2006 US Senate Races

Although I found Barack Obama's candidacy last year energizing and donated to it, I haven't actively worked to elect a politician since 1992, when I volunteered for Bill Clinton's and Al Gore's campaign for the presidency and handed out fliers and signed up voters down at Boston Common. I was still in my 20s then, still somewhat idealistic, and had grown so tired of the twelve years of Republican misrule, covert war and scandal--which in retrospect appear mild compared to the disasters we've experienced in less than half that time, since 2000--that I was eager to do what I could to oust the elder Bush (HW) and get Clinton and Gore into office. I had many problems with Clinton's stances, which I found too right-leaning or shifty, as if his political compass was really a weathervane. I also had issues with Gore's past as a conservative Southern Democrat and his Puritanical crusades on pop culture (were those Gore daughters any worse for having listened to Prince? Seriously?). But I felt that both men would be far better for this country and for me than the Republican option of HW and Quayle. So I did my part, and was delighted when Clinton, in that infamous three-way race that involved the megalomaniac "reformer" H. Ross Perot, triumphed.

By 1996, I'd decided I wasn't going to waste another moment on Clinton's behalf; while I was going to vote for him (there was no way I would cast a vote for Bob Dole and Jack Kemp, both of whom would be out of touch with the Straussian neocons, Talevangelists and other kooks now guiding the rudder of the Republican Party), I found his triage-style of politics and pandering destructive to real progressivism, and I was angered that he'd failed to work with the Democratic Congress more during the short period (1992-1994) when they jointly led the country. That was truly a wasted moment. Instead, we got Gingrich's Contract Against America, and the Republicans have, to our national detriment, pretty much run the Congress ever since. (There was a brief period from May 2001 through January 2003 when the Democrats had control of the Senate because of Jim Jefford's defection.) The resulting damage from this has become increasingly clear over the last few years, as the Republican Congress has provided little to no governmental oversight and has rarely challenged the president, choosing instead to serve as the prosecutors of the Executive Branch's extreme agenda. The weak and shrinking Democratic caucuses in both houses haven't done much better, though in both cases, they have no power to initiate legislation or inquiries; in the Senate, they can block or hold up processes, while in the House, they are almost completely neutered by their lack of a majority.

After listening the other night to about two minutes of President Katrina's babble on the Iraq War, which is the same, inane crap he's been repeating since shortly after 9/11, I thought to myself, we are going to have to help the Congressional Democrats do the right thing in spite of themselves. In essence, we have no choice, since outside of Socialist-Independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, there's little chance that the Greens or Democratic Socialists or even Libertarians would be elected to federal offices as a counter against the inept AND corrupt one-party rule of the GOP. So it'll have to be the Democrats, and, despite how we might feel about their overall timidity and fecklessness, they're the only option right now. I won't be manning or handing out fliers for any, but I may try some other options to support some of the more progressive candidates who're running.

And there's a very good chance that, with enough a grassroots push and despite the worst ministrations of the DLC, voters can push the Democrats over the top, at least in the Senate, so that they're in control for 2 years at a minimum, which would mean no more Pat Roberts covering for George W, no more outrageous CAFTA or bankruptcy or Medicare bills, no more ramming of the W agenda through without a pause, no more having to wait for John McCain, a Vietnam-era prisoner of war, to take two years to get upset enough to push through a bill ending the enabling of torture by top officials. Were the Democrats in control right now, it's very likely that scary crackpots like Janice Rogers Brown would never have gotten out of committee, and John Roberts probably wouldn't be heading SCOTUS. And W would have at least one major check in place, since it looks increasingly likely that the Supreme Court is going to shift even further rightward if Miers joins it (she's no David Souter or even Anthony Kennedy, let alone Sandra Day O'Connor), and given DeLay's handiwork in redistricting Texas, which means that the GOP will have an ongoing cushion in one of the most conservative states in the country. Unless the Democrats can defeat a few more GOPers in moderate to left-leaning states like New York (where's W's popularity is at an abysmal 29%), Connecticut, California, Pennsylvania, Michigan, etc. I wouldn't count on that.

So we return to the Senate, which, if it changed hands, would provide at least means of addressing the spate of problems the W administration continues to create. One major constitutional check in the federal balance of powers would once again be in place. But the truth is, the Democrats will have to defend more seats than the Republicans. As 2004 showed, the Democrats frequently pick pathetic candidates. There was that strange-looking guy who was running against Tom Coburn, a certified nutcase (how many sane people do you know who sterilize other people AGAINST THEIR WILL and claim that "lesbianism" is rampant and call for the killing of doctors performing abortion? Oh, and defraud Medicaid?). Yes, W is very popular in Oklahoma, but that Democrat in Oklahoma just looked...off! In one of the debates I saw, he looked like he was hiding something, like he was terrified, while Coburn just looked...crazy. So guess whom the voters chose? Again, I realize that W was popular, especially in Oklahoma, and that his propaganda machine was working overtime, but I refuse to concede that had the Democrats found a better candidate, Coburn (at least) might have lost. When the Democrats actually field strong, appealing candidates, like Ken Salazar and Barack Obama, they can win. Sure, Illinois is more liberal than many states, but Obama had outpolled all the Republicans combined in the primaries, and even did well outside Chicago and its liberal suburbs before the general election, so great was his appeal. So had the Democrats found better candidates (Betty Castor? Inez Tenenbaum?), they could probably have won a few more seats and not lost so many, which basically was like writing a blank check ("capital") for W, though he's thankfully burnt it up before he could cash it.

So, factoring in that the Democrats have more seats to defend and that they field pathetic candidates far too often, they have gotten several lucky turns of late.

Democratic Incumbent Seats

South Dakota and West Virginia: Popular GOPers have decided not to run against Kent Conrad and Robert Byrd (respectively). Conrad is a moderate, but votes with the Democratic caucus more often than with the Republicans, and octogenarian Byrd, no matter what you think of his past, has served as the conscience of the Senate, frequently speaking out against the W administration's follies and faults in his inimitable, stentorian style. It's important that both be reelected, and very likely that they will. West Virginia also has a Democratic governor, just in case...well, you know.

Florida: Senator Bill Nelson appeared to be in trouble, but then Rep. Katherine Harris, the highly partisan electrix who did her part in engineering the 2000 coup, decided she wanted to move to the upper house, so now she is set to challenge Nelson, against the wishes of Republican and potential-felon marioneteer Karl Rove. Nelson is leading in head-to-head polls and Floridians are souring on W, so short of Dieboldian trickery, Nelson's chances look good so far. He's no Lawton Chiles or even Bob Graham, but he'll do.

Nebraska: the other Nelson, Ben, basically is about as conservative a Democrat as you can find in the Senate, yet he still votes with his party more than 50% of the time. Overall, his chances are shaky, and W remains popular in that state. But he won't have to run against former Sooners coach, now Rep. Tom Osborne, who is wildly popular, so he may have a chance, especially if energy prices remain high, the situation in Iraq drags on, and he runs against the man he closely defeated last time through. He really has a freaky, Republican-looking coiffure, I must add, cattily.

Other Democratic incumbent states: a number of other Democratic seats are very safe. Hillary Clinton should coast in New York, where she's registered approval ratings above 65% and faces ridiculous opponents (either Jeanine Pirro or Mr. Tricia Nixon Cox). In addition, W's popularity is at 29% and NY's Republican mayor, Mike Bloomberg, is running as if he's a Democrat (and leading handily). Jeff Bingaman has no challenger so far in New Mexico, though W barely won the state in 2004. Bingaman was supposed to be in trouble, but it turns out that he's quite popular. I can't recall ever seeing him utter a single word on TV (regular network TV, C-SPAN, "The Newshour with Jim Lehrer," any other program), so I think of him as the "Mute Senator." Does he speak when he campaigns? Debbie Stabenow, a freshperson from Michigan, is one of the most reliably liberal members of the Senate, but faces feeble opposition, and her state continues to trend Democratic, as does Washington State, where Maria Cantwellalso is up for reelection, having registered an upset defeat of Slade Gorton back in 1999. Both are assets to the Democrats. Stabenow also looks tough and doesn't appear to be someone to trifle with. Others who will have little problem include Daniel Akaka (Hawaii), Teddy Kennedy (Massachusetts), Herb Kohl (Wisconsin), Tom Carper (Delaware), Dianne Feinstein (California), and Joe Lieberman (Connecticut). Were Richard Blumenthal or some other Democrat to challenge Lieberman, I might go on leave to help her or him out. I still blame him in part for Al Gore's loss in 2000; had another Democrat been on the ticket, Gore might have won another state (Arkansas, Nevada, etc.) and the Florida debacle would have been moot.

