Texas Executes Mentally Impaired, Cites Steinbeck Character + Russian Punk Protesters in Politlcal Show Trial

Marvin Lee Wilson

Yet another travesty of justice and a human tragedy, as well as a grotesque misuse of prose fiction, has just unfolded in Texas, where Marvin Lee Wilson, a 54-year-old man with a neuropsychologist-reported IQ of 61 was killed on Tuesday evening, by lethal injection, for the abduction and murder of Jerry Robert Williams, 21, a police department confidential informant, in 1992. Originally the court sentenced Wilson to death in 1994, but the death sentence was overturned in 1996 by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The case went back to court in 1998, and Wilson was sentenced to death on a capital murder charge. The US Supreme Court ruled, in Atkins v. Virginia, that states cannot execute convicts deemed mentally impaired, but has left the standard for such a decision up to each state. Texas has yet to firmly establish such a standard. Morever, in Wilson's case, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had the opportunity to stay the execution, but chose not to, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals also chose not to consider any other evidence that might have halted Wilson's execution, and Texas's current governor, Rick Perry, refused to grant clemency (which is distinct from a pardon). Since the Supreme Court's reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, 1,301 people total and 500 in Texas have died as a result of state-sanctioned execution.

I mention "prose fiction" in Wilson's case, because according to the Beaumont Enterprise, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, in a 21-page 2004 ruling detailing what factors could be in considered in capital punishment cases and denoting what it considered mental impairment cited the fictional character Lennie Small, from the late 1962 Nobel literature laureate John Steinbeck's 1937 novella Of Mice and Men. The court stated that

Texas citizens might agree that Steinbeck's Lennie should, by virtue of his lack of reasoning ability and adaptive skills, be exempt. But, does a consensus of Texas citizens agree that all persons who might legitimately qualify for assistance under the social services definition of mental retardation be exempt from an otherwise constitutional penalty?

As it turns out, Steinbeck's son Thomas Steinbeck was unaware of this use of his father's work until he read about it in the Guardian UK newspaper online, and he and his wife have been outraged about it since. Both called for clemency for Wilson. As he notes, the court treats a fictional character as if he were real and arrogates to him the sympathy and mercy of "Texas citizens," yet failed to stop the execution of a real person--in this case Wilson--who is verifiably mentally impaired, under the standards of real-world neuroscience, which is to say, who was not to be accorded the same putative "exemption." Thomas Steinbeck's expounded on the matter

I am deeply troubled by today's scheduled execution of Marvin Wilson ... I had no idea that the great state of Texas would use a fictional character that my father created to make a point about human loyalty and dedication, ie., Lennie Small from 'Of Mice and Men,' as a benchmark to identify whether defendants with intellectual disability should live or die. My father was a highly gifted writer ... and the character of Lennie was never intended to be used to diagnose a medical condition like intellectual disability.

As I said, Wilson died by lethal injection yesterday evening.  A number of people, including nine in Texas alone, are scheduled to undergo state execution in the United States through January 14, 2012. If you do not believe in the death penalty, please take the time to contact state authorities to appeal for clemency.

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As a result of their March 2012 public protest, an anti-Putin, anti-Kremlin "punk prayer" in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior, three members of the collective Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29, have been imprisoned in a Russian jail for the last five months, and are currently on trial, facing between 7 and 3 years of jail, on the charge of "hooliganism." The court decision is planned for August 17. A number of major musicians across the globe, including Madonna, as well as people all over the globe (you can do so here, via Amnesty International), have spoken out and called for these performers, known for their outspoken critiques of the Russian government under Vladimir Putin and their brightly-colored balaclavas, to be released and the blatantly political charges against them thrown out, but so far such calls have met with silence from the Russian authorities. Who are "Pussy Riot"? Here are a few videos, including one from this past spring in which Maria Alyokhina (Alekhina) describes the conditions in which they're being held.

