The colonizer's consciousness

I'm reading The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell. The novel tells the story of an 1857 uprising in India against the British occupiers. It's told entirely from the point of view, in the voice, of those British occupiers--but in a good way! That is, this is a deeply accomplished, subtly effected satire aimed dead-on against the colonialists, exposing their racism, ethnocentrism, and self-serving endless justifications for imperialism.

I may write more about it once I've finished reading the book. In the meantime I've got to give you this. It's from roughly the middle of the novel, a single paragraph with which Farrell manages to pretty much say it all about the brutality, callousness and deeply racist consciousness of the colonialists.

A few yards away, still in the shadow of the church, was another collection of dogs, uncivilized ones this time and dreadful to behold. In spite of the years he had spent in the East the Collector had never managed to get used to the appearance of the pariah dogs. Hideously thin, fur eaten away by mange to the raw skin, endlessly and uselessly scratching, timorous, vicious, and very often half crippled, they seemed like a parody of what Nature had intended. He had once, as it happened, on landing for the first time at Garden Reach in Calcutta, had the same thought about the human beggars who swarmed at the landing-stage; they, too, had seemed a parody. Yet when the Collector piously gave to the poor, it was to the English poor, by a fixed arrangement with his agent in London; he had accepted that the poverty of India was beyond redemption. The humans he had got used to, in time ... the dogs never.

What's fiction for? Art of suffering, art of struggle

We've got a brand new conversation freshly posted over at Politerature, the site focused on political fiction that I maintain with author Meredith Sue Willis. This one starts with our mutual praise for the novel The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis and ranges outward from there, eventually toward questions about what art is for and what literature should be about. Plus, we've even included links to two pieces of writing, mine and MSW's, as examples of fiction that brings the reader right into the heart of political action.

Check it out.

Chinua Achebe

The great Chinua Achebe died this morning. This is a great loss for red readers, for literature, for the worldwide working class and oppressed peoples. His works, from Things Fall Apart  and his other novels of Nigeria and colonialism, to his essays and other non-fiction, constitute a peerless contribution to providing, as U.S. political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal does, a voice for the voiceless.

He was also a friend to the people of Palestine. I first heard of his death today via a Facebook posting from the Palestine Festival of Literature. Although he could not attend their 2008 gathering, he sent the following message.

Alice Walker's poem for Hugo Chavez

The great and good Alice Walker has posted a beautiful poem on her website Alice Walker's Garden. The title is "The Good Ones, for Hugo Chavez, Presente."

The good ones
who listen
to women
to children and the poor
die too soon,
their lives bedeviled
by opposition:
our hearts grieve for them. ...

Read the entire poem here. I especially like the line "What a mighty ruckus Hugo Chavez made!"

Hugo Chavez presente! Gracias por todos!

For Black History Month

I want to say a few words about two books I read this month. It was pure coincidence that I read them during Black History Month but it is fitting to comment.

One was The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis. This book has received unusual attention for a first novel by an unknown author. It was selected as an Oprah's Book Club 2.0 pick, which guarantees sales. And well, I've got to say, Ms. Winfrey hit this one out of the ballpark. This is a seriously good book. One of those that likely augurs a seriously important future for its author.

The book is about the lives and struggles of a woman and her family from the time she arrives in Philadelphia from Georgia in the early 1920s on through the next 50 and more years. What a generic description for such a specific set of stories, but since I'm almost never about recounting plot here--it seems a pointless waste of time--instead let me say that these stories are etched in pain and suffering. There is hardship. There is bitterness. There is, shot through it all, love. And there is, ultimately, just a smidgen of hope, tenuous, tentative.

I attended an event at the Schomburg Center in Harlem last month where Ayana Mathis read from and discussed her book. She declined to characterize Hattie as a political novel, insisting on the particularity of its characters and their travails as she imagined them into being. Indeed, the characters live, I mean feel really alive, on the page. This is an exceedingly accomplished piece of literary art, written with the lightest hand yet imbued with considerable depth of feeling and meaning. Yet I, with greatest respect for the writer, do see this as a political work, for it takes on a large, important historic topic: the Great Migration. Yes of course the story is a particular one, imagined as only this author could imagine it, and the characters are people, individual people, not some sort of symbol or contrivance meant to stand for more than each individual character with her/his individual story. But there is a context, a serious political context, in which these imagined lives are lived.

The author of the other book I want to mention most assuredly saw the novel as political, indeed as didactic. Oh horrors--didactic fiction, story told in the service of teaching something, didactic that worst of curse words for the bourgeois literary establishment. It is no curse word to me, in fact is something to be aspired to, and I daresay the great Howard Fast felt the same way when he was writing Freedom Road, first published in 1944.

