Obamaphobia + Sarko Wins

I originally wrote a longish post about what might be termed Obamaphobia, prompted by this Digby entry about Senator Barack Obama (at left, photo by Michael Moore--Keene Sentinel via AP), and naturally Firefox froze and the whole entry vanished. The old Blogger, now consigned to defunct servers somewhere, used to have a restorative button, but Google's version, which temporarily disappeared my blog last year, as some J's Theater readers will recall, does not, or at least I'm not aware of it. I know I should periodically save entries as drafts, or maybe type them out in Word or another program--though the hyperlinks don't transfer properly--before posting, and I have periodically done this, but the usual result is that I don't ever complete those posts!

So perhaps I can reconstruct it at a bit....

I began by pointing out, as Digby does, citing Dave Neiwert, that CBS.com has had to shut down its comments section on articles about Obama because of the toxic sludge of racism that has burst forth:

Today CBSNews.com informed its staff via email that they should no longer enable comments on stories about presidential candidate Barack Obama. The reason for the new policy, according to the email, is that stories about Obama have been attracting too many racist comments.

"It's very simple," Mike Sims, director of News and Operations for CBSNews.com, told me. "We have our Rules of Engagement. They prohibit personal attacks, especially racist attacks. Stories about Obama have been problematic, and we won't tolerate it."

CBSNews.com does sometimes delete comments on an individual basis, but Sims said that was not sufficient in the case of Obama stories due to "the volume and the persistence" of the objectionable comments.

There has been a fierce debate about how news outlets should handle reader comments. Washingtonpost.com's Jim Brady, whose site, like CBSNews.com, does not have the resources to filter comments in advance, told Howard Kurtz that he'd "rather figure out a way to do it better than not to do it at all."

But Post reporter Darryl Fears told Kurtz that comments should be eliminated if they can't be pre-screened for offensiveness.

"If you're an African American and you read about someone being called a porch monkey, that overrides any positive thing that you would read in the comments," he said.

Neiwert, who on his Orcinus blog writes extensively* about the extremist right, anti-Semitism, religious fanaticism, and the entire fetid sociopolitical-ideological constellation in which they all mutually co-exist and cross-pollinate, in fact notes that

It really shouldn't be a surprise, I suppose, that Barack Obama's run for the presidency is bringing out innate racism of so many right-wingers these days. After all, so many of them have had to suppress their Inner Theodore Bilbo for so many years now, it's bound to come squirming out when given the opportunity -- and nothing draws them out like liberal blacks running for political office. Making it the presidency drives them into another sphere altogether.

So far, we have been regaled with the oft-repeated "Hussein" note, the Fox smear of Obama's Muslim background, followed by Limbaugh's astonishing riff on "Barack the Magic Negro". That these reflect a barely concealed racial animus mixed with general white xenophobia should be obvious, and notably, these are all occurring on a national scale, within ostensibly mainstream media sources.

For right-wing audiences, cues like this signal just how far they can take things themselves. So on the public level, the result of this kind of talk is a regular outpouring of old-fashioned racist bile, permission having been granted by leading right-wing voices.

Did someone say Limbaugh? Because he's the broadcaster on whose show the President, Vice President and numerous prominent Republicans have repeatedly appeared over the last eight years, and whose rhetoric has is so blatantly over the top it can't easily be subsumed by diversionary chatter about hip hop and rap's effects or attributed solely to his history of drug abuse:

The Rush Limbaugh radio parody "Barack the Magic Negro" is picking up speed on the Internet with lyrics that mock Sen. Barack Obama's popularity with white voters and portray African-American activist Al Sharpton as sputtering with jealousy of the younger black politician.

Dissemination of the parody, which has been airing on the conservative radio host's show for a few weeks, renews in a new context the contentious American conversation about race in politics and society.

Obama's status as the first African-American with a realistic chance of winning the presidency highlights the ambivalent state of racial tolerance in the country: Even as he attracts massive and adulatory crowds, he also inspires hateful remarks and threats that carry distinct racial undertones.
***
The controversial parody got its start in March shortly after the Los Angeles Times published a provocative column by a black writer calling Obama the "Magic Negro." The article said Obama fits the prototype of the black cinematic figure who arises to "assuage white guilt over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history."

Columnist David Ehrenstein suggested Obama is running in the public imagination for the office of "Magic Negro"—a kind of benign African-American figure who is there to help and for whom even mild criticisms are waved away "magically."

The term "Magic Negro" in cinematic circles dates to the 1950s.

Not long after Ehrenstein's column was published, Limbaugh began to air "Barack the Magic Negro," sung to the tune of "Puff, the Magic Dragon." The song was familiar to his listeners before critics began to pick up on it in recent days.

But it's not just the right-wingers like Rush Limbaugh, because the mainstream media have repeatedly been laying the stage for the kinds of extremism that have exploded on CBS.com. As I noted back 2 days into the new year

Last month I reported on the mainstream media's nascent campaign against Illinois's junior Democratic US Senator, Barack Obama, one of the presumptive leaders in the 2008 campaign. In addition to members of the media fixating on Obama's Arabic middle name, "Hussein," and joking about how close "Obama," his Luo family name is to "Osama," CNN's Jeff Greenfield compared his style of dress to that of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and a right-wing columnist, Debbie Schuessel, in a fit of bizarre pseudo-psychoanalysis, suggested that he might be a Muslim Manchurian candidate. After a series of critical blogabaloos, most, though not all of the offenders apologized or feinted as if they had. But of course it wasn't over. We've got a year and 11 months to go, and Obama's fame and popularity aren't waning, they're waxing.

So it didn't take one day to pass in the New Year before the media, in this case CNN, started up its hijinks again, running the tag line "Where's Obama?" over an image of Al Qaeda's unaccountably still-free leaders Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden during Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room show. As soon as I saw this on DailyKos's site, I fired off an email to CNN's "Situation Room" site, and apparently enough other people did that both anchor Soledad O'Brien and Blitzer himself apologized on air to Obama today.

Jeff Greenfield, Jonathan Alter, and others--not considered "right wing" among the punditocracy--have all participated in this madness (one could draw an analogy, absent the issue of race, with the "mainstream" media's "War Against Gore" during the 2000 campaign). My reading is not simply that these people are racists (at least not consciously so), but that they are invested in a particular narrative and outcome, which is that Hillary Clinton be the nominee (and the misogynistic commentary about her would deserve another entry), which appears to be what the leadership of the Democratic Party, as well as corporate and business interests, and many on the Right, who are convinced that a Republican candidate could defeat her, most want. (This also brings to mind Dr. SWEAT's quotation a while back about the steady, powerful and negative effects of daily non-spectacular racism, which rarely receive much commentary, but which create the conditions and contexts in which more overt and spectacular forms occur.)

I had some other thoughts, but can't recall them now. They led me to link to this pricelessly racist-but-she-doesn't-realize-it post by Washington doyenne Sally Quinn, which articulates what a great deal of the punditocracy are thinking, and which is receiving criticism across the blogosphere:

I was reminded of [her feeling good about herself because she hadn't thought of the "color" of a Bahian professor she met during a Carnaval visit there shortly after Nixon's resignation] the other day watching Barack Obama. I realized that when I look at him, I don't see a person of color. I see a really smart, appealing, thoughtful person. There is something about his manner that seems to demand that he be seen for who he is and not for what color he is.

Of course, Obama has many attractive attributes. He is charismatic and has a youthful exuberance. He is a new face and connects with both young people and key Democratic constituents. But there's something else going on here as well.

Is it possible that Obama's incredible popularity in such a short time is a reflection of that same feeling I had in Bahia? Could it be that Obama makes people feel proud of themselves because they can look beyond the color of his skin? Perhaps some of the many people who are supporting him sense that doing so brings out the better part of their nature.

I recently took another trip, this one around the world, and everywhere I went, all that people wanted to know about was Obama. In every country, when people learned I was American, the questions were the same: Could a black man possibly be elected president of the United States? More important, would Americans actually elect someone like him to represent their country? In almost every case the reaction at the possibility was admiration.

But "she" ("we") doesn't "know who he is," who he surrounds himself with, where he's coming from, so she's quite worried. (His advisors do appear to be known to more than a few in Washington and elsewhere, though not, apparently, to Quinn.) I mean, she doesn't see his color or race or whatever, but then again, he could get into office and appoint the likes of Jesse Jackson Sr. and Al Sharpton to high-level posts, or start issuing laws requiring ebonics, or proclaim a National Day of Collard Greens, Fried Chicken and Cornbread, or, God forbid, have some of those rappers he's been seen with, like Ludacris, performing at a state dinner! And he and the dangerous Democrats might even go so far as to pass a reparations bill that not only hands out encyclopedia-sized packages of $1000 bills to all the clambering Black folks in this country...but they might even start sending them back to Africa! I mean, you just never know, do you? But seriously, the basic question for people like Quinn is, is he too Black?

