Great Expectations

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

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

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

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

The Internationale in Arabic

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

As the Arab masses rise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long live Palestine! Victory to the Arab revolution!

Just to show I'm still here

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

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

Mao Zedong on literature and the revolutionary class struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hubert Harrison

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

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

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

Why I did not love Little Bee

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huck & Fagin, Twain & Dickens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading red in 2011

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

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

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

Here's a better, truer image of Latinas

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

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

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

A dirty rotten shame

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

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

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

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

Christmas at the apartheid wall

From Palestine Today

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

Toward a new year of the three Rs

That's reading, writing and revolution.

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

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

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

Oh joy

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

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

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

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

My Year's Best

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

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

Best book
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

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

Poetry
Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith

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

My holiday break book hoarding frenzy has begun

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

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

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

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

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

Here's a mood booster for ye

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

 More lit talk soon. Cheerio!

It was 30 years ago today

So far it's been a crappy New York morning. Not one but two nasty screaming people on the trains. Not one but three trains not running or delayed or otherwise screwed up. Angry impatient crowds crowding each other. Me all the while uptight about running late because there's a new regime at work clocking my arrival to the minute. Just what I need, on top of all my ongoing complaints. I'm tired. I'm not eating right or exercising and as a consequence my body's in awful shape. I'm not getting much writing work done, I'm not doing my part in the struggle very well.

And John is dead.

No, it's not new news. Yes, he's been dead for 30 years today. Yet even after three decades, on this anniversary of the murder of John Lennon, I can still call up the feelings from that night, the awful knowledge that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play nevermore. Two years ago on this same anniversary I wrote about how I heard that night, when I got home from work after the late shift as a city bus driver in Ann Arbor. In that post I also mentioned my story "John and Yoko and Rowena and Me," published in Cream City Review. I wish it were online to link to, because I'm fond of it and would like to share it. While it's of course fictional, it does call up some of the feel of those days. Maybe I'll figure out a way to make it available, says I, as if someone other than me is clamoring for it.

John was no saint. He was at his death rich as Croesus; it's nice to think that if he'd lived he would have shared the wealth, but who knows. He was guilty, by his own admission, of violence against women. His politics were an odd amalgam of anarchism/pacifism/socialism/yippie/performance art. They're easy to dismiss as unserious. On the other hand, he was really committed to his anti-war principles--and did pay a price for that, having to wage a years-long battle against the U.S. government's efforts to deport him. He was working hard at raising his feminist consciousness. He and Yoko brought Bobby Seale onto the Mike Douglas Show, and sang their great song "Attica State" in solidarity with the prisoners who'd risen up and been slaughtered at NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's orders. There's fair cause, then, I think, for this wistful pit-of-the-stomach sadness that lingers 30 years on. It's all the what might have beens. He was a great artist. His music is magnificent, and he did contribute in his way to the struggle for peace and justice. What more might he have done?

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the movie The U.S. vs. John Lennon for a pretty decent introduction to all this. Plus, I like to think that you can hear my 17-year-old voice shouting during the footage from the December 10, 1971 Free John Sinclair concert.

After Tupac and D Foster

I have a new author crush. Jacqueline Woodson. Swoon. Earlier this week I read her Young Adult novel After Tupac and D Foster. I really really loved it. So then I cyberstalked her for a day or so, reading various online interviews with her and pieces by her, and as a result I really really love her. She is an African American lesbian who's committed to creating fiction that speaks to and about young people, especially young people of color, honestly as well as hopefully. Honesty and hope are in my opinion two crucial facets of meaningful, relevant fiction, YA or otherwise. In this, the first work of Woodson's that I've read, both shine through.

It's amazing how much she packs into this novel. It is a lovely, touching story of friendship and a coming-of-age story. At the same time it takes in, takes on many issues, including police racism and brutality and targeting of young Black men and false arrests and the prison system, homophobia and anti-gay violence, community and its many meanings and manifestations, families, the foster care system, and more. Through her exploration of how important Tupac Shakur is to the main characters, the impact of his work, of his life and death, Woodson does an amazing job of evoking the yearning vulnerability of these three girls on the cusp of adolescence. Not to get sappy, but there's a lot of love in these pages, family love, friend love, writerly love for these characters the author brings so glowingly to life. I found myself quite caught up in it all.

