9/11

14 years ago today, my first day teaching in Providence, a day whose events and aftermath we all will be living and dealing with for decades to come.

Random Photos

One of the 9/11 Memorial pools
on the footprint of the destroyed
WTC towers (the Museum is visible
directly in the center rear of this photo)

I am still gearing up for the James Baldwin conference in Montpellier, France, and wrapping up edits on my next book, so until soon, posting here remains a challenge. 

Meanwhile, so much is happening in the wider world, and I have many events to blog.... 

Here are a few random photos from my daily circuits. Enjoy!

A ship on the Hudson River 

Only in New York: a shop selling only
high-end cosmetics and the Paris Review! 

Window displays 

Musician, in a violet mood,
on the High Line
(it's actually uncrowded!) 

Looking east, from the High Line

Rainy 14th Street

Two different loaves baked
in the same pot (cinnamon raisin
bread & walnut wheat) 

Laying a seeding carpet
in the St. Paul's Church cemetery 

On the street 

Black carpet opening

TV journalist, across the street
from the newly opened
 9/11 Memorial Museum site 

One WTC (the Freedom Tower)

Flowers in the names
of those lost in the 9/11 attacks

One of the 9/11 Memorial pools 

The 9/11 Museum

The WTC site, from the east 

Behind Asser Levy Pool,
on the east side of Manhattan

In Stuyvesant Cove Park, looking east to
Queens and Brooklyn

Long Island City, from Manhattan

Peter Cooper Village 

East Side Community Junior/Senior
High School, the first school I taught at,
back in the 1990s

One of those giant "scab"
rats, at a union boycott,
Manhattan 

Fresh lobster, 23rd Street

A dancer-performer, strolling
the streets, Manhattan

Meditations on 9/11

1. More than anything about the World Trade Center before 2001, I remember the subterranean maze of the concourse, always pulsing with the hustle and bustle of people zooming from one set of trains to the next, gliding from restaurants to stores, moving, always moving beneath the vast, windy, unwelcoming plaza. I remember sitting upstairs outside and hearing a jazz band perform there, its melodies wafting off in the relentless summer air. I remember holding down food wrappers so that they wouldn't blow away as I tried to each lunch; I remember always perceiving the impossibly tall towers looming above as so high and immense that it dizzied me to look up as I stood beneath them. I remember going up to the top, to the observation area, and feeling something akin to vertigo, despite the sublime portrait of the city spreading out before me. I did it once and vowed I would never do it again. For years I could not grasp the geography of the plaza, the train stations, the streets, anything of that portion of lower Manhattan above ground, but the concourse I grasped almost immediately. Even today when I ascend the steep escalators from the lower level where the PATH trains power in from New Jersey, in almost Pavlovian fashion I look for that concourse. My memory walks it even if I follow the new route, fully understood and memorized, towards the terminal at Fulton Street.

2. In 2000, I read in the Barnes & Noble beneath the World Trade Center towers, with Asha Bandele. I cannot remember who invited us, or why we were paired together, but I recall enjoying meeting her, and I recall the reading, at which she read from her memoir The Prisoner's Wife, and I read poems. New York 1 taped and broadcast us, and the screening of that reading provided me with the only bit of public fame I have ever had (outside of a childhood performance as John Henry at Loreto-Hilton during the Bicentennial Year, and among adolescent readers of my poetry in Sicily). Several times people recognized me on the street, including in the post office on 10th Street, off 6th Avenue. My poems were nothing to speak of, but one wasn't so bad, a paean to Jackie Robinson and St. Louis, and an old man even blurted out to me, apropos of nothing but his delight at seeing someone from TV, "I liked your baseball poem." That experience seared into my consciousness the power of television, but also made me wonder later what show had broadcast our event, why couldn't I find the email or notes of who had invited me to participate, why everything but the aftermath of the reading was such a blur. I cannot even say that I remember where in that concourse the Barnes & Noble was, though I do know I went in there once or twice just to browse. Does that tape of that reading even still exist, and would it not be too macabre to see it now?

