Farrago

Tyler Perry's House of Payne
I saw ads for this show on Monday, then this evening heard Wendy Williams on her WBLS show dismissing it and breaking on Tyler Perry (at right, courtesy EURWeb) when she responded to a caller's inquiry about the purported romance between Perry and Tyra Banks (Wendy implied that Perry's real interests lay in the person of the show's star, Allen Payne ("How you doin'?")). So I was curious to catch it, despite my longstanding feelings about the buffoonery Perry packages so adeptly and lucratively for public consumption. As I was chatting on the phone with my friend David this evening, C. pointed to the TV screen to say that the show was coming on, at 11 pm, on UPN after WWOR-TV's infamously over-the-top news program. Though I missed the first few minutes of the show, when I finally did begin watching it I realized that I was witnessing something so bad, so awful, that it actually merited the description "dreadful," as in, "filling one with dread at the possibility of seeing it again." Dreadful premise, dreadful production, dreadful performances. In fact, it's so dreadful I thought it might be an elaborate joke, until I realized that, no, it was for real. It makes both The Jeffersons and Good Times look not only like high art, but progressive. The premise involves Payne's character moving back home with his parents, his two children in tow, because his wife has become...a crack addict who burned the house down! (Maybe I misheard this bit, but then maybe I'm misremembering a similar scenario for Perry's character in Diary of a Mad Black Woman.) The actor playing Payne's father was in full minstrel mode, and would have made Amos or Andy jealous; the woman playing Payne's mother, when not missing her timing, actually had to turn sideways to exit the soundstage. Payne himself seems to be performing as if he'd never learned even the basics of acting, including convincing facial expressions and gestures and was in a drama. Tonight's episode involved the father/grandfather fearing that his grandson, who he caught with a very tiny tutu hanging (not draped, and he wasn't wearing it) around his neck, was a "tambourine player." Which is to say, gay. (Is "tambourine player" an alternate name for gay people somewhere on this planet? Is "Riverdance" a gay reference? Really?) So the show went through all the predictable, homophobic responses. It suggested that if a young boy didn't want to be a fireman or learn karate, he could still be beaten up to be "toughened up," which would, naturally, de-gay him. (I guess there wasn't time or narrative space to deploy the Bible's de-gaying powers in this episode.) Payne's character, the boy's father, showed no character by going along with this, and initially was unable to deal with the fact that his son was sitting alone in the kitchen drinking out of a carton of milk (in an African-American household?) with the tutu hanging from his neck. Wouldn't this provoke some basic questions even in the most inane sitcom world? The source of the family's gay panic, the clumsy tutu-as-symbol, ultimately turned out to be rather simple and utterly sentimental, however; the boy missed his (crackhead) mother, and was sporting the tutu, which would not have fit on a Barbie, let alone a human being, like a necklace (?) because he and she used to dance around while she wore it (how?) when times were good (naturally), and of course it still bore her scent. Yep. In Tyler Perry-land. I know Perry is a hot commodity right now, but someone with UPN must have a semblance of aesthetic and critical judgment left, right? According to EURWeb, 10 episodes of this syndicated dreck are set to air. UPN, please stop while you're ahead.

The PATH Train Disparity
This entry will really be of interest only to those of us who (have to) take the PATH trains between New York and New Jersey. Every day that I've been back in New Jersey and have ridden the PATH into and out of Manhattan, I've said to myself, you have to write something on the blog about how the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey continues to run more Hoboken-bound trains than Journal Square-bound (Jersey City) trains, even though Jersey City, the second-largest city in the state, is now almost as populous as Newark, the largest city, and the more-frequent Hoboken-bound trains are seldom full at any hour of the day or night (except when on a holiday schedule that combines their route with the Journal Square trains'), while the Journal Square trains are alwayspacked at morning and evening rush hours, and sometimes approaching full in the early afternoon and late evening. For years I dealt with this, inquired of and complained to conductors and thought, they are eventually going to figure out that this disparity is idiotic and will finally run more Journal Square trains. But it seems in over 10 years, they haven't gotten a clue. I've always heard the rationale that the Hoboken trains are more frequent because of the New Jersey transit rail lines that converge at the Hoboken station, but then where are all the train riders? Does the Secaucus exchange get most of them? Do they simply go straight into and out of New York's Penn Station and skip the PATH ride? There is the alternate explanation of racism; the fact is, the majority of people taking the Journal Square trains (like the Newark trains) are people of color, while the majority of Hoboken line commuters are white, but this seems too blatant and obvious. And with steroid-style development that's overtaken Jersey City, there's again a large and growing white population in Jersey City, though many of the new residents are much more affluent than their predecessors from 50 and 100 years ago. Will the train schedule disparities change once this new Jersey City population reaches critical mass, or will there still be more Hoboken trains?

New Yorker's Rowing Experiment Capsizes
It was a fascinating idea, for undeniably great public and private causes. But unfortunately 41-year-old Victor Mooney wasn't able to get beyond the coast waters of Senegal in his attempt to row across the Atlantic Ocean to raise money for HIV/AIDS research and prevention. Fortunately for him the Senegalese Navy came to his rescue. If he does try this again, and I hope he does for the reasons he outlined, I pray that he'll find more seaworthy boat and some national, NGO or corporate sponsorship, and an official rescue agreement with several navies and coast guards. The Reuters article ended rather disturbingly with the following paragraph:

"I know the sea and how it gets. That man is going to have trouble in that boat -- he doesn't even seem to know how to row," said a local boatman who saw him take his first strokes.

Given what he was undertaking, I trust his rowing skills and prowess weren't really and won't in the future be an issue....

Brazil's Pirahã Tribe Upends Chomskyan Thesis
Or so says this article in Der Spiegel, which tells of a Brazilian tribe, the Pirahã, who, unlike every other group of speakers on earth, never use the very sort of compound sentence I'm unfurling here. This fact appears to contradict the recursion theory of human linguistic development, of which MIT linguist, philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky, one of my intellectual avatars, is an pioneer. But then the person who's made this claim is one of the few non-Pirahãs to understand and speak the language, so two Chomskyans are going to check things out very soon. They will get there, they will figure out what's really up.

Blog Round Up
Bernie has an excellent post on the appalling but not surprising Cocodorm story
Andrés beautifully memorializes HIV/AIDS activist Juan Mendez
Keguro posts on Googlebombing to aid the detained Egyptian blogger Alaa Abdel Fatah
Frank features fabulous photos for days on the Awards Ball 2006
Larry K. gives a thumb down to the Broadway version of The Color Purple
Nubian posts a video that speaks for itself
EJ has an Old School Wednesday lineup to carry you into the weekend

Random Photo

At the World Trade Center temporary PATH station, which from the day it opened has been a work of art

Farrago - I have always loved this word, though I'm using it here in its more positive connotations as a motley assembly, rather than a confused one.

Photos: 9th International Book Fair, Santo Domingo

At the Café Bohemio, "Propuesta E+Z=P" (Poetics and poetry of Argentinian Ernesto Sábato and Dominican Zacarías Espinal), featuring Puro Tejada and José Almonte Batista

Students walking in front of the Argentina pavilion

Wall of quotes (Jorge Luis Borges is at the top)

An artist working on large sheet of paper in the Argentinian pavilion

Public popular art commemorating the US invasion 41 years ago

Person effects of Pedro Henríquez Ureña, one of DR's and Latin America's major literary figures

People awaiting a talk (I think I waited for about a half-hour)

In the José Peña Gómez pavilion (he was one of the key figures on the Dominican left until his death several years ago)

People chatting between readings in the Dominican authors' pavilion

An outdoor print workshop

Students taking notes on Marcio Veloz Maggiolo's bibliography

A tableau of Veloz Maggiolo with other archeologists, discovering Taino paintings in Dominican caves

Paintings by Veloz Maggiolo, in the Veloz Maggiolo Pavilion

Lounging around the Verdi statue

The baseball pavilion, with its long line.