In another sense, he's in good company, because during the Bill Clinton impeachment hullabaloo, Quinn made clear her utter contempt for the President and his wife, who she denounced for having come from the sticks and simply made a mess of themselves before official Washington. The loathing for the Clintons has hardly dissipated in said quarters, I'm sure, and the very mention of Hillary Clinton's name sends some of these people frothing, just as they remain utterly obsessed with her husband and his success, despite all (their) odds. It's probably fair to say, however, that however much horror the Clintons inspire in the punditocracy, the media, and the GOP, Obama revs it up by several orders of 10. And it's not because of his youth or inexperience....

To end on a different note, in the current New Yorker Larissa MacFarquhar profiles Obama in a piece entitled "The Conciliator." Her view is mixed and full aware of many of the ironies that attend Obama, but positive. One of my favorite quotes from the piece:

In the office reception area, crowds of people milled about, many of them unscheduled; the office had become something of a tourist attraction. Marian Wright Edelman had marshalled a group of faith leaders, parents, and sample sick children to speak with Obama for a minute or two about children’s health. About twenty rotund, middle-aged firefighters arrived and, too many to fit in the office, stood in the hallway, blocking the door. A couple of reporters from the Chicago Tribune—two of several people the paper has assigned to cover the Obama beat full time—waited on the sofa for a delayed interview. (The day had begun with a candidates’ forum sponsored by a builders’ union at which Obama was scheduled to speak after Senator Joseph Biden, and, as a consequence, a winking press aide told the reporters—we all know what happens when you speak after Joe Biden—Obama was going to be late to everything for the rest of the day.) A white father from Winnetka had brought his two sons, the elder of whom, about nine years old, begged to wait as long as it took to spot Obama for even a second. (After an hour, a receptionist suggested that they come back the following morning.) Two teen-age girls—one, from Lake Elmo, Minnesota, carrying a soda, another, wearing pink tights and carrying a frozen yogurt—stopped by, hoping for a photograph with the Senator. A receptionist gave them a black-and-white portrait from a pile she kept at her desk, and the girls squealed in delight. The girl with the soda snapped a few photographs of the reception area and the empty conference room next to it and signed the guest book. “Where are you? No picture?” she wrote, next to more conventional comments (“Good luck Your Sweet,” “My hero!,” “Thank you, you rock!”).

Lynne Duke's article in today's Washington Post also is worth reading. It provides a response to Quinn's piece that doesn't tiptoe around the elephants in the room.

They watch him. They listen to him talk. Is he the kind of person they think he is? The kind of black man? The stakes are oh so high. It's the presidency he's after, the breaking down of a historic barrier. Can he transcend racial divisions? Is it safe to support him? Is he safe from harm while running for president in a nation of such abiding racial tension?

For Sen. Barack Obama's white supporters, this is the dialogue of race, the parsing of perceptions and expectations as they watch their man campaign.

They are people like Katie Lang, 32, a Tampa insurance executive, who has her own simple formula for judging Obama. In a word, it's transcendence. She believes Obama, when it comes to race, rises above the fray.

"Obama speaks to everyone. He doesn't just speak to one race, one group," she says. "He is what is good about this nation."

At a campaign event in Tampa last month, she hung on Obama's every word as he spoke to an adoring crowd packed into the courtyard of the historic Cuban Club of Ybor City. As she listened, race wasn't in the forefront of her mind, she says later. It usually isn't, she says.

"Kind of like, if I could compare him to Tiger Woods. When I look at Tiger Woods, I see the best golfer in the world," she says. "So when I see Barack Obama, I see a strong political candidate. I do not see 'Oh, that's a black man running for president, or African American or multiracial black.' It's not what comes to mind first. What comes to mind first is: great platform, charismatic, good leader, attractive."

If the United States is to elect its first black president, it is white voters like Lang who largely will make that choice. Though much has been made about whether Obama is "black enough" for black voters, perhaps a more relevant question is this: Has the nation's white majority evolved to a point where it can elect a black man as president?

--
*Neiwert's most recent entry touches upon a group of Alabama militiamen who were planning to launch a "machine-gun attack" against Mexican immigrants....

***

Monsieur "Action Man," Nicolas Sarkozy, is the new president of France. He defeated his Socialist opponent, Ségolène Royal, by the projected total of 53% to 47%. She swiftly conceded. An estimated 85% of eligible voters cast second-round ballots, the highest since 1981. Sarkozy, the first person of direct immigrant background to become French president, had won the first round and held a distinct lead up until voting began on Saturday, despite inspiring "fear" in nearly half the electorate. Ségo, whose platform and policies drifted hither and thither without coherence, attempted to play on these fears, issuing a last minute warning about possible riots if Sarko were elected, but the call appeared to backfire, as did Ségo's vocal challenges to Sarko in their debate last week. (She was all but called "hysterical" by the French and American press.) The new president, who possesses significant state power, including command of the military and the ability to dissolve the Assembly and call for new elections, will take office May 6, replacing outgoing president Jacques Chirac. Before then, he will be campaigning for his conservative UMP party to control the legislature, and he has promised a dramatic "break" with Chirac's Gaullist policies. His Reaganesque aims include breaking the 35-hour workweek rules and permitting overtime pay, slashing corporate and personal taxes, increasing criminal penalties for various offenses, and streamlining the deportation of immigrants. He has vowed to weaken France's powerful unions and attack "political correctness."

Although Sarko barely campaigned in any of working-class banlieues or cités, which erupted in the summer and fall of 2005, he has interestingly enough proposed affirmative action programs to address the disparate unemployment levels among the Black and Arab French citizens, particularly the young, as well as a controversial Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, whose name has echoes of the pro-Nazi, Vichy period. This was one way that he captured the vote of the far right; another was the adoption of Jean-Marie LePen's infamous "France, love it or leave it" slogan, which fit his previously harsh rhetoric about France and Frenchness. Despite having served for five years in Chirac's government, including as Interior Minister, he paid little price in the final tally. But perhaps it's best to think of his victory in light of the absence of real options from Ségo, who offered glamor and platitudes by the busloads, but no plausible rethinking of France's economic and social policies, nor any sense that she could achieve the policies she had proposed, Sarko's unfortunate victory is not surprising. This election marks the third straight presidential loss for the Socialists, who will yet again engage in self-examination and recrimination. While not failing as badly as in 2002, when the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin failed to outpoll LePen, forcing millions of left-leaning and leftist voters to support Jacques Chirac, Ségo's showing was still a severe disappointment. Given that she did not have the full support of senior figures in her party, it's questionable whether she will be the party's candidate in 2012.

The Guardian Online describes it thus:

Mr Sarkozy, the right-wing former interior minister, who believes France has shifted firmly right, fought the campaign on a promise of restoring rightwing values - authority, the merit of work, a hardline on law and order and controlled immigration.

Unashamedly courting the far-right, he had promised to be a "protector of the nation" and restore pride in a country suffering "a crisis of confidence", with stagnating economic growth, rising public debt, severe unemployment and social unrest on housing estates.

Promising to turn France into a nation of hardworking homeowners he had offered a rallying call to a "silent majority", the France "that wakes up early".

Doug Ireland notes another important point about Sarko's victory, relating to the progressive traditions that Sarko vowed to "liquidate" in his attack on "the May '68 heritage":

Sarkozy absolutely hates the left -- in part because the Communists burned his aristocratic family's chateau in Hungary (from whence his family emigrated to France) in 1944. And, in a major campaign speech just days before the election, Sarkozy surprisingly devoted 20 minutes of his discourse to a violent denunciation of the May 1968 student-worker revolt (Sarko was only 14 at the time of that rebellion.). The heritage of May '68, Sarko thundered, must be "liquidated." He blamed it for a generalized attitude of "laxisme," for France's having become a country " in which work has no value, in which people think they can do anything they feel like doing, in which people are lazy," and on and on. May '68 was, of course, the fountain of social ferment that led to the sexual revolution, to women's liberation and the legalization of abortion, the gay liberation movement and the eventual repeal of laws criminalizing homosexuality, the relaxation of censorship laws, and a whole series of other cultural changes that opened up a stuffy, paternalistic, arteriosclerotic French society. But May '68 was also a general strike by 11 million French workers that gained union recognition in many factories, higher wages, and that won a reinforcement of the social safety net in an agreement (negotiated on behalf of then-President Georges Pompidou by a young Jacques Chirac) that became known as "les accords de la rue de Grenelle" (the agreement of Grenelle Street). What was unstated in Sarko's anti-May '68 speech was that all that sort of thing, too, must be "liquidated." Dark days are ahead for those who love liberty, equality, and fraternity in France.

The "freedom fries" crowd perhaps will be able to take a new look at their chosen bête noir: Sarko not only made a pilgrimage to meet with W. Bush during the campaign, but made clear during his victory speech that he was reaching out to the United States to renew the two countries' relationship (which has continued, despite the public rancor), and he even received a congratulatory call from W shortly after he was elected. He will thus be a useful replacement for W's longtime lackey Tony Blair, who is set to step down soon, with his likely replacement being the dour and more traditional Labourite Scot Gordon Brown.

