Happy Halloween

In costume or real, a truly terrifying prospect...and we've still got 3 more years to go....

Quote: Zakes Mda

"Twin and Qukezwa sat and watched the sky. And watched the horizon. And watched the sand. He sat behind her, his arms covering her tightly. She sat ensconced between his sinewy thighs. She played the umrhubhe, the musical instrument that sounded like the lonely voice of mountain spirits. She sang of the void that the demise of Gxagxa, Twin's brown-and-white horse, had left in their lives. She cursed the lungsickness that had taken him away. She spat at those who had brought it into the land. When she closed her eyes she saw herself riding Gxagxa on the sands of the beach, completely naked. Gxagxa began in a canter. And then gathered speed in a fiendish gallop, raising clouds of dust. Again Twin's thighs were around her. He was sitting behind her, while Heitsi was wrapped in her thighs at the front. Gxagxa continued his wicked gallop until they all disappeared in the clouds. Through the voice of the umrhubhe she saw the new people riding on the waves, racing back according to the prophecies, and led by none other than Gxagxa and the headless patriarch.

"The song of the umrhubhe creates a world of dreams."
--Zakes Mda, from The Heart of Redness (New York: Picador, 2000).

Franky G

Reggie H. sent me and Ryan this photo today (it originally was posted on MostProper, a blog that features lots of "phyne sights" in Reggie's words), letting us know that Franky G. (pictured at left) will be in Saw 2, which I gather is the sequel to Saw. I had to write back to let Reggie and Ryan know how out of it I must be, since I'd never heard of the initial film, which according to IMdB (the online encyclopedia of film information), appeared in 2004. A horror movie directed by James Wan (¿quién es él?), starring Danny Glover, Cary Elwes, and quite a few actors I've never heard of, it concerns a serial killer whose calling card is a circular saw, or something like that. The general viewer rating for Saw is 7.5 stars out of 10, which ranks higher than Hitchcock's superb Suspicion or Cassavetes's standard-setting Gloria. Yeah, right.

But anyways, who cares about Saw or Saw II, really? At my age I'm able to recognize quite clearly there's enough horror going on in the world around me that I don't wish for or need cinematic treatments of it anymore--the important issue is the man above. I know I'm not alone in thinking that the New York native Puerto Rican-American Franky G (for Gonzalez) is one of the more beautiful men in film and TV, am I? And the man is the same age as me, 40 years old! Sadly and unsurprisingly, Hollywood doesn't know what to do with this kind of (male) beauty, which has always fallen and continues to fall outside its "mainstream." In my alternative universe, Franky G, who does have some acting talent (though he's no Denzel Washington, Sean Penn or Robert DeNiro), would have regular roles, both in movies and on TV. And he'd have material suited to his talent and looks, not the sort of dreck that characterized Johnny Z, his late show on Fox, which brings me to another point.

As I stated in my second post on Noah's Arc, I intend to keep watching that show, despite how bad it is. Thinking of Johnny Z, I realized that in fact lack of quality is no bar to my watching a TV show, if it has other things going for it (humor, attractive stars, some catchy element). For much of my life I eagerly watched bad or retrograde TV (F Troop, My Three Sons, One Day at a Time, Good Times, Dallas, Eight Is Enough, Family, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, Three Is Company, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Greatest American Hero, Cybill, Melrose Place, Beverly Hills 90210, Sister Sister, The Parkers, etc.) for a variety of reasons other than quality (which I think was and is one key element of, for example, Batman, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Schoolhouse Rock, Zoom, The Electric Company, Speed Racer, The Patty Duke Show, Get Smart, Monty Python, Maude, The Golden Girls, Frank's Place, The Cosby Show, Seinfeld, SCTV, The Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show Show, certain seasons of SNL, The Wire, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Comeback, etc.), though as I age I can't really take too much of it anymore, especially shows that depict a world set anywhere but Iceland or Finland (or Wyoming, let's say) that's focused excessively on the very young and devoid of any people of color. My tolerance for minstrelsy also has shrunk to indetectable levels. But my friend David M. and I caught the first episode and faithfully watched the really awful--dreadful, cringe-inducing, appallingly badly written--episodes of Franky G's Johnny Z every week, until, mercifully, it was pulled. If you never saw the show, you missed little--except, of course, for Franky G.

He was the ONLY reason to watch it. The entire scenario--a Latino late-30s-something, with a kid and ex-wife, gets out of jail, is on parole in NYC, has to keep clean yet cannot help getting involved with criminals, etc.--started out a mild stench. So much of it was utterly implausible: a British gangster in NYC...wait, let me repeat that. A British gangster--in New York City! Okay, there may be British gangsters in New York (New York has all kinds of people, and there certainly are quite a few in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, etc.) but seriously, and at the risk of political incorrectness, while I appreciate the writers' attempts at being...inventive?...wouldn't a Black or Latino or Italian or Irish or Russian or Albanian or Greek or Chinese crime boss...well, you get my drift. We're talking about New York City. Any student in an introductory fiction class would find every mention of this character in a story based on the initial premise of Johnny Z surrounded by circles and question marks. Then there was his sidekick, this endlessly babbling, unspeakably annoying, wannabe comic White guy who looked like a plucked chicken, and they shared a huge apartment...I kept wondering, why on earth wasn't this waste of space and dialogue shed during the development phase? David I both concurred, of course, that the network probably thought that the show wouldn't succeed without a central White character. So why not instead give us a real New York type, a White tough, say from Queens or Brooklyn, who probably might have met Johnny Z on the inside and caught up with him when they both go out? The quasi-Jerry Lewis-esque buffoon didn't work at all. And then they added an Australian bondswoman, who just happened to be a busty blonde bruiser, and...well, the show was off the airwaves not long thereafter.

So there is no chance anymore to watch horrible TV just to see Franky G every week. I doubt I'll go see Saw 2, so I'll have to miss Franky G's newest star turn. Which is a shame, because I relish any opportunities to see Franky G. onscreen. And not only Franky G, but any number of other actors that whose beauty lights up the screen, but whom Hollywood and the major networks in New York don't know what to do with. (Mekhi Phifer has kept his job on ER and there's the two guys, Eva Longoria's husband and Alfre Woodard's son on Desperate Housewives, a show I don't watch, but that's about it now that Taye Diggs, Keith Hamilton Cobb, Matthew St. Patrick, etc. are no longer on regularly airing shows.) But then things may change, as they already have in my lifetime, though slowly, slowly.... So cable TV stations, just so you know, Franky G could still be a contender....

Emanuel Xavier Attacked

Just the other day I received several emails (includinng one from my NYPLC brother Blackkat) concerning author, actor and activist Emanuel Xavier; each sent around word that he'd been brutally attacked by a group of young men near his home in Brooklyn. On his blog Blabbeando, activist Andrés Duque gives a fuller account of the attack:

On the evening of Tuesday, October 25th, spoken word artist, openly queer activist and actor, Emanuel Xavier, was brutally beaten at random by a street gang in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn. On his way to visit his mother, currently struggling with cancer, the poet was surrounded by fifteen to twenty young Latino men and punched several times in the face. The crime has not been labeled a biased attack and - though one of his poems is set to appear in King’s Court, the Almighty Latin Kings Nation newsletter - no gang affiliation has been established and is unlikely. Though he declined hospitalization, initial statements described him as badly bruised with possible hearing damage to his right ear.

Andrés applauds Emanuel's courage at speaking out about this attack, as do I, and notes what an important figure in the literary and arts community he is. I concur. In addition to his seminal collection of poems Pier Queen, he also has authored Christlike and Americano, and edited a collection of spoken word poetry called Bullets & Butterflies. Emanuel has appeared on Def Comedy Jam, and in the movie The Ski Trip.

I should add that I first came across Emanuel when he worked at the now vanished A Different Light gay bookstore, which had moved only a few years before to 19th St. just off 7th Avenue. (A Different Light closed in March 2001.) That was in the mid-1990s, which now seems like a truly distant era. We didn't really make each others' acquaintance then, but we'd exchange hellos, and so when I came across Pier Queen several years later, in Creative Visions, the gay bookstore (is it still open?) that replaced A Different Light on Hudson Street, I was delighted to learn that he was a writer and to read his work. I have gotten to see him read and perform once, and it was worth the wait. I wish him a full recovery, and hope that the NYPD can apprehend all of the people involved in the vicious assault on him.

Update: Andrés has updated information on Emanuel Xavier, his recuperation and some rumors that have arisen about the attack on his Blabbeando site.

Horn Tooting

I don't often toot my own horn on this blog, but tonight was quite special: I was one of 10 recipients this year of a writing award for my fiction by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, based in New York. (The New York Times wrote it up here.) The ceremony took place on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a grand hall belonging to the Council on Foreign Relations, and the extraordinary short-story writer Grace Paley read one of her autobiographical stories to conclude the awards ceremony. C. was there (and when they read out my citation, they noted that he was at the event!), as were wonderful friends Carolyn Micklem, the director of the Cave Canem Foundation, my brilliant colleague Jennifer Brody, and poet Patricia Spears Jones.

What made it even more special was that two of the other winners, Thomas Sayers Ellis and Tracy K. Smith, both amazing poets, were members with me years ago in a Black writers group based in Cambridge (and later Boston) called the Dark Room Collective. Thomas actually co-founded the Dark Room with poets Sharan Strange and Janice Lowe (whom I hadn't seen for years but then ran into several times this past summer at my New York gym, 24/7.) Additionally, among my other links to Tracy is that her first book of poems, The Body's Question, won the 2003 Cave Canem Poetry Prize; my collection was one of two finalists for the prize (I spent 3 summers in CC's workshops, becoming a graduate fellow in 2001).

Here are some photos of the event, taken by C. and I:


Carolyn, I, Tracy, Thomas


I, Carolyn, and Jennifer


Patricia and I (fellow winner Ilya Kaminsky stands in the background)


C. after the ceremony (Hi paddi!)

Chi Sox Win Series, Trump Stros 4-0 + Noah's Redux

How's that for a headline? Not so great, I know, but the Chicago White Sox did finally win their first World Series championship in 88 years, defeating the Houston Astros tonight 1-0, and winning in a four-game sweep. Veteran outfielder Jermaine Dye, who drove in the lone run tonight, was named World Series Most Valuable Player, though that honor could have gone to relief pitcher Bobby Jenks, who preserved Sox leads last night and tonight, or shortstop Juan Uribe, who had made several errors in previous games but rang the Astros' final two death knells with a superb foul catch in the stands and brilliant fielding and a throw that led to the final Houston out.

General Manager Ken Williams, one of the few (the only?) Black GMs in the major leagues, and Manager Ozzie Guillén, a former star infielder, Venezuelan native, and one of the few Latino managers, also deserve tremendous praise. In fact sportswriters openly doubted and questioned the often outspoken (sometimes to the point of offensiveness) Guillén throughout the season, especially when Chicago experienced a late-summer swoon, before righting itself and winning its division.

This year marks one of the rare periods in Major League Baseball history, especially in the post-Jackie Robinson era, when the Series has had two consecutive years of four-game sweeps; the last time was in 1998-1999, when the powerhouse New York Yankees accomplished it, but they'd done it several other times, and have also won more than 20 Series crowns. Last year's winner was the long suffering Red Sox (originally Stockings), this year the White--and Chicagoland fans all across the vast swathe of the city and suburbs south of Madison Street (and some outside that demarcated territory) get to cheer what for years looked like an impossibility. Now it doesn't look like an impossibility even for the hapless Cubs! Congratulations, White Sox!

***

I finally caught the first episode of Noah's Arc, director and writer Patrik-Ian Polk's series on Logo, which C. had taped for me, as well as the second episode, which aired tonight, and I'm going to let C.'s previous, hilarious review stand. No quibbles here.

I do want to add that while there is so much to criticize with this show--the acting, the writing, the implausibilities, the characterizations (Chance?), the materialism, the constant reversion to clichés (I have never ever witnessed any Black people, let alone anyone else, eating out of Chinese takeout food boxes as they depicted here and as films and TV shows always depict--try plates!), the binaristic view of sexuality in terms of Wade, the 1980s feel, etc.--I actually enjoy it. I even felt moments of...well, if not exact recognition, something close to it.

Not one of the primary characters strikes me as especially likeable or, outside of Alex, Wade, and the two peripheral characters Eddie and Tre, resembles any Black gay person I know. In addition, I found Halle Minnelli's (Ricky's) lack of a living space outside his store/bathhouse bizarre (and his hairdo annoying), wondered whether Chance (like Noah) was independently wealthy or one of the most brilliant economists under the sun to afford his lifestyle (so perhaps just make him a business or med school prof and then, like Oz, dare anyone to recognize or even challenge the background change), and tried to figure out if Noah's character had originally been written as a woman (on the model of Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw, or any of the characters on Girlfriends), since it sometimes felt as if we were being read to read him, at least in a semiotic sense, in this manner. (Gender theorists, you betta work with this one.) In fact, in episode 1, the phrase that kept coming to mind in terms of Noah was "too many things...."

But still, I actually want to see it again. I do.

C. thought the second episode was better than the first, and I agree, though Chance's SUV-"shop-wrecking" (or "moving furniture," as C. told me was the more current term) was...totally implausible, probably would have meant he'd be out of a job (note to writers: most universities, including UCLA/USC/etc., will fire a tenured professor for felonious behavior, which driving a car into someone's living room/day room/den, etc., probably would qualify as, given the decided intent), and in any case, his character is so rebarbative (what's up with that voice, that delivery, the utter inability to show even the slightest emotion beyond a slightly upcurled upper lip?) that I really find it hard to believe the other three characters would want to spend more than a few minutes around him. I mean, can we really blame his boyfriend, Eddie, who appears to be far more interesting and nuanced, for looking for some on the side--or at least wanting to get the hell out of that house?

I did like that the episode played with some expectations, though, including bringing in the transgender (or gender-disrupting) designer, and having the new employee mack hir (I think that's the right pronoun, isn't it?), that it pressed the issue of safe sex, and that it evoked cybersex as sex, broached the issue of alternative sex play, and, at the risk of sounding crass, it's great to see lots of men running around in no clothes or cute clothes (or BDSM outfits!) and sexing things up. So it wasn't all bad. But....

And yet, I intend to keep watching it. Perhaps it is, as someone (Rod?) sagely said, like watching a car-wreck, which sounds rather morbid when Noah's Arc really doesn't have an edge: it's silly, at times to the point of absurdity, often unbelievable or like a fantasy gone awry, but also at times sexy and funny while intending to be so. Still the wreck simile, which I guess Chance's moment of payback literally (and ironically?) embodied, does seem to apply. And I'll keep staring/watching.

2000 Dead

2,000 US soldiers killed in Iraq between March 13, 2003-October 25, 2005
(1,863 killed between 1957-1965 in Vietnam)
Who are the fallen soldiers?
198 Other US coalition soldiers killed

15,000+ US soldiers wounded in Iraq

26,000-30,000 Iraqi civilians killed in Iraq

100 journalists killed in Iraq

No WMDs found
No links between Saddam & Osama bin Laden (still free)
No greetings with flowers and flags
Plamegate/Treasongate
More global terrorism each year since the 2003 invasion of Iraq
More sophisticated attacks against US and coalition troops each year
A divided Iraqi state with a strong, Islamicist Shiite government linked to Iran
$203,463,100+ in US funds spent so far on Iraq....

CAUSA BELLI by Andrew Motion

They read good books, and quote, but never learn
a language other than the scream of rocket-burn.
Our straighter talk is drowned but ironclad:
elections, money, empire, oil and Dad.

Copyright © 2003, Andrew Motion, on PoetryInternational.com
--
Andrew Motion is the Poet Laureate of the UK

RIP: Rosa Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks
(b. 1913, Tuscaloosa, Alabama - d. 2005, Detroit, Michigan)

World Series: White Sox vs. Astros

Okay, the World Series is already underway, so why am I just now posting? In fact, the Chicago White Sox (including SS Juan Uribe, at left, courtesy of Chicago Comcastsportsnet) are now up 2-0 over the Houston Astros, having won the opening game behind José Contreras 5-3, and tonight's game in the final inning in dramatic fashion 7-6. Now both teams head down south to play under less trying weather conditions (it was chilly last night, and cold and rainy tonight in Chicago) in the Astros' stadium. I guess it took me a few days of recovery after the Cardinals' NLCS loss to Houston to focus on the this matchup, which appeared initially to be akin to the 1966 or 1968 World Series, that is, all about starting pitching, but which has turned out to be a test of whose bullpen won't collapse.

The White Sox vaunted starters so far have been average. In game 1 Contreras gave up three runs, hardly dazzling. In game 2, Mark Buehrle, a native St. Louisan, surrendered 4 runs in 7 innings. So how did they win both games? In both games, the Astros relief corps, one of the best in the major leagues, has been sketchy at best, turning Roger Clemens' hamstrung 2-inning performance 1 into a loss, and in this game, blowing what was a superb start by Astro Andy Pettitte, who only gave up 2 runs in 6 innings. Chicago has been able to get singles and home runs when needed, including tonight, when outfielder Scott Posednik, who hadn't hit even a single home run during the regular season (a shocking statistic for an outfielder), smacked one off Houston reliever and iceman Craig Lidge in the bottom of the 9th. I could hear the ecstatic cheers all the way up here on the far North Side.