3. On the morning of September 11, 2001...well, I have recounted this many times elsewhere, but I will only say that I had begun the second stage of my commuting-to-teach life, to Providence, for a wonderful year-long stint for which I will always be grateful. That day was the first I was supposed to teach. It goes without saying that it was tumultuous, wrenching, impossible. I did not know if my partner and his colleague were on one of the hijacked, weaponized planes. I did not know if there were other attacks, as the landlady of the little inn where I was lodging asserted, based on what she had seen on TV. We watched it that morning together, in shock and horror. I did not know if I could even bear to teach, or if my students could sit through a class. (I did, they could, we all were nevertheless shaken.) What I most recollect about that day, beyond seeing the towers being attacked on TV, beyond the cars with open doors broadcasting the news, beyond several of my colleagues breaking down in tears, beyond trying, using the rotary phone in the old building where the Creative Writing (Literary Arts) Program was then housed, to reach C and make sure that he was okay, was the seemingly interminable faculty meeting I and everyone else had to sit through, some of the senior people on the verge of breaking down. We went through every bullet point on the agenda. Every single one. I don't, however, remember getting my university ID card, which still bears the proof that it was issued that afternoon: September 11, 2001.

4. The hysteria and spectacle that rightly or wrongly followed the terrible events of 9/11 caught and continue to snare us in their net. On the train I rode back to New York the following day, September 12, a phalanx of police--local, state, auxiliary, etc.--scoured every car, with dogs and machine guns in tow, based on the report of man in a turban carrying a knife. The terrorists had seen fit to continue, by way of Providence. It turned out to be a Sikh passenger carrying his ritual knife, though I did not learn this until the train finally was pulling into New York City, which was on high alert given the tragedy that had just unfolded and was still ongoing. I and everyone else got off that train even more frazzled that we could have imagined. There were more reports and accounts of attacks or strange incidents on the day of the attacks and in the days after, but all were but immediately efflorescences, soon to lose their horrible blooms, of a trauma that lingered, that still lingers, a decade on.

5. In the days and weeks, in the months after 9/11, New York City felt ghostly--figuratively, and literally. There was the gravesite, a smoldering wound, at which thousands of people had died, and legions were working heroically to search. There were the many people who had lost loved ones, the many who had escaped, the many, like a friend of ours who was living in Battery Park City at the time, who lost everything but their lives, and were displaced. There was a vulnerability and fear so raw they might erupt like a volcano, and a resolve and determination as strong as the most tempered armor. But what was going to become of New York? And to a lesser degree, New Jersey, which is always hasped to the city but so easily and readily forgotten? Friends of ours moved away; they couldn't deal with the undiminished horror, the danger, the uncertainty. Some went "home"; some moved to Atlanta; some just scattered to wherever life took them. One of my closest friends, a brilliant man, began to suffer a nervous breakdown shortly after the attacks from which he never recovered. He is, the last I heard, still homeless. Every September the city holds its memorial for those lost in the attacks, and there is a memorial museum which will anchor memories for the rest of time; the site where they occurred is transforming into a New York-style zone of nostalgia and commerce; and the empty storefronts and makeshift tributes and scars of 12 years ago are mostly erased, having given way to luxury skyscrapers and bike lanes and bedizened parks and a level of prosperity, at least among the super-rich, to rival the Gilded Age. The wound remains, if concealed. All who lived through that moment carry it around, and those who have arrived since do to, even if they cannot feel or imagine it.

6. That wound: the city, the country, and the globe have never fully recovered. The horrific attacks became the pretext for wrongheaded, unending wars, a monstrous hyper-surveillance and security state, a military-industrial complex so out of control, so rapacious, that we are yet again at the precipice of an unnecessary, ill-conceived, potentially disastrous intervention that an overwhelming majority of Americans, and people across the globe, do not want to occur. We have a nebulous "War on Terror" that is as unjustifiable today as it was shortly after 9/11. Meanwhile, so many basic questions surrounding the 9/11 attacks have never been answered satisfactorily. We have rampant spying on American citizens and, as we have learned from Edward Snowden's disclosures, on everyone and everything across the globe that moves or breathes, have had it since before 9/11, but we still have no assurance that the basic sharing of classified, flagged information, that would have prevented or at least stunted the attacks in 2001, is occurring. Despite the fact that Russia tried to warn the US about one of the terror suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, he was still able to proceed to his murderous goals. Yet we are told lie after lie about the entire security apparatus we are living under, at the same time we hear the word freedom uttered as readily as greetings. Are we free? Were we ever? We certainly are, by many measures, far less free. That is one of the wounds we all live with. All the airport security theater, the secret courts and unwarranted warrantless wiretapping, the cameras on every corner and in every hallway, the truly nefarious militarization of law enforcement, and of our culture: these are all signs of that still open wound. They are symptoms of a fever that has not broken. They are the residue of our inability to deal with the root causes of what led to those terrible attacks. Someday, perhaps in my lifetime, we will come together and figure out why we did not do what we needed to before the fact, why we persist in the grip of our delusion, why we cannot rightly diagnose the problem, ourselves, and prescribe the right medicine. We do not have to live this way. But we will continue to unless we recognize why we do.