Krista Franklin's Stick & Move Show

Last night I headed down to Wicker Park to check out the opening Krista Franklin's new show, "Stick and Move" at the Silver Room. As the folks like to say, Krista has obviously been "in the laboratory," and had a number of new pieces, as well as many old favorites, on display. Several of them had sold before the evening was even half over. The associative logic of her collages has struck me as inherently intuitive, but her pieces succeed because of her growing assurance with composition, as well as her grasp of the poetry created by certain types of image-text juxtapositions. Her sense of color has always been a feature of her work, and in many of the works on display, it's adroitly conveyed. One of my favorite pieces is the cover image on poet Linda Susan Jackson's just-published book of poems, What Yellow Sounds Like (Tia Chucha). Her visual art, like her poetry, has also appeared in periodicals and has graced the covers of collections by Jacqueline Jones LaMon (Gravity USA) and Tyehimba Jess (Leadbelly). As these names make clear, the Cave Canem family thinks highly of Krista's artwork, and many CC folks were present throughout the night. But a broad sampling of Chicago's poetry and arts communities came out, and I'm posting some of the photos I snapped below.


"the people's champ"

"to your desire"

"Ascension (put your hands in the air)"

Above the counter: "Ascension (put your hands in the air)", "What Goes Around Comes Around," and "Everything Will Get Better"

Some of the attendees

Naïeveté Studio's Emily Evans through the window

Krista Franklin herself, in front of "Drapetomania #2," "Wanderlust Wonderland," and "Drapetomania #1"

Rambles + "Commander Guy"

There are some great brief responses from Keguro and Audiologo to the post on the anti-gay violence in Jamaica in the comment section. One thing I noted to Audiologo there--and it's not an original thought by any measure, I'm sure it's been mentioned quite often--is that outside of some countries under strict Islamic Sharia law, the nations with the most restrictive anti-gay laws still on the books tend to be former British colonies (including those that are predominantly Muslim). Nigeria and Jamaica are two of the most notorious, both in terms of the statues and public attitudes, but there are numerous others, though not all of these other countries actually act upon the laws. I imagine that someone has written about this, so if a J's Theater reader has a link to an article or citation, please do pass it on. It's also the case, however, that several former British colonies--Canada, Australia, and South Africa--have some of the most liberal, gay-friendly laws on the world, though in the case of the last, it was post-apartheid political and social revolution, which are still underway, that put the progressive, gay-friendly laws in the national constitution. South Africa may be one of the rare examples of a country whose laws are more progressive than the social attitudes of the majority of its population.

With respect to the former British colonies now known as the United States, this country has witnessed the entire range of legal constraints and penalties, from Inquisition-like punishment during parts of the colonial era (people were hanged for homosexual offenses) to judicial and social indifference at other points (such as during the Civil War) to federal and local government-orchestrated persecution (during the 1950s and early 1960s) to a situation where now it depends really on where in the country you live. Lawrence v. Texas did strip away the remaining anti-sodomy laws, more than a dozen have civil protections for gays and lesbians on their books, and now four states--Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New Hampshire--will have civil union laws, while Massachusetts, remains the only one that permits gay marriage. It is only a matter of time before another state--New York or California, whose legislature courageously voted up a gay marriage bill that Schwarzenegger vetoed--joins Massachusetts, while the other coastal states and some of the upper midwestern states, like Illinois, permit civil unions, and many more will have civil protections (Iowa just voted them up, I believe). Within 25 years, I predict that only Southern states (and not all of them) will not have some sort of civil protections or civil union laws on the books.

The post about Jamaica reminded me that I have not written anything about the violence against gay people or people suspected of being gay in Iraq (though I have written about the grave situation in Iran, whose government just imposed even more stringent clothing and related social rules on men and women, and whose histrionic conservatives are in a tizzy today because the dour, fundamentalist president, Ahmedinejad, kissed and held the hand of his octagenarian former grade school teacher after presenting her with an award). The anti-gay persecution continues unabated and, if it's possible to assess it qualitatively, it appears to have worsened. Doug Ireland has repeatedly reported on this issue, but as far as I can tell, it hasn't merited hardly any mainstream media attention. (Of course I realize they couldn't give a damn about gay people being killed, especially gay brown people.) I have no idea what things were like for gay people under Saddam Hussein's rule (I doubt it was rosy), but it's clear that being identified as gay or lesbian in war-torn contemporary Iraq means that you are a walking target, and basically have a death sentence hanging over you. He lists a litany of the attacks, murders and death threats, and I would imagine these are only a fraction of the larger crisis. Since one of the leading Shiite clerics has issued a fatwa calling on the persecution of homosexuals, and since the "Commander Guy" and his administration can barely turn the lights on over there or complete any of the "reconstruction" projects they keep praising to the high heavens let alone stem the rampant factional and sectarian slaughter, the horrendous suffering of gay Iraqis won't wane anytime. Nevertheless, if this is an issue that strikes you as important, sending a note of support to Iraqi LGBT, the main Iraqi gay rights organization, which maintains safe houses for persecuted LGBTs there; a letter to the International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Campaign (IGLHRC); and a note of protest to Iraq's embassy here would probably helpful, and Ireland asks for people who want to contribute money to Iraqi LGBT to send it via OutRage, with a cover note marked “For Iraqi LGBT"; according to him they will forward it on by wire to the Iraqi group.

Ireland also blogs about tonight's debate between the two front runners in the race for the French presidency, Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal and Gaullist Nicolas Sarkozy, or Ségo and Sarko. According to Ireland, Ségo, despite bursts of passion, did not help her cause at all, because in good DLC fashion, she has been moving steadily towards the putative political "center," while also making promises that come out of the worst Socialist-pandering playbook, thus leaving voters, both on the Left and in the center, unsure of what she stands for on the domestic front. He therefore predicts a Sarkozy victory, which he suggests, echoing so many other commentators I've read, would be a nightmare for a sizable portion of France's population, especially its Black, Arab and immigrant populations. Sarkozy's authoritarianism is well known, as are his hair-trigger temper and intemperate rhetoric, his contempt for people of color, his strange scientific beliefs (suicide is "genetic" is one of his gems), and his pro-Americanism (he came to genuflect at the foot of "Commander Guy" last year). What's probably less well known is how intimately tied in he is to French industry. In fact, his economic plans sound like tarted up Republican supply-side economics with heavy neoliberal seasoning, and at the end of the day, France's multinationals will be the ones laughing all the way to the banque. Ségo challenged him on why he hadn't introduced these plans, which have some in the US media positively drooling with excitement, during his five years in the current and moribund administration of Chirac, and according to the Guardian Online, this question actually gave him pause, though in general he kept his cool. The truth is that Chirac, despite being a "conservative," was as invested in retaining power and not shaking up the status quo as his Socialist predecessors. Whether Sarko's plans are going to revive France's economy or not is open to question, but Ségo has not put forward counterproposals on most fronts to energize the populace. Glamor only goes so far. As unpalatable as Chirac is, it's doubtful he'll drag Sarko down like Commander Guy W is sure to do to any Republicans who get too close him (the "snow baby" W unfortunately isn't going to melt away soon enough), so France very well may have as its leader an ideological soulmate to some of the worst people on the US right.

Finally, here's a bit of found antipoetry (on the principle of the very toxic element antimony), which would make Alfred Jarry envious, except that it issued from the mouth of our Decider today as he was participating in yet another Potemkin Village-style event, on our taxpayers' dime, in an effort to drum up nonexistent support for his vanity disaster in Iraq:

By the way, in the report it said, it is -- the government may have to put in more troops to be able to get to that position. And that's what we do. We put in more troops to get to a position where we can be in some other place. The question is, who ought to make that decision? The Congress or the commanders? And as you know, my position is clear -- I'm the commander guy.

I just wonder: is he hitting the vodka or the gin, and is he mixing in some blow, meth or prescription drugs in with it? Can impeachment come soon enough?

Random Photo
Yes, I sort of dropped this aspect of the blog once the school year rolled around last September, but here's one from last summer, on that marvel of engineering, the PATH train:

May Day + Notes on Rampersad on Ellison

***

Last weekend, when I was in a local bookstore to pick up a book I'd been meaning to get for a while, I found myself near the new non-fiction titles, and one of the first ones I reached for and couldn't put down, for at least half an hour, was Arnold Rampersad's new biography of Ralph Ellison. I do intend to get it soon, but it reminded me that I've never posted any of my notes from Rampersad's short and illuminating keynote talk, which opened the Cave Canem 10th Anniversary celebration at Notre Dame University a few months ago. Though I've read Invisible Man, Ellison's essays, and some of his stories many times and Juneteenth only once, my knowledge of Ellison's personality and personal life remains minimal. None of the older writers I know had ever spoken to me of direct encounters with him, not even Michael S. Harper, with whom Ellison maintained an acquaintance. So some of Rampersad's comments really surprised me.

What I jotted down was that Rampersad had worked on the biography for seven years, and once he'd finished it, he realized that he really did not like Ellison as a person at all. (His feelings about Ellison's wife were similarly negative.) He told the poetry conference audience--which included faculty, students and staff from Notre Dame, as well as South Bend residents--that Ellison did not like poetry for the most part, and also had little interest in Africa. "If you do not love poetry, you do not love literature," was Rampersad's formulation, and he quoted Langston Hughes's 1964 definition of poetry as "the human soul entire squeezed like a lemon or lime drop by drop into atomic words." This led Rampersad to surmise that Ellison probably would not have liked Cave Canem's focus on poetry or its Black-oriented nature.