As for the Astros, I understand that they've never won a World Series, though several of their individual players (Clemens, Pettitte) have. Most, however, have played for years without ever getting this far. (An observation: Houston appears to have the fewest people of color of any team in Major League baseball. Only one starter, cute top rookie Willy Taveras (below right, courtesy of Yucatan.com.mx) is not White, and there appear to be almost no non-White people on their bench, which is a little odd in 2005. There is, moreover, not a Black American anywhere to be found on their roster, which is not that strange, since 4-5 teams this year didn't have a Black American starter or hardly any Black American players.)

I don't think Houston, a very good team, is going to defeat Chicago this year and I hope they won't; but if the former First Couple, Poppy and Barf, decide to start mugging at and smooching on camera, I'll be very actively rooting against them. If Prince of Incompetence W himself shows up....well, let's just say a 4-game Chitown sweep wouldn't be consolation enough. Something tells me, though, that with Fitzmas/Fitzukkah imminent and the pending indictments set to be decided on Tuesday (and perhaps issued soon thereafter), our Feckless Leader won't be leaving Washington anytime soon, not even for yet another Gulf Coast photo op, though his brother and fixer Jeb beckons him down to Florida for some the Hurricane Wilma walkarounds to try to raise W's Faux News/Gallup poll numbers off the ocean floor.

During the regular season I more than once harbored (and occasionally expressed) a private hope that the White Sox would at least make the playoffs, in part because I wanted them to knock the self-mythologizing Red Sox off their bandbox, and because I would have loved to see them play the Cardinals in the World Series. They did satisfy the former desire, but the latter was out of their hands. As for their not winning a World Series since 1917, their infamous "Black Sox" scandal, and their not even being in the Series since 1959, I could care less. My fandom doesn't run that deep, among American League teams I support the Yankees first and foremost, and the Angelheimers were a lot easier on the eyes.

But I have derived additional satisfaction from the fact that among Chicago's baseball teams, it was the White Sox, and not the even more outrageous self-mythologizing Chicago Cubs (of Wrigley Field, that quaint museum and beerhall on Clark and Addison), who now have a chance to break a long streak of bad luck, missed changes, a curse, the gods know what. The Cubs, in addition to being the Cardinals' chief rivals, usually have Chicagoland (not just the Hog Butcher of the world, mind you, but the teeming Midwestern nerve center of more than 9 million people!), knotted around their finger. For the last few weeks, and perhaps a while longer, the White Sox will keep that knot untied, and perhaps begin to lace up some love of their own.

So the Chicago White Sox in 5 (or 4 if those two show their faces too much)!

Quote: Octavia Butler

Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.

--Octavia Butler, an excerpt "From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING," in The Parable of the Talents (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998), p. 167.

Slavoj Zizek on "The Subject," Racism, and Hurricane Katrina

Who says critical theorists, even famously abstruse ones like the Slovenian post-Lacanian critic and professor, Slavoj Zizek, don't or can't make valuable contributions to the (American) public discourse? Here's one: in "The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape," in In These Times, he reads the "racism" in the hyperbolic claims of violence and looting that were made as the Hurricane Katrina tragedy unfolded. Though subsequent studies of the supposed orgies of bloodthirstiness (including child rapes and cannibalism!) have been debunked, Zizek is more interested in the psychological mindset that constructs the "subject who is supposed to..." and this case, "the [Black] subject who is supposed to [commit violent acts when unloosed, by events like Hurricane Katrina, from the constraints of civilization]...." You know, those _______ gangbangers who were firing at helicopters, conducting street-by-street serial rapes, etc.

(Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, and thousands starved and thirsted, suffered from lack of medicine and adequate medical treatment, lost everything and were subjected to a horrifically cruel oversight by the federal government which, astonishingly (or not) is still paying "Brownie-you're-doin'-a-heckuva-job!" even though he was more concerned with getting his eat on than dealing with the dire conditions in the Superdome and elsewhere....)

Zizek goes on to link this to a larger discussion of globalization and the fall of walls meant to keep people in (as in the Berlin Wall), which led Francis Fukuyama, recently a critic of neoconservatism and the W debacles, to declare, pompously, "the end of history." Ah, such vision, such genius. Only, as Zizek points out, what has followed is the rise of new walls, such as the one in Ceuta, to keep the ______ Others out of the wealthy, liberal states (Spain, France, Italy, etc.) of the West, as well as the continuing existence of internal, often "invisible" socioeconomic walls and barriers which separate the impoverished, mostly Black (but also poor Whites, Asians, Latinos, and others) from the middle and upper-classes and industrial base in New Orleans, which in any case depend upon low-cost labor for capitalism to flourish. (And so far, no one wants those poor folks, especially all those poor Black folks, to come back anytime soon.) He even includes that monstrous hypocrite Bill Bennett in his reading (who says foreigners aren't paying attention to our barbarism?). Says Zizek:

This brings us back to rumours and “reports” about “subjects supposed to loot and rape:” New Orleans is one of those cities within the United States most heavily marked by the internal wall that separates the affluent from ghettoized blacks. And it is about those on the other side of the wall that we fantasize: More and more, they live in another world, in a blank zone that offers itself as a screen for the projection of our fears, anxieties and secret desires. The “subject supposed to loot and rape” is on the other side of the Wall—this is the subject about whom Bennett can afford to make his slips of the tongue and confess in a censored mode his murderous dreams. More than anything else, the rumors and fake reports from the aftermath of Katrina bear witness to the deep class division of American society.

It's also worth reading the comment section, where several posters go at each other and misread Zizek, which is hardly surprising. (The denial of racism, unsurprisingly, factors in here.) That Sublime Object of Ideology requires at least two or three readings, almost Straussian in focus, to be understood fully.

Three Reviews

Though I'd badly wanted to see Patrik-Ian Polk's Noah's Arc, the first Black gay (male) series on TV, which premiered last night on Logo, the new gay channel, my local cable company does not yet have the station (in this most cosmpolitan city that is the heart of the Heartland). But my partner C. did catch it. He left me a phone message after catching only a few minutes, and then sent me this e-mail review, which made me laugh out loud before I headed off this morning to my introductory fiction class (in which we read a Richard Bausch story that also contained lines that were outrageously funny--an achievement I am always willing to praise). Rereading the review this evening made me laugh again.

NOAH'S DRECK

Opening Scene; 4 dizzy queens clumsily rollerblading on some boardwalk in Cali. Doris Day, I mean, Noah, breathlessly, lips pursed, clutching his chest runs into a "friend" who the other gurlz don't know and spends the next 2 minutes breathlessly, lips pursed, clutching his chest introduces said queens to said friend all of whom stumble over themselves like cats in heat to make an impression on him, he being Wade.

Turns out man is straight but heavily mackin' Doris, I mean Noah. Entire episode revolves around should he or shouldn't he, can he or can't he sleep with Wade and... his girlfriend, which is the only way Wade will slip it to him.

Other themes in this episode; Slut friend sleeps with male employees, Dame Edna friend discovers partner of 7 years has online sex life, Rudolph Byrd friend moves in with lover after only 6 months of dating. And so it goes. Empty stereotypical characters, HORRIBLE acting from everyone but especially Doris Day, I mean Noah, who can only communicate breathlessly, lips pursed and, clutching his chest and sighing while running around in some of the most frightening early 80's madonna outfits I have ever seen. The entire episode, though contemporary, seems somehow stuck in 1983. The only characters who seemed interesting were Dame Edna's partner, Wade, and the thugged out brother the slut plays around with in the store.

They reeeeeeeally need to re-tool this.. i think that's the lingo...

Did anyone else catch the premiere? What do you think? C. also pointed me to this Post-Gazette review, "Noah's Arc is racy fun but shallow," which took a similar stance. (One question: why is the character on the far right featuring a Liza Minnelli do and wearing what looks like lipgloss? Do Black gay men in Los Angeles run around looking like this? They certainly don't in New York, Chicago, Washington, Boston, Atlanta...or is it an LA thing?) The outtakes on the Noah's Arc website give a little bit of its flavor and lots of shots of sexy men, but little of the what the series' narrative arcs might look like, the fullness of the characterizations, the overall quality of the writing.... A friend of mine, whom I'll call J., was in communication with Polk at one point, and J. has written spec scripts and is a great writer, so maybe he can take up C.'s challenge and help with the re-tooling. I want this series not only to be as good as the standard HBO has been setting, but to succeed and perhaps last a few years. If it's as shallow as it sounds, it might not last that long, especially once the novelty wears off.

***

Other reviews: In today's Salon, Andrew O'Hehir harshly reviews Steve Martin's new film, Shopgirl, which he adapted from his best-selling novella of the same name. (Once while in a Waldenbooks in New York, I picked this book up, read a page, and then experienced a moment of despair that this trite crap would sell unaccountably more copies than 10 other, better written books ringing on the bookshelves.) O'Hehir really, really dislikes it. But what he especially dislikes is Martin's performance. He calls it a bad film. A very bad film. He even devises an analogue for Martin's character/performance, and it ain't pretty:

I'm not quite sure what has happened to Steve Martin; I was never his biggest fan, but some of his early movies are silly and fun and some of his mid-period ones, like "Roxanne" and "L.A. Story," are enjoyably sweet. If I were his therapist, I would no doubt applaud his desire to reinvent himself as an author of worldly-wise fiction. I haven't read "Shopgirl" and am hopeful that it's better on the page than on-screen (although Martin's snippets of voice-over narration are not encouraging: "...he had hurt them both, and he cannot justify his actions except that, well, it was life"). But his character in the film, resembling more a Madame Tussaud waxwork of Steve Martin than the real thing, crystallizes all the discomfort below the surface of "Shopgirl" and turns a dreary movie into an awful one.

Ray is supposed to be the suave older guy with money and taste who sweeps Mirabelle from behind the glove counter at Saks (if indeed the Saks store in L.A. even sells gloves) and makes her feel appreciated, in body and spirit, for the first time. First of all, this is a trite and slightly unpleasant theme that cries out for original handling and doesn't get it here. Martin's performance is one of implacable, rubberized unhappiness; you get the feeling he saw Bill Murray in "Lost in Translation" and thought, "I can do that."

He can't, though. Is Ray a damaged divorcé who falls in love with Mirabelle, after his own fashion, but can't express his feelings? I guess that's the idea, but you can't really tell. He could also be planning to add her to his collection of chopped-up girlfriends beneath the pool. He could be a narcoleptic. He could be the reanimated corpse of Richard Nixon, nervously sweating embalming fluid. He could be shot so full of Botox it's a wonder he can speak at all.

Yikes! "The reanimated corpse of Richard Nixon!" Oh well. Jason Schwartzman, a really annoying, unattractive actor is in this film. He's not Jon Cryer, but he comes close. I know he's well-connected, but he's really not very photogenic nor is he particularly talented (he was good in Rushmore, and that's about it). So please, Hollywood, let's use him sparingly in films. Very, very sparingly. Also, O'Hehir points out that this is yet another "aging celebrity's unpleasant" personal fantasy that's been made into a major Hollywood film, and for this, I thank him. In fact, one of the reasons I loathe most Hollywood films is because far too many of them are drawn from a very narrow racial, class and gender perspective, or from an equally narrow bank of fantasies--which is to say, most of the original screenplays for major Hollywood films that get churned out strike me as the products of a small set of people who appear to have little knowledge of the vast majority of people out in the country, of regions outside a few enclaves on either coast, of anything beyond their immediate ken. And the older, male, hetero fantasies, from screenwriters, celebrities, directors, and producers, and those that fit all four categories, are also grating. Please, no more such films. We know you lust after nubile, adolescent and post-adolescent, preferably blonde females (or in Spike Lee's case, lesbians of color). It's neither fresh nor interesting any more, if it ever was. It hasn't been for years. So please spare us. Seriously.

***

Yesterday the award-winning poet and University of California, Irvine professor Michael Ryan came and read at the university. I was only mildly familiar with his work, and totally unaware that he too was a native of St. Louis (till the age of about 7). After a sparkling introduction by my colleague Robyn Schiff, he read for only about 35 minutes or so, beginning with a light and humorous poem, "Airplane Food," that actually made the phrase "baby bundt cake" work, and then turned towards some of his darker materials, which included a poem addressing a murdered young woman ("A Dead Girl"), an injured sister ("Ashpits, St. Louis, 1951"), a voyeur watching a "Brazilian-thong clad courier" ("Open Window, Truck Noise, 3 AM"), a character known as "Dickhead" ("Dickhead"); larger themes included sexual desire, suffering, disappointment, death. A number of the poems, which dealt with everyday lives and pedestrian subjects (on the surface at least), were in 16-line quatrain form, and all featured not only vivid and memorable lines

"Last night I got shot in the head...." ("Flimsy")
"Cruelty turns to astonishment." (ending of "Dickhead")
"Maybe you're a verb / or some lost part of speech" ("God")
"As Chekhov put it, compassion down to your fingertips" ("Reminder")
"Their light — their light — / pulls so surely. Let it." ("Reminder")

but a sure grasp of narrative drama, portraiture and concision. I vowed after Ryan was finished to pick up his New and Selected Poems, and when I see a bit more of a clearing to read new work, I plan to do so. (I also will post my little drawing of him here soon.)

MLCS Over, Chisox to Face Stros in Series

Tonight I did something I rarely do, participated in a reading, which went well, but half my attention was on Major League Baseball's Championship Series ended tonight. In fact, the baseball game was playing in the main room of the Chicago bar where the reading was taking place.

As I learned when the literary festivities ended, the Houston Astros defeated my favorite team, St. Louis Cardinals 5-1, behind the excellent pitching of Astro Roy Oswalt, and timely hits, to take the National League pennant. The Astros, who finished with a 4-2 record against the Cardinals, now go to the world series for the first time in their 44-year-history. Though the Redbirds had defeated Houston in their season series, they failed at what had been their chief strengths from April to September: starting pitching, clean fielding and steady hitting. Their starters led the team to the lowest ERA in the league (even better than Houston's pitchers), but this year the team only won the games started by Chris Carpenter. Tonight, Jim Edmonds misplayed a ball in the field, and in several of the games the Cardinals flubbed plays, allowing the Astros chances they could not afford. Outside of Albert Pujols's monster bat, and his dramatic, game-winning home run two nights ago, in Houston, the Cardinals couldn't hit their way out a wet-paper bag, which sadly and disturbingly mirrored their performance last postseason. Meanwhile, Houston got superb pitching from the starters, middle-relievers and closers, made almost no errors, and despite being blanked repeatedly during the regular season, ate the Cardinals' pitching up. Tonight's starter Mark Mulder threw a ball behind Craig Biggio, leading to one run, then served up a home run to Jason Lane, leading to two more. Cardinals reliever Jason Marquis, a starter all season, served up another run, and reliever Julián Tavares did his part, giving Houston its 5th tally. More bad officiating, which has plagued the divisional and championship series, did not help; the Cardinals had mustered a rally, but Yadier Molina was called out at second, ending what was the Redbirds' best scoring opportunity. Now, the Astros regroup and head to the Windy City to face the Chicago White Sox.

The Chicago White Sox haven't won a World Series since 1917, and haven't been in one since 1959. They got this far this year mainly on the dazzling arms of their starters. José Contreras, Mark Buehrle, Jon Garland, and Freddy García pitched four straight complete games to take the American League Champion Series pennant from the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, and they are as good as matchup as exists to challenge the Astros' Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, and Oswalt. Contreras has been the best pitcher in the AL over the last two months, and he demonstrated his control in his winning start against the Angels. Buehrle and Garland were the workhorses of the 2005 season, and neither has shown any ill effects in the playoffs. García faltered a bit, but won his start and appears to be ready to help bring Chicago its first World Series championship since the era of World War II. The Chicago batters, however, will have to keep hitting, and manager Ozzie Guillén, whose emotions guide his compass, will have to rein them in and use some strategy if his hitters aren't knocking in runs.

I think Chicago has the better team, so I give it to them, in 6. I'm rooting for them this go round. Go White Sox!

Today + IIT's Koolhaas Gem

I always feel so drained on days when I have my graduate seminar. I love the class, but the demand of provoking and sustaining discussions for three hours, at a high analytical level, that wears me out more than if I was doing other things (and I have done other things in life, from working at an amusement park to being a waiter to teaching people whose first language was not English how to write papers on debt service, etc.). I often marvel at professors I had who were able, in graduate literature courses, to launch rafts of both information and key points of knowledge endlessly, especially when it was not directly related to 1) their dissertations, 2) their past books, 3) their current books or projects, or 4) their future books or projects. And then there was HB, of course, who knew the entire corpus of Western lit, but that's another story.... Today I decided to conclude the discussion by reading some passages from Wittgenstein aloud, which actually was appropriate since the (African-American) author we were reading riffs off his ideas--in fact, her book represents an enactment of his difficult concept of the "language game" in several ways--and that brought things to a good close. But then once I was on the train, heading to pick up my newly bewindowed car, I thought of about ten things I could have pointed out, and was too tired to jot them down (though I finally did)....