I thought hard about whether to include a book by a white writer in this post for Black History Month. But the foreword to the edition of Freedom Road currently in print was written by W.E.B. Du Bois. If the greatest historian of Reconstruction and the counter-revolution that overturned it, the author of Black Reconstruction in America, The Souls of Black Folk and so many other vitally important works, the founder of the NAACP, and a great communist to boot--if W.E.B. Du Bois, himself a towering figure in African-American history, commends this book to us, and he does in his foreword, I can do no less than commend it to you.

The story tells of Gideon Jackson, a man of African descent who was enslaved in South Carolina, who left the plantation where he'd been held in servitude and fought with the Union Army during the Civil War, and who, from 1868 to 1877, plays a pivotal role in the grand effort to bring democracy and equality to the South. This effort includes wresting the right to vote, writing a new state constitution, working to build a system of free public education, claiming land ownership and building homes and community with Black and poor white working together in common cause for the good of all. Jackson eventually serves in the U.S. House of Representatives; his son travels to Scotland to train as a doctor; he and his whole family learn to read and write, build a house, hold personal possessions; all these gains hard won but possible through unity and with the backing of the Union army of occupation holding back the forces of the old slaveocracy. Until it all comes crashing down when the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, looked to at that time as the safeguard of freedom, makes a deal, withdraws the troops that had been the safeguard of liberty and looks the other way while racist reaction organizes a terrorist armed force, the Ku Klux Klan, to wage war against Jackson, his family and community, and communities like them throughout the South, bringing on a bloody counter-revolution to end Reconstruction, shut down equal education, voting rights, land rights, and replace them with sharecropping, bitter poverty, no rights--the era of Jim Crow that would last nearly another hundred years.

All this is true. All this happened. Fast made it his job to tell the story, a story that was little known in the mid-20th century and is still little known today, the story of the war of racist terror that came after the brief flourishing of freedom after the Civil War. Jackson's character was based on one or several Black men who did indeed serve as leaders in the Reconstruction period, who accomplished much and would have accomplished much more had they not been sabotaged and left to the forces of murder and mayhem. Fast doesn't sugarcoat it. The final scene is a bitter battle, Jackson and his small community holed up in the old plantation house with guns and rifles, waging a furious defensive battle against an all-out assault by the Klan marauders who outnumber the freedom fighters and ultimately kill them all.

There are many lessons to this story, and the story itself, so true, so little known, bears telling and re-telling, and so for this alone Freedom Road is a book that matters. But please don't misunderstand: I recommend this book not merely for its political virtues. This is a fine work of literature. There are beautiful passages, stirring, touching; there is, as Du Bois noted, "profound psychological insight" and "lyrical charm"; there is above all the protagonist, Gideon Jackson, as finely wrought a character as I can remember ever encountering. It's a book to make you feel deeply, think hard--and rededicate yourself to the struggle.

Finally, I want to point anyone interested in resources for Black literature from African-American sources to a list we've posted at Politerature, the lefty lit site I collaborate on. And to add to it this from Saeed Jones at Buzzfeed on the Best Black Queer Books, Plays and Films. Lots to read, lots to learn.

Introducing POLITERATURE!

I'm involved in a new project that's just gone live: Politerature. I think it'll be of interest to anyone who follows Read Red, and I urge you to take a look.

The website, www.politerature.com, is dedicated to politically progressive literature. The idea is to seek out, share, promote and discuss fiction that embodies and expresses political ideas, fiction that takes sides with the workers and oppressed, that raises consciousness about racism or colonialism or women’s and LGBTQ oppression, about war and intervention, about destroying the Earth for corporate profit, about class and unions. To honor and develop a kind of literature that runs counter to the conventional wisdom that true art cannot be political.

We'll be posting book reviews, notes, news and commentary. And we'll be carrying on a conversation that ranges over our thoughts and ideas about politics and literature and where they meet. That conversation has now begun. In the first installment, we ponder plotlines--and whether we've had enough of family dysfunction stories.

Politerature is based on the belief that political fiction can open minds, inform, give insight, inspire, strengthen, and arm those fighting for a better world.
 

If that sounds familiar, similar to my slant here at Read Red, well yes, but what we'll be trying to do at Politerature is different. For one thing, Politerature is a collaboration, initially between one other person and me, and perhaps with more folks getting involved eventually. My partner at Politerature, author and teacher Meredith Sue Willis, is a leftist but not a revolutionist; we do come at this from different angles, which we're hoping will make for an interesting exchange of views. Politerature is in various other ways too something of a more formal endeavor than Read Red will ever be.