Open Seats

Tennessee: I believe a Republican will replace Dr. Charlatan-HCA a/k/a Dr. Insider Trading a/k/a Bill Frist in Tennessee, because as optimistic as I am, I can't see the people there electing a Black person to a statewide office, even a right-wing leaning one. Maybe they'll prove me wrong, but then the highly photogenic Harold Ford Jr. actually said he "loved" W (huh?), so would worry about his being sufficiently cooperative with other Democrats. An African-American Joe Lieberman--is that what the Democrats need at this point? On the other hand, he'd probably vote with the Democrats half the time at least, so if he won, it might not be so bad. I get the impression that he feels he should pander to Republicans, so if he wins, I'd count this as a 1/2 victory (historic as it would be in other ways).

Maryland: the Democrats face a conundrum. The Republicans have nominated a Black conservative, Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, in a state whose Black population is now close to 30% and liberal-leaning. The Democrats will have a primary pitting Ben Cardin, a liberal White running against the sex scandal-plagued former Congressman Kweisi Mfume. Now, I was long a fan of Mfume's, but at he should bow out and find another place to utilize his talents. White Democratic voters are going to go for Cardin, and will be less likely to vote for Mfume even in the primary based on the harassment and nepotism allegations during his time as NAACP head. Moreover, if Mfume loses, do NOT believe the Republicans won't use this to tarnish Cardin and appeal for votes for Steele. So someone has GOT TO convince Mfume to get out of it, and campaign for Cardin. Please, Mr. Mfume, put your ego aside and don't let the GOP get any further than they need to, because Steele, if he won, would be in there for six years, and as even the moderate Republicans have shown, they enable the right-wing by putting the party and above all the President above the interests of the country.

Minnesota: the Republicans have a good, conservative candidate in Mark Kennedy, but the state has trended Democratic-progressive over the last election cycle, and W is very unpopular there, so the strongest of the Democratic candidates (Patty Wetterling, Mark Ciresi, Amy Klobuchar) should be able to prevail. I can't see W's abysmal numbers in the state and outrageous energy prices this winter helping Kennedy, either.

New Jersey: If Jon Corzine, who is one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate, wins the gubernatorial race, which has tightened because of the New Jersey Democrats' endless scandals and the relentless advertising of his robotic Republican opponent, Doug Forrester, the seat will become open, and he'd appoint his successor. Right now the leading candidate is Rep. Robert Menendez, formerly my Congressman. (I never voted for him, and instead always chose either the Green or Democratic Socialist candidates.) Though Menendez is well known to be thuggish in his politics and has a sex scandal on his hands, he would become New Jersey's first Latino Senator (he's Cuban-American), which would be a major plus in his winning the seat outright against moderate Republican Tom Kean Jr. If Corzine won and appointed Rep. Frank Pallone or some of the other New Jersey pols vying for the seat, they'd also have a good chance against Kean. Still, the toxicity out of Trenton may harm any Democrats in a state that has moved from being middle-of-the-road (as recently as the 1980s) to reliably Democratic.

Vermont: Bernie Sanders, the Socialist-Independent, lone Representative from one of the country's progressive state, faces only a token Republican challenge in this race, and the Democrats have chosen not to oppose him. So he will win, and vote regularly with the Democrats, except when they lean as a caucus to the right. As a House member he has been a powerhouse in passing bills, even with Republicans, so his legislative prowess will be of great assistance to the Democrats if they regain control. I'm most excited about his candidacy, and look forward to the day he's actually in his new position.

Republican Seats

In terms of the Republican seats that are up, several of the candidates are in serious trouble.

Pennsylvania: Rick Santorum is now behind Bob Casey Jr., a moderate Democrat (who's also unfortunately anti-abortion) by 18 points. Antediluvian in his views (according to his recent book, he is against women going to college or being independent, etc.), hypocritical, nasty, and given to outright dissimulations, Santorum's departure would be a MAJOR boost. I once saw him openly mock John Kerry on the Senate floor on C-SPAN when he was feeling his oats several years ago and have never forgotten it. The Democrats should do their damnedest--without breaking the law--to get Santorum out of the Senate. As for Casey, I've not seen a word out of him, which appears to be his strategy.

Rhode Island: Lincoln Chafee is a very liberal Republican. In fact, he probably could have changed parties two years ago and done himself and the Democrats a favor, but he didn't, and now he's in trouble. He faces a primary challenge from a more conservative (but not right-wing) candidate, former Cranston mayor Stephen Laffey, who is trailing right now. Chafee probably will win, since his family is beloved even by Rhode Island Democrats (and his late father, John Chafee, was a moderate Republican and close associate of W's father). But if Laffey won, he would then have a hard time against either of the two Democrats running, Matt Brown and Sheldon Whitehouse, since Rhode Island is one of the most liberal states in the US. If he loses to Laffey, he deserves to go, since his politics are strongly at odds with W's, yet he's enabled far too much of the mess that's occurred, including voting against an independent panel to investigate the Hurricane Katrina fiasco. Why, Chafee, why? Against Brown, who now leads Whitehouse, Chafee has a decent chance.

Ohio: Mike DeWine, a political moderate (as Republicans go), has weak poll numbers. A massive financial scandal, involving allegations of outright theft of state workers' compensation funds, money laundering, and numerous ethical lapses, has convulsed his state party, which craftily engineered W's win in 2004. I'm not sure how disgusted most Ohio voters are, but Democrat and Iraq War veteran Paul Hackett ran in an ultraconservative district earlier this year against ghoul Jean Schmidt, and nearly pulled off an upset, so DeWine had better be nervous. Hackett has announced that he's going to run for the seat, as has Democratic Congressman Sherrod Brown. Hackett is gutsy, outspoken, lively, and doesn't play. He's also gone through the crucible of a high-profile campaign. Brown I know zero about, except that he's considered to be fairly progressive and can raise money. Either one, I think, can beat DeWine, which would be a major pickup for the Democrats, who once held both seats (John Glenn and Howard Metzenbaum, etc.).

Missouri: The Show Me State once regularly sent distinguished Democrats (Harry Truman, Stuart Symington, Tom Eagleton) to Washington as its Senators, and the people of my native state even had the good sense to elect a dead person (the late Mel Carnahan, whose wife Jean briefly took his seat) over extremist John Ashcroft in 2000. Unfortunately, Missourians bought the GOP's lies and not only helped to elect W and the lackluster torture-enabler Kit Bond in 2004, but chose as their governor Matt Blunt, the son of one of the GOP Congressional delegation's major operators, Roy Blunt, who is now Majority Whip and closely tied not only to Tom DeLay, but also to scandal-virus lobbyist Jack Abramoff. More than 50% of the voters are disgusted by both Blunt, who has turned out to be an ultraconservative, and the GOP there, which has its own problems with corruption. The very smart, pro-choice, moderate woman young Blunt defeated, Claire McCaskill, is going to run against Jim Talent, the 50-year-old conservative Senator who looks like he's 12. If W's popularity doesn't rise, Missouri might show Talent right out the door, which would be a major victory. Right now their poll numbers are equal, which I take to mean that Talent may be leading but is in trouble, since he should be ahead by a comfortable margin as an incumbent Republican there. I think the election depends on the situation in Iraq, energy prices, and how the vote turns out in northern Missouri. St. Louis, St. Louis County, Kansas City, its suburban areas, and the college towns will go for the Democrats. But the state now has a large ultraconservative evangelical base centered in and around Branson, the alternate country music and entertainment capital in the far South, which used to be basically an extension of Arkansas.