9th International Book Fair/IX Feria Internacional del Libro, Santo Domingo

Last week I did something I've never done before, which was to attend an international book fair outside the US. I went to the IX Feria Internacional del Libro 2006, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. This government-sponsored literary and arts festival, which was much larger and more vibrant than I'd expected (it's the largest in the Caribbean, and one of the larger ones in Latin America), ran from April 24 through May 7, and took place mostly throughout the grounds and museums of Santo Domingo's designated arts and cultural area, the Plaza de la Cultura Juan Pablo Duarte, in the leafy Gazcue neighborhood. The fair's theme was "Leer Ilumina" (Reading Illuminates), and from my spot observations, the nearly two-week event drew thousands of authors, booksellers, and literary enthusiasts from across the city, nation, and world. Most of the attendees and literary figures I came across were from Hispanophone countries; the strong attendance of Dominicans themselves, especially young adults and children, was particularly encouraging. As far as I could discern, the presence of Anglophone publishers and writers was minimal, however, outside of a few joint English-Spanish Dominican-American and Puerto Rican books, and I didn't see any official US representation (which perhaps was a good thing given that there were several exhibits both at the fair and in the city (at the Parque Independencia) commemorating the country's liberation four decades ago from the US invasion and occupation that began in 1965). There were booths and pavillions from France, Italy, Japan, Haiti, Germany, and other nations.

Every year, the fair designates a País Invitado (Invited Country), or Country of Honor, and this year's honoree was Argentina, which has one of the most distinguished literary traditions in 20th century Spanish-language and world literature. Argentina mounted a pavilion which I didn't find especially impressive (in it there was an English-language (?) travelogue film, with Spanish subtitles, that was packing people in but which I found sort of cheesy and dull). Much more interesting I thought was the tiny historical exhibit the Dominican National Library featured on Argentina's major authors that I spent a good while viewing. Other highlights of the festival included an exhibit of paintings by poets, including some beautiful small canvases by one of the DR's most famous authors, Marcio Veloz Maggiolo (above, right, from Gutierrez's Escritores Dominicanos); a pavillion dedicated to the fair's dedicatee, the prolific Maggiolo himself, which included many more examples of his plastic gifts, many copies of his books, and photos of him with writers I adore, like Jose Saramago and João Guimarães Rosa; several historical rooms in different museums devoted to aspects of Dominican and Latin American history; the modestly stocked but engaging Museum of Contemporary Art; and the almost endless array of Spanish-language publishers and booksellers, which were divided up into various categories. Another exciting aspect of attending was that the minimal English-language presence meant that I had to function almost completely in Spanish (or occasionally French). I managed okay, though there were moments when my lack of Spanish vocabulary and longstanding mild deafness, which was first identified in first grade (when I opened the letter from the auditory testers to my parents, saw that they'd noted I had a possible hearing problem, and promptly threw it down the grate at the curb) combined to such an extent that I caught about half of what was being said. Throughout I felt like a guest at a very special party whose secrets were being steadily revealed to me, so long as I paid attention and made more than a cursory effort.

Whenever I travel outside the US, I always look for books by authors I know and have never heard of, and this trip I came across several revelations. One was the Dominican author Pedro Peix (1952-), whose highly lauded, inventively experimental stories and prose pieces were collected and published by the fair's organizers, via their publishing unit Ferilibro (Dirección del Feria International del Libro) in a huge and attractive volume, El amor es el placer de la maldad: Relatos 1976-2006 (Love Is Evil's Pleasure: Stories 1976-2006), which Jimmy Hungría compiled. I recalled Peix's name (but hadn't read his story) from Marguerite Fernández Olmos's and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert's Caribbean short-story anthology, Remaking a Lost Harmony. Another Dominican author whose work I'd seen before but wasn't too familiar with was poet Mateo Morrison (1947-), who is a native of San Pedro de Macorís, the town from which a number of the country's most famous baseball players (Sammy Sosa, Alfonso Soriano, Robinson Cañó, George Bell, Joaquín Andújar, etc.) come from, and which has had a history of immigration from the English-speaking Caribbean as well as of African-Americans during the Boyer regime in the 1820s.

Other authors whose books I picked up include La Vasta Lejanía (The Vast Distance) by Cuban poet Agustín Labrada (1964-)--and there were so many fascinating books of Cuban poetry I had trouble picking. The cultural and arts organ Cielonaranja's press offered up some of the most visually appealing books, bound in what looked like heavy brown card stock, with linotype-style printed title cards and inside pages, and I ended up getting a reprints of works by Antonio Lockward Artiles (1943-) and late fiction avatar Aída Cartagena Portalatín (1918-1994). My visit to their booth involved a dreadlocks demonstration to a group of young schoolgirls! I had also long been curious about the Congo-derived drumming traditions which are based in the town of Villa Mella, which is north of Santo Domingo city proper, and I found a book, ¡Kalunga Eh! Los Congos de Villa Mella, by Dominican anthropologist Carlos Hernández Soto. One press that had lots of books I was interested in was Isla Negra, based in Puerto Rico. Juan Dicent (?-) read from his collection of contemporary pop-flavored stories, Summertime (Shampoo, 2005), at the fair's Café Bohemia on Tuesday, and I figured I'd get the book and read the whole thing. Two volumes I bought were by the acclaimed Dominican short-story writer and scholar, José Alcántara Almánzar (1946-), and a fairly young Dominican author who lives part-time in the US, Reynolds Emmanuel Andújar (1977-, pictured at left, courtesy Cielonaranja). I was especially looking for Puerto Rican author Ángel Lozada's second novel, No quiero quedarme sola y vacía (I Don't Want to Be Left Alone and Empty, 2006), published by Isla Negra, which my friend Anthony Montgomery hipped me to before I headed down and which was to make its debut (se estrenaría) at the fair, but I had to leave before Ángel was scheduled to read and the different guys repping the press that I spoke with couldn't even find it in the catalogue! (I wasn't able to find his first novel in any of the New York Spanish-language bookstores, so I ordered it online.)

Other highlights of the trip included having a great time with Anthony and getting an inside view (literally) of Santo Domingo's Colonial Zone houses and apartments (as if we had stepped straight into a Pedro Peix story setting); having brunch with David Lee of the Sports Bar; finally meeting Alan Washington of Tropical Desires; walking the streets of the city, especially down Calle Cesar Nicolas Penson, past the heavily fortified American Embassy; talking and dining with Bernard T. of Philly; witnessing the mad campaigning for the upcoming elections (though I could do without the eardrum-blasting speakers; catching the tail-end of the still-unfinished Hard Rock Café's fashion show on the Conde; spotting Scotch of Casa New Yorker at the airport and later getting a chance to laugh with him and Byron; and hanging out with the many other Americans (Vincent, Joshua, and many others) and Dominicans (José, el maestro de la moda, y los otros).

I'll post photos in my next entry.

