RIP Lindon Barrett + FISA + iPhonery + Miscellany

It's been a long while, more than a week, since I last posted (I've added my unfinished post from yesterday). It's not for want of things to post about, but a general lassitude and inability to muster the energy to write up things as well as add photos and hyperlinks.

Posting one-line entries isn't my thing, but far too many paragraph-length posts have died on the...cybervine? Or remain as ghost entries in the editing box. And so much has happened over the last few months too. So here go a few brief notes.

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My sincerest condolences to the family, close friends, colleagues, and students of Lindon Barrett, a brilliant scholar, who, I'm sad to report, was recently murdered in his home. I posted the following on the CC list yesterday about Lindon, whom I met only once in person, in DC many years ago, but we did speak over the phone more than once and he never failed to offer sage advice or read a manuscript if needed when I had to call upon him.

I'm so sorry to hear of this horrible news. Lindon was so smart, a lovely man, and one of the important figures in the new generation of black and out LGBTQ scholars who've reshaped departments over the last decade and a half. His intellectual range was impressive. I worked with him a little bit in the early 1990s, and he was unfailingly helpful and kind. His tragic death is so saddening.

A member of his family has suggested donations to the Winnipeg Public Library in his memory, as he greatly loved books and literature, which his scholarly work testifies to.

There's also this Lindon Barrett tributes site, if you knew Lindon and would like to post some memories or kind thoughts about him. A terrible loss, for so many reasons.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, NELSON MANDELA!

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Both Audiologo and Eileen posted in the comments section about how their Senators with the FISA vote last week, which left me so apoplectic I couldn't even post a denunciation. Both of my home-state senators also voted against the bill in its final, toxic form, and my Congressperson also voted against the House's version of this immunity giveaway. But as is now well known, and I gather forgotten (and forgiven?), the Democratic nominee Barack Obama not only voted for the bill but offered a series of insulting, distorted justifications for doing so. I have wracked my brain trying to figure out why he sold out on this, and I keep coming back to the idea that, as was the case with Bill Clinton with the first Bush-and-Reagan administration crime syndicate, he's decided that rather than investigate and prosecute the full range of violations by this current administration, he's going to take give them every pass to clear off the stage in the hope that he can start fresh and not look back. I would imagine that since figures in the Democratic leadership repeatedly acceded to or complied and colluded with the administration, and since it appears increasingly likely that Obama will be president, he's also decided that to ensure smooth relations with them--the leadership--he'll give them a free pass as well. It's all very disgusting, disillusioning, and par for the course, but we do end up with the governments we deserve, and until we create viable party options, particularly to the left, we will be stuck with the capitutionalist and collusionist Corporatocrats at the federal level. As I said, both of my Senators and my Congressperson did not fall in line, so it's not the entire party, but it must be noted that in the case of the former, neither one made any effort to filibuster, hold or in any other way obstruct the passage of this bill. Why?

Remember, the actions of the president were so grave that the extreme right-wing Attorney General John Ashcroft, on his sickbed, refused to sign on them; his deputy, James Comey, also refused to sign off; Comey contacted the head of the FBI and requested that authorities be stationed in Ashcroft's hospital room to keep a close eye on the actions of the president's henchmen, including the disgraced and now nearly unemployable Alberto Gonzales; both men and a number of other top officials Justice Department officials were threatening to resign en masse if the administration didn't stop what it was doing and adhere (more closely?) to the law. Learning what was behind all of this is only one of many reasons why I think the new FISA bill should never been passed, but there are many others, based on the text of the horrible bill itself. As Eileen points out, the ACLU has filed suit to prevent the law from taking effect, so let's see what happens, but cynically, I wonder if the courts will shelve it, and if Obama, when president, if he starts receiving the sort of extreme, biased and unmerited criticism that Clinton did, will see how far he can stretch its now tyrannical provisions.

The Strange Bedfellows Congressional accountability PAC is still seeking funding, so if you can contribute, please do so.

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I was a little fascinated by the iPhone frenzy last week, but having joined in the iKlatsch last winter, when the price of the phones dropped considerably from their July 2007 launch prices, I was not going to seek an upgrade. After listening to C's caution about the 2.0 upgrade for the first generation phones, which proved a disaster for countless customers, I waited until Saturday morning to update my phone, and it went off without a hitch. Both old and new users have access to one of the best things Apple has devised yet, an application (app) store, which is easily accessible and has a sizable number of free and lowcost apps you can download swiftly and easily.