While he did maintain relationships with some other Black authors, like Langston Hughes (whom he considered one of his "relatives," rather than a peer, and thus less deserving of respect than some White writers) Rampersad supposed that Ellison paid a stiff price for his disdain of and estrangement from most of his Black peers and younger Black artists, many of whom, especially during the period from the late 1950s through the early 1970s when his reputation was at its apogee, were pioneering new possibilities for Black cultural production. He mentioned James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka in particular, but it's fair to say that many of the major figures in late 20th century African-American literature emerged during this temporal window. There were some White writers and intellectual figures, like W. R. B. Lewis, William Styron, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., with whom Ellison was close, and in the case of Saul Bellow, their friendship led Bellow to provide Ellison with a home in which to write, which Ellison abused by allowing his pure-bred dog to crap and chew up everything in sight. For Ellison, it was only natural that a "pure breed" be given free rei(g)n! (I read in the biography that both appealed to their mutual friend John Cheever, who found the whole flap a bit ironic and ridiculous.) Ellison's investment in elusive mythic substructures and a version of literature that cut him off from both his specific past and from the vibrant Black cultural sphere around him--he did live in Harlem for most of his life--dogged his efforts to complete his second book.

Rampersad made many other coruscating remarks about poetry and the changes that had occurred since the days when Karl Shapiro (a poet little discussed and probably unknown to most younger poets these days) called it a "closed corporation," but I was most interested in the remarks on Ellison. Following up on one other point I noted above, Rampersad clarified that Ellison considered some writers to be relatives: Richard Wright and Hughes, for example, fit this category, and in fact Wright was absolutely crucial in the development of Ellison's career. On the other hand, he consider his "ancestors" to be only the "great" White authors like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose influence is evident in Invisible Man. They received the utmost respect and reverence for him. In the book I noted that there were no pictures of him with younger Black authors--save his close friend and acolyte Albert Murray--until very late in life, when he's shown in consecutive photographs alongside two of the leading contemporary African-American literary figures, Toni Morrison and Rita Dove, though I haven't yet read the book to see what he thought of them (and especially Morrison, whose fame and centrality to African-American and American literature had so totally eclipsed his own by the time he died in 1994). Now that I've typed out this entry I realize I'm going to have to purchase this biography soon. As I said, I could not put it down for a half hour the other day.

Update: Here's Phyllis Rose's American Scholar review of Rampersad's biography of Ellison, entitled "An Impulse to Exclude." A quote:

He was also a gatekeeper. In every group he belonged to, he was, almost invariably, the only person of color, and Rampersad provides some evidence that he wanted it to stay that way. He put little effort into bringing other black members into his favorite clubs, the Century and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. There’s an old joke about admitting the first Jew to the country club. Smith and Jones agree they must admit Schwartz, because he owns the whole town, but how, asks Jones, will they keep out all those other Jews once they’ve admitted Schwartz? “Don’t worry,” says Smith. “Schwartz will do it.”

New Anti-Gay Attack in Jamaica + Poem: Audre Lorde

I don't have time to post anything original tonight, but today I received the following email from Colin Robinson about yet another vicious anti-gay attack in Jamaica, and it's worth reading.

By now most of you have heard of the mob attack on a drag queen in Falmouth, Jamaica Friday morning. Or maybe you haven't and are confusing it with any of the three similar attacks you may have heard of in the past 11 weeks, in greater Kingston (Feb. 14), Montego Bay (Apr. 2) and near Mandeville (Apr. 8). This time there is a photo and video. There have been no public announcements of arrests in any of the incidents. Please circulate widely to bring broad attention to the specific dangers gay/Trans folks in Jamaica face, on top of a climate of general violence and murder, and the general inattention of the police and government. In response to the attacks, Jamaica's public defender (the chief constitutional ombudsman and anti-discrimination official) recently publicly suggested that gay men recognise that "tolerance has its limits," not be so "brazen", and "confine their activities to their bed chambers."

Thanks for your actions!! So many of you showed tremendous leadership in protesting recent dancehall peformances in New York; this is so much more serious. Please let those at the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG) know what you are planning and how they can work with you.

News story: Jamaican Daily Gleaner

Video: YouTube (just a forewarning: the video is extremely disturbing)

The incomparable Rod 2.0 has background information on the homophobic warning given to Jamaican gay men by public defender (the irony isn't mine alone) Earl Witter....

In tribute to the people who have been attacked simply for trying to live their lives as they see fit, as they want and need to, the final poem for this poetry month will be by none other than Audre Lorde (1934-199x), whose artistry and vision have made it possible for countless poets to write the poems they want and need to write, and countless people to live the lives they want and need--must--live. Here is one of her most important poems, from The Black Unicorn

A LITANY FOR SURVIVAL

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

Copyright © 1995, Audre Lorde, from The Black Unicorn, New York: W. W. Norton Co.

RIP: Josh Hancock & David Halberstam + Rogers's Prize + Poem: Daniil Kharms

I am very sorry to hear about the tragic death of Saint Louis Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock, who was killed early this morning when he drove into a tow truck parked in the left lane on one of St. Louis's main highways. He was 29 years old. Last season, he appeared in 62 games for the World Series winners, and posted decent numbers up until the championship series. Previously he'd pitched for Cincinnati, Boston, and Philadelphia. This is the second time in the last few years that the Cardinals have lost a pitcher to untimely death; starter Darryl Kile, only 33 years old, died in his sleep of a heart attack during the 2002 season. I imagine that the team is in a state of shock right now, and will play the rest of the season under the cloud of this loss and thus in memory of Hancock, who was so integral to last year's success and to this year's squad. My thoughts are with them.

Reggie has a great long post on the recent passing of journalist and author David Halberstam, who also died in a tragic car crash this week, and was everything that so many of the "mainstream" journalists, especially the ones given to punditizing, are not.

A great quote from him:

"If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring."

Journalists, are you taking note(s)?

***

I realized I hadn't written anything about Richard Rogers's Pritzker Prize yet (and now another month is almost over!). Hurray for him! I managed to snap a number of shots of one of his masterpieces, which is also one of my favorite museums in the world, the Centre Georges Pompidou, which is one of the true visual icons of contemporary Paris. He is also designing the addition to fellow Pritzker Prize winner I. M. Pei's hideous Jacob Javits Center in New York, which probably could have used a lot more color, a livelier external carapace, or something, but we all make mistakes, some of them monumental. Rogers's addition certainly can't hurt. The Millennium Dome isn't ugly, it just didn't draw as many visitors as the British government would have liked. Many of his other buildings are up to the Pompidou level--like the Lloyd's Tower in London, or the brightly colored Minami Yamashiro School in Tokyo. I always think Santiago Calatrava is next in line for this award, but I'm sure his time is coming. Meanwhile, enjoy the Pompidou.


Its front plaza

From the rear

Inside, behind the Samuel Beckett exhibit

People on the front plaza, from high up, on the escalator

***

Apropos of nothing that I've just written about (or perhaps it was the Pompidou and Beckett, if I work backwards) here's a "poem" by one of Russia's least known but important 20th century avant-garde authors, Daniil Kharms (the pen name of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachov, 1905-1942), who ran afoul of the Soviet authorities, was exiled to Kursk, and then died of starvation while in prison during World War II. In the late 1930s, Kharms, who had co-founded the left-leaning Oberiu literary group in 1927 with his close friend Aleksandr Vvedensky (1900-1941) and poet Nikolay Zabolotsky (1903-1958), found that he could neither perform nor publish his formally experimental, socially provocative work for adults, so he took to writing children's books, which worked out until he crossed an imaginary line of provocation in 1937. During the last decade or so of his life, he wrote a number of absurdist prose works, which he kept hidden from the authorities' view, and which were not published until the period of the Krushchev "thaw" in the 1960s. Many of his short prose pieces are ironic to the point of absurdity in theme and thrust, and include moments of meaningless violence, reflective, I would venture, of the increasingly brutal, totalitarian society he found himself in during the inter-war period. Ironically, the Party figures and censors could brook little overt irony or absurdity as each increased, in real, material terms.

Here is "Sonnet"--from the collection Incidents (c. 1930)--which is anything but.

SONNET

A surprising thing happened to me: I suddenly forgot which comes first -- 7 or 8.

I went off to the neighbours and asked them what they thought on the subject.

Just imagine their and my surprise when they suddenly discovered that they too couldn't recall how to count: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 they remembered, but they'd forgotten what followed.

We all went to the overpriced food shop, the Gastronom on the corner of Znamenskaya and Basseynaya street, and put our quandary to the cashier. The cashier smiled sadly, pulled a small hammer out of her mouth and, twitching her nose a bit, said -- I should think seven comes after eight whenever eight comes after seven.