Young's and Zazeela's Dream House

One of my brilliant former students, Tai Little, suggested almost a month ago that I check out composer LaMonte Young's and visual artist Marian Zazeela's Dream House: Seven + Eight Years of Sound and Light, one of several versions of a pioneering famous sound and light environmental art installation, which opened for its thirteenth season at the Mela Foundation down in Tribeca last year. Since Tai suggested I knew it would be worth seeing, though it took me weeks to finally get downtown to check it out. After being introduced to the space by a friendly woman (was it Zazeela? I didn't think to ask before she disappeared) I was the only person in the rooms.

I recommend Dream House, especially if you have some time to spare, aren't too bothered by loud, repetitive music, don't need lots of visual flash and are in a contemplative mood, and want to experience one of New York's famous participatory sensory aesthetic artworks. As the site says:

Both artists are presenting works utilizing concepts of structural symmetry. Zazeela's mobile forms are arrayed in symmetrical patterns with lights placed in precisely symmetrical positions creating symmetrical colored shadows; the wall-mounted light sculpture and the neon are both symmetrical forms. Young's sound environment is composed of frequencies tuned to the harmonic series between 288 and 224, utilizing numbers with factors of only 9, or those primes or octave transpositions of smaller primes that fall within this range. The interval 288/256 reduces to a 9/8 interval as does the interval 252/224. Thirty-two frequencies satisfy the above definition, of which seventeen fall within the range of the upper, and fourteen fall within the range of the lower of these two symmetrical 9/8 intervals. Young has arranged these thirty-one frequencies in a unique constellation, symmetrical above and below the thirty-second frequency, the center harmonic 254 (the prime 127 x 2).

The technical aspects of the piece will probably appeal more to a composer or mathematician, while the experience of repetitive music and light over extended durations may draw out the psychologist and philosopher in a viewer. I also recommend taking someone with you to check it out, since I believe this will alter the dynamics of the waveforms; whenever I stood in one spot, the rhythmic pulsing turned into buzzing. I tried walking slowly, then running, then hopping around, punctuating my different paces with long pauses--at least as long as I could take the feedback-like buzzing--but I did wonder what it would be like to experience with others present. The photos below are from the exhibit, though I have to say they hardly capture my realtime ocular experience, since the camera's optics filter out the multilayered imagescape that the human eye is able to perceive. If I go back, maybe I'll try my first podcast...

The entry hallway

Inside one of Zazeela's environments, Imagic Light, Magenta Day (the mobiles are almost invisible)

Another view of Imagic Light, Magenta Day

Zazeela's neon Dream House Variation I

Zazeela's Ruine Window 1992 from her series, Still Light
.
Self-portrait in the Imagic Light room

David Blaine at Lincoln Center

He's a little bit of a 21st century Houdini and a little bit Kafka's "Hunger Artist" come to life, and over the years I've been as magnetized by David Blaine's public spectacles (including his suspension above London, his live burial, and his immurement in ice) as the hundreds of people I saw milling about Lincoln Center Plaza. He entered the watery sphere this past Monday and is aiming to hold out until this upcoming Monday, despite the numerous dangers that his aqueous sojourn poses. If he makes it till Monday, he supposedly is going to cap thigns off with a Houdiniesque escape. Some people are more willing to tempt fate than others, I guess.

One thing I do enjoy about Blaine's performances above all is how they're usually free, at least part of the time, and bring all kinds of people out to see them, just as similar stunts would have drawn similar crowds 100 or 200 years ago. The crowd I saw was a typical cross-section of New York: all ages, colors, classes, assembling to participate in a communal experience in an iconic, semi-public space, which have become rarer in the city with each passing decade. Since I first heard about Blaine's current project, I've had one basic, very prosaic question, which I heard a young woman vocalize as I was snapping the pictures. How does he go to the bathroom?

Here are some photos:

The distortion caused by the sphere's curvature, the light and the water made Blaine literally look larger than life.

People were watching from the balcony of the New York State Theater, where a ballet was also taking place today.

From a westerly perspective.

Blaine's bubble with the Metropolitan Opera House in the background.

Blaine greeting fans.

A close-up.

Reaching out to touch a fan.

The woman in the red hat was grinning widely seconds after I snapped this photo.

Some of the many who were out to see what was up.

Update: Blaine survived his week underwater, but he was unable to hold his breath long enough to break the record. He unlocked the double wrist locks as the clock counted down, but blacked out with more than a minute to go. Nevertheless, it was a great bit of showmanship of the kind that this culture often seems to have lost sight of.

Quote: Ricardo Piglia (on Viswanathan)

This past week I was (re)reading Argentinian writer Ricardo Piglia's 1992 novel, Ciudad Ausente (The Absent City), and came across this passage at the end of his afterward. I immediately thought of the plagiarism scandal surrounding Kaavya Viswanathan's novel, now-recalled How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got In (Little Brown, 2006). His idealist, anticapitalist view clashes squarely against the reality of global capitalism itself, and in particular the fact that a 17-year-old received half a million dollars, plus a movie deal, for a project that appears to have been slapped together by a marketing company, but at the same time, it poses many interesting questions, including: is language common property, and can anyone--any corporation, in particular--ever fully own it?

***

"I hold the same relationship with literary property as I do with property in society: I am against it. I think there is a game with property in translation. That is, it puts into question something that common literary sense takes for granted, which is the fact that issues of property in literature are extremely complex, just as they are in society. Language is a common property; in language there is no such thing as private property. We writers try to place marks to see if we can detain its flow. There is no private property in language; language is a circulation with a common flow. Literature disrupts that flow, and perhaps that is what literature is."
--Ricardo Piglia, from the afterword to The Absent City (Introduction and translation by Sergio Waisman; Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 146-147.

May Day

Happy May Day!



For workers' rights we must unite • la lucha continua • sempre la luta da vida e da trabalho • Мы имеем мы заработали • wir müssen für unsere Freiheite kämpfen • 労働者は結合する • 우리는 우리가 있는 모두는 투쟁으로 이겼다 • toujours il nous faut marcher pour nos droits

Photo: Fuera Yankis

Man looking at photo of 1965-66 era protest (Mílvio Perez)

2006

MTV's Yo Momma's Racism + Vishwanathan Flap

Speaking of TV, I'm not sure if any of Jstheater's regular or periodic readers have caught the MTV show Yo Momma, hosted and produced by former That 70s Show star Wilmer Valderrama (photo at left, in center, with co-hosts Jason on the left, Sam on the right).

If you haven't you aren't missing anything of note, but if you have watched the show, I have to ask if you're as disturbed as I am by how this show, piggybacking on the current Nick Cannon-inspired vogue of using what has historically been an important form of African-American cultural performance--known as "joning," "signifying," "snapping," "the dozens," trash-talking, etc.--employs this insult-trading to supposedly witty and comic ends but with the ultimate result of regularly reinforcing extremely hateful, racist and white supremacist notions about Blackness. In particular, many of the insults traffic in the most negative, deprecatorily retrograde ideas about skin color, sub-Saharan African-descended facial physiognomy and hair and body traits. To put it more simply, if you're black--dark-skinned--on this show, you betta get back, because there's nothing worse or more insulting--here cast as humorous--that anyone can toss out.