***

Back to Mies (not Miers) and IIT: one of the most interesting buildings on IIT's campus was OMA principal, Harvard GSD professor and Pritzker Prize-winner Rem Koolhaas's McCormick Tribune Campus Center, which is the new student center. Because of the campus layout, Koolhaas had to site the building partially beneath Chicago's Green Line El tracks, so he devised an ingenious solution, which was to wrap the tracks in a huge sound-dampening tube, and then curve the roof of the center under the tube, while grading the space beneath the roof so that once inside the building, the dip in the roof isn't as noticeable. I was curious to see this, so I went into the building, walked around, snapped pictures, and I can say it is a marvel. The only other Koolhaas building or space I've ever been in is the Prada Store in New York's Soho, which was a revelation when I first visited it, with its marvelously sloping floor, step-benches, liquid screens, and so on. I have not seen the new library in Seattle, but hope to one of these days. This building uses color, unanticipated angles and spaces, shifting sightlines, dispersed spaces for congregation, and a rich mixtures of colored glass, buffed metals and concretes, and advanced plastics, to create a space that feels both profoundly futuristic and virtual--it's almost like the embodiment and performance of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "smooth space," but not merely as concept, but at experienced, situated, temporally grounded space.

Here are some photos of this center, which I think is one of the most interesting college or university buildings I've been in (some of my favorites were at MIT, though that was before they had begun their new wave of buildings that includes the Gehry, Holl and other masterpieces).


The tube(s), and the slanted (side) façade and entryway of the McCormick Tribune Campus Center

The side entryway up close. The tube hovers behind me. The slanting roof is hardly perceptible from this vantage.


The game room area, with the shimmering floor, the defamiliarizing angles, and the flowing contrasts of light and color.


There's a juice bar/café, with an aquamarine color motif, as well as the recurrent human symbols that appear all over the building, including on the glass walls facing State Street, where from a distance they form coherent images


The pumpkin-colored computer bank (which only featured PCs). The photo hardly captures the dramatic lines and color of this space.


The radio station, and the space behind the State Street façade, with its orange-tinted windows. The orange light was almost spellbinding, but this photo hardly does it justice.


The multicolored, multifloored cafeteria. Again, the photo hardly does it justice, since there are multiple spaces that constitute it, and depending upon where you are, you might be looking out onto or down or up into another area altogether.


A view of the State Street façade, with its orange-tinted windows. The slanted roof again has become invisible, though the Tube hovers in the background above the center of the building.

I'll end here. Koolhaas is about 60 or so, and has a number of projects underway, but I sincerely hope he gains or wins commissions for other US buildings. This one is hardly as experimental and dramatic as either the Prada Store or the images I've seen of the Seattle Library, but it's still a gem.

Very Brief Post + Quote: Fran Ross

I was all set to write about how I'd done my part in conserving gas by not driving for the last three days, but then I went out to my car this afternoon, and someone had smashed in the back passenger vent window to steal...quarters! Yes, that's all that was missing. Quarters. The radio and CD player, a wireless transmitter, a AC/DC converter, a toolkit, Dentyne Ice, my insurance card all lay strewn across the front seat, along a coin compartment where I'd stored the quarters. Was it a kid or a crackhead? Not taking the radio, they must really have needed to do laundry or get a fix. And I'd just walked past my car yesterday afternoon and smiled because it was sitting so tranquilly, having burned no high-priced gas in three days....

***

She was once inadvertently in the state of hwip-as when she was riding in her uncle's car. A man standing on a corner as the car passed had seen her and had made sucking noises to denote his approval of her apperance. Oreo did not consciously know she had heard these primitive sounds, but as she was getting out of the car, she was in such an advanced state of hwip-as that when she yanked at the ashtray, mistakenly thinking it was a door handle, she heedlessly created for her uncle the only three-door club coupe in America.
--Fran Ross, Oreo (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1974), p. 55.

Boykin Barred from Speaking at MMM + Miller/Plamegate

I was going to post more photos from my visit to IIT and my El ride, but I'm going hold off now because there are two more pressing things I want to write about.

***

First, this weekend, the highly controversial Nation of Islam leader's Rev. Louis Farrakhan's Millions More March (MMM) was scheduled to take place in Washington, DC. (It did, and drew far fewer people than organizers expected.) The MMM aimed to commemorate and capitalize on the ten-year anniversary of the Million Man March by reigniting a grass-roots conversation on the problems faced by Black people, and especially Black men, in America. We have the highest levels and rates of incarceration, the highest rates of unemployment, and some of the highest rates of HIV seroconversion in this country; Black families also disproportionately suffer from poverty, Black children have disparate rates of educational attainment compared with Whites and others groups, and on and on. The aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy laid bare so much of this for not only America, but the entire world, to see.

One element of this conversation that had gotten some recognition was the possibility of a dialogue involving Black LGBT people; Black LGBTs were present at the march in 1995, but one of the things that some Black LGBT leaders and organizations, like the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), had hoped for was that a real Black LGBT leader and activist could address the attendees. So over the last years, representatives from Farrakhan's camp and the march organizers had been in dialogue with the NBJC. They also were in dialogue with another Black LGBT organization, the Black Men's Exchange (BMX), a bicoastal outfit that began in Oakland in the 1990s. BMX's leader, who has advanced the term "same-gender-loving" (sgl) as a cultural-specific term to counter what he views as the White-normative implications of "gay," "queer," and other frequently used terms (on this page and elsewhere), appeared to have cemented an agreement to speak at the MMM. (He did, and I'm going to see if I can link to any video on CSPAN's site.)

Rod 2.0 and others, however, reported that noted LGBT activist, author, lawyer, and former Clinton White House staffer Keith Boykin (pictured above, at left, with Donna Payne, Farrakhan, and NBJC's H. Alexander Robinnson), along with representatives of NBJC, had spoken personally with Farrakhan, and was also set to speak at MMM. Keith not only has written two authoritative books on the Black LGBT experience, the first an excellent overview with lots of personal history (One More River to Cross), and the most recent one addressing issues related to the "down-low" (DL) identity and performance (On the Down Low), but has served as a leader on Black LGBT issues for years. (I should add that C. and I have known Keith since his law school days.)

According to Pamindurham's diary today on the Website DailyKos, however, when Keith attempted to speak at the MMM yesterday, he was preventing from doing so by the homophobic Reverend Willie Wilson, who had previously made homophobic statements this summer (his particular fixation, like Senator Tom Coburn's (R-OK), appears to be lesbianism...), prevented Keith and the Human Right Campaign's Donna Payne, who'd accompanied him, from speaking. Pamindurham quotes several different sources, including MetroWeekly's Will O'Bryan, TerrenceDC's Million More March (Not) Missed, and Keith's own blog to fill out her account. According to Keith:

This is what happened today. After I arrived at the VIP tent shortly after 8 in the morning, my colleague Donna Payne spoke directly to Rev. Willie Wilson backstage, and he informed her that no one from the National Black Justice Coalition would be speaking today. Donna told Rev. Wilson that he was violating our agreement, and Wilson replied that the agreement was void because the Coalition had not responded by Friday. That was not true.

Rev. Wilson's excuse seemed a mere pretext to prevent us from speaking. Sadly, I am not surprised. He has been an obstacle to this process all along. Ever since his controversial July 3 sermon in which he blamed the rise of lesbianism for the problems in the black community, Rev. Wilson seems to have developed ill feelings toward the black gay community for responding to his attack. That was three months ago, and I had hoped to use my speech today to extend an olive branch to Rev. Wilson to move beyond our differences and heal our wounds, but his actions this morning made that impossible.

The powerful speech he was not allowed to deliver is here. The Washington Post reports today that Black LGBTs present then turned what was supposed to be a "unity rally" into a vocal protest and march at Keith's exclusion. More power to them! Meanwhile, did Farrakhan know from the beginning that this was a set-up? Was he acting in bad faith? As for the Talevangelist types people like Wilson, who call themselves "Christians," do they have any concept of what the Gospels say or of Christ's example of love and tolerance? And where are the masses of mainstream Christians who should be calling them out on their hatefulness and obsession with sexuality and homosexuality in particular? Why, in the midst of all that that Black people are facing, are people like Wilson so fixated on sexuality and homosexuality in particular? What are they afraid of or hiding from?

I also have to wonder, since Wilson and others allowed the BMX representative speak, what did he (since it's an all-male group) have to say, about the topics at hand, about sexuality, and about Keith's exclusion? Or did he collude, through silence and oversight, in our oppression and exclusion? I'm not wasting an iota of gray matter trying to figure out the answer to that question.

As for the Millions More March, I had not seriously considered attending, and am glad I didn't. I'm also glad to hear that "millions" didn't waste their time. (I do wonder if a good friend went, though.) While the focus on the issues facing Black Americans, Black men and women, Black families, is critical and crucial, and must translate into more than rhetoric or misguided reaction, Farrakhan, by affording Wilson so much power and allowing BMX to assert its very slanted viewpoints as any kind of statement about the experiences of Black LGBT or same-gender-loving people (BMX, what about Black lesbians, bis and transgender people?), proved that was the person to organize or foster the necessary discussions and conversations that have to occur, and underscored MMM wasn't the venue in which they'd take place.

***

By now, one would have to be hiding under a rock not to know at least the rudiments of the Treasongate-Plamegate-Traitorgate drama that is steaming towards a finale of sorts at the end of this month (or perhaps sooner), when Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is expected to issue a series of indictments against individuals believed to have committed any number of crimes that arose from the outing in the summer of 2003 to journalists of and Robert Novak's publication of classified information in a newspaper column about Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert CIA operative whose husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had emerged as a vocal critic of the W administration's propaganda efforts to build the case for the War in Iraq.

One key cog in the wheels of the outing has been New York Times reporter Judith Miller. As is also well known, she spent 85 days in a Washington jail for refusing to testify before an empaneled grand jury in Fitzgerald's probe. Although she presented her stance as a honorable example of journalistic integrity and honor, it has since emerged that in fact, Miller's role in this entire mess is much, much murkier. But then, for those who'd followed Miller's career and her close ties to neoconservatives and powerful Republicans, this isn't suprising. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, she wrote a series of articles touting exclusive, sourced information about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction capabilities and capacity; the articles and the information in them were later proved to be grossly wrong. In addition, she went to Iraq as an embedded reporter with the MET Alpha group after the fall of Hussein's rule to report on the discovery of those WMDs, which President W, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State Colin Powell had all claimed would be found. As critics of Miller--including yours truly--imagined, no proof--not just no conclusive proof, but no proof whatsoever--of an extensive WMD arsenal or of programs to weaponize the nonexistant nuclear materials, and biological and chemical agents that the W administration terrified the public into believing were in Iraq, was found, by any of the figures (David Kay, Charles Duelfer, etc.) charged with finding them. Those WMDs and the fact that they were readily weaponizable were, let us never forget, the W administration's chief and often-stated rationale and pretext for toppling Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq. W pressed this point in his 2003 State of the Union address, and his officials reiterated it again and again in public appearances and speeches. Not to liberate the Iraqis from a tyrant with whom Reagan and HW had cooperated intimately for 8 years, not to spread democracy, not to protect Israel, not to remake the Middle East. It was to destroy the man who had all those WMDs AND avenge the 9/11 attacks, though, as the president himself subsequently admitted, there were no established ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden, the person behind the 9/11 suicide attacks.

After the truth of the nonexistant WMDs came to light, Times editor-in-chief Bill Keller had to issue a public mea culpa apologizing for the shoddy reporting and the paper's role in further the W administration's agenda. Five of the six faulty articles that Keller cited were written or co-written by Miller, who bizarrely claimed at the time claimed that events somehow vindicated her. Huh? Keller nevertheless took her off the WMDs beat shortly after taking over, but as he notes in the long, new quasi-mea culpa published in today's Times, the self-described "Miss Run Amok" (?) "drifted" back into "the national security realm." In fact, as recently as early this summer, before her stay in the hoosegow, she was again carrying water for the administration by pushing its slanted take on the United Nations' Oil-for-Food scandal. The scandal's chief investigator, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, actually ended up implicating the US government's laissez-faire-to-negligent approach as a contribution the scandal, though Miller's articles said little about this. But back to Miller, how was she able to do what she felt like? Why wasn't there more--any?--control over this employee?

Meanwhile, the Fitzgerald probe has been cranking along since it got underway, after the strong push from CIA agents, in the fall of 2003. Slowly but surely, a number of Washington and New York journalists, including Miller, Time's Matthew Cooper, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus, and TV personalities Tim Russert, Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell, as well as high-level administration officials like W's political marioneteer and fixer Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, found themselves part of Fitzgerald's dragnet. Even the President, Vice President, and past and former Secretaries of State have testified; Condoleezza Rice admitted "cooperating" with Fitzgerald this morning. Although Libby, who was thought to be Miller's chief source, provided her with a waiver through his lawyer in 2004, Miller dramatically took a stand, after being ordered by a federal judge to testify in the case, that she would not reveal her supposedly "lone" source. (Libby later wrote a personal letter again giving her a waiver, but the drama queen refused to or pretended to believe it wasn't coerced.) The Times dramatically decided to back her, viewing and promoting her as a confidentiality champion, and consistently did so all through this past summer. Well, well, well, what a difference a year, some time in jail, a raveling story, and a competent lawyer named Patrick Fitzgerald make.

Miller is now out of jail and has testified twice before the grand jury. Supposedly she decided to sing like a canary (or should I say nightingale?) after Libby spoke with her via conference call and suggested she testify. This was after she realized that Fitzgerald might charge her with criminal contempt and that the grand jury could be extended, thus meaning she'd stay in jail for potentially 16 more months. Even the steady stream of important people (including major journalists, the problematic UN Ambassador John Bolton, and others) didn't lighten her time in the slammer very much; there is only so much bad food, thin mattresses, and monitored phone calls that most non-masochists can take. Not only has Miller sung (though she's ludicrously claimed she can't recall if Libby outed Plame to her), but she supposedly "found" a notebook from a June interview with Libby that she'd forgotten to pass onto the prosecutor; and, with her criminal attorney, Bob Bennett (brother of white supremacist-gambling-addict-hypocrite Bill Bennett), she may have cut a deal of some sort with Fitzgerald to keep her bony backside from returning behind bars.

Meanwhile, the august Gray Lady, the Newspaper of Record, the journalistic organ than ironically announces--despite its roles in the Whitewater fiasco, the relentless destruction of Al Gore that aided W in being able to stage his 2000 coup, the jayson Blair brouhaha, and the Iraq War buildup--that it publishes "all the news fit to print," had long remained silent about Miller, its disastrous coverage of the Plame outing, and the potentially criminal aspects of the affair. Other news organizations and innumerable blogs have repeatedly scooped the Times about its own reporter and the grand jury deliberations. So today, it served up a tepid bucket of spit (to modify Vice President John Nance Garner's phrase) by staff reporters, a long and hole-ridden story that posed more questions than it answered. A number of the statements in it simply did and do not make sense or square with each other, as if there were some major point that either the reporters or the Times itself was not telling us. (Which made me wonder--is or was Judith Miller a CIA or Pentagon or government agent herself?)

It also published a strange, evasive, self-serving, 3,500 account by Miller that should serve as grounds for her immediate dismissal, unless it was meant to be a joke or was the opening to her book proposal. One particularly troubling issue she raises in her piece was the fact that despite her self-proclaimed espousals of the sanctity of her role as a journalist and defender of the truth, she had a security clearance*, meaning that she was starting from the premise that she couldn't report on classified information she came across and was basically working as an operative. Say what? Did the Times know about and condone this, or did she hide it from them? And are other Times reporters operating under similar ethical and professionally dubious constraints? Can we trust them if they claim there aren't?

What both pieces underlined for me was that Times has displayed yet again that it cannot be taken seriously any more as a legitimate source of news regarding politics and national affairs (it still has interesting high arts, science, fashion, etc. coverage). Indeed, I was so personally disgusted that I wrote the following letter ending my brief experiment with TimesSelect. I sent it not only to their "cancel" e-mail address, but also to the Executive Editor, the Managing Editor, the Public Editor, and their Help Desk, just in case someone else there might see the piece. (I have already received an automatic response from the new public editor, Byron Calame.) I tried not to go overboard:

Dear New York Times:

I am writing to unsubscribe from TimesSelect.

While I have relied on the New York Times for many years as one of my main news sources and have long treasured your reporting, I am so dismayed and unnerved by the newspaper's long account surrounding the Judith Miller reporting scandals on WMDs and Iraq and the failure to address fully and truthfully her role in outing CIA operative Valerie Plame that I am going to have to unsubscribe from TimesSelect for now. Neither the long "mea culpa" nor Ms. Miller's self-serving sidebar answers a number of basic questions, including WHO WAS HER SOURCE and why can a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist not recall who told her something so incredibly politically significant and valuable. Also, neither account explores why I. Lewis Libby would have been discussing Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife with her well in advance of his Op-Ed in the New York Times, who the mystery editor was who did not allow her to publish her story on the topic, what role UN Ambassador John Bolton may have played in this whole saga (since she had previously reported faulty information conveyed by him, like the illusory links between Iran and Cuba on WMDs, in the New York Times), and what her true connection was to the late Dr. David Kelly, who'd been exposed as the source on the "sexed up" intelligence in the Blair "white paper" that later turned about to be full of falsehoods.

Why has the New York Times not only given us the full account of what Ms. Miller was up to, but linked all these dots? I mean, this is one the great newspapers in the world, so I'm unclear about why it hasn't been able to make these connections.