Montana: In my mind, this state only elects Republicans, until I realize I am wrongly confusing it with, oh, Wyoming (even Utah has at least one Democrat in Congress because of Salt Lake City). Sorry, Montana! The Big Sky State now has a very popular and effective Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, who's folksy and swift on his feet. Once he cleans up the waste the GOP left there, he should run for President. Montana also has a Democratic majority in its statehouse. And its Republican Senator, Conrad Burns, not only is close to W, but to Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist-virus who very well may drag down Tom DeLay and other Republicans once all the investigations into his actions have finished. His opponents sound very interesting: an organic farmer named Jon Tester, the Montana State Senate Majority Leader from very conservative eastern Montana (!), or moderate DLC star and wealthy lawyer John Morrison. Methinks Tester sounds like the better choice, so people of Montana, clean house, bring Burns home, and put the Tester in the Senate!

Nevada: John Ensign is conservative and has good poll numbers. He works well with Harry Reid, the Minority Leader, and there were suggestions that they had some kind of deal in which they wouldn't campaign against each other. Reid, however, is a battler, and has said he will strongly support the new Democratic candidate, Jack Carter, an investment banker and the son of President Jimmy Carter. Once upon a time Nevada had two Democratic Senators, but the state has grown and had grown increasingly conservative. W's popularity has recently plummeted there, Bill Clinton won the state at least once as did Al Gore in 2000, and if Carter has any platform to run on beyond being humanitarian Jimmy Carter's son and not a Republican, he might actually win. This would be a major victory for the Democrats.

Arizona: Jon Kyl is one of the most conservative Senators in that body. According to Progressive Punch (whose methodology admittedly is a bit problematic), only Richard Burr (NC), Larry Craig (WY), and that horror John Cornyn (TX) were less progressive. (Keep in mind that Cornyn is more conservative than both Senators from Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Oklahoma....) I don't see him losing, but supposedly his poll numbers are awful and he has a worthy opponent in the multimillionaire Jim Pederson. Arizona has a very effective Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, who probably could defeat Kyl if she challenged him, but it looks like she'll run again to continue her successes at the state level. Maybe she can work some mojo for Pederson, because defeating Kyl would be an extraordinary coup, in that one of the president's most reliable allies would be gone.

Other Republican incumbent seats:

Liberal Republican Olympia Snowe has the highest favorability ratings (over 70%) of any member of the Senate, and will be reelected handily in Maine. If the Democrats pick up 2-5 seats, she could prove to be a major ally along with her fellow Maine Senator, Susan Collins. George Allen, whose Fred Flinstone-ish utterances never cease to make me cringe, is going to romp in Virginia. Short of committing murder he won't be voted out, though if he were, Democrats should declare a national holiday. Extreme right-winger Craig Thomas will trounce his opposition (if there is any) in Wyoming. Other Republicans set to win include Trent Lott (Mississippi), Kay Bailey Hutchinson (Texas), Dick Lugar (Indiana), and Orrin Hatch (Utah). They'll leave only on retirement or on a stretcher, whichever comes first.

Final tally:

Say the Democrats hold all their seats except the one in Nebraska, which appears to be the most in danger. (I'm praying that that Harrison woman doesn't win in Florida. Please O Lord and Lady, God, gods, spare us that horror, please! And Mfume, please don't screw up the situation in Maryland!). That would mean they'd be down to 43 seats, plus the Sanders one, giving them 44. (Right now it's 44 + Jeffords = 45). If Santorum, DeWine and Burns lost, that would give them 48, still not enough for a majority, but closer to where they were just a few years ago. If Nelson hung on and the Democrats in Missouri and Arizona could pull off upsets, that would give the Democrats a razor-thin margin of 51, which would be enough to restore prerogatives destroyed by the Republicans (like the blue slip, etc.) and pass legislation (barring filibusters, against which right-wingers are supposedly constitutionally opposed, right?) without bringing in Dick Cheney. If Ford were to win miraculously in Tennessee, that would be 52 votes, though given how conservative Nelson is and Ford would be, it's effectively 50 plus 2 extras about half the time. Also, liberal Republicans Snowe, Collins, Chafee (if he hangs on) and possibly Spector would make it 56 votes in some cases (especially if Reid conferred regularly with them). The Democrats wouldn't have enough votes to prevent filibusters, but they'd be far more empowered to launch of turnaround of the current situation.

Also, given the seniority rules, several of the most liberal and progressive senators (Kennedy, Leahy, etc.) would chair committees, which would be a GOP nightmare. Ah, fellow voters, let's make this happen, not for purposes of revenge and Schadenfreude, but because our country's survival depends on it!

Update: In Monday's Washington Post, Charles Babington and Chris Cilizza cover much of the ground in my post in their article "For GOP, Election Anxiety Mounts." They specifically focus on the criticism some on the Right have lodged against Senator Elizabeth Dole, "The Phantom," who now heads up the GOP's senatorial election committee, but her supporters lay the blame more broadly on the country's malaise, the War in Iraq, and the scandals plaguing DeLay, Frist, Rove, the White House and state Republicans. The GOP is also at a disadvantage, for a change, in fundraising. Much hinges on this election and on what happens leading up to it, so I hope to post more as the months proceed.

The Floods and the Quake

Just last month two hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, the former particularly ferocious, hit the Gulf Coast of the United States, leaving widespread destruction and dislocation in their wakes (and exposing the utter incompetence of the W regency, but that's another story). The international response, from nations and people, was immediate and tremendous.

In the last week, the aftereffects of Tropical Storm Stan have ravaged parts of the southwestern, Pacific coastal and inland regions Central America. Although the storm landed as a Category 1 (Hurricane Katrina was category 5), the subsequent rains drenched El Salvador, Mexico and Guatemala, causing widespread damage.

In Mexico, the village of Tapachula was divided into two by the floodwaters. El Salvador, which had only just experienced the effects of a volcano, has suffered more than 50 deaths from landslides. The storm triggered floods, mudslides and death in Guatemala. So far whole villages have been destroyed, and rescuers are now engaged in the process of trying to assess the human, infrastructure and financial costs. Two cities, Panabaj and Santiago Atitlán (whose morgue is pictured at left, BBC News), have suffered particularly severe destruction. Some 90 villages, however, remain inaccessible because of the mudslides, and the Guatemalan government fears that more than 1,400 people may be buried under the mire.

Just yesterday, a 7.6 earthquake struck Pakistan's Kashmir region, sending shock waves that could be felt throughout the Indian subcontinent, from Afghanistan to eastern India and China. Many thousands are thought to have died in Pakistan, particularly near the earthquake's epcenter, though two large apartment buildings in the capital also collapsed (map at left, BBC World), trapping and killing untold numbers of people. Initial reports are stating that hundreds of people have died in Indian Jammu and Kashmir, and millions of people will probably be homeless. The BBC News offers some eyewitness accounts here.

So far nations across the globe have offered aid and assistance; the US, the richest nation on earth, and a close ally of Pakistan, has promised $100,000. The EU is offering several million dollars, while China has already dispatched rescue supplies and allocated $2.6 million. Pakistan's President, General Pervez Musharraf, has made a special appeal for medicine, tents and blankets, and transportation equipment to assist in reaching isolated, mountainous regions affected by the quake.

DirectRelief International also is coordinating donations for the people and regions affected by the South Asian earthquake. I haven't seen specific information for donor organizations focusing on the regions hit by Tropical Storm Stan, but when I do I'll post them.

Poem: Ko Un

Ko Un (b. 1933) is one of South Korea's major poets, and has received international praise for the quality of his verse and for his history of political independence and resistance. One of his most significant works, Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives), an epic written during his imprisonment by the authoritarian South Korean regimes of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was published in the United States this year. The individual poems read as strongly narrative and often focus on everyday themes and folk content.

