In Memoriam: James Richardson & Steve Jobs

I received a message yesterday from a friend, the great poet Honorée Jeffers, letting me know that another very fine poet we both knew, James Richardson, had passed away. I did not know James well, but been acquainted and his work for over two decades, and followed what he posted on the Cave Canem Foundation's Fellows' listserve avidly. His messages, critiques and commentary and our occasional direct exchanges showed that in addition to possessing the gifts of wit, critical acumen and an exuberance in everything he did, James knew a great deal about poetry and poetics. He also had written a dissertation comparing understanding of the Diaspora in fiction by Jewish-American and African-American writers. James taught at several different institutions, including Kennesaw State University, Morehouse College, and Phillips Academy, as well as most recently at his alma mater, Hampton University. He passed away shortly after suffering a heart attack. James leaves his sisters and extended family, including his students, colleagues and friends. Write poetry wherever you are, James, and keep on teaching.

***

Steve Jobs (Vibe.com)

So extensive are the online tributes about Steve Jobs (1955-2011), the late co-founder of and chief impresario behind Apple Computers that I have nothing to add, except this: since college I primarily worked on Apple computers. I wrote both of my books, and am writing new ones, in addition to almost every poem, short story, play, translation, essay, letter, student critique--everything that I have not penned or penciled--and all these blog posts on one. (I had forgotten until coming across the mention in an online copy of my high school yearbook that "many" of my wealthy high school classmates had Apple II or III computers at home, and I was one of the yearbook's co-editors, so I certainly read that copy even if I didn't write it. I was still using a typewriter back then.) C will remember my beloved little SE30, the first Apple computer I ever owned, which I bought with the proceeds of the first major award I received, which was the only way I could afford it, and that machine was easily worth countless times its purchase price. It was invaluable. Every Mac I've purchased since has been as well.

As I've shown more than once on this blog, I have also drawn hundreds (I think it's now upwards of 350) images, figurative, abstract, semi-cartoon, what have you, on an Apple product (my iPhone and iPad). I have designed moving gifs and web pages, made microfilms and edited videoclips, and even tried my hand at admittedly dreadful musicmaking on an Apple computer. I have taken thousands of photos, produced thousands of tweets, sent thousands of emails, on Apple products. This blog is even accessible from a app(lication) available on Apple products. My debt to Steve Jobs is immense and grows. He did not just create a successful company, but rethought how we interact with technology, which is to say, rethought and reshaped how we live. Right now, I am sitting in a café, reading short stories by my undergraduates and graduate students, and know without even querying them that many were produced on Apple computers. Near me six people are working on Apple's Macintosh computers; four are listening to music, podcasts, or who knows what on iPods or iPhones. This would mirror any cafe across the US.  Past the large picture windows, shaded by ecru screens, a thickset man bops down the street, Apple headphone wires descending from his ears into this pocket. It is almost impossible to think that just 10 years, iPods didn't exist; just 7 years ago, there were no iPhones; and before January 2010, while there were tablet computers, there were no iPads. Now their purchase is both becoming an educational mandate and provoking political scandals.

Apple Computers would not have existed without Jobs, but it might have listed on towards irrelevance had he not returned to its operations in 1997. Even when he'd left the company and during all the years he was associated with it, right up to these last few weeks, it has been his vision, coupled with the genius of countless engineers, marketers, manufacturing workers, support staff, and customers, that have produced the remarkable creations issuing regularly from its offices and factories. Thank you, Steve Jobs, and your imprint and those of all associated with Apple will remain on my work, as it will on many others, for time to come.

Quote: Patricia Grace

Patricia Grace
(Kapi Mana News)

I would like to start talking a little bit about the beginning of your writing career.

Well, I always liked writing when I was a child, even though we didn’t really do creative writing as such. I was also a keen reader and I began writing in my mid-twenties when I joined a woman’s writing group that was based in Auckland. I was living too far away to go to the meetings, but I joined as a country member and took part in the monthly writing competitions that they held throughout the year. It was from the encouragement that I got from judges, sometimes doing quite well with my stories, that I gained confidence; and then I began sending stories to be published in journals and magazines and in particular the Te Ao Hou magazine, which was the official journal of the Maori Affairs Department. That was where I also started seeing writing by other Maori writers in English for the first time, so that also helped me develop the kind of confidence that I needed. And eventually my work came to the notice of a publisher in Auckland—Phoebe Meikle—who contacted me and asked me if I had enough short stories for a collection. So that’s how my first collection of short stories Waiariki came about and it was published in 1975.

What was happening in New Zealand at that time? 

I believe there was a group of women who started having their work published around 1975, like Fiona Kidman, Rachel McAlpine or Lauris Edmond.

Did you feel that you were part of that generation or, on the contrary, that you had arrived at that point independently? 

I didn’t really notice it at the time. But it was only later when I came to know these otherpeople that had books published around the same time, although I do remember that I was at Fiona Kidman’s and Lauris Edmond’s book launch in the same year. I suppose my main realisation was that there was beginning to be work by Maori writers published because Witi Ihimaera’s book Pounamu, Pounamu, which came out in 1973, was the first book of fiction ever written by a Maori person. Before that was Hone Tuwhare’s poetry. Hone became a role model for Maori writers, and not only Hone Tuwhare, but there were also other pioneer writers who did not have books published but they were writing at the time.
--from "An Interview with Patricia Grace," conducted by Paloma Fresno Calleja, in Atlantis 25:1 (June 2003): pp. 109-20.

(Patricia Grace, a writer of Maori descent, was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1937. She is the author of the first collection of short stories published by a Maori woman, Waiariki (1975), and has subsequently published 7 novels and works of nonfiction, 6 collections of short stories, and three children's books. She received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2008.)

Remembering Derrick Bell

Derrick Bell
(aalbc.com)

I have been fortunate over the years to interact directly with some very extraordinary people, whose vision and generosity stamped something indelible on me, and one of these was Derrick Bell (1930-2011), who passed away yesterday.  At the time of his death he was a visiting professor of law at New York University, where he had taught for nearly two decades, but long before that he had repeatedly taken courageous stands and stood on principle when, given his keen intellect and well of charisma, social expediency and conformity could easily have paved his route to wealth and success.

For example: in 1959, Bell, who had only recently graduated from the prestigious University of Pittsburgh Law School in 1957 and was the only African American working in the US Justice Department at the time, refused to resign his membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which his bosses thought might compromise his objectivity, or call into question that of the Justice Department, and instead quit his job.  Or: in 1961, after taking a job with the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund, he supervised the legal aspect of James Meredith's attempts to enroll in and eventual admission to the University of Mississippi, in 1962.

