make a contribution, fight the good fight, via fiction?

Also, are there signs of any openings? Any cracks in the wall of reaction through which we might shove some politically conscious work?

These are questions I'm mulling. I hope to do some of the mulling here at Read Red soon.

Black History links

From Abayomi Azikiwe: "Carter G. Woodson & African-American History Month."

From Clara West: "Claudia Jones: A Life of Struggle & Exile." The book reviewed if you keep reading is Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile." I very much want to read it to learn more about this amazing woman.

Check out "Twenty-Eight Days Later: A Black History Month Celebration of Children's Literature" at the Brown Bookshelf.

Find more Black History Month book suggestions at The Divining Wand.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the day Nelson Mandela was freed from his long imprisonment by the apartheid state of South Africa. The title of his autobiography: Long Walk to Freedom. Four months later, in June 1990, he came to New York. I was among the throngs who filled Yankee Stadium to hear the great freedom fighter speak. What a memorable evening.

oh good lord

I had to edit yesterday's post -- removed the references in the heading and text to the title of Isabella Rosselini's series on Sundance. Why? Because it seems that men (I believe I can safely assume) in countries around the world spend their time googling the word p---o, and some of them found their way here. Sorry you nasty people, what you seek is not on offer at Read Red. And I'll have to remember never to use that word again.

And yes, my snow day fantasy was indeed but a dream. As I expected, the overlords ordered us in to work today.

Snow Day dreaming

My employer, a huge private university, almost never closes for bad weather. However, in advance of the supposedly big snowstorm heading our way, New York City public schools have already announced a citywide shutdown for tomorrow. Now I can't get out of my head a vision of myself sipping coffee in my PJs tomorrow morning when I'd ordinarily be making my way in to Manhattan from Queens. Most likely reality will find me fighting my way through the whiteout, snarling, coughing, sniffling, cursing. Still, a girl can dream, can't she?

In that dreamy mode, there's this from that font of intellectual inquiry, Marie Claire magazine: reading is a great cure for stress.

What do New York subway riders, a fairly stressed-out group of people, read? Here's a kind of cool site where "a team of publishing nerds" reports on books spotted on the subway. Today it's an interesting mix, from Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying to some kind of dragon-y thing called Eldest.

Speaking of New Yorkers and reading, yesterday I was at an old neighborhood diner and sitting in the booth next to me was the actor Isabella Rossellini. I've confessed here often enough that it should come as no surprise to anyone that I partake fairly fully in various aspects of pop culture, and I find these star sightings that happen frequently here in NYC as much fun as the next shnook. In fact, this one made me wonder how many of this specific sort--sitting next to actors at cheap old restaurants--I've had. I came up with six others that I can remember. Anyway, Rossellini had on a pair of those trendy big black eyeglasses and was reading a book. I got to wondering about her and what she's working on nowadays, especially because she's mostly taken on some pretty quirky projects in recent years, so later I got online to check. Turns out she's into the second season of writing and acting in a series for the Sundance Channel. Each brief episode focuses on some non-mammalian species and its sex and reproductive practices--and Rossellini plays the creature. Delightful! Here she is as an earthworm.

Liberation Lit!

What's Lib Lit? Library, map, lens, scalpel, compost, chisel, textbook, excavation: voices, images, wrestling, contradicting, confirming, the matter of resistant art and practice.

-Adrienne Rich

This is exciting.

Liberation Lit, just published by Mainstay Press, is a big, bold, unique anthology of voices and visuals from around the world, all united by what editors Tony Christini and Andre Vltchek call a "liberatory" stance. It's gorgeous, too, with a cover collage made up mainly of 1930s-era illustrations from the The Masses magazine and posters from the WPA Federal Theater Project.

In defiance of the conventional view, conventional in this country at least, that true art can't be political, here Christini and Vltchek have gathered the work of an impressive roster of writers and artists all of which takes a clear stand on the great issues of the day. (And of days past, with earlier voices, from Victor Hugo to Charlotte Perkins Gilman to W.E.B. DuBois, weighing in.)