I'm not sure about the rest of his work, which may be far broader in its range and forms, but the poems in Ten Thousand Lives do interest me, as does the idea of a contemporary epic. Former US Poet Laureate and University of California-Berkeley professor Robert Hass, who wrote the introduction to the English-language selection of Ko's work, will be publishing an essay on it in an upcoming issue of the The New York Review of Books.

Here is one of Ko's poems, "Su-Dong and the Swallows":

SU-DONG AND THE SWALLOWS

Su-dong’s family is only his parents.
When they’re out at work
and he is playing, alone,
looking after the house, he gets bored.
Home alone, his only sport is idly pulling weeds,
until every year in early spring the swallows arrive.
Filling up the empty house, the swallows become his family.
As droppings fall on Su-dong’s head,
the swallows fill up the empty house.
The brood hatches, then in the twinkling of an eye,
the chicks grow up
and go their separate ways,
at which he finds himself bored again.
The yard is suddenly that much bigger.
Late in autumn the swallows,
setting off to fly fast over hills and seas,
over seas and oceans,
the swallows leaving for lands beyond the river,
for distant south seas,
gather on the neighborhood’s empty washing lines
and sit in rows, preening their breasts with their beaks
before setting off.
Looking up at them all, Su-dong feels utterly lonely.
Feeling lonely
means growing up.
‘You’re leaving now, you’ll be back next year.
Good-bye for now.’
He gives each of the swallows a name:
Chick-sun,
Chick-ku,
Cheep-sun,
Cheep-bo.

From Maninbo (Ten-thousand Lives), published by Green Integer, 2005, translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-moo Im, and Gary Gach

Thursday Quote: Alex Weheliye

I contend that the spatialities resulting from the juxtaposition of consuming sonic technologies and being consumed by them suggest specifically modern ways of be(com)ing in the world. These modes of subjectivity differ from the ones outlined in the preceding chapter as they arise from modern spatialities constituted through and magnifed by sonic technologies, rather than temporality; which is to say that while these subjectivities take place in time, the sounding spatialities of sonic Afro-modernity are what this chapter highlights more forcefully.... "Noise," as opposed to "music," disrupts the privacy of musical consumption; however, these categories are not as stable as they initial seem, since they are both heavily reliant on the perspective of the sonic consumer vis-à-vis the borders between "music" and "noise."
-Alexander G. Weheliye, from Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 107.

Wednesday Round Up

Shortly after learning of theater great August Wilson's death the other day, I subsequently learned that Nipsey Russell, a fixture on TV programs, especially game shows during the 1970s, had died from cancer at his Manhattan home at age 80. He was especially memorable in the movie version of The Wiz. What I particularly remember about Russell is his versifying; he often offered up had an inventive, catchy lyric that made me go, "Huh!" Russell, who studied English and American literature in college, was one of the important figures in a generation of late 20th century Black comics who emphasized a broader, expansive kind of humor, though, as the NY Times obit asserts, he never lost his critical edge on racial or other political and social issues.

Another RIP goes to Mãe Olga de Alaketu [do Alaketo] (at left, with Carlos Moura of Portalafro.com), who died in Salvador, Brazil, at age 80. She was one of the leading figures in the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé, a syncretic faith, based strongly on Yoruba and neighboring spiritual traditions, that arose in the state of Bahia during the long period of Brazilian slavery. Ms. Alaketu, as The NY Times obituary notes, presided over the one of the oldest temples in Salvador, the Ile Maroia Laji terreiro, established in 1636. Brazzil Magazine says that "the ialorixá [Ms. Alaketu's title] was the fifth generation of the princess Otampê Ojarô, from Ketu, in the Western Africa's Benin. Ojarô had been brought to Brazil as slave in the 18th Century." Princess Otampê Ojarô was a member of the royal family of Aro, in what is now present-day Benin, and played a central role in establishing Candomble in Brazil.

Bernie T., at Bejata, posts a heads-up about the "Slavery in New York" exhibit at the New York-Historical Society, which opens this Friday, October 7, 2005. Bernie's entry provides a fine background on the history of slavery in New York, which is usually overlooked, though it's important to note that slavery above the Mason-Dixon line, and particularly in New England, is rarely mentioned or presented in the public discourse or by the media. I do hope to catch the exhibit, and thinking about it reminds me of the second summer I was at the Cave Canem Writer's Workshops, in 2001 at Cranbrook Academy in Detroit. The Sunday (June 24, 2001) before the workshops began, the New York Times Magazine published an article on how researchers had found traces and relics of slave life, an in particular material evidence of spiritual practice, in the attic of a farmhouse (the "Lott" House) in what is now Marine Park, Brooklyn; many people who lived right near the building had no idea that slaves had been kept there, or even of Brooklyn's, Long Island's, and New York's long slave history. My first short piece based on this news, "Passage I," reads:

In the forgotten
attic crawlspace
of the abandoned

Brooklyn
farmhouse
where even mice

no longer
linger spirits
summon signs

from neckbones beads
a corncob
star still

burns

As I discussed with my grad students in our conversation on Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, the author's invocation and interweaving of the story of the Jewish Diaspora (in the figure of Tituba's putative owner and husband, Benjamin Cohen D'Azevedo), has particularly relevance for New York City, as both Jews and free and enslaved Blacks settled and established plots in what is now Greenwich Village during the New Amsterdam period, which followed the Dutch expulsion from the Brazilian state of Pernambuco in 1650 or so. New York has always been a cultural stew!

Emperor W, whose abysmal approval ratings finally match the horrible job he's done ("It's hard work!") over the last five years, has nominated yet another enigma to replace Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the United States Supreme Court. The 60-year-old Harriet Miers, who replaced torture-enabler Alberto Gonzales and now serves as White House Chief Council, is W's choice, apparently enraging ultraconservative nutcases who wanted W to select from the increasing kitty of right-wing jurists who believe that interpretation of the Constitution stops at the limits of what its authors, in their day (which included limited franchise, slavery, etc.) believed and felt. Miers, a Texas native and legal pioneer, was reared Roman Catholic, but after a spiritual crisis in 1979, was reborn as evangelical Christian. This did not prevent her, however, from donating $1,000 to Al Gore Jr. and Lloyd Bentsen (remember him!) and to the Democratic National Committee over W's father in 1988, or from meeting with a Dallas gay rights group and stating unequivocally on a questionnaire that she supported equal rights for LGBT people when she was running for the Dallas City Council in 1989. Yet conversely she did not believe that gay sex should be decriminalized; she also did and does not believe in a woman's right to choose to have an abortion. She also once called W. "the most brilliant man" she knew, helped to clean up his National Guard AWOL scandal, and handed him the infamous PDB stating that Osama bin Laden was "determined to strike" in the US. None of which speaks well for her judgment, but all of which testifies to her very close links to W, which is, as has become clear, all that matters for him. ("Brownie, you're doin' a heckuva job!") Interestingly, according to AmericaBlog, there was similar conservative disappointment about Raygun's selection of O'Connor, who actually voted from the right for years. Miers undoubtedly is very conservative, perhaps a little less so than newly seated Chief Justice John Roberts; so unless Clarence Thomas, who is now as big as Mt. Kilimanjaro, or Antonin Scalia keels over, we may be stuck with a very right-leaning court for at least a decade or more to come.

On a completely different tip, Rod 2.0 has a funny piece on actor Vin Diesel (at right, courtesy of iballer.com) who has caught Dominican fever, tinged, it seems, with a touch of American divadom. According to Dominican Today, after a young woman (really?) whom longtime bachelor Diesel had befriended refused to accompany him to his hotel room, he had her barred from setting foot in the Santo Domingo club, Praia, where they met up. The account is a bit jumbled (were they inside or outside the club--they were "on" their car? Huh?). Really, who knows how true this account is? But what is clear is that Diesel is planning to film part of a story about a Dominican immigrant, The Godfather (Vin, please find a more original name for your movie, okay?--and maybe cast Amaury Nolasco, Victor Rasuk, Judy Marte, and Zoe Saldana, who are Dominican(-American), in starring roles?) to the US in DR, has met with the president of the country, Leonel Fernández Reyna, and supposedly has been spotting riding his motorbike along the waterfront (where? Please don't say Boca Chica...). OK. As the newspaper article states in rather curious (unintentionally or intentionally ironic?) English, "During the past weeks, Diesel has been seen in the most diverse of entertainment places, and has announced his intention to undertake a series of projects in the country," and "Diesel is a recurring visitor to the country, that goes around from disco to disco in the company of his security detail and certain local businessmen." Hmmm.....