We thanked the cashier and joyfully ran out of the shop. But then, having thought about the cashier's words, we got depressed again, since her words seemed to us to be devoid of any sense.

What were we to do? We went to the Summer Garden and started counting the trees there. But, getting as far as 6, we stopped and began to argue: in the opinion of some, 7 came next, and in the opinion of others -- 8.

We would have argued for ages, but fortunately then some child fell off a park bench and broke both his jaw-bones. This distracted us from our argument.

And then we dispersed homewards.

Copyright © 1930, 2007, Daniil Kharms, translation by Serge Winitzki.

Rambles + 2 Pieces on Novels + Poem: Masayo Keike

Finally, a little spring--Spring--in Chicago. It's actually been here already, but only when I'm back in New Jersey. I always associate favorable weather in Chicago with the slim period just before classes start or as they're winding down, which is to say, early September or May and early June (though we always lurch onwards up to my birthday, in June, by which time I am convinced anyone and everyone in our hemisphere not enrolled in summer courses should have a little break from a classroom). When I think of Chicago springs I immediately envision the sun-bleached lakeshore and the lake's churning surface, with the blue bolt of sky crumpling above it, before anything else. Yet most of the time I only see it in passing, from the window of my car as I'm heading to or from Evanston or downtown. I think I'll have to head over there soon just to remind myself what the real thing looks like.

***

I have too many books on my current bookshelf. I read 20 pages into one and then start another. And it's not as if I don't have countless other things for work to read. But I feel like I'm finally now recovering from last quarter's reading marathon (though I cannot look at a computer screen without wearing my glasses, or my strabismus immediately kicks in), but one result is that I have so many things I want to read and not enough time to read them. Fully, that is. I hate to skim books (and most good novels or books of poetry, let alone scholarly texts, cannot be skimmed), so I'm now in the sifting and gleaning period. One of my colleagues is always nevertheless urging slow reading, and while I take her point, I cannot imagine any time soon when I'll have the opportunity to read anything except at breakneck speed (students' manuscripts, the many many many of them, notwithstanding). There is just not enough time to do so and have a life, at least the life I envision even if I'm not living it right now.

***

Which brings me to this article, in the London Times Online, on Orion Books's decision to published abridged versions of the "classics," because, well, people don't have time to read--read: slog--through the countless longeuers of so many of the great(est) novels. According to Arts Reporter Ben Hoyle, Orion will soon issue its first six Compact Editions, which it's billing as "great reads 'in half the time'." The outrageousness of this plan is a marketer's dream: short of the late author herself or himself, or an editor deeply immersed in the author's life, work and thought, how could anyone else presume to know what to trim from these longer works? And once they've been so damaged, are we even talking about the same work at all?

Here is how Hoyle reports on the origins of this plan:

Malcolm Edwards, publisher of Orion Group, said that the idea had developed from a game of “humiliation”, in which office staff confessed to the most embarrassing gaps in their reading. He admitted that he had never read Middlemarch and had tried but failed to get through Moby Dick several times, while a colleague owned up to skipping Vanity Fair.

What was more, he said: “We realised that life is too short to read all the books you want to and we never were going to read these ones.”

Research confirmed that “many regular readers think of the classics as long, slow and, to be frank, boring. You’re not supposed to say this but I think that one of the reasons Jane Austen always does so well in reader polls is that her books aren’t that long”.

The first six titles in the Compact Editions series, all priced at £6.99, are Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Moby Dick and Wives and Daughters.

Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, The Count of Monte Cristo, North and South and The Portrait of a Lady will follow in September.

Each has been whittled down to about 400 pages by cutting 30 to 40 per cent of the text. Words, sentences, paragraphs and, in a few cases, chapters have been removed.

!!! Chapters??!! I almost thought I was reading an Onion (Orion, hmmm...) article at first. Edwards's assessment of why Austen always does so well also struck; even if you concede him the point about the relative concision of her work, he appears to have misses all its other aspects, such as the gracefulness and wit of her writing, the novels' focus on bourgeois domesticity and their lively, female protagonists, the engaging plots, and the underlying moral frameworks, which still resonate with countless readers. (The fact that her works have also repeatedly been translated into film and TV versions also doesn't hurt.)

But the essential question of whether or not a book--especially Moby Dick and Middlemarch, for example, or any of the Dickens texts--is seriously damaged by truncation of this sort (chapters!), and whether it should even be called by the same name--whether it can be considered the same work at all--does not appear to register. It's stories like this that confirm my suppositions, fortified by André Schiffrin's and others' accounts, that there are people in the publishing industry who really do not like literature at all. Yes, I know, old news. Selling books, they enjoy; but actually taking account of what may be in some them, not so much. (This reminds me that Byways, the supposedly excellent lyric memoir by my first publisher, James Laughlin, have been out for two years, and I need to pick it up.)

Anyways, I laughed at the Times's examples of super-condensed novels, which reminded me of Linh Dinh's and Kenneth Koch's poems along the same lines:

Very compact

As Orion Books decides there is a market in creating cut-down classics The Times shrinks them further.

Anna Karenina

The problem is, thought Anna — her aristocratic brow furrowing slightly under a fabulous new hat — men look so irresistible in uniform! Ditto boots, billowing shirts and moustaches! Hangmarriage. Hang motherhood. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a train to catch.

Vanity Fair

At Vauxhall, Posh and Becky were toying with their parasols and nibbling macaroons. Becky was singing, in a voice not unlike her poor dead mother’s, “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman. Giving all your love to just several men”; when she spotted young George Osborne coming towards them.“Oops!” she said, as her friend fell into the boating lake.

David Copperfield

I am Born . . . I am Sent Away from Home . . . I Have a Memorable Birthday . . . I Become Neglected and Am Provided For . . . I Make Another Beginning . . . Somebody Turns Up . . . I Fall into Captivity . . . Depression . . . Enthusiasm . . . Dora’s Aunts . . . Mischief . . . Mr Dick Fulfils my Aunt's Predictions . . . I am Involved in Mystery . . . Tempest . . . Absence . . . Return . . . Agnes!

So now, as an exercise, try to reduce any of the following to paragraphs (or just imagine being the editor who decided to lop off whole sections): The Last of the Mohicans, Typee, Sister Carrie, USA, Finnegan's Wake, Babbitt, The Man Without Qualities, The Death of Virgil, My Ántonia, Ship of Fools, Doktor Faustus, The Book of the Dead, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Mumbo Jumbo, The Sot-Weed Factor, Beloved, Rabbit Redux, Infinite Jest, Mason & Dixon, The Tunnel, The Gold-Bug Variations, Cryptonomicon....

***

Which brings me to my next post, on Hermione Lee's refreshing but perhaps not exploratory enough paean, posing as a review, to the novel, in all its formlessness and relative length, breadth and girth, in the current New York Review of Books. What is the novel, and what good is it? She looks at Milan Kundera's The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Auden scholar Edward Mendelson's The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life, John Mullan's How Novels Work, John Sutherland's How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide, Franco Moretti's two-volume study of the novel, The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography and Culture and The Novel, Volume 2: Forms and Themes, and Patrick Parrinder's Nation & Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day, in order to assess what she terms "storms over the novel," or in other words, what this long, often ungainly and endlessly characterized and decried form is, does, and, what its value is . She begins

What good is the novel, the long story told in prose? Hegel called the contingent, the everyday, the mutable, "the prose of the world," as opposed to "the spiritual, the transcendent, the poetic." "Prosaic" can mean plain, ordinary, commonplace, even dull. Prose fiction, historians of the novel tell us, has had to struggle against the sense of being a second-rate genre. Heidegger said that "novelists squander ignobly the reader's precious time." In late-eighteenth-century Britain, when large numbers of badly written popular novels were being published, "only when entertainment was combined with useful instruction might the novel escape charges of insignificance or depravity."

In pre-modern China, Japan, and Korea, the general word for fictional writing was xiaoshuo (in Chinese), meaning "trivial discourse." Socialist critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have accused the novel of bourgeois frivolity. By contrast, aestheticians of the novel, like Flaubert, proposed the ideal novel as "a book about nothing," or, like Joyce, as a game which would turn the everyday world into the most concentrated and highly designed prose possible. Moral writers of novels like George Eliot or D.H. Lawrence believed in the novel as the book of truth, teaching us how to live and understand our lives and those of others.

The novel's entanglement in "the prose of the world" can also be its justification and its pride. The novel's virtue, it has often been argued, lies in its egalitarianism, its very commonplaceness. And the novel's everydayness need not be an enemy to its aesthetic integrity. In his wise, deep, and witty essay on the novel, The Curtain, Milan Kundera, a follower of Flaubert in his critique and practice of the European novel, celebrates "the everyday" ("it is not merely ennui, pointlessness, repetition, triviality; it is beauty as well") while writing in praise of the novel's essential self-sufficiency:

It...refuses to exist as illustration of an historical era, as description of a society, as defense of an ideology, and instead puts itself exclusively at the service of "what only the novel can say."

