Assata

It's embarrassing that I hadn't read it till now, over 10 years since its publication, but I did just read Assata, the autobiography of Assata Shakur. And wow.

This is a great book. I say that not just because it's by a hero of the struggle for liberation and revolution. Not just because it's timely to read Assata's own words now especially, since the U.S. government has renewed its attack on her this month, labeling her a terrorist and naming her one of the FBI's most wanted. Not only because this latest escalation is also an attack on Cuba, where sister Assata has lived since she escaped prison and sought refuge in that revolutionary nation. All these are true and all are good reasons to read her story.

But I recommend her autobiography also for the simple reason that it's a great book. Told in the most vivid, no-nonsense language, filled with the verve and fervor that Assata Shakur has brought to her lifetime of struggle, deeply informative and winning. This is a book to strengthen and buoy revolutionaries. It is also a book to educate and raise the consciousness of those who may not yet understand why socialist revolution is necessary. Because Assata Shakur, like most people, was once such a person--and by tracing her life, her experiences, what she witnessed, what she learned, she provides here a deeply affecting series of lessons, depicted as she herself learned them. About racism and how it's integral to capitalism. About education and mis-education. About oppression, how to recognize it and how to fight it.

I'm sorry it took me so long to read this book. I'm moved and humbled by reading it. Nearly as moved and humbled as I was on one of the greatest days of my life, in April 1996, when I met sister Assata in Havana, Cuba. I was there with the U.S.-Cuba Labor Exchange, and one afternoon our delegation was driven to a downtown building for a snacks-and-drinks reception where we, unbelievably thrillingly, got to meet and chat with Assata.

So here I am with the great liberation fighter Assata Shakur. (Original photo is good quality but I don't have a scanner so this is a cell-phone shot of the actual photograph.) In the second picture we're joined by Khadouri, a wonderful Iraqi activist. That same day at that same reception we also met another great revolutionary, Kwame Toure, who was also in exile from the U.S., living in Guinea, but at that time was in Havana receiving medical treatment for the cancer that would eventually kill him. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a picture of myself with him, but meeting and talking with him was also a great honor for me, one of the highlights of my life.

 U.S. terrorist government: hands off Assata!

Nakba

Today is the 65th anniversary of the Nakba: the catastrophe that was the official creation, backed by the full force of U.S. imperialism, of the state of Israel based on the expulsion of three-quarters-of-a-million Palestinians from their homes and homeland.

Today roughly 7 million refugees, those expelled and their descendants, take to the streets worldwide to demand the right to return.

Today all who support and defend the right to self-determination of all peoples stand with the heroic Palestinian people.

In less than two weeks there will be a focus on the struggle's literary front as the fifth annual Palestine Festival of Literature convenes. As in past years, PalFest features a great array of writers, Palestinians and others, in what looks like a fabulous series of programs "in cities across all of historical Palestine," as the organizers have announced. Most every year Israeli state forces attempt to block or disrupt one or another session, but PalFest cannot be stopped. Here's a list of participants over the years. Read their work! And here's an interesting commentary from a British author about how PalFest educated him and improved his novel.

But it's May Day!

And I can't let the other side grab my attention. Not today, on our day, the workers' day.

Happy May Day! To my sisters and brothers here in New York, gathered in Union Square. And in Havana, in Revolution Plaza.

And in Gaza.

And around the world. A better one's in birth!

More on the anticommunist saints of the writing world

Stopping in again briefly with a coda to yesterday's post regarding the PEN World Voices Conference. A while back I read this illuminating piece on Vaclav Havel by the leftist writer Michael Parenti. Havel of course was the playwright and leading front person for U.S. imperialism in working to bring about the counter-revolution in Czechoslovakia. After that effort succeeded, Havel served as president of the new Czech Republic. Now dead, he's pretty well achieved sainthood standing as he does for freedom, democracy and art all tied up together in a pretty bow.

The truth, as Parenti points out, is that Havel was the scion of a wealthy family and a fighter above all for his own class interests. He hated the workers' state, hated the struggle to build socialism in Czechoslovakia--because it expropriated his family's wealth, wealth that was created by and had been stolen from workers. He fought hard to overturn that system so he and his lot could get their riches back.

In 1992, writes Parenti, "while president of Czechoslovakia, Havel, the great democrat, demanded that parliament be suspended and he be allowed to rule by edict, the better to ram through free-market 'reforms.' 

"That same year, he signed a law that made the advocacy of communism a felony with a penalty of up to eight years imprisonment." How's that for free speech?

So anyway, Philip Roth's great revelation at last night's PEN gala was that he spent a lot of time in the 1970s boosting Havel. He brought him money! He arranged contracts to have his books published in the United States! He soothed and supported Havel and his cronies who, Roth claims, were forced to actually work for a living. Work! Manual labor! What horrors! What nerve the socialist state had, refusing to pay these fine artistes a salary for fomenting counterrevolution! What antidemocratic anti-art baddies! All of this, Roth's service to U.S. imperialism, he portrayed in his talk, as far as I can tell from reports, as his own personal endeavors, but it's an absolute certainty that Roth carried out his mission in cahoots with the State Department. That's how this stuff works.