Finally, also via AmericaBlog, there's this hilarious post by Andy Goldman of Radar Online, who actually decided to...buy International Male outfits and bravely wear them in public. It made me laugh so much I started crying--you absolutely cannot miss his trips, in opulent finery, to the Four seasons, his jaunt in a candy-colored suit to Yankee Stadium, his wearing of a cape to a Chelsea gay bar, where he was treated as if he radioactive, and...well, here's one excerpt from his turn as "Count F*ckula":

With a huge knot in the pit of my stomach I steel myself and walk through the doors of Giorgio Armani’s Madison Avenue store. From a back corner a mysterious hooting wail pierces the sleek Italian silence. I adopt the bearing of the count I am dressed as, hold my head high, and rush upstairs to the men’s department.

Back in they day (the 1980s), I knew of more than a few people who tooled around in IM garb. I even once thought of buying a pair of their pants ("slacks"?), which were peg-legged, but then realized I couldn't afford them and just broke out the needle and thread myself. But in 2005? If there is a place where lots of men currently traipse around in their gear, I want to see these folks with my own eyes, and cheer them on (I'm not being sarcastic.) Especially the puffy shirt and that cape!

MLB Playoffs

Tonight at a welcome gathering for new and current graduate students of color at the university, I asked a young man why he and others, when introducing themselves and their native cities, yelled out "Lakers" in response to the New Yorkers' and Chicagoan's cheers for the Yankees and White Sox respectively.

"What about the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim?" I asked, invoking the southern California franchise that was now in the playoffs.

"Nobody in LA cares about baseball," he answered me, with polite abruptness.

The poor Angels, no mojo, no love. And I still can't wrap my mind around that name; I actually saw them battle as the California Angels against the overhyped, overpraised Boston Red Sox, in the playoffs at Fenway Park, in 1986. Not being a violent person or someone who invites violence upon himself, I quietly rooted against the Boston team in its home park. (Mike Witt mercifully beat future Hall of Famer Roger Clemens that night, but Boston went on to win the pennant and then lost to the Mets in 7 games)

So what gives with this year's playoffs?

AMERICAN LEAGUE

New York Yankees vs. Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim

Yep, they're baaaaaaaaack! The Yankees won the division title by tiebreaker after trailing Boston (and falling below second place at one point) almost the entire season. They have one of the most impressive batteries in either league, led by MVP candidate and pretty boy Alex Rodríguez (A-Rod, gracing at right), longtime captain Derek Jeter, hot sulker Gary Sheffield, handyman Hideki Matsui, semi-rehabilited admitted roider Jason Giambi, and charming rookie Robinson Canó. Their pitching faltered for half the season, but they have future Hall of Famer Randy Johnson leading the corps and reliable Mike Mussina also commanding the mound. Two mid-season acquisitions, Shawn Chacón (from Colorado), and minor leaguer Aaron Small (who went 10-0!), pushed the Yankees over the top, and though neither has post-season experience, they are in very good hands. A fifth pitcher, Jaret Wright, wasn't so bad either, and former Mets star Al Leiter is also now on staff. The Yankees also have one of the best closers in baseball, Mariano Rivera, and good middle-relief, so they're well set to wallop the Angels and get to the next round quickly.

The Lost Anaheim...the Lost Angels of...Los Angelheimers...the Angels, let's leave it at that. The Angels also have a great lineup, led by MVP candidate Vladimir Guerrero, Garrett Anderson, Darren Erstad, former Red Sox Orlando Cabrera, Adam Kennedy, and second year basestealer Chone Figgins. They finished with the exact same record as the Yankees, 95-67, though in a weaker, smaller division. Though they popped the Yankees in the 2002 playoffs, they simply don't have the starting pitching or the lineup to match the Bronx Bombers this year. Only starter Bartolo Colón won more than 14 games, and is a candidate for the Cy Young (with a 21-8 win-loss record and 3.48 ERA), but Colón is nobody's ace. The Angels do have very good middle relief, and a superb closer in Francisco Rodríguez, who first came to national attention in the Angels' 2002 World Series victory, and racked up 45 saves this year with a 2.67 ERA and 91 Ks in 67.1 innings.

The undeniable fact is that the Yankees haven't won the Series since 2000, and they have a pardoned-but-once-convicted-felon madman as owner always breathing down their neck, an issue the Angels--no other team, for that matter--don't have to deal with. "Every Angel is terrifying," Rilke wrote. But not these, so I give the edge to the Yankees.

Yankees in five games.

Boston Red Sox vs. Chicago White Sox

Oh, the Red Sox, the Red Sox! Last year by trouncing the Cardinals they broke their stupid curse, and got a film starring Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon, songs, Lord knows what else out of it! Spare the rest of the world, please! (I also think the bad karma led to Kerry's loss against the Dictator, but that may be stretching it.) I was praying--about as close as I come to it--for Cleveland not to collapse, so I wouldn't have to hear the Red Sox' name bandied about for even a few more weeks, but it wasn't to be. They have a fiercesome lineup, that I don't feel like mentioning except for Big Papi David Ortiz, another MVP candidate who slammed 47 home runs and a league-leading 148 RBIs, and the cute and dreadlocked Manny Ramírez (al derecho), who yet again proved his indispensibility by hitting 45 HRs and driving in 144 RBIs. And to think that Boston's owners seriously considered getting rid of this man! They let Pedro Martínez go (as they did Mo Vaughn, Roger Clemens, Carlton Fisk, etc.), which should have produced enough ill will to sink them, but no, it wasn't to be; they're here. Their pitching is decent, even without Pedro and Darren Lowe, who was shipped out west, but it's no match for Chicago's. Plus, the more they win, the more we'll have to see that bloated right-wing blowhard Curt Schilling. He makes me want to retch. All of which is to say, please, Chicago White Sox, do us all a favor, and send them back to Boston as soon as possible!

Now, as for the Chicago White Sox: they labor in the Southside shadow of the yuppie-beloved, endlessly disappointing (if you care), losing team that plays in Wrigley Field, on the Northside (Wrigleyville). The White Sox have an ignominious history (the Black Sox scandal) that they've never lived down. They have a doofus for an owner. They hired a cute, speech-challenged homophobe as manager. And they basically could not hit a ball out of the infield after the All Star break and were on the verge of being the first team ever--or something like that--to be up by 15 games and then fall out of contention. What kept them in the running was their outstanding starting pitching, which no team can ever have enough of. Starters Mark Buehrle and Jon Garland were the first half leaders, steadily winning and allowing very few earned runs game after game, and José Contreras, an enigma whom the Yankees let go and who I'm convinced is about 10 years older than his stated age (34? oh come on!), pitched like Jim Palmer down the stretch. In fact, Contreras, who started the season in mediocrity, finished with a 15-7 record, winning his final eight starts. Freddy García, the third original starter, was iffy at times, and El Duque (Orlando Hernández), the ageless, oft-injured mound magician from Cuba, factored much less into the White Sox's success, though a healthy and sharp Garcia may be required to get past Boston and win the pennant, especially if the White Sox's bats remain atrophied. (They came alive tonight in a 14-2 win.) Since the Team from Boston won the Series last year, the two teams from Chitown have gone the longest without a world championship, but I don't think this is going to be Chicago's year--if they make it that far. Just beat the Red Sox, though. That's all I ask.

White Sox over Red Sox in five games.