7. I wrote, on the train heading and returning, on the comforter-covered bed in the inn where I stayed, at my desk at our old apartment from which we once could see the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Twin Towers, a short piece, a fragment, that was to be the beginning of a longer work. I was never able to finish it. I published it in an anthology edited by the friend of a friend, a professor at NYU. I had not thought it dealt at all with 9/11, but it was if I had distilled the moment before and the long period after into a dialogue, or monologue, depending, that could not go any further. The echo of that failure, of the absent text that was supposed to precede what I had written, haunted me for years. I used to think, if only I could have forced it, but those voices were meant to go where they were meant to go.

7. I am mildly obsessed with photographing--to the point of having to stop myself at times--the new World Trade Center Tower, the Freedom Tower, which may not be its name any longer and which sounds jingoistic and hyperbolic, though I have that name stuck in my head and when I see the tower, which is visible from Jersey City, from Hoboken, from Bayonne, from many a vista in Manhattan, which looms above everything, that name comes to mind. It has not erased the Twin Towers in my mind, but it has joined them. I see the one tower but somewhere, in a chamber of my thinking, there are three. Tonight the original two are columns of bluish-white light, but when I pass by the solid, impregnable base of the new tower, the Freedom Tower, a giant obelisk of steel and glass and who knows what else, those invisible towers, that unmanageable plaza, the phantasm of that teaming concourse return. The head can hold as much or more than it can bear. Memory can hold even more. We cannot and must not forget what happened on September 11, 2001, or all who died that day and afterwards as a result of the attacks, or all those who essentially gave their lives and health in the process of rescue and recovery, or all those who lost loved ones and continue on with those losses inside. We cannot and must not forget as well what has transpired since those attacks, what we as a nation have become, what sense of the world we had as a people, and what it will take to recover it.

9/11

Also, a few links:

Kurt Eichenwald, "The Deafness Before the Storm"

Alex Seitz-Wald, "Bush missed 9/11 warnings"

Paul Campos, "9/11: What Bush knew"

9/11

Protest & March to Support Islamic Cultural Center

At the invitation of Miriam R., one of my former fiction students, I joined her and a friend of hers at the rally, at City Hall Park yesterday, on behalf of the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center, which originally had merited little commentary or negative reponses, until blogger Pamela Geller, disgraced former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, fanatical talkshow host Sean Hannity, and others demagogued the issue, mischaracterizing both the center (which is not a mosque, or masjid) and its location (not at Ground Zero, the former World Trade Center site, under which I passed at least 2-3 days every week this summer on my way to the 4, 5 or 6 trains and thus the New York Public Library's Research Branch at Bryant Park, but two blocks away on Park Place), thereby provoking a racist, anti-Muslim furor that has not yet fully waned. Believing strongly in the principles of religious freedom, free speech, and separation of church and state, I decided to commemorate 9/11 by attending the rally, which was only a block north of the memorial for the victims but several blocks away from the anti-Islamic Center protests, and am posting a few of the photos from it and from my post-rally gambol around the area with Miriam below.