From time to time I've noted here that I want to try to read more YA fiction, and I have in fact been doing that over the last few months. To tell the truth, it hadn't gone all that swimmingly until I got to Woodson's book. Several titles I didn't make it through because they just didn't grab me, didn't sustain my interest. Several others I did finish and did like to varying degrees but none stirred me the way I wished. I'd begun to conclude, ridiculously wrongly I now realize, that perhaps I just couldn't find my way into the world of YA lit, probably because I'm, well, not a YA to say the least. I didn't think it was a matter of the fictional focus or topics but I wondered whether it was about pacing, vocabulary, structure. Then I read After Tupac and D Foster, and all that gets swept away and I see that, as with any other genre of literature, it was just a matter of not yet having found the one I was waiting for. Now I'm looking forward to reading more of Woodson's work, and I'm happily reassured that other great YA books also await.

World AIDS Day

Today, as a storm howls and rain and wind lash the last remaining leaves off the trees, I'm thinking about my comrades who died of AIDS.

Bill Haislip. Marshall Yates. Rafael Ramos. William Mena. Albert Ramos. Michael Davidson. Steve Schultz.

And of other friends, and folks I knew and worked with in the early ACT UP years (and was arrested with at the first big Wall Street protest in Spring 1987, and then again at the Supreme Court that October), all of them killed as much by capitalism as by this disease. Keith. David. Mike. Mark. Rob. Many more.

I'm thinking too of friends and comrades now living with AIDS/HIV, some of them for years now, the lucky ones who have medical coverage and all the various types of support it takes to survive. Which necessarily leads to thinking about everyone else, about the ongoing global toll and what kind of struggle it will take to end its ravages.

Of the roughly 33 million people worldwide now living with HIV, some 68 percent are in sub-Saharan Africa. It's no surprise that the region most robbed, exploited, devastated by capitalism, colonialism and the slave trade, and thus left the most impoverished, now bears the brunt of this epidemic. Women and children are hit hardest of all. A recent book edited by Professor Ezekiel Kalipeni—Strong Women, Dangerous Times: Gender and HIV/AIDS in Africa—looks like an important contribution to a socially conscious understanding of this development, as is Kalipeni's earlier book HIV and AIDS in Africa: Beyond Epidemiology.

As to older works about the early years of the AIDS crisis here in the U.S., two I remember reading and can recommend are And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts and Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette. The best recommendation, though, is to keep fighting, for full worldwide funding for research, treatment, care and prevention. And for socialism, a system in which every possible resource will be directed toward all the needs of our billionfold humankind instead of stolen and hoarded by a tiny crew of thieving criminals.

Kugel & books

I had a wonderful time off, visiting with my best friend who came from San Francisco to stay with Teresa and me for a week. We packed in a lot of fun and interesting New York stuff, from the food-oriented (Yonah Shimmel's knishery, Russ & Daughters Appetizing, Essex Street Market, Carnegie Deli, Veselka, De Mole, La Flor, an all-macaroni-and-cheese restaurant, plus home-cooked feasting) to the historic (the Tenement Museum,where I'd never before gone and now will go again as it was considerably better, by which I mean more honest and accurate, than I'd expected), to the cultural (Complexions Contemporary Ballet, an amazing company that we were thrilled to see at the Joyce Theater, and also a silly/fun backstage tour of Radio City Music Hall), to the tried and true like Central Park, the Strand bookstore, the garment district, and lots and lots of walking in Queens and Manhattan.

I read hardly at all while Rosemary was here because we had too damned much to say. Time together is precious since we generally only see each other every few years; although we talk on the phone a lot, and I mean a lot, the in-person experience is a whole other thing. So I didn't finish the book I'd been reading until after she left. And then I started a new one this morning: Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin. Rose and I bought it together last week at the Strand. She read it while she was here, each night at bedtime, which was time enough, for as anyone who's read the Tales of the City series knows, these books are extremely fast reads. Then she left it for me, and now I'm already almost halfway through it. It was kind of perfect for her as one of the series' original followers and for its San Francisco-ness, and now it's kind of perfect for me as a sort of immediate memento of her visit. When I finish I'll pass it along to Teresa.

Rose had brought another book as a present for me, and I hope to get to it soon: Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary by Monica Nolan. How yummy does this look?!

I, a lesbian secretary, hope I like it because I'd love to move on to Nolan's other titles: Bobby Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacher and The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories.