The fall-back insult for many of the comedic winners, who're cheered on by their home crews and selected by Valderrama and his judging partners, is often a degrading comment about nappy hair ("the back of your head looks like pubic hair"), dark skin ("Yo mama so dark I couldn't see her"), a broad or wide nose or big lips, etc. Black is the (new, old) abject. The few times I have caught the show the final contestants have usually been two Black people trading these insults, and it is particularly in these instances that the troubling color and physiognomical (word?) hierarchies come to the fore. It's hardly an insight to note the ongoing power of colorism and color fetish, in Black or other communities (including White ones) in the US or across the globe, or the inhering power of white skin privilege and racial supremacy in the mass media; but this show, which is sometimes truly funny, appears to be a perfectly dangerous vehicle to reinforce and reinscribe them, especially for younger viewers. (Dave Chappelle's skit in which he plays a (badly white-faced) White judge who contemptuously labels a black defendent a "big-lipped beast" runs through my mind every time one of the comics snaps off a piece of her or his opponent in this way.)

Neither Valderrama nor his assistants ever steps in--as that would defeat the purpose of the show. The celebrity guests also say nothing, though ironically I did see Houston rapper Mike Jones's eyes widen to cyclone size after one set of exchanges. Several of the competitors have tried "You so _(signifier other than black)_" jokes, but it's clear that the subtext is that, unless the participant is identifiably not Black and tired stereotypes for her or his group can be trotted out (and this has happened with Latinos and Asians), Blackness, especially racially marked, physically represented Blackness, becomes the ultimate, negative limit of signification. I won't be watching the show again, though I almost feel like with programs of this sort, someone needs to be monitoring it, as it's of a course with a subtle racial backsliding and use of psychic, symbolic violence that masquerades as the product of a new liberalness and progressiveness.

I actually received an email about this, though the writer's focus was on the White participants who were using the "You're so Black" formula and the "N" word. As problematic as both are, the general acceptance of retrograde racist and hierarchically colorist assumptions about beauty, physiognomy and so on, in the name of "humor" and "wit" are far more troubling to me. As has so often been the case with the TV media over the last few decades, I think, MTV may be leading the way.

***

It all sounded so...novelistic. Kaavya Viswanathan (at right, photo from Playfuls.com) a rising Harvard sophomore, secured a $500,000 two-book contract at age 17, and a Dream Works option, for her first novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life*, an autobiographically based narrative about a smart but too-narrowly-focused young Indian-American high school student whose father strategizes to get her into...guess where...Harvard! When I mentioned what I'd heard of Viswanathan's book deal to my graduate fiction class this past winter, they all groaned. All were older than 21 and thus beyond the age of "boy/girl wonderdom" that the publishing industry so fetishizes, and none were at Harvard, the institution whose very name alone sends the New York Times, still one of the major arbiters of (high) literary culture in this country, into sustained paroxysms.

Unfortunately, it appears that Viswanathan borrowed passages, almost wholesale, from author Megan McCafferty's novel Sloppy Firsts (and another, Second Helpings?) without attribution. Or her "book packaging" company did. (Say what?) A reader alerted McCafferty and her publisher, the Harvard Crimson newspaper got on the case, as did other media outlets, and thus the brouhaha began. Whatever the case may be, Vishwanathan's selections appear to be clearcut cases of plagiarism. If you use exact or near exact phrases and don't give credit, it's a problem. Viswanathan, apologizing, says that she "internalized" Megan McCafferty's work. Random House, McCafferty's publisher, however, isn't accepting the excuse for now. McCafferty, for her part, suggested that young novelists find "their own voice." This sometimes is a long process, of course, and overlooks the fact that it was once common practice for beginning authors to write out and copy the work of predecessors, or to use them as guides. It also passes over the point that a number of well-known authors have "borrowed," sometimes with little or no attribution, texts, phrases, plots, and more, of peers or antecedents. Guy Davenport, a sublimely inventive fiction writer and thinker, reprinted a section of Robert Louis Stevenson's Robinson Crusoe, with slight modifications, I believe, and labeled it "Home." The late writer Kathy Acker openly admitted that she plagiarized as a critical strategy and in several of her works--her version of Great Expectations comes to mind--raised the technique to an art.

Then there is that issue of "cryptomnesia," or unconscious borrowing or theft, though perhaps that deserves more extensive discussion if the case goes to court.

Harvard meanwhile is looking into the matter seriously as Viswanathan is making media rounds, appearing this morning on the Today Show, to defend herself. She says she will change the passages completely in the next edition. (Hint: get yours before the first are completely sold out.) The Crimson editorial staff opines, and its verdict on the Harvard undergrad isn't pleasant. The New York Times asks the question I'm most curious about, which is: what on earth was the role of the "book packager"?
--
*This has to be one of the worst novel titles I've ever heard of. Too long, too trite, too close to Terry McMillan's blockbuster, and utterly grating on the ear. Please, Ms. Viswanathan and Little Brown, don't just change the passages in the book, change its title!

Quote: Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá

"The extraordinary appearance of [Roberto] Clemente always helped him to reach those heroic dimensions. He was born as much for baseball as for photographs, busts and statues. That aspect was accentuated with an aristocratic gravity that convinced one as if it were another feature, more than his virile and Apollonian beauty. While the smile of Peruchín ([the Little Bull] Orlando Cepeda) always insinuated that easy-going confidence like my homeboy that went back to his origins in Santurce, back there in the space of the saoco* and Sunoco, Clemente even when he was smiling didn't lower his guard, in his persistence to prove himself, as a Black Puerto Rican baseball player, worthy of the greatest respect. In him there was something tense and fateful, as he hit those three thousand unstoppable balls; it was the Apollonian Kabbalah, the one of an ambition in which no excess fits, neither more nor les. He was a man touched by perfection. Peruchín, by comparison, is pure Dionysian exaltation."
--Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, from Peloteros (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1997), p. 37. (My translation)
--
*Saoco is a drink that mixes rum and coconut milk.

In this past weekend's Newark Star-Ledger, sportswriter Allen Barra strongly praises David Maraniss's new biography, Roberto Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero. Clemente was more than just one of the finest batters and fielders, and a widely praised humanitarian; according to Barra's account of Maraniss's book, he was also a pathblazer in other notable ways, including being one of the first players on this team to join the union and, as Rodríguez Juliá notes in the passage above, outspoken against racial or ethnic prejudice.

Nubian on Quitting Blogging + Mendi on Duke Mess

Nubian has a great post I've only belatedly come across, about her and similar blogs' lack of recognition, marginalization, cooption (in terms of their ideas), and so on. More than once I've felt the same way, though for me it has little to do with recognition and more to do with a desire for dialogue and engagement, which has only periodically come. I take this is part of being neither fully insect nor fowl, not showing enough flesh or sharing personal information, not mentioning celebrities frequently enough nor tapping out interesting enough philosophical or political posts in advance of their broader discussion on the net. I also don't remain within a few obvious constituencies though I do return to regular concerns. All in all, I don't expect a lot of readers and would imagine that most blogs that are regularly posting certain kinds of material yet who don't have natural or particularized constituencies wouldn't have them. So what does a blogger who wants to contribute and shape certain types of discourses do? Nubian poses this importan question. Check out what she has to say.

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Mendi O. of Sweat has a very brief but important piece up on the "disaster at Duke," as she terms it. It quotes scholar Wahneemia Lubiano on the need for ways to present the everydayness, the prosaicness, the regularity and routine, of racism, racial, sexual, class and gendered hierarchies and violence. I strongly agree and can attest that we all live it. It's in our blood, our bodies, our bones, the streets we walk and drive, the school rooms and cubicles we inhabit, the images and sounds that are integral to our lifeworld. There is everything that precedes and follows the spectacle, that doesn't pass unnoticed, to all of us, even as it allegedly, seemingly does....

