... I made a mad dash to three bookstores during my lunch hour. Yes, I have a lot to do over the weekend, including a must-do massive writing session but also many household chores. And yes, when I'm not writing or housekeeping and want to read, I've got the new novel that I just started, and it's highly doubtful I'll finish it over the weekend. And yes, even if I do finish it I've got huge to-read piles from which to pick my next book. And yes, if this hurricane does its worst and we're without power on Sunday, it's unlikely I'll be able to read much anyway as I'm not really a flashlight or candlelight kind of gal.
And yet. I felt compelled. I checked online, found quite cheap copies of three books I've been yearning after, ran here and there, got them. Take that, Irene! You don't scare me--I've got exciting new stuff to read!
P.S. I'll also be buying that water and those batteries on my way home today.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Happy 100th birthday, General Giap!
The great hero General Vo Nguyen Giap, a military genius who helped drive both French and U.S. imperialism out of Vietnam, turned 100 years old yesterday. Happy birthday to him!
The world's workers and oppressed owe Gen. Giap eternal gratitude. As do I personally, in terms of my own puny life. For what he and his comrades did in the 1960s and early 70s played a big role in my coming to political consciousness and turning toward the class struggle as my life's path.
The world's workers and oppressed owe Gen. Giap eternal gratitude. As do I personally, in terms of my own puny life. For what he and his comrades did in the 1960s and early 70s played a big role in my coming to political consciousness and turning toward the class struggle as my life's path.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
This is an abomination
Just when I was starting to open my crusty old mind bit by bit to the idea of e-reading, just when I could almost conceive of myself trying to read a book on such a device, comes this.
Oh sweet Jesus. See how bad it is, it made me utter a locution like oh sweet Jesus!
Some bright young moneygrubbers--aka "a startup" in the Times story--are offering e-books that have soundtracks. "Instrumental music or ambient noise." And, "during livelier passages," "the patter of footsteps, a booming gong, a crackling fire or the tick of a grandfather clock."
Shoot me now. Or no, don't bother--these horrid monsters known as "Booktrack" are hell-bent on destroying my imagination, my reader's creativity, my quiet concentration, my fancy and fantasy, without which I'm as good as gone.
I'm not one of those doom-and-gloom "reading is dead" people. But capitalism is sure doing its best to take reading, what it really is, its beautiful ephemeral essence, and destroy it.
Oh sweet Jesus. See how bad it is, it made me utter a locution like oh sweet Jesus!
Some bright young moneygrubbers--aka "a startup" in the Times story--are offering e-books that have soundtracks. "Instrumental music or ambient noise." And, "during livelier passages," "the patter of footsteps, a booming gong, a crackling fire or the tick of a grandfather clock."
Shoot me now. Or no, don't bother--these horrid monsters known as "Booktrack" are hell-bent on destroying my imagination, my reader's creativity, my quiet concentration, my fancy and fantasy, without which I'm as good as gone.
I'm not one of those doom-and-gloom "reading is dead" people. But capitalism is sure doing its best to take reading, what it really is, its beautiful ephemeral essence, and destroy it.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
The cultural front
I'm popping in here mostly with links because I'm in the midst of a writing project that's taking a lot of time and concentration, and will for quite a while to come. So. For now:
I suggest that you head over to author Carleen Brice's always interesting and informative site White Readers Meet Black Authors for this list of upcoming new books by writers of color. I see quite a few that I'm adding to my to-read list.
One book on the list, Martha Southgate's new novel The Taste of Salt, reminded me to post her piece for Entertainment Weekly on The Help. There is a lot of hard-hitting truth-telling commentary on both the book and movie written by African Americans, and I'd encourage readers to seek out and read it. Ms. Southgate's is particularly pithy. Also check out Color Online's post, which includes a link to the first chapter of The Taste of Salt.
Speaking of movies, and turning from the untruthful, inauthentic, reprehensible to several that seem to be more up our alley, author Zetta Elliott recommends two that sound really worth seeing: Gun Hill Road and Attack the Block.
There's also John Sayles' new movie Amigo, which is about U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. If you read the New York Times review, a mix of praise for Sayles' artistry, caution about his politics, and, worryingly, satisfaction with his evenhandedness, you know that this film pulls its punches more than those on our side of the class struggle would wish. Indeed, a Filipina activist friend of mine saw it and judged it "only okay." I'll probably see it once it hits my TV's on-demand system because it's not as if there's a glut of films about the U.S. invasion and occupation of the Philippines--I'd bet most people in this country don't even know it ever happened--but of course the best source for information about this history, whether served up via fiction or nonfiction, is Filipino writers and artists. I've read several novels by Filipinos this year. I'm going to see what Filipino films I can find.
Finally, there's this. The most gag-o-rific new book on the market, winning prominent reviews throughout the bourgeois media, is the horrifyingly yet aptly titled Class Warfare, subtitled Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools by the reactionary enemy of public education Steven Brill. Pun aside, this is indeed class warfare, but Brill and his admirers aren't the least bit honest about which class they represent and which they're waging war on. They pretend they care about the public schools. Nonsense. They care about the huge flow of private profit that would begin to flow (that is already flowing to charter-school outfits) if they could only crush the teachers' unions and end government funding of public education entirely. Plow through the front-page piece by Sara Mosle in today's New York Times Book Review, all three pages of it if you can stomach it. You'll search in vain for any mention of the real, the primary cause of so-called failed schools (in itself a completely dishonest and untrustworthy category, when failure is defined as it everywhere now is by the anti-public-school, anti-teachers'-union forces in power from the Education Department on down)--that is, you won't find any reference to funding and finances. Not until nearly the end of this review, and even then the only mention goes to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and to the disgusting federal "Race to the Top" that dangled financial reward to school districts that dismantle even the pretense of a system of equal education. Yet for any honest analyst, there can be no mystery. The scandal, the crime--indeed, The Shame of the Nation as the exemplary writer and equal-education advocate Jonathan Kozol titled his last book, which you've really got to read if you haven't already, but first read this recent interview with him--is quite simple. It's all about funding. Schools that serve a population that's poor, working-class, people of color, any or all of these, are under-funded. Drastically, outrageously, we're talking about no textbooks, no chalk, no chairs, no working toilets and worse. Schools that serve a population that's more prosperous and more white have way way more money to work with, and it shows. It's like the emperor's new clothes the way these commentators, these education "reformers" (read destroyers), harumph around analyzing why oh why this high school in, say, the South Bronx can't seem to send a better percentage of its graduates to college or even graduate a better percentage of its kids vs. why oh why this sparkly pretty clean high-tech-equipped high school in, say, Greenwich, Connecticut manages to graduate almost all its students and send them off to college, good colleges, too. Duh. What a difficult conundrum. Right.
OK, now that I've demoralized us all, let's try to pull ourselves back up with this: the new movie Precious Knowledge, which just played at the New York Latino Film Festival and will show on PBS next spring. It's about the struggle to create, and now to defend, ethnic studies classes in Tucson, Arizona. With young people and educators like those shown in this film leading the way, I feel sure that the fight to save our schools, while tough, will be won.
I suggest that you head over to author Carleen Brice's always interesting and informative site White Readers Meet Black Authors for this list of upcoming new books by writers of color. I see quite a few that I'm adding to my to-read list.
One book on the list, Martha Southgate's new novel The Taste of Salt, reminded me to post her piece for Entertainment Weekly on The Help. There is a lot of hard-hitting truth-telling commentary on both the book and movie written by African Americans, and I'd encourage readers to seek out and read it. Ms. Southgate's is particularly pithy. Also check out Color Online's post, which includes a link to the first chapter of The Taste of Salt.
Speaking of movies, and turning from the untruthful, inauthentic, reprehensible to several that seem to be more up our alley, author Zetta Elliott recommends two that sound really worth seeing: Gun Hill Road and Attack the Block.
There's also John Sayles' new movie Amigo, which is about U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. If you read the New York Times review, a mix of praise for Sayles' artistry, caution about his politics, and, worryingly, satisfaction with his evenhandedness, you know that this film pulls its punches more than those on our side of the class struggle would wish. Indeed, a Filipina activist friend of mine saw it and judged it "only okay." I'll probably see it once it hits my TV's on-demand system because it's not as if there's a glut of films about the U.S. invasion and occupation of the Philippines--I'd bet most people in this country don't even know it ever happened--but of course the best source for information about this history, whether served up via fiction or nonfiction, is Filipino writers and artists. I've read several novels by Filipinos this year. I'm going to see what Filipino films I can find.
Finally, there's this. The most gag-o-rific new book on the market, winning prominent reviews throughout the bourgeois media, is the horrifyingly yet aptly titled Class Warfare, subtitled Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools by the reactionary enemy of public education Steven Brill. Pun aside, this is indeed class warfare, but Brill and his admirers aren't the least bit honest about which class they represent and which they're waging war on. They pretend they care about the public schools. Nonsense. They care about the huge flow of private profit that would begin to flow (that is already flowing to charter-school outfits) if they could only crush the teachers' unions and end government funding of public education entirely. Plow through the front-page piece by Sara Mosle in today's New York Times Book Review, all three pages of it if you can stomach it. You'll search in vain for any mention of the real, the primary cause of so-called failed schools (in itself a completely dishonest and untrustworthy category, when failure is defined as it everywhere now is by the anti-public-school, anti-teachers'-union forces in power from the Education Department on down)--that is, you won't find any reference to funding and finances. Not until nearly the end of this review, and even then the only mention goes to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and to the disgusting federal "Race to the Top" that dangled financial reward to school districts that dismantle even the pretense of a system of equal education. Yet for any honest analyst, there can be no mystery. The scandal, the crime--indeed, The Shame of the Nation as the exemplary writer and equal-education advocate Jonathan Kozol titled his last book, which you've really got to read if you haven't already, but first read this recent interview with him--is quite simple. It's all about funding. Schools that serve a population that's poor, working-class, people of color, any or all of these, are under-funded. Drastically, outrageously, we're talking about no textbooks, no chalk, no chairs, no working toilets and worse. Schools that serve a population that's more prosperous and more white have way way more money to work with, and it shows. It's like the emperor's new clothes the way these commentators, these education "reformers" (read destroyers), harumph around analyzing why oh why this high school in, say, the South Bronx can't seem to send a better percentage of its graduates to college or even graduate a better percentage of its kids vs. why oh why this sparkly pretty clean high-tech-equipped high school in, say, Greenwich, Connecticut manages to graduate almost all its students and send them off to college, good colleges, too. Duh. What a difficult conundrum. Right.