Панк-молебен "Богородица, Путина прогони" Pussy Riot в Храме ("Punk prayer" "Hail Mary, Putin Put," Pussy Riot in the Church)
Alyokhina talks about detention conditions
Группа Pussy Riot жжет путинский гламур (Group Pussy Riot sets fire to Putin's glamor)
Pussy Riot на Красной площади песня Путин зассал (Pussy Riot at Red Square, singing "Putin zassal")

Russian Writers Lead Protest Walk + Daniel Sada's Almost Never

Boris Akunin (© RIA Novosti. Ilia Pitalev)

"[Writers are] engineers of the human soul."

I'd never read this quote before, and having done so today, hesitated to reprint it, despite its truth, mainly because of who uttered it and how he acted on its ramifications. I'm talking about Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator whose ruthlessness has no peers in the modern history of that country. The tally of Stalin's victims is vast beyond accounting, perhaps, but the names of writers he persecuted and murdered is less hazy to many, and any student of literary history could find parallels throughout the annals of literature. But I'm not posting about authoritarians' and totalitarians' persecution of writers so much as clumsily searching for a way to highlight an important event that took place the other day in in Moscow: a peaceful march  of opposition and resistance to the May 7, 2012 reelection of Russian president Vladimir Putin, led by a dozen of Russia's most famous writers, which drew over 10,000 participants. Among the march's organizers were poet and conceptual art pioneer Lev Rubinstein (1946-), journalist Sergei Parkhomenko, and disability rights activist, economist and journalist Irina Yasina (1964-), and other leaders included internationally renowned detective fictionist and translator Boris Akunin (1956-) and poet, journalist, and essayist Dmitrii Bykov (1967-).

The route proceeded from a statue of Russia's poetic icon, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), exiled, as New York Times reporter Ellen Barry notes, by Czar Alexander I, to one of Alexander S. Griboyedov (1795-1829), whose ludic send-ups of the Czarist-era bluebloods were proscribed until after his death. At the park housing Griboyedov's bust, in the Chistye Prudy neighborhood, anti-Putin activists have set up an Occupy-style encampment, which has so far not been attacked, though Putin has vowed to do so. Only a week before, a demonstration against Putin's reelection and inauguration near the Kremlin culminated in a brutal assault by the police forces, with 700 people arrested, some for allegedly doing nothing more than wearing white protest ribbons, and the state forces have remained on the prowl for any signs of antigovernment protest.  Moreover, opposition figureheads Alexei Navalny (1976-) and Sergei Udaltsov (1977-) were jailed for 15 days on May 10, 2012, for "disobeying police orders" as they met with supporters in Moscow, and, according to the Times, "Russia’s Parliament is considering a draft law that would increase fines for causing unrest at demonstrations to 1.5 million rubles, or about $50,000, and introduce a penalty of up to 240 hours of compulsory labor."

As a result, opposition activists decided to rethink their tactics, engaging in more artful "dilemma protests," such as flash gatherings, nonviolent resistance, ludic small-group activities, and site occupations, not unlike those of the Occupy Movements across the US and the rest of the globe.  The organizers of this march decided four days ago to see if the very act of walking together, on a "test stroll," without a permit, through Moscow's streets would provoke a police response involving "being blocked, beaten, poisoned with gas, detained, arrested or at least subjected to stupid molestation with questions." It did not, thankfully, and one point the phalanx of protesters, many clutching the books of the march's leaders, spanned over a mile. Afterwards, marchers got autograph and an opportunity to chat with the writers and each other, then dispersed.  As of today, the Chistye Prudy encampment remains , but for how long it's hard to say. A much larger March of Millions is planned for June 12, 2012 in Moscow. Perhaps writers across the globe should consider June 12 solidarity marches, on behalf not only of the Russian people, democracy, freedom of speech and protest, but against authoritarian and totalitarian forces, including corporate ones, worldwide.