The Park 51 site

A 9/11 truther, just outside Ground Zero

At the rally, before the march

A veteran, supporting the Islamic Cultural Center

People raising placards and signs as an anti-Islamic van drove by

A reporter waiting to deliver her remarks

Reporters from a Japanese news crew

Marching

A fashion-forward photographer

Young man being told by cops he must take a different route

The media

Some people after the march, gathering on the State Court House steps, at Foley Square

A friendly young Christianist we encountered after the march

A Christianist with hateful sign

From the Notebooks

Since I'm not feeling a real post right now, I thought I'd try something different. In the past I've posted drawings, others' and my own poems, quotations, etc. More of those are coming. I've had Susan Sontag's notebooks in mind of late, both because I've wanted to read the volume of them that her son edited since it was first announced and because of Reggie H.'s note in an email about them (he's finished them), and then today as I was rifling through some of the boxes I sent back I came across some old notebooks, so I figured, why not post some of what's in them. I can't claim to have anything approaching the excitement of anything like Sontag's scribblings, but nevertheless, here goes: The first is a list I saw displayed at the Detroit Museum of African-American History. I and many others wrote these and a slew of other names down during the summer of 2001, when we were at the Cave Canem workshops at the Cranbrook Academy, outside Detroit. My original aim was to make a poem out of them, but that never happened (others did so, if I recall) but looking back the list is almost poetic by itself. Can you guess what they are? The answer's just below the list.

L'Amitie - Encomium - Mears - La Nanette - Dwight - Hutchinson - June - Lottery - Endeavor - Jack - Protection - Nova Amora - Judith - Higgins - Armstrong - African - Fame - Charming Betsey - Sappho - Quay - Ajax - Constance - Black Joke - Despatch - Mystic - Brownlow - Science - Angola - Thomas and John - Renown - Woodward - Beckey - Kilpatrick - La Bonne - Honnete - Revel - Revels - Marshall - Sally - Watts - Sukie - Winter - Defyance - 4th of July

Slave ships!

The next is a random list of observations I penned shortly after after 9/11, probably the first weekend after, when I took the PATH into the city (I was commuting weekly from Penn Station and the Port Authority, but I usually went straight from either venue to the Jersey-bound PATH to get home) just to walk around and see the aftermath of the horrific events. Like a number of people I posted my memories of that day and the next, and sent it around via email (one of the best I read was by Samuel R. Delany), but I wanted to take notes for a work of fiction. I did write one, but nothing of this rather obvious and paltry list made it into the final piece:

Makeshift memorial @ Wash. Sq.
votives - postcards - poems - charred sheets from the towers - drawings - flowers - photos
Smell of burnt wood
Missing posters
People on the streets - only a fraction
Almost no car traffic
Sky behind the arch + NYU is empty -
Lots of people wearing masks
Heaviness in your chest -
Memorial @ firehouse on W 10th and Greenwich
At W10th @ Bleecker Miami police - 3
Brilliant late autumn day
People walking in 6th Ave.
Down Hudson @ Christopher an ocher screen
Flags from some balconies and fire esc.
"Whitney Houston probably died..."
White plume merges into the clouds

Next is a list of books I apparently was considering for my Spring 2002 advanced fiction class (the students expressed a desire to be challenged, and so they were). I only used a few of these, and added others, such as Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, and Mario Puig's An Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages. Oh, and The Atrocity Exhibition, q.v.

Jack the Modernist - Robert Glück
Wittgenstein's Mistress - David Markson
Bedouin Hornbook - Nathaniel Mackey
Oreo - Fran Ross
Travesty - John Hawkes
Ill Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando - Reinaldo Arenas
Planetarium - Nathalie Sarraute
Les Guerrillières - Monique Wittig
... (something!) - Michelle Cliff
Age of Wire & String - Ben Marcus
The Hour of the Star - Clarice Lispector
The Woman in the Dunes - Kobe Abe
Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison
Count Julian - Juan Goytisolo
Palm-Wine Drinkard - Amos Tutuola
Living - Henry Green
Deep North - Fanny Howe
The Autobiography of Red - Anne Carson
My Summer in Baden-Baden - Leonid Tsypkin
... (something) - Justin Chin
Wigger - Lawrence Ytzhak Brathwaite
Cattle Killing - John Edgar Wideman
The Comforters - Muriel Spark
Textermination - Christine Brooke-Rose
Carnival - Wilson Harris
... (something) - Milan Kundera
--down to around 12 - Exercises - discussions

(I've still never taught some of these books, while others I've taught several or many times, even though a few, like Carnival, rank among the most difficult works of literature out. That one probably shouldn't be introduced to anyone below the graduate level--in a writing class, that is. They are all high among my personal favorites.