OK, now that I've demoralized us all, let's try to pull ourselves back up with this: the new movie Precious Knowledge, which just played at the New York Latino Film Festival and will show on PBS next spring. It's about the struggle to create, and now to defend, ethnic studies classes in Tucson, Arizona. With young people and educators like those shown in this film leading the way, I feel sure that the fight to save our schools, while tough, will be won.
Friday, August 12, 2011
The Lonely Hunter
Last weekend I finished reading Virginia Spencer Carr's 1972 biography of Carson McCullers, The Lonely Hunter. My understanding is that this is still considered the definitive McCullers study. I have no reason to challenge that, as all I knew about McCullers before reading this book was what I concluded about her sublime artistry after reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter earlier this year. Yet I can't say that I come away from The Lonely Hunter feeling that I have much new insight into McCullers as a person or artist.
No, that's too harsh. I do, of course, is some ways. I now know her life story, I understand something of how she approached writing, I have perhaps some slight sense of what it must have been like to be in a room with her. As in, she sucked all the air out of it. In a good way! Or not. See, if I come away with anything it's an appreciation for the largeness of McCullers' personality and the complexity of her character. I don't know that she had many dimensions but she certainly had more than the usual complement of contradictions.
Frustratingly, so does Carr's book. She straddles every possible fence. Page by page, paragraph by paragraph, sometimes sentence by sentence and sometimes even within sentences, Carr offers up so many clashing descriptions, analyses and judgments, her own and those of the many people she interviewed about McCullers, that the reader's head swirls not knowing which lead to follow, whose word to believe. McCullers was a prodigious drinker--she never really did anything but sip--she slurred her words--she was never really drunk. She suffered paralysis from a series of strokes--she faked paralysis for sympathy--it was real but psychosomatic. The portrait, overall, is deeply sympathetic which is fine, but it felt as if Carr at the same time tried terribly hard to maintain an evenhanded approach, as a result sometimes abdicating the biographer's responsibility to draw some conclusions.
Above all this applies to the question of McCullers', and to a lesser extent her husband's, sexual orientation. It's striking how quaintly, which is to say homophobically, discreet and judicious is Carr's handling of this issue throughout the book. It's a reminder of how little had yet changed even three years after the Stonewall rebellion that gave rise to the modern LGBT movement, when this book was published. On the one hand, she does not entirely shy away from the topic--how could she when everyone knows that McCullers had great female loves and her husband great male loves--and she even in some ways writes of this sympathetically. On the other hand, she was mired in all the old attitudes, and uses ugly old terminology like the word "invert" which I didn't realize anyone was still using in 1972. Most frustratingly, there are great swaths of the book given over to indirection--what no doubt was seen as discretion--when it comes to many of McCullers' relationships. She's passionately in love with a Swiss woman but it's all conveyed at such a remove that I couldn't see through the gauze to figure out what they really were to each other. Decades later she seems to be inseparably paired with a psychiatrist who's her therapist/friend/companion--huh? You may ask why any of this matters. Well, for a million obvious reasons. Even if one thinks, wrongly, her sex or love life irrelevant to her art, this is a big full biography, not merely a study of her as a writer, and the weird wobbly way that Carr at once addresses and shies away from the whole issue of who and how McCullers loved is very frustrating.
Then there's this. By all accounts, as related in Carr's book, Carson McCullers drank enormous amounts of alcohol pretty much constantly, and smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, starting when she was a teenager and on throughout the rest of her life. I found Carr's frequent attempts to discount the effects of all this substance use bizarre. More than once she asserts that McCullers was not an alcoholic. I'm no expert, but I don't know another word for someone who starts drinking in the morning and never stops, and does so every single day. For Carr to claim, as she does several times, that all this drinking had little to no effect on McCullers' behavior or, more interestingly, her creativity and creative output, strikes me as absurd. What's really incomprehensible is the biographer's failure to link the drinking and smoking to McCullers' continually precarious health. At the least, the writer must have destroyed her liver. Her heart, lungs and circulatory system had to be in awful shape too. Which leads to the other odd gap, Carr's strangely disingenuous and quite muddled reporting about McCullers' ongoing and increasingly complicated and debilitating medical ailments throughout her adult life. McCullers had her first stroke in her 20s, by which time she'd been smoking and drinking nearly a decade, and by the time she died of the final stroke at 50 she'd had several more in between, along with breast cancer, disabling pain and paralysis, and other serious illnesses. Carr never ever connects the writer's smoking to her health problems, nor does it seem anyone in her circle ever did or ever appealed to her to clean up her act. It's not as if the ramifications of all that drinking and smoking were unknown during her lifetime. They would certainly have been known, in 1972, to Carr.
Leaving aside this odd reticence from a fuller treatment of McCullers' lifestyle as related to her physical health, I was intrigued by the whole question of how she created what she created under the influence as she most assuredly always was. I've always discounted all the silly saws about writers and drinking, I've always thought that being drunk or high cannot ever really feed creative work and must always in the end impede it. I myself (not of course that I'm comparing myself to great writers like McCullers, just relating my own experience) could never write after drinking even a little. I must have a clear mind to come up with the words. I must be alert, as fully lucid as possible. In contrast, if Carr's portrayal is to be believed, McCullers felt herself too restricted, somehow, felt her mind too tightly bounded, to be able to enter the creative dream state necessary to write fiction when she was in full control of her faculties. She felt that only by drinking alcohol could she relax, loosen up, and open the portals to the half-trance state that fiction writers must enter. Fascinating. If true.
No, that's too harsh. I do, of course, is some ways. I now know her life story, I understand something of how she approached writing, I have perhaps some slight sense of what it must have been like to be in a room with her. As in, she sucked all the air out of it. In a good way! Or not. See, if I come away with anything it's an appreciation for the largeness of McCullers' personality and the complexity of her character. I don't know that she had many dimensions but she certainly had more than the usual complement of contradictions.
Frustratingly, so does Carr's book. She straddles every possible fence. Page by page, paragraph by paragraph, sometimes sentence by sentence and sometimes even within sentences, Carr offers up so many clashing descriptions, analyses and judgments, her own and those of the many people she interviewed about McCullers, that the reader's head swirls not knowing which lead to follow, whose word to believe. McCullers was a prodigious drinker--she never really did anything but sip--she slurred her words--she was never really drunk. She suffered paralysis from a series of strokes--she faked paralysis for sympathy--it was real but psychosomatic. The portrait, overall, is deeply sympathetic which is fine, but it felt as if Carr at the same time tried terribly hard to maintain an evenhanded approach, as a result sometimes abdicating the biographer's responsibility to draw some conclusions.
Above all this applies to the question of McCullers', and to a lesser extent her husband's, sexual orientation. It's striking how quaintly, which is to say homophobically, discreet and judicious is Carr's handling of this issue throughout the book. It's a reminder of how little had yet changed even three years after the Stonewall rebellion that gave rise to the modern LGBT movement, when this book was published. On the one hand, she does not entirely shy away from the topic--how could she when everyone knows that McCullers had great female loves and her husband great male loves--and she even in some ways writes of this sympathetically. On the other hand, she was mired in all the old attitudes, and uses ugly old terminology like the word "invert" which I didn't realize anyone was still using in 1972. Most frustratingly, there are great swaths of the book given over to indirection--what no doubt was seen as discretion--when it comes to many of McCullers' relationships. She's passionately in love with a Swiss woman but it's all conveyed at such a remove that I couldn't see through the gauze to figure out what they really were to each other. Decades later she seems to be inseparably paired with a psychiatrist who's her therapist/friend/companion--huh? You may ask why any of this matters. Well, for a million obvious reasons. Even if one thinks, wrongly, her sex or love life irrelevant to her art, this is a big full biography, not merely a study of her as a writer, and the weird wobbly way that Carr at once addresses and shies away from the whole issue of who and how McCullers loved is very frustrating.
Then there's this. By all accounts, as related in Carr's book, Carson McCullers drank enormous amounts of alcohol pretty much constantly, and smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, starting when she was a teenager and on throughout the rest of her life. I found Carr's frequent attempts to discount the effects of all this substance use bizarre. More than once she asserts that McCullers was not an alcoholic. I'm no expert, but I don't know another word for someone who starts drinking in the morning and never stops, and does so every single day. For Carr to claim, as she does several times, that all this drinking had little to no effect on McCullers' behavior or, more interestingly, her creativity and creative output, strikes me as absurd. What's really incomprehensible is the biographer's failure to link the drinking and smoking to McCullers' continually precarious health. At the least, the writer must have destroyed her liver. Her heart, lungs and circulatory system had to be in awful shape too. Which leads to the other odd gap, Carr's strangely disingenuous and quite muddled reporting about McCullers' ongoing and increasingly complicated and debilitating medical ailments throughout her adult life. McCullers had her first stroke in her 20s, by which time she'd been smoking and drinking nearly a decade, and by the time she died of the final stroke at 50 she'd had several more in between, along with breast cancer, disabling pain and paralysis, and other serious illnesses. Carr never ever connects the writer's smoking to her health problems, nor does it seem anyone in her circle ever did or ever appealed to her to clean up her act. It's not as if the ramifications of all that drinking and smoking were unknown during her lifetime. They would certainly have been known, in 1972, to Carr.