But back to my first question, how is it that she cannot recall who told her the name "Valerie Flame" (or later "Victoria Wilson"), and why didn't the New York Times editors and writers press her on this?

When the New York Times's editor-in-chief, Bill Keller, and some more of your reporters completely clarify what really went on, when they explain why Ms. Miller is still employed at the newspaper after her series of dreadful, grossly wrong reports about WMDs, when they justify her defiance of her editor's decision to pull her off the WMD beat, when they explicate why she cannot say decisively who told her about "Valerie Flame," and so on, I will strongly consider signing up again.

For the time being, however, I cannot comprehend the damage that you have allowed to be done to your journalistic integrity. I can't comprehend it, but then I am not a journalist, just a very concerned citizen who wishes that a newspaper like the New York Times would live up to its potential and reputation, and serve as a beacon of the free press. Instead, it has repeatedly allowed Ms. Miller (like Elizabeth Bumiller, Frank Bruni, and so many others) to turn it into yet another propaganda weapon on behalf of the Bush administration. The effects of this on our politics, our public discourse, our standing in the world, and our country in general are incalculable.

Many of the issues I raise in this unsubscription letter have been raised by others, but I really would love for the Times or Miller to answer the basic question of WHO told her the name "Valerie Flame" and later, I presume, "Victoria Wilson?" How could she not recall who did so, or is it more likely the case that she's lying to protect someone? If it wasn't Libby, then who was it? Why did she tell her editor that she hadn't been one of the people to whom this information was leaked? Why did she also try to have her lawyer get Fitzgerald to limit his questioning of her to the issue of Libby as her source if she says Libby didn't give her this name and someone else did? And why doesn't the Times piece ask these basic facts? I am not a journalist, as I note, nor a lawyer, and like all human beings, I transpose and mix up facts. (Hell, I can't even get names right anymore.) But isn't a journalist expected to remember who said what and when, and be able to use notes as a guide to backing up supposedly truthful statements? (Also, her odd recitation of what her "notes" confirm made me wonder, what does she recall? Because she surely didn't and couldn't let the notes speak for her to Fitzgerald and the grand jury.) Fiction writers, no. But people working in non-fictional genres, especially journalists, have this burden, don't they? Don't they?

I think this case will prove more than yet another bad but survivable storm in the winter of W's 2nd term discontent; it may be the opening gambit into a larger and more comprehensive examination of how the American people were systematically duped into supporting an unnecessary, possibly illegal, and certainly poorly conducted war. Supposedly Fitzgerald is mulling obstruction, conspiracy and perjury charges in addition to indictments based on the 1917 law forbidding the leaking of classified information by government officials and the more recent law expressly prohibited identifying undercover CIA agents. Given how frequently the GOP leaders have lied over the last five years, I wouldn't doubt that they thought they could get away with a few more concerning this case. (Rove was "not involved" in the leak; Rove learned about Plame "from" Matt Cooper; Lewis Libby "did not reveal" Plame's name to any of the reporters he spoke to; etc.) It is somewhat depressing to consider that our GOP-controlled Congress, which is charged with serving as our representatives in the government, refuse to do their job, and that our media, especially powerful independent organs like the Times, also will not assume their role as independent guardians of the truth. But we still do have a justice system; the radical right, Straussian neocons, and Talevangelists have not totally wrecked it yet, and if Fitzgerald can do his job even halfway competently, we will see some of the most dangerous officials who've been manipulating the public at will finally pay a price--even modest ones--for having done so. As to whether we'll ever get the full truth, or whether the Times will ever recover, who can say? I don't want to say I doubt it, but over the last fiveyears, the cynical attitude has increasingly seemed to be the aptest one.

Update 1: Actually, I decided to finish Judith Miller's article in the New York Times, and I have to say, its ending is sooooo bizarre, I'm not sure what to make of it.

Mr. Fitzgerald also focused on the letter's closing lines. "Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning," Mr. Libby wrote. "They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."

How did I interpret that? Mr. Fitzgerald asked.

In answer, I told the grand jury about my last encounter with Mr. Libby. It came in August 2003, shortly after I attended a conference on national security issues held in Aspen, Colo. After the conference, I traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyo. At a rodeo one afternoon, a man in jeans, a cowboy hat and sunglasses approached me. He asked me how the Aspen conference had gone. I had no idea who he was.

"Judy," he said. "It's Scooter Libby."

Say what? She doesn't recognize a man she'd interviewed in person twice and said she trusted? How does her question answer Fitzgerald's, or address that creepy, cryptic passage of Libby's? And what on earth could it mean? Okay, it could be a straightforward comment about aspen trees, which are deciduous, but then it very well could be code, a sort of verbal steganography (the encoding of secret messages in Net-based images), letting Miller know...what? They're all linked, and uh, the roots of one tree, if felled, could bring down the others...???

*Update 2: This Franklin Foer article from New York magazine actually explores in detail Miller's sordid background, her links to the neocons, a hint at the whole security clearance business, and her colleagues' marked dislike of her. It explains why she was "running amok" before Bill Keller took over, but not why, after he'd had to defend the paper against her depradations, he didn't play a stronger hand, especially after the administration's lies become increasingly more transparent.

***

Okay, here are two photos that have nothing to do either with either of the pieces above, but everything to do with baseball mania in Chicagoland.


A young "Green" Chicago White Sox fan on the southbound Red Line train


Cellular One (New Comiskey) ballpark, from the Gate 4 side, home of the Chicago White Sox (South Side!). If they win tonight, they'll return here for the World Series. If they don't win tonight, they'll return here to close out the ALDS. Either way, the place'll be mobbed!

Photos: IIT's Crown Hall

(Blast Blogger! Once again, I lost a long, complete post; I don't know if it was Blogger or my Mac, which just freezes at times when opening too many pages in Mozilla Firefox, but there was no way even to do a screen copy or anything to save it....)

So here's another try, on the brevity tip. Today I traveled via the El to see some of one of the most famous collections of architecture in one of American architecture's capitals, Chicago. The Illinois Institute of Technology, located at State Street and E. 35th, just across the Dan Ryan Expressway from the Chicago White Sox's Cellular One (New Comiskey) ballpark, was the US homebase for one of 20th century's greatest architects, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969). A emigré from Germany, where he'd pioneered an original avant-garde "functionalism" that synthesized elements of the deStijl school, the unornamented façades of Austrian Secessionism, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Style to novel effect, and led the Bauhaus School in its final days before the Nazi takeover of the government, Mies assumed the leadership of the architecture school at what was then the Armour Institute of Technology. He devised a new, comprehensive masterplan for the campus, designed many of its buildings, and went on to develop the highly influential International Style, whose apotheoses are his Farnsworth House (1946), 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartments (1948), the Seagrams Building in New York (1954-1958), Neue Nationalgalarie in Berlin (1965-1968), the Illinois Center in Chicago (1967). It is perhaps true to say that a Miesian vocabulary, however, has defined much skyscraper building from the late 1940s on, with architects all across the world drawing upon his various exposed truss, "glass boxes." (He was among the first architects to propose the glass skyscraper, as far back as 1919).

One of his true masterpieces is Crown Hall, which was built from 1950-1955/56, after Mies had designed a number of important campus buildings, such as Alumni Memorial, Perlstein and Wishnick Halls, and established his signature style. Crown Hall underwent a complete external and internal renovation over the last few years, and supposedly looks even more beautiful today than it did when it first opened. As the Chicago Landmarks website says

A defining structure of 20th-century modern architecture, this is one of the masterpieces of the world-reknowned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Designed to house Illinois Institute of Technology's departments of architecture, planning, and design, the building's dramatic, structurally-expressive form resulted from the need to create an open interior space that could be flexibly adapted for changing needs and uses. Instead of interior columns, the roof is hung from exposed steel trusses bridging the depth of the building. It was named for S. R. Crown, a co-founder of the Material Service Corporation.

Here are some of my photos:


Crown Hall, from the front, southwest corner


Crown Hall, frontal view, facing the main entryway


Crown Hall, rear view (from State Street side)


Interior shot of Crown Hall (Not being affiliated with IIT in any way, I was prohibited from setting foot in this building, though I did wander through the Rem Koolhaas-designed McCormick Tribune Campus Center, which I'll post photos of tomorrow--so I had to photograph it through the front door's panes, thus the reflections of the trees hovering, like phantasms of Mies, atop the shadowed interior).


A similar building in the Miesian style is Hermann Hall, the student union building, which Walter Netzsch of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill designed in 1962. It strongly resembles Crown Hall, yet it lacks the earlier building's purity of line, formal symmetry, and innovative internal structure. From a distance, though, it would hard to tell them apart.

One of the first things I thought after seeing these and the other Mies buildings up close was, even though they're 50 years old, they don't look dated and they still look modern. In fact, they look as contemporaneous as the Koolhaas and Jahn buildings across State Street. I wish Mies had laid the buildings out so that instead of turning outwards from each other--they cluster around the walkways that are are extensions of the surrounding streets (Dearborn, etc.)--they formed an inwards-turning axis so that from the front of one you could see the entrances to the others. From the rear of Crown Hall you can see some of the older buildings, but it faces a dreary building that might have been a Mies toss off, or something built in the Mies style that doesn't make the grade.

Profile in Courage: Vivian Malone Jones

Tonight's entry is a brief one, honoring the courage of Vivian Malone Jones, who passed away today at the age of 63. In 1963, she and James Hood attempted to enroll in the University of Alabama, an act of bravery and resistance that sparked one of the most famous scenes in the long and brutal history of racism in this country; Alabama's then-governor, Democrat George Wallace, infamously stood in the doorway of Foster Auditorium, with state guard troops, to block the two black students' entry, fulfilling a campaign pledge to halt integration "at the schoolhouse door"; at his inauguration, he had proclaimed "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Since a federal judge had ordered that the students be allowed to enroll, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, following a script that had been choreographed by his boss, Robert F. Kennedy, with Wallace, approached the governor and asked that the students be admitted, which Wallace publicly defied. Four hours later, National Guard troops who'd been federalized by President John F. Kennedy, Malone and Hood, with Katzenbach and other administation officials, were able to enter the building, go to their dormitories, and enroll.

The day after they'd enrolled, Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered in his driveway by Byron de la Beckwith and others. Malone, vowing to show no fear, went to classes that day, and despite the extreme social isolation--White students would neither speak nor socialize with her--as well as the constant threat of violence, including bomb threats (three actually detonated not far from her dorm room at one point during her two years there), she completed the coursework for her degree in 1965, becoming the first Black graduate in the University of Alabama's 143-year history. (Hood dropped out after two months to preserve his sanity and didn't return to Alabama until more than 30 years later, to receive his doctorate in education.) Malone, who'd subsequently married the young student driver, Mack Jones, from nearby HBCU Stillman College that the university had contracted for her, returned in the 1990s to receive a masters in education from the university. For the rest of her life, she was active in civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the SCLC, and the National Council of Negro Women. In 1996, when the Wallace Family Foundation awarded her the Lurleen Wallace Award for Courage, she met with George Wallace, and, according to the Washington Post, asked him directly about his actions some 33 years before:

"I asked him why did he do it," she said. "He said he did what he felt needed to be done at that point in time, but he would not do that today. At that point, we spoke -- I spoke -- of forgiveness."

On WBEZ yesterday, I heard Malone Jones, in an interview from a few years, say that she was conscious of making history, but what was more important to her was that her courage would make it possible for the generations of Blacks who would come after her. And it did. Black students are now enrolled at every one of Alabama's public institutions of higher education, and at public universities across the South, as well as private institutions that once admitted very few to none. A widow (her husband, Dr. Mack Jones, died in 2004), she leaves her two children, three grandchildren, a number of siblings and family members, and a tremendous legacy. Thank you, Vivian Malone Jones, and those of your generation whose courage and sacrifice made our own freedoms possible!

Pinter Wins Nobel

Harold Pinter (pictured at left in his play One for the Road, on the right, with Lloyd Hutchinson, photo by Sara Krulwich, New York Times), one of the most prolific and influential dramatists in English-language literature, received the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature. The London native was cited for a lifetime of writing that "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." In essence, the citation aptly characterizes Pinter's chief style, a clipped, repetitious, often pause-ridden series of verbal exchanges, (sometimes shading into lyricism especially in some of the later works) between his dramatis personae, that initially appear banal or innocuous on the surface but which usually portend his great theme, which was the lurking evil and horror that lie both outside the rooms in which his plays are set, and also lurk within the characters themselves.

His dramatic successes are numerous: they include his famous early plays The Birthday Party (1957), which was a critical failure at its initial opening but which was later acclaimed as one of the signal plays of the mid-20th century, The Dumb Waiter (1957), and The Caretaker (1960); plays from the early and mid-1960s, including The Tea Party (1962), The Homecoming (1964), Landscape (1967), Silence (1968), and Old Times (1970); and Betrayal (1978), which was made into a noteworthy film, and which inaugurated a string of plays dealing more overtly with political and social themes, including A Kind of Alaska (1982), One for the Road (1984), The New World Order (1991), Party Time (1991), Ashes to Ashes (1996), and Celebration (1999).

Pinter's work shows the influence of English dramaturgy, and in particular the plays of the Anglo-Irish Anglophone and Francophone absurdist writer Samuel Beckett (Nobel Laureate in 1969), who befriended Pinter while he was still alive. It also bears the strong effect of his having grown up as the son of a Jewish tailor in working-class pre and post-war London, amidst the atmosphere of everyday, pedestrian speech and routine, and of living through the Second World War; he experienced anti-Semitism directly as a young person, and witnessed firsthand the effects of the fascist state in the destruction caused by the aerial raids on Britain's cities, as well as the tragedies both of country's killed and wounded citizens and soldiers, but also of the millions who died in the death camps. Violence, evil and death recur frequently in his work, sometimes by allusion, implication and assertion, at other times, as in The Birthday Party or Ashes to Ashes, more directly in the plot. Pinter's experiences led him to conscientious objection, and later to open activism on behalf of peace. He has remained a vocal activist and critic of war, imperialism, social and economic conservative schemes (especially as enacted by the Thatcher woman), and as recently as a few years ago, issued blistering denunciations of the W administration's march towards war in Iraq.

One other very important aspect of Pinter's long and distinguished career has been his screenwriting, which is not usually honored or even noted by authorities like the Swedish Academy. He has written a number of important screenplays, both original and adaptations, from the 1950s to very recently. They include scripts for the films The Quiller Memorandum, The Last Tycoon, Langrishe Go Down, The Go-Between, Reunion, The French Lieutenant's Woman (I love Meryl Streep in this film), The Heat of the Day, The Comfort of Strangers, and The Trial. Even more remarkably, he wrote several of the screenplays for the noted director Joseph Losey (The Servant, Accident, The Go-Between) as he was also writing his stylistically different and distinctive plays.

Several years ago he suffered from throat cancer, and vowed to cease writing in order to devote his energies to peace. Perhaps this august award will persuade him to resume his playwriting, or work in other genres, as he's also an accomplished poet and fiction writer (The Dwarfs, a fascinating little novel from the late 1950s, I believe, is a book I read many years ago). Congratulations, Harold Pinter!

Update: On RadarOnline, the wretched old bat John Simon dissents from the praise chorus and dilates nastily on Pinter's Nobel win. In his own words: "Harold Pinter has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature? I would have gladly accorded him the Nobel for Arrogance, the Nobel for Self-promotion, or the Nobel for Hypocrisy—spewing venom at the United States while basking in our dollars—if such Nobels existed." But wait--the Swedish Academy awards the Nobel Prize, not the United States. And theaters, directors and actors across the country--and in many parts of the world--are free to choose the plays they want to stage, and of their own volition they choose Pinter. And why shouldn't a brilliant playwright be proud and promote herself or himself? Simon patronizingly praises Pinter's acting and directing, but those plays...well, they just don't meet Simon's critical standards. I guess Pinter should be glad he's not going as far as he did with John Ashbery back in the early 1960s, when he noted an appraisal of that author's revolutionary The Tennis Court Oath was "garbage"...plus ça change, plus ça reste.

Oulipo Story: The Agent's Oversight

THE AGENT'S OVERSIGHT

Puzzling over the map, he slows down and drifts to the side of the road, where the oaks lining the curb are casting a cool shadow like a tarp, restraining the blazing July sun. He likes to be early--you can't do this job properly if you're rushing--so he left the house a little before noon, but once again his plan has raveled as he's gradually found himself lost in a neighborhood he's never visited before, and it's now after 2. The imagery is so indistinct, the landscape so featureless--every detached house similar in size, shape and color, the same flat green-brown lawns, trim juniper hedges, black driveways--he feels like he's been driving into and out of an immense mirror. When he finally does find the house he's looking for, a development he's sanguine about, he intends to draw a large, red circle around the exact spot on the unfolded chart before him, like he's done every other time he's ended up in a similar situation, though he realizes it's unlikely he'll ever have to come back here; he never does, he's so good that once is always enough. Which is why he's got like models carefully stored away in his basement from previous trips to any number of destinations, in countless cities, but the targets in the suburbs are always a trial, and the exurbs are the worst. He's like to pull out his afro in many of them, because it's as if the surveyors and planners simply clipped fragments of various other pictures, ideas and concepts of what a town ought not to be and then, using the assembled mess as a template, gave developers and homeowners the go ahead. His head is starting to hurt so he turns back to the map and scans the crumpled squares and squibbles, fathoming that their like is blurring into a colorful abstraction. The shade shifts, so he starts the car, his chances of finding the place perhaps moot at this point, he thinks, and advances like ten feet, to where the light relents. Then he glances up, through a window in the wall of trees, and experiences a quantum moment of insight: like, hello, the house he's been searching for is directly before him, to his right, straight through the driver's side window, and when he squints, he can see the person's he's looking for, whose future hovers on the tips of his fingers, passing back and forth behind the grail of blinds....