And: in 1980, Derrick Bell, after having taught at Harvard Law School since 1969, where he became that institution's first tenured African American law professor, left to become the dean of the University of Oregon School of Law. He resigned from his Oregon post in a dispute over the lack of faculty diversity.  He subsequently returned to Harvard in 1986, where he staged a 5-day sit-in in his office to protest HLS's denial of tenure to 2 junior colleagues who were working in what would later become the widely disseminated "critical legal studies" methodology. And again: in 1990, after taking account of HLS's dismal record of hiring and tenuring women and people of color, Bell announced that he was taking an unpaid leave of absence until the school appointed a woman of color to its tenured ranks. When he did not return from his protest leave, having taken a temporary position at NYU Law school, HLS dismissed him, in 1992.  Harvard would not hire a tenured woman of color to its law school ranks until 1998, when it appointed civil rights attorney and former University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Lani Guinier.

During my stint at NYU's Faculty Resource Network, I had the opportunity to work with Professor Bell, who graciously agreed to lead a seminar for the faculty members participating in this academic development program from smaller local and national institutions, including a number of historically black colleges and universities, and Hispanic/Latino-serving colleges and universities. Not only was he a pleasure to deal with, but he made it clear that he saw his role as facilitating knowledge exchange with fellow scholars. The enthusiasm that all the participants of his seminar expressed before it began and after it concluded was a summer highlight. Though he often spoke softly, he had a galvanizing voice and manner, and his innovative, insightful mode and manner of thought, his courage and conviction, and his gentleness and kindness kindled in whatever he was talking about. I never had the opportunity to study with him, but I was able to take his measure and have considered him a model of what a professor, a scholar and a public intellectual might be. Everyone I know who studied under him sang his praises, and working with him, I got to see why.

Derrick Bell's books include Race, Racism and American Law (Little Brown & Co. 6th ed., 2008, original ed., 1973); Silent Covenant: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (Oxford University Press, 2004); Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth (Bloomsbury, 2002); Afrolantica Legacies (Third World Press, 1998); Constitutional Conflicts (Anderson Press, 1997); Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protestor (Beacon Press, 1996); Gospel Choirs (1996); Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992); and And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (1992).

His passing is a great loss. RIP, Derrick A. Bell Jr.

Tranströmerei (Nobel Prize for Literature, 2011) + 3 Poems by Tranströmer

Tranströmerei it is. A poet, and so I cheer.
Not my first choice, not even my fifth
but I'm glad see the Swedish Academy
acknowledge that artists toiling
in the oldest literary art deserve
recognition too. Recognize!

Tomas Tranströmer's (1931-) personal biographical information, with bibliography, is available at the Nobel Prize for Literature website. Instead of recounting it or faking an appraisal of his poetry--

because though I have read it
and even mentioned him before
as a possible Laureate on here
aeons ago I would be telling
tall tales if I said I read him regularly or
considered him a poet I ever
turned to* except on days like today--

Here are three Tranströmer poems not translated by Robert Bly (1926-), whose translations of today's laureate predominate across the Net. See what you think. (*Teju Cole is a huge fan of his. I'm a huge fan of Teju Cole. So transitively...?)

(An interview with Tranströmer, on translation.)

Tranströmer is not without gifts, ample ones:

FROM MARCH '79

Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I come across the marks of a roe-deer's hooves in the snow.
Language but no words.

Copyright © Tomas Tranströmer, from The Wild Marketplace, translated by John F. Deane, Dublin: The Dedalus Press, 1983. All rights reserved.

And this:

DEEP IN EUROPE

I am a dark hull floating between two lock-gates
rest in the hotel bed while the city around me wakens.
The silent clamor and the gray light stream in
and raise me slowly to the next level: the morning.

Overhead horizon. They want to say something, the dead.
They smoke but don't eat, they don't breathe but they keep their voice.
I'll be hurrying back through the streets as one of them.
The blackened cathedral, heavy as a moon causes ebb and flow.


Copyright © Tomas Tranströmer, from For the Living and the Dead: New Poems and a Memoir, edited by Daniel Halpern, this poem translated by Robin Fulton, Hopewell, New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1995.


And this:


STROPHE AND ANTISTROPHE


The outermost circle belongs to myth. There sinks the helmsman
erect among glittering spines of fish.
How far away from us! When the day
suffocates in windless unrest--
like the Congo's green shadow holds
the blue men in its vapor--
when all of this flotsam on the heart's slow
twining river
piles itself up.


Sudden change: beneath the float of heavenly hulls
glide the tethered ones.
Stern high, at an impossible angle,
leans the carcass of a dream, black
against a pale red strip of coast.  Deserted,
the years drop downhill, quick
and silent as sled shadows, doglike, enormous,
run over snow,
reach the forest.


Copyright © Tomas Tranströmer, from Windows & Stones: Selected Poems, translated by May Swenson, with Leif Sjöberg, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972.

Nobel Prize for Lit or American Fictionistas Need Not Apply

Tonight, at the end of my graduate fiction class, as we were circulating next week's stories and concluding a very brief discussion of Gloria Naylor's "Mattie Michael," from The Women of Brewster Place, one of the students mentioned that on Thursday, the Swedish Academy will award the Nobel Prize in Literature. (The prizes in physiology or medicine, i.e., biomedical research, and physics, have been awarded already, the former to someone who unfortunately had passed away between the award decision and the announcement. Tomorrow the chemistry prize winners will be named. On Friday the Peace Prize will be promulgated, and Monday will bring a new economics winner or winners.)  Usually the grad students don't mention the Nobel Prize in Literature until after the fact, but this student and several others were excited about the pending notice, and one mentioned that it was unlikely that an American fiction writer would honored, which reminded me of this Salon article, "Why American Novelists Don't Deserve the Nobel Prize," by Alexander Nazaryan, that Reggie H. forwarded to me yesterday (or was it today? It's all a blur!).

Before I address the article, let me say that I hope a POET or someone who primarily writes poetry wins the prize this year. There are many extraordinary poets living and writing these days, many outstanding ones doing so within the Euro-American orbit, and many outside it. One such worthy, Adunis (Ali Ahmad Said Asbar) (1930-, born in Syria), was supposed to visit the university a few weeks ago but was too ill to join us; in his place came another such worthy, Raúl Zurita (1950-, from Chile), about whom I have posted several times.  Although I have zero influence with the Swedish Academy (although reading their guidelines, I realize that given my academic post, I can write a letter nominating someone, not that anyone affiliated with that institution will read it, but...), I sincerely hope and will send positive vibes that they spread the love around genrewise and honor a poet. Or someone who writes what's now commonly called creative nonfiction but which I guess might also be labeled imaginative, non-journlistic, non-scholarly prose. There are lots of fine examples of that genre too. And there are always the playwrights.

Now, back to Nazaryan's article. He notes that no American since Toni Morrison in 1993 has won the Nobel Prize in literature, and goes on to say American fiction writers don't deserve the honor because, qua former Swedish Academy permanent secretary Horace Engdahl, they/we are "too isolated, too insular," they/we don't look outside the borders of the US, they're/we're narcissistic, etc. Nazaryan slams Harold Pinter for his still valid Nobel Award ceremony speech (I mean, does anyone thinking clearly doubt that the US's invasion of Iraq was anything but illegal and criminal?), but then goes on cite the Ladbrokes tip on winners (Thomas Pynchon is in first place), after which he reduces all of contemporary American fiction writers to a tidy, ugly category, the "Great Male Narcissists," drawn from a David Foster Wallace essay. (Yes, him--what is the force field this writer has over so many literary journalists?) Que up trashing MFA programs. Cite a TS Eliot essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (you know, "dissociation of personality," etc.)  Then Nazaryan makes the outrageous claim that Jhumpa Lahiri is a South Asian female "Great Male Narcissist." (Mr. Nazaryan, please just read "The Third and Final Continent" if you need to be abused of this notion.) Anyone who doesn't fit into this formula is of course ignored. You can read the rest and gag.