Leaving aside this odd reticence from a fuller treatment of McCullers' lifestyle as related to her physical health, I was intrigued by the whole question of how she created what she created under the influence as she most assuredly always was. I've always discounted all the silly saws about writers and drinking, I've always thought that being drunk or high cannot ever really feed creative work and must always in the end impede it. I myself (not of course that I'm comparing myself to great writers like McCullers, just relating my own experience) could never write after drinking even a little. I must have a clear mind to come up with the words. I must be alert, as fully lucid as possible. In contrast, if Carr's portrayal is to be believed, McCullers felt herself too restricted, somehow, felt her mind too tightly bounded, to be able to enter the creative dream state necessary to write fiction when she was in full control of her faculties. She felt that only by drinking alcohol could she relax, loosen up, and open the portals to the half-trance state that fiction writers must enter. Fascinating. If true.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Just married
Well, we went and did it: yesterday Teresa and I, after almost 23 years together, got married at the New York City Clerk's Marriage Bureau in lower Manhattan. It was a fun and interesting experience being there with all the working-class folks, opposite-sex and same-sex couples alike, who opt to wed this way for various reasons personal, political, and mostly, I'm guessing, financial. When we'd picked up the marriage license the day before Teresa and I had both gotten weepy, especially as we watched several gay couples come out of the chapel (yeah, that's what they call the little room where they perform the ceremony) and pose for their newlywed pictures. It's not about aping the hets, it's not about endorsing the patriarchy, it's about claiming a legal right that had been denied; the sheer fact of this achievement hit home as we watched these couples celebrate and we got all shook up. (My thoughts on this immediately after the law passed are here; my article in Workers World newspaper the week after is here.) After that I was terrified that I'd bawl all during our ceremony but happily it turned out instead that we both smiled, in fact started laughing, as we said our I Do's and exchanged rings.
Then we posed for lots of pictures with, and taken by, our dear friends Monica and LeiLani who'd accompanied us and signed the marriage license as our official witnesses.
Headed uptown to Sheridan Square, where we posed at the Gay Liberation Monument by sculptor George Segal.
Crossed the street and took a picture in front of the Stonewall Inn, where the modern LGBT movement began with the great rebellion of June 1969.
Headed inside the Stonewall for a celebratory drink and toast to the struggle. Strolled down Seventh Avenue to the Pink Teacup, a soulfood restaurant and one of my all-time favorites for all those years it was a tiny jam-packed hole in the wall and now even more wonderful since it relocated to much bigger digs. There we met a few more friends for dinner, delish and delightful. A grand time was had by all.
Today's the honeymoon: we're going to a movie! Then it's back to real life. Tomorrow, a poitical meeting; Sunday paying bills and doing laundry; Monday wage work. Yesterday, though, yesterday was a keeper.
Then we posed for lots of pictures with, and taken by, our dear friends Monica and LeiLani who'd accompanied us and signed the marriage license as our official witnesses.
Headed uptown to Sheridan Square, where we posed at the Gay Liberation Monument by sculptor George Segal.
Crossed the street and took a picture in front of the Stonewall Inn, where the modern LGBT movement began with the great rebellion of June 1969.
Headed inside the Stonewall for a celebratory drink and toast to the struggle. Strolled down Seventh Avenue to the Pink Teacup, a soulfood restaurant and one of my all-time favorites for all those years it was a tiny jam-packed hole in the wall and now even more wonderful since it relocated to much bigger digs. There we met a few more friends for dinner, delish and delightful. A grand time was had by all.
Today's the honeymoon: we're going to a movie! Then it's back to real life. Tomorrow, a poitical meeting; Sunday paying bills and doing laundry; Monday wage work. Yesterday, though, yesterday was a keeper.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
That was the month that was
The last three weeks of July were eventful, and also not, both of which account for my almost total absence from the blogosphere. I was on vacation as scheduled, the first half visiting my best friend in the California desert, having a wonderful time, the second half back home which was not so great. I got back just in time for NYC's annual horrible 100-degree-plus heat wave, which coincided with the only four days Teresa was able to take off to vacate with me. We'd had lots of lovely stuff planned--the High Line, Governor's Island, Bear Mountain, Coney Island--but since it was impossible to be outside and since we couldn't find a decent movie at which to cool off, we ended up imprisoned in our bedroom, the only room in our apartment with air conditioning, for most of our precious few days together. Also in the midst of that there was a death in my family, and while my feelings about this were not standard they did require attending to, so the sticky heat took on an added layer of sad musing memory processing, a sort of strange solitary version of sitting shiva if you like, as well as an added week off which I'm now amid, this first week of August.
I've been reading throughout, of course. Not as many books as I usually race through on my summer vacation, which is partly because of what else I was doing and partly because I've been moving through a very fat book very slowly for almost two weeks now. That one is The Lonely Hunter, Virginia Spencer Carr's 1972 biography of Carson McCullers. I'll probably post some thoughts about it once I've finished. Of the four other books I read, here are quick comments on two.
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Published in 2001, this is a novel I'd steered clear of for what proved faulty reasons. I'd been given it as a gift some years back, and read the first five or 10 pages but decided not to read on, as I was turned off by the use of the word "terrorist" to describe the guerrillas who burst in upon and take hostage the attendees at a fancy-shmancy private opera recital at the vice president's mansion in an unnamed country that is clearly supposed to be Peru during the time of the Fujimori presidency and the armed struggles led by theTupac Amaru and Shining Path revolutionary groups. I never thought of picking Patchett's novel up again until a couple years ago when a comrade of mine, a communist revolutionary through and through, asked me if I'd read it and, when I told her I hadn't and why, said that I'd made a mistake and should read it. She said this novel, far from painting a one-dimensional hostile portrait of the hostage-taker characters, provides a deeply compassionate, deeply sympathetic portrayal of the rebels in all their humanity. She was right. I was swept into and very moved by the story, and found Patchett's writing lovely. Delicate and deep. I'm glad I finally got back to this one.
I also read Four Fish: the Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg, which I'd had on my to-read list for a while and impulsively bought at an airport bookstore. It was a fast read, and mildly interesting, but that's about the best I can say. Overfishing along with industrial development and environmental despoilage are leading/have led to catastrophic destruction in the world's rivers and seas, driving some key species to the brink of extinction and in the process destroying livelihoods and communities while, most important of all, depriving the world's tables of vitally important, formerly abundant and sometimes cheap foods. OK, well, I knew this already, but I'm glad I read up on the history of how all this happened and the particulars of the current situation. The four fish of the title, by the way, are salmon, tuna, bass and cod. The problem is that Greenberg either hasn't the foggiest notion of or is unwilling to take on the real culprit--capitalism, and in particular late-stage high-tech imperial-age capitalism--and therefore the solutions he offers up amount to mild, silly nostrums. In the course of which he--like Michael Pollan in his writings and all the other well-meaning but fundamentally helpless, unhelpful liberal-bourgeois commentators on current food issues and agribusiness--throws around terms like artisanal and sustainable and argues for small-scale settings and high-priced commodities as the way forward. Neither of which, a small scale of production or a high price of sale, is any solution at all for the great mass of billions of poor and working people. The only viable solution in the long run, and as it fast approaches the short run too, is an internationally coordinated effort to restore and revive the world's fisheries, manage fishing so as to conserve and protect the fish while also providing healthy non-toxic fish for the masses to eat, etc. etc. -- the very idea of which is inconceivable under capitalism, when the sole driving force is the quest for profit. Any analyst who can't or won't address this has little to offer.
I can't close without also noting an aspect of Greenberg's book that infuriated and disgusted me: his use of the word "man" to mean people or humankind. Really? Aaarggh!#$%! I've complained before about other writers who persist in using this absurd, insulting sexist language--and here we are, well into the 21st century, and they can't stop. Assholes! The word "fisherman" is lame enough--the word is "fisher," and any man who refuses to use it for any reason is a simple sexist as well as a simpleton--but much much worse is the repeated, relentless reference to our species as "man." I make allowances when I encounter this usage in older works--reluctantly, but I do. In a current book of popular science? No excuse. So offensive.
I've been reading throughout, of course. Not as many books as I usually race through on my summer vacation, which is partly because of what else I was doing and partly because I've been moving through a very fat book very slowly for almost two weeks now. That one is The Lonely Hunter, Virginia Spencer Carr's 1972 biography of Carson McCullers. I'll probably post some thoughts about it once I've finished. Of the four other books I read, here are quick comments on two.
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Published in 2001, this is a novel I'd steered clear of for what proved faulty reasons. I'd been given it as a gift some years back, and read the first five or 10 pages but decided not to read on, as I was turned off by the use of the word "terrorist" to describe the guerrillas who burst in upon and take hostage the attendees at a fancy-shmancy private opera recital at the vice president's mansion in an unnamed country that is clearly supposed to be Peru during the time of the Fujimori presidency and the armed struggles led by theTupac Amaru and Shining Path revolutionary groups. I never thought of picking Patchett's novel up again until a couple years ago when a comrade of mine, a communist revolutionary through and through, asked me if I'd read it and, when I told her I hadn't and why, said that I'd made a mistake and should read it. She said this novel, far from painting a one-dimensional hostile portrait of the hostage-taker characters, provides a deeply compassionate, deeply sympathetic portrayal of the rebels in all their humanity. She was right. I was swept into and very moved by the story, and found Patchett's writing lovely. Delicate and deep. I'm glad I finally got back to this one.
I also read Four Fish: the Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg, which I'd had on my to-read list for a while and impulsively bought at an airport bookstore. It was a fast read, and mildly interesting, but that's about the best I can say. Overfishing along with industrial development and environmental despoilage are leading/have led to catastrophic destruction in the world's rivers and seas, driving some key species to the brink of extinction and in the process destroying livelihoods and communities while, most important of all, depriving the world's tables of vitally important, formerly abundant and sometimes cheap foods. OK, well, I knew this already, but I'm glad I read up on the history of how all this happened and the particulars of the current situation. The four fish of the title, by the way, are salmon, tuna, bass and cod. The problem is that Greenberg either hasn't the foggiest notion of or is unwilling to take on the real culprit--capitalism, and in particular late-stage high-tech imperial-age capitalism--and therefore the solutions he offers up amount to mild, silly nostrums. In the course of which he--like Michael Pollan in his writings and all the other well-meaning but fundamentally helpless, unhelpful liberal-bourgeois commentators on current food issues and agribusiness--throws around terms like artisanal and sustainable and argues for small-scale settings and high-priced commodities as the way forward. Neither of which, a small scale of production or a high price of sale, is any solution at all for the great mass of billions of poor and working people. The only viable solution in the long run, and as it fast approaches the short run too, is an internationally coordinated effort to restore and revive the world's fisheries, manage fishing so as to conserve and protect the fish while also providing healthy non-toxic fish for the masses to eat, etc. etc. -- the very idea of which is inconceivable under capitalism, when the sole driving force is the quest for profit. Any analyst who can't or won't address this has little to offer.