So now it's back to the grind, and I have a grinding week ahead of me. Work, including overtime; an unavoidable dental appointment; some editorial work. Which means I may not have time to get right back into a blogging groove. But I'll try to soon.

28 years later

It's a busy time for me at work, which means I have less brain power than usual outside of work, and I'm in a bad sleep cycle, which means I have less brain power period in addition to being tired and cranky and whining about it as much as possible … therefore sorry, blogiverse, expect no substantive contributions from me for now. Instead, in brief:

Literacy, the brain power thief—I'm always fascinated by new findings about the brain and literacy. We did not evolve to read, which of course is why human beings have to learn this skill anew, not a single baby being born with reading an inbred function. This latest study hones in on which brain structures are used for reading—and which other more natural functions suffer as a result when the brain areas that evolved for those functions are co-opted instead for reading. Of course, it's not quite that simple, but still. I'm not too bad with faces, contrary to what these findings might suggest. I am, however, truly terrible at spatial relations—I flunked geometry in junior high, can't do puzzles for shit, and if there's ever a household task that requires anything to be eyed and moved about or fitted together in any way, I'm hopeless—so unless I'm extrapolating completely wrongly from this article, it seems that my early and ever intensifying involvement in reading might have something to do with this.

Rise like lions after slumber—Earlier this month students in London took some righteous and oh so welcome action against the reactionary British government's moves against social benefits, and to mark the occasion Rust Belt Radical reprinted a 1992 Paul Foot essay on poet Percy Byshe Shelley, commenting that it's "easy to imagine him among the throngs of young people who marched for their future. He might have written a few stanzas on the occupation of Tory headquarters had he witnessed it. Hell, he might have broken a window or two himself." Read the Foot essay.

Freedom's just another word—Check out this fantastic piece by novelist Percival Everett about sexism against women authors. If a woman had written the book Jonathan Franzen just did, it would be considered a domestic family saga and never considered anything close to, you should excuse the expression, the Great American Novel.

Point of personal privilege—Tomorrow my best friend arrives from San Francisco for a weeklong visit, her first to New York in many years. Having tacked some vacation days on to next week's four-day "holiday" weekend so we can spend some good quality time together, I'll be doing just that, starting tomorrow night, for the next week or so. I don't expect to blog at all. When I get back online, I will have passed a landmark of sorts. I'll have now lived in New York for 28 years. I was 28 when I moved here, so I've now lived half my life here and am as much a New Yorker as a Michigander—more, I think, for though I was formed there I've done most of my adult living here. Here's how I moved: the evening after "Thanksgiving," with $20 in my pocket, personal items crammed into a small backpack and a few clothes stuffed into a shopping bag, I boarded and rode a bus filled with Palestinian sisters and brothers, all of us headed overnight from Detroit to Washington for a demonstration the next day; there we marched and got tear-gassed; then I boarded a different bus, this one taking demonstrators from New York back home and me with them to my new home. Maybe I'll write more about all that, but for now I'll just say from this vantage point, 28 years later, that I made the right decision with that move—and that the best decision for any of us next week is, if possible, to march with United American Indians of New England to mark the National Day of Mourning, and if we can't get to Plymouth then at least to take whatever action we can in solidarity with the ongoing struggles of Native nations whose lands were stolen and civilizations decimated by the European invasion the turkey holiday celebrates.

Autumn in the city

A tall building. A road. A car. A tree or three, showing their colors. This is Queens. 

I am deep. And need some sleep, in case it isn't obvious. As bloggish as it gets today.

'All belongs to all!' Against Veterans' Day, with Eduardo Galeano

Last month I happened to finish reading Genesis by Eduardo Galeano just in time for Columbus Day, the celebration of the European invasion of and genocide in the Americas. Now, again by happenstance, I finished reading Faces & Masks—the second book in Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy, a sweeping, literarily gripping history of the Western Hemisphere presented in brief vignettes based on voluminous research—just in time for yesterday's repugnant national adoration of imperialist war known as Veterans' Day. Faces & Masks, like Genesis, is a stunningly written (and beautifully translated, an acknowledgment I too often forget to make but must here for the translator, Cedric Belfrage, is a gifted artist) exegesis of the whole record of the years 1700-1900 and what befell the peoples of the Americas in those two centuries. Unending horrors against the indigenous peoples. Slavery and the slave trade, across oceans and continents. The crimes of the church. The sacking of natural riches. Wars, wars, wars, over territory, resources, trade routes, labor. Wars, above all, that is, over ownership and control of capital and commodities driven by the quest for profit. As with the first volume, much of what Galeano presents is terrible—awful, painful, almost unbearable to face. And much is inspiring—stories of courage, humanity, struggle. All is moving. And all, each brief entry, is so packed with information, ideas and emotion that the reader has to stop and think about and recover from each one before moving on, which is why it takes a full week to read this relatively short book. Or at least that was my experience, now with the first and second volumes of the trilogy.