I will continue blogging here, and I hope you'll keep checking in at Read Red where I'll post my own individual unmediated rants, reviews and responses to literary news.
 
I hope you will also regularly check out Politerature. And spread the word! Like us on Facebook where there's now a Politerature page. Let your reader, writer, and activist friends know about POLITERATURE.com. If you want to read more political fiction, stick with us, follow this project as it develops, and let's see if we can't have some impact on building the literary left wing.

Flight Behavior

I'm pleased to say that I've finally read a Barbara Kingsolver novel that I loved, or at least super-duper liked which is close enough. I've read most of her fiction going back to the start when she was an obscure leftish writer addressing U.S. intervention in Central America, and while I've often admired the effort I've never been knocked out by the execution. Last time around I was quite critical. Now, with Flight Behavior, hooray, she pretty much nailed it.

It, in this case, being climate change and the devastation it's wreaking. It being a vivid, compelling, character-driven story lushly laid out in beautiful language replete with a dazzling mastery of metaphor matched to a sweeping thematic vision. It being a thoroughly winning, complex, conflicted protagonist. All of it adding up to that which we red readers so prize: high quality political fiction.

As such, naturally, this novel has garnered its share of complaints about being "too didactic" and the like. Looking through the reader reviews at Goodreads, you'll find lots of this. What nonsense. Me, I'm all for didacticism in fiction--I love to learn, I love to be shown important stuff, I don't even mind being lectured by a character which is something Kingsolver skillfully pulls off in one or two sharp scenes in Flight Behavior. If anything, she errs too far on the side of the soft stuff--character development/family dynamics/internal monologues, etc.--when I would have happily gone much farther along in the direction of tromping through the woods or bent over lab tables studying the butterflies. For there is story, too, in doing science, which she does convey but mostly not in the foreground. No matter. This here is good work.

Bab al-Shams, the Gate of the Sun

Thank you to Philip Metres at Behind the Lines for posting this piece by Adam Shatz about a powerful, beautiful act of resistance by hundreds of Palestinians and the brutal Israeli military response. I also found this report, and these videos, the first showing the brave young activists setting up Bab al-Shams, the Gate of the Sun, named for Elias Khoury's acclaimed novel about Palestine, and the second showing the vile Israeli police move against it:





I have a copy of The Gate of the Sun, a beautiful edition I might add, but have not yet read it. This moves me to skip it higher up to the top of the to-read pile. The fact that Palestinian freedom fighters named their encampment for this novel is an amazing tribute to Khoury's work.

A Naked Singularity

Having finished reading A Naked Singularity I can affirm that (1) it's a very good, sometimes an exciting, book, (2) Sergio de la Pava is a very good writer who might become a great writer, and (3) the fact that I/we almost had no chance to read this book and meet this talented, promising and extraordinarily original writer says a lot about the publishing industry in this country. More on that last later. First, the book.

I don't generally use this space to provide plot synopses, good thing since it would be pretty hard to do with this innovative, often surprising novel. There is a plot, of sorts, having to do with a plan for a perfect heist--so it's a caper, then, but no; having to to do with a death-row appeal case for a poor, mentally disabled inmate doomed to death in Alabama--a legal thriller, then, but no, not at all, this is as far from that genre as it could be; having to do with a young public-defender lawyer's unraveling life or coming of age or personal awakening--a character study, then, but no; having to do with the legal system and its vile brutal racist inequities--a cri de coeur, then, a literary companion to The New Jim Crow, but no; a treatise on the career of Wilfred Benitez with learned exegesis on 1980s-era boxing and its leading lights including Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran and Thomas Hearns--a meditation on the sweet science, then, but no; a screed against television and popular culture featuring a cameo appearance by Ralph Kramden incarnate--it's none of these things, it's all of these things and more, I could go on and on. As de la Pava does in the course of 688 pages. I didn't love every page of it. I could for example have used many fewer or much shorter scenes in the protagonist Casi's neighbors' apartment, scenes that often felt over-pumped and sophomoric. I would also wish that the publisher had made sure of much better proof-reading, as the text is rife with typos, misplaced apostrophes, misspellings, word mistakes (who's for whose, it's for its, etc. ). This sort of thing becomes quite distracting especially in a book like this that is already playing with language and style; you want to be able to get at it cleanly, give yourself over to it, without being repeatedly stopped short by unintended dissonances.