NATIONAL LEAGUE

St. Louis Cardinals vs. San Diego Padres

In 1982, my classmates and I watched jubilantly as the Cardinals, with a slap-hitting lineup and average starting pitching, beat the Milwaukee Brewers and win the World Series. They had one of the best managers of all time, Whitey Herzog, who could manufacture runs out of bubble gum and birthday wishes. Under his tenure they returned to the Series twice, in 1985 and 1987, each time with unintimidating lineups but incredible heart. They did not win in either return, but they came very close and Herzog showed that anything was possible. The Cardinals now have the second-winningest manager in MLB history, Tony LaRussa, who has taken them to the post-season repeatedly since he became their manager, but who's never won it all. Not once. LaRussa's questionable moves are legendary, and I think the man is a walking liability, though others construe this as genius. (The St. Louis Rams have a similarly infuriating, seemingly incompetent but occasionally dazzling coach, Mike Martz.) Despite LaRussa's managerial faults, the Cardinals' lineup is good enough to win it all this year. I'm saying that with a bit of bubble gum and a birthday wish tossed in for good measure.

The Cardinals, who won 100 games for the second straight year, had the National League's best starting staff, with Chris Carpenter (21-5, 2.83 ERA, 213Ks, at right), Mark Mulder (16-8), Matt Morris (14-10), Jeff Suppan (16-10), and Jason Marquis (13-14) producing the most quality starts of any team. Carpenter in fact had a 22-game stretch of starts with at least 6 innings in which he allowed no more than 3 earned runs (from May 12-Sep. 8), the best such streak since 1920 (and this includes outstanding seasons by the likes of Gomez, Koufax, Gibson, Drysdale, Hunter, Palmer, Carlton, Valenzuela, Gooden, Clemens, Johnson, etc.), but fell apart, as did Mulder, Morris and Marquis, at the end of the season. Morris, in fact, was so bad that he went 4-9 after a 10-1 start! But supposedly all is well, Carpenter's arm is okay, he pitched six shutout innings this afternoon, Mulder, a sharp lefthander, also is supposedly to be back on track, Suppan has improved since early September, and Marquis (who can hit like Rod Carew) had five good starts before his Oct. 1 debacle, so Morris, I think, is the main liability. Which means that LaRussa, in his infinite wisdom, is starting Morris (and not Suppan) third! Their relief corps is problematic, so the starters have to show up with game.

On the batting side, the Cardinals suffered numerous injuries throughout the season, and lost the production of third baseman Scott Rolen, who went MIA in the playoffs. Outfielders Reggie Sanders and future Hall of Famer Larry Walker also were injured for stretches. They still had and have leading MVP candidate Albert Pujols (.330, 42 HRs, 117 RBIs, 129 runs), Jim Edmonds (whose average dropped dramatically this year, though he hit 29 HRs), and sparkplugs David Eckstein and Mark Grudzielanek. Rookie catcher Yadier Molina played very well, as did substitute baseman Abrahám Núñez, but outside of Pujols and Edmonds, and Sanders before he suffered a broken leg, the Cardinals' bats were solid but not outstanding. It'll have to come down to pitching, then, and timely hits, which I hope they can scare this year. Last year in Boston....

The Padres mustered an 82-80 record, which should have sent them home to the sun-bathed shores of the Pacific, except they were in a division so weak that they finished first. At one point, they were even in first place while lacking a .500 winning percentage. Even with so little to recommend them, they beat the Cardinals 4 games to 3 in the season series, and don't give up. But they might as well in this series, since they've lost their best pitcher to a fractured rib (which he got in a pile-on after the team realized it'd won the division--guys, you're grown millionaires, don't you know better?), and the lineup isn't that dangerous either. After Ryan Klesko, Brian Giles and Khalil Greene....

The Cardinals in four.

The Atlanta [Braves] vs. The Houston Astros

Atlanta has won 14 straight division titles in a row. They're formerly-owned-by-Ted Turner engine that can. Once upon a time the keys to that engine were Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz, who will have plaques and ceremonies in Cooperstown within the next decade. Greg Maddux is now finishing his career with the team he broke into the majors with, the Chicago Cubs. Tom Glavine is now a Met. Only John Smoltz remains. Still, the Atls, with their skillful manager, Bobby Cox, who just smiles and says very little, and their determined victory machine, keep on winning. But...they have only won the World Series ONCE in those fourteen years. Oops!

They do have a great lineup, powered by MVP candidate Andruw "Thickness" Jones, the pride of Curaçao, who hit 51 homers and drove in 128 runs, rebounding from a lackluster 2004 season. Alongside him are a mix of established players like Chipper Jones, Marcus Giles, and Rafael Furcal, and terrific rookies like Adam LaRoche, Wilson Betemit and Jeff Francoeur. On the pitching side, alongside Smoltz, a real talent has emerged in young Dominican Jorge Sosa (above right), who went 13-3, while former Oakland starter Tim Hudson has pitched well too. This Atlanta team also played in the toughest NL division, so they have been tested.

Their opponents are the Houston Astros, a team that initially was in a tailspin, but after the midway mark started to turn things around. The major reason behind their resurgence was the pitching, without which it's almost impossible to win in the playoffs. The most noteworthy Astro was Roger Clemens, who was supposed to have retired two years ago after a "final" outstanding season as a Yankee, but came back with Houston, went 18-4 with a 2.98 ERA and 218 Ks, and won his seventh Cy Young award. This year, he was even better, despite his pitiful 13-8 win-loss record. Twice in the season, Clemens went five starts without a win despite performances that would have resulted a 10-o record on most other teams (cf. Matt Morris), and he gave up 4 or more earned runs only three times in 32 starts. His earned run average was a MLB best 1.87, and opponents batted only .198 against him. Andy Pettitte, who was the Yankees' other reliable winner for nearly a decade (1995-2003), switched to the Astros after being treated with indifference by Steinbrenner, then had a down year in 2004. This year, he was one of the best pitchers after the All Star break and rose to his old form, going 17-9 with a 2.39 ERA. The third member of the Astros' outstanding staff was Roy Oswalt, consistently excellent for Houston year and year out. He went 20-10, with a 2.94 ERA, and 184Ks. All three will be extremely important if Houston is to advance, because the hitters this season were a bit off. Not bad (Morgan Ensberg hit 32 home runs, Craig Biggio and Jason Lane each hit 26; Lance Berkman nearly broke .300, while driving in 82 runs, etc.), but not up to their standard of recent years. But then with Clemens, Pettitte and Oswalt pitching the way they have, do you need a lot of hits? Houston better hope the answer is no, and Atlanta had better hope that...well, Clemens only won 13, Pettitte 17, and Oswalt lost 10, so there is a way to beat or neutralize them. Bobby Cox, run those charts!

A tough one, but I say Houston in 5.

I'm not predicting the ALCS and NLCS winners yet. I want to get through this round first.

The Nobel Prize in Literature (Updated)

This week marks the start of the Nobel Prize season. I used to be extremely fascinated by the Nobel Prizes when I was younger, and always wondered what the winners in the various categories--physiology or medicine, chemistry, physics, literature, peace, and economics--had achieved to earn such a prestigious honor, and though my fascination has waned, residual interest in the Prizes overall persists. For example, today's winners for the Physiology or Medicine Prize discovered helicobacter pylori, the corkscrew-like bacterium that is the chief co-factor in stomach and intestinal ulcers. Some years ago, after I'd first read about their discovery in the newspaper and then a few days later in a magazine, I asked my mother, who was suffering from an ulcer and who works in the medical field, if she'd heard about the new treatment. She hadn't, but proposed it to her doctor, and she was soon cured of her ulcer. I thought it was such a simple, but revolutionary discovery, and testimony to what scientic inquiry, at its best, can achieve. Yet over the years, and increasingly in the last fifteen years, I've found that the chemistry and physics discoveries were, after the blurb and a paragraph or so of description, often too complex, sometimes verging on incomprehensible. (The femtochemistry discovery, however, still impresses me, and I wonder how long it'll be till the professor at Harvard who slowed light particles down until they were still will win the prize.) I've also tended to care less about the peace and economics prizes; the former often is awarded for what turn out to be chimeras and utopian efforts that, unfortunately fail (or go to the likes of Mother Teresa), while the other has most frequently gone to brilliant people who have no sense of how human beings behave--except as variables in rarefied mathematical models. James Tobin and Amartya Sen are notable exceptions who come swiftly to mind. I also distinctly recall my surprise in ninth grade at seeing in the local paper that a Black person--Sir Arthur Lewis, a St. Lucian--was a co-winner of the economics prize and taught at Princeton University. I don't think I believed that one even after reading it several times.