If Genesis tells the truth of invasion and colonialism, and boy does it ever, and is therefore a great antidote to the lies of Columbus Day, Faces & Masks tells the truth about what came next, the passage into imperialism, leading up to and ending with the bloodbath birth of U.S. imperialism at the turn of the last century, and so it is a great antidote to the lies of Veterans' Day.

Here are some excerpts. This first one struck me because last April tens of thousands of people gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, for the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. I have to admit I'd never heard of Cochabamba before then, but as I read about and watched videos from this event, and then heard about it directly from people who'd gone including my lover Teresa, what stood out most was the leadership of the indigenous women of that region. So when I came across this passage in Galeano's book, it sent a shiver through me; it made me feel as if the echoes of the war cries of the brave martyred women in their last stand against the Spaniard despoilers almost 200 years earlier had reverberated at the April conference.

1812: Cochabamba—Women
From Cochabamba, many men have fled. Not one woman. On the hillside, a great clamor. Cochabamba's plebeian women, at bay, fight from the center of a circle of fire.

Surrounded by five thousand Spaniards, they resist with battered tin guns and a few arquebuses; and they fight to the last yell, whose echoes will resound throughout the long war for independence. Whenever his army weakens, General Manuel Belgrano will shout those words which never fail to restore courage and spark anger. The general will ask his vacillating soldiers: Are the women of Cochabamba present?

One of the recurring themes in Faces & Masks is how European and North American capital impoverished the rich lands of the Americas—not only directly, by expropriating the lands and resources and enslaving millions and super-exploiting the nominally free labor force, but by imposing unfair trade measures that made the market economy anything but free and equal. Today's equivalent is NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which since its imposition in 1994 has devastated the Mexican economy and fueled massive migration of Mexicans to the U.S. forced by the collapse of agriculture and related industries; because of NAFTA, corn imported from the U.S. has driven Mexican-grown corn out of the market and deprived untold numbers of campesinos of their livelihoods. I learned from this book that NAFTA is only the latest expression of a two-century-long pattern of trade wars. Here's an example, and there are many others throughout the book.

1826: Buenos Aires—Rivadavia
On the crest of the River Plata ravines, above the muddy bank of the river, lies the port that usurps the wealth of the whole country. …

From the Thames flows the torrent of merchandise manufactured, to Argentine specifications, in Yorkshire and Lancashire. In Birmingham they imitate to the last detail the traditional copper boiler that heats water for maté, and they produce exact replicas of the wooden stirrups, bolas, and lassos used in this country. Workshops and textile mills in the provinces have scarcely a chance of resisting the assault. A single ship brings twenty thousand pairs of boots at bargain prices and a Liverpool poncho costs five times less than one from Catamarca.

Argentine banknotes are printed in London and the National Bank, with a majority of British shareholders, monopolizes their emission. …

Then there's this. I've written before about the wonderful essay "The Right to Be Lazy" by Paul Lafargue. I knew Lafargue was Karl Marx's son-in-law. I did not know he was Cuban, of African and Native heritage. Check it out:

1869: London—Lafargue
When Paul Lafargue began laying siege to Laura Marx, the founder of scientific socialism was finishing the correction of the first volume of Capital. Karl Marx took a dim view of the Cuban's ardent assaults, and told him to court his green-eyed daughter with quieter English manners. He also asked him for economic guarantees. Ousted from Germany, France, and Belgium, Marx has gone through hard times in London, devoured by debt, sometimes without a penny to buy a newspaper. The miseries of exile have killed three of his children.

But he cannot scare off Lafargue. He always knew he couldn't. Lafargue was very young when he and Marx began to fight and to love each other. And now Marx's first grandson is born of the Cuban mestizo, great-grandson of a Haitian mulatta and an Indian from Jamaica.