Anyways, this got me to thinking: have the recent Nobel Laureates in Literature all the antithesis of "isolated," and "insular"? Do they not write about the "self," "themselves"? Do they write about life outside their native countries or societies? Let's look. The last 10 Nobel Laureates in Literature, going backwards, have been 2010: Mario Vargas Llosa (primarily fiction, Peru); 2009: Herta Müller (fiction, Germany/Romania); 2008: J-M. G. LeClézio (fiction, France); 2007: Doris Lessing (fiction and imaginative prose, UK); 2006: Orhan Pamuk (fiction, Turkey); 2005: Harold Pinter (drama, UK); 2004: Elfriede Jelinek (fiction and drama, Austria); 2003: J. M. Coetzee (fiction, South Africa); 2002: Imre Kértesz (fiction, Hungary); 2001: V. S. Naipaul (fiction and imaginative prose, Trinidad & Tobago/UK).  That is a very male, fiction-weighted, Europe-heavy list, ahem.

Now, I can say authoritatively that every single one of these authors initially wrote first and foremost about life in their native countries.  In the cases of Vargas Llosa, Müller, Pamuk, Jelinek, and Kértesz, they have tended to write about almost nothing else, though Pamuk's and Kértesz's works are historically inflected in very interesting ways, and Vargas Llosa's novels moved from to personal to grander, broader social and political themes, with some of the more recent books set outside Peru, such as The Feast of the Goat, which treats the Dominican Republic under Rafael Trujillo. Jelinek's works are extremely insular (and unreadable). Müller writes about emotional, psychological, social, and political isolation and insularity (quite beautifully). Pinter's works, while ostensibly set in the UK, could take place in many different places, but a central theme for many of them social and psychological isolation, and, especially in the later works, play on and with selfhood and its discontents--but, as I said, are not geographically bounded, for the most part. Lessing's realist works, while geographically situated, turn primarily on themes and tropes more so than place. Coetzee wrote primarily about South Africa (how could he not?), but his later works range widely in many senses; geographically, from Russia (The Master of Petersburg) to a fictional island and the UK (Foe), to the US and Australia (Diary of a Very Bad Year).  His masterpiece Elizabeth Costello is set in a range of places, including Heaven, or something like that realm. Intellectually they range as widely. LeClézio's work, after his first few books, seems set all over the place, but having skimmed a few of his novels, I'm not sure I buy any of them; they strike me as exercises in exoticism. But I haven't finished a single one, so I could be very wrong. Naipaul's writing ranges all over the place, but is essentially ALWAYS about V.S. Naipaul. He has no other subject, which is why after A House for Mr. Biswas and Miguel Street, two jewels, I cannot bear to read his work. I personally have no problem with any of these writers' approaches; what matters is the work they produce. Insular or outward-looking, isolated in its focus or catholic, if it's great work, it's great work.

All of which is to say that the criticisms of American fiction writers are not exactly fair if you look 1) at broader spectrum of who is writing and publishing fiction in the US today and what those works address and 2) at who has received the Nobel Prize, at least in the last 10 years, though one could go further back, and whether those works defy the critiques above. I get what Nazaryan and others like Engdahl are saying, but I just think they've settled on a hobbyhorse that doesn't really capture how rich American fiction writing truly is, especially if you go beyond the biggest (mostly male) names Nazaryan cites. And as the above international list suggests, these writers all started by writing about the societies they've spent most of their time in. Some of them, in fact, effectively have written the same novel, about that same place, over and over. I don't have any problem with anyone doing that, so long as the variations are compelling. That's all that matters. But back to fiction. The Swedish Academy missed Robert Bolaño, who did range across countries and ideas, and there are other fictionists like Wilson Harris, Maryse Condé, Nuruddin Farah, A. B. Yehoshua, Shariar Mandanipour, Margaret Atwood, Javier Marías, Dubrakva Ugresic, Haruki Murakami, etc. very deserving of the prize. As for Thursday...who do you think will be honored?

Freedom Budget + Occupy Wall Street's Declaration

Much ado about various responsibilities, so no time for intensive blogging, but the ever brilliant Geoffrey J. pointed me toward the following remarkable document, the Freedom Budget For All Americans: Budgeting Our Resources, 1966-1975, To Achieve 'Freedom From Want,'" which the A. Philip Randolph Institute of New York published in 1966. In edition to the eponymous Randolph, the longtime president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of the most important 20th century labor organizations for African-Americans, and a beacon in and of the Civil Rights Movement, other signatories to the document include many of the leading lights of the mid-century labor, progressive, civil, human and equal rights movements, crossing all racial, ethnic, ethnic, and class backgrounds. (There are almost no women on the list, but this document appears almost at the early point of what we now think of as the full-flowering of women's movement and second wave feminism; there are also almost no openly queer signatories, save Bayard Rustin, but the document precedes the Stonewall Riots by 3 years.)

A page from the Freedom Budget, 1966

It's a remarkable document, and I urge you to read it at your leisure, but sooner rather than later; it's hosted on invaluable the Internet Archive site, which allows you to read documents online, download them in a range of formats, and forward them to others quite easily, free of charge.

The Freedom Budget makes an engaging companion template to the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, which was accepted by the General Assembly of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which I first wrote about almost three weeks ago, on September 29, 2011. I am linking to it, but also posting it in full. Whatever one may feel about the protests, which I personally believe are among the most important to have occurred in the US in some time, the principles below articulate a good deal of what a great many people--a great many of the 99% of us who have not been the beneficiaries of the disaster-capitalism, supply-side, neoliberalism-meets-libertarianism economic debacle that has marked not just the decade preceding the Global Financial Crisis 2.0 of 2007-2009 (+), but of the 3 decades before--feel about what has gone wrong, while highlighting a number of other issues that are important to progressives in the US. The document below, like the protests, is both an important start, and a vital link in a long tradition of dissent and protest from the left that has preceded it. Do read it, amend it, talk about it, challenge and debate about it, but above all, pass it on.

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

Posted on September 30, 2011 by NYCGA

THIS DOCUMENT WAS ACCEPTED BY THE NYC GENERAL ASSEMBLY ON SEPTEMBER 29, 2011

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

 These grievances are not all-inclusive, indeed. Now read the Freedom Budget, and note how many of these issues are addressed or touched upon both in its in general principles, and in its specific plans for how the government might spend its--our--monies.

We have a ways to go, but to the people of Occupy Wall Street and all the sibling protests, all over the country and the world, you are on the best track, a new one building upon many older ones, and I like many people say: thank you!