I downloaded about a half dozen, then ended up erasing most of them because I didn't need them on my phone, but as a result of my colleage Alex W.'s suggestion, I signed up for Evernote, which I haven't really figured out how to use yet but has the capability of translating any photographed text into printed text (sort of like an OCR scanner), and I also kept Jott, which allows dictaphone-style notes that a computer transcribes and then emails to you! I have used it a few times and it does work well, though I have to speak slowly and spell out words my accent usually mushes together. And best of all, both are free! Now I just have to figure out how to use them. One unpleasant side effect of the new upgrade, however, has been a more sluggish overall trend to the phone's operation. It's as if the new software added molasses to its circuits. I do sync it regularly, though, and back up my computer, because I learned the danger of not doing so a few years ago....

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For the first time in a few years, I didn't watch this year's Major League Baseball All Star Game, which was played at the soon-to-be-destroyed Old Yankee Stadium. (I think I only voted once, online.) Or to be more accurate, I watched the introduction of the players, which the league switched up this year by including a tribute to past Hall of Famers and All Stars alongside the elected and appointed players, a nice but eventually boring touch, and then we went back to whatever C was watching. (I can't even remember what happened on half of what I've seen on TV this summer; it's all starting to blur together, save Life on the D-List with Kathy Griffin, which is unfailingly packed with ridiculousness, which is to say, hilarious). Those who know me well know that I am, or was, a longtime baseball fan; I used to memorize stats, read boxscores daily in the newspaper, and follow the on-field minutiae of various players I championed. But this season, as has been increasingly the case over the last few years, my interest has waned substantially. Part of it has been the ongoing doping-steroid scandal, which MLB, the Players Union, Congress, and the courts have all handled poorly. Part of it is, I think, my own personal maturity and a shift in interests, along with a general dwindling enthusiasm about most professional sports and athletes. Part of it is my recognition that in these incredibly difficult and uncertain economic times, most of the people on these teams are making millions of dollars per year, and many still want and crave more. And part of it is outrage at situations like the one Willie Randolph faced with the New York Mets' ownership and hierarchy. The net result is that while I do still check the box scores regularly, I've yet to attend a baseball game this season or watch a complete one on TV, and can go days without knowing whether the Cardinals or Yankees or any other team won or lost (that is, if I miss the late evening news sports wrap ups.) The All Star Game came and went; I barely recognized half this year's players--a sign I'm getting old and haven't kept up--and even when I learned that the American League had yet again won, thus giving that league's eventual champion the home field advantage in the World Series, I didn't bother to check the game's box score. I guess I really should try to catch a game in Yankee Stadium by the end of the year, though, since I haven't been there in years. As for Shea....

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By this point last summer, I think I'd read about 4-5 books I'd had on my waiting shelf, but this year it's been slow going. I'm not sure, but I think I'm still trying to get up to gear. I have browsed a number of books for my work, and my little bookshelf at the library stays full with volumes for projects. One book I've been reading for pleasure is Nathalie Stephens's Je Nathanaël, which imagines and embodies the eponymous, absent assistant from André Gide's Les nourritures terrestres (The Fruits of the Earth) (L'Hexagone, 2003). Queer, hybrid and challenging its core, it's a lyrical text in which substitution and transformation in and as language repeatedly take form before one's eyes in the shifts between words, passages, forms, genres--languages. Stephens writes in both French and English, and has the mastery of both languages to draw as much out of both as possible. I've been studying and luxuriating in the book's French and thinking about how it differs from the English of Stephens's other works, but also considering how the deep(er) knowledge of the other language frees up hidden possibilities in English, how it colors and queers it. Here is one little passage, in French:

Entre deux mots le souffle.
Entre deux corps le chagrin.
Entre deux villes la douleur.
Entre deux voix le désir.

Entre nous le livre à feuilleter. (p. 59)

And, quite appropriately of Gide himself, and what he did write and couldn't in his era:

Je suis un livre qui a déjà été écrit.
Je suis le livre que personne n'ose écrire.

Qui es-tu Nathanaël? (p.65)

Who are you, Nathanaël, a question Gide asks of the assistant, but that Stephens raises reflexively, for the lyric's speaker, as the author, to the reader. Who are you?

Thanks, Democrats!

(click on the document to see a high-resolution version)

So what can you do?

You can visit this site, Blue America PAC vs. Retroactive Immunity, for more information on this horrible bill, and to donate money for a targeted campaign to oppose several of its most heinous Democratic enablers. So far, the PAC has collected over $200,000 from 4,000 donors. You can write, call or fax your Congressperson or Senator, and demand that she not support this bill, which will be put up for a vote tomorrow.

Dems Capitulate to GOP/Bush on FISA/Telecom Amnesty/Immunization? + Tayari on New NEA Report

Happy Juneteenth!