Finally, as the book closes at the start of the 20th century, Galeano brings onto the page the brothers Flores Magón—Jesús, Ricardo and Enrique. Actually, we were briefly introduced to them earlier, as children, when their father Teodoro Flores, a Native man whose every breath rebelled against all that the colonial invasion and occupation had done to his land, inculcated them with an egalitarian ethos, making them repeat day and night the principle "all belongs to all." Now they are grown, and actively rebelling, and will soon become leading lights of the Mexican revolution.

1900: Mexico City—The Flores Magón Brothers
…This is the day of Our Lady of the Angels, which in Mexico lasts for a week of balls; and on the margin of the violent joy of people, as if wishing to merit it, a new newspaper is born. It is called Regeneration. It inherits the enthusiasm and debts of The Democrat, closed down by the dictatorship [of Porfirio Diaz]. Jesús, Ricardo, and Enrique Flores Magón write it, publish it, and sell it.

The Flores Magón brothers grow with punishment. Since their father died, they have taken turns between jail, law studies, occasional small jobs, combative journalism, and stones-against-bullets street demonstrations.

All belongs to all, they had been told by their father, the Indian Teodoro Flores, that bony face now up among the stars. A thousand times he had told them: Repeat that!

All belongs to all!

Where I'll be this weekend

Shelve under: crime

There's a move afoot to encourage people to re-shelve George W. Bush's memoir when it hits bookstores tomorrow, November 9. The guy is, above all, a war criminal. He is directly responsible for the murders of over 100,000 people in Iraq and Afghanistan. He can also be fairly held accountable for thousands of deaths in New Orleans after the levees broke, based on his failure to order immediate effective emergency action to save lives. Go down the line--social service cutbacks, school and hospital closings, the destruction of affirmative action, bank bailouts, the foreclosure crisis, union busting, the war on women's reproductive choice and on LGBT rights--and you can tote up how every part of his record led to death and devastation. Of course, to varying extents you can say the same of every U.S. president, Democrat or Republican. But the special animus that so many hold against GWB is well earned, I'd say.

So tomorrow, go ahead and do it. If you can stomach even touching the thing, pick up his book. Saunter about the bookstore. Find yourself in the Crime section. Leave it there.

There's even a Facebook group promoting this mild bit of subversive rebranding. From its statement: "Be part of a literary movement. Literally. They did this to Tony Blair's book and I think we should do the same here. ... Make bookshops think twice about where they categorize our generation's greatest war criminals."

I must add that Bush had already established himself as a serial killer well before he moved into the White House. As governor of Texas he presided over 152 executions. That's more than any other governor in U.S. history. Texas is well known as the headquarters of the racist death penalty in this country, and for its outrageously unjust courts and abysmally inhuman prisons. Bush personifies the worst of this.

Go ahead, put him where he belongs.

93rd anniversary of the Russian Revolution

Sunday, November 7, is the 93rd anniversary of one of the greatest events in all of human history, the coming to power of the Russian Revolution led by V.I. Lenin. (Also known as the Glorious October Revolution, the actual date falls in November on the modern calendar.)  Read Red has been getting more and more visits from people in the countries of the former USSR and the former Soviet bloc--hello Romania! hi there Bulgaria! howdy Kazakhstan! and of course welcome welcome welcome my dear comrades in Russia, ever devoted as you are to overturning the counterrevolution that has led to such devastation in your country, devastation that includes increased infant mortality, lowered life expectancy, high unemployment, and above all a calamitous plunge in the conditions for the female including the horrific rise of the traffic in women and girls. I can't let this occasion pass without noting it and paying tribute to all that the peoples of Eastern Europe and Central Asia accomplished in the 73 years between the triumph of the Revolution and the U.S.-funded, CIA-engineered counterrevolution--all the strides made toward building democratic, equitable societies with decent living standards, and all the heroic sacrifices made in the battle to defeat fascism.