Baseball Update (Cards, Rays in Playoffs!)

Albert Pujols, at potentially his
final game at Busch Stadium
in St. Louis, September 25, 2011
(Ed Szczepanski/Getty)

I'll keep this simple, but let me first note that although I'm not a superstitious person (yet grew up around quite a few such folks), I did fear that if I blogged at all about the amazing late-season comeback of the St. Louis Cardinals, who'd some St. Louis-area media and fans by early August had considered failures, I would somehow jinx their surge. I know, it's utterly ridiculous, but I decided not to post until things had sorted themselves out, and now, here we are, on the final day of the regular season and what a remarkable turn of events has occurred. Yesterday the Cardinals, had made up the 10.5-game deficit they had on August 26 to tie Atlanta, the National League Wild Card slot leaders, and today St. Louis defeated the Astros today 8-0 behind a complete game shutout by former Cy Young Award-winner Chris Carpenter, while Atlanta lost in 13 innings to the Philadelphia Phillies, the NL East Division winners, to fall out of contention. The Cardinals will now face the Phillies starting on Saturday in a best-of-five series to see who heads to the NL League championship series. In the other NL playoff game, the Milwaukee Brewers, the surprise NL Central Division leaders, will face the NL West Division leaders, the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Pujols with Philly and former Cardinal
Plácido Polanco at Citizens Bank
Park, Philadelphia, September 25, 2011
(Jim Redkoles/Getty)

As astonishing was the American League's parallel, in which the Tampa Bay Rays experienced a late-season surge and ended up tying the Boston Red Sox for the AL Wild Card slot. Today would determine either a winner or a playoff for the slot, and as Tampa Bay was poised to lose to the New York Yankees after being down 7-0, the Rays came back and won it in the 12-inning, defeating the Yankees 8-7. The Red Sox, a mainstream media favorite, had a 9-game lead over Tampa Bay on September 4, but thereafter stumbled, yet still had a chance at least to vie for a one-game playoff to make it into the post-season, yet their star reliever, Jonathan Papelbon, could not hold a 3-2 lead against the Baltimore Orioles, and lost the game 4-3. The Rays now face the AL West-leading Texas Rangers, a team rarely seen in the post-season, while the other matchup will pit the perennial champion New York Yankees, the AL East Division leaders, against the Detroit Tigers, who won the AL Central Division.

Pujols breaks his bat
against Chicago Cubs at
Busch Stadium, St. Louis
September 25, 2011
(Ed Szczepanski/Getty)

A few other notes: the Cardinals have unfortunately not yet signed one of the greatest players ever to grace one of their uniforms, Albert Pujols, a sure Hall of Famer, but he has again made a case for them to find the money to keep him. Pujols struggled early on and broke his non-catching hand mid-season, but returned to form by late July, and was trying to continue his career-long streak of at least 30 home runs, a .300 batting average, and 100 runs batted in. He finished the season, his 11th in the major leagues, with 37 home runs, a .299 average, and 99 runs batted in, just points below his empyrean standard. Thus far he has amassed a .329 lifetime batting average and a .617 slugging average, 445 home runs, 1329 runs batted in, and 975 walks. He is only 31. Since he joined the team in 2001 he has played a key role in every Cardinals post-season, including their World Series victory in 2006. They--the Cardinals, the wealthy DeWitt family that owns the team, their partners--must sign him if they want to remain competitive. Without him they'll be hard-pressed to keep up even with the middling teams in their division, let alone better teams across the league.

NY Mets shortstop José Reyes (r)
escorted back onto the Citi Field
lawn by teammate Willie Harris
Flushing, New York,
September 28, 2011 (Jim McIsaac/Getty)

A pitching rarity seems set to occur. Both the American League and the National League will have pitchers who will qualify for the pitching Triple Crown, which  comprising posting the highest win total, most strikeouts, and lowest earned run average. In the AL, Detroit's Justin Verlander posted 1970s-style numbers, going 24-5, the first pitcher to win so many games in decades, while striking out 250 (in 251 innings) and posting a 2.40 ERA. He allowed 0.92 walks and hits per inning pitched. Opposing batters hit only .091 against him. The next closest AL pitcher in wins was the Yankees' C. C. Sabathia, with 19. In the NL, the Los Angeles Dodgers' Clayton Kershaw, only 4 years in the majors, went 21-5, tying Arizona Diamondbacks starter Ian Kennedy (21-4) for the highest win total, yet bested him by striking out 248 batters in 233.1 innings, with a 2.28 ERA. Kershaw allowed only 0.98 walks and hits per innings pitched, and opposing batters only hit .207 off him. Seldom to pitchers in either league achieve the Triple Crown; the last NL pitcher to achieve it was Jake Peavy, when he pitched for the San Diego Padres in 2007, while the last AL pitcher to do so was Johan Santana when he pitched for the Minnesota Twins in 2006. The last time pitchers in both leagues achieved this pinnacle in the same year was 1924 (!), when Walter Johnson did so for the old Washington Senators in AL, while Dazzy Vance did so for the Brooklyn Robins (Dodgers) in the NL. (The only pitcher to win it more than twice remains Sandy Koufax, who led the NL in all three categories during three of his final four seasons as a Dodger, in 1963, 1965, and 1966.)

Met José Reyes bunts a single in his only at bat against
the Cincinnati Reds at Citi Field, Flushing, NY,
September 28, 2011 (Jim McIsaac/Getty)

Lastly, another player who may leave his longtime hometeam, José Reyes of the New York Mets, won the NL batting title for the first time in his career. The 27-year-old shortstop posted some of the best numbers of his career, hitting .336, scoring 101 runs, and stealing 39 bases. He edged the Minnesota Twin's Ryan Braun, who finished the day 0 for 4, leaving him with a .332 batting average.  Like Pujols Reyes hasn't been signed, and may leave the Mets for more lucrative environs. What a loss his departure would be for his team. In the AL, Detroit's Miguel Cabrera, a regular sparkplug from his days with the Florida Marlins, finished the season at .344, putting him ahead of Boston's Adrian González and Texas's Michael Young, who both finished at .338. In both cases both leagues had new batting title winners for the second straight season. The AL home run king was Toronto Blue Jays outfield José Bautista, who hit 43 this year and had won last year, while the NL saw a new star emerge in the Dodgers' Matt Kemp, who hit 39 and also was vying for the batting Triple Crown. He finished with a .324 average, but also led the league in RBIs, with 126.

Finally, hits marvel Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners ended his streak of 10 consecutive 200-hit seasons this year, posting only 184. In 2004 Suzuki broke the single-season record when he gained 262 hits; his final batting average that year was .372. This year he managed only a .272 average, the lowest of his stellar career. His team managed only a 64-95 record, putting them 4th and last in their division, and second-worst in the AL. Only the Twins had a worse record (63-99).

Now let the playoffs begin! GO CARDINALS! GO YANKEES!