It's the annual pro-imperialist anticommunist literary love fest

That's right: it's the PEN World Voices Festival, now and for the next several days on stages throughout NYC congratulating itself for always aligning with imperialism.

I'm not saying the PEN festival doesn't feature some good writers, some worthy writers from around the world. And I'm not criticizing those writers for taking part. Nor am I denouncing those who attend. There are so few such opportunities for writers from other countries to get their work read in this country, and so few opportunities in this country to be exposed to the work of those writing in other languages.

So what's my beef? Well, to start with, here's what I wrote here a few years ago:

It's just that, on balance, it [the PEN World Voices Festival] does not in fact offer anything close to what its title advertises: the voices of the world. Which would be the voices of workers and the oppressed. PEN is a construct of the bourgeois literary establishment devoted to promoting bourgeois literary values. It will never provide a platform for a revolutionary literary voice; in fact it often propagandizes against such voices, for instance those in Cuba. So while the glit-lit crowd wines, dines and opines, let's the rest of us march -- and write -- and organize -- in solidarity with the real world's voices ... on May Day.

In fact, if there were the slightest smidgen of an orientation toward the workers and oppressed, the organizers would not schedule this event to conflict with May Day, which is the workers' holiday in every country of the world. Which would you rather do, shmooze with the gliterati or march with the workers?

Let's be clear. PEN is no more a left organization, no more a force for fairness and freedom, than is Amnesty International. Both are adjuncts of the U.S. imperialist ruling class. Both loyally stand with U.S. imperialism against any and every country that defends its own sovereignty as against the force of U.S. imperialism (Iran, Syria, Libya before the U.S. destroyed it, Venezuela) and especially against any and every country that makes a revolution and tries to build socialism.

In fact, this is not mere commentary, not merely my crazy communist take on things. It is fact, fact in the person of PEN Executive Director Suzanne Nossel. She took the helms in January. Before that, she was executive director of none other than Amnesty International. And before that? Why, she worked at the State Department! She was deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations. She's been a major advocate of the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, of the Israeli war against Palestine, of the U.S. bombing and invasion of Libya. On and on. It's a continuum. See how this works?

So. Let's take this a step further, as a heckler apparently did last night at one of the PEN festival's opening events with Salman Rushdie at the podium. Leave aside PEN's anticommunist and pro-imperialist work regarding other countries. What about the U.S.? I'm hearing reports that last night this heckler repeatedly characterized PEN as a tool of the U.S. government and challenged PEN and Rushdie to acknowledge the heroism of Bradley Manning. The heckler certainly raised a good point. Where is the award to a true hero right here? It's within PEN's purview--Manning didn't write anything, but he provided documents, he shared information, he exposed the most horrific murderous wrongs done by a monstrous anti-human government--isn't that the sort of thing PEN is supposedly set up to celebrate and defend? 

 
And what about Mumia Abu-Jamal? I understand that PEN allowed him membership--but where is its spirited organized active embrace of the struggle to free him? Why isn't Mumia the keynote speaker, the main honoree? Why isn't the case of this brilliant journalist and author imprisoned for his activism--um, isn't that there description almost exactly what PEN claims to be all about--why isn't Mumia's case, a case of monstrous injustice right here in this country, a centerpiece of PEN's work?

 

Well, because the sort of thing PEN is actually all about takes center stage tonight at its one-thousand-dollar-a-head gala. The guest of honor who will be presented with the PEN Literary Service Award is none other than racist misogynist extraordinaire Philip Roth, who will "reflect on his lifetime of literary endeavor and his personal involvement in promoting freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe, a story that he has never told publicly." Oh goody! It sounds like Philip Roth worked on behalf of U.S. imperialism to undermine the workers' states and bring about the counterrevolutions that have transformed the former socialist countries into such fabulous bastions of the good life that standards of living have plummeted; life expectancy has dropped and infant mortality skyrocketed; unemployment, homelessness and poverty are now the rule of the day; and women are trafficked. How did he do it? Via the National Endowment for the Humanities? Voice of America? Directly on the CIA payroll? All of the above, or via some other more subterranean route? Those thousand-dollar-a-plate attendees will no doubt lap it up, whatever the story is. What courage, they'll applaud, what dedication, what a paragon, a champion of literary freedom!

What an anti-communist anti-worker anti-woman racist champion of the status quo. Thus spake PEN.

Here's a terrific poem

by Jacob Rakovan, reprinted as permitted from the Split This Rock Poem of the Week site (see info after poem). Which site is worth checking, well, weekly. Split This Rock is a national network of socially engaged poets.

Hilt's Law 

 

The bones cast in the field like seed corn grow nothing,

grow briars in the boarded gas stations
brown stalks ready for the fire.
You do not hear our song,
earth thick in our throats, benzene, chromium
cadmium and arsenic

shuttered stores,

hosts of dead in cold-mill towns
the day that does not come though prayed for.

