The Barbarian Nurseries

Last week I read a great book. The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar. I can't recommend it enthusiastically enough.

This fine novel has everything that turns me on as a reader. Beautiful, complex writing. Multidimensional, surprising characters who are anything but pat. A deeply involving story—I'm telling you, I was on the edge of my seat through the middle 200 pages, and not in a shallow cinematic-car-chase sense, oh no, what is at stake in Tobar's plot is ever so much more meaningful and important than anything any thriller writer ever conceived. Class consciousness, to the max. And most of all, social engagement, for this is a profoundly relevant and timely novel. Relevant, that is, to some of the most compelling issues facing our class here and now.

Primary among these issues is immigration, specifically the struggles of undocumented workers and the racist war being waged against them. It's not for me to say, but I suspect this just might be the novel of Los Angeles and southern California. The novel that tells the truth.

Necessarily the reader is drawn immediately and throughout to take sides. From start to finish we are on the side of the main character, a Mexican immigrant, undocumented, who works in the household of a well-off suburban couple. Tobar is a largehearted writer, allowing every character her/his humanity even when objectively they don't deserve our sympathy, sketching no one as a stick figure or stereotype. Still, his great achievement is his protagonist, Araceli Ramirez. An artist who finds herself stuck cooking and cleaning in someone else's house, ultimately stuck taking care of someone else's kids when she never wanted to, smart, prickly, resentful and full of contradictions—that is, fully human, as many-layered as every human being is—Tobar's Araceli is never less than fascinating. I can't remember the last time I cared so much about a fictional character, was so invested in where her story would lead.

There's too much juice here to suck it dry by giving more specific details about the story itself. Readers should come at it clean. Let it sweep you along. I will note that I was a bit puzzled at the end, at Tobar's treatment of a certain southwestern state as the story winds down. It almost left me wondering whether there's a sequel in the works. That would be splendid.

Librotraficante!

Check this out--and become a part of the Librotraficante movement!


This exciting, in-your-face challenge to the Arizona anti-Latino book ban is building toward a caravan to bring books across the border in defiance of that state's racist campaign against immigrants, Latinos and Latino Studies. So far several authors have committed to taking part in the caravan. They include Sandra Cisneros, Luis Alberto Urrea and Dagoberto Gilb.

The caravan is being built and will originate in Houston and San Antonio, Texas, but the call is going out nationwide to join in. Check out the website and do what you can to join the Librotraficantes.

The (semi) seduction of S

Some six weeks after shocking myself and perhaps one or two others by buying an e-reader, I thought I'd stop in here for a brief posting about my experience with the machine so far.

Mostly, I like it. A lot. There are caveats, however, and, in a weird bizarro-world twist on my reading life pre-E, mostly they have to do with libraries.

First the good news. I continue to love the loss of the heavy weight of physical books burdening my backpack and my back. I love the petite sleek ease of handling that is the key feature of my little red machine. This lovely little number fits my grip as no book ever did, love the grip of books though I always have. I find the reading experience swell. I've also been having a lot of fun searching out and retrieving free books at Project Gutenberg and sometimes Google Books. I've read several issues of the New York Times Book Review on my reader, because the bookstore where I pick up my weekly free copy is unreliable, sometimes offering a pile, sometimes not, and so the weeks when the paper NYTBR isn't available for free, I live a little and spend the dollar and change to buy it onto my reader. The rag itself remains as maddening as ever for its reactionary politics and mostly dimwitted reviews--and in the electronic version, those endless back pages of infinite versions of bestseller lists are endlessly annoying, turning them virtually seeming to be more of a time-consuming obstacle than flipping actual pages ever is--but it's a habit I can't seem to break so it's nice to have the e-option.

I did break down and buy a couple books, quite cheap, but that same week I used a gift certificate I'd been holding on to and also picked up some physical books at a physical bookstore. So it's not as though I've abandoned the old technology.

Except--eek--yes I have! Sheepishly I shall admit: I've quickly grown so enamored of the ease of use of this new approach to reading that, despite the to-read piles of books amassed throughout my apartment, whenever I finish a book and am faced with the choice of which one to read next, I find myself turning toward those on the e-reader and not those towering on my dresser or crammed onto bookshelves. It seems that I can't bring myself to heft a book book anymore. Or at least not yet. I hope and trust that it's just the newness of the thing, and that I'll soon settle down, settle into the pattern I'd predicted and expected, that is, moving between physical and e-books, picking what I want to read next based on what I want to read next, not based on how I'll access the book's words.