Also, I also once told Reggie H. that I wished I could find one of my books in every bookstore I entered, "like Wittig's Les Guerrillières." He kindly replied that he didn't think that book could be found everywhere, and I'm sure he was and is right, though I did always seem to come across it, which probably says more about the bookstores I was hanging out in that the book itself.)

And finally, a vocabulary list, of the sort I often keep when I read poetry and fiction, and especially works in another language. These are words from an array of authors, though among the words I'd interspersed quotes from a poems by Wallace Stevens (as well as Hazel Carby and George Moore!); from his poems alone you could fill many notebooks. How many of these words did you already know? (I think I've seen "ukase" countless times but always forget its meaning.)

fub (vi) - to put off, delay, cheat
girandole (n) - a showy composition; ornate candlestick
gibbet (n) - a lump, mass
schwärmerei (n) - wild devotion; sentimental enthusiasm
furbelow (n) - a flounce, ruffle; showy trimming
caparison (n) - an adornment, trapping
gloze (vt) - to make appear right or acceptable
pettifog (vi) - to engage in legal trickery, to quibble over insignificances
riband (n) - a ribbon
antinomian (n, adj) - one who rejects conventional morality
turophile (n) - a connoisseur of cheese
drabble (vt) - to draggle / (vi) - to grow wet and muddy
loricate (vt) - to coat with armor protectively
ukase (n) - edict
glacis (n) - a gentle, sloping bank
sarangousty (n) - waterproof stucco
pelisse (n) - a sleeveless cape lined with fur
scelestic (adj) - wicked; villainous
miniate (vt) - to decorate (manuscripts) with letters painted red, to decorate with red lead or vermillion
palpebral (adj) - pertaining to the eyelids
swyve (vi) - to copulate

That's it!

Things & Thoughts + Memorial for Phebus

C said yesterday that he thought I would have gone down to Ground Zero (ground zero? why wouldn't the term be capitalized given its sacralization since the ultratragedy that occurred six years ago), but I told him that while I understand the need and desire for government officials and family members of those who died on that day to participate in an official service, I personally feel the way for me to honor the 9/11 horrors and their aftermath is to remember them, in silence, and, though I didn't say to this, to consider ways that we might prevent them in the future, beginning with not getting involved in wars that help to generate more terrorism while underming the longterm health of our society, government and constitutional system, the rest of the world. Thus my post yesterday. I can remember the weeks and months right after 9/11 when I and so many others exchanged our stories of life that day in person and on the phone, how we sent emails back and forth (Samuel Delany's was one of the most memorable), how we felt relief at seeing people we hadn't seen in years, how some friends and acquaintances could not get out of New York and its environs fast enough, and then the moment came, how some of us tried to transform our experiences--or even just feelings--into art (and Ulli Baer, like others, later published an anthology of some of these earliest pieces, including one of mine); and then perhaps a year and a half later, the stories ceased being narrated, revised, exchanged, circulated. The memories were still fresh--how could they not be--and still are, but the stories of those memories, the accounts themselves, have become echoes that are still perceptible under the surface of everyday life, especially in and around New York, even if no longer so audible. But then whenever I walk down a street that was vibrant in its shabbiness during the summer of 2001, but which became a sorrow-edged row of empty storefronts in the summer of 2002, and which is now a haunt of the wealthy who ply more and more of Manhattan's grid, some of those stories, and the world they encapsulated that is certainly gone, once again buzz in my ears.

***

It's no news to anyone that for years New York City was browning, so to speak, except in certain neighborhoods (the Upper East Side, Upper West Side, SoHo, parts of the West Village, Tribeca, etc.), as hundreds of thousands of White residents left for the suburbs of Long Island, the northern counties, New Jersey, Connecticut, and other hospitable places near and far. The nadir of New York's image as a multiethnic, chaotic city came, I think, in the 1970s. The Blaxploitation films, and subsequent ones like Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver, Fort Apache, The Bronx, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Gloria and the hilarious The Out of Towners are just a few of the films reflectiong this era of the unlivable metropolis, and there are countless others, extending well into the early 1990s, like Spike Lee's masterpiece Do the Right Thing.