The trains of coal and corpses, the price of power
though wires are stretched like a mandolin on our backs
though the saints bob above us like car-lot balloons
You do not hear our singing.
In electric light the bubble gum machine is full of teeth
the babies' bottles with a slow sweet poison
the air thick with cancer, the rain with
teeth, without flowers, without cease.

This dream of sleep, in hunter's orange
over oil-black in cups, in the hollows under eyes.
The unborn sun in the darkest river, the hollow hills
unsong of un-place, Bloody Harlan, Centralia
the blessed fly over in air conditioned comfort.

    

Let the bone-fire of your city burn 'till your shadow stains the bricks 

Let the dark come spilling from the mine thick as molasses
Let the end come if it is coming,
Let the rich hang from their ankles,
a washtub full of black blood.
You do not hear.

 
Let the hills and stones fall on us and cover us
Let those curse us who curse the day, who are skillful
the smelters of iron, and armaments, the hilltop removers. 

 

Though we are dying, though we breath black dust
and blue powder, spit liquor and blood
the black drink, the earth's secret breath.
Though we are toothless, though we are blind
we hear this: 

 

Steady trundle of the train under storm clouds
loaded down with malediction,
the radio tower's Babel-bleat to heaven
with the black stone, with the dead for burning 

song of electric light, and sleeplessness.

 

Weariest river at the end of all things 

We follow you into the earth.

-Jacob Rakovan   

Used by permission.

Jacob Rakovan is an Appalachian writer in diaspora. He is a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry and recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has appeared in numerous journals including The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The James Dickey Review, Anon, Thrush and Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism as well as anthologies by Salmon Poetry Press, MTV Books and The Arsenic Lobster. His manuscript The Devil's Radio was a finalist for the 2012 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature and the Gell poetry prize and is forthcoming on Small Doggies Press. He is co-curator of the Poetry & Pie Night reading series in Rochester, New York. 

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

How dare they

Samer Issawi, the Palestinian political prisoner who has been on hunger strike since August 1, 2012, and whose life is now in grave jeopardy, has called on supporters to do everything possible to demand his release and safe his life.

In his most recent statement, a public letter specifically addressed to Israelis, this brave brother called on " intellectuals, writers, lawyers and journalists, associations, and civil society activists" to visit him in prison and witness his suffering. He noted bitterly that "I have not heard one of you interfere to stop the loud wail of death, it's as if every one of you has turned into gravediggers, and everyone wears his military suit: the judge, the writer, the intellectual, the journalist, the merchant, the academic, and the poet." He concluded: "Israelis: Listen to my voice, the voice of our time and yours! Liberate yourselves of the excess of greed power! Do not remain prisoners of military camps and the iron doors that have shut your minds!"

I find this not only poignant and moving, but incredibly generous, that this freedom fighter who is at death's door should find it in his heart to reach out with nearly his last breath and call on Israelis to open themselves to his words, to "liberate themselves" from the chokehold of the racist monster that is the Zionist state.

So what is the response from the Israeli intellectuals and writers to whom brother Issawi issued this appeal? Did they heed his words? Visit him and pledge solidarity? Take a stand? Did they announce they were joining him in his hunger strike, call on others to do the same, build a mass public campaign to demand that Samer Issawi be freed and pledge that they would suffer along with him until he is? Did they do anything at all, in fact, anything to support this political prisoner their government is murdering?

Quite the contrary. They didn't address the Israeli state at all. Instead, they issued a statement addressed to him, to Samer Issawi, demanding that he call off his hunger strike.

Wow. The arrogance. The arrogance of the oppressor, condescending to instruct the oppressed in how they, the oppressed, ought to proceed.

The statement's writers, including such supposed literary luminaries as Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, expressed their "agony," pronounced themselves "horrified," about Issawi's hunger strike. They accused him, in so many words, of making things worse. And so on.

Damn. Do you wonder why I refuse to read any Israeli fiction, even, no especially, written by ostensible liberals? If this is the best of them, I mean, Jesus H. Christ, come on! How dare these privileged comfortable thieves of the Palestinian homeland presume to instruct one of the dispossessed about what he ought to be doing! How dare they lecture a hero like Samer Issawi!

Such is the state of arts and letters inside the Zionist state. Which should come as no surprise, for what other art could the project of theft, expulsion and occupation, the Zionist project, possibly give rise to but the most distorted expressions based in occupier consciousness?

The colonizer's consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

Check it out.

Chinua Achebe

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

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

Alice Walker's poem for Hugo Chavez

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

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

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

Hugo Chavez presente! Gracias por todos!

For Black History Month

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing POLITERATURE!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flight Behavior

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

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

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

Bab al-Shams, the Gate of the Sun

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





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

A Naked Singularity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teju Cole on drones: brilliant!

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

Banishing the blahs

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

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

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

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

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

The blahs

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

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

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

My year's best

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

Non-fiction

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

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

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

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

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