Copyright © John Keene, 2005.

Question: Two different verbal games are operating in this ultrashort story.
One is obvious, one not so obvious. Can you figure them out?

Stackhouse on Rattapallax + Nobel Judge Resigns

Friend, artist and collaborator Christopher Stackhouse appears on Rattapallax literary journal's audio feed site, reading his poem "Fabrication." Check it out!

Rattapallax's most recent issue (12) includes works by Stackhouse, as well as Saul Williams, Rick Moody, Paul Beatty, Ernesto Cardenal, Kenneth Goldsmith, Patricia Spear Jones, Mohammed Khair-Eddine, Marilyn Hacker, Samuel Menashe, Dael Orlandersmith, Margert Ryan, Jerome Rothenberg, Virgil Suarez, Raul Zurita, Li-Young Lee, Cid Campos, Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Carl Hancock Rux, and a special section on South African Poetry After Apartheid. (Thanks for the heads up, Mendi!)

∞∞∞

According to a report in the BBC News, Knut Ahnlund, an 82-year-old member of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, resigned today in protest over last year's awarding of the literary world's most important international prize to Elfriede Jelinek. According to Ahnlund, Jelinek's works, which include novels, plays and essays, are "a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure." In fact, he stated that "last year's Nobel Prize has not only done irreparable damage to all progressive forces, it has also confused the general view of literature as an art." Talk about a delayed response; did he just learn about last year's award today?

I also think he protesteth too much. Jelinek's works, which he also called "pornographic" (which is partially right) are also held in high esteem by other writers and readers. Her most famous book, the violent and disturbing The Piano Teacher, became an internationally celebrated movie under Michael Haneke's direction in 2001. Ahnlund suggested that the Academy had not read most of Jelinek's works, so were they basing the award on the movie and Isabelle Huppert's extraordinary performance? In which case, will the award to this Thursday to Canadian author and poet Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient), Britons John LeCarré (The Constant Gardner), A.S. Byatt (Possession) or Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day), or Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (Tony Takitani)? Those Jelinek books aren't easy reading, but then Ondaatje is even tougher....

Clarice Lispector, Mother of Blogs

Perhaps someone has already written (about) this, but I was thinking today as I rereading sections of the Pernambucan author Marilene Felinto's The Women of Tijucopapo for tomorrow's class, and also preparing for the the visit tomorrow of Hélène Cixous, who has done so much to popularize and promote the work of the late Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), that what Lispector in particular accomplished with her crônicas, or daily/weekly newspaper pieces on a variety of topics, was to anticipate the blog form before there was the technical means to do so. (Of course one could trace out other antecedents going even further back, but Lispector's style and approach provide, I think, one very important originary point.)

New Directions published a selection of Lispector's translated crônicas (Selected Crônicas) in 1996, and what is fascinating to note as you read them is how much like (and yet different from) many contemporary blog entries they are. Instead of satisfying the demands of the traditional opinion column, which she had done years earlier, or the more formally consistent regular pieces by her male colleagues, Lispector's crônicas comprised sometimes meandering, autobiographical, often confessional musings, short stories and sketches, dream narratives, poems, gossip, and so on from 1967 to the early 1970s in the Jornal do Brasil, one of Rio de Janeiro's major newspapers. Many of the works hold a mirror up to Lispector's amazing but occasionally difficult life: as an immigrant (born in Tchechelnik, Ukraine, her family arrived in the northeast of Brazil--first Alagoas, then Pernambuco--when she was only two months old); as the wife of a diplomat who didn't truly understand her aims in life; as a single mother of young children; as a survivor of a terrible accident (she nearly burned herself up when she fell asleep smoking and her mattress caught fire); as a person interested in the eternal verities of life, love, suffering, and death; as someone struggling to write herself into language and a literature.

The works often served as leads for her published literary short stories and novels; fragments, obsessions, explorations, theses occur in the journalistic pieces and then reappear in similar and altered form in the longer works. Though Lispector's prose fiction has won international acclaim for its metaphysical profundity and feminist focus, another of its most noteworthy qualities is its earthiness, its openness, its indeterminacy, its literal rawness at times, which can be found in abundance in the crônicas. There is also a concern with the poor, who then, as now, constituted a majority in Brazil, and who appear most famous in her longer work in the character of the northeastern immigrant to the big city, Macabéa, whose brief life, humiliation and transcendence lie at the center of one of Lispector's most unforgettable works, The Hour of the Star (A hora da estrela). In that remarkable work, as in the crônicas, the author breaches the traditional authorial wall, the sociological or anthropological distance often employed (or deployed) when writing (about) the Other, to implicate the narrator, and by extension herself, a radical act of resituation and location. Lispector creates the preparatory space for this in her earliest works, but also in the pieces she wrote as a cronista, as the Ur-blogger. No Narcissus, no navel-gazing, but before the reading public (still smaller then as now than the total population in Brazil), she inspected the self, often with great clarity, creativity, and force.

I sometimes wonder what she might have written had she not died from cancer the day before her birthday in 1977, and tonight I wonder what she might have thought--and done--had she lived long enough (she'd be 85, so it's not inconceivable) to experience the birth, growth and ubiquity not only of the Internet, Websites, and e-mail, but of the (We)blog itself. Perhaps she might have taken an interest in trying the medium out, and those would have been fascinating crônicas indeed.

2006 US Senate Races

Although I found Barack Obama's candidacy last year energizing and donated to it, I haven't actively worked to elect a politician since 1992, when I volunteered for Bill Clinton's and Al Gore's campaign for the presidency and handed out fliers and signed up voters down at Boston Common. I was still in my 20s then, still somewhat idealistic, and had grown so tired of the twelve years of Republican misrule, covert war and scandal--which in retrospect appear mild compared to the disasters we've experienced in less than half that time, since 2000--that I was eager to do what I could to oust the elder Bush (HW) and get Clinton and Gore into office. I had many problems with Clinton's stances, which I found too right-leaning or shifty, as if his political compass was really a weathervane. I also had issues with Gore's past as a conservative Southern Democrat and his Puritanical crusades on pop culture (were those Gore daughters any worse for having listened to Prince? Seriously?). But I felt that both men would be far better for this country and for me than the Republican option of HW and Quayle. So I did my part, and was delighted when Clinton, in that infamous three-way race that involved the megalomaniac "reformer" H. Ross Perot, triumphed.

By 1996, I'd decided I wasn't going to waste another moment on Clinton's behalf; while I was going to vote for him (there was no way I would cast a vote for Bob Dole and Jack Kemp, both of whom would be out of touch with the Straussian neocons, Talevangelists and other kooks now guiding the rudder of the Republican Party), I found his triage-style of politics and pandering destructive to real progressivism, and I was angered that he'd failed to work with the Democratic Congress more during the short period (1992-1994) when they jointly led the country. That was truly a wasted moment. Instead, we got Gingrich's Contract Against America, and the Republicans have, to our national detriment, pretty much run the Congress ever since. (There was a brief period from May 2001 through January 2003 when the Democrats had control of the Senate because of Jim Jefford's defection.) The resulting damage from this has become increasingly clear over the last few years, as the Republican Congress has provided little to no governmental oversight and has rarely challenged the president, choosing instead to serve as the prosecutors of the Executive Branch's extreme agenda. The weak and shrinking Democratic caucuses in both houses haven't done much better, though in both cases, they have no power to initiate legislation or inquiries; in the Senate, they can block or hold up processes, while in the House, they are almost completely neutered by their lack of a majority.

After listening the other night to about two minutes of President Katrina's babble on the Iraq War, which is the same, inane crap he's been repeating since shortly after 9/11, I thought to myself, we are going to have to help the Congressional Democrats do the right thing in spite of themselves. In essence, we have no choice, since outside of Socialist-Independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, there's little chance that the Greens or Democratic Socialists or even Libertarians would be elected to federal offices as a counter against the inept AND corrupt one-party rule of the GOP. So it'll have to be the Democrats, and, despite how we might feel about their overall timidity and fecklessness, they're the only option right now. I won't be manning or handing out fliers for any, but I may try some other options to support some of the more progressive candidates who're running.

And there's a very good chance that, with enough a grassroots push and despite the worst ministrations of the DLC, voters can push the Democrats over the top, at least in the Senate, so that they're in control for 2 years at a minimum, which would mean no more Pat Roberts covering for George W, no more outrageous CAFTA or bankruptcy or Medicare bills, no more ramming of the W agenda through without a pause, no more having to wait for John McCain, a Vietnam-era prisoner of war, to take two years to get upset enough to push through a bill ending the enabling of torture by top officials. Were the Democrats in control right now, it's very likely that scary crackpots like Janice Rogers Brown would never have gotten out of committee, and John Roberts probably wouldn't be heading SCOTUS. And W would have at least one major check in place, since it looks increasingly likely that the Supreme Court is going to shift even further rightward if Miers joins it (she's no David Souter or even Anthony Kennedy, let alone Sandra Day O'Connor), and given DeLay's handiwork in redistricting Texas, which means that the GOP will have an ongoing cushion in one of the most conservative states in the country. Unless the Democrats can defeat a few more GOPers in moderate to left-leaning states like New York (where's W's popularity is at an abysmal 29%), Connecticut, California, Pennsylvania, Michigan, etc. I wouldn't count on that.

So we return to the Senate, which, if it changed hands, would provide at least means of addressing the spate of problems the W administration continues to create. One major constitutional check in the federal balance of powers would once again be in place. But the truth is, the Democrats will have to defend more seats than the Republicans. As 2004 showed, the Democrats frequently pick pathetic candidates. There was that strange-looking guy who was running against Tom Coburn, a certified nutcase (how many sane people do you know who sterilize other people AGAINST THEIR WILL and claim that "lesbianism" is rampant and call for the killing of doctors performing abortion? Oh, and defraud Medicaid?). Yes, W is very popular in Oklahoma, but that Democrat in Oklahoma just looked...off! In one of the debates I saw, he looked like he was hiding something, like he was terrified, while Coburn just looked...crazy. So guess whom the voters chose? Again, I realize that W was popular, especially in Oklahoma, and that his propaganda machine was working overtime, but I refuse to concede that had the Democrats found a better candidate, Coburn (at least) might have lost. When the Democrats actually field strong, appealing candidates, like Ken Salazar and Barack Obama, they can win. Sure, Illinois is more liberal than many states, but Obama had outpolled all the Republicans combined in the primaries, and even did well outside Chicago and its liberal suburbs before the general election, so great was his appeal. So had the Democrats found better candidates (Betty Castor? Inez Tenenbaum?), they could probably have won a few more seats and not lost so many, which basically was like writing a blank check ("capital") for W, though he's thankfully burnt it up before he could cash it.

So, factoring in that the Democrats have more seats to defend and that they field pathetic candidates far too often, they have gotten several lucky turns of late.

Democratic Incumbent Seats

South Dakota and West Virginia: Popular GOPers have decided not to run against Kent Conrad and Robert Byrd (respectively). Conrad is a moderate, but votes with the Democratic caucus more often than with the Republicans, and octogenarian Byrd, no matter what you think of his past, has served as the conscience of the Senate, frequently speaking out against the W administration's follies and faults in his inimitable, stentorian style. It's important that both be reelected, and very likely that they will. West Virginia also has a Democratic governor, just in case...well, you know.

Florida: Senator Bill Nelson appeared to be in trouble, but then Rep. Katherine Harris, the highly partisan electrix who did her part in engineering the 2000 coup, decided she wanted to move to the upper house, so now she is set to challenge Nelson, against the wishes of Republican and potential-felon marioneteer Karl Rove. Nelson is leading in head-to-head polls and Floridians are souring on W, so short of Dieboldian trickery, Nelson's chances look good so far. He's no Lawton Chiles or even Bob Graham, but he'll do.

Nebraska: the other Nelson, Ben, basically is about as conservative a Democrat as you can find in the Senate, yet he still votes with his party more than 50% of the time. Overall, his chances are shaky, and W remains popular in that state. But he won't have to run against former Sooners coach, now Rep. Tom Osborne, who is wildly popular, so he may have a chance, especially if energy prices remain high, the situation in Iraq drags on, and he runs against the man he closely defeated last time through. He really has a freaky, Republican-looking coiffure, I must add, cattily.

Other Democratic incumbent states: a number of other Democratic seats are very safe. Hillary Clinton should coast in New York, where she's registered approval ratings above 65% and faces ridiculous opponents (either Jeanine Pirro or Mr. Tricia Nixon Cox). In addition, W's popularity is at 29% and NY's Republican mayor, Mike Bloomberg, is running as if he's a Democrat (and leading handily). Jeff Bingaman has no challenger so far in New Mexico, though W barely won the state in 2004. Bingaman was supposed to be in trouble, but it turns out that he's quite popular. I can't recall ever seeing him utter a single word on TV (regular network TV, C-SPAN, "The Newshour with Jim Lehrer," any other program), so I think of him as the "Mute Senator." Does he speak when he campaigns? Debbie Stabenow, a freshperson from Michigan, is one of the most reliably liberal members of the Senate, but faces feeble opposition, and her state continues to trend Democratic, as does Washington State, where Maria Cantwellalso is up for reelection, having registered an upset defeat of Slade Gorton back in 1999. Both are assets to the Democrats. Stabenow also looks tough and doesn't appear to be someone to trifle with. Others who will have little problem include Daniel Akaka (Hawaii), Teddy Kennedy (Massachusetts), Herb Kohl (Wisconsin), Tom Carper (Delaware), Dianne Feinstein (California), and Joe Lieberman (Connecticut). Were Richard Blumenthal or some other Democrat to challenge Lieberman, I might go on leave to help her or him out. I still blame him in part for Al Gore's loss in 2000; had another Democrat been on the ticket, Gore might have won another state (Arkansas, Nevada, etc.) and the Florida debacle would have been moot.

Open Seats

Tennessee: I believe a Republican will replace Dr. Charlatan-HCA a/k/a Dr. Insider Trading a/k/a Bill Frist in Tennessee, because as optimistic as I am, I can't see the people there electing a Black person to a statewide office, even a right-wing leaning one. Maybe they'll prove me wrong, but then the highly photogenic Harold Ford Jr. actually said he "loved" W (huh?), so would worry about his being sufficiently cooperative with other Democrats. An African-American Joe Lieberman--is that what the Democrats need at this point? On the other hand, he'd probably vote with the Democrats half the time at least, so if he won, it might not be so bad. I get the impression that he feels he should pander to Republicans, so if he wins, I'd count this as a 1/2 victory (historic as it would be in other ways).

Maryland: the Democrats face a conundrum. The Republicans have nominated a Black conservative, Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, in a state whose Black population is now close to 30% and liberal-leaning. The Democrats will have a primary pitting Ben Cardin, a liberal White running against the sex scandal-plagued former Congressman Kweisi Mfume. Now, I was long a fan of Mfume's, but at he should bow out and find another place to utilize his talents. White Democratic voters are going to go for Cardin, and will be less likely to vote for Mfume even in the primary based on the harassment and nepotism allegations during his time as NAACP head. Moreover, if Mfume loses, do NOT believe the Republicans won't use this to tarnish Cardin and appeal for votes for Steele. So someone has GOT TO convince Mfume to get out of it, and campaign for Cardin. Please, Mr. Mfume, put your ego aside and don't let the GOP get any further than they need to, because Steele, if he won, would be in there for six years, and as even the moderate Republicans have shown, they enable the right-wing by putting the party and above all the President above the interests of the country.

Minnesota: the Republicans have a good, conservative candidate in Mark Kennedy, but the state has trended Democratic-progressive over the last election cycle, and W is very unpopular there, so the strongest of the Democratic candidates (Patty Wetterling, Mark Ciresi, Amy Klobuchar) should be able to prevail. I can't see W's abysmal numbers in the state and outrageous energy prices this winter helping Kennedy, either.

New Jersey: If Jon Corzine, who is one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate, wins the gubernatorial race, which has tightened because of the New Jersey Democrats' endless scandals and the relentless advertising of his robotic Republican opponent, Doug Forrester, the seat will become open, and he'd appoint his successor. Right now the leading candidate is Rep. Robert Menendez, formerly my Congressman. (I never voted for him, and instead always chose either the Green or Democratic Socialist candidates.) Though Menendez is well known to be thuggish in his politics and has a sex scandal on his hands, he would become New Jersey's first Latino Senator (he's Cuban-American), which would be a major plus in his winning the seat outright against moderate Republican Tom Kean Jr. If Corzine won and appointed Rep. Frank Pallone or some of the other New Jersey pols vying for the seat, they'd also have a good chance against Kean. Still, the toxicity out of Trenton may harm any Democrats in a state that has moved from being middle-of-the-road (as recently as the 1980s) to reliably Democratic.