Liberation Lit is 800-plus oversized pages, divided into several sections: Liberatory Fiction, Liberatory Fiction Past, Liberatory Visuals, Liberatory Poetry, Liberatory Focus on the U.S. in Iraq, Liberatory Focus on the Prisons, Liberatory Focus on Kenya, Essays Interviews & Blogs, and Liberatory Literary Criticism. There is so much here, enough to occupy the reader for a long time. This is a collection to hold close and delve into slowly and steadily, I think, which is how I intend to approach it, dipping in and out over the weeks and months ahead. I don't know that I'll love every page; I suspect I won't agree with every word; there will probably be work whose inclusion I'll question; I'll wish other work had been included. Which is to say this anthology is not perfect, nor is it the be-all and end-all of politically conscious literature. Fine. So what? Let it be a start--what a grand start it is. Let others take heart, and follow with more. For in a time and place where left political literature is nearly impossible to find, Liberation Lit is a huge--huge!--contribution to the cultural conversation, bringing to it voices that are usually silenced.

Here is writing from and/or about Nigeria, Mexico, Haiti, Ecuador, Japan, Bangladesh, India, East Timor, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, and the United States. Work written in, from, or about war, invasion, occupation, repression, racism, sexism, oppression, prisons, environmental destruction, labor; work about the terrible wreckage of imperialism, the human toll of colonialism, the experience of exploitation; and work about uniting and organizing and fighting back. Work that will make you cry, laugh, and burn to sign up on the side of human liberation.

Here in these pages there are many writers who are not well known in this country. And here as well are better known names, a range gathered together I suspect for the first time, including Adetokunbo Abiola, Eduardo Galeano, Ishimure Michiko, Doreen Baingana, Marge Piercy, Arundhati Roy, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Dahr Jamail, Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lorde, Edward Said. (Full disclosure: I'm in here too. There's no question that I'd be trumpeting this book even if I wasn't part of it, but I sure am glad to be a part of it.)

So shake off any remaining notions about the incompatability of political partisanship and literary accomplishment, and dive in to Liberation Lit with me. Here's the website, on which you can read many of the individual pieces. Here's the Amazon page, where you can buy the book.

I expect that I will return to this book and pipe up with blog posts about it again and again as I work my way through it, for there's much in it that's directly relevant to the focus of Read Red. Thank you to Mainstay Press for this unprecedented contribution to the effort to liberate art from the shackles imposed by the gatekeepers of bourgeois-imperialist culture.

Yesterday, today, tomorrow

Sometimes you don't have to be a card-carrying communist to qualify as a comrade in the struggle. My appreciation of Howard Zinn is up at Workers World.

Today is the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of Vietnam. Earlier this week, CPV General Secretary Nong Duc Manh "affirmed the road to socialism in Vietnam."

Over a hundred years ago, there was another Asian war being carried out by U.S. imperialism, a war that today very few people in this country know about. This was the invasion and breathtakingly murderous occupation of the Philippines. Thank you to comrade Berna of Bayan USA for this link to a Black History tribute to David Fagen, "the most celebrated of a handful of African American soldiers who defected to the Filipino revolutionary army."

Every day in Palestine, the Israeli occupiers brutalize the people. Check out Behind the Lines for a heads-up on the book Breaking the Silence, in which Israeli soldiers tell the truth about the atrocities they've committed.

Mornings in Jenin. That's the title of the newly issued edition of the wonderful novel by Susan Abulhawa previously known as The Scar of David, which I read and blogged about a year ago. Get it! Read it! Long live Palestine!

Soon I'll be back to enthuse about some great new books that I just got into my hot little hands. Hint: check out what I'm reading now down at the bottom right.

Black History Month: Safiya Bukhari & The War Before

This book is just out from the Feminist Press. The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting for Those Left Behind. It is a collection of writings, speeches and other documents of the life of the brave soldier for freedom Safiya Bukhari. From her days in the Black Panther Party to her long imprisonment as a victim of COINTELPRO to her leadership of the movement to free death-row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, this was a life of struggle and this book traces its course. It is edited by former political prisoner Laura Whitehorn; the foreword is by former political prisoner Angela Davis; the afterword is by Mumia; and the preface is by Wanda Jones, Safiya Bukhari's daughter.