But--see, I'm saying I have my quibbles but they are just that, quibbles, so pay attention to this but--but overall I very much enjoyed the long and usually very stimulating trip that reading this book is. I felt myself in the hands of an extraordinarily interesting mind.

If I were to try to craft a real chapter-by-chapter synopsis you'd probably conclude that, jeez, this thing is all over the map, and superficially you'd be right, but big-picture-wise you'd be wrong, you'd have missed the point. Ultimately this big sprawling mess works. Wherever the words went, I happily followed. Most of the time I was mesmerized. Much of the time I was moved, as well, especially in any and all scenes having to do with the actual workings of the criminal justice system, which de la Pava depicts very well in all its horrific depraved injustice. The opening sequence is a tour-de-force tour of the hell that is the route between the Tombs and night court. The last two pages are a sweeping culmination that left me breathless, stunned.

Randall Jarrell famously defined a novel as "a prose narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it." Well yeah. This one fits the bill. Sometimes I wasn't moved. Sometimes there was a show-offiness to the cascade of words and ideas, the rat-a-tat dialogues that went on for page after page, that was off-putting. But only sometimes, and even then I'd soon get pulled right back in by something amazing, thought-provoking, challenging, sad or hilarious. By de la Pava's gimlet eye on the shape of things.

Let me take my stand on something much commented on among readers and reviewers: this author's similarity to David Foster Wallace. Me? I don't see it. Yes, a lot of words, well lots of writers use a lot of words, so OK yes de la Pava is in the putter-inner group not the taker-outer. The similarity, in my view, ends there. I loathed Infinite Jest. Forced myself to read the whole damn thing to see what all the fuss was about, and felt not one tingle of feeling, was not moved to one shadow of human emotion in the course of all its thousand-plus pages. Nor stimulated to think one interesting thought. Infinite Jest lives in my reading memory as all artifice, all look-at-me-I'm-so-clever privileged-straight-white-male wordplay to no purpose. There's no there there. No resonance, no connection to life. Nothing to touch my heart or awaken my mind, both of which de la Pava does. Look, sure, Wallace deserves our human compassion for the personal pain that killed him, but he was a Reaganite so the disconnect of his big fat book full of nothing shouldn't surprise. In contrast, A Naked Singularity is bursting with connections, not artificial connections, but visceral, real, substantive, the, pardon my excess, stuff of life, and in particular the struggles of the poor, left out, oppressed. De la Pava may be a polymath, as his novel suggests, but his wide-ranging mind is socially engaged a way that strikes me as important for the creation of art that matters.

De la Pava himself was almost left out. His book nearly didn't make it into my or anyone else's hands. It was rejected by something over 70 agents and so finally he self-published it. Which usually means death. I don't understand the part of the story where the novel somehow drew someone's attention, started getting read, and finally found its way to an actual publisher, the University of Chicago Press, which actually published it so people can now buy it, take it out of libraries, read it. I'd like to understand it, partly out of curiosity and partly because my novel too has been widely spurned and so this unknown-author-who-could-and-did story is nice to hear. More important, it makes me think again about all the unheard voices. All the art that never makes its way to us because the artists--driving buses, cleaning hospitals, teaching, ringing up groceries, typing, or, like de la Pava, public defending--have no route to recognition, no way to get anyone to consider let alone take on their work. That it happened this time is a lucky fluke that you should take advantage of as I did. Read this novel.

Teju Cole on drones: brilliant!

Well if I've ever grimaced at a phrase like "Twitter literature" I grimace no more. This is brilliant! From Teju Cole, "Seven short stories about drones." Concision perfection, aka this says it all.

Banishing the blahs

Almost as soon as I growled about all the bad reading I'd been doing, things started looking up. I used a couple gift certificates I got over the holidays and got a couple exciting books into my hands. One that I'm already some 200 pages into is, while yes uneven, no not utter pure genius as some of the raves have claimed, still overall an enthralling, even exhilarating read: A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava. I will probably post more about this book once I've finished it, but for now I'll just say hallelujah something new, something different, original creative innovative and not just all that good artistic stuff, but, equally important to me, something full of thematic meat, political-cultural heft, and heart.

I also got an old book, originally published in 1944, Freedom Road by Howard Fast. For some reason several people lately have mentioned this novel about Reconstruction to me and I'd found that the edition currently in print has a foreword by W.E.B. DuBois, which seemed in itself one hell of an endorsement, so I'd decided I've got to read it. Now I soon shall.