As has been clear for since before 9/11 and certainly since then, that's changed. As have the demographics of New York City: there are now more White residents and fewer African Americans, but also more Asians, more Latinos (who can be of any race), and, as always, a lot of immigrants of all racial backgrounds. A while ago I posted on the falling numbers of African-Americans in New York City, which is becoming unaffordable for people of any race who aren't very rich, and as the linked New York Times article, White s are returning to and Blacks are leaving the cities noted, I imagine, for wherever's more affordable, especially during a period of wage stagnation and rising prices. The article also notes that despite the ethnic transformation underway, New York possesses an ethnic equilibrium that few other cities or metro regions in the country can boast of. Nevertheless, as more and more poor and working class people, especially brown and black ones, are dispossessed and exiled and Manhattan in particular, but Brooklyn as well becomes ethnically and economically monochrome, where will the people who keep the city running--the people who person the service jobs--live, and will the city that remains still be a draw?

It isn't only New York, though. Hurricane Katrina and its disastrous aftermath drove out a sizable portion of New Orleans's Black community, which has dropped from 67% to 58% of the population. (The city overall has recovered only about 60% of its population.) To the horror of the world and the delight of right-wing Republicans and some real estate magnates, black New Orleaneans were scattered to all corners of the country. Many of the discussions I've seen about the reconstruction of New Orleans note that there appears to be little more than lipservice paid to bringing back a large portion of the working-class and poor Black people or to creating a city that would improve their lives. The aim is to create a tourist-friendly living museum, which chunks of Harlem, the East and West Village, and many other parts of New York have become. (On a Times blog, historians Madhulika Khandelwal and Joshua Zeitz offer somewhat different, enlightening perspectives.)

More broadly, gentrification has also changed other cities, like Washington, DC, which is steadily losing its Black population to Maryland, Virginia, and more distant points. I think that these changes are cyclical--New York, as I say above, was supposedly on its last legs in the 1970s and "ungovernable" during the last years of Ed Koch's mayorship and the first two of David Dinkins's, yet is now on an upswing, and I can only wonder what cities like New York, Boston, Atlanta, and Chicago will look like, what their urban cultural mixes will be like, 1o or 25 or even 50 years on.

***

Yesterday I heard a radio report, later confirmed by a TV news account, that according to data from the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, over the 2001-2006 period, the rates of HIV seroconversion were up by 33% among New York men under 30, though they had fallen by 22% among men over 30. Most troubling were two statistics: first, that males between the ages of 13 and 19 constituted the group with the fastest-growing rate of H.I.V. infection; HIV diagnoses doubled for this group in the five year period. And second, more than twice as many Black men, and 55% more Latino men, reported HIV diagnoses as White men, with 90% of the diagnoses of men under 19 among Blacks or Latinos.

Quoting the New York Times's City Room blog article directly:

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, offered a blunt assessment of the data.

“We’re headed in the wrong direction,” he said in a statement. “Unless young men reduce the number of partners they have, and protect themselves and their partners by using condoms more consistently, we will face another wave of suffering and death from H.I.V. and AIDS.”

Dr. Frieden’s statement included statements of support from leaders of the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS, Gay Men of African Descent and the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center.

Thoughts? Suggestions? What can we do/what can be done, especially for adolescents who are susceptible to HIV seroconversion, and probably not receiving adequate and comprehensive sexual education in school these days?

***

As for disturbing US news--and I don't mean the Petraeus-Crocker Kabuki-carnival in Washington, which is distressing and dispiriting, or the ongoing horrorshow in Iraq, etc.--there are few things that can top this (which I quote directly from the The Smokinggun website):

Six Held In West Virginia Torture Horror
Cops: Black woman raped, beaten, abused during week-long captivity