Well, perhaps quite a few novels do this, but quite a few others do seek to exist as "illustrations of an historical era, as descriptions of a society, as defenses of an ideology," even if they're not sure what that ideology is or how it functions. But such is the broader history of literature and of literary texts, as opposed to the specific set of works and the literary body they constitute that Kundera is extolling, and I'm willing to accept his argument based on the library he refers to, which I imagine is similar to the one he drew from in The Art of the Novel, a work I love but which I also love repeating endlessly that my students found boring and pretentious. It is not full of longueurs, asides, set pieces, passages of tedious description, and many of the other things that can be found in the works of such authors as Balzac, Zola, Melville, Henry James, John Steinbeck, and countless others. Rather, it's a original and artful defense of Kundera's idea of the novel, which is markedly different, at least on the surface and also in terms of models and aims, from most of the examples of this form that one currently finds being churned out in the United States. I nevertheless think it's an indispensible book, and I intend to read his new one to see.

At any rate, I especially like the idea of the novel's heterogeneity, its undefinability, and, following Bakhtin, who can never be cited too much, or Auerbach, its prosaicness, even when it is highly poetical and lyrical. So much of daily life is unexciting, dull, a bit of drudgery; there are our routines, our mere comings and goings which never merit being described, our mere presence in and movement through time, our innumerable patterns, remarkable primarily to psychologists and applied mathematicians, that we not even be aware of. So much of this has continued to make its way into the novel, against the desires of those who'd leave it all out and give us only action, and larger-than-life character, and of course what results from and converse guides the combination of these two things, plot, but the quotidianity of life itself is essentially plotless, which makes me wonder if the many meandering and divagating bits--words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters!--that Orion Books plans to lop off to create fast and fan-ready books aren't part of the very moments in these texts that embody the essentially prosaic quality of our human existence?

***

And now, after all this chatter about prose, and particularly the novel, here's a poem, by the Japanese poet Masayo Keike (1959-), entitled "Falling Star."

I only know a few Japanese phrases and cannot read the language at all, so perhaps a J's Theater reader who knows Japanese can tell me how accurate this translation is. (The poem and its translation are both from Poetry International Web.) I love how the Japanese poetry looks on the page, and so I'm reproducing the .jpg image of the entire poem.



Coypright © 2001, Masayo Koike
From: Ameotoko, Yamaotoko, Mame o hiku otoko
Publisher: Shinchosha, Tokyo, 2001
ISBN: 4-10-450901

FALLING STAR

Above our head
A star fell
A strong bluish star

Like the moment when for the first time
A man uses his instrument dripping with ink
The star swiftly disappears a blur into the sky

During then
All we could do was
To forget to wish
Just surprised, as if for the first time

The night air as if enveloping in a sphere
The void after it was lost to sight

(Among the night trees a solemn sound grown by the rhythm)

Ah, what a
Daring wheel-track traced by the star!

It was
Like a stake silently driven into us
Remain on the earth and live!
Live, said the star!


© Translation: 2006, Leith Morton
From: Masayo Koike: Selected Poems
Publisher: Vagabond Press, Sydney, 2006
ISBN: 0 97 515 06

Poems: Amiri Baraka

I could not let this National Poetry Month posting period pass without a poem by Amiri Baraka (1936-), who, despite my multiple disagreements with many of his positions, actions, statements, and ideological shifts, remains a poet whose life and work were incredibly important to my own formation. (I've met him more than once, and have found him to be far more reasonable in person than in print.) The following poems remain one of my favorites; I initially read the first one in a poetry anthology while in junior high, and I imagine that, as was the case then, while Baraka's appears in anthologies, it probably isn't taught that often, though it's useful to any understanding of the seismic aesthetic and political shifts in American and African-American poetry that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s. The second comes from Baraka's Black Nationalist period and marks his break with the White avant-garde and his White wife and children; his critique of a certain sphere of the Black bourgeoisie (really the Black middle-class here) is acid--though without the violent rhetoric of "A POEM SOME PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO UNDERSTAND" or the landmark "Black Art"--but as the tone makes clear, it's also tinged with sadness. The Clay of Dutchman who only erupts after repeatedly provocations here is fully cast aside; the air that remains is funereal, though in other poems, like "SOS," in which Baraka is "calling all Black people," a new, more joyful tone and statement appear. Both poems are about love, and disillusionment, and in an ironic, the nostalgias that Baraka describes in each, though quite different, are intimately linked.

IN MEMORY OF RADIO

Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?
(Only Jack Kerouac, that I know of: & me.
The rest of you probably had on WCBS and Kate Smith,
Or something equally unattractive.)

What can I say?
It is better to have loved and lost
Than to put lineoleum in your living rooms?

Am I a sage or something?
Mandrake's hypnotic gesture of the week?
(Remember, I do not have the healing powers of Oral Roberts . . .
I cannot, like F. J. Sheen, tell you how to get saved & rich!
I cannot even order you to gaschamber satori like Hitler or Goody Knight

& Love is an evil word.
Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean?
An evol word. & besides
who understands it?
I certainly wouldn't like to go out on that kind of limb.

Saturday mornings we listened to Red Lantern & his undersea folk.
At 11, Let's Pretend/& we did/& I, the poet, still do, Thank God!

What was it he used to say (after the transformation, when he was safe
& invisible & the unbelievers couldn't throw stones?) "Heh, heh, heh,
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows."

O, yes he does
O, yes he does.
An evil word it is,
This Love.

Copyright © 1961, 1991, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, from Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press.

LETTER TO E. FRANKLIN FRAZIER

Those days when it was all right
to be a criminal, or die, a postman's son,
full of hallways and garbage, behind the hotdog store
or in the parking lots of the beautiful beer factory.

Those days I rose through the smoke of chilling Saturdays
hiding my eyes from the shine boys, my mouth and my flesh
from their sisters. I walked quickly and always alone
watching the cheap city like I thought it would swell
and explode, and only my crooked breath could put it together again.

By the projects and small banks of my time. Counting my steps
on tar or new pavement, following the sun like a park. I imagined
a life, that was realer than speech, or the city's anonymous
fish markets. Shuddering at dusk, with a mile or so up the hill

to get home. Who did you love
then, Mussolini? What were you thinking,
Lady Day? A literal riddle of image
was me, and my smell was a continent
of familiar poetry. Walking the long way,
always the long way, and up the steep hill.

Those days like one drawn-out song, monotonously
promising. The quick step, the watchful march march,
All were leading here, to this room, where memory
stifles the present. And the future, my man, is long
time gone.

Copyright © 1969, 1991, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, from Black Magic, in The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press.

Poem: Alain Mabanckou

I haven't featured any of my translations during this run of poetry, so here is one, by the poet Alain Mabanckou (1966-), about whom I've written before. (His newly translated novel African Psycho, published by Soft Skull Press of Brooklyn, is now on bookstore shelves, and it'll be one of the J's Theater book picks for next month.) Mabanckou, as I'd previously noted, is an award-winning fiction writer, but he's also a talented--and award-winning--poet, and began his career with several books of poems before turning primarily to prose. Of Congolese ancestry, he now lives in the United States and has taught at the University of Michigan and the University of California-San Diego. He was just at the Pen World Voices Festival this past week (did anyone catch him or the festival?).

The following poem, in its brevity and pessimism, captures the feelings, I would unfortunately suggest, of a sizable number of people across the globe.

SÉJOUR TERRESTRE

à J. Dipongo, la disparue

Jour nouveau
Promesse de lumière
Fleurs écloses
Joie de vivre
La Terre est un jardin de mille-feuilles
mais aussi
une masure à louer
avec vue sur la Mort…

EARTHLY SOJOURN

to J. Dipongo, the vanished one

New day
Promise of light
Flowers blooming
Joy of living
Earth is a thousand-leaved garden
but also
a dump for rent
with Death-front views...

Copyright © 1995, 2007, Alain Mabanckou, from L'Usure des Lendemains, Ivry: Éditions Nouvelles du Sud, all rights reserved.

Poem: Juan José Arreola

Rain, cold...another of those days. So here's a prose poem by the highly inventive and innovative Mexican author Juan José Arreola (1918-), who was quite influential for several generations of younger Mexican authors and received most of his country's major literary prizes, but remains little known, I would imagine, to most English speakers. The poem below reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges's prose poetry, though somewhat more gentle in its paradoxes, while other of his pieces strongly resemble those of Francis Jammes.

TELEMACHIA

Wherever there is a duel I shall be on the side of the man who falls, hero
or villain.
 I am tied by the neck to the theory of slaves sculptured in the most ancient
stele.  I am the dying warrior beneath Hasurbanipal's chariot, the charred bone in
the Dachau ovens.
 Hector and Menelaus, France and Germany, and the two drunks breaking each
other's noses in the tavern oppress me with their discord.  Wherever I turn my
eyes an immense tapestry with the face of Good getting the worst of it covers the
world's landscape.
An involuntary spectator, I see the contenders start fighting and I don't want
to be on anybody's side.  Because I am both the one who strikes and the one who
receives the blows.  Man against man.  Does anyone wish to take a bet?
Ladies and gentlemen:  There is no salvation.  We are losing the match.  The
Devil is now playing with the white pieces.