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Today Reggie H. sent along Marie Arana's May 10, 2012  Washington Post review of an exciting new publication by Graywolf Press, the first novel by late Mexican genius Daniel Sada (1953-2011) to be translated into English, Almost Never (2012, originally published as Casi nunca by Anagrama in 2008). The translator is Katherine Silver, co-director of the highly regarded Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC), which several translators I deeply admire have attended. Rachel Nolan gave Almost Never rhapsodized over the novel in the April 20, 2012 New York Times. Sada passed away late last year after many years of battle with kidney disease, but in his brief writing life he was not only prolific, but made his name as one of the more important and inventive prose writers not just in Mexico but in the Spanish language, winning numerous national literary prizes and the adulation of peers across the Hispanophone world. The late Robert Bolaño (1953-2003) in particular sang Sada's praises many times, while Nolan, in her laudatory article, wrote this: "If you read only three novelists on Mexico — and you should read many more, but that’s your affair — choose Juan Rulfo, Roberto Bolaño and Daniel Sada." That is very high praise, especially considering how many exceptional contemporary let alone past Mexican fiction writers there are.

As I replied to Reggie, I'd been told of Sada but it wasn't until I saw his email that I recalled two prior encounters with his name: one, a 2006 Bomb interview, conducted by Mexican novelist José Manuel Prieto and translated by one of the best contemporary translators of Mexican poetry, poet and book artist Jen Hofer, and this 2011 epicedium, in The Paris Review, by author, journalist and critic Francisco Goldman. In the Prieto interview, Sada ranges widely in discussing his work, describing his reasoning behind his use of Spanish prosody in writing verse-novels (about which I'll say more below), and what he learned from Juan Rulfo (1917-1986) one of Mexico's canonical literary figures and the author of Pedro Páramo (1955), with whom he took a writing class. Of his lessons from Rulfo, he says:

He once recommended that I shouldn’t persist in intellectualizing everything I was experiencing, because that would end up getting in the way of my perception. Reading is perpetual nourishment, never a vehicle for vanity. Intellectuals, in general, are braggarts, perhaps because they do not possess a true interior landscape. Artists are more silent; they are observers and have, naturally, a great capacity for astonishment. Artists are continual absorbers, and it is perhaps only much later that they pick and choose. These are all Rulfian concepts, and were spoken, I will confess, very close to my ear, as if they were secrets that can only be told in low tones.

 Goldman talks about Sada's influence on and aid to Bolaño, who set many of his novels in Mexico, where he spent his adolescence, but which he never returned to after his move to Spain in his early 20s, while also describing Sada's work and its significance, and their confabulations over the years.  One of my favorite passages in Goldman's memoriam comes when he translates a reminiscence by Sada's friend and editor at Tusquets Mexico:

He wasn’t interested in luxury or power, though his prose is a true luxury. Nobody could write the way he could. In life, he only ever boasted about one thing: his way of writing. To the students who took his writing workshops, he gave one of the simplest but most valuable pieces of advice: in literature there are no excuses. You have to organize your life to be able to write at least a half a page every day. After a week, you’ll have enough words to finish a story, after a month enough for a novella, after a year enough for a novel or a collection of stories … Some of his first novels were written under great economic duress, but they are among his best: Una de dos, Albedrío. t took him six years to write his most ambitious novel, amid personal upheaval and much moving around, but he never lost his energy or concentration …  

Daniel Sada (Pascual Borzelli Iglesias © New York Times)

About Sada's innovation: I cannot pretend to have read his work, but from what I can tell, he distinguished himself not just by overall narrative adroitness, tending towards the baroque (as with Cuba's unsurpassable José Lezama Lima (1910-1976)), but through his use of traditional Spanish prosody as the foundation for his novels.  As he told Prieto:

It is in no way a desire to be flashy or overly elaborate that leads me to use octosyllables, hendecasyllables, alexandrines, decasyllables or heptasyllables. I have a deep knowledge, from childhood, of the most elemental constructions of these metric forms, so characteristic of Spanish. In my primary school in Sacramento, Coahuila, Panchita Cabrera, a rural schoolteacher who was an ardent fan of the Spanish Golden Age (a type that no longer exists) taught us these phonetic techniques with one goal in mind: that we might fine-tune our ears in order to appreciate the expressive delicacy and virulence of our language. In fact, to be honest, it’s more difficult for me to write free prose, because I don’t have any technical (phonetic) resources on hand that might provide some support.