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The Democrats in Congress are on the verge of what could be one of their best electoral triumphs in decades; nearly every poll out shows that they will increase their margins in the House, perhaps by double digits, and will gain anywhere from 2-6 seats in the Senate. In fact, they could gain as many as 9 Senate seats and pass the 60-vote margin that they've allowed the minority GOP to wield as a weapon of control. They enter this upcoming election facing one of the widely acknowledged worst, most unpopular, least trusted presidents in recent US history, a man whose rhetoric, though still dangerous, is so ineffectual--save on the warmongering calls against Iran--that he might as well not open his mouth ever again until he leaves office.

And yet, these Democrats, particularly in the House, have repeatedly found ways to give this deeply loathed president and his party what they want, again and again. On issues surrounding the Iraq War and civil liberties, they have been abominable.

Really and repeatedly abominable.

The newest abomination is the "bipartisan," "compromise," FISA-gutting, telecom amnesty bill, which the Democrats have decided must not only provide the White House and GOP with everything they want in terms of the freedom to spy without a warrant on Americans, but also a giveaway to the telecom industry in the form of grandfathered amnesty; although several lawsuits are now underway to see if the telecoms broke the law (since they are alleged to have been spying on Americans since early 2001, months before 9/11), and although the US had a perfectly workable FISA law that could, with some minor changes, have been updated to make it as effective as possible, the Bush administration decided it must have this horrible draconian new law, in effect protecting itself and the telecoms from possible crimes they committed, and the Democratic leadership in both the House, led by Majority Whip Steny Hoyer, and the Senate, led by West Virginia's Jay Rockefeller, are doing their damnedest to make it pass.

In fact, when the GOP controlled Congress, they couldn't get this telecom amnesty debacle through. And yet now that Democrats control both houses, it's almost law.

How bad have the violations been that this bill is trying to wipe away? From Glenn Greenwald:

As Judge [Vaughn] Walker [a Republican appointee and the chief judge of the Northern District of California] ruled, the alleged actions by the telecoms "violate the constitutional rights clearly established" by prior Supreme Court rulings and "no reasonable entity in [the telecoms'] position could have believed [the spying program] was legal." Beyond that, the telecoms -- by allowing the Bush administration to spy on their customers with no warrants -- knowingly violated at least four separate federal statutes (.pdf).

This is the bill that Senator Chris Dodd repeatedly threatened to filibuster when he was still a candidate for president.

And Steny Hoyer has stonewalled and dissimulated about it. Repeatedly. WHY?

Barack Obama has said that he strongly opposes this law. He has not yet spoken out about this new House-led effort. Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold says that the bill was not a "compromise" but a "capitulation" to the White House. In Eric Lichtblau's New York Times article, the GOP are already gloating about how they rolled the Democrats on behalf of Bush. Again.

So what can you do?

You can visit this site, Blue America PAC vs. Retroactive Immunity, for more information on this horrible bill, and to donate money for a targeted campaign to oppose several of its most heinous Democratic enablers. So far, the PAC has collected over $200,000 from 4,000 donors. You can write, call or fax your Congressperson or Senator, demanding that she not support this bill, which will be put up for a vote tomorrow.

A coalition calling itself "Strange Bedfellows" has drawn people from across the political and ideological spectrum. They are concerned with yet another serious threat to civil liberties, and the possible legislation of behavior that drew strong rebukes after it reached some of its worst abuses under the Nixon administration. You can visit the site at:




And you can call Senator Obama's campaign, at (866) 675-2008 [Dial 6, then 0, on the menu], and demand that he take action to prevent its passage, since he is on record claiming that he opposed it. Or you can contact his office directly, if you're an Illinois resident. From his Senate webpage: Phone: (202) 224-2854 / Fax: (202) 228-4260 / Email

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Tayari has posted on the NEA's recent comprehensive report on artists in the workplace. It's worth checking out. Three of her bullet points:

The percentage of female, black, Hispanic and Asian artists is bigger among younger ones. Among artists under 35, writers are the only group in which 80 percent or more are non-Hispanic white. I wonder why it is that all other areas of art are becoming more diverse, but not writing? I would think that writing would really lend itself to inclusion since the start up costs are so low. A question worth thinking about is whether this means times are good or hard for writers of color. On the one hand being so darn rare makes us attractive, or at least it does, theoretically. But on the other hand, the scarcity suggests steep challenges.

The “Artists in the Workforce” report, prepared by Sunil Iyengar, the endowment’s director of research and analysis, identified 185,000 writers.... That's a lot of people.

Overall, the median income that artists reported in 2005 was $34,800 — $42,000 for men and $27,300 for women. That's just depressing. No comment needed.