There's a further complication. E-borrowing from the library. This has turned out to be an exasperating experience, further skewing, nay limiting in an unexpected way, my reading choices. Yes, the libraries have limited offerings and long lines for those few e-books, I wrote about this in my last post. What I didn't know yet at that point is that the effect not only of the shortage but of the whole e-library-borrowing setup is insidious. See, I'll log on at the library, search its e-book collection, find, say, three or four I'd like to read, and add myself to the waiting list. Then, some days or weeks later, I'll get an email from the library saying such-and-such e-book I requested is now available for me to check out and that I have three days to do so. Well now. If I don't check out the book I lose my shot at it. If I do check it out, a countdown clock immediately kicks in, and I have 21 days to read it. At the end of those 21 days the e-library-book will disappear from my e-reader. Ack! What if I'm in the middle of reading it? Too bad! It's gone! And so I lose all volition. If it's a book I want to read, I have to either set aside whatever book I'm already reading if I'm concerned this library e-book might take a while and start it immediately, or finish the book I'm reading and then have no choice but to start this library e-book as my next one. Either way I'll feel that 21-day clock nipping at me as I read it. The effect is compounded if I've borrowed more than one.

The experience is absolutely opposite the way I've always used libraries. I've always made my rounds--I frequent two to three branches of the New York Public Library, two branches of the Queens Library, and the library of the university where I work--and taken out armloads of books. These armloads become piles alongside the rest of my to-read piles, and I have this juicy embarrassment of riches always at my fingertips. And so I've always danced a splendid dance, arcane, unique, with steps only I know, each time I'm ready to start a new book, roaming among the available volumes until I decide which one it'll be. The library books might stay piled for a good long while, as I renew and renew and renew, so there's never been any pressure to get to them before books I own. No one, no entity,no algorithm, no clock, ever forced upon me the decision of my next book. Now that freedom is gone. I miss it.

Ah well, these are kinks, I'd like to think, and will work themselves out. Overall I remain glad I got the device. One day soon I'll return to this space to report on some of what I've read on it.

A traitor to the cause

That's me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are other frustrations. The touch screen is sometimes too sensitive, sometimes unresponsive. I flew into a terrible howling rage on my second day of reading on the device when it suddenly froze up completely. I couldn't turn the page backward or forward, couldn't close the book, couldn't even turn off the machine. I'd been deep into a reading session, engrossed in a book—my god, can you imagine suddenly not being able to keep reading! No physical book has ever done that to me, just closed itself up and not let me continue. It really made me crazy, and I started yelling that I was going to return it—I mean, really, what's the use of the thing if it blocks you from reading?—but then finally after about 10 minutes, during which I'd been searching online for what to do about the problem, it came back to life. That has not happened again since, and if it does I now know how to reboot the thing. In any case I have one more week to decide whether I'm definitely going to keep it. There's a 30-day return policy, and if it freezes up again I might decide to return it.

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

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

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

World without women

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

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

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

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

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

My year's best

As every year, this year's list of the best books I read ranges from new releases back through the previous two centuries. I've read 73 so far, will probably finish one or two more by year's end, not quite up to my record-breaking 80 of last year but they do say there's more to life than reading …

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

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

Cellophane by Marie Arana

The Price of a Child by Lorene Cary

Spartina by John Casey

We the Animals by Justin Torres

Wading Home by Rosalyn Story

Mr. Toppit by Charles Elton

Pym by Mat Johnson

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Montecore – The Silence of the Tiger by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

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

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman

The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Poetic Injustice by Remi Kanazi

Century of the Wind by Eduardo Galeano

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

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

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

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

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

I don't know if this line of attack is a sign of despair or fury on part of some critics who define themselves as white -- whatever that means in our mongrel society. Are they trying to make a last stand against the hordes of up-and-coming poets of different skin complexions and different eye slants? Were we -- African Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans -- only acceptable as long as these critics could stand guard by the door to examine our credentials and let us in one by one?