Vermont: Bernie Sanders, the Socialist-Independent, lone Representative from one of the country's progressive state, faces only a token Republican challenge in this race, and the Democrats have chosen not to oppose him. So he will win, and vote regularly with the Democrats, except when they lean as a caucus to the right. As a House member he has been a powerhouse in passing bills, even with Republicans, so his legislative prowess will be of great assistance to the Democrats if they regain control. I'm most excited about his candidacy, and look forward to the day he's actually in his new position.

Republican Seats

In terms of the Republican seats that are up, several of the candidates are in serious trouble.

Pennsylvania: Rick Santorum is now behind Bob Casey Jr., a moderate Democrat (who's also unfortunately anti-abortion) by 18 points. Antediluvian in his views (according to his recent book, he is against women going to college or being independent, etc.), hypocritical, nasty, and given to outright dissimulations, Santorum's departure would be a MAJOR boost. I once saw him openly mock John Kerry on the Senate floor on C-SPAN when he was feeling his oats several years ago and have never forgotten it. The Democrats should do their damnedest--without breaking the law--to get Santorum out of the Senate. As for Casey, I've not seen a word out of him, which appears to be his strategy.

Rhode Island: Lincoln Chafee is a very liberal Republican. In fact, he probably could have changed parties two years ago and done himself and the Democrats a favor, but he didn't, and now he's in trouble. He faces a primary challenge from a more conservative (but not right-wing) candidate, former Cranston mayor Stephen Laffey, who is trailing right now. Chafee probably will win, since his family is beloved even by Rhode Island Democrats (and his late father, John Chafee, was a moderate Republican and close associate of W's father). But if Laffey won, he would then have a hard time against either of the two Democrats running, Matt Brown and Sheldon Whitehouse, since Rhode Island is one of the most liberal states in the US. If he loses to Laffey, he deserves to go, since his politics are strongly at odds with W's, yet he's enabled far too much of the mess that's occurred, including voting against an independent panel to investigate the Hurricane Katrina fiasco. Why, Chafee, why? Against Brown, who now leads Whitehouse, Chafee has a decent chance.

Ohio: Mike DeWine, a political moderate (as Republicans go), has weak poll numbers. A massive financial scandal, involving allegations of outright theft of state workers' compensation funds, money laundering, and numerous ethical lapses, has convulsed his state party, which craftily engineered W's win in 2004. I'm not sure how disgusted most Ohio voters are, but Democrat and Iraq War veteran Paul Hackett ran in an ultraconservative district earlier this year against ghoul Jean Schmidt, and nearly pulled off an upset, so DeWine had better be nervous. Hackett has announced that he's going to run for the seat, as has Democratic Congressman Sherrod Brown. Hackett is gutsy, outspoken, lively, and doesn't play. He's also gone through the crucible of a high-profile campaign. Brown I know zero about, except that he's considered to be fairly progressive and can raise money. Either one, I think, can beat DeWine, which would be a major pickup for the Democrats, who once held both seats (John Glenn and Howard Metzenbaum, etc.).

Missouri: The Show Me State once regularly sent distinguished Democrats (Harry Truman, Stuart Symington, Tom Eagleton) to Washington as its Senators, and the people of my native state even had the good sense to elect a dead person (the late Mel Carnahan, whose wife Jean briefly took his seat) over extremist John Ashcroft in 2000. Unfortunately, Missourians bought the GOP's lies and not only helped to elect W and the lackluster torture-enabler Kit Bond in 2004, but chose as their governor Matt Blunt, the son of one of the GOP Congressional delegation's major operators, Roy Blunt, who is now Majority Whip and closely tied not only to Tom DeLay, but also to scandal-virus lobbyist Jack Abramoff. More than 50% of the voters are disgusted by both Blunt, who has turned out to be an ultraconservative, and the GOP there, which has its own problems with corruption. The very smart, pro-choice, moderate woman young Blunt defeated, Claire McCaskill, is going to run against Jim Talent, the 50-year-old conservative Senator who looks like he's 12. If W's popularity doesn't rise, Missouri might show Talent right out the door, which would be a major victory. Right now their poll numbers are equal, which I take to mean that Talent may be leading but is in trouble, since he should be ahead by a comfortable margin as an incumbent Republican there. I think the election depends on the situation in Iraq, energy prices, and how the vote turns out in northern Missouri. St. Louis, St. Louis County, Kansas City, its suburban areas, and the college towns will go for the Democrats. But the state now has a large ultraconservative evangelical base centered in and around Branson, the alternate country music and entertainment capital in the far South, which used to be basically an extension of Arkansas.

Montana: In my mind, this state only elects Republicans, until I realize I am wrongly confusing it with, oh, Wyoming (even Utah has at least one Democrat in Congress because of Salt Lake City). Sorry, Montana! The Big Sky State now has a very popular and effective Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, who's folksy and swift on his feet. Once he cleans up the waste the GOP left there, he should run for President. Montana also has a Democratic majority in its statehouse. And its Republican Senator, Conrad Burns, not only is close to W, but to Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist-virus who very well may drag down Tom DeLay and other Republicans once all the investigations into his actions have finished. His opponents sound very interesting: an organic farmer named Jon Tester, the Montana State Senate Majority Leader from very conservative eastern Montana (!), or moderate DLC star and wealthy lawyer John Morrison. Methinks Tester sounds like the better choice, so people of Montana, clean house, bring Burns home, and put the Tester in the Senate!

Nevada: John Ensign is conservative and has good poll numbers. He works well with Harry Reid, the Minority Leader, and there were suggestions that they had some kind of deal in which they wouldn't campaign against each other. Reid, however, is a battler, and has said he will strongly support the new Democratic candidate, Jack Carter, an investment banker and the son of President Jimmy Carter. Once upon a time Nevada had two Democratic Senators, but the state has grown and had grown increasingly conservative. W's popularity has recently plummeted there, Bill Clinton won the state at least once as did Al Gore in 2000, and if Carter has any platform to run on beyond being humanitarian Jimmy Carter's son and not a Republican, he might actually win. This would be a major victory for the Democrats.

Arizona: Jon Kyl is one of the most conservative Senators in that body. According to Progressive Punch (whose methodology admittedly is a bit problematic), only Richard Burr (NC), Larry Craig (WY), and that horror John Cornyn (TX) were less progressive. (Keep in mind that Cornyn is more conservative than both Senators from Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Oklahoma....) I don't see him losing, but supposedly his poll numbers are awful and he has a worthy opponent in the multimillionaire Jim Pederson. Arizona has a very effective Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, who probably could defeat Kyl if she challenged him, but it looks like she'll run again to continue her successes at the state level. Maybe she can work some mojo for Pederson, because defeating Kyl would be an extraordinary coup, in that one of the president's most reliable allies would be gone.

Other Republican incumbent seats:

Liberal Republican Olympia Snowe has the highest favorability ratings (over 70%) of any member of the Senate, and will be reelected handily in Maine. If the Democrats pick up 2-5 seats, she could prove to be a major ally along with her fellow Maine Senator, Susan Collins. George Allen, whose Fred Flinstone-ish utterances never cease to make me cringe, is going to romp in Virginia. Short of committing murder he won't be voted out, though if he were, Democrats should declare a national holiday. Extreme right-winger Craig Thomas will trounce his opposition (if there is any) in Wyoming. Other Republicans set to win include Trent Lott (Mississippi), Kay Bailey Hutchinson (Texas), Dick Lugar (Indiana), and Orrin Hatch (Utah). They'll leave only on retirement or on a stretcher, whichever comes first.

Final tally:

Say the Democrats hold all their seats except the one in Nebraska, which appears to be the most in danger. (I'm praying that that Harrison woman doesn't win in Florida. Please O Lord and Lady, God, gods, spare us that horror, please! And Mfume, please don't screw up the situation in Maryland!). That would mean they'd be down to 43 seats, plus the Sanders one, giving them 44. (Right now it's 44 + Jeffords = 45). If Santorum, DeWine and Burns lost, that would give them 48, still not enough for a majority, but closer to where they were just a few years ago. If Nelson hung on and the Democrats in Missouri and Arizona could pull off upsets, that would give the Democrats a razor-thin margin of 51, which would be enough to restore prerogatives destroyed by the Republicans (like the blue slip, etc.) and pass legislation (barring filibusters, against which right-wingers are supposedly constitutionally opposed, right?) without bringing in Dick Cheney. If Ford were to win miraculously in Tennessee, that would be 52 votes, though given how conservative Nelson is and Ford would be, it's effectively 50 plus 2 extras about half the time. Also, liberal Republicans Snowe, Collins, Chafee (if he hangs on) and possibly Spector would make it 56 votes in some cases (especially if Reid conferred regularly with them). The Democrats wouldn't have enough votes to prevent filibusters, but they'd be far more empowered to launch of turnaround of the current situation.

Also, given the seniority rules, several of the most liberal and progressive senators (Kennedy, Leahy, etc.) would chair committees, which would be a GOP nightmare. Ah, fellow voters, let's make this happen, not for purposes of revenge and Schadenfreude, but because our country's survival depends on it!

Update: In Monday's Washington Post, Charles Babington and Chris Cilizza cover much of the ground in my post in their article "For GOP, Election Anxiety Mounts." They specifically focus on the criticism some on the Right have lodged against Senator Elizabeth Dole, "The Phantom," who now heads up the GOP's senatorial election committee, but her supporters lay the blame more broadly on the country's malaise, the War in Iraq, and the scandals plaguing DeLay, Frist, Rove, the White House and state Republicans. The GOP is also at a disadvantage, for a change, in fundraising. Much hinges on this election and on what happens leading up to it, so I hope to post more as the months proceed.

The Floods and the Quake

Just last month two hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, the former particularly ferocious, hit the Gulf Coast of the United States, leaving widespread destruction and dislocation in their wakes (and exposing the utter incompetence of the W regency, but that's another story). The international response, from nations and people, was immediate and tremendous.

In the last week, the aftereffects of Tropical Storm Stan have ravaged parts of the southwestern, Pacific coastal and inland regions Central America. Although the storm landed as a Category 1 (Hurricane Katrina was category 5), the subsequent rains drenched El Salvador, Mexico and Guatemala, causing widespread damage.

In Mexico, the village of Tapachula was divided into two by the floodwaters. El Salvador, which had only just experienced the effects of a volcano, has suffered more than 50 deaths from landslides. The storm triggered floods, mudslides and death in Guatemala. So far whole villages have been destroyed, and rescuers are now engaged in the process of trying to assess the human, infrastructure and financial costs. Two cities, Panabaj and Santiago Atitlán (whose morgue is pictured at left, BBC News), have suffered particularly severe destruction. Some 90 villages, however, remain inaccessible because of the mudslides, and the Guatemalan government fears that more than 1,400 people may be buried under the mire.

Just yesterday, a 7.6 earthquake struck Pakistan's Kashmir region, sending shock waves that could be felt throughout the Indian subcontinent, from Afghanistan to eastern India and China. Many thousands are thought to have died in Pakistan, particularly near the earthquake's epcenter, though two large apartment buildings in the capital also collapsed (map at left, BBC World), trapping and killing untold numbers of people. Initial reports are stating that hundreds of people have died in Indian Jammu and Kashmir, and millions of people will probably be homeless. The BBC News offers some eyewitness accounts here.

So far nations across the globe have offered aid and assistance; the US, the richest nation on earth, and a close ally of Pakistan, has promised $100,000. The EU is offering several million dollars, while China has already dispatched rescue supplies and allocated $2.6 million. Pakistan's President, General Pervez Musharraf, has made a special appeal for medicine, tents and blankets, and transportation equipment to assist in reaching isolated, mountainous regions affected by the quake.

DirectRelief International also is coordinating donations for the people and regions affected by the South Asian earthquake. I haven't seen specific information for donor organizations focusing on the regions hit by Tropical Storm Stan, but when I do I'll post them.

Poem: Ko Un

Ko Un (b. 1933) is one of South Korea's major poets, and has received international praise for the quality of his verse and for his history of political independence and resistance. One of his most significant works, Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives), an epic written during his imprisonment by the authoritarian South Korean regimes of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was published in the United States this year. The individual poems read as strongly narrative and often focus on everyday themes and folk content.

I'm not sure about the rest of his work, which may be far broader in its range and forms, but the poems in Ten Thousand Lives do interest me, as does the idea of a contemporary epic. Former US Poet Laureate and University of California-Berkeley professor Robert Hass, who wrote the introduction to the English-language selection of Ko's work, will be publishing an essay on it in an upcoming issue of the The New York Review of Books.

Here is one of Ko's poems, "Su-Dong and the Swallows":

SU-DONG AND THE SWALLOWS

Su-dong’s family is only his parents.
When they’re out at work
and he is playing, alone,
looking after the house, he gets bored.
Home alone, his only sport is idly pulling weeds,
until every year in early spring the swallows arrive.
Filling up the empty house, the swallows become his family.
As droppings fall on Su-dong’s head,
the swallows fill up the empty house.
The brood hatches, then in the twinkling of an eye,
the chicks grow up
and go their separate ways,
at which he finds himself bored again.
The yard is suddenly that much bigger.
Late in autumn the swallows,
setting off to fly fast over hills and seas,
over seas and oceans,
the swallows leaving for lands beyond the river,
for distant south seas,
gather on the neighborhood’s empty washing lines
and sit in rows, preening their breasts with their beaks
before setting off.
Looking up at them all, Su-dong feels utterly lonely.
Feeling lonely
means growing up.
‘You’re leaving now, you’ll be back next year.
Good-bye for now.’
He gives each of the swallows a name:
Chick-sun,
Chick-ku,
Cheep-sun,
Cheep-bo.

From Maninbo (Ten-thousand Lives), published by Green Integer, 2005, translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-moo Im, and Gary Gach

Thursday Quote: Alex Weheliye

I contend that the spatialities resulting from the juxtaposition of consuming sonic technologies and being consumed by them suggest specifically modern ways of be(com)ing in the world. These modes of subjectivity differ from the ones outlined in the preceding chapter as they arise from modern spatialities constituted through and magnifed by sonic technologies, rather than temporality; which is to say that while these subjectivities take place in time, the sounding spatialities of sonic Afro-modernity are what this chapter highlights more forcefully.... "Noise," as opposed to "music," disrupts the privacy of musical consumption; however, these categories are not as stable as they initial seem, since they are both heavily reliant on the perspective of the sonic consumer vis-à-vis the borders between "music" and "noise."
-Alexander G. Weheliye, from Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 107.

Wednesday Round Up

Shortly after learning of theater great August Wilson's death the other day, I subsequently learned that Nipsey Russell, a fixture on TV programs, especially game shows during the 1970s, had died from cancer at his Manhattan home at age 80. He was especially memorable in the movie version of The Wiz. What I particularly remember about Russell is his versifying; he often offered up had an inventive, catchy lyric that made me go, "Huh!" Russell, who studied English and American literature in college, was one of the important figures in a generation of late 20th century Black comics who emphasized a broader, expansive kind of humor, though, as the NY Times obit asserts, he never lost his critical edge on racial or other political and social issues.

Another RIP goes to Mãe Olga de Alaketu [do Alaketo] (at left, with Carlos Moura of Portalafro.com), who died in Salvador, Brazil, at age 80. She was one of the leading figures in the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé, a syncretic faith, based strongly on Yoruba and neighboring spiritual traditions, that arose in the state of Bahia during the long period of Brazilian slavery. Ms. Alaketu, as The NY Times obituary notes, presided over the one of the oldest temples in Salvador, the Ile Maroia Laji terreiro, established in 1636. Brazzil Magazine says that "the ialorixá [Ms. Alaketu's title] was the fifth generation of the princess Otampê Ojarô, from Ketu, in the Western Africa's Benin. Ojarô had been brought to Brazil as slave in the 18th Century." Princess Otampê Ojarô was a member of the royal family of Aro, in what is now present-day Benin, and played a central role in establishing Candomble in Brazil.

Bernie T., at Bejata, posts a heads-up about the "Slavery in New York" exhibit at the New York-Historical Society, which opens this Friday, October 7, 2005. Bernie's entry provides a fine background on the history of slavery in New York, which is usually overlooked, though it's important to note that slavery above the Mason-Dixon line, and particularly in New England, is rarely mentioned or presented in the public discourse or by the media. I do hope to catch the exhibit, and thinking about it reminds me of the second summer I was at the Cave Canem Writer's Workshops, in 2001 at Cranbrook Academy in Detroit. The Sunday (June 24, 2001) before the workshops began, the New York Times Magazine published an article on how researchers had found traces and relics of slave life, an in particular material evidence of spiritual practice, in the attic of a farmhouse (the "Lott" House) in what is now Marine Park, Brooklyn; many people who lived right near the building had no idea that slaves had been kept there, or even of Brooklyn's, Long Island's, and New York's long slave history. My first short piece based on this news, "Passage I," reads:

In the forgotten
attic crawlspace
of the abandoned

Brooklyn
farmhouse
where even mice

no longer
linger spirits
summon signs

from neckbones beads
a corncob
star still

burns

As I discussed with my grad students in our conversation on Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, the author's invocation and interweaving of the story of the Jewish Diaspora (in the figure of Tituba's putative owner and husband, Benjamin Cohen D'Azevedo), has particularly relevance for New York City, as both Jews and free and enslaved Blacks settled and established plots in what is now Greenwich Village during the New Amsterdam period, which followed the Dutch expulsion from the Brazilian state of Pernambuco in 1650 or so. New York has always been a cultural stew!