I was and am most interested in the Nobel Prizes for Literature. For much of my youth, I associated the Nobel Prize in Literature with "greatness"--it was the ultimate mark of it. But quickly I came to recognize that most of the greatest writers out there, especially non-Europeans, did not and would not win the prize, and that some of the winners (René Sully Prudhomme, Verner von Heidenstamm, Pearl S. Buck, Roger Martin du Gard, etc.--who? exactly!) weren't as interesting or accomplished--good--in any way, as writers that were generally considered to be "bad" or "mediocre." The Good Earth? Please. I also saw that some writers, like John Steinbeck and John Galsworthy, had fallen out of critical favor or had written some books that really weren't that good--though Steinbeck produced several masterpieces that continue to hold up. I also learned about the source of Nobel's wealth--talk about disillusionment!

Still, back then when I thought of the Nobel Prize in Literature, I envisioned the texts I'd read by and images of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Eugene O'Neill, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Hermann Hesse, Luigi Pirandello, Pablo Neruda, Eugenio Montale, André Gide, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, George Bernard Shaw, St.-John Perse, etc.. Most of these male figures were also the ones extolled as "geniuses" throughout my education; Eliot's "The Waste Land" was the paradigmatic avant-garde poem, his "Four Quartets" the signature testament of a return to faith; Yeats was one of the most passionate and lyrically inventive figures ever to grace English-language poetry, and he got his second wind!; Faulkner and Hemingway were the stylistic poles around which every American writer had to navigate, and so on. The colonized mind....

But there were those "great" writers who'd never won a Nobel Prize, but who'd lived at least long enough to have gotten one, so what had happened? Why was there no award to James Joyce (how was this possible?), to Kafka, to Proust, to Woolf, to Henry James, to Valéry, to Brecht, to Cather, to Conrad, to Langston Hughes, to Cavafy, to Vallejo, to Roque Dalton...in fact, up till my teen years, only a few non-White, non-European writers had ever won the Nobel Prize: Neruda, of course, and Miguel Angel Asturias, and Gabriela Mistral, all Latin Americans, as well as the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata (at left), whose startlingly spare and remarkably condensed work, which at its best still holds up, became a passion of mine for a short while. (I didn't know anything about the political or sexual orientations of writers, but Yeats appeared to have fascistic leanings, while Eliot's work was evidently extremely conservative. Gide, I fathomed, was the only openly homosexual--or quasi-homosexual--figure among the bunch; I hadn't yet learned about Mann's ephebophilic passions, Eliot's youthful queer and racialist fantasies....)

I think it was around the time I graduated from high school that the Nobel Prize winners really started to interest me. One year (1982?) Gabriel García Márquez, whom we'd recently read in one of my English classes, won, and he was under 60 years old. Then William Golding, whom we'd also read--The Lord of Flies; do junior high school English classes still assign that book?--received the prize. I felt like I knew these people--I certainly knew their work, and it was contemporary (unlike Eliot's, or Hemingway's, or Yeats's). Then, when I was in college, lo and behold, an African writer received the Nobel Prize! A sub-Saharan African--from Nigeria, Wole Soyinka! And while I'd never seen any of his plays, I'd actually found a book of his hermetic, stunning prison poems in the library, and was so giddy I ran around with it for weeks. After Soyinka, it seemed like a sea-change had taken place--there was Naguib Mafouz of Egypt (1988); Octavio Paz of Mexico (at right) (1990), whom I'd actually seen speak and read his work; Nadine Gordimer, another African writer, whose work I'd found in a used bookstore; and then, in 1992, the Mack himself, Derek Walcott, whom the Dark Room had actually convinced to read, for no money, at the house on Inman Street, just a few years before!

None of these picks was as astonishing or marvelous, I thought, as the one the next year: Toni Morrison. I remember being choked up when I heard that this woman, whose work I'd first come across as a child, who was from a small town in Ohio and went to Howard University, who'd written what I'd come to think was one of the finest novels in American literature (The Song of Solomon) and another that left me speechless at its brilliance (Beloved), a Black American woman who was still alive and still writing and one of my heroes and models--and a hero to almost every writer I knew; and who'd gotten my friend Eric canned when he pressed her for her autograph, on my behalf, just a few years earlier--who was so fierce that she reduced a querulous young woman to tears the night she, Morrison, received an award from the Unitarian-Universalists in Cambridge, whom I'd drawn a picture of and presented it to (does she still have it?), a writer who appeared to raise the hackles of male and non-Black critics with equal frequency--she'd just been awarded the Nobel Prize. It almost seemed unreal. And then, when the pettiness and nastiness of her harshest critics burbled up--"Maybe now she'll learn to write" (Charles Johnson)--it was clear what an achievement her honor really was. She'd won the Nobel Prize! This to me represented the high point of the Nobel committee's efforts. Yes, extraordinary writers before and since have won, writers who've produced more than Morrison, a lot more--how many novels did Halldor Laxness actually publish?--but this was, I thought, a daring choice. And the committee followed it up with several more: Japan's Kenzaburo Oe, who essentially writes variations on the same novel, about his mentally challenged son; Dario Fo, a left-leaning provocateur whose work really doesn't seem to be that great; Gao Xinjian, an obscure Chinese writer living in Paris (when there was the far better known and praised Bei Dao already living in exile in the west); José Saramago, the dazzling Portuguese Communist spinner of metaphysically profound yarns; and last year's winner, with her sexually provocative and formally disruptive texts, Elfriede Jelinek (below). Her novel The Piano Teacher, which I used to see sitting on store shelves for years, untouched, is even more disturbing than the film. Some of the choices have been less surprising: Seamus Heaney, a longtime canonical poet; the plaintive, plangent Polish lyricist Wislawa Szymborska; J. M. Coetzee, whose work up to the raw utterly strange and remarkable Elizabeth Costello struck me as Nobel-resuméish; V.S. Naipaul about whom I'll pass over in silence; and Günter Grass, who was going to win it if he lived long enough. (Jorge Luis Borges's politics, I gathered, kept a Nobel out of his hands, yet the Argentinian right, including the dictatorship, held him in abeyance as well.)

Though I have a much clearer picture these days of the national and international literary world, how people get published or not, how reputations are made (or not)--how the literary system works globally, and exceeds mere aesthetic considerations--I still believe the Nobel Prize is a significant award, and also feel that every writer who wants her or his work to last--and there are other reasons for writing too, which a writer may consider more important, like topicality, or advocacy, or play, etc.--should strive for the stars, push her or his work as far as it will go, even to the risk of failure--and then beyond--as if the Nobel Prize, or some exalted target of excellence, were the goal. I also have read several different books about the history and awards processes of the Nobel Prizes in literature; each of the works broke down the various political and ideological battles, prudery, and other shenanigans that have resulted in some of the bizarre choices, or non-choices, such as the one that kept Tolstoy from winning a prize while a mediocrity like Prudhomme was honored. A more recent book by a Swedish author and articles in the last few years have explored in detail the aesthetic and political bent, quirks and leanings of the members of the Swedish Academy, as well as the nomination and award system, which resulted in certain writers being overlooked completely, while others--Jaroslav Seifert???--were lauded. So I'm quite aware that objectivity isn't really operative (or possible), and that many exceptional writers, for a variety of reasons, may not be honored.