Quote: Binyavanga Wainaina

"Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

"Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country."--from Binyavanga Wainaina, "How to Write about Africa," in Granta: The Magazine of New Writing 92: The View from Africa, Winter 2005.

Raúl Zurita @ Northwestern

Earlier this evening, the university's Poetry and Poetics Colloquium and Workshop held its first event of the fall, a reading by Raúl Zurita, accompanied by one of his many fine translators, Anna Deeny.  A number of units within the university, as well as the Poetry Foundation, sponsored Zurita's visit, and for their generosity I offer deep thinks. I have previously written a little about Zurita's work on this blog, noting his former compatriot Robert Bolaño's imaginative (mis-)treatment of his life in the former's novels, especially Distant Star (Estrella distante), and even translating (a very tiny example of) one of his works, "[Zurita]," myself. When Zurita came through Chicago several years back, I was away, so I didn't get to see him, but I was determined not to miss tonight's event. And he did not disappoint. I won't try to recap the reading, which lasted a little under an hour, but I will say that I felt moved in a way I haven't by hearing poetry in a while, at least since last spring.

One of the things that Zurita's poetry offers is an sublime gravity, a dizzying weightiness masked by humor, breeziness, riduculousness, absurdity--the absurdity of a world in which people are disappeared or dropped out of planes or tortured for disagreeing with a political dictatorship, and the society for the most part looks in the other direction, closes its eyes, talks in circles, and enjoys the "economic successes" the murderous regime touts, which primarily benefit those at the top of the social, political and financial pyramid. Zurita read from several of his books, including Purgatorio (1979), Sueños para Kurosawa (2009), and the often astonishingly beautiful La vida nueva (1994), which plays with Dante's legendary title in rethinking what a new life might mean under the circumstances in which Zurita and his fellow countrypeople were living before and at the time he wrote the book. It forms the final title in a trilogy that includes Purgatorio and Anteparaíso (1982), the first of Zurita's works I ever came across, and itself a rethinking, in so many ways, of Dante's worldview, while also drawing on the aesthetic daring of that great poetic ancestor.

After the reading, Zurita answered questions from the audience, including responding to a fine one, I believe by my colleague Jorge Coronado, in which he noted off the cuff that it was only the desert, the mountains, and the sea that showed "compassion" to those who were killed or dropped onto or over these natural sites. I am still thinking about that one.


Jorge Coronado introducing Anna Deeny (translator) and Raúl Zurita


Anna Deeny and Raúl Zurita, reading his poetry

Political Impressions (Saturday Silliness)

Some serious silliness for a Saturday.  Unfortunately for all of us, so much of the current rhetoric echoes what's being ridiculed and spoofed below (note how the recent GOP debates echo the UK conservative candidate impressions featured at the bottom of the page.) Plus ça change, plus ça reste, but nevertheless, enjoy!

From SNL: The real Ronald Reagan (Phil Hartman)
From SNL: George H W Bush (Dana Carvey) debating Michael Dukakis (Jon Lovitz), with Diane Sawyer (Jan Hooks) moderating
From Dana Carvey show: H. Ross Perot (Dana Carvey) on Larry King's (Phil Hartman) show, 1996
From SNL: Bill Clinton (Phil Hartman), running for the Presidency, in 1992, stops in at a McDonald's
From SNL: Al Gore (Darrell Hammond) debating George W Bush (Will Ferrell) in 2000, on Bush's tax cuts and the "lockbox"
From SNL: Joe Biden (Jason Sudeikis) debating Sarah Palin (Tina Fey) in 2008, moderated by Gwen Ifill (Queen Latifah)
From SNL: Sarah Palin (Tina Fey) discusses her politics with Katie Couric (Amy Poehler) And from the UK:
Margaret Thatcher (Janet Brown), the day after she became the UK's Prime Minister
Gordon Brown invades Dead Ringers Laurie & Fry, on Young conservative contest (watch till the end)
Rowan Atkinson, at a Conservative Party (UK) conference

Classes Underway + End-of-Summer Poems: Basho & John Ashbery

September is nearly over, the quarter charges forward, my classes have begun.  This fall I am teaching two fiction classes, one undergraduate, the other a graduate workshop. The undergraduate course, "The Theory and Practice of Fiction," is a required course for all the fiction majors and minors, and runs into the winter quarter's midpoint, or early February, making it one of the rare semester-long classes in the university's undergraduate curriculum.  (All three major/minor required tracks, poetry, fiction and nonfiction, have this course.) As part of the class students read short stories by established writers (this year ranging from Anton Chekhov and Flannery O'Connor to Jhumpa Lahiri and ZZ Packer) and (practical) theoretical texts (including Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer) on fiction writing, and produce three draft short stories (as well as in-class reports, critical papers and commentary), which they'll revise and submit by the end of the long-course, at which point I guide them to my colleague who will lead through the writing of a novella, which they'll complete by next June.  They are a very sharp, talented group, and I'm greatly looking forward to working with them. I also have a wonderful MFA student who is conducting a practicum this quarter, and will be joining me as a teaching assistant.

The graduate course is the standard fiction workshop for all MA/MFA students, and it too brims with smart, skilled writers.  Earlier this year, at Reggie H.'s urging, I read Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel, A Visiting from the Goon Squad (Knopf, 2010), and among the many things about this outstanding work that struck me, I realized it might offer another way of thinking about negotiating the relationship between writing short stories and novels, which the graduate students often are thinking about. Egan's consists of chapters that could work as free-standing short stories, and she has in fact said that she wrote two of them first, then thought about how to relate them to each other, which produced the inventive novel that resulted. In addition to Egan's book, with which we'll be concluding the class, I've assigned chapters from works that comprise interrelated short stories, novellas, or near-autonomous story-like texts that also have been termed, by the authors themselves, critics or readers novels. These include texts by Rebecca Barry, Ray Bradbury, Sandra Cisneros, J. M. Coetzee, David Mitchell, Nami Mun, Gloria Naylor, Tim O'Brien, and W. G. Sebald. I'm excited about the potential discussions to arise out of these works, as well as about the work the students will be submitting.

This year I have several graduate literature students I'm working with, several graduate fiction students, and one honors creative writer, who is writing a novel to submit as his thesis.  A lot of reading, and this is only one aspect of my job, but one I'm definitely glad about so far!

+++

Today is the last day of summer. Could I have written that more prosaicly? What about: today summer's over. There's a touch of poetry there. Here, however, are two great poems elegizing summer's end. One by one of the greatest poets of concision, the Edo-era master of haiku no renga and other forms, Basho Matsuo (松尾 芭蕉, 1644-1694), the other by one of the most important living poets writing in English, American poet John Ashbery (1927-). Its opening sentence enacts what it describes, and is one of my favorites among all his poems. Enjoy!

A statue of Matsuo in Hiraizumi, Iwate (from Wikipedia)

[Farewell, my old fan]

by Basho

Farewell, my old fan.
Having scribbled on it,
What could I do but tear it
At the end of summer?

***

Summer

by John Ashbery

There is that sound like the wind
Forgetting in the branches that means something
Nobody can translate. And there is the sobering “later on,”
When you consider what a thing meant, and put it down.