Meanwhile, I hope to soon fill another gap in my literary education. Until today, I admit, I'd never heard of J.G. Farrell. Now, thanks to my web meanderings, I know that he was a highly political writer whose greatest work is The Empire Trilogy, which consists of three novels that expose the depredations of British colonialism, in Ireland, India and Singapore. This from the Wikipedia entry on Farrell of course made me feverish to start reading his work: "When The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker Prize in 1973, Farrell used his acceptance speech to attack the sponsors, the Booker Group, for their business involvement in the agricultural sector in the Third World. In this vein, some readers have found Farrell's critique of colonialism and capitalism in his subsequent novel The Singapore Grip to be heavy-handed ... ." Sounds fabulous, right? I ran right over to the university library and checked out The Siege of Krishnapur.

I'd been meaning for quite a while to, and now I finally ordered and have received the poet Daljit Nagra's book Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy Machine!!! (exclamations are part of the title, not my comment). I'm working my way through it slowly, one poem at a time, but, as expected, it's amazing. Deep, funny, harsh, cutting.

Finally, I've got a great date for this coming Monday evening. A friend and I are going to the Schomburg Center in Harlem for a reading and signing by Ayana Mathis, where I'll get her novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. Last week it was reviewed by Isabel Wilkerson, whose brilliant The Warmth of Other Suns was the best book I read in 2010. Wilkerson as reviewer struck me as apt since from previous reviews I had drawn the conclusion that Mathis's novel is in a way the fictive counterpart to Wilkerson's history. Anyway, I'm looking forward to this event, and then to reading the book.

The blahs

The end of 2012 and start of 2013 has been a blah bleh meh time for me reading-wise. I got stuck in one of those Mobius strip type of loops where each new book I'd start turned out to be as bad or worse than the one I'd just given up on and I felt a panicky desperate sense that I would never escape to a good book. I must have started and stopped four or five books. And read through to the finish several that were at least unmemorable (go ahead, ask me their titles--I don't remember!) plus at least two that were big disappointments.

Those two were disappointing because they fell far short of the excellence I'd expected because of the blurbs, reviews and awards, which excellence, all this commentary had led me to believe, included some political shading that would please me. It did not come to pass, not in my read of either The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst or Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt. From the first, nearly 10 years old now and widely acclaimed, I'd expected a sharp takedown of Thatcherism served up with literary beauty. I found it neither beautiful nor sharp. An exercise in neurasthenic ennui more like it. From the second, which I think just came out in 2012, I'd looked for a pithy satire on workplace sexism or something along those lines. I'm sorry to say (and can I really be the only one who feels this way?) I found this book to be very low level, almost startlingly so, as any sort of satire or critique, and way too long to boot. It neither made me laugh--and really, it's not hard to make me laugh--nor delivered a punch to my gut. All it did was make me sad for how low the bar is or, rather, how stunted any effort at this sort of thing almost necessarily is at this point in this debased culture that can't even spawn any first-rate literary savagery against the endless horrors of U.S. society.

Necessarily? No, I can't believe it's not possible for somebody to do it right. It is done right elsewhere. The best counter-example that comes to mind is from France. I'm talking about the work of Lydie Salvayre and Marie Darrieussecq. I haven't read all their books but I have read four--The Lecture, Everyday Life, and The Award by Salvayre and Pig Tales by Darrieussecq--and wow they pack precisely the punch Lightning Rods is apparently meant to but doesn't. At, might I add, half the length or less. Kudos to the translators--Linda Coverdale, Jane Kuntz and Jane Davey--for managing the tricky task of conveying Salvayre's and Darrieussecq's deep-funny-horrifying-demented digs at work and sex roles and family life, at society, that is, under late-stage capitalism. I guess we'll just have to keep waiting and hoping for such a writer to turn up hereabouts.

My year's best

It looks like I'll finish out this year with 72 books read. I'm in the middle of one I'll finish in another day or two, then next week I head to Texas to spend the holiday break with my wife and in-laws which means probably my only reading time for the final week of the year will be on airplanes, so that's that, 72. I've had the impression of a vaguely unsatisfying reading year, but I wonder why, for when I review the books I read in 2012 I see clearly that that impression is mistaken. Curious. It's been a very good reading year indeed. Here's why: the best books I read this year.

Non-fiction

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Fiction
The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
The Cutting Season by Attica Locke
Home by Toni Morrison
The Infinities by John Banville
The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis
Once Upon a Time in England by Helen Walsh
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

Yes I know--I got caught up in those damn Cromwell books by Hilary Mantel! Embarrassing, but what can I say? They're delicious, just superb juicy sublimely well written. Actually I may have more to say about them, here or elsewhere, by and by. I did blog here earlier in the year about the wonderful books by Otsuka, Tobar and De Robertis. I didn't about Brooks' novel of the plague in England; or about the new ones by Banville and Erdrich, both very fine and long since established writers; or the second book by Locke, who follows up her great debut of a couple years ago and who is a writer I will now follow anywhere; or by the master Morrison who once again works magic, this time in a quite short but oh so powerful book. Sorry I didn't, hope to do more diligent reporting on my reading in the coming year.