There is a fashion in the U.S. and Europe among those who style themselves as some sort of progressive and/or appropriate the label "socialist." This fashion, which definitely plays out in the literary arts, is to pretend to be for socialism but to reject and denounce anyone anywhere who actually fights for socialism in the living struggle, to tar any socialist movement that actually manages to take state power as faulty and not worthy of support or solidarity. Those who take this stance, and they are legion, the critics of Revolutionary Cuba, for example, the ridiculers of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the opponents of the FARC of Colombia or the PFLP of Palestine, are in my opinion piss-poor sorry shadows of what a revolutionary socialist should be, and they are objectively siding with imperialism. The comrades with whom I feel the closest political affinity take the opposite approach. We support any and every revolutionary socialist movement. We hail and stand in solidarity with any and every communist party in power. This is not because we have stars in our eyes. No movement or government appears to me to be perfect. But we don't place ourselves above the masses of workers and oppressed of any country as if we somehow have the right to be the arbiter of their worthiness or the correctness or incorrectness of their theory or revolutionary practice. We apply no litmus test. If you are fighting the capitalists and imperialists, we are with you, no matter the details of any disagreement we might have. It's as simple as that old coal strikers' song: which side are you on? Me, I'm with the working class and oppressed peoples.

And so it is with the Russian Revolution. Was it perfect? We all know it wasn't. Was it a huge step, a 73-year-long series of huge steps, toward building the kind of society we all want, the kind of society that the whole planet needs if it and we are to survive? It most certainly was.

That's why I'll be there with you in spirit, my sisters and brothers in Moscow who do not give up the fight, on Sunday, the 93rd anniversary of the Revolution, when you gather on Tver Street between Pushkin Square and B. Gnezdnikovsky Lane at 11:30 and march to a rally and concert at Theater Square. (Thanks to Fuck Yeah Marxism-Leninism for this info.) If I find any photos of the demonstration, I'll post them next week. Update: lots of photos, from both now and then, at my comrade Greg's site Fuck Yeah Marxism Leninism.

My solidarity with everyone trying to build socialism is also why I like this video. It's obviously sort of a promotional piece, propaganda on behalf of the DPRK. And that's great! I use the word propaganda here in its best non-pejorative sense, and I use it as someone who has written my fair share of propaganda over the years. It is the use of words and images to convey the message of our side and win over adherents and allies. In the case of North Korea, such pro-DPRK propaganda is badly needed, for in this country we're subjected to an endless barrage of anti-DPRK propaganda. Much of it is it amazingly crude and vapid, like the constant ridicule of Kim Jong-Il's haircut, of all inane things. Much of it is out and out lies, about famine and police state repression and so on--but since the United States maintains an illegal, murderous blockade against the DPRK that makes it almost impossible for U.S. residents to travel there and see the reality for themselves and also blocks any pro-DPRK material from reaching people here, this campaign of smears steamrolls ever forward. (See last week's New Yorker for an unbelievably long article filled with same.) So. Don't dismiss this (especially not the singing, for everyone I know who's been to the DPRK raves about how central singing is to the culture, how everyone sings together all the time and it is the most joyous communal expression of the human spirit)--don't dismiss this as a puff piece. Sure, its purpose is to counter the relentless wave of slander. Good! What's wrong with that? Keep this in mind: It is also a message from the descendants of the great revolutionary generation that, led by Kim Il Sung, rose up against poverty and oppression and nearly took back their country, against which revolution the U.S. invaded and slaughtered millions of Koreans. At the end of that war, the revolution had held on to the north but imperialism occupied the south--and does to this day, to the tune of some 30,000 occupying U.S. troops. Let's welcome, then, this message from the young generation of socialist Korea.

The art of colluding with reaction: Lost City Radio

That book I just read? You know, the one whose author is one of the 20 Under 40 recently celebrated by the New Yorker and whose recognition and success are offered up as proof of how U.S. publishing is becoming less narrow, more inclusive? That book set in Latin America, which is also a credit to the industry, in this case one of the big houses, Harper Collins, that they are finally taking a look at the rest of the world? The one with the beautiful writing and the subtle, complex consideration of the human stories behind the blood-and-conflict-filled news headlines?

I started that book, Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón, last week, and finished it earlier this week. My feelings about it changed from appreciation of fine writing and an openhearted hope about where this read would take me, to disappointment and feelings of betrayal as it took me deeper and deeper into the same muddy old bog. The empty heart of the anti-struggle liberal intelligentsia's favorite dogma: that the left and right are equally bad, their actions equally evil, that they equally harm average individual human beings haplessly caught in the crossfire. Fascism is equated with people's revolution. When the two sides clash, and especially when fascism wins as it does in the unnamed country where this novel is set—this fable whose moral after all is that fascism will always win, that there is no point to the struggle, and that revolutionary leaders are soul-less lovers of violence who care nothing about the masses and their misery—the inevitable result is shattered lives, lost love, loneliness hopelessness ruin wreckage.