I was lucky enough to meet and hear Safiya Bukhari speak several times in the last couple years of her life--she died at 2003 when she was only 53--which she devoted to fighting for Mumia. It was always an occasion of re-energizing and renewal to hear her sharp political take on the case and her strong call for action. She has been missed. Now this book looks to be a fine tribute to her work.

Links, literary and otherwise

Adoptees of color speak out against the rush to "save" the children of Haiti by removing them from their country. Cautions like this – in fact, alarms, outrage, action, worldwide solidarity in defense of the children of Haiti – are more than warranted. Terrible tales are emerging of the already brisk trafficking in Haitian children, whose lives are now valued at $50 each.

Read Andrea Shalal-Esa's take on "the pigeonholing of Arab-American writers" at Behind the Lines.

I just read the review of Louise Erdrich's new novel Shadow Tag in this coming Sunday's New York Times Book Review. The reviewer's repeated return to the question of whether the novel is Erdrich's fictionalizing of her own marriage to Michael Dorris annoyed the hell out of me, but then I got to the information that a key character in the novel is named Louise. Well. Regardless, it sounds like another winner from this fine writer.

"We're being political whether we like it or not." Courttia Newland on Black writers, interviewed in London's Catch A Vibe. (Link via Fledgeling.)

This looks like an important book. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Painful and infuriating, too, as so many important books are. There are echoes here, it seems to me, of the Tuskegee Experiment.

Obama one year later: Saturday in NYC

This Saturday at 4:00 at the Solidarity Center in Manhattan, Larry Holmes will be the main speaker at a Black History Month forum. His topic: "Obama One Year Later--A Critical Assessment from a Marxist Perspective."

If you're in the NYC area and you like many are wondering what now, I'd urge you to check out what Larry has to say. He's a fantastically exciting speaker and an incisive, astute political analyst.

Larry has been an indefatigable fighter in the working-class struggle for some 35 years now. He's also written some important work, including a 1970s pamphlet called "Weber Was Wrong, the Steel Workers Were Right" about the fight to defeat an anti-affirmative-action attack on the union.

Most important, this comrade offers a keen insight that hones in on the class truth and thus shines a light on the way forward.

Hope to see you Saturday.

Against forgiveness

"So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn't forgive the unforgiveable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can't stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That's my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment."

From A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley.

I'd meant to read this 1991 novel for a long time, and I finally just did. Wow. It is superb. I need to think some more about why, and I don't know that I'll be able to articulate my thoughts well enough to post them here, but I do want to say that I found this little speech, which comes right at the end from one of the main characters who's dying, to be very powerful. It refers on the most obvious level to what this character's, and her sister the narrator's, father did to them. But I believe it's meant to have broader resonance as well, and it certainly did for me. I felt such a strong boi-oi-oing effect as I read it, as if it were echoing off mountainsides and canyons and prison walls and factories, in Palestine and Haiti, Detroit and New Orleans, everywhere wrongs are done and the wrongdoers expect the oppressed to let them off the hook.

An update and a correction

This from Tayari Jones on today's anniversary, and what came before.

The novelist's point:

Resistance is always happening. It's just not always on the news.

Among other things that came before was a 1958 Oklahoma City lunch-counter sit-in. Tayari's mother, Barbara Ann Posey Jones, "was among these brave young people."

Also, I apologize for the typo in my earlier posting that for a while there had the Woolworth sit-in happening in 1950.

Black History Month: 50 years ago today

Ezell A. Blair Jr. David Leinhail Richmond. Joseph Alfred McNeil. Franklin Eugene McCain.

On this date in 1960*, these four incredibly courageous young college students sat down at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., and asked to be served. They were African American. The seats were designated for whites only.

The era of sit-ins for civil rights had begun.

By the next morning, these four were joined by 27 more. Within days, hundreds had joined the sit-in.

I will try over the course of this month to post recommendations for books about and by participants in the great civil rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s and onward to this moment when the struggle still very much continues. For today, I simply salute the Woolworth Four, 50 years on.

*I apologize for the typo in the original posting, which had 1960 as 1950.