For the time being the shadow is ample
And hardly seen, divided among the twigs of a tree,
The trees of a forest, just as life is divided up
Between you and me, and among all the others out there.

And the thinning-out phase follows
The period of reflection. And suddenly, to be dying
Is not a little or mean or cheap thing,
Only wearying, the heat unbearable,

And also the little mindless constructions put upon
Our fantasies of what we did: summer, the ball of pine needles,
The loose fates serving our acts, with token smiles,
Carrying out their instructions too accurately—

Too late to cancel them now—and winter, the twitter
Of cold stars at the pane, that describes with broad gestures
That state of being that is not so big after all.
Summer involves going down as a steep flight of steps

To a narrow ledge over the water. Is this it, then,
This iron comfort, these reasonable taboos,
Or did you mean it when you stopped? And the face
Resembles yours, the one reflected in the water.


Copyright © John Ashbery, from The Double Dream of Spring, New York: Dutton, 1970, 2011. All rights reserved.

Troy Davis, 1968-2011

"May God have mercy on your souls." -- Troy Davis's final words

I am opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances. I do not believe any state or State should be in the business of executing anyone, for any reason. As more than enough investigations over the last three decades, including ones pursued at the university's Innocence Project, have shown, innocent people not only have been locked up for years, but have been put to death for a variety of reasons, because of serious flaws in our justice system. Claude Jones, the last person consigned to state execution by former President George W. Bush, when he was still Texas's governor in 2000, was later exonerated by DNA evidence. He is not alone in having lost his life because of shoddy prosecution, and the situation has long tended to be far worse for black men especially, but also latinos. But even in the case of people who have been proved beyond a reasonable doubt to be guilty of the gravest crimes, like the avowed white supremacist whom the state of Texas killed for his role in the brutal lynching of James Byrd, I do not believe capital punishment is warranted.

Tonight the country and world witnessed a travesty of justice and  a human tragedy mirroring what Claude Jones and countless others have unfortunately suffered. Troy Anthony Davis (October 19, 1968 - September 21, 2011), who maintained his innocence from the time he was arrested through his conviction for murdering a off-duty Savannah police officer in 1989 was put to death this evening. Davis's legal team, as well as supporters across the US and the globe, had called for a new trial based on the facts that there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime scene, he was convicted based on testimony that 7 of the 9 witnesses at his initial trial later recanted, and another man allegedly admitted to having shot the officer.  There had previously been three last-minute stays of execution, and numerous hearings before state and appellate courts, but these same courts repeatedly ruled against Davis's appeals. The US Supreme Court had earlier denied Davis's last minute petition to review the case without comment or dissent. With that non-intervention, Davis was executed beginning at 10:54 pm by lethal injection.

Putting anyone to death is wrong; getting even one of these cases wrong and thus consigning someone to prison for years, let alone death, is barbaric and unconscionable. Convicting anyone based on shoddy evidence, prosecutorial misbehavior or legal incompetence, or other mitigating factors that do not ensure a fair trial, like race and ethnicity, poverty and class status, religious background, or intellectual capacity, is wrong. Yet it happens in this country all the time, and it has to stop. It must stop and we must stop it. But it will not if we do not collectively speak out and act.  For every Claude Jones and Troy Davis, there are others who have almost no one to rally to their cause. We must speak out and act, en masse, because ending this barbarity is possible. From 1972 to 1976, capital punishment in the US was banned after having been ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court. It should be banned again. Troy Davis, Claude Jones, and many others will not have to chance to thank us, but there are many others who will.

DADT Finally DOA + OccupyWall Street Protests

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the failed "compromise" policy restricting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender service people to serve openly, which President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1993 after the Republican-controlled Congress passed it, is now officially no longer on the books.  As of today, LGBTQ people, who have been members of the US military since its establishment, can now serve without fear of prosecution simply because of their sexual or gender orientation, whether they announce it publicly or not. The policy also should end the costly witchhunts to root out queer servicepeople, and automatically halts all investigations currently underway.

( Matthew Cavanaugh / European Pressphoto Agency )
Retired Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva, who lost a leg in Iraq, testified to Congress in 2008 that he told his fellow troops he was gay and that it didn't erode "unit cohesion" -- an argument used by opponents of gays serving openly in the military

The change occurred not because of the military's or politicians' benevolence, but because of intensive and sustained efforts, including militancy, to shift public attitudes on LGBTQ people, and to repeal an overtly discriminatory policy that never should have been enacted in the first place. A strong congratulations goes to all the LGBTQ and straight people, especially those in the service and veterans, who fought to end the policy, and a hearty thanks to all who have supported repealing the policy, especially the members of Congress who voted to end it; President Barack Obama, who, after some dillydallying, finally signed it into law; and the military leaders and officers who have taken steps to implement it.  All branches of the military are now taking applications for anyone who qualifies, and this includes LGBTQ people.

Now, if only we could end all the wars the US currently is engaged in and bring the majority of our troops, whatever their sexual orientation, home!

+++

As I type this entry, thousands of people of all ages are participating in a public protest, Occupy Wall Street, down at Liberty Plaza in Lower Manhattan, against the past, current and likely future economic crises caused by Wall Street other other American and global financial firms. From 2007-2009, the United States and numerous other countries suffered the worst economic catastrophe since the Global Economic Crisis, also known as the Great Depression, which stretched from 1929 through the 1940s. The most recent crisis resulted from a number of factors, among the bursting housing bubble, the effects of deregulatory policies that loosened longstanding financial controls, overleveraging among consumers and banks, poor to non-existent government oversight, and a sense that our public tax dollars and private savings existed to be played as in a casino. We know the aftermath; we also know that Wall Street and foreign banks have received billions of dollars of taxpayer support, and continue to. In addition to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), banks have benefitted from trillions of dollars in Federal Reserve-backed swaps, loans, and monetary policies. They contine to benefit, and yet despite destroying the lives of millions of Americans and people across the globe, there have been almost no prosecutions, let alone serious, sustained investigations, of the people involved.  Wall Street bankers continue to influence and shape policies in Washington, DC and in other government capitals, while also strongly shaping non-governmental, global banking policies.

This then is part of the background to the protests, which Adbusters and the online group Anonymous organized. Related are the ongoing trials of organized labor; public labor unions have suffered repeated legislative assaults to match the longstanding rhetorical ones in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Florida, Michigan, Maine, and Ohio, and private ones are battling corporations like Verizon, Boeing, and Albertsons, to name just three. (The strikers and Albertsons have settled their issues for now, while the communication workers unions ended the Verizon strike without an agreement, and the legal issues involving Boeing's attempted job shift to South Carolina also continue.) The protests began on Saturday, and will continue for the foreseeable future.  The Occupy Wall Street site features live forums, chat rooms, phone conferencing bridges, photos, live streaming, and user maps for participants.  A number of protesters have been arrested (I can't verify the numbers so I don't want to post incorrect ones), some based on an obscure law preventing masks during protests. Others have been brutally roughed up (as the photos below show), including one who allegedly had police pile onto him as he was having an asthma attack. I've also posted below a video of the Verizon workers who on strike to keep their tenuous hold on the middle class.