I can't close without also noting an aspect of Greenberg's book that infuriated and disgusted me: his use of the word "man" to mean people or humankind. Really? Aaarggh!#$%! I've complained before about other writers who persist in using this absurd, insulting sexist language--and here we are, well into the 21st century, and they can't stop. Assholes! The word "fisherman" is lame enough--the word is "fisher," and any man who refuses to use it for any reason is a simple sexist as well as a simpleton--but much much worse is the repeated, relentless reference to our species as "man." I make allowances when I encounter this usage in older works--reluctantly, but I do. In a current book of popular science? No excuse. So offensive.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Daljit Nagra
I just read a brilliant poem in, of all unlikely places, the New Yorker. It's titled "A Black History of the English-Speaking Peoples." The poet is Daljit Nagra of whom I'm an instantaneous fan. I'm definitely going to get his most recent book, Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy Machine!!!. First, though, I'll reread the New Yorker poem once or twice. There's much meat to it. It's amazing in terms of craft and structure, but mostly its language and especially its broad, profound political sweep and scope blew me away. The poem begins with the poet in the audience at a Shakespeare play--King Lear, I think, though I'm not 100% sure I understood the allusions--at the modern reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, and it spins outward with his thoughts as they're spurred to range upon empire and history. I am, as I've confessed before here, spectacularly uneducated and ignorant in poetry, but as they say I know what I like and I like this very much.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger
Last week I read a fantastic novel. Montecore-The Silence of the Tiger by Jonas Hassen Khemiri. This one has everything I look for in fiction: an engaging story, original and multidimensional characters, deeply political themes, painful honesty, roaring humor. On top of that, the writing is incredibly—often uproariously—creative on several levels. And Khemiri plays with form in innovative ways that, for all the innovation, still allow full access for the ordinary reader and stay far removed from the usual apolitical antisocial ironical above-it-all airs so often assumed by metafiction.
Montecore tells the story of a North African (Algerian born, orphaned in the liberation war, raised in Tunisia) man who moves to Sweden after he and a Swedish woman fall in love. They marry and raise a family, and it's the firstborn, a son who grows up to become a writer, who's mostly, or may or may not be, the narrator of the father's story, along with someone who may be the father's oldest friend, may be the father himself, or both, or neither.
The story—of the father, Abbas, a photographer, and his son, Jonas—is in its essence the story of racism in Sweden, and of the hard lives of immigrant workers trying to survive in the face of this most unwelcoming society. How this racism, in the early years barely camouflaged behind the society's bland herring-and-snow exterior and later bursting out into organized mass murderous violence against African, Asian and Latin American immigrants, stymies Abbas's every attempt to pursue his artistic dreams. (What an artist he is! I'm crazy about his series of photographic depictions that capture the essence of Sweden: photo after photo of frozen stripped bicycles toppled over into ice heaps, frozen piles of vomit on snowy sidewalks, and the like.) And it's about how this racism creates in his son as he comes of age all the rage and will to rebel against oppression that the father spends nearly his whole adult life suppressing. And how it alienates, heartbreakingly, the two from each other.
It's also a story about language, first languages and adopted languages, about words and communication, and how deeply all this is tied up with identity, in particular national identity, and how language is a weapon in the hands of the smug racist majority forcing the immigrant minority always into outsider status. Khemiri is brilliant at weaving in, frequently with wild hilarity but also, increasingly as the story proceeds, with piercing poignancy, Abbas's endless and endlessly futile attempts to master Swedish, and of course we're also made to see that he could have become utterly fluent and it still would have made no dent in that racist walls that press in against him more and more.
In this regard, I must do something I too often forget: hail the translator. Rachel Willson-Broyles does some amazing work here. She somehow manages to take Khemiri's novel, written in Swedish and full of twisty-turny language, malapropisms, tricky turns of phrase, and both explicit and implicit commentary on the Swedish language, its racist uses, its relation to the anti-racist struggle, etc., and convey all that in English.
Two other points. One is that of late we're so inundated in this country with Swedish mysteries, suspense novels, detective novels, we're so overwhelmed with supposed evidence of that country's writers' excellence in this genre, that a deeply literary political novel that exposes some of the most important truths about the deeply racist horrors in that country is very very welcome. I'm grateful that this one was translated and published here, and I hope more of Khemiri's work soon will be. The other point, perhaps obvious but still needs to be said, I think, is that although Montecore is about a North African immigrant to Sweden and the racism he encounters there, it could just as easily be about the United States and immigrants here from any number of countries. Every word of it will ring true to anyone who has lived this experience, knows someone who has, or has the slightest awareness of the anti-immigrant racism that the U.S. ruling class has so assiduously whipped up over the last two decades or so. So Khemiri has, in my view, not only stripped away the lovely lies about lovely snowy Sweden, he has also provided an accurate assessment of commensurate horrors in the United States.
All in all, a powerful offering. It'll definitely be on my "best of" list for this year.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Against the Fourth of July with Eduardo Galeano
I've now read the magnificent Memory of Fire trilogy in its entirety, having finished Century of the Wind in time for this weekend's national celebration of jingoism, neocolonialism, militarism and mass murder. Thank you Eduardo Galeano, Uruguay's literary/historical gift to the world, for documenting the truth about U.S. imperialism and what it has done to the peoples of the Americas.
For U.S. imperialism, born two years before the turn of the 20th century, is necessarily the main focus of any honest treatment of the story of the Western Hemisphere in that century. Galeano is above all honest. So in this book he takes as his task, unpleasant to say the least though it must have been, to ferret out the hidden history and guide us step by step through what happened, when, where, to whom--by whom, at whose behest, funded by whom, these last questions leading always back to Washington and Wall Street.
As with the first two books in this series, Genesis and Faces and Masks, which I wrote about here and here, Century of the Wind consists of a series of vignettes ranging over all of Latin America and the Caribbean and occasionally touching down in the U.S. as well. Each is a small story about something that happened. Something that actually happened--at least one source for each is provided--yet about which something like 99 percent of the people in this country are unaware. Like the repeated U.S. invasions of Nicaragua. If you only count actual U.S. troops officially entering the country, that's happened eight times--yes, count 'em, U.S. soldiers have invaded the small Central American country of Nicaragua eight times. But of course the official admitted military incursions only tell half the story. If you also include "unofficial" U.S. invasion and occupation of Nicaragua--that is, by the National Guard, by paid U.S. mercenaries, by U.S.-paid Latin American mercenaries, by Latin Americans trained at the Pentagon-run School of the Americas a.k.a. School of the Assassins, and by private corporate-provided forces--the scope of the picture enlarges hugely.
Here's one example from the book. A vignette from 1909, headed with Galeano's typically mordant wit "Inter-American Relations at Work."
Another fact stands out. Along with the history of relentless exploitation, invasion, occupation, along with the mass graves and slaughtered Indigenous people and slave labor in mines and fields--there was also, always, resistance. There was always, as there today continues to be, organizing by the workers and poor. There were, as there are today, heroes. There were, as there will be again, revolutions. So in these pages we meet Sandino and Marti, Zapata and Villa, Torrijos and Bosch, Arbenz and Allende and Parra, and of course Che and Fidel and even Ethel and Julius, and many others whose names were less familiar to me who I'm grateful to Galeano for teaching me about.
On this July 4 weekend, reading Galeano spurs us to remember these additional facts:
So no, don't support the troops. Fight to bring them home, all the hundreds of thousands of them. Don't fly or salute the flag: it is the symbol of U.S. imperialism, and regarded as such by our sisters and brothers around the world. Fly the red flag instead, the flag of solidarity, unity, class struggle and revolution.
And read the Memory of Fire trilogy. It'll help fire you up for the work that lies ahead.
For U.S. imperialism, born two years before the turn of the 20th century, is necessarily the main focus of any honest treatment of the story of the Western Hemisphere in that century. Galeano is above all honest. So in this book he takes as his task, unpleasant to say the least though it must have been, to ferret out the hidden history and guide us step by step through what happened, when, where, to whom--by whom, at whose behest, funded by whom, these last questions leading always back to Washington and Wall Street.
As with the first two books in this series, Genesis and Faces and Masks, which I wrote about here and here, Century of the Wind consists of a series of vignettes ranging over all of Latin America and the Caribbean and occasionally touching down in the U.S. as well. Each is a small story about something that happened. Something that actually happened--at least one source for each is provided--yet about which something like 99 percent of the people in this country are unaware. Like the repeated U.S. invasions of Nicaragua. If you only count actual U.S. troops officially entering the country, that's happened eight times--yes, count 'em, U.S. soldiers have invaded the small Central American country of Nicaragua eight times. But of course the official admitted military incursions only tell half the story. If you also include "unofficial" U.S. invasion and occupation of Nicaragua--that is, by the National Guard, by paid U.S. mercenaries, by U.S.-paid Latin American mercenaries, by Latin Americans trained at the Pentagon-run School of the Americas a.k.a. School of the Assassins, and by private corporate-provided forces--the scope of the picture enlarges hugely.
Here's one example from the book. A vignette from 1909, headed with Galeano's typically mordant wit "Inter-American Relations at Work."