Why Wilbur? + Shawn Crawford Back on the Track

I saw yesterday that 85-year-old poet Richard Wilbur had received the Poetry Foundation's $100,000 Ruth Lilly Prize. Wilbur is a former US Poet Laureate and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1957, for Things of this World, which appeared the same year as Howl, Some Trees, and other notable books of poetry, and in 1989, for his New and Collected Poems, which edged out volumes by Donald Hall and Garrett Hongo. (No Asian-American or Latino-American poet has ever received the Pulitzer Prize in the poetry category.) The editor of Poetry magazine, a former colleague of mine whom I respect quite a bit, Christian Wiman, remarked of the winner that "If you had to put all your money on one living poet whose work will be read in a hundred years, Richard Wilbur would be a good bet." I have been thinking about this repeatedly since I read it, and have to disagree. Strongly. Do (m)any poets nowadays read Richard Wilbur's work? Did they do so 20 years ago? 40? Can anyone--any reader out there, without looking one up--name a book of Richard Wilbur's poems (The Beautiful Changes, his first volume, comes to mind)? Does anyone teach his work? Who would these potential readers 100 years on be?

At one point in a John Ashbery interview I came across years ago he remarked that back when he began publishing his work in the 1950s, Wilbur already was considered somewhat old-fashioned, and in light of the achievements of the American Modernist poets, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Projectivists, the the Beat Poets and the writers of the San Francisco Renaissance poets, the Black Mountain School, the New York School poets, the writers gathered around Russell Atkins in Detroit, Lowell's dawning confessionalism and Plath's early work, and many other groups and individual figures who emerged by the late 1950s, one would have to conclude that Wilbur's formalist verse, while accomplished and graceful, was (and is) somewhat old-fashioned even half a century ago. I can recall a moment during a brief stay a few years ago that I had at Yaddo, the writer's colony up in Saratoga Springs, when I came across a book of Wilbur's poetry and found one poem, about bats, that enchanted me a bit. When I mentioned it to the poets at my dinner table, they scoffed, though gently, and took my enthusiasm as not unsurprising given that I was supposedly engaged in writing fiction. I found Wilbur's skillfulness with meter and rhyme instructive, but I wasn't intending to write a poem like it and when I do encounter a poem like, I usually skip right over it.

In fact, I would much rather read Wallace Stevens's poems than Wilbur's; the latter's early work shows the strong influence of the Connecticut versifier, but lacks Stevens's moments of inscrutability, silliness, rebarbartiveness, opacity--his strangeness and uniqueness that, at their best, make his poetry among the most important ever written by an American. From what I know of Wilbur's person politics (and attitudes towards Blacks and other people of color and women), I'll take them over Stevens's any day, but as for their poetry.... Donald Hall is quoted on the Modern American Poetry site saying back in 1961 that "The typical ghastly poem of the fifties was a Wilbur poem not written by Wilbur...a poem with tired wit and obvious comparisons and nothing to keep the mind or the ear occupied." It notes that "Hall added presciently: 'It wasn’t Wilbur’s fault, though I expect he will be asked to suffer for it.'" The article itself includes near its end the following appraisal: "Even though he is an outstanding example, he excels in a debased category. Among minor poets he is allowed to be most major, but among major poets he is not even considered the most minor."

Here's a Richard Wilbur poem, from Poets.org, the Academy of American Poets' site:

JUNE LIGHT

by Richard Wilbur

Your voice, with clear location of June days,
Called me outside the window. You were there,
Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare
Of uncontested summer all things raise
Plainly their seeming into seamless air.

Then your love looked as simple and entire
As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face
As legible as pearskin's fleck and trace,
Which promise always wine, by mottled fire
More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.

And your gay gift—Oh when I saw it fall
Into my hands, through all that naïve light,
It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight
As must have been the first great gift of all.

"June Light" represents a fine example of a poem that deploys a 14-line, sonnet-like form, with an conventional meter (iambic pentameter with variations) and rhyme scheme, and that also skillfully presents a progression of imagery and metaphoric language within a small frame. Wilbur demonstrates skill both with its surface and with the statement it contains--but there is an air of mustiness about this poem that all its linguistic beauty cannot dispel. "Pearskin's fleck and trace?" "Fatal fleshed?" "Mottled fire?" "Gay gift?" Interestingly enough, I do think that many poets who work regularly with rhyme could learn something from Wilbur, but beyond its instructiveness, who is going to turn to this poem first? Or even tenth? Today?

All of which is to say, what would lead Wiman to his assessment? Stepping outside the particular politics or aesthetic affinities of Poetry today, aren't there at least 50 living poets, especially poets alive from the late 20th century, including poets who Poetry publishes, who readers of 100 years from now, if there are poetry readers 100 years from now (and I think there will be), would be reading? If you look back to the work of most of the non-Modernist Establishment poets who were acclaimed in the 1940s and 1950s, who remembers them or reads their work? Who even teaches it? (Peter Viereck, who received the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 and is now 90 years old, is probably better known as a historian and influential conservative than a noted poet.) Even accounting as well for academic interests and the rehabilitation of lost or forgotten poets, will Wilbur's poetry be what future readers turn to, readily, willingly, easily? I don't think I'd bet my money on it.


¡¡¡

Some readers may remember US Olympic sprinter Shawn Crawford (at right, photo Nick Krug), who'd made his name back in 2003 when he participated in a neo-Darwinian era race (racial) spectacle for Fox's (surprise!) "Man vs. Beast" TV show (I'm not making this up) against a giraffe and a zebra (he beat the first and lost to the second), received the silver medal in the 100 (after a bit of showboating in a prelim) and 4x100 meter races, and the gold in the 200 at the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics. (Al Campanis could be heard jumping up and down in his grave.)

Last year was tough for the stunning South Carolina native and Clemson alumnus. He suffered from injuries to both feet, and as a result had a sub-par year, but he's back on the track and as he told the Lawrence Journal-World and 6 News, "I’m just trying to get back up on the pedestal, getting in running shape and being at that elite level again." He races this weekend in the 100 m at the Kansas Relays. I can't wait for the track and field season to start up in earnest!

Poem: Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

Here's a poem by a poet, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, whom I first encountered as an undergraduate (thanks to Ishmael Reed, who invited her to campus and urged us all to go hear her read). I think I said hello, but was too shy to say much else beyond offering praise for poems, which were unlike anything I'd seen up to that point.

Her sensuous, prismatic collection The Heat Bird (Burning Deck) was one of the first books of poetry I bought to read for pleasure as an adult, rather than for a class, and though I enjoyed it almost immediately, it took me years to fathom what was going on in it, to decipher--as Sylvia Wynter would say--what it was doing, rather than to interpret it as I'd been trained to do.

I finally got to chat with Berssenbrugge at length last year when she came to read at the university, and got to spend a little time with her and another colleague, Dorothy Wang, just talking about poetry. She wanted to see the lake (Michigan), so Dorothy and I walked with her towards the shore in Evanston, and it was then that I learned that she was married to one of the artists she'd collaborated with in the past, Richard Tuttle. I've nabbed the poem excerpt below from the Dia Center for the Art's poetry pages, though it also appears on this wonderful page, Intercapillary Space (from which I've borrowed the photo of Berssenbrugge above), which has lots of great links on her and her work. She has a new book out, entitled I Love Artists (California), which I am going to get as soon as I can.