"Octosyllables, hedecasyllables, alexandrines..." I couldn't make that up. As a result it makes his work quite difficult to translate into English, which uses a very different stressed prosodic system. (Among American writers of the last 50 or so years, I immediately thought of Vikram Seth (1959-), who wrote his astonishing novel Golden Gate in "Onegin stanzas," as well as of Anne Carson (1950-), Peter Taylor (1917-1994), and Thanhha Lai (1965-), each of whom wrote works of fiction in verse, but none in conventional meter or even blank verse.) On top of this, he apparently also was a master of puns and other forms of wordplay, as well as rhetorical devices and figures, and a good deal of this is lost--as it must be--in English.  Rereading the Prieto interview, I thought of Spanish-language wordsmiths like Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929-2005) and Julián Ríos (1941-) both of whom, however, also knew (and in Ríos's case, still does) English, and wrote Spanish prose, playful and elaborate, that could still be rendered into English. Cabrera Infante even possessed the remarkably rare capacity not just to write in English but to pun in it as well, and to write puns that could signify in many cases in both languages. But Sada's languages were all drawn from the registers of Mexico, and so Silver's labor, and that of subsequent translators, will require a golden-drummed ear. I'm eager to peek at Sada in the original, though I imagine my Spanish will be too rudimentary to grasp his richness, but I also want to read Silver's translation and compare it, to learn what she was able to successfully bring over, or, invent as needed.

Apologies + J's Theater Gets Cited in Putin Critique + My Former Agent, Redux

First, my sincere apologies to all J's Theater readers for the typos that pop up here too frequently. I try to be meticulous about these entries, but I've found it's gotten more difficult reading and reviewing material on a laptop screen--though not on the iPad, which has a higher resolution, or on printed texts, such as books, students' manuscripts, or my own critical and creative work, which I always print out and edit by hand, with a pencil or pen--and when I rush to produce these (because have to limit the time I devote to these entries given my workload), the typos abound. I often do update my entries when I spot one or two (as with yesterday's post on "Blogs vs. Term Papers," when C spotted a typo in the first paragraph), and if you spot any gross ones or errors of any sort, please don't hesitate to post a comment or correction. Again, my sincere apologies, and thanks for reading!

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Yesterday evening I was reading an article by Alexander Nazaryan in The New York Daily News, on a proposed "reading list" drafted by Russia's current and potentially future President, the beefcake strongman Vladimir Putin, that to Nazaryan's eye represents an extremely dangerous, nationalistic attempt at social engineering of the kind that prevailed in Russia before the fall of the Soviet Union. (He points out too that prior Russian governments, under the Tsars, also had censors, prescribed and proscribed writing, and punished violators.) But Putin goes further in the direction of ethnocentrism and racism when he basically suggests that for Russian to prosper, it must not only have ideological coherence (i.e., be under the boot of whatever Putin and his allies want), but ethnic social and cultural coherence as well--does this sound familiar?--and that a common literary canon will help to ensure this.


Putin lays out his ideas in a turgid essay entitled "Russian: The Ethnicity Issue," which basically rejects multiculturalism and pluralism in favor of Russian cultural nationalism, and, Nazaryan notes, includes the following inflammatory rhetoric:

The Russian people and Russian culture are the linchpin, the glue that binds together this unique civilization...this kind of civilizational identity is based on preserving the dominance of Russian culture.

As I said, do this rhetoric and discourse ring any bells? Nazaryan's article would interest me in and of itself, but I ask you to keep reading further into it, for he cites the case of how a group of nationalistic, pro-Putin thugs, organized into a group titled Walking Together (a priceless name, really), burned the books and threatened the life of one of Russia's most important and path-breaking authors, Vladimir Sorokin (1955-), based on his 1999 controversial, experimental novel Goluboe Salo (Blue Lard).*