Copyright © 1964, Juan José Arreola, translated by George D. Schade, from Confabulario, in Confabulario and Other Inventions, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Why J's Theater + Rambles + Poem: Erik B. and Rakim

Last year, a colleague asked me why I blogged. My immediate response focused on the discipline of blogging--which was an explicit aspect of my first year of blogging, as I'd set the task of blogging every day if possible for one straight year, and nearly made it--and as another, immediate means of personal expression, and left it at that. But really, when I think about why I continue to blog, it's really because I want to initiate conversations, thoughts, responses, of the sort that I rarely enjoy these days outside my classes.

When I entered academe as a teacher, one of the things I was really hoping for was to engage in conversations not only with my students, undergraduate and graduate, which do occur and are very productive, but with colleagues, both in the areas I'm directly interested in and outside it. I do occasionally have opportunities to chat with some of my colleagues, but when we are not all zooming back and forth with work like drones (because the university likes to keep us very, very busy, for most of the year), so many of our conversations revolve around university business--bureaucratic issues, administration, and so on--and don't touch upon any of the countless other topics I'd love to talk about, especially creative or intellectual ones.

It was this desire for a different kind of intellectual experience that once led me to propose to Ronaldo Wilson that we found a school, and that was an exciting idea--and one of my friends of college, Miguel Herrera, tried a few years ago to get me to work with him on something a lot more informal, but I couldn't swing the fact that I'm in Chicago most of the year and he's in New York--so these kinds of things probably aren't going to happen anytime soon. I am still on one or two listserves--far fewer than years ago--with people who affiliated with particular organizations like Cave Canem or Fire & Ink, or animated by specific topics like sports and so on, but I envisioned this space--a theater, in the oldest sense--as forum for exchanges that crossed the usual boundaries, barriers and dividing lines. (Is that a mixed metaphor?) Or a crossroads, to put it another way, where I'm sort of sitting in the somewhere near the center, and people steadily come through, stop and stay for a little bit--and keep coming back.

I've greatly appreciated the responses I've gotten (and since February, a month in which I simply could not post because I was daily trying to dig myself out of an ever-towering cave of fiction manuscripts, it's been two years), and I do hope readers keep reading and keep posting. Which depends on my continuing to post--and post interesting things. I really do value the responses a lot, as I hope I make clear.

Now, back to the unscheduled programming:

Earlier this evening I saw the rapper Akon on BET (yes, I do watch it) talking about the differences between growing up in Africa and the United States. But only yesterday I learned, to my surprise, that while he is of Senegalese ancestry, he's also a native of St. Louis--Missouri, not Senegal. And grew up Jersey City! Go figure. I guess there was a reason I was able to get past the whininess in his voice. He appeared to be implying that he grew up, however, on the other side of the Atlantic, but then he was suitably vague, so I guess he was speaking in general terms about this particular contrast (which perhaps shouldn't be so easily generalized, given the vastness and diversity of Africa, a continent, vs. the huge and diverse US, a country) than about his own experience.

Speaking of BET, has anyone else been watching Season 4 of College Hill? Why, oh why can't these young Black people act like they have (any) good sense? Why do they have to keep segregating themselves into the Cali (California) and VI (Virgin Islands) camps? Why are thye so hot in the pants and never seem to have a book nearby (yes, I know this is to a great deal a result of the editing, but still--wouldn't they and BET do everyone a service by showing these young people actually in classes and studying)? Why did two of the young women, Vanessa and Krystal, have to have a throwdown (which included Krystal beating Vanessa with a pump)? Why did Krystal have to list Osama bin Laden and Hitler as people who didn't deserved to be attacked as part of her utterly jawdropping response? (Double Hunh??) Why are nearly all of them (except the athlete "Chicki") behaving half the time as if they're auditioning for a very bad minstrel show? And to top it off, why does BET have to run The Players Club, which I think is some programmer at that station's favorite movie, so often, and especially before College Hill? Yes, I know, I sound like someone's grandparent!

Speaking of rap and the recent Imus controversy, I thought Kelefa Sanneh's article, "Don't Blame Hip Hop," in today's New York Times offered a useful summary of the brouhaha, a discussion of Russell Simmons's proposal to snuff out the problematic awful words, and some real insight, particularly on the issue of widespread media focus and displacement of criticism on hiphop without any real discussion of some of the most popular current hip hop artists and the specific language and discourse of their raps (cf. Akon, but also Huey, Crime Mob, Mims--and I'd add Nas, DJ Khaled, Lupe Fiasco, Dem Franchise Boyz, T.I., etc.). Can I add once again that in addition to the first statement by Imus that everyone has fixed and fixated on, his executive producer, Bernard McGuirk, also used the highly offensive term "j" word, which I cannot recall anyone in hip hop bandying about, but perhaps my knowledge of hip hop really is as limited as I imagine it is, so please do enlighten me. At any rate, I'm some what amazed by the collective media erasure of this second offensive term, as if by simply ignoring it--and writing it out of the record--it would disappear, and thus enable the shifting and shifty critiques of everyone and everything but Imus himself that have followed. Strange.

On a completely different note, I want to publicly thank Deborah Hoffman, who responded to my post last year (or was it two years ago), about Vladimir Sorokin's Goluboe Salo (Lavender Lard--she suggests that "lavender" is a more appropriate translation than "blue") by kindly sending the first few pages of an English translation of the novel that she worked on and a paper that she wrote with Nadezhda Korchagina, which appeared in Ohio Slavic Papers (8, 131-148, 2006), entitled "Notes Towards a Postmodern Translation: 'Translating' Sorokin's Goluboe Salo." I've only had an opportunity to skim the paper, but after reading the first few pages of the translation--and then looking at the Russian text again today at the university library--I really wonder whether the right-wing protesters whom this text so vexed actually read the book. Because seriously, it looks like a doozy, as in, a real challenge to make one's way through. By comparison, Houellebecq's perverse post-modern fantasy, The Possibility of an Island, is as transparent and limpid as New York tap water. In the opening three pages of Lavender Lard (which I saw in French translation as Le lard bleu while in Paris), Sorokin's "Russian" includes words and phrases in English, Chinese, French, Sanskrit, and an invented lexicon--and I had to reread it repeatedly to get even a hint of its gist. Hoffman and Korchagina point out in their paper that the opening pages are parts of letters that a gay scientist, Boris Glogger is writing to his lover, letting him know that he's working on a top secret project that entails the cloning of famous writers--Akhmatova ("Akhmatova-5" and "AAA"), Nabokov ("Nabokov-7"), etc.--with the clones producing the infamous lavender lard process as a result of their writing. The texts they produce are "useless byproduct[s]," permitting Sorokin to draft parodies of these noted Russians' styles. None of this seems to have set off the right-wing nationalists, though; it was the scene of sadomasochistic sex involving a clone of Stalin and a clone of Kruschchev that led them to file a criminal complaint that he was promoting homosexuality and pornography.

(Let me note that Hoffman and Korchagina go on to talk quite productively about the relationship between translation, cloning, and postmodernism, Sorokin's parodic play on and in forms, styles and discourse, and the cultural offense he risks, as well as the untranslatability of (so) much of it, among other things, while posing necessary questions about the challenges they faced as they worked their way through the text: here is one example from the text, the first translation by Hoffman, the second by Korchagina:

Your ribs that shone through your skin, your birthmark shaped like a monk, your pro-tattoo that leaves no taste in my mouth, your gray hair, your secret tsin tsi, your dirty whispering, "Kiss me on my STARS."

Your ribs under transparent skin, your monk's birthmark, your tasteless tattoo-pro, your gray hair, your secret tsintsi, your dirty whisper, kiss me on the STARS.)

Mmm hmm. But again, I wonder, did the Moving Together protesters really read all the way through to that moment in the text, or did they just fly off the handle, like right-wingers over here do after not reading a text or attending an art exhibit, after hearing someone else describe the scene?

For those in New York or Austin, you will be able to see Mr. Sorokin in the flesh, because he (and Alain Mabanckou, and quite a few others) will be participating in this year's PEN World Voices festival):

Wednesday, April 25
Columbia University
Altschul Auditorium in the School of International and Public Affairs
420 W. 118th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
4th floor, Room 417.
Event Start Time, 6PM

Thursday, April 26
From Page to Stage (PEN World Voices)
Time: 1 p.m.-2:30 p.m.
Location: The Segal Theater, CUNY
Participants: Abla Farhoud, Dorota Masłowska, José Luís Peixoto, Vladimir Sorokin
Free

Saturday, April 28
BookPeople
Austin, Texas
Event Start Time: 6PM

Sunday, April 29
Literary Thrillers (PEN World Voices)
Time: 5 p.m.-6:30 p.m.
Location: The Bowery Ballroom
Participants: Jean Echenoz, Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett, Vladimir Sorokin; moderated by S.J. Rozan
Ticketing: $5 at the door/members free
Proper government-issued photo id required. 21+

Since I've mentioned hip hop, here's a piece that I've always thought was poetry, "My Melody," from Erik B. and Rakim's first album, Paid in Full (1987), one of my favorite rap albums of all time. Those around during that era may remember it well for the meteor (see, I'm keeping with Sorokin theme, but turning it on its head!) that it was. "The melody that I'm stylin, smooth as a violin / Rough enough to break New York from Long Island...." Yes, indeed. Oh, and no mention of the "h" word, the "n" word(s), or the "j" word, by the way.