A photo photos from @Hatofhornigold (with permission; thank you! If you Twitter, do follow this real-life mariner!)

http://twitgoo.com/4jawpe @OccupyWallStreet

http://twitgoo.com/4jm83t. @occupywallstreetnyc

http://twitgoo.com/4jaype @OccupyWallStreet

http://twitgoo.com/4jmgwp Crowd raises hands to show they approve civil rights lawyer Sam Cohen's offer to represent us #OccupyWallStreet

2011 MacArthur Fellows Announced

Historian Tiya Miles

Tonight the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation announced its 2011 MacArthur Fellows, popularly known as recipients of "Genius" grants. Congratulations to all of them! As always, the new fellows comprise a mixed group of artists, scientists, activists, and people doing work that doesn't easily fall in any categories.  I am familiar with the work of several: Roland Fryer, a 43-year-old professor of economics at Harvard University, who studies the relationship between discrimination, social inequalities and educational attainment using economic experiments; Kay Ryan, the former US Poet Laureate and winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in poetry; and Jad Abumrad, co-host of RadioLab, a radio show and podcast series that explores science and technology-related topics; and poet and translator A. E. Stallings, whose translation of Lucretius's De Rerum Naturum in 2007 received quite a bit of acclaim.  It's an amazing group, no doubt.

Computer scientist
Schwetak Patel

Several of the more unusual winners this year include metalsmith Ubaldo Vitali, who uses old and contemporary techniques to restore ancient and classical artifacts and to create new works of art, and "long-form" journast Peter Hessler, 42, whose work, as the MacArthur Foundation describes it, "whose three books and numerous magazine articles explore the complexities of life in Reform Era China as it undergoes one of the fastest social transformations in history." Especially timely, it strikes me, is the work of Kevin Guskiewicz, the Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Department of Exercise & Science at the University of North Carolina, who looks at the causes and effects of brain injuries incurred during sports; and historian and University of Michigan professor of Tiya Miles's studies on the complex interrelationships between African and Cherokee peoples during the Colonial Era, especially now that the Cherokee have decided to expel the descendants of slaves from their communities.

The list of all the fellows is available here. Congratulations again to all of them, and here're 2 videos of 2011 winner, musician Dafnis Prieto doing what led to his being honored.


Dafnis Prieto Proverb Trio (his solo is off the charts)
Dafnis Prieto at Modern Drummer Fest 2008 (with commentary by him)

Abramovic Video Game + Gamers Solve Difficult Chemistry Puzzle

In the spring of 2010, while I was teaching that wonderful Conceptual Art/Writing class, one of my most favorite of all the courses I've taught over the last 15 or so years, I had the good fortune to be in New York and go to the Museum of Modern Art to see Marina Abramovic perform "The Artist Is Present" live, and subsequently blogged about it. I even stood in line to participate in the face-off, but after waiting for a long while I bagged and instead caught some of the other exhibits, including the enthralling retrospective of her work. I did draw her on my iPhone, though, because the guard forbade me to take photos while in line (though as countless other blogs and sites demonstrated others present did not hesitate to keep photographing away, and, in any case, I did snap some pictures once out of his sightline). As I say, I was lucky; many New Yorkers and everyone who could not get to New York were unable to catch the performance, and have viewed it online, in still photos and via MoMa's servers, as well as via countless blogs. That was the way most of my students saw the performance.

Pippin Barr, a New Zealander now resident in Denmark who creates art and games, writes commentary about technological topics, blogs and teaches at the Center for Computer Game Research at IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark, however, has come up with a video game, entitled "The Artist Is Present," that allows participants the virtual experience of facing off with (or against) Abramovic.  But, it has a few catches: as I and others experienced in real time, if you play the video game you must wait in line for a period of time, and it restricts the hours when you can play (to MoMa's). There are no guards preventing photos or screen captures for that matter, though.  The Village Voice's Rosie Gray, who tried to play the game, interviewed Barr last Friday for the Voice's "Running Scared" column, and he had some interesting things to say about it, his long interest in comics and how this translated into "The Artist Is Present," and what games he's planning for the future. Next year his book, How To Play a Video Game, will be published by Awa Press.  When I have a free moment I'm going to try out his game.  On a related note, I also take it that Abramovic (nor MoMa) is not hassling him for use of the name/concept/etc. "The Artist Is Present," which is great to hear.  But then doing so would not be in the spirit of conceptual art or Conceptual Art, wouldn't it?

+++

Speaking of games, a remarkable story: a brilliant group of gamers using Foldit, an online collaborative game, solved a puzzle that had bedeviled researchers for years, and did so in astonishing time. Three weeks. As Alan Boyle relates it in this MSNBC article, what they did was to figure out the detailed molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme, retroviral protease, from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys. Doing so would aid researchers in designing drugs to neutralize HIV. Neither sheer mindwork nor computers programs geared towards protein folding, like Rosetta, sufficed in mapping out the right configuration, but Foldit, which has over 236,000 registered participants, allows players to tinker with virtual molecular structures--much as in chemistry classes with physical models, but with far greater complexity--and rewards those who devise the most "elegant structure[s]," according to chemical laws, with points, while subtracting points for designs tending toward the opposite direction.

A screen shot shows how the Foldit program posed the monkey-virus molecular puzzle. (University of Washington)

A small subgroup, the Foldit Contenders Team, comprising 12-15 regular participants living in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, other European countries, and New Zealand, solved the problem.  These players "worked as a tag team to come up with an incredibly elegant, low-energy model for the monkey-virus enzyme," astounding lead researcher, University of Washington biochemist Firas Khatib and his colleagues.  Rawstory.com notes that "The exploit [will be] published on Sunday in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, where--exceptionally in scientific publishing--both gamers and researchers are honoured as co-authors." Collaboration as a form of play, with incentives, apparently does pay off, and video games can be a serious epistemological tool. Foldit, which was developed and  by UW computer scientist Seth Cooper, and according to Boyle's article, it and similar games, forms of what he calls "citizen science," may prove vital in solving and resolving other scientific quandaries, whether they be pharmacological puzzles or bioengeering.  Boyle ends his article with an email from "mimi," one of the participants in solving the Pfizer-Mason enzyme problem, who notes that rather than receiving individual recognition within the article the gamers asked to be accredited as Foldit Contenders Team and tops off the missive by requesting that instead of a real name, Boyle use the gaming tag: mimi. Indeed.

Quote: Isabel Wilkerson

"At one point in the research process, I was reading a book a day — books on citrus production or southern geology or obscure court cases in Florida. I took to paying close attention to the footnotes and actually enjoyed reading them. I was reading the footnotes of the annotated version of Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, when I saw a passage that had been in the original published version of the book but omitted in the text of the current version. This passage had not been part of the original manuscript he had submitted, and he had had to write it in haste when he had been asked to cut the second half of the manuscript in order to get it published. Under deadline, he had to find the words to conclude his now truncated autobiography, and those words were succinct and beautiful:

I was flinging myself into the unknown, I was taking a part of myself to plant in alien soil…to see if it could grow differently…. If it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and perhaps to bloom.