Emperor W, whose abysmal approval ratings finally match the horrible job he's done ("It's hard work!") over the last five years, has nominated yet another enigma to replace Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the United States Supreme Court. The 60-year-old Harriet Miers, who replaced torture-enabler Alberto Gonzales and now serves as White House Chief Council, is W's choice, apparently enraging ultraconservative nutcases who wanted W to select from the increasing kitty of right-wing jurists who believe that interpretation of the Constitution stops at the limits of what its authors, in their day (which included limited franchise, slavery, etc.) believed and felt. Miers, a Texas native and legal pioneer, was reared Roman Catholic, but after a spiritual crisis in 1979, was reborn as evangelical Christian. This did not prevent her, however, from donating $1,000 to Al Gore Jr. and Lloyd Bentsen (remember him!) and to the Democratic National Committee over W's father in 1988, or from meeting with a Dallas gay rights group and stating unequivocally on a questionnaire that she supported equal rights for LGBT people when she was running for the Dallas City Council in 1989. Yet conversely she did not believe that gay sex should be decriminalized; she also did and does not believe in a woman's right to choose to have an abortion. She also once called W. "the most brilliant man" she knew, helped to clean up his National Guard AWOL scandal, and handed him the infamous PDB stating that Osama bin Laden was "determined to strike" in the US. None of which speaks well for her judgment, but all of which testifies to her very close links to W, which is, as has become clear, all that matters for him. ("Brownie, you're doin' a heckuva job!") Interestingly, according to AmericaBlog, there was similar conservative disappointment about Raygun's selection of O'Connor, who actually voted from the right for years. Miers undoubtedly is very conservative, perhaps a little less so than newly seated Chief Justice John Roberts; so unless Clarence Thomas, who is now as big as Mt. Kilimanjaro, or Antonin Scalia keels over, we may be stuck with a very right-leaning court for at least a decade or more to come.

On a completely different tip, Rod 2.0 has a funny piece on actor Vin Diesel (at right, courtesy of iballer.com) who has caught Dominican fever, tinged, it seems, with a touch of American divadom. According to Dominican Today, after a young woman (really?) whom longtime bachelor Diesel had befriended refused to accompany him to his hotel room, he had her barred from setting foot in the Santo Domingo club, Praia, where they met up. The account is a bit jumbled (were they inside or outside the club--they were "on" their car? Huh?). Really, who knows how true this account is? But what is clear is that Diesel is planning to film part of a story about a Dominican immigrant, The Godfather (Vin, please find a more original name for your movie, okay?--and maybe cast Amaury Nolasco, Victor Rasuk, Judy Marte, and Zoe Saldana, who are Dominican(-American), in starring roles?) to the US in DR, has met with the president of the country, Leonel Fernández Reyna, and supposedly has been spotting riding his motorbike along the waterfront (where? Please don't say Boca Chica...). OK. As the newspaper article states in rather curious (unintentionally or intentionally ironic?) English, "During the past weeks, Diesel has been seen in the most diverse of entertainment places, and has announced his intention to undertake a series of projects in the country," and "Diesel is a recurring visitor to the country, that goes around from disco to disco in the company of his security detail and certain local businessmen." Hmmm.....

Finally, also via AmericaBlog, there's this hilarious post by Andy Goldman of Radar Online, who actually decided to...buy International Male outfits and bravely wear them in public. It made me laugh so much I started crying--you absolutely cannot miss his trips, in opulent finery, to the Four seasons, his jaunt in a candy-colored suit to Yankee Stadium, his wearing of a cape to a Chelsea gay bar, where he was treated as if he radioactive, and...well, here's one excerpt from his turn as "Count F*ckula":

With a huge knot in the pit of my stomach I steel myself and walk through the doors of Giorgio Armani’s Madison Avenue store. From a back corner a mysterious hooting wail pierces the sleek Italian silence. I adopt the bearing of the count I am dressed as, hold my head high, and rush upstairs to the men’s department.

Back in they day (the 1980s), I knew of more than a few people who tooled around in IM garb. I even once thought of buying a pair of their pants ("slacks"?), which were peg-legged, but then realized I couldn't afford them and just broke out the needle and thread myself. But in 2005? If there is a place where lots of men currently traipse around in their gear, I want to see these folks with my own eyes, and cheer them on (I'm not being sarcastic.) Especially the puffy shirt and that cape!

MLB Playoffs

Tonight at a welcome gathering for new and current graduate students of color at the university, I asked a young man why he and others, when introducing themselves and their native cities, yelled out "Lakers" in response to the New Yorkers' and Chicagoan's cheers for the Yankees and White Sox respectively.

"What about the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim?" I asked, invoking the southern California franchise that was now in the playoffs.

"Nobody in LA cares about baseball," he answered me, with polite abruptness.

The poor Angels, no mojo, no love. And I still can't wrap my mind around that name; I actually saw them battle as the California Angels against the overhyped, overpraised Boston Red Sox, in the playoffs at Fenway Park, in 1986. Not being a violent person or someone who invites violence upon himself, I quietly rooted against the Boston team in its home park. (Mike Witt mercifully beat future Hall of Famer Roger Clemens that night, but Boston went on to win the pennant and then lost to the Mets in 7 games)

So what gives with this year's playoffs?

AMERICAN LEAGUE

New York Yankees vs. Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim

Yep, they're baaaaaaaaack! The Yankees won the division title by tiebreaker after trailing Boston (and falling below second place at one point) almost the entire season. They have one of the most impressive batteries in either league, led by MVP candidate and pretty boy Alex Rodríguez (A-Rod, gracing at right), longtime captain Derek Jeter, hot sulker Gary Sheffield, handyman Hideki Matsui, semi-rehabilited admitted roider Jason Giambi, and charming rookie Robinson Canó. Their pitching faltered for half the season, but they have future Hall of Famer Randy Johnson leading the corps and reliable Mike Mussina also commanding the mound. Two mid-season acquisitions, Shawn Chacón (from Colorado), and minor leaguer Aaron Small (who went 10-0!), pushed the Yankees over the top, and though neither has post-season experience, they are in very good hands. A fifth pitcher, Jaret Wright, wasn't so bad either, and former Mets star Al Leiter is also now on staff. The Yankees also have one of the best closers in baseball, Mariano Rivera, and good middle-relief, so they're well set to wallop the Angels and get to the next round quickly.

The Lost Anaheim...the Lost Angels of...Los Angelheimers...the Angels, let's leave it at that. The Angels also have a great lineup, led by MVP candidate Vladimir Guerrero, Garrett Anderson, Darren Erstad, former Red Sox Orlando Cabrera, Adam Kennedy, and second year basestealer Chone Figgins. They finished with the exact same record as the Yankees, 95-67, though in a weaker, smaller division. Though they popped the Yankees in the 2002 playoffs, they simply don't have the starting pitching or the lineup to match the Bronx Bombers this year. Only starter Bartolo Colón won more than 14 games, and is a candidate for the Cy Young (with a 21-8 win-loss record and 3.48 ERA), but Colón is nobody's ace. The Angels do have very good middle relief, and a superb closer in Francisco Rodríguez, who first came to national attention in the Angels' 2002 World Series victory, and racked up 45 saves this year with a 2.67 ERA and 91 Ks in 67.1 innings.

The undeniable fact is that the Yankees haven't won the Series since 2000, and they have a pardoned-but-once-convicted-felon madman as owner always breathing down their neck, an issue the Angels--no other team, for that matter--don't have to deal with. "Every Angel is terrifying," Rilke wrote. But not these, so I give the edge to the Yankees.

Yankees in five games.

Boston Red Sox vs. Chicago White Sox

Oh, the Red Sox, the Red Sox! Last year by trouncing the Cardinals they broke their stupid curse, and got a film starring Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon, songs, Lord knows what else out of it! Spare the rest of the world, please! (I also think the bad karma led to Kerry's loss against the Dictator, but that may be stretching it.) I was praying--about as close as I come to it--for Cleveland not to collapse, so I wouldn't have to hear the Red Sox' name bandied about for even a few more weeks, but it wasn't to be. They have a fiercesome lineup, that I don't feel like mentioning except for Big Papi David Ortiz, another MVP candidate who slammed 47 home runs and a league-leading 148 RBIs, and the cute and dreadlocked Manny Ramírez (al derecho), who yet again proved his indispensibility by hitting 45 HRs and driving in 144 RBIs. And to think that Boston's owners seriously considered getting rid of this man! They let Pedro Martínez go (as they did Mo Vaughn, Roger Clemens, Carlton Fisk, etc.), which should have produced enough ill will to sink them, but no, it wasn't to be; they're here. Their pitching is decent, even without Pedro and Darren Lowe, who was shipped out west, but it's no match for Chicago's. Plus, the more they win, the more we'll have to see that bloated right-wing blowhard Curt Schilling. He makes me want to retch. All of which is to say, please, Chicago White Sox, do us all a favor, and send them back to Boston as soon as possible!

Now, as for the Chicago White Sox: they labor in the Southside shadow of the yuppie-beloved, endlessly disappointing (if you care), losing team that plays in Wrigley Field, on the Northside (Wrigleyville). The White Sox have an ignominious history (the Black Sox scandal) that they've never lived down. They have a doofus for an owner. They hired a cute, speech-challenged homophobe as manager. And they basically could not hit a ball out of the infield after the All Star break and were on the verge of being the first team ever--or something like that--to be up by 15 games and then fall out of contention. What kept them in the running was their outstanding starting pitching, which no team can ever have enough of. Starters Mark Buehrle and Jon Garland were the first half leaders, steadily winning and allowing very few earned runs game after game, and José Contreras, an enigma whom the Yankees let go and who I'm convinced is about 10 years older than his stated age (34? oh come on!), pitched like Jim Palmer down the stretch. In fact, Contreras, who started the season in mediocrity, finished with a 15-7 record, winning his final eight starts. Freddy García, the third original starter, was iffy at times, and El Duque (Orlando Hernández), the ageless, oft-injured mound magician from Cuba, factored much less into the White Sox's success, though a healthy and sharp Garcia may be required to get past Boston and win the pennant, especially if the White Sox's bats remain atrophied. (They came alive tonight in a 14-2 win.) Since the Team from Boston won the Series last year, the two teams from Chitown have gone the longest without a world championship, but I don't think this is going to be Chicago's year--if they make it that far. Just beat the Red Sox, though. That's all I ask.

White Sox over Red Sox in five games.

NATIONAL LEAGUE

St. Louis Cardinals vs. San Diego Padres

In 1982, my classmates and I watched jubilantly as the Cardinals, with a slap-hitting lineup and average starting pitching, beat the Milwaukee Brewers and win the World Series. They had one of the best managers of all time, Whitey Herzog, who could manufacture runs out of bubble gum and birthday wishes. Under his tenure they returned to the Series twice, in 1985 and 1987, each time with unintimidating lineups but incredible heart. They did not win in either return, but they came very close and Herzog showed that anything was possible. The Cardinals now have the second-winningest manager in MLB history, Tony LaRussa, who has taken them to the post-season repeatedly since he became their manager, but who's never won it all. Not once. LaRussa's questionable moves are legendary, and I think the man is a walking liability, though others construe this as genius. (The St. Louis Rams have a similarly infuriating, seemingly incompetent but occasionally dazzling coach, Mike Martz.) Despite LaRussa's managerial faults, the Cardinals' lineup is good enough to win it all this year. I'm saying that with a bit of bubble gum and a birthday wish tossed in for good measure.

The Cardinals, who won 100 games for the second straight year, had the National League's best starting staff, with Chris Carpenter (21-5, 2.83 ERA, 213Ks, at right), Mark Mulder (16-8), Matt Morris (14-10), Jeff Suppan (16-10), and Jason Marquis (13-14) producing the most quality starts of any team. Carpenter in fact had a 22-game stretch of starts with at least 6 innings in which he allowed no more than 3 earned runs (from May 12-Sep. 8), the best such streak since 1920 (and this includes outstanding seasons by the likes of Gomez, Koufax, Gibson, Drysdale, Hunter, Palmer, Carlton, Valenzuela, Gooden, Clemens, Johnson, etc.), but fell apart, as did Mulder, Morris and Marquis, at the end of the season. Morris, in fact, was so bad that he went 4-9 after a 10-1 start! But supposedly all is well, Carpenter's arm is okay, he pitched six shutout innings this afternoon, Mulder, a sharp lefthander, also is supposedly to be back on track, Suppan has improved since early September, and Marquis (who can hit like Rod Carew) had five good starts before his Oct. 1 debacle, so Morris, I think, is the main liability. Which means that LaRussa, in his infinite wisdom, is starting Morris (and not Suppan) third! Their relief corps is problematic, so the starters have to show up with game.

On the batting side, the Cardinals suffered numerous injuries throughout the season, and lost the production of third baseman Scott Rolen, who went MIA in the playoffs. Outfielders Reggie Sanders and future Hall of Famer Larry Walker also were injured for stretches. They still had and have leading MVP candidate Albert Pujols (.330, 42 HRs, 117 RBIs, 129 runs), Jim Edmonds (whose average dropped dramatically this year, though he hit 29 HRs), and sparkplugs David Eckstein and Mark Grudzielanek. Rookie catcher Yadier Molina played very well, as did substitute baseman Abrahám Núñez, but outside of Pujols and Edmonds, and Sanders before he suffered a broken leg, the Cardinals' bats were solid but not outstanding. It'll have to come down to pitching, then, and timely hits, which I hope they can scare this year. Last year in Boston....

The Padres mustered an 82-80 record, which should have sent them home to the sun-bathed shores of the Pacific, except they were in a division so weak that they finished first. At one point, they were even in first place while lacking a .500 winning percentage. Even with so little to recommend them, they beat the Cardinals 4 games to 3 in the season series, and don't give up. But they might as well in this series, since they've lost their best pitcher to a fractured rib (which he got in a pile-on after the team realized it'd won the division--guys, you're grown millionaires, don't you know better?), and the lineup isn't that dangerous either. After Ryan Klesko, Brian Giles and Khalil Greene....

The Cardinals in four.

The Atlanta [Braves] vs. The Houston Astros

Atlanta has won 14 straight division titles in a row. They're formerly-owned-by-Ted Turner engine that can. Once upon a time the keys to that engine were Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz, who will have plaques and ceremonies in Cooperstown within the next decade. Greg Maddux is now finishing his career with the team he broke into the majors with, the Chicago Cubs. Tom Glavine is now a Met. Only John Smoltz remains. Still, the Atls, with their skillful manager, Bobby Cox, who just smiles and says very little, and their determined victory machine, keep on winning. But...they have only won the World Series ONCE in those fourteen years. Oops!

They do have a great lineup, powered by MVP candidate Andruw "Thickness" Jones, the pride of Curaçao, who hit 51 homers and drove in 128 runs, rebounding from a lackluster 2004 season. Alongside him are a mix of established players like Chipper Jones, Marcus Giles, and Rafael Furcal, and terrific rookies like Adam LaRoche, Wilson Betemit and Jeff Francoeur. On the pitching side, alongside Smoltz, a real talent has emerged in young Dominican Jorge Sosa (above right), who went 13-3, while former Oakland starter Tim Hudson has pitched well too. This Atlanta team also played in the toughest NL division, so they have been tested.

Their opponents are the Houston Astros, a team that initially was in a tailspin, but after the midway mark started to turn things around. The major reason behind their resurgence was the pitching, without which it's almost impossible to win in the playoffs. The most noteworthy Astro was Roger Clemens, who was supposed to have retired two years ago after a "final" outstanding season as a Yankee, but came back with Houston, went 18-4 with a 2.98 ERA and 218 Ks, and won his seventh Cy Young award. This year, he was even better, despite his pitiful 13-8 win-loss record. Twice in the season, Clemens went five starts without a win despite performances that would have resulted a 10-o record on most other teams (cf. Matt Morris), and he gave up 4 or more earned runs only three times in 32 starts. His earned run average was a MLB best 1.87, and opponents batted only .198 against him. Andy Pettitte, who was the Yankees' other reliable winner for nearly a decade (1995-2003), switched to the Astros after being treated with indifference by Steinbrenner, then had a down year in 2004. This year, he was one of the best pitchers after the All Star break and rose to his old form, going 17-9 with a 2.39 ERA. The third member of the Astros' outstanding staff was Roy Oswalt, consistently excellent for Houston year and year out. He went 20-10, with a 2.94 ERA, and 184Ks. All three will be extremely important if Houston is to advance, because the hitters this season were a bit off. Not bad (Morgan Ensberg hit 32 home runs, Craig Biggio and Jason Lane each hit 26; Lance Berkman nearly broke .300, while driving in 82 runs, etc.), but not up to their standard of recent years. But then with Clemens, Pettitte and Oswalt pitching the way they have, do you need a lot of hits? Houston better hope the answer is no, and Atlanta had better hope that...well, Clemens only won 13, Pettitte 17, and Oswalt lost 10, so there is a way to beat or neutralize them. Bobby Cox, run those charts!

A tough one, but I say Houston in 5.

I'm not predicting the ALCS and NLCS winners yet. I want to get through this round first.