Meanwhile, I see a good number of also-rans in my list of 2012 reads, so, why the hell not, herewith the Honorable Mentions, books that I enjoyed a lot even if they didn't quite make me swoon:

Arcadia by Lauren Groff
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall
The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey
Love and Fatigue in America by Roger King
Middle Age: A Romance by Joyce Carol Oates
The Missing by Tim Gautreaux
Monstress by Lysley Tenorio
Open City by Teju Cole
Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips
Work Song by Ivan Doig

Read it & weep. No, rage. No: act!

I just finished reading The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. 

I've known about this book for some time, of course, as it has had a major impact around the country, an ever-growing impact since its first publication two years ago. A couple months ago I attended a huge meeting on mass incarceration and the racist prison-industrial complex that took place at Riverside Church in Manhattan, where Ms. Alexander spoke, along with Angela Davis, Cornel West and others including Mumia Abu-Jamal live by telephone hookup from prison. It was an electrifying event, thousands-strong, most of them young people, such an encouraging sign about the potential for building this movement. The talks were superb, especially Michelle Alexander's. The work to which she is devoting her considerable energies is an inspiring, courageous call to action for all the rest of us, all who fight against racism and for justice.

This is one of the most important books, as well as one of the best, that I've read in a long time. You read this book and you want to buy 100 copies and force them into the hands of everyone you know and tell them to stop everything and read it. Even activists in the struggles for social justice including prisoner-solidarity work, even those who already agree with the political argument of this book and are aware of the basics of the situation elucidated in this book -- that is, that there is a war against the Black community being carried out in the name of a "war on drugs"--will learn much from The New Jim Crow. Alexander harnesses a wealth of information--facts, figures, studies, legal cases--and puts it together to present a cogent, stirring, impassioned argument that is ultimately a call to action.

This is not an easy book to read. The truths told here are bitter and hard. The human suffering wrought by the criminal "justice" system and its racist "war on drugs" is horrific. But you don't read this book for ease; you read it to inform and arm yourself so that you can step up and become a better fighter. This is a necessary book. Read it, and join the movement against mass incarceration.

First, this, though not about lit

It's a hard day to concentrate on anything but the bitter news out of Michigan, which as of today is a "right-to-work" state. Seventy-five years after the great Flint sit-down strike, 75 years after the bloody Battle of the Overpass, it's almost impossible to believe that this could happen in one of the great centers of labor struggles in this country. I'm originally from Detroit, once a union bastion, now the prime evidence that capitalism must go, Detroit, the city destroyed by capitalism, and I'm very angry this morning.

As is everyone on our side of the class struggle. It is of course impossible to know what will be the decisive blow, the attack against the workers and oppressed that turns out to be one attack too many, the turning point at which our class rises up and begins to battle back in a massive, united way, but it seems to me that that point must be close. How much more can we take? How much worse can it get? If they can do this in Michigan--if the bosses believe they can get away with this in the heartland of organized labor--they will no doubt be emboldened to push forward to ever worse atrocities. And oh, they will regret it. Soon, I hope, very soon, they will be made to regret it.

Hiatus ends

Read Red has been inactive for about six months. Won't bore you with why, but I'm here to say I'm getting ready to revive this blog.

I'll be back soon with some new posts, including a list of my best reads of 2012. Looking forward to getting back to the business of red lit commentary, hope you'll come back to checking out what I have to say.

This time it's official...

... sort of. The hiatus, that is. Which Read Red is now officially, sort of, on. Yes we love to hedge our bets, red readers. Final or not, long-lived or short-, this break is on. See you later. Or not.

Reading roundup

It's been a while since I've talked books here. Since that, or something in that neighborhood, is this blog's ostensible purpose, I'm going to do so now, albeit briefly.

I've read 30 books so far this year. Aside from those I've already blogged about they're a motley lot. The list ranges from great classics (Anna Karenina) to overhyped "edgy" first novels by supposed wunderkinds that I didn't like very much at all (Citrus County, Hemlock Grove) to several bleh-to-meh embarrassing pop brain-vacations (Pompeii, The Gargoyle, Sister) to one deeply insipid celebrity memoir (Diane Keaton's Then Again) to one disappointment (The Prague Cemetery) to one interesting work to which I had a complex reaction that I just haven't had time to parse here (Open City) to several books that I just pretty darned well liked. The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips, Middle Age: A Romance by Joyce Carol Oates, The Missing by Tim Gautreaux, Shifting through Neutral by Bridgett M. Davis, Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, The False Friend by Myla Goldberg, Assumption by Percival Everett.

