Should a socialist indulge in schadenfreude?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great Expectations

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.