As part of his discussion of the Sorokin issue, he cites...J'S THEATER!!! Yes, this little blog makes an appearance as part of Nazaryan's critique, and he specifically cites my discussion of Sorokin's Blue Lard, which, as I've mentioned before, has not yet been translated into English, in part because of its linguistic difficulty.  That post has taken on a life of its own, I should add. First, a scholar working writing about the complexities of translating the book wrote to me and sent me a copy of her paper on the topic, and then, this fall, a young scholar writing a dissertation (I believe) was able to connect with the professor after coming across the post. But back to Nazaryan, his main point is that a great deal of Russian literature--one of the world's treasures, especially over the least 150 years--let alone other literary traditions, would challenge the narrow ideological and cultural prescriptions of someone like Putin, and so it won't make the list. Putin cites what appears to be a combination of Mortimer Adler's Great Books Program and Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, but in the cases of both, as excessively Eurocentric as they are, they do not suggest only one ideological and certainly not one nationalistic approach. Nazaryan mentions that a Muscovite is wondering whether the works of George Orwell will make the list, to which Nazaryan replies, "No, he won’t." I though the query was ironic and perhaps sarcastic. But not only would Orwell not pass muster, nor would a great deal of Russia's 20th century writers. Would any of its major poets or fiction writers other than the Socialist Realists clear the bar? What foreign writers would?  It very well could be a short list, a short list indeed.

I often wish that more people would comment on this blog--though not the spammers, who once threatened to overwhelm the comments section--and do often wonder if anyone is reading it, but then I come across a citation like the one in Nazaryan's news article and realize, just because most of these posts meet with silence doesn't mean no one is reading them. So thank you, Mr. Nazaryan, and thank you to the regular and occasional readers!

*Can you imagine even the most extreme right wingers (or anyone on the far left, whatever that might be these days), organizing a book-burning and threatening the life of an American author of experimental literature? Sorokin's book, as I have discussed several times on this blog, is actually quite innovative, formally, linguistically, and thematically.  Most of Sorokin's work is not as formally experimental as Blue Lard, but having read several of his works in English translation--the hilarious The Queue, the utterly chilling and horrifying Ice, and its strange follow-up Bro Says, part of the Ice Trilogy--I can attest that his work always pushes the limits--formal, thematic, structural, political--in some way or other. Jonathan Franzen and the mainstream of contemporary American literature it is not!

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(Photo: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times)

As C put it last evening, I have come across some very interesting people in my lifetime. I'll admit it. So here's a little story about someone I knew once upon a time. When I was in graduate school at NYU I had a good friend, a lovely woman with whom I was in several fiction workshops and who has gone on to publish a novel to some acclaim. One day she introduced me to her boyfriend, a very friendly, enthusiastic, preppy young guy who was looking for clients for the literary agency he was working for. He read my first book, and became a fan. He was very supportive of my work, and I gave him several things to try to get published, but nothing came of it. I then would get the material published myself. This went on for a while, and while I always felt he was very encouraging, supportive, friendly, decent, a good person, he could not sell any of my work. He even once got some of my poems into the hands of the poetry editor of the New Yorker, who said that she was "holding them," but they were never published. I ended up submitting one for a prize, and, to my amazement, it won. (He did once hammer the editors at Out quite relentlessly, though, on behalf, so that I could paid for an article I'd written; they blithely held my check for as long as they could, which reminded me that being a freelance writer was not the way to go.) So we agreed to part company. I still thought very highly of him, and loved to hear about how successful he was with selling other people's work.

A few years down the pike, I heard over the grapevine that he and my friend had broken up, and that he was now seeing a guy. This surprised me, because I didn't think he was interested in men, though C had pegged this the first time they met. (My gaydar is often not very good with people I'm close to.) But more power to him and anyone coming to terms with who they are. His boyfriend was a filmmaker, and the boyfriend's first feature film appeared to some acclaim. I saw the film and found it quite disturbing because of the racist discourse in it. I won't go into it, but suffice it to say that a mixed-race character living in the South ends up striking out not against his white oppressors so much as against black people. Hmm. I have seen such crap all my life--though not as well-made as this film, I'll give it that--and really tire of it. At any rate, another friend told me that the agent was seeing this director, and my friend didn't think the film was so bad at first, until he later thought about it, and then agreed he wasn't a fan. Another friend told me that the agent was getting huge advances for his writers, who now included some very famous people, among them award-winning poets.  I ran into my former agent on the street around this time, and I believe we had a brief, pleasant conversation. That was that.