There were two doozies too. Really wonderful books that got to me the way I always hope a book will as I turn to its first page.

One of those is The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis. With writing that soars to lyrical heights, with deep emotion, with charged political consciousness, this novel tells the tale of three generations of women in a family whose struggles and travails tell a larger story, that of Uruguay in the 20th century. I am ashamed to confess that, until last year when I read the magnificent Memory of Fire trilogy by the brilliant Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, I did not know that the working class of Uruguay endured the same kind of fascist suppression, and in the same period, as did the workers of Chile under Pinochet and Argentina during the Dirty War. Nor about the great history of working-class and communist organizing in Uruguay. With this wrenching novel, De Robertis corrects my ignorance, and wins me over as a literary fan in the process. She has a new novel out, Perla, which looks like it takes on a story of the children of the disappeared of Argentina. It's a definite to-read.

The other great book I recently read is The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka. In not much more than a hundred pages this exquisitely written, heartbreaking novel packs the kind of wallop few fatter tomes manage. Otsuka pulls off something amazing here. She makes the reader care, pulls the reader deeply in, yet there is no one protagonist, no unitary story. Rather, the book is written in the first-person plural—that is, in a sort of a chorus of voices. Whose voices are they? Japanese women whose families have made marriage agreements with men in California in the period just after World War I. We first meet them on the boat crossing the ocean. And we follow them for the next quarter century or so, as nothing they were promised comes true, as they live hard lives, toiling in the agricultural fields, raising children, trying to survive, always in the face of racism, always dreaming of something better. At the same time, and this is crucial, this choral narrator is not of one voice and she—they—do not in any way conform to stereotypes. It's impossible to unpack how Otsuka does it, but somehow sentence by sentence she both brings to life many individuals with as many dreams, aspirations, disappointments, loves and hates, and conveys an overview of what life was like for the community as a whole. Which all comes to an unbearable climax in the weeks and months after Pearl Harbor when, at the order of FDR, that entire community is forced from their homes and into internment camps in the middle of nowhere. The final pages are full of pain and terror. And then, at the very end, Otsuka does something truly audacious. The final first-person-plural chorus of voices concluding the story—telling of the empty houses, of the neighbors at first missed then quickly forgotten, the sadness shrugged off, the questions not asked—are the Anglos who go on living their lives, who spread out in fact, taking over the empty shops and farms and houses, as if those forcibly removed had never been there at all. Stunning. Devastating. Damned great writing.

Finally, I'm currently reading Did Jesus Exist? by Bart Ehrman. It's so-so and I may or may not bother finishing it. Stylistically it's a clunker, ploddingly written and unbelievably repetitive. What actual information and analysis is here is thin. Basically it's one of those books that should have been, and perhaps had its first incarnation as, a journal article and should have been left at that. Ehrman's argumentation, too, is not very satisfying. The greatest part of it consists of circular reasoning, basically that because everybody says so it's true. The earliest Gospel writers, he tells us, were clearly retelling or embellishing stories they'd heard from others, and in a leap that doesn't quite do the trick of convincing me he avers that this proves the stories are true, at least the bottom line of the stories, the existence of this Jesus fellow. I don't have a strong opinion about whether there was a Jesus fellow or not though I lean more toward thinking that there was than that there wasn't, but Ehrman doesn't provide much solid evidence to support that position. I like reading this stuff on occasion. I've read a couple of Elaine Pagels' books, I read Karl Kautsky's The Foundations of Christianity, I read articles now and then on all this business. It's interesting, how it all unfolded, though why is more interesting and Ehrman, so far at least, doesn't have anything to say about that. Meanwhile there's lots of criticism of this book, lots of back and forth polemics slinging their way across the Internet, and after reading some of it I must conclude that Ehrman's scholarship is less than stellar. So. I may stick through to the end. Or I may not.

Revolutionaries, real & fake

May Day, this "Democracy Now" broadcast about it as the day began, and the news that Tomas Borge had died the day before all prompt me to share some news and muse.