From THE RETIRED ARCHITECT

3

I tried to complete a life circumstance like a building, loose in space on
used land.

I made a shape against sky on flat land like a cut in the weeds, but I got
bored and didn't finish.

Concrete surfaces need support, and my illness made calculations difficult,
shadows fell like hinges on erasures.

This site is riddled with plastic wood panelling, plastic ducks and
discarded coach lamps.

The iconography doesn't ethically correspond to its cut up and eroded
state.

I make something which as it changes and falls apart, offers no clues to
itself before, as if all shots were mobility frames.

Small daisies grow in the cut, preserving the shape.

Physical significance becomes an area lacking objects, a changing surface
as limit, like the surface and mass of a lake.

Nothing was completed, but there are a lot of sketches.

Actually, I designed two bungalows: the gold leaf, and one later, because
I had missed something.

Gilding was decoration, irrelevant to her private space.

Now, when my work expresses loss or failure, I no longer say, get rid of
that.

© 1999

Black Gay Men's Campaign + Ireland on Iraqi Gays' Crisis + Juan Goytisolo Profile + Pulitzer Winners

Yesterday evening I received the following info in an email from Bernie of Bejata. It's taking place this evening in New York City:

The Campaign for Black Gay Men's Lives

Invites you
to join others who are concerned about
the lives of Black Gay/SGL Men

We will be working together to:

• Respond to the city-wide silence concerning the lives of Black Gay Men
• Challenge homophobia in Black Communities
• Build community awareness on issues impacting Black Gay Men

Campaign Kick-Off Meeting
Tuesday, April 18th, 2006
6 pm - 9 pm

RSVP at: ourlivesmatter@yahoo.com or 212.828.9393 x137

Refreshments and light foods will be available

GMHC
119 West 24th Street (btw 7th & 6th aves)
New York, NY 10011
Rooms 610/615 on 6th floor

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Doug Ireland of Direland was one of the first US journalists to focus on the dire (no pun intended) situation for LGBTs in Iran under that country's fanatical, defiant president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, against whom the US may or may not have already initiated a war. Ireland has continued his fine and important reportage on this part of the world, concentrating most recently on the terrible situation gays in Iraq face. Most American reporting on the US has covered the daily bombings, the US military casualties, the nascent (or ongoing, depending upon whose perspective is taken) civil war between the Sunnis and Shiites, or among the Shiite faction, and the overall success or failure of George W. Bush's aims and plans. The situation for LGBT people in Iraq, as for Christians and other minorities, has gotten lost in the media's muddle.

Ireland, however, has for the last month been discussing the close links between the grave situation for gays in Iran and Iraq, which derive from the longstanding ties between Iraq's governing Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) coalition and the Iranian mullahs. (This has long been an issue the US media dance around. In effect, US and coalition soldiers have been fighting and dying to install an Islamicist Shiite government in power in Iraq that's closely linked to Iran, thus strategically empowering Iran even more than it was before the fall of Saddam Hussein, an eventuality that as far as I can tell was never on the carousel of rationales given by Bush, PNAC or any of the neocons.) Ireland's March 23, 2006 article in GayCityNews, "Shia Death Squads Target Iraqi Gays," was the first story in the US press to lay out the crises Iraqi gays now face.

Ireland's post yesterday praises the BBC as the "first major news" outlet to cover this topic, and he opens with quotes from Martin McDonough's article:

"I don't want to be gay anymore. When I go out to buy bread, I'm afraid. When the doorbell rings, I think that they have come for me." That is the fear that haunts Hussein, and other gay men in Iraq. They say that since the US-led invasion, gays are being killed because of their sexual orientation.

They blame the increase in violence on the growing influence of religious figures and militia groups in Iraq since Saddam Hussein was ousted. Islam considers homosexuality sinful. A website published in the name of Ayatollah Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shia cleric, says gays should be put to death. "Those who commit sodomy must be killed in the harshest way," says a section of the website dealing with questions of morality. The statement appears on the Arabic section of the website, which is published in the Iranian city of Qom, but not in the English section.

The BBC asked Mr Sistani's representative, Seyed Kashmiri, to explain the ruling. "Homosexuals and lesbians are not killed for practising their inclinations for the first time," Mr Kashmiri said in a response sent via email. "There are certain conditions drawn out by jurists before this punishment can be implemented, which is perhaps similar to the punishment meted out by other heavenly religions." Mr Kashmiri added: "Some rulings that are drawn out by jurists are done so on a theoretical basis. Not everything that is said is implemented."

Yet he also points out that

The BBC failed to note the relationship between the killings of Iraqi gays and the lethal anti-gay pogrom in Iran -- it does not mention that Ayatollah al-Sistani is himself an Iranian, that SCIRI (Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) is backed by Iran -- its headquarters were in Tehran for more than 20 years during the Saddam Hussein dictatorship -- and that the Badr Corps is financed by Iran. This is common knowlege in Iraq -- indeed, in an important February 17 interview with Le Monde that was ignored by the English-language press, the fact that the salaries of the soldiers of the Badr Corps -- whose death squads are carrying out the "sexual cleansing" campaign of murder of gay Iraqis -- are paid by Iran, was confirmed by Ali Debbagh, a counselor to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a member of the Iraqi parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, and a university professor specializing in religious political parties. And while the BBC report did mention that "there are widespread concerns that large parts of Iraq's police force are under the control of such groups," it omitted the fact that Badr Corps members in Baghdad and elsewhere wear the uniforms of the official police under the control of the Interior Ministry.

The current Iraqi Interior Ministry has come under increasingly withering criticism, both within Iraq and without, for its role in torture and assassinations of Sunnis and some Shiites.

Some of Ireland's previous articles, going back to last summer, on the problems in Iran, include: July 21, 2005 -- Iran Executes Two Gay Teenagers (Updated); August 12 -- Two New Gay Executions Scheduled in Iran, Says Iranian Exile Group; August 17 -- Iran's Deadly Anti-Gay Crackdown: With Two More Executions Scheduled, the Pace of Repression Steps Up. August 25 -- Iran's Anti-Gay Purge Grows: Reports of New Executions. September 8 -- Iran and the Death of Gay Activism. September 20 -- "They'll Kill Me" -- A Gay Iranian Torture Victim Speaks of His Ordeal ; September 29 -- Iranian Gays Urgently Appeal for Help; October 6 -- Canada Introduces UN Resolution Condemning Iran's Human Rights Record; January 27, 2006 -- "A Call to Solidarity: U.S. Gay Groups Must End Their Isolationism. (There are more articles, so definitely check out his site.)

Ireland also has written about the uproar surrounding the announced deportation of gay Iranian refugees by a member of the Netherlands' rightist government, and links to Rob Anderson's November 10, 2005 New Republic article, "How America's Gay Rights Establishment is Failing Gay Iranians."

Although there is so much to criticize concerning Iraqmire, we should not overlook this aspect of the mess, which Bush and Co. helped to create.

‡‡‡

"¿Quién sabe donde?" This was the title of a talk I once heard Juan Goytisolo (at right, El Navigante.com) give at New York University several years ago. I listened attentively, though I understood only a sliver of it, as I have trouble comprehending the Castilian accent and my grasp of the Spanish idiom was even more rudimentary then than it is today, but what was most important to me was the opportunity to hear a lecture by a writer whose work had played a key role in my intellectual development. (He actually taught during the 1973-74 academic year at NYU, but became regular annual visitor again in the late 1990s to the university's King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center.)