Toward the end of her review, Helen Vendler reveals much about the skewed thought processes that seem to inform these critics when she writes: "Of the twenty poets born between 1954 and 1971 (closing the anthology), fifteen are from minority communities (Hispanic, Black, Native American, or Asian-American), and five are white (two men, three women).” My husband was in Germany tending to his sick mother when the review came out, so I emailed him a scan. Half an hour later, he emailed me back. "I can't believe Vendler topped off her diatribe with bean counting so offensive, she’s put herself in league with Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan", he wrote. "Has she lost all historical perspective? In juxtaposing 'white' with 'minority communities', counting among the latter everybody who does not adhere to her imaginary Caucasian purity principles, she incriminates herself. Just like the Nazis tagged every German as Jewish who had a Jewish grandparent, just like the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk ascribed to the 'one drop rule', she lumps together everybody who is not 'rassenrein' [racially pure] white, including all those of the 'fifteen from minority communities' who are of mixed racial heritage."

Heroes & martyrs, defiled

I've been reading Harriet A. Washington's searing, infuriating, important book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Although you'd think it would be naïve to be shocked by any given piece of information, any new revelation, about the depraved depths this country's racism has reached, I can't come up with any other word but shocking for what Washington presents here. Over years of painstaking research that must have been extremely difficult on many levels, she unearthed indisputable evidence of massive systemic institutionalized crimes against Black people from slavery times right up through today—crimes committed by and in the name of medical science, most of which had been until now either forgotten or deliberately concealed. These crimes are horrific. They range from unethical experimentation to malign neglect to forced medical and surgical treatments to intentional inducement of illness or injury to outright murder to grave robbing and unauthorized post-mortem uses of the stolen cadavers for training and even entertainment.

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

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

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

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

Lest anyone think this practice is a thing of the past, Washington's book also reports this, perhaps even more upsetting: In 1998, almost 35 years after 13-year-old Addie Mae Collins was murdered, one of the four little girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., two of her sisters arranged to move her grave to a better-maintained cemetery.

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

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

On the town

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

1. Teresa, Rosemary and I saw the play Venus in Fur, written by David Ives and starring the extraordinary Nina Arianda. Amazing. This is one of those rare instances when I agree with all the raves even though they emanate from bourgeois sources. Well, not quite, for I've discovered, since seeing it and upon delving further into the critical commentary, that while the adoration of Arianda is unanimous opinion is more divided on the play itself, and furthermore that there are, it seems, varied interpretations of what it all means, what it's about, most of all what's up with that ending. Hmm. So methinks the bourgeois sources have screwed up here after all. Arianda in all her glory aside, the play itself is, yuk yuk inside joke you'll only get if you've seen it, divine. Brilliant writing that had me on the edge of my seat straining to catch every word only to be whipsawed about this way and that by them up to the very last moment, and that moment is breathtakingly perfect. Hilarious too, as well as discomfiting in a good way.

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

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

3. I took Rosemary to the Queens Museum for a perambulation around the Panorama of the City of New York. It is a glorious thing. And she permitted me to be in my glory, pointing here and there orienting her, showing off my fabulous town.

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

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

NYPD versus the people's pages

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

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

OCCUPY WALL STREET LIVES!

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

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

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


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

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

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

I said I wouldn't ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memorial & cultural tribute to Consuela Lee

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

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

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

Occupy Writers!

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

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

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

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

As well we all should.

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

Tomatoland

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

Because who the hell wants to eat those horrid red balls that pass themselves off as tomatoes in stores and restaurants? I refuse to buy them at the supermarket. At restaurants I always specify "no tomatoes" with whatever I'm ordering. Whoever I'm with usually asks, oh don't you like tomatoes? My answer is that actually I love tomatoes but what they're going to slice onto my sandwich or quarter into my salad is not a tomato and I cannot abide the look feel or taste of the imposter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't have a Twitter account ...

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

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

That's few enough characters, right?

Hail the Occupy Wall Street Library!

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

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

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

Death of a billionaire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All day, all week--occupy Wall Street!

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

And for the many many other occupations that are springing up around the country.

I haven't gotten to spend much time at the occupation—I'll head there again today after work for the aftermath of the big labor solidarity march—but I've heard and read and seen enough to know that it is a Very Good Thing. Don't let anyone, fake left or unabashed right or phony neutral, tell you otherwise. Yes, the people taking part in this occupation have a range of political ideas, from liberal-reformist to libertarian to anarchist to socialist revolutionary.  So yes, there's no one unified program. Yes, some of them are inconsistent or confused. Yes, their various tactics run the gamut from inspired to not so much. None of this matters. What matters is that a group of young people are in motion in a protest that, whatever its contradictions, focuses on the symbol of the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. Wall Street. And calls for a reversal of the robbery of the planet's wealth and resources.

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

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

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

 

On hiatus

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

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

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

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