MY MELODY

Verse One:

Turn up the bass, check out my melody, hand out a cigar
I'm lettin knowledge be born, and my name's the R
A-k-i-m not like the rest of them, I'm not on a list
That's what I'm sayin, I drop science like a scientist
My melody's in a code, the very next episode
Has the mic often distortin, ready to explode
I keep the mic in Fahrenheit, freeze MC's and make em colder
The listener's system is kickin like solar
As I memorize, advertise, like a poet
Keep you goin when I'm flowin, smooth enough, you know it
But rough that's why the middle of my story I tell E.B.
Nobody beats the "R", check out my melody...

Verse Two:

So what if I'm a microphone fiend addicted soon as I sing
One of these for MC's so they don't have to scream
I couldn't wait to take the mic, flow into it to test
Then let my melody play, and then the record suggest
That I'm droppin bombs, but I stay peace and calm
Any MC that disagree with me just wave your arm
And I'll break, when I'm through breakin I'll leave you broke
Drop the mic when I'm finished and watch it smoke
So stand back, you wanna rap? All of that can wait
I won't push, I won't beat around the bush
I wanna break upon those who are not supposed to
You might try but you can't get close to
Because I'm number one, competition is none
I'm measured with the heat that's made by sun
Whether playin ball or bobbin in the hall
I just writin my name in graffiti on the wall
You shouldn't have told me you said you control me
So now a contest is what you owe me
Pull out your money, pull out your cut
Pull up a chair, and I'ma tear shit up
My name is Rakim Allah, and R & A stands for "Ra"
Switch it around, but still comes out "R"
So easily will I e-m-c-e-e
My repetition of words is "check out my melody"
Some bass and treble is moist, scratchin and cuttin a voice
And when it's mine that's when the rhyme is always choice
I wouldn't have came to ?set? my name ?around the? same weak shit
Puttin blurs and slurs and words that don't fit
In a rhyme, why waste time on the microphone
I take this more serious than just a poem
Rockin party to party, backyard to yard
Now tear it up, y'all, and bless the mic for the gods

Verse Three:

The rhyme is rugged, at the same time sharp
I can swing off anything even a string of a harp
Just turn it on and start rockin, mind no introduction
Til I finish droppin science, no interruption
When I approach I exercise like a coach
Usin a melody and add numerous notes
With the mic and the R-a-k-i-m
It's a task, like a match I will strike again
Rhymes are poetically kept and alphabetically stepped
Put in order to pursue with the momentum except
I say one rhyme and I order a longer rhyme shorter
A pause, but don't stop the tape recorder

Verse Four:

I'm not a regular competitor, first rhyme editor
Melody arranger, poet, etcetera
Extra events, the grand finale like bonus
I am the man they call the microphonist
With wisdom which means wise words bein spoken
Too many at one time watch the mic start smokin
I came to express the rap I manifest
Stand in my way and I'll lead a --- words protest
MC's that wanna be dissed they're gonna
Be dissed if they don't get from in fronta
All they can go get is me a glass of Moet
A hard time, sip your juice and watch a smooth poet
I take 7 MC's put em in a line
And add 7 more brothas who think they can rhyme
Well, it'll take 7 more before I go for mine
And that's 21 MC's ate up at the same time
Easy does it, do it easy, that's what I'm doin
No fessin, no messin around, no chewin
No robbin, no buyin, bitin, why bother
This slob'll stop tryin fightin to follow
My unusual style will confuse you a while
If I was water, I flow in the Nile
So many rhymes you won't have time to go for your's
Just because of a cause I have to pause
Right after tonight is when I prepare
To catch another sucka duck MC out there
Cos my strategy has to be tragedy, catastrophe
And after this you'll call me your majesty
My melody...

Verse Five:

Marley Marl synthesized it, I memorize it
Eric B made a cut and advertised it
My melody's created for MC's in the place
Who try to listen cos I'm dissin ???
?Take off your necklace, you try to detect my pace?
?Now? you're ?buggin? over ??? off my rhyme like bass
The melody that I'm stylin, smooth as a violin
Rough enough to break New York from Long Island
My wisdom is swift, no matter if
My momentum is slow, MC's still stand stiff
I'm genuine like leather, don't try to be clever
MC's you'll beat the "R", I'll say "Oh never"
So Eric B cut it easily
And check out my melody....

Copyright © 1987, 2005, Erik B. and Rakim, from Paid in Full (Island Records).

Poem: Wanda Coleman

Soooo much reading, always....

Today 9 US soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber in Diyala Province in Iraq, more than 20 were wounded, as were a number of Iraqis. Every day, scores of Iraqis are slain, many more injured. The war inn Afghanistan continues as well. Just as many people took time out to remember the students who were slaughtered at Virginia Tech, we should take time out to remember those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. We should also thank the politicians who are serious about getting our troops out of the former quagmire.

To see MoveOn.org's VideoVets Project, which presents the stories of Iraq veterans and their families in their voices, click here.

My brain is tired, so instead of something more thoughtful about the troop deaths, the war, the Gonzales-Rove Attorneygate crisis, the reappearance of Abramoffia, the disappearance of the honeybees, the ongoing massacres in Darfur, sun in Jersey City or rain in Chicago, Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald's, Boris Yeltsin's or David Halberstam's deaths, or the voting mess that marked Nigeria's recent elections, or the first round of the presidential vote in France, which portends a Sarkozy victory in the second round, here's a brief poem, by Wanda Coleman, a Los Angeles-based poet one should read periodically because of what she can do with form, voices, and daily experience. Once I received a mysterious mailing urging me to buy several of her books--but I already had the ones on the sheet. I wondered if Coleman had sent it to me herself, and thought I should write her back and initiate a correspondence. But I didn't. I keep thinking that I'll meet her at some point and hear her read her work live and finally express my appreciation in person and talk with her. Some day. Fate, get to work.

AMERICAN SONNET 12
--After Robert Duncan

my earliest dreams linger/wronged spirits
who will not rest/dusky crows astride
the sweetbriar seek to fly the
orchard's sky. is this the world i loved?
groves of perfect oranges and streets of stars
where the sad eyes of my youth
wander the atomic-age paradise

tasting

the blood of a stark and wounded puberty?
o what years ago? rapture lost in white
heat of skin/walls that patina my heart's
despair? what fear disturbs my quiet
night's grazing? stampedes my soul?

o memory. i sweat the eternal weight of graves

from American Sonnets © 1994 by Wanda Coleman, Woodland Pattern Book Center and Light and Dusk Books, Wisconsin

Earth Day Poem: Emily Dickinson

Here's a poem for Earth Day, "'Nature' Is What We See," by the incomparable Emily Dickinson (1830-1886).

For information on Earth Day itself, you can go to the EarthDayNetwork, which has pages of information, portals and links to participating organizations and sites focused on environmental awareness, conservation of our planet and natural environment, and reversing the current worsening global warming trends.

I spent most of the day in the garden, after waiting through weeks of cold and rain, as well as being able to get back from Chicago. I planted a few flowering shrubs (creeping phlox, with periwinkle-type flowers), lots of herbs (lemon balm, two or three different types of sage, more rosemary, arugula, English thyme, African purple basil), a few vegetables (red cabbage, spinach, brussel sprouts), a blueberry bush (alongside the rapidly spread blackberry plants), and a fig tree. I can still feel the workout. The cold appears to have killed off some of the plants, like the Spanish lavender, but the other lavender plant has returned, and the regular and alpine strawberries are already leafy and sending out shoots. The other plants--the azaleas, the roses, the honeysuckles, the hyacinths (which are now blooming), and the lilac bush, are also thriving. Please let the weather stay sunny and mild for a while!

At the very back of the yard, we have a saucer magnolia tree, which I originally thought was a tulip tree, except that when I looked that tree up, the flowers and fruit were different. (There's a twin saucer magnolia in our neighbor's yard, and shoots have started to rise from the base of the main trunk.) The saucer magnolia (Magnolia x soulangiana) has beautiful, highly distinctive leaves, which flower in spring and leave a thick carpet of petals after a few weeks. The first photo below shows the flowers, which the wind was steadily shaking from the tree, leaving a bit of a mess, so I won't post any pictures of the new plantings just yet. Instead, the second photo shows both trees in flower (and the new plantings along the fence).


The flowers


The saucer magnolias themselves (alongside the compost heap; the raked petals have already filled lots of bags)

"NATURE" IS WHAT WE SEE

"Nature" is what we see—
The Hill—the Afternoon—
Squirrel—Eclipse—the Bumble bee—
Nay—Nature is Heaven—
Nature is what we hear—
The Bobolink—the Sea—
Thunder—the Cricket—
Nay—Nature is Harmony—
Nature is what we know—
Yet have no art to say—
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

Poem by Emily Dickinson