Philander Knox is a lawyer and a shareholder in the Rosario and Light Mines Company. He is also secretary of state of the United States. The president of Nicaragua, José Santos Zelaya, does not treat the company with due respect. He wants Rosario and Light to pay taxes. Nor does he respect the Church enough. The Holy Mother has judged him to be in sin ever since he expropriated her lands and suppressed tithes and first-fruits and profaned the sacrament of matrimony with a divorce law. So the Church applauds when the United States breaks relations with Nicaragua and Secretary of State Knox sends down some Marines who overthrow President Zelaya and put in his place the accountant of the Rosario and Light Mines Company.Wow. Among the many striking things about just this single vignette are the fact that those profiting from the foreign companies robbing Nicaragua's resources were one and the same as those running the U.S. government. The fact that the Church was in complete cahoots with the imperialists. The fact that the U.S. intervention was brazen. The fact, which sort of blew my mind although I know it's mere coincidence, that exactly 100 years before the U.S. backed and engineered a coup that ousted a progressive president named Zelaya who was working to lessen the deep poverty of Honduras by redistributing agricultural land albeit on a modest scale, the U.S. had staged a coup against a president named Zelaya who was working toward similar reforms in the neighboring country of Nicaragua.
Another fact stands out. Along with the history of relentless exploitation, invasion, occupation, along with the mass graves and slaughtered Indigenous people and slave labor in mines and fields--there was also, always, resistance. There was always, as there today continues to be, organizing by the workers and poor. There were, as there are today, heroes. There were, as there will be again, revolutions. So in these pages we meet Sandino and Marti, Zapata and Villa, Torrijos and Bosch, Arbenz and Allende and Parra, and of course Che and Fidel and even Ethel and Julius, and many others whose names were less familiar to me who I'm grateful to Galeano for teaching me about.
On this July 4 weekend, reading Galeano spurs us to remember these additional facts:
- The U.S. military has carried out over 144 "interventions" in Latin America and around the world.
- The number of secret, hidden, unacknowledged interventions and those carried out by entities other than the official arms of the U.S. military reaches the thousands.
- Today U.S. troops occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, and have killed over a million people in those countries. U.S. bombs rain down on Libya, Yemen and Somalia. The U.S. arms and funds the apartheid Israeli state's ongoing occupation of and war against Palestine. U.S. secret forces kidnap, torture and murder unknown numbers of people via "extraordinary rendition" operations in an unknown number of countries.
- There are currently over 700 U.S. military bases around the world.
So no, don't support the troops. Fight to bring them home, all the hundreds of thousands of them. Don't fly or salute the flag: it is the symbol of U.S. imperialism, and regarded as such by our sisters and brothers around the world. Fly the red flag instead, the flag of solidarity, unity, class struggle and revolution.
And read the Memory of Fire trilogy. It'll help fire you up for the work that lies ahead.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
The cultural crap heap
In a bad start to what I hope will be a relaxing three-day weekend, Teresa and I made the terrible mistake of renting the movie Burning Palms, written and directed by Christopher Landon. Stay away from this one! It's the most offensive piece of racist, misogynist and anti-gay--that's right, this pig managed a three-fer--cinematic trash I've seen since I don't know when. I don't want to spend much time and energy on it after losing almost two hours of my life to its utterly disgusting assault (and why did I, you might justifiably ask, to which I'd answer we kept looking at each other in disbelief, saying, oh come on, he's pulling our legs, he's building up to making some point, pitiful, right, but we were in denial, we just couldn't believe it could really be as horribly Nazi-ishly bad as it was), but I just have to make the record here. Burning Palms is a big bag of cultural fascism.
Women who love to be raped, seek out their rapists and beg for more? Oh yeah, got it. Women who become deranged after a single instance of slightly kinky sexual acts and mutilate themselves? Sure, check it out. Women who upon being confronted by nasty affronts immediately crumble and commit suicide? Yeah, you like watching dead women, self-loathing women, women begging to be raped? Hey, this is the movie for you. While you're at it, take a quick trip to West Hollywood to gawk at the cartoonishly shallow simpering self-centered idiotic gay men to which stereotype Landon manages to attach an equally cartoonish racist depiction of an African child adoptee.
Hate women, gay people, people of color? Check out Burning Palms. Otherwise, stay the hell away from this stinking pile of shit.
If more evidence were needed for how desperately we need a ramped-up movement creating and promoting progressive people's art and stomping to its death the anti-people--especially the racist, anti-woman, anti-gay--so-called art beloved of the bourgeoisie, here it is.
Women who love to be raped, seek out their rapists and beg for more? Oh yeah, got it. Women who become deranged after a single instance of slightly kinky sexual acts and mutilate themselves? Sure, check it out. Women who upon being confronted by nasty affronts immediately crumble and commit suicide? Yeah, you like watching dead women, self-loathing women, women begging to be raped? Hey, this is the movie for you. While you're at it, take a quick trip to West Hollywood to gawk at the cartoonishly shallow simpering self-centered idiotic gay men to which stereotype Landon manages to attach an equally cartoonish racist depiction of an African child adoptee.
Hate women, gay people, people of color? Check out Burning Palms. Otherwise, stay the hell away from this stinking pile of shit.
If more evidence were needed for how desperately we need a ramped-up movement creating and promoting progressive people's art and stomping to its death the anti-people--especially the racist, anti-woman, anti-gay--so-called art beloved of the bourgeoisie, here it is.
Friday, July 1, 2011
I'm weak
Today was payday and in one week my vacation starts and well I'm a weak-willed human being unable to stick to my library-only resolution as I ever more frantically labor to amass a big old to-read pile from which to choose vacation books. To put it another way: I picked up some half-price titles at the Strand on my lunch hour today.
Now I'm admiring and caressing them:
Toxicology by Jessica Hagedorn
The Major Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ludlow by David Mason
The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble
Riding the Trail of Tears by Blake M. Hausman
Leche by R. Zamora Linmark
Over the three-day weekend I'll probably finish (and possibly blog about) the novel I'm currently reading, Montecore-The Silence of the Tiger by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, a fantastic book. Then I've got piles upon piles to pick from next. How great is that?
Now I'm admiring and caressing them:
Toxicology by Jessica Hagedorn
The Major Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ludlow by David Mason
The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble
Riding the Trail of Tears by Blake M. Hausman
Leche by R. Zamora Linmark
Over the three-day weekend I'll probably finish (and possibly blog about) the novel I'm currently reading, Montecore-The Silence of the Tiger by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, a fantastic book. Then I've got piles upon piles to pick from next. How great is that?
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Bloombergville
No, the richest person in town, who by no coincidence at all is also mayor, hasn't managed to get the whole city named after him, not yet at least. What he and his class, the Wall Streeters who rule New York, have done is bit by bit, year by year, pushed through round after round of budget cuts, program closings, layoffs and other attacks on the working class and oppressed of this country's biggest city. They've just done it again, passing a so-called austerity budget that will make life harder for millions of people.
This time, though, they weren't able to duck and hide and finish their dirty work behind closed doors. This time there was Bloombergville.
For the last two weeks in June, through heat humidity and smog, through wind rain and chill, breathing an endless bouquet of auto and truck exhaust, harassed and moved from corner to corner by the cops, a hearty angry determined band of activists maintained a 24-hour encampment near City Hall to demand that City Council reject the Bloomberg/Wall Street/Democratic/Republican cuts—cuts to a budget that has a $3 billion surplus, in a city that routinely hands over billions of dollars in tax breaks to big business.
They called the encampment Bloombergville, an echo of the Hoovervilles that sprang up during the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was an exciting, vibrant phenomenon. Its population ranged from a few dozen at some points to several hundred at others. Many were young, high school and college age, but there were also many older folks, ranging up to veterans of the 1960s Freedom Rides now in their 70s and 80s. Union members along with the unorganized.
They organized themselves beautifully, in a fascinating demonstration of democracy in action, putting together committees to make sure everyone had food and water, to find area bathrooms, to furnish the sidewalk with yoga mats and sleeping bags and rotate lying-down time, to stay safe and secure. They made a lot of noise, too, banging buckets and beating drums and chanting and singing. Finally, last night, on the eve of the City Council vote, they marched around City Hall and demonstrated outside the bank building (!) where the Council's offices are—and went inside, where 13 protesters sat in and were promptly dragged off to jail.
Here are a few pictures I took last night with my camera phone. The first is one of my favorites. See how they created a real community, complete with a free library! Long live the spirit of Bloombergville! I'm sure many more will be sprouting up, here and around the country, in days to come.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
We the Animals
Last week I predicted that I'd tear through it and be blown away by it. Today I pronounce myself prescient. Didn't take much; anyone who's read any of his work knows going in that We the Animals is going to be a rare reading experience. And so it is. Justin Torres's writing is raw, piercing. It's unbearable yet un-put-down-able.
In a series of short takes, each scene unstitched with a surgical precision that leaves the reader stunned and short of breath, Justin lays bare the complex dynamic of pain, love, rage and laughter that is the family of the first-person narrator, a young boy, youngest of three brothers. These are rough waters. It seems at times it'll be a miracle if he makes it to shore. You so much want him to.
Along with the exquisite artistry of his writing, deep emotional insight, and profound humanity, Justin offers here something that I particularly value. In his depiction of what it would be too glib to label dysfunction in an oppressed working-class family barely getting by, he lays bare some of what this system does to those it exploits most. How the desperation of never having enough—money, respect, time, support—plays out in violence, drink, love expressed as its opposite, hurt all around.
Capitalism, it seems to me, gives love a hard go of it. I think there is an accurate reflection of this in We the Animals.
By the way, I've taken the liberty here of referring to the author by his first name because, as I've mentioned before, I know him a little, having spent a week with him a few years ago at a writing retreat. In an interview in the PR material, Justin makes the point, as so many authors must, that this is fiction, not memoir. It is nevertheless true, as he also says, that the book's framework—the family he portrays, its circumstances— is based on his family. He may not have lived through every story told in these pages, but he sure went through some stuff.
It reminds me again of how many wondrous talented writers and artists are out there who never get a chance to fulfill their potential. We are all so lucky that here, in Justin Torres, is one who made it to where he ought to be.