As I read on, getting toward the end of the book where this slant became clearer and clearer, I started marking the passages that ticked me off. There are too many to include in this post. Here are two to give a flavor of the whole. This passage is about the young villagers recruited into the guerrilla force:

We'll take the capital, the commanders said, and the boys repeated it to Rey, and he could tell they believed it. Meanwhile, they practiced making bombs in the jungle. None had even the cloudiest sense of what the war was about, and none had ever asked. They were happy to be out of their homes. Once a month, they marched into some town to kill a priest or burn a flag fluttering above a police outpost.

Then there's this, in an internal monologue by one of the main characters, a sympathizer and sometime collaborator with the rebels who was once captured and horribly tortured by the fascist government yet who ultimately is presented as proof of the wrongheadedness and futility of the class struggle:

Consider the improbability of it: that the multiple complaints of a people could somehow coalesce and find expression in an act—in any act—of violence. What does a car bomb say about poverty, or the execution of a rural mayor explain about disenfranchisement? Yet Rey had been a party to this for nine years. The war had become, if it wasn't from the very beginning, an indecipherable text. The country had slipped, fallen into a nightmare, now horrifying, now comic, and in the city, there was only a sense of dismay at the inexplicability of it. Had it begun with a voided election? Or the murder of a popular senator? Who could remember now? They had all been student protesters, had felt the startling power of a mob, shouting as one chorus of voices—but that was years ago, and times had changed. No one still believed all that, did they?

OK, we get it already. Violence is bad. Any and all violence is equally bad and its perpetrators equally evil, or maybe, probably, those fighting the status quo are worse, more to blame, because if they'd just lay down their weapons the fascist state could stop slaughtering people and things might achieve at least a semblance of normalcy. Whooey—that's some slippery slope the author is skidding down. That's liberalism. Ostensibly opposing political reaction while objectively enabling its continuance by siding with the status quo as opposed to actual action in struggle against it. Liberal, too, is the depiction of revolutionary warfare as aimless random terrorism, of its soldiers as clueless ignorant delusional saps, of its activists and partisans as a misled misguided hypnotized mob. There is no place in this model for an honest depiction of guerrilla warfare as something other than crazed meaningless violence, or of the armies that successfully took power after strategically waged revolutionary wars based on profound popular support like those led by Fidel and Che, or Mao, or Ho Chi Minh, or Leon Trotsky; or those like the FMLN in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the New People's Army of the Philippines, the fighters in Guatemala, in Puerto Rico, everywhere people have taken up arms against neocolonial repression. There is certainly and absolutely no acknowledgment of the U.S. role in the mass misery—deep poverty, lack of potable water, decent housing, education, health care—that is engendered by imperialism and upheld by the comprador bourgeoisie in these countries.

Have I said oy yet?

When I started reading Lost City Radio, I thought I was entering a thoughtful fictional treatment of recent history in Argentina and the Dirty War in which tens of thousands were disappeared by the fascists, or perhaps Chile where the Pinochet coup assassinated an elected president and also killed and disappeared tens of thousands, or Peru where the Fujimori government waged war against the Shining Path people's army, or Colombia where the FARC is up against government by death squad—in each case, again, the ever-increasing poverty and ever-worsening overall conditions of life caused by capitalism, by U.S. imperialism in particular—but no. I was entering instead that territory most beloved by literary commentators in this country, in thrall as they all are to bourgeois consciousness. It is called by various names. "Subtle." "Complex." "Humane." "Chaotic." It is a landscape devoid of political consciousness or artistic responsibility to the reality of the raging class struggle, substituting instead a cynical rejection of the possibility of revolutionary change. This default to support for the status quo is couched, swathed, smothered in beautiful writing, in lovely language conveying the pain and suffering of various characters. We are meant to feel these characters' individual pain and suffering as at once more important than the pain and suffering of the vast masses from whose numbers are drawn the ranks of revolutionary warriors, and at the same time as symptomatic, emblematic, of the rank wrongness of the revolutionary project. There is not one sentence's acknowledgment that all this pain and suffering is caused by a particular system and that it takes a struggle for revolutionary change to overturn that system and replace it with one that is just and equitable and might end the pain.