The Nobel Prize in Literature (Updated)

This week marks the start of the Nobel Prize season. I used to be extremely fascinated by the Nobel Prizes when I was younger, and always wondered what the winners in the various categories--physiology or medicine, chemistry, physics, literature, peace, and economics--had achieved to earn such a prestigious honor, and though my fascination has waned, residual interest in the Prizes overall persists. For example, today's winners for the Physiology or Medicine Prize discovered helicobacter pylori, the corkscrew-like bacterium that is the chief co-factor in stomach and intestinal ulcers. Some years ago, after I'd first read about their discovery in the newspaper and then a few days later in a magazine, I asked my mother, who was suffering from an ulcer and who works in the medical field, if she'd heard about the new treatment. She hadn't, but proposed it to her doctor, and she was soon cured of her ulcer. I thought it was such a simple, but revolutionary discovery, and testimony to what scientic inquiry, at its best, can achieve. Yet over the years, and increasingly in the last fifteen years, I've found that the chemistry and physics discoveries were, after the blurb and a paragraph or so of description, often too complex, sometimes verging on incomprehensible. (The femtochemistry discovery, however, still impresses me, and I wonder how long it'll be till the professor at Harvard who slowed light particles down until they were still will win the prize.) I've also tended to care less about the peace and economics prizes; the former often is awarded for what turn out to be chimeras and utopian efforts that, unfortunately fail (or go to the likes of Mother Teresa), while the other has most frequently gone to brilliant people who have no sense of how human beings behave--except as variables in rarefied mathematical models. James Tobin and Amartya Sen are notable exceptions who come swiftly to mind. I also distinctly recall my surprise in ninth grade at seeing in the local paper that a Black person--Sir Arthur Lewis, a St. Lucian--was a co-winner of the economics prize and taught at Princeton University. I don't think I believed that one even after reading it several times.

I was and am most interested in the Nobel Prizes for Literature. For much of my youth, I associated the Nobel Prize in Literature with "greatness"--it was the ultimate mark of it. But quickly I came to recognize that most of the greatest writers out there, especially non-Europeans, did not and would not win the prize, and that some of the winners (René Sully Prudhomme, Verner von Heidenstamm, Pearl S. Buck, Roger Martin du Gard, etc.--who? exactly!) weren't as interesting or accomplished--good--in any way, as writers that were generally considered to be "bad" or "mediocre." The Good Earth? Please. I also saw that some writers, like John Steinbeck and John Galsworthy, had fallen out of critical favor or had written some books that really weren't that good--though Steinbeck produced several masterpieces that continue to hold up. I also learned about the source of Nobel's wealth--talk about disillusionment!

Still, back then when I thought of the Nobel Prize in Literature, I envisioned the texts I'd read by and images of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Eugene O'Neill, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Hermann Hesse, Luigi Pirandello, Pablo Neruda, Eugenio Montale, André Gide, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, George Bernard Shaw, St.-John Perse, etc.. Most of these male figures were also the ones extolled as "geniuses" throughout my education; Eliot's "The Waste Land" was the paradigmatic avant-garde poem, his "Four Quartets" the signature testament of a return to faith; Yeats was one of the most passionate and lyrically inventive figures ever to grace English-language poetry, and he got his second wind!; Faulkner and Hemingway were the stylistic poles around which every American writer had to navigate, and so on. The colonized mind....

But there were those "great" writers who'd never won a Nobel Prize, but who'd lived at least long enough to have gotten one, so what had happened? Why was there no award to James Joyce (how was this possible?), to Kafka, to Proust, to Woolf, to Henry James, to Valéry, to Brecht, to Cather, to Conrad, to Langston Hughes, to Cavafy, to Vallejo, to Roque Dalton...in fact, up till my teen years, only a few non-White, non-European writers had ever won the Nobel Prize: Neruda, of course, and Miguel Angel Asturias, and Gabriela Mistral, all Latin Americans, as well as the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata (at left), whose startlingly spare and remarkably condensed work, which at its best still holds up, became a passion of mine for a short while. (I didn't know anything about the political or sexual orientations of writers, but Yeats appeared to have fascistic leanings, while Eliot's work was evidently extremely conservative. Gide, I fathomed, was the only openly homosexual--or quasi-homosexual--figure among the bunch; I hadn't yet learned about Mann's ephebophilic passions, Eliot's youthful queer and racialist fantasies....)

I think it was around the time I graduated from high school that the Nobel Prize winners really started to interest me. One year (1982?) Gabriel García Márquez, whom we'd recently read in one of my English classes, won, and he was under 60 years old. Then William Golding, whom we'd also read--The Lord of Flies; do junior high school English classes still assign that book?--received the prize. I felt like I knew these people--I certainly knew their work, and it was contemporary (unlike Eliot's, or Hemingway's, or Yeats's). Then, when I was in college, lo and behold, an African writer received the Nobel Prize! A sub-Saharan African--from Nigeria, Wole Soyinka! And while I'd never seen any of his plays, I'd actually found a book of his hermetic, stunning prison poems in the library, and was so giddy I ran around with it for weeks. After Soyinka, it seemed like a sea-change had taken place--there was Naguib Mafouz of Egypt (1988); Octavio Paz of Mexico (at right) (1990), whom I'd actually seen speak and read his work; Nadine Gordimer, another African writer, whose work I'd found in a used bookstore; and then, in 1992, the Mack himself, Derek Walcott, whom the Dark Room had actually convinced to read, for no money, at the house on Inman Street, just a few years before!

None of these picks was as astonishing or marvelous, I thought, as the one the next year: Toni Morrison. I remember being choked up when I heard that this woman, whose work I'd first come across as a child, who was from a small town in Ohio and went to Howard University, who'd written what I'd come to think was one of the finest novels in American literature (The Song of Solomon) and another that left me speechless at its brilliance (Beloved), a Black American woman who was still alive and still writing and one of my heroes and models--and a hero to almost every writer I knew; and who'd gotten my friend Eric canned when he pressed her for her autograph, on my behalf, just a few years earlier--who was so fierce that she reduced a querulous young woman to tears the night she, Morrison, received an award from the Unitarian-Universalists in Cambridge, whom I'd drawn a picture of and presented it to (does she still have it?), a writer who appeared to raise the hackles of male and non-Black critics with equal frequency--she'd just been awarded the Nobel Prize. It almost seemed unreal. And then, when the pettiness and nastiness of her harshest critics burbled up--"Maybe now she'll learn to write" (Charles Johnson)--it was clear what an achievement her honor really was. She'd won the Nobel Prize! This to me represented the high point of the Nobel committee's efforts. Yes, extraordinary writers before and since have won, writers who've produced more than Morrison, a lot more--how many novels did Halldor Laxness actually publish?--but this was, I thought, a daring choice. And the committee followed it up with several more: Japan's Kenzaburo Oe, who essentially writes variations on the same novel, about his mentally challenged son; Dario Fo, a left-leaning provocateur whose work really doesn't seem to be that great; Gao Xinjian, an obscure Chinese writer living in Paris (when there was the far better known and praised Bei Dao already living in exile in the west); José Saramago, the dazzling Portuguese Communist spinner of metaphysically profound yarns; and last year's winner, with her sexually provocative and formally disruptive texts, Elfriede Jelinek (below). Her novel The Piano Teacher, which I used to see sitting on store shelves for years, untouched, is even more disturbing than the film. Some of the choices have been less surprising: Seamus Heaney, a longtime canonical poet; the plaintive, plangent Polish lyricist Wislawa Szymborska; J. M. Coetzee, whose work up to the raw utterly strange and remarkable Elizabeth Costello struck me as Nobel-resuméish; V.S. Naipaul about whom I'll pass over in silence; and Günter Grass, who was going to win it if he lived long enough. (Jorge Luis Borges's politics, I gathered, kept a Nobel out of his hands, yet the Argentinian right, including the dictatorship, held him in abeyance as well.)

Though I have a much clearer picture these days of the national and international literary world, how people get published or not, how reputations are made (or not)--how the literary system works globally, and exceeds mere aesthetic considerations--I still believe the Nobel Prize is a significant award, and also feel that every writer who wants her or his work to last--and there are other reasons for writing too, which a writer may consider more important, like topicality, or advocacy, or play, etc.--should strive for the stars, push her or his work as far as it will go, even to the risk of failure--and then beyond--as if the Nobel Prize, or some exalted target of excellence, were the goal. I also have read several different books about the history and awards processes of the Nobel Prizes in literature; each of the works broke down the various political and ideological battles, prudery, and other shenanigans that have resulted in some of the bizarre choices, or non-choices, such as the one that kept Tolstoy from winning a prize while a mediocrity like Prudhomme was honored. A more recent book by a Swedish author and articles in the last few years have explored in detail the aesthetic and political bent, quirks and leanings of the members of the Swedish Academy, as well as the nomination and award system, which resulted in certain writers being overlooked completely, while others--Jaroslav Seifert???--were lauded. So I'm quite aware that objectivity isn't really operative (or possible), and that many exceptional writers, for a variety of reasons, may not be honored.

For the last few years, nevertheless, Reggie H. and I have tossed out our choices and expected winners--who we realize won't coincide--and usually the Swedish Academy has chosen someone else. Realizing that my bias tends towards American and English-language writers, and writers from the African Diaspora, whose work I know best, I still believe that top choices should be, based on the innovation, sustained excellence, and literary, cultural and aesthetic significance and impact of their work: Wilson Harris [at bottom] (Britain/Guyana), Jay Wright (US), Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe/US), John Ashbery (US), Adonis (Syria/Palestine), Assia Djébar (Algeria/US), Hélène Cixous (Algeria/France), Nuruddin Farah (Somalia), Juan Goytisolo (Spain/France), Duong Thu Huong (Vietnam), Alexander Kluge (Germany), Javier Marías (Spain), Harold Pinter (UK), Haruki Murakami (Japan), Luisa Valenzuela (Argentina), Adrienne Rich (USA), Ngugi (Kenya/US), Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua (Israel); Milan Kundera (Czech Rep./France), E. L. Doctorow (US), and Femi Osofisan (Nigeria). Two candidates who probably would have strongly been in the running are no longer eligible--August Wilson; Israeli Yehuda Amichai; German-British writer W. G. Sebald; and Chilean Roberto Bolaño, who passed away a few years ago. I also think it's tougher for poets, and other than Osofisan, I know very little about international dramatic arts, so there may be some very important playwrights I've totally overlooked. I haven't tossed this list of my usual suspects to Reggie H.; I imagine he agrees with some and not with others.

Taking into account the fact that often the Nobel committee follows a round-robin pattern with genres and continents, but prefers writers with centrist-to-leftist viewpoints, a few writers who probably are more likely to have the award bestowed upon them include David Malouf (Australia), who is one of the most highly regarded novelists in his country, a Booker Prize recipient, and winner of the Neustadt Prize for Literature a few years ago, which has gone to several Nobelists in advance of the Swedish prize; Les Murray, also of Australia; Carlos Fuentes, with whom I took a course in college, and whose work has always existed in the shadow of García Márquez's; Marías; Tom Stoppard and Ian McEwan, of Britain; Tomás Tranströmer, of Sweden; novelist Nélida Piñon of Brazil; French poet Yves Bonnefoy; poet Okot p'Bitek of Uganda; Israeli Yoel Hofmann; Roberto Sosa of Honduras; Caryl Phillips, of St. Kitts, the UK, and the US; Mavis Gallant of Canada and France; Alvaro Mutis of Colombia; Homero Aridjis of Mexico; Brazilian Adélia Prado (at right); late Cuban poet Heberto Padilla; Pramoedya Ananta Toer of Indonesia; and Muriel Spark, of Britain. Less likely is American Philip Roth, who, simply because he's American, will probably not win, especially given the horrorshow we have passing for a government, though one exposé a few years actually mentioned Roth as a favorite of one of the chief judges. And he is an extraordinary writer, of capacious skill and accomplishment. To have written one or two of his best books is a lifetime's achievement, but to have penned Portnoy's Complaint; Goodbye, Columbus; Operation Shylock; Sabbath's Theater; American Pastoral; and The Human Stain is beyond amazing, and one of the reasons he's the most highly decorated living fictionist in the US.

But who knows what the Swedish Academy has decided? The end of this week or early next will provide the answer.

***
UPDATE: According to an article I just came across (but which others probably have already seen) on Yahoo! News, "Nobel Literature Prize Date in Limbo," by AP writer Matt Moore, the Swedish Academy has decided to postpone its announcement of this year's laureate from Thursday, October 6, to the following Thursday, October 13.

Moore says that the postponement has led to speculation that the 18-member Swedish Academy, whose board includes noted poet Kjell Espmark, "may be locked in fierce debate as to who should take home this year's prize, which includes a $1.3 million prize, a gold medal and a diploma, along with a guaranteed boost in sales." Oh, the drama!

Moore's article also suggests that the leading candidates are Americans Joyce Carol Oates (why?) and Philip Roth, Canadian Margaret Atwood, and Somalian Nuruddin Farah. Other writers considered strong favorites are Syrian/Palestinian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said), mentioned above; Korean poet Ko Un; and Swede Tomas Tranströmer. Of this august group, Atwood, Farah, Roth, or Adonis would be my choices. Oates?

August Wilson, 1945-2005

In memory of August Wilson, b. 1945, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - d. 2005, Seattle, Washington

"I'm trying to take culture and put it onstage, demonstrate it is capable of sustaining you. There is no idea that can't be contained by life: Asian life, European life, certainly black life. My plays are about love, honor, duty, betrayal - things humans have written about since the beginning of time."--August Wilson


(Photo: Bob Donaldson - Post-Gazette)

Cronenberg's A History of Violence

Tonight we went to see David Cronenberg's newest film, A History of Violence. Based on John Wagner's and Vince Locke's 1997 graphic novel and adapted by Josh Olson, the movie has received praise in various quarters, including some rapturous encomiums in the New York Times, onNPR, and elsewhere, and was even nominated for the Golden Palm award at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

The film stars Viggo Mortensen as Tom Stall, a Midwestern small-town diner owner who's married to an attractive and very loving lawyer, Edie (Maria Bello). They have two children, a wimpy, witty teenage son (Ashton Holmes) and an annoyingly darling young daughter (Heidi Hayes). After two itinerant robbers happen upon Stall's diner, he heroically kills them both and saves his waitress, cook, and two diners, which provokes national acclaim, as well as the notice of a band of Irish-American mobsters from Philadelphia (led by a one and half-eyed Ed Harris), who arrive in town to settle what they claim are old scores. In fact, they claim that Tom Stall isn't really who he appears to be at all; they say he's really Joey Cusack, highly-skilled and proficient killer who went on the lam years ago. I won't spoil the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it, but I will say that while it excels in some areas--especially in William Hurt's marvelous but far too short performance near the end of the film--it is quite predictable overall, extremely violent (to the point of being lurid, though I ultimately think the gore is necessary), and doesn't provide the payoff that all the hype around it portends.

In fact, I would suggest that people who haven't seen it ignore the rhapsodies and take it on its own terms. Its greatest strength, I believe, is as a cinematic example of dramatic irony, verging on parody at times, that might simultaneously have you bursting into laughter at the ridiculousness and patness of the iconography and mythmaking even as the violence horrifies and unsettles you. In this regard, I thought as we were exiting the theater of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, which works a similarly disturbing vein, though the older film is much sharper, more perverse and pushes the irony much farther; Lynch's portrait is more explicit and acute in its view of the dark underside of American life. Yet another film that came to mind was American Beauty, though that over-praised movie is far more concerned with class relations--or the standard upper-middle-class reading of class relations--and sexual repression than Cronenberg's.

Indeed, in Cronenberg's film, it's sometimes hard to tell exactly how he wants us to read the irony, and react. He intends, I believe, for the candy-coated scenarios and portrayals and soundtrack to weave together an idealized tapestry of visual and dramatic clichés (sometimes to the point of hilarity), and yet the sheer ruthlessness of the violence and the near-explicit sex scenes points us in another direction, a counter-ideal. This is the barely suppressed id of American life, the roiling, volcanic unconscious that erupts after a fashion, lurking behind pruned hedges and locked doors and handsome, placid, "All-American" faces like Stall's. In those blue eyes, storms are constantly building, Cronenberg appears to say. In this film, there were no dark "Others"; the rage and brutality resided in the almost all-White main characters. One thing I did find novel: the mobsters for once weren't Italian (which made me immediately think of Boston's wiley arch-criminal Whity Bulger and the Irish mob, which plays a role here; in fact, that city plays a mention in the plot).

I did wish, however, after leaving the film, that filmmakers would portray Americans as we really are: for example, where are the heavyset, overworked and underpaid or underworked and underpaid, working-class and poor, average-looking people--of all races--who predominate in the sorts of towns in which A History of Violence is set? Do filmmakers think Americans wouldn't go see movies about them (us/our[true]selves)? Would the foreign audiences, who constitute an increasing share of the take, also not buy such films? I wonder, and I wish more filmmakers would take the challenge.

Still, I found the surface-depth dialectic interesting enough, and recommend the film, though I don't think it's as well done as In the Bedroom, Blue Velvet or American Beauty (a film I disliked), or even Cronenberg's truly bizarre and unforgettable Crash. It is certainly far better--far more truthful--than Paul Haggis's utter car-wreck of a Crash of earlier this year at plumbing one aspect of American life. Perhaps other filmmakers will dare themselves to go even further.