The book is out the first week in September, which is also when Justin's book tour starts. I've already marked my calendar for his first stop here in New York, at the New School on September 12. He'll also be going to San Francisco, Boston, D.C., Syracuse, Austin, Iowa City, Portland, and Los Angeles, so get yourself to hear him read if you can.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Now I can get married. No I do not thank Governor Cuomo
I'm writing this late Friday evening, an hour or so after the New York state legislature finally passed the marriage equality bill, legalizing same-sex marriage. This is a great victory--for which full credit goes to our community, to our 42-plus years of fighting, organizing, mass mobilizations, our struggling angry strong proud LGBTQ people. No credit is due to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In fact, the way that this vile vicious union-busting anti-worker anti-poor program-cutting reactionary maneuvered his way into the position of appearing as the hero, the leader, the great man who handed us this law is in my view the most brazen display of demagoguery mounted by any politician in a long time. Here he is--one day after forcing the state employees' unions to sign off on a raft of terrible givebacks, in the throes of attacking the working-class students of SUNY and CUNY by cutting budgets and raising tuition, here he is gutting social programs left and right, pushing the kind of assault against the working class of New York state that not even the last Republican governor could get away with--and lo and behold he gets to portray himself as the great liberator. What an act--hey everybody, says the guv, don't look at what I'm doing to wreck and ruin you, no, look over here, look at my beautiful rhetoric. I'm the guy who gave you gay marriage!
Well no he didn't. We won this with our many years of fighting. And we should none of us offer up any thanks to this demagogue, nor let this achievement distract us from all the evil he is doing. Let's celebrate tonight! Tomorrow let's get back to organizing to fight back against him!
That said, I want also to clarify why I do see this as a victory. It might seem surprising, coming from a revolutionary socialist. It's certainly true that as a communist I am no fan of the patriarchal institution of marriage, rooted as it is in class society, based as it is on the subjugation of women. I've never understood why any revolutionary would get married, except discreetly if they felt they had to for practical reasons like getting onto a spouse's health plan. However, this here is a different matter. This here is a matter of an oppressed group having been barred from access to a legal right. It is, simply, a matter of equality. Marriage may be an estate rooted in sexist society--but that's marriage as it traditionally was, heterosexual marriage whose essential purpose was to codify paternity, ensure patrilineal inheritance, and enforce male ownership of women. But marriage today is also a conferral of legal recognition--a conferral of over 1000 rights and privileges under the law. To be banned from access to that recognition and to those over 1000 rights and privileges is sheer discrimination. Which is why the fight to win same-sex marriage is a basic civil-rights struggle.
And why the passage of this law is something to celebrate. In fact, when I got home tonight after a meeting and turned on NY1 and watched live as the state senate acted on the bill, and I saw on the split screen that they were also covering the crowd that had gathered in Sheridan Square outside the Stonewall Inn, waiting to hear the news, I really regretted not realizing folks would be down there, not having gone down to the Village, not being there with my people cheering and dancing and singing and crying a little. No one should underestimate the very real joy so many people feel tonight. Finally, a measure of justice. Finally, some recognition of our relationships. Of our love.
On the other hand. Yeah, you're right if you say it's all symbolic. For it is--getting married in New York state carries with it precious few if any practical actual benefits. Not as long as the Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, remains federal law. DOMA means that even if same-sex couples get married in any one of the several states that now let them, the federal government will not recognize the marriage, and in fact the horribly onerous anti-gay tax penalty that now accrues to employees whose same-sex spouse is covered on their health plan will go on.
Thus, there is much more to this fight. Ultimately, this state-by-state nonsense must be transcended. No oppressed minority can win its rights this way. This is, and should be, a national fight. And marriage is, and should be, a federal right. As is the overall right to freedom from discrimination in housing, employment public accomodations, and so on -- that is, the basic right that we have been fighting for all these years and that we still lack in most of this country. There is still no federal law banning anti-LGBT discrimination.
So yeah, the fight goes on. It's fitting that we are now in the weekend of the annual LGBT Pride events here in New York, when we come out in our hundreds of thousands and mark the anniversary of the great 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. Sunday we'll march down Fifth Avenue as we always do, and we'll show our pride and joy and strength while we raise all our demands. Anger and celebration in equal measure: it will be a good day. We have a right to savor this small step forward.
As for me, I'll be heading down to City Hall with Teresa, my lover of 23 years, soon after the new law takes effect, some time this summer. We'd actually decided a while back to get married, and had been trying to plan a few days to take a quiet trip to Connecticut, the nearest state that allowed same-sex marriage. Now we don't have to go to all that trouble. Now we can just take the subway downtown. We're not going to make a big to-do out of it. We're both still too queasy about all that marriage has meant in its long history as an oppressive sexist institution. We both know we won't get any practical benefit from taking this step. But we decided that, as fighters for liberation, when the movement we've been a part of succeeds in breaking down even a small part of the social barriers, even if mostly, for now, symbolically, it is correct that we should step forward and claim this newly won right. We should take our place among our sisters and brothers saying this is ours, we've won it, we're taking it. It's a statement we've got to make.
Well no he didn't. We won this with our many years of fighting. And we should none of us offer up any thanks to this demagogue, nor let this achievement distract us from all the evil he is doing. Let's celebrate tonight! Tomorrow let's get back to organizing to fight back against him!
That said, I want also to clarify why I do see this as a victory. It might seem surprising, coming from a revolutionary socialist. It's certainly true that as a communist I am no fan of the patriarchal institution of marriage, rooted as it is in class society, based as it is on the subjugation of women. I've never understood why any revolutionary would get married, except discreetly if they felt they had to for practical reasons like getting onto a spouse's health plan. However, this here is a different matter. This here is a matter of an oppressed group having been barred from access to a legal right. It is, simply, a matter of equality. Marriage may be an estate rooted in sexist society--but that's marriage as it traditionally was, heterosexual marriage whose essential purpose was to codify paternity, ensure patrilineal inheritance, and enforce male ownership of women. But marriage today is also a conferral of legal recognition--a conferral of over 1000 rights and privileges under the law. To be banned from access to that recognition and to those over 1000 rights and privileges is sheer discrimination. Which is why the fight to win same-sex marriage is a basic civil-rights struggle.
And why the passage of this law is something to celebrate. In fact, when I got home tonight after a meeting and turned on NY1 and watched live as the state senate acted on the bill, and I saw on the split screen that they were also covering the crowd that had gathered in Sheridan Square outside the Stonewall Inn, waiting to hear the news, I really regretted not realizing folks would be down there, not having gone down to the Village, not being there with my people cheering and dancing and singing and crying a little. No one should underestimate the very real joy so many people feel tonight. Finally, a measure of justice. Finally, some recognition of our relationships. Of our love.
On the other hand. Yeah, you're right if you say it's all symbolic. For it is--getting married in New York state carries with it precious few if any practical actual benefits. Not as long as the Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, remains federal law. DOMA means that even if same-sex couples get married in any one of the several states that now let them, the federal government will not recognize the marriage, and in fact the horribly onerous anti-gay tax penalty that now accrues to employees whose same-sex spouse is covered on their health plan will go on.
Thus, there is much more to this fight. Ultimately, this state-by-state nonsense must be transcended. No oppressed minority can win its rights this way. This is, and should be, a national fight. And marriage is, and should be, a federal right. As is the overall right to freedom from discrimination in housing, employment public accomodations, and so on -- that is, the basic right that we have been fighting for all these years and that we still lack in most of this country. There is still no federal law banning anti-LGBT discrimination.
So yeah, the fight goes on. It's fitting that we are now in the weekend of the annual LGBT Pride events here in New York, when we come out in our hundreds of thousands and mark the anniversary of the great 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. Sunday we'll march down Fifth Avenue as we always do, and we'll show our pride and joy and strength while we raise all our demands. Anger and celebration in equal measure: it will be a good day. We have a right to savor this small step forward.
As for me, I'll be heading down to City Hall with Teresa, my lover of 23 years, soon after the new law takes effect, some time this summer. We'd actually decided a while back to get married, and had been trying to plan a few days to take a quiet trip to Connecticut, the nearest state that allowed same-sex marriage. Now we don't have to go to all that trouble. Now we can just take the subway downtown. We're not going to make a big to-do out of it. We're both still too queasy about all that marriage has meant in its long history as an oppressive sexist institution. We both know we won't get any practical benefit from taking this step. But we decided that, as fighters for liberation, when the movement we've been a part of succeeds in breaking down even a small part of the social barriers, even if mostly, for now, symbolically, it is correct that we should step forward and claim this newly won right. We should take our place among our sisters and brothers saying this is ours, we've won it, we're taking it. It's a statement we've got to make.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Summer reading
It's been an up-and-down, mostly middling, first half of the year reading-wise. Now things are looking up.
I'm about to start reading Century of the Wind, the final book in Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy about the history of the Western Hemisphere. I happened to finish the first volume just before Columbus Day, and the second just before Veterans Day, and I'm guessing I'll finish this third in time to offer up its evidence against the celebration of imperialism and jingoism that is the Fourth of July. Sure looking forward to that.
When I finish the Galeano, I'll move on to another book that I'm looking forward to with wild thrilled anticipation, We the Animals, the first novel by Justin Torres. I'm ecstatic to have procured a review copy in advance of the September 6 publication date, and I expect to rip through its pages speedily and giddily. How can I be so confident? Well, I read several chapters in early draft form four years ago when Justin and I were both fellows at the first annual Lambda Literary Foundation LGBT writers' retreat in Los Angeles. Early draft? I remember that everyone in the workshop was hard pressed to offer any criticism or suggestions, the writing was so exquisitely fierce and stunning. I also loved Justin himself. He's a beautiful person. His has not been a life of middle-class white privilege as is the case with so many of the first-novelist products of the MFA factory to whom we're serially subjected, nor is he unconscious politically as they so generally are, and his fiction reflects this. I'm so happy he's getting the recognition he deserves, and so happy his book tops my to-read pile.
Congratulate me: I still haven't used up the bookstore gift certificate I got last holiday season. I did take a big chunk out of it this past week when I picked up A Moment in the Sun, the new novel by writer and filmmaker John Sayles. It's a big fat book--perfect for summer vacation, issued in a gorgeous edition by McSweeney's--that takes on the history of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. I'm going on faith that Sayles, whose movies are all politically progressive and mostly pretty good, does justice to the topic. Hope I'm right; this will be some literally heavy lifting for naught if it turns out my faith is misplaced.