For the last few years, nevertheless, Reggie H. and I have tossed out our choices and expected winners--who we realize won't coincide--and usually the Swedish Academy has chosen someone else. Realizing that my bias tends towards American and English-language writers, and writers from the African Diaspora, whose work I know best, I still believe that top choices should be, based on the innovation, sustained excellence, and literary, cultural and aesthetic significance and impact of their work: Wilson Harris [at bottom] (Britain/Guyana), Jay Wright (US), Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe/US), John Ashbery (US), Adonis (Syria/Palestine), Assia Djébar (Algeria/US), Hélène Cixous (Algeria/France), Nuruddin Farah (Somalia), Juan Goytisolo (Spain/France), Duong Thu Huong (Vietnam), Alexander Kluge (Germany), Javier Marías (Spain), Harold Pinter (UK), Haruki Murakami (Japan), Luisa Valenzuela (Argentina), Adrienne Rich (USA), Ngugi (Kenya/US), Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua (Israel); Milan Kundera (Czech Rep./France), E. L. Doctorow (US), and Femi Osofisan (Nigeria). Two candidates who probably would have strongly been in the running are no longer eligible--August Wilson; Israeli Yehuda Amichai; German-British writer W. G. Sebald; and Chilean Roberto Bolaño, who passed away a few years ago. I also think it's tougher for poets, and other than Osofisan, I know very little about international dramatic arts, so there may be some very important playwrights I've totally overlooked. I haven't tossed this list of my usual suspects to Reggie H.; I imagine he agrees with some and not with others.

Taking into account the fact that often the Nobel committee follows a round-robin pattern with genres and continents, but prefers writers with centrist-to-leftist viewpoints, a few writers who probably are more likely to have the award bestowed upon them include David Malouf (Australia), who is one of the most highly regarded novelists in his country, a Booker Prize recipient, and winner of the Neustadt Prize for Literature a few years ago, which has gone to several Nobelists in advance of the Swedish prize; Les Murray, also of Australia; Carlos Fuentes, with whom I took a course in college, and whose work has always existed in the shadow of García Márquez's; Marías; Tom Stoppard and Ian McEwan, of Britain; Tomás Tranströmer, of Sweden; novelist Nélida Piñon of Brazil; French poet Yves Bonnefoy; poet Okot p'Bitek of Uganda; Israeli Yoel Hofmann; Roberto Sosa of Honduras; Caryl Phillips, of St. Kitts, the UK, and the US; Mavis Gallant of Canada and France; Alvaro Mutis of Colombia; Homero Aridjis of Mexico; Brazilian Adélia Prado (at right); late Cuban poet Heberto Padilla; Pramoedya Ananta Toer of Indonesia; and Muriel Spark, of Britain. Less likely is American Philip Roth, who, simply because he's American, will probably not win, especially given the horrorshow we have passing for a government, though one exposé a few years actually mentioned Roth as a favorite of one of the chief judges. And he is an extraordinary writer, of capacious skill and accomplishment. To have written one or two of his best books is a lifetime's achievement, but to have penned Portnoy's Complaint; Goodbye, Columbus; Operation Shylock; Sabbath's Theater; American Pastoral; and The Human Stain is beyond amazing, and one of the reasons he's the most highly decorated living fictionist in the US.

But who knows what the Swedish Academy has decided? The end of this week or early next will provide the answer.

***
UPDATE: According to an article I just came across (but which others probably have already seen) on Yahoo! News, "Nobel Literature Prize Date in Limbo," by AP writer Matt Moore, the Swedish Academy has decided to postpone its announcement of this year's laureate from Thursday, October 6, to the following Thursday, October 13.

Moore says that the postponement has led to speculation that the 18-member Swedish Academy, whose board includes noted poet Kjell Espmark, "may be locked in fierce debate as to who should take home this year's prize, which includes a $1.3 million prize, a gold medal and a diploma, along with a guaranteed boost in sales." Oh, the drama!

Moore's article also suggests that the leading candidates are Americans Joyce Carol Oates (why?) and Philip Roth, Canadian Margaret Atwood, and Somalian Nuruddin Farah. Other writers considered strong favorites are Syrian/Palestinian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said), mentioned above; Korean poet Ko Un; and Swede Tomas Tranströmer. Of this august group, Atwood, Farah, Roth, or Adonis would be my choices. Oates?

August Wilson, 1945-2005

In memory of August Wilson, b. 1945, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - d. 2005, Seattle, Washington

"I'm trying to take culture and put it onstage, demonstrate it is capable of sustaining you. There is no idea that can't be contained by life: Asian life, European life, certainly black life. My plays are about love, honor, duty, betrayal - things humans have written about since the beginning of time."--August Wilson


(Photo: Bob Donaldson - Post-Gazette)

Cronenberg's A History of Violence

Tonight we went to see David Cronenberg's newest film, A History of Violence. Based on John Wagner's and Vince Locke's 1997 graphic novel and adapted by Josh Olson, the movie has received praise in various quarters, including some rapturous encomiums in the New York Times, onNPR, and elsewhere, and was even nominated for the Golden Palm award at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

The film stars Viggo Mortensen as Tom Stall, a Midwestern small-town diner owner who's married to an attractive and very loving lawyer, Edie (Maria Bello). They have two children, a wimpy, witty teenage son (Ashton Holmes) and an annoyingly darling young daughter (Heidi Hayes). After two itinerant robbers happen upon Stall's diner, he heroically kills them both and saves his waitress, cook, and two diners, which provokes national acclaim, as well as the notice of a band of Irish-American mobsters from Philadelphia (led by a one and half-eyed Ed Harris), who arrive in town to settle what they claim are old scores. In fact, they claim that Tom Stall isn't really who he appears to be at all; they say he's really Joey Cusack, highly-skilled and proficient killer who went on the lam years ago. I won't spoil the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it, but I will say that while it excels in some areas--especially in William Hurt's marvelous but far too short performance near the end of the film--it is quite predictable overall, extremely violent (to the point of being lurid, though I ultimately think the gore is necessary), and doesn't provide the payoff that all the hype around it portends.

In fact, I would suggest that people who haven't seen it ignore the rhapsodies and take it on its own terms. Its greatest strength, I believe, is as a cinematic example of dramatic irony, verging on parody at times, that might simultaneously have you bursting into laughter at the ridiculousness and patness of the iconography and mythmaking even as the violence horrifies and unsettles you. In this regard, I thought as we were exiting the theater of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, which works a similarly disturbing vein, though the older film is much sharper, more perverse and pushes the irony much farther; Lynch's portrait is more explicit and acute in its view of the dark underside of American life. Yet another film that came to mind was American Beauty, though that over-praised movie is far more concerned with class relations--or the standard upper-middle-class reading of class relations--and sexual repression than Cronenberg's.

Indeed, in Cronenberg's film, it's sometimes hard to tell exactly how he wants us to read the irony, and react. He intends, I believe, for the candy-coated scenarios and portrayals and soundtrack to weave together an idealized tapestry of visual and dramatic clichés (sometimes to the point of hilarity), and yet the sheer ruthlessness of the violence and the near-explicit sex scenes points us in another direction, a counter-ideal. This is the barely suppressed id of American life, the roiling, volcanic unconscious that erupts after a fashion, lurking behind pruned hedges and locked doors and handsome, placid, "All-American" faces like Stall's. In those blue eyes, storms are constantly building, Cronenberg appears to say. In this film, there were no dark "Others"; the rage and brutality resided in the almost all-White main characters. One thing I did find novel: the mobsters for once weren't Italian (which made me immediately think of Boston's wiley arch-criminal Whity Bulger and the Irish mob, which plays a role here; in fact, that city plays a mention in the plot).

I did wish, however, after leaving the film, that filmmakers would portray Americans as we really are: for example, where are the heavyset, overworked and underpaid or underworked and underpaid, working-class and poor, average-looking people--of all races--who predominate in the sorts of towns in which A History of Violence is set? Do filmmakers think Americans wouldn't go see movies about them (us/our[true]selves)? Would the foreign audiences, who constitute an increasing share of the take, also not buy such films? I wonder, and I wish more filmmakers would take the challenge.

Still, I found the surface-depth dialectic interesting enough, and recommend the film, though I don't think it's as well done as In the Bedroom, Blue Velvet or American Beauty (a film I disliked), or even Cronenberg's truly bizarre and unforgettable Crash. It is certainly far better--far more truthful--than Paul Haggis's utter car-wreck of a Crash of earlier this year at plumbing one aspect of American life. Perhaps other filmmakers will dare themselves to go even further.