"I came across this passage fairly late in the writing process. Until I saw that footnote, I had neither an epigraph nor a title. That passage gave me both."
--from "An Interview with Isabel Wilkerson," conducted and posted by Kim on Sophisticated Dorkiness, March 1, 2011. Wilkerson is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, New York: Random House, 2010, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Mark Lynton History Prize, administered by Columbia and Harvard Universities.

Via the Wayback Machine

c. 1997

When I first started blogging in 2005 I had no idea who my blog visitors were outside of very rough statistics or posts in my comment section.  I still don't know exactly, apart from commenters or people who tell me in person, but it's quite easy now to view the weekly, monthly or yearly stats and get an idea. To give an example, this week my top 5 most visited posts have been 2007 Rugby World Cup (always high on the list since it first appeared, and I have a strong idea why), Poem: Julia de Burgos's "To Julia de Burgos" (also usually quite high, and it makes me especially proud that my blogpost about one of Puerto Rico's most important poets, an Afrolatina, tends to be regularly sought out), Poem/Translation: Claudia Roquette-Pinto (my translation of one of her many exquisite poems), Review: Homme au bain (Man at Bath) (my review of Christophe Honoré's film, which features a discussion of M. François Sagat, whose name I suppose generates the searches), and The High Line (my 2009 photos from a visit to one of New York City's contemporary treasures).

This week the top referring sites are all Google (US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, India), no surprise there, but the top key searchwords bringing people to the site are a surprise: "a julia de burgos translation," "homme au bain," "roberto bolano," "mamuka gorgodze" [მამუკა გორგოძე] (? - yes, I had to look him up; he's a star of Georgia's 2011 Rugby World Cup team), "a julia de burgos," and "martin puryear."  Again, how wonderful that people are searching out films, writers and visual artists and coming across this site. J's Theater readers are overwhelmingly from the US, but the next highest groups of page viewers this week come from the UK, France, Canada, Australia, Germany, New Zealand, and Brazil. Hello to all of you! Most viewers (40%) are using Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows (66%), but Firefox (23%) and Safari (17%), once in the single digits, have crept up, as have the number of Macintosh (25%) and Linux (4%) viewers. iPhone, Android and iPad readers together make up about 3% of readers, which is 3% more than existed a few years ago.

My old web page banner

Before the blog, which I began in 2005, I did have an earlier Web presence, and the main way I knew who visited--beyond the Stat counter --was through the emails I would receive from time to time letting me know that a reader had taken interest in some aspect of my site.  I wantonly gave that out, and never received a single nastly post. Instead, I heard from people who shared my interests in architecture, who wondered what it was like to peer down through the glass floor in Toronto's CN Tower, and who wanted to offer thoughts on who'd win the Cy Young Award in each league. Via the Wayback Machine, the Internet archive, I came across my old page, which I started in 1997 while still in school, and which is archived, with selected posts and updates in 23 "captures," from 1998 through 2001.  Alma mater NYU's servers hosted it, and after I departed their urban groves they shut it down, though by that point it had already been preserved in Net amber. Interestingly enough, one of the first students I taught at the university knew about me and my work via that old website. She mentioned one my animated gifs, a poem I'd created in that format (another remains), and I was amazed that she'd come across it. This was pre-Google, so it might have been Yahoo! or one of the older search engines that summoned it up.

In my personal preamble, I included the following:

One truly scary sign is when one company owns a publishing house, newspapers, a movie studio, TV and radio stations, and on and on! And several companies (Rupert Murdoch's behemoth empire, Sony, Time Warner, etc.) now fit this description. We have to be vigilant as consu mers, as citizens, and one small step is keeping informed through organs such as Media Watchdog, reading everything you can, and resisting the increasing industrialization of our consciousness(es). So PLEASE READ a good book, magazines, newspapers, and buy them if you can from your local INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE, and articles and pieces on the Web. Whatever you do, don't surrender without a fight! RESIST! 

I'm proud to say I was calling out media consolidation and Rupert Murdoch quo ante. I admit to having not visited Media Watchdog (update: which no longer exists) in many years, though. In subsequent updates I removed most of the polemics and offered readers a less combative welcome. The final accessible main page is from 2001, just before I headed to the university for the first time. From it as from the earlier pages, you could reach my distinct pages set aside for books, sports, art (fascinating to me that some of the drawings have vanished, but one of Charles Bernstein remains), and poetry. Hmm, doesn't this all sound familiar?  Also, because I'd finally figured out how to create frames and tables (remember when those were the hot new thing?) in Html, I'd set up an "Notable African Americans" page, with those frames. This was pre-Wikipedia, so such pages weren't so easy to come by. I did update it a few times. Most of the links appear to have disappeared. Checking Wikipedia today, I note that there are pages for all the people I wrote entries for, including fairly obscure folks like composer Robert Nathaniel Dett, whose music my friend Byron M. turned me onto.

One of the drawings from my MIT days, c. 1989

Many of the files stored on NYU's server(s) are no longer accessible, so my 5 pages of photos from my first trip to Brazil (we went to Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in 2000, and ran into Sonia Sanchez and her son twice, once in each city!), are mere ghost traces. Though the captions remain I had to think for a minute about what they may have looked like, though in no time I recalled one of them featuring some of the enthrallingly grotesque statuary in Salvador da Bahia's Ordem Terceira de São Francisco, the monastery just off the Terreiro de Jesus, in Salvador's upper city.  Think ropes--velvet--of blood emanating from Jesus Christ's hands, stigmated palms, horror-film grimaces on the faces of Saint Francis and his life-size peers lining the room, and you start to get the picture.  C couldn't bear to spend more than a few minutes anywhere near these marvelously horrible creations, nor in the ossuary downstairs, but having grown up Roman Catholic and had more than a little exposure to the gory tales of numerous saints' martyrdoms, I found these fascinating. Other photos featured capoeristas, Rio tourist sites (the Rio page is riddled with grammatical and factual errors--Oscar Niemeyer did not design the city's new cathedral, though our guide told us this), and at some point I will have to scour my desk in NJ for the original prints--since I think this might have been just before I got ahold of a digital camera--to find them and scan them in. They also feature my dreadlocks, now a year gone, at their earliest stages. The memories!

One of the old poems, "Super Matrix," that appeared on old website, c. 1998

As Wayback Machine searches make clear, there's more of our earlier web presence than we might imagine, and things persist on the Net perhaps not eternally, but for a much longer time than they once did when they appeared only in print form or when they were passed along in the form of spoken or whispered tales and gossip. I do miss the informality, freedom and directness of that earlier pre-Google, pre-social networking site world, though. I also wonder what has happened to some of the people I used to correspond with, that is, the ones I wasn't fortunate enough to befriend and stay in contact with, no matter how far away they physically were.