Goytisolo, who like another of my favorite writers, Toni Morrison, turns 75 this year, is one of the most important novelists in the Spanish language and one of the most highly acclaimed formally experimental writers in the world. A native of Barcelona, he lived for much of his adult life in exile in Paris because of the Franco regime, against which he was a harsh critic, but he also been an unwavering critic of the Eurocentric and racist strains in Spanish and European life in general, with some of his most blistering and sublime critiques crystalized in the superb novel Count Julian (La reinvindicación del Conde Julián, 1970), the second in his excellent trilogy that began with Marks of Identity (Señas de identidad, 1969) and concluded with Juan the Landless (Juan sin tierra, 1975). For these three novels alone, I have always thought he deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature.

After completing the trilogy, Goytisolo has gone on to write many other important novels, publish literary criticism and memoirs and, resuming an aspect of his early career, has also penned journalistic several outstanding journalistic pieces. His later fiction includes the highlights Makbara (1980), Landscapes after the Battle (Paisajes después de la batalla, 1982), Quarantine (Quarantina, 1991), and The Garden of Secrets (Las semanas del jardín, 2002), which is comparable to Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style (Exercises de style, 1947) as a lively, well-written, idiosyncratic manual on the art of storytelling.

What led me to mention Goytisolo today was noted author Fernanda Eberstadt's profile of him in this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Entitled "The Anti-Orientalist," Eberstadt's article explores Goytisolo's life and career, with a particular emphasis on his long residence in Morocco, which she relates to his presiding interest in Islamic North Africa and its central role in Spain's history and culture. She also touches upon his enduring political engagement and ideological unorthodoxy, his complex views of (his own) sexuality and his relationship with his late wife, French author Monique Lange, and his ongoing personal and public self-fashioning, which includes his fascinatingly constructed "family" in Marrakesh.

One quote from the opening page of the article:

Yet [Goytisolo] has remained all but unknown in the United States. This oversight may be explained in part by the difficulty of his fiction. He has continued to write in a densely allusive, high-Modernist style, which makes few concessions to the reader. In happier times, Goytisolo's preoccupation with medieval Islam's impact on Western civilization or the plight of Muslim immigrants in contemporary Europe might have made his work seem arcane to American readers. But in the post-9/11 world, this alternative vision often looks prescient. In "Landscapes of War," a collection of essays on the Muslim world that were first published in El País in the 90's, Goytisolo warns repeatedly that radical Islam is mobilizing a generation that has been impoverished and disenfranchised by the disastrous experiments of Arab governments with nationalism and secular socialism, which merely masked the military dictatorships that underpinned them. As for more theocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia's, Goytisolo compares it with Spain's in the centuries following Ferdinand and Isabella's Reconquista: a society characterized by "intransigent homogeneity," "autistic self-absorption and inquisitorial vigilance," whose New World gold (read oil wealth) is spent not on development or reform but on hounding dissidents and quarantining the nobility and clergy in ever more grandiose palaces.

The West is criticized no less starkly. Goytisolo regards Bush's invasion of Iraq, which he described in a recent essay as "the illegitimate war of an illegitimate president," as the crowning catastrophe in a series of American blunders in the Muslim world, extending from U.S. backing in the 80's of both Saddam Hussein and the Taliban to U.S. support of deeply unpopular and repressive regimes in Egypt, North Africa and the gulf states.

There is so more in the piece, which I recommend whether you're familiar with Goytisolo and modern Spanish(-language) literature or not.

‡‡‡

Yesterday, the Pulitzer Prize Foundation announced the 2006 recipients of its prizes in journalism, and letters and drama. I want to offer congratulations to a winner and two nominees:

Jarvis DeBerry, a member of the Cave Canem poetry community, was one of the very talented corps of writers at the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper whose heroic coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina received the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism in the category of Public Service.

The citation read: "For its heroic, multi-faceted coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, making exceptional use of the newspaper's resources to serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant."

In poetry, poet Claudia Emerson received the Pulitzer Prize for her collection, Late Wife (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), though Elizabeth Alexander, one of the outstanding contemporary American poets and a member of the Cave Canem poetry community, was nominated for her fourth book, American Sublime (Graywolf, 2005). Even though she didn't win this time, I think this is a terrific honor for Elizabeth, and can imagine that she will be duly lauded at some point in the (near) future.

In fiction, author Geraldine Brooks received the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, March (Viking, 2005), which treats the fictional experiences of the eponymous character [Mr.] March from Louisa May Alcott's classic 1868 novel Little Women. Also nominated in this category, ironically enough, was E. L. Doctorow's The March, which received the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Awards. I was hoping that Doctorow, one of my former professors and a writer whose work I've admired for years, would finally be honored by the Pulitzer committee, but not, it appears, this time through.

‡‡‡

Happy Birthday, Victor!

Who Reads Poetry? + The Sinking of Kiribati

Who reads poetry?

This is a question I've pondered quite often, though mainly in terms of who outside the poetry-focused circles I spend a great deal of my time reads poetry. I've often felt I have a better sense of who writes and performs poetry than who reads it, particularly chapbooks, pamphlets, journals, anthologies and books of it.

Some other questions I've also posed to friends, fellow poets and not, my classes and myself include: Why do some people read and listen to poetry throughout their lifetimes? How do people in general perceive poetry, poets, and poetry readers? What prevents people without a strong interest in poetry from reading or listening to it? What steps might be taken to broaden the audience for poetry in the United States? The Poetry Foundation, based in Chicago, actually contracted with the highly regarded Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to get some answers, some of which were mentioned in Dinitia Smith's article last week, "Arts Briefly: Who Reads Poetry?" (now a costly Times Select/archived article, unfortunately) and the full report, "Who Cares about Poetry? 90% of American Readers, New Study Shows," was posted on the Poetry Foundation's site a week later.

The researchers polled 1,023 self-identified readers. According to Smith:

Seventy-six percent of the total said they read poetry. Overall, the highest percentage of people who read poetry are educated white women. ''But if you look just at the percentage of African-Americans,'' said Norman Bradburn, a senior fellow at the center and a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, who supervised the study, ''as compared to the percentage of whites, a higher percentage of African-Americans--85 percent of those sampled --are likely to read poetry than of whites.''

She continued:

If you like poetry, according to the study, no matter what your race, there is a better chance that you're athletic, too, and enjoy the company of others. And there isn't necessarily a correlation between having a college degree and being a poetry reader. ''Fifty-six percent of poetry readers have less than a college degree,'' Mr. Bradburn noted.

The first point parallels though differs from the "Reading at Risk" findings that regular readers have higher levels of civic participation. Some other points, straight from the Poetry Foundation's site:

• Most poetry readers (80 percent) first encounter poetry as children, at home or in school. 77 percent of all readers were read nursery rhymes as children; 45 percent of current poetry readers also had other forms of poetry read to them as children.
• Poetry readers believe that poetry provides insights into the world around them, keeps the mind sharp, helps them understand themselves and others, and provides comfort and solace.
• Readers turn to a variety of sources to find poetry: single-author books (77 percent), anthologies (58 percent), television (48 percent), radio (41 percent), the Internet (36 percent), poetry readings (29 percent), poetry magazines (20 percent), reviews/commentaries about poetry (19 percent), poetry slams (12 percent).
• When people encounter poetry in unexpected places such as newspapers, general-interest magazines, and public events, even non-poetry readers read or listen to it: 99 percent of all adult readers indicated that they have incidentally encountered poetry, and 81 percent reported that they read or listened to the poem when they encountered it.
• Approximately two-thirds of the respondents thought that both poets and poetry readers are people who are generally respected; 70 percent would like to meet poets, and 66 percent would like to meet poetry readers.
• Among the most frequently cited reasons that people don't read poetry are lack of time, loss of interest, lack of access, and the perception that poetry is difficult and irrelevant.
• While more than 80 percent of former poetry readers find poetry difficult to understand, only 2 percent of respondents don't read poetry because they feel it is "too hard."