A few years later, I was reading the newspaper, and happened upon an article about my former agent, in which it was revealed that he had been a crack addict. A crack addict. I fell out of my chair. Literally. Not only that, but according to the article, he had burned all kinds of bridges, lost his clients, hit the skids professionally, gone through rehab (I think), regained old and new clients, and  was now writing a memoir, for which he had received a $350,000 or so (perhaps it was more, I'm too lazy to Google it) advance--as I said, he could score advances! The book's title was Portrait of Addict as a Young Man, riffing off James Joyce's similar, incomparable Bildungsroman, and when I told some undergraduate students that this book was coming out, I gather several thought I might be exaggerating in its title or particulars, though I assured them I was not. I subsequently came across excerpts of the work, which were both more lurid than I expected but yet not as outrageous as I imagined.  I also flipped through the book at the bookstore, but I have not purchased it. Another friend told me that my former agent, who had been quite friendly to him, cut him cold at an event; he wasn't sure why, or whether it had to do with my former agent's newfound fame. I actually did spot him, from a distance, one evening last winter or spring in Chelsea, but he was hailing a cab, so I didn't try to get his attention.

And then, yesterday, I was reading The New York Times, and saw on the front page an article about the distinguished editor, translator and poet Jonathan Galassi, who helms what one of the most prestigious publishing units in the United States, Farrar Straus & Giroux. Without a doubt FSG publishes many of the finest writers from the US and across the globe, and although it is no longer an independent house, it continues to operate like one, with a distinct and distinctive editorial approach, producing beautiful books of the highest quality. As is often the case with articles in the Times these days, the writeup by Charles McGrath functioned a bit like a combination of a gossip column, book review and a press release. In discussing Galassi's new book of poems, Left-Handed, it reveals that the subject matter of the book, a middle-aged man's ending his marriage to a woman and falling in love with a younger man, not exactly new in American or many another literary tradition, was also Galassi's personal life story.

The tone of the article, which I urge you to read, unfolds at a pitch one will find only in the Times; there is something almost prim about it, even as it vies to spill all the juicy details. It is especially interested in citing how Galassi is a member of the upper-middle-class, invoking Harvard College more than once (the Times has an obsession with my alma mater, news to no one), which is the main reason, along with Galassi's exalted position, that the Times even reported on it.  Truthfully, were he some random New York poet or even editor, and certainly were his skin brown, going through the same experiences, we wouldn't be reading about it in that newspaper. Fair enough. I immediately printed the article out and plan to show it to my LGBTQ class, along with Frank Bruni's piece on Cynthia Nixon's comments on "choosing" to be gay. And you thought we were in a "post-gay" world, did you?

So what does this have to do with my former agent? Well, lo and behold, if you read to the middle of the article, it turns out that the "younger man," who in the poetry book is named "Tom," probably was and is my former agent, and that this relationship provoked a real hubbub in the New York publishing world in 2007. How could it not? But it gets better. The former boyfriend filmmaker is now making a movie of my former agent's book too! So it will be onscreen at some point within the next few years, I gather.  And since the memoir appeared in 2010, and the affair treated in the poetry book occurred in 2007, I am wondering whether my former agent was still an addict as he was canoodling with the editor-poet? McGrath rather politely dares not go there.

We all have various bright lights crossing our horizon. For those of us who are creative, we might think that they belong in something we're creating, be it a book, a play, a film, a song. Whatever form is amenable. Often we will do so, whether we're conscious of it or not; lesser lights, and certainly family members, loved ones, you name it, enter our work in some way or fashion, and it might everyone except an astute reader or scholar who comes along years down the road.  When I try to reconcile what I recall of my former agent, a delightful but not especially wild person, I draw a blank when it comes to these later shenanigans. But he is now the subject of his own memoir, of a film, and, it seems, of a book of poems by a distinguished poet. (I am sure a novel featuring him is on the way too, by someone, and a play wouldn't be inconceivable either.) That is really something when you think of it.  Can any J's Theater readers think of another contemporary figure who has been so honored? In a book of POEMS? Also, the behavior described above would not be that unsurprising were we to be talking about many a writer throughout history.  But a literary agent? Talk about a first! At any rate, I do know that I'll be getting Mr. Galassi's book!