Speaking of vacation--yay! It looms! I've got about three more weeks to work, then I'll be off for three weeks. It may not be the reading-est vacation I've ever had, as I'll be visiting a friend on the West Coast for a hunk of it, but then again that may not interfere as she's a big reader too and we may spend nice chunks of time in quiet companionship reading poolside. Sounds like heaven, no? So here are some of the volumes, mostly fiction but some non, that I've amassed with my gift certificate and in my libraries rounds, from among which I'll be making my vacation reading selections. In no particular order except that first place must always go to genius:
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (I suddenly realized recently that I'd never read this, to my shame)
Caramba! by Nina Marie Martinez
Malinche's Children by Daniel Houston-Davila
The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
Stonewall by Martin Duberman
Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe
The Famished Road by Ben Okri
L'Assommoir by Emile Zola
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington
Cellophane by Marie Arana
Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman
Finally, a note about the novel I just read. Pym by Mat Johnson. Damn! This is one rollicking raging biting piercing angry hilarious book. It is about--well, the story itself is a wild quasi-spec-fic tale most of which takes place on Antarctica where an all-Black team has gone in quest of, variously, pure water, adventure, fame, fortune, love, revenge and the truth, but what it's about is Blackness and whiteness and the racism upon which this country was founded, built and currently rests. This is a work of high imagination, incredible invention, cutting humor, and most profound meditation on "race" and racism. You should read it.
I'm about to start reading Century of the Wind, the final book in Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy about the history of the Western Hemisphere. I happened to finish the first volume just before Columbus Day, and the second just before Veterans Day, and I'm guessing I'll finish this third in time to offer up its evidence against the celebration of imperialism and jingoism that is the Fourth of July. Sure looking forward to that.
When I finish the Galeano, I'll move on to another book that I'm looking forward to with wild thrilled anticipation, We the Animals, the first novel by Justin Torres. I'm ecstatic to have procured a review copy in advance of the September 6 publication date, and I expect to rip through its pages speedily and giddily. How can I be so confident? Well, I read several chapters in early draft form four years ago when Justin and I were both fellows at the first annual Lambda Literary Foundation LGBT writers' retreat in Los Angeles. Early draft? I remember that everyone in the workshop was hard pressed to offer any criticism or suggestions, the writing was so exquisitely fierce and stunning. I also loved Justin himself. He's a beautiful person. His has not been a life of middle-class white privilege as is the case with so many of the first-novelist products of the MFA factory to whom we're serially subjected, nor is he unconscious politically as they so generally are, and his fiction reflects this. I'm so happy he's getting the recognition he deserves, and so happy his book tops my to-read pile.
Congratulate me: I still haven't used up the bookstore gift certificate I got last holiday season. I did take a big chunk out of it this past week when I picked up A Moment in the Sun, the new novel by writer and filmmaker John Sayles. It's a big fat book--perfect for summer vacation, issued in a gorgeous edition by McSweeney's--that takes on the history of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. I'm going on faith that Sayles, whose movies are all politically progressive and mostly pretty good, does justice to the topic. Hope I'm right; this will be some literally heavy lifting for naught if it turns out my faith is misplaced.
Speaking of vacation--yay! It looms! I've got about three more weeks to work, then I'll be off for three weeks. It may not be the reading-est vacation I've ever had, as I'll be visiting a friend on the West Coast for a hunk of it, but then again that may not interfere as she's a big reader too and we may spend nice chunks of time in quiet companionship reading poolside. Sounds like heaven, no? So here are some of the volumes, mostly fiction but some non, that I've amassed with my gift certificate and in my libraries rounds, from among which I'll be making my vacation reading selections. In no particular order except that first place must always go to genius:
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (I suddenly realized recently that I'd never read this, to my shame)
Caramba! by Nina Marie Martinez
Malinche's Children by Daniel Houston-Davila
The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
Stonewall by Martin Duberman
Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe
The Famished Road by Ben Okri
L'Assommoir by Emile Zola
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington
Cellophane by Marie Arana
Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman
Finally, a note about the novel I just read. Pym by Mat Johnson. Damn! This is one rollicking raging biting piercing angry hilarious book. It is about--well, the story itself is a wild quasi-spec-fic tale most of which takes place on Antarctica where an all-Black team has gone in quest of, variously, pure water, adventure, fame, fortune, love, revenge and the truth, but what it's about is Blackness and whiteness and the racism upon which this country was founded, built and currently rests. This is a work of high imagination, incredible invention, cutting humor, and most profound meditation on "race" and racism. You should read it.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Gaza: Symbol of Resistance
I referred to it earlier this year, in the context of the popular uprisings in Egypt and other Arab countries and the promise they hold for boosting the Palestinian struggle, but now that I actually have a published (as opposed to pre-publication proof) copy in my hands I want to draw attention to the new book Gaza: Symbol of Resistance, edited by the brilliant Joyce Chediac and issued by World View Forum.
This is an important book. This is a unique book. This is an informative book and this is one of those rare books that are intended to contribute to the struggle, and succeed in doing so. You should buy and read this book.
Why? Because the people of Gaza are suffering, they are suffering terribly, bombed, blockaded, consigned to terrible conditions without adequate food, water, means of sanitation, medicine--and because this suffering is sponsored by your tax dollars, which fully fund and sponsor the Zionist state's ongoing war against the Palestinian people, whose land it has occupied for 63 years.
Here is the truth, written by partisans for Palestine, about Israel's bombardment and occupation of Gaza in December 2008-January 2009, about what came before, about the endless vicious attacks since. Most important, two truths you'll never get from the bourgeois press: what's really behind this criminal campaign against the people of Gaza, and what the people of Gaza themselves are doing, saying, thinking. For me, it is the heroism of our Palestinian sisters and brothers in Gaza--their resistance, their defiance in the face of what would seem to be unbearable conditions and relentless pressure, their steadfast refusal to deny their own history or abandon their right to self-determination--that comes through strongest in these pages and is most inspiring. This is why the title is so apt.
There's another reason I'm so glad this book is out and why I hope it gets out to many readers, especially now as we approach the big LGBT Pride march here in New York City. Every year on the last Sunday in June, hundreds of thousands gather to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion that gave rise to the modern gay movement. This year, spurred in large part by a political struggle that's broken out, a new contingent, organized by LGBT Palestine solidarity activists, will be marching: Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. QAIA has already marched this month, in the Queens and Brooklyn Pride parades, where they and their message urging our community to stand with our Palestinian sisters and brothers were well received. Now it's on to the big event next Sunday.
The political struggle I refer to is over the right of pro-Palestinian queer groups to meet at the LGBT Center on 13th Street in Manhattan. I blogged about this issue when it first broke out in early March. Sadly, since then the position of the Center's officialdom, after a number of flip-flops, has gone from bad to worse. Its latest and supposedly final edict was to permanently ban all groups having anything to do with "the Israel/Palestinian issue." This fake equating of "both sides" is of course patent nonsense--the ruling is nothing more or less than a racist attack against Palestinian queers and their supporters, and a craven cave-in to the most brazen reactionary forces who mobilized a racist pressure campaign on the Center's board and director, a campaign to whose every demand these sorry stooges have acquiesced. Well, the friends of Palestine know a thing or two about mobilizing themselves, and this struggle is far from over, won't end, in fact, until the Center is once again a free, open space for all of our community. For more on this whole matter, check out Queers for an Open LGBT Center. On their site, every step over the last few months is documented, allied groups are listed, and plans--including a protest at this Monday's annual fancy-shmancy Garden Party and then the contingent at next Sunday's big march--are offered.
Why? Because the people of Gaza are suffering, they are suffering terribly, bombed, blockaded, consigned to terrible conditions without adequate food, water, means of sanitation, medicine--and because this suffering is sponsored by your tax dollars, which fully fund and sponsor the Zionist state's ongoing war against the Palestinian people, whose land it has occupied for 63 years.
Here is the truth, written by partisans for Palestine, about Israel's bombardment and occupation of Gaza in December 2008-January 2009, about what came before, about the endless vicious attacks since. Most important, two truths you'll never get from the bourgeois press: what's really behind this criminal campaign against the people of Gaza, and what the people of Gaza themselves are doing, saying, thinking. For me, it is the heroism of our Palestinian sisters and brothers in Gaza--their resistance, their defiance in the face of what would seem to be unbearable conditions and relentless pressure, their steadfast refusal to deny their own history or abandon their right to self-determination--that comes through strongest in these pages and is most inspiring. This is why the title is so apt.
There's another reason I'm so glad this book is out and why I hope it gets out to many readers, especially now as we approach the big LGBT Pride march here in New York City. Every year on the last Sunday in June, hundreds of thousands gather to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion that gave rise to the modern gay movement. This year, spurred in large part by a political struggle that's broken out, a new contingent, organized by LGBT Palestine solidarity activists, will be marching: Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. QAIA has already marched this month, in the Queens and Brooklyn Pride parades, where they and their message urging our community to stand with our Palestinian sisters and brothers were well received. Now it's on to the big event next Sunday.
 | |
| At Queens Pride |
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Betwixt & between
The blogging slowdown continues, as is surely apparent. I've also recently closed my Facebook account, so my live-time online presence, such as it was, is shrinking. I never did tweet or follow anyone on Twitter—could there be anything more annoying, more pointless, trivial, hollow, time-wasting?—and although I was a more or less active Facebook user for the past couple of years, my engagement was always steeped in ambivalence. My FB postings were generally judicious, I think, not too crazy, impulsive, inappropriate or offensive--I am a highly flawed individual but I'm not a dickhead or a weiner (yeah, I went there)—but they always made me queasy nonetheless. Not only did it feel creepy to repair to this virtual lounge whenever I had something I wanted to express and express it to virtual people, especially for someone like me who's always been reserved in person with all but my closest friends (and yeah, to them I'm a wild, un-shut-uppable ranter), creepy so that I almost always regretted posting, always felt embarrassed or out of control, but more than that I could never quite figure out the answer to this question: Why bother? Why bother the couple hundred or so people I'd somehow accumulated as "friends" with my random effluvia? Why post or pass along endless news items, political analysis, Youtube videos and the like when there are plenty of other people doing it already? As for the flip side, reading all those other folks' equally random effluvia and/or endlessly repetitive news etc., logging onto FB and scrolling through the posts (and mind you, this was even after adjusting my settings so that many didn't show anyway) came to feel like punishment. Like slogging through a daily flogging to which I ultimately couldn't find a reason to keep subjecting myself. Important political news and developments? I'm on enough lists and read enough news that most things I should see make their way to me already. Personal info and updates? If we really know and care about each other, even virtually, you'll call or email me. Ultimately, I couldn't come up with any reason to keep returning to an imaginary land of irkdom and jerkdom except to spin my wheels when what they need is to stay in contact with the road and transport me forward.