I've written before on this blog about a genre of U.S. fiction I think of as "the madness of the 60s" novels, books that portray the great struggles of that time as crazy and misguided and powered mostly by white middle-class youthful drugged self-centered idiots. I've also complained about that vastly populated category, the counter-revolutionary emigrant's tale, which most often takes the form of a screed against the Chinese or Cuban Revolution. This novel I just read falls in yet another category: the fictionalized polemic against revolutionary struggles in progress. All three types (and they're not the only three in the bourgeoisie's endless artistic arsenal) so starkly give the lie to the "literature shouldn't be political" cant chanted ceaselessly by the literary powers that be in this country that you'd think it'd be put to rest for once and for all. Or at least that they'd admit what they really mean is "literature must not be allied with the workers and oppressed."

I am sorry to say all this. I wanted to like this novel. But because it takes sides against the revolutionary struggles that are currently on the rise in Latin America, I couldn't. Once again, then, we who long for fiction that stands with the workers and oppressed and tells their true stories are left in the lurch. And here's the thing: those stories are out there. I never doubt this. Is there a great novelist in the Colombian jungles camping with the FARC? I know there is. Are there wondrous political poets locked in the stinking jails of Peru? No doubt. But theirs is not the work we get. What we get is this, and, as I write this, a month after the Nobel ascension of Mario Vargas Llosa, I know I shouldn't be surprised. The search continues, for the words of our side.

Yosimar Reyes tells it

I just saw this at the We Got Your Back Project and had to share it. Listen to poet/activist Yosimar Reyes:



Yosimar Reyes; "for colored boys that speak softly" from Corduroy Media on Vimeo.

Cop-out though it is ...

... and date me though using "cop-out" does, I'm going to go with what I've got. And what I've got is a hodge-podge. To whit:

I haven't read any of the books, but this piece about three Young Adult novels with trans teenaged characters is important. Although I haven't been blogging about it consistently, by no means have I dropped my interest in learning more about YA literature in general and in particular YA literature that features characters of color and/or LGBT characters. I've got several on my pile, and I've lately read several. When and if I've got something new or worthwhile to say about them I'll do so. In the meantime, these titles are added to my to-read list.

For 10 years or so I've been on an occasional drive to read "classics" that I'd never read. By classics I mean, yes, books considered central to "the canon" by the literary establishment, mostly Dead White Men stuff. I went to a hippie college in the early 1970s and was able to study what I wanted with few requirements, which is why I never read many of these volumes, and on through the years what I've read for my own pleasure has, as will be obvious to anyone who follows this blog or even looks at its name, not been the roster of DWMs. But for some time, a decade or more, I have been reading, or trying to read, some of them because it became frustrating reading book reviews or other literary commentary when so many of these make reference in one way or another to the "standards" and I couldn't fully get the reference. So. I've read a fair number of Shakespeare's plays. I tried reading Henry James until that proved almost fatal as the boredom damned near killed me. I finally read The Great Gatsby. And so on. All of which is my long-winded way of noting this news about another volume that, sorry all you book clubbers, I found impossible to read since I'm unable to read when I'm asleep.

This news is over a month old, but I'm still pissed off about it. I don't know why anyone should be surprised that there's a move to privatize the public libraries since the public education system is under the same attack. Good to see that there's some effort at fighting back.

A couple weeks ago I said I wanted to read a new book about the brain-cancer threat from cell phones. I'm happy to say that good science indicates there is no such threat. So that's one less book I've got to read.

I've got more. There's always more. Maybe later. For now, check out what looks like a great site, Poets for Living Waters, which describes itself as "a poetry action in response to the BP Gulf oil disaster of April 20, 2010." I'm not sure how I feel about that formulation "a poetry action." On the one hand, poetry is not the same as action, and action, mass militant united action on so many fronts, is desperately needed at this time of unemployment, murderous imperialist wars and invasions, and the ever-emboldened march of reaction (to which I simply must add a big Fuck You to Jon Stewart who's getting mighty rich off of fronting for the capitalist system's status quo as in his insipid speech at his anti-struggle Washington rally equating working-class organizing with neo-fascist mobs). On the other hand, I certainly do believe in, spend most of my words on this blog arguing for, partisan political poetry and fiction, which I think can aid the struggle in several ways. So it's always good to see these sorts of efforts to collect and promote it. I hope to spend some time reading the poems here. One I already have, and I commend you to it: "The Day We Added Ecocide to Our Vocabulary" by Andrew Rihn.