SEPTEMBER 11--A black West Virginia woman was sexually assaulted, stabbed, and tortured while being held captive by her white abductors, one of whom told her, "That's what we do to niggers around here." The 23-year-old victim was freed Saturday after cops responded to the home of Frankie Brewster for a "welfare check on a female that was reportedly being held against her will." When cops arrived, Brewster claimed she was the only one home, but then the victim limped to the door and said, "Help me." According to six harrowing criminal complaints, the woman, who apparently had been held for more than a week, had four stab wounds in her left leg, bruised eyes, and had been repeatedly sexually assaulted and humiliated. The woman told police that she was forced to lick Brewster's "toes, vagina, and anal cavity." Brewster's son Bobby forced the woman to eat dog and rat feces, according to one complaint filed in Logan County Magistrate Court. The victim, who is now hospitalized, was raped at knifepoint, choked with a cable cord, and had her hair pulled and cut during the ordeal. Police, who have arrested six defendants for their roles in the abduction and attack, are looking for other suspects who may have lured the victim to Brewster's home. The arrestees are seen in the below mug shots. Pictured clockwise from the upper left are Frankie Brewster, 49; Bobby Brewster, 24; Danny Combs, 20; George Messer, 27; Alisha Burton, 22; and Karen Burton, 46. (11 pages)

I did not link from the Raw Story website, whose comments section for this article evidently drew some of the nuttiest, most virulently racist people running around out there, but one person does claim that these folks had a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker on one of the trailers and another points to parallels with the Abu-Ghraib torture scenarios, which, let's not forget, Rush Limbaugh waved off as fraternity-style hijinks. Sadly and unfortunately, brutal, inhumane attacks against women, particularly Black women, or against racial and ethnic, religious, sexual, and socially different people are nothing new, but still, the specifics of these allegations were so horrible I almost could not believe what I was reading.


***

On a different note, I received from several different people this notice about a memorial reading for Phebus Etienne (1965-2007, at right) this upcoming Friday at NYU. It's a divine roster reading in memory of a divine person and poet (whom I first met at NYU), who left us far too soon:

Memorial Reading for Phebus Etienne
Friday, September 14, 2007, 7 p.m.

Reading Phebus' poems are her friends Sarah Gambito, Aracelis Girmay, Joseph O. Legaspi, Vikas Menon, Dante Micheaux, Khalil Murrell, Mendi Obadike, January Gill O'Neil, Gregory Pardlo, Evie Schockley, & R.A. Villanueva

@ Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House
58 West 10th St. (between 5th and 6th Aves.)
New York City

Reception to follow

9.11.2007

And following on a suggestion by Not Atrios, tell

Senate

House

Media

that we want US troops brought home from Iraq as soon as possible, and that the Democratic-led Congress refuse to support a coup that will install a US puppet, be it Ayad Allawi or anyone else;

that we do NOT want a war with Iran or military strikes on Iran or the Iranian people, whether directly or by proxy, and that the the Democratic-led Congress not compromise even in the slightest on this issue;

that we want the Democratic-led Congress to revisit and completely rethink its capitulation on the warrantless wiretapping bill, which includes restoring the oversight of the independent, secret federal court; providing NO immunity or indemnification for phone companies that participated in any illegal activity; and severely constraining the power of the Executive and his offices to conduct spying of any form, using any technology, on Americans;

that we want the the Democratic-led Congress to pass a comprehensive voting bill which, among other things, makes all source code reviewable by government authorities; maintains a printed paper trail and preserves this trail for at least 100 years, with any willfull destruction of it publishable as a serious felony; makes all votes cast fully auditable by public officials and citizens; criminalizes and enforces the law on actions like voter caging, intimidation of voters and willfully striking voters from voting lists to deny them their franchise; and permits people who have completed their jail and probation terms to vote;

that the president's choices for the new Attorney General are unacceptable right-wing hacks and that at the very least he should select someone chosen by a bipartisan, blue-ribbon panel, and that the Democratic-led Congress should not give any leeway given the successive debacles of the John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales tenures at the Department of Justice;

that we want all of the investigations initiated by Democratic-controlled Congress to result in action, not just a series of queries, shrugs, whines and idle demands--they must review the U.S. Constitution and use all options available to them, beginning with enforcing the subpoenas; and they absolutely must not let this president and his administration get away with anything else;

that we finally have a full and complete investigation of the incompetence that led to the horrific tragedies on September 11, 2001, and afterwards, and that the president and vice president be forced to testify separately and under oath about their actions before, during and after this tragedy;

that the Democratic-led Congress and any journalists who still feel their profession has any worth stand up to the morally and ethically bankrupt, corporatized "mainstream" media and its broken, RNC-derived narratives any longer.

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If you have any demands to present to Congress, please add them in the comment section.