So goodbye to all that. Not to all this, lit-blogging, yet, but who knows. The original impetus for starting Read Red, almost three years ago now, had to do with my frustration at the dearth of truly left literary news and analysis on the internet. This dearth remains in effect, to the best of my knowledge, at least in English. The ubiquity of bourgeois consciousness, unconscious though it generally is especially in the minds of good-hearted progressive-oriented commentators, bloggers, reviewers et al, remains unchanged. My frustration unabates. However, my need to comment, my desire to do what I can to carve out a class-struggle space in the literary blogosphere, no longer compels quite so compellingly as it did at the start. It might just be fatigue. I mean, how many times can I yelp and yowl about the endless assault of literary and other offenses? It might just be personal fatigue unrelated to matters literary or bloggish. Hell, it might just be that I need a vacation (one month till VDay).
It might also be—no, it definitely is—that I've got to knuckle down, as I've scolded myself so many times before, including publicly here on this blog, and get this damned novel finished. I've got to brush aside impediments. FB was one, an absurd time waster like online games used to be. Is Read Red another? Not if I maintain the slowed down pace I've reverted to this spring. As long as I only post here when I've actually got something halfway meaningful to contribute to the conversation, I think this blog justifies itself, both in a broad way in terms of fulfilling its charge of offering a communist take on literature and personally while not sucking my writing energy away from the story I'm trying to get onto the page.
So I'm here. I'll be back. As for all that other crap, if you need me you know where to find me.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Even the Rain
I saw a provocative and important movie this past weekend. Even the Rain, about a year old, available, at least on my cable system, on demand for five bucks. It's about a film crew that's come to Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the year 2000 to make a movie about the arrival and subsequent actions of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish colonizers in what are now the Americas. The movie they are making has a progressive slant; it shows the horrors inflicted on the Indigenous inhabitants by the invaders; it does not portray Columbus and the rest as heroes; it highlights the efforts of Bartolome de las Casas and the now lesser-known Antonio Montesinos against these horrors. And yet, for all their good intentions, the European director/writer, producer, crew and most of the actors, from the moment they arrive for the shoot, themselves engage in the same racism, exploitation and oppression that they're supposedly committed to exposing when it's safely 500 years in the past. Ironies abound, but really irony is the wrong word because there's a bourgeois disengagement to artistic irony, a trap into which Even the Rain does not fall. Rather, I should say that this film does a great job, careful but clear, of depicting a latter-day invasion—not physically cruel, brutal or violent but nevertheless oppressive and exploitive in many ways, and clueless about its oppressiveness, utterly insensitive—an invasion in this case by a moneyed force, that is, a movie production.
Although that alone would be interesting enough, there's much more. For the film crew arrives just as the great water wars of Cochabamba are hitting a fever pitch. No one—actors, director, producer, crew—remains untouched as the Bolivian peasants and workers organize, take to the streets, shut down the city, battle street by street to defend a most basic, precious right. The fulcrum of it all, of the struggle and of the movie and of the movie within the movie, is the character of Daniel. He and his daughter have been hired for the movie, he playing the pivotal role of Hatuey, the Taino rebel who led the resistance to the invaders and was crucified for it. At the same time, Daniel is a leader of the actual real-life struggle to block imperialism (it was the U.S. company Bechtel) from stealing the people's water and forcing them to pay for it. This struggle coincides with and interrupts the shoot, and it forces the producer and director to make hard decisions about what matters most—a movie or a struggle for justice, an investment or a human being.
The acting in Even the Rain is very good, especially that of Juan Carlos Aduviri as Hatuey and Luis Tosar as Costa the producer. The director is IcÃar BollaÃn; I'm not familiar with her work but would gladly see more of her movies. The writer is Paul Laverty, who also wrote Bread and Roses about the Justice for Janitors strike in Los Angeles and the great great The Wind that Shakes the Barley about the Irish republican struggle. The movie is dedicated to Howard Zinn, a signal of the filmmakers' orientation toward truth telling.
A final note. I mused a bit after watching Even the Rain about why the filmmakers hadn't simply made a movie about the Cochabamba water wars and how the peasants and workers drove Bechtel out of Bolivia. Wouldn't that be a great, exciting, dramatic movie, and don't we desperately need movies that show the class struggle in action? So is this one more case of foregrounding European central characters (the Spanish moviemakers of the movie-within-the-movie) onto a story that is not theirs, of telling a story of Indigenous resistance through European eyes? In one way, yes it is, it's undeniable, that's what this film does. In another way, though, I think the artists behind Even the Rain deserve some leeway, some credit, even. I think they very consciously framed the story the way they did, not to provide some through-privileged-eyes surrogate viewpoint, but rather to make a particular point about how what Columbus started is still going on. How Europe (now joined by the U.S.) continues to rob the riches and resources of Latin America and the Caribbean (and Asia and Africa)—in the most pernicious, overt ways, as with Bechtel's water grab, and also in less obvious or extreme ways, as with the moviemakers-within-the-movie paying extras $2 a day, putting them through physical and psychological hardship, swooping in to spend the least possible money for the highest possible later profit, all the while trying desperately to ignore the class war swirling all around them.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Silver Sparrow
As anyone who reads this blog with any regularity knows, I'm a fan of novelist Tayari Jones. I read and raved about her first two novels, Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling. I follow her blog ardently. I admire her, not only as an author but as someone who makes it her business to encourage and mentor young writers, particularly people of color, women, LGBT folks, working-class writers, everyone, in other words, who doesn't get much encouragement from the literary establishment. I have it on good authority that she's a great teacher, too, tough as all get-out in that way great teachers have of dragging the best out of you, not letting you settle for less, and then when the best emerges giving you all the strokes you deserve.
Back to her writing. It's superb. However, from my vantage point, as I belabor constantly hereabouts, that's not enough. I require something more from fiction, something beyond beautifully crafted sentences. I require engagement, some meaningful level of grappling with social and political issues, with reality, and I mean more substantial reality than kitchen-table talk or interpersonal angst. Tayari Jones' work engages with the world. I don't know if she thinks of herself as a political writer, and most reviews of her work don't characterize her that way, and that's cool, in my book you don't have to be a Political Writer to be a political writer, see what I mean? You have to contend in some way with the realities of life in this society (or whatever society you're writing about), and she does so with great skill and insight.
So yay! She's got a new novel out! Silver Sparrow, just released by Algonquin.
And yay--I'm going to the book launch Wednesday night at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. Reading, Signing, Frolicking, as it's described on the author's website, where you can find the other dates in her book tour. I'm bringing some friends, and we're going to try to get there in time to find seats, which might be hard because I have a feeling it'll be a full house. No matter. I'll be glad to stand.
In fact, I'll be sitting much of the next day, on a plane as Teresa and I fly to Texas to spend an extended holiday weekend with her family. Which means this is probably the last post for at least a week, probably more. I probably won't get to read Silver Sparrow until some time after we return--I don't think I'll take it on the trip because I don't want to start it on the plane only to be ripped away from it for the better part of a week visiting with family--but I'll be happy knowing it's waiting for me back home in Queens.
Update: I attended and maximally enjoyed the book launch on May 25. It was packed, it was exciting, and Tayari was incredibly thrilling. She's not only a great writer but a great reader, and so smart, and so funny, and the only reason I'm not mentioning that she's also gorgeous and charming and charismatic is because that would be against my principles since all that should matter is the art...anyway, it was a great, I'm so glad I went, and I'm looking forward to reading her book very soon.
Now I'm back from six days in Texas, or rather inside the air conditioning of Texas, since it was way too hot to step outside. It was a lovely time. But I ate way too much, and especially way too much meat--yep, when in Texas--so now it's back to being sensible. And to work. I'll return with new lit talk as soon as I can.
Back to her writing. It's superb. However, from my vantage point, as I belabor constantly hereabouts, that's not enough. I require something more from fiction, something beyond beautifully crafted sentences. I require engagement, some meaningful level of grappling with social and political issues, with reality, and I mean more substantial reality than kitchen-table talk or interpersonal angst. Tayari Jones' work engages with the world. I don't know if she thinks of herself as a political writer, and most reviews of her work don't characterize her that way, and that's cool, in my book you don't have to be a Political Writer to be a political writer, see what I mean? You have to contend in some way with the realities of life in this society (or whatever society you're writing about), and she does so with great skill and insight.
So yay! She's got a new novel out! Silver Sparrow, just released by Algonquin.
In fact, I'll be sitting much of the next day, on a plane as Teresa and I fly to Texas to spend an extended holiday weekend with her family. Which means this is probably the last post for at least a week, probably more. I probably won't get to read Silver Sparrow until some time after we return--I don't think I'll take it on the trip because I don't want to start it on the plane only to be ripped away from it for the better part of a week visiting with family--but I'll be happy knowing it's waiting for me back home in Queens.
Update: I attended and maximally enjoyed the book launch on May 25. It was packed, it was exciting, and Tayari was incredibly thrilling. She's not only a great writer but a great reader, and so smart, and so funny, and the only reason I'm not mentioning that she's also gorgeous and charming and charismatic is because that would be against my principles since all that should matter is the art...anyway, it was a great, I'm so glad I went, and I'm looking forward to reading her book very soon.
Now I'm back from six days in Texas, or rather inside the air conditioning of Texas, since it was way too hot to step outside. It was a lovely time. But I ate way too much, and especially way too much meat--yep, when in Texas--so now it's back to being sensible. And to work. I'll return with new lit talk as soon as I can.
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