Here in New York City, it was a glorious day of solidarity in action. We rallied all afternoon in Union Square, we marched down Broadway, we stood with the Transport Workers Union in their contract struggle with the MTA, we stood with immigrant workers, and great numbers of Occupy Wall Street youths stood with the workers and oppressed, with labor organized and undocumented, in a mass demonstration of unity. The marchers numbered somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000, which made it the biggest May Day manifestation since the vast uprising of immigrant workers in 2006.

S.E. photo

Meanwhile, the working class of Nicaragua mourned on May Day, lining up in the thousands outside the National Palace of Culture in Managua to file past Tomas Borge's coffin. Borge, who died April 30, was one of the leaders of the Sandinista revolution that overthrew the hated U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979. The U.S.-based bourgeois news reports of his death defile and defame him—naturally, for here was an actual revolutionary—but it was those crowds of mourners that told the real story. Borge wrote several books that are worth revisiting, and just last year when asked whom he most admired he responded: "First, Fidel Castro. Second, Fidel Castro. Third, Fidel Castro. Fourth, Fidel Castro. Fifth, Fidel Castro."

In contrast, there's a fake revolutionary of the sort Borge would easily recognize, for they called them contras in Nicaragua, a guy who's been going around trying to diminish the Occupy Wall Street movement, seizing every opportunity to publicly denounce and divide it—all the while, of course, claiming to be all for it. This is Chris Hedges, writer and journalist beloved of social democrats, one of the leaders of the anticommunist left-liberal loyal opposition, those trying to reign in what they call corporate capitalism, as if there were any other sort, as if some extreme corporate takeover has sullied the system and can be rolled back to a kindler gentler variety as if that ever existed and ever could. This fellow throws around the word "revolution" a lot, positioning himself as a proponent, yet if you listen closely much of the time he's actually extolling counterrevolution. As in yesterday morning's "Democracy Now" broadcast, when he was given lots of air time to continue his crusade of the last couple months, excoriating the "Black Bloc" tactic sometimes used by some activists. For me, the tipoffs, if any were needed beyond his actual argument, are in his reference to the German "revolution" of 1989—better known to any actual revolutionary as the counterrevolution that overthrew the German Democratic Republic and opened up eastern Germany for capitalist ruination—and his quoting of Vaclav Havel, scion of a rich family who organized toward and eventually led the counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia, bringing his own class back into power and henceforth functioning as a puppet of U.S. imperialism.

As you'll hear if you listen to the program, Hedges' case is that somehow wearing black bandanas is an inherently counterproductive tactic and that this specific tactic somehow invites intervention by agents provocateur. This is not merely nonsense on a logical, logistical, political and every other level. It is not merely oppositional contrarianism, precisely the opposite of the support Hedges professes. It is itself a perfect example of the kind of undermining destructiveness he claims to be worried about. The so-called journalist, in other words, is himself the agent provocateur. It is he himself who's working hard to break up this exciting young movement, trying to turn activists against each other while he masquerades as an ally. That is the objective reality. Hedges fails the Which Side Are You On test. It's a shame he got yet another opportunity to do the ruling class's dirty work on May Day morning.

Luckily, Teresa Gutierrez of the May 1 Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights, who was also on the program although given scant air time by host Amy Goodman, managed to get in a clear counter to Hedges' baiting. The real foes, she said, are the cops. The cops are the ones to worry about, not various militant forces using various tactics. It's the cops who attack, try to divide marches, isolate groups, and so on. They're the ones to watch out for. 

As a comrade of mine noted the other day, I've never seen an OWS activist of any stripe beat someone with a nightstick or pepper spray someone or throw someone in jail. This the cops do. Their work is made easier by contras like Hedges.

Our work is to keep fighting. For real revolution, by the workers and oppressed against the bosses and bankers, their government and military, media stooges try as they may to slow our way.

HBO's white "Girls"

I more or less zone out advertising hype for premium-cable TV shows as we can't afford any of those channels, but the incessant faux-buzz HBO's PR machine has been foisting on us all about the new series "Girls" eventually penetrated and I became aware of this new show touted as hot and hip. So I watched a little bit of the first episode online where HBO has posted it for free as part of the hype. Only a little bit because it was repulsive and also quickly boring. Repulsive in its focus on characters of monochrome petit-bourgeois privilege--in a city whose vast majority of residents are people of color and working-class--and boring, well, for the same reason. But look, the best thing for me to do here rather than rant on myself is to point you to critiques already written by others, including Black women and other people of color writers who have important things to say. You'll find incisive commentary not only on "Girls" and its obscenely disgustingly racist story editor Lesley Arfin, but also on the whole cultural context, the ongoing endless systemic racism of TV and the movies. Here, and here, and here, to start, and you'll find more if you follow some of the links in these pieces.