The full report has even more interesting and enlightening information and presents a more positive portrait of the state of poetry in the US than even many poets might imagine. The question of poetry's miniscule publishing might, in sheer dollar terms, is an important question that isn't fully addressed, however.

I do wonder, however, about the small sample size, and the fact that it comprised only self-identified readers. What about people who don't consider themselves "readers" or read often, which is to say, the sorts of people who were included in the NEA's "Reading at Risk" study. Nevertheless, it's definitely great news for National Poetry Month.

•••

Do you want to get a sense of what life in certain parts of the world may be like if the environmental degradation caused by global warming steadily worsens? Andrew Selverston's Salon.com article on the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, which is south of Hawai'i, presents one chilling example.



Now that we know what we're doing to the earth and our climate, we proceed blindly at our own peril. Our current course is unsustainable. Kiribati, like New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after Katrina, or the midwestern states hit by storms, or the Caribbean countries battered by increasing hurricanes, or the slowly disappearing coastline of Bangladesh, or the creeping desert in northern Africa, won't be the only or last places affected by our folly....

Memoirs like Hotcakes + Adidas's Racist Sneakers + Nigeria's Harsh Anti-Gay Law

Do you have an interesting personal story? Can you make up one? Publishers, fresh off the Frey, LeRoy and Nasdijj controversies, are pushing for and publishing more memoirs. Novels, critic Robert Hughes of the Wall Street Journal points out, aren't "hot" and aren't selling (as well), so publishers are upping the ante with this personal nonfiction genre. Says Hughes:

This spring sees memoirs by a transvestite art director (buttoned-down nerd by day, drag queen by night), a tell-all from the Beatles' publicist; a book about the year in the life of a Catholic seminarian; a cartoon memoir about surviving cancer; Helen "I Am Woman" Reddy on life as a feminist icon; and a memoir by "Maude" daughter and horror queen Adrienne Barbeau.

From left, new memoirs by horror queen Adrienne Barbeau, taboo-breaking novelist Erica Jong, and writer Augusten Burroughs.

Publishers say the controversy surrounding James Frey's memoir "A Million Little Pieces" -- which turned out to be filled with fiction about his purported life as a drug addict -- hasn't dimmed interest in the form. Mr. Frey's book, after all, sold more than four million copies and continued to sell even after Oprah Winfrey, who had earlier endorsed the book, denounced it on TV.

Hughes attributes the current memoir moment to related trends in American culture, including the fascination with reality TV and pop psychology. I would add that the American public's desire for authenticity and recognition right now, as well as our nationwide self-absorption, narcissicism and passivity also are playing a role.

Hughes historicizes his discussion by noting that memoirs have a distant provenance and were quite popular in the 19th century. Ulysses S. Grant's famous memoirs, which he completed just before he died, became a posthumous bestseller and helped to pull his survivors out of debt. I wonder how long this trend will go on, especially now that more and more institutions of higher learning, including the university where I teach, now offer courses and writing tracks, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, in creative nonfiction.

***

Adidas, it seems, is hell-bent on shedding customers as quickly as it can. Customers, that is, who are unwilling to support a company that thinks it's okay to put racist depictions of Asians on its premium "Yellow Series" sneakers. (I'm not making that "yellow" bit up.) But wait, you're saying, the artist who created the graphic is half-Chinese, and the images originally appeared in his graffiti works, and it's all just a joke, so.... It's still racist.

Michael Tunison writes in today's Washington Post:

A new, limited-edition shoe from Adidas-Salomon AG, part of the "Yellow Series" and decorated with the face of a character who has buck teeth, a bowl haircut and slanted eyes, has provoked a heated debate about the lines dividing racism, art and commerce.

The character on the shoe is the creation of a San Francisco graffiti artist, Barry McGee, who is half Chinese. McGee, who calls the character Ray Fong after an uncle who died, said the image is based on how the artist looked as an 8-year-old.

"You have to look at it as a piece of artwork," said McGee, 40, who used Ray Fong as a graffiti tag in the late 1990s and later in art installations and catalogue covers. "The way we put it all together, it becomes a collectible as art."

The shoe was released April 1, with 1,000 pairs on sale at a dozen boutiques in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Tokyo, Hamburg and Denmark. It retails for $250 and comes with a graffiti art fanzine.

Since then, several blogs and message boards have been consumed with fervid debate over the shoe, and Asian American organizations have said it evokes damaging and long-standing stereotypes.

Tunison notes the hullabaloo that attended Abercrombie and Fitch's similar imagery and slogans on T-shirts back in 2002. That retailer, which has been involved in multiple controversies and lawsuits surrounding its racist practices and imagery, eventually withdrew the T-shirts from sale. But Tunison also addresses how McGee's mixed racial background, his career as a graffiti artist, and the imagery's original artistic context complicate the issue. When an image, sign or discourse that might be ironic or oppositional or that might contain ironic and oppositional potential in one context is transferred to another, can its original range of meanings possibly inhere and be understood, especially if there is a larger contextual field in which similar imagery has functioned and developed very problematic meanings? No sign operates in a void, as McGee and Adidas surely know, and racist and stereotypical depictions of Asians and Asian-Americans continue to circulate in this society, so the shoes' images function within this larger semiotic economy whether Adidas likes it or not.

But then perhaps this was all a cleverly cynical strategy anyways; at $250, if these sneakers are pulled off the market, they will surely go up in value, to the delight of collectors, McGee, Adidas, and whoever bought a pair and is hawking them on the web. "All day I dream about suckers..."

***

Nigeria is proposing a law that would make anti-gay fanatics in the US and elsewhere (like Jamaica, as Rod 2.0 points out today) jump for joy: in addition criminalizing gay marriage with a five-year prison term, the law, which president Olusegun Obasanjo proposed and which is expected to pass, would also anyone criminalize attendance at a gay wedding, public same-sexual affection or membership in any LGBT organization, and would apply not only to Nigerian citizens, but to foreigners living on Nigerian soil. 365Gay.com's article says

The legislation is regarded as the most repressive gay measure in the world.

Last month, before the additional prohibitions were included, and in advance of a state visit to the US by President Obasanjo human rights organizations called for the bill's withdrawal. (story)

In an open letter to Obasanjo the groups, including the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and Human Rights Watch, said the proposed law contravenes international law, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and undermines Nigeria’s struggle to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS.

As in parts of the Caribbean and Asia, the legacy of Britain's harsh colonial-era anti-sodomy laws unfortunately lives on. I also imagine that the law is Obasanjo's sop to religious and political extremists (especially since homosexuality is proscribed by the Shari'a law that Obasanjo permitted in the country's Muslim north). Since he isn't really addressing the multiple and worsening divisions in the oil-rich but economically challenged country, why not offer up a diversion that will certainly stir up passions and identify an easy scapegoat? No wonder he and President Pretzelcoatl were grinning so fulsomely when he came to visit last month....