From my notebooks

I just came across this old poem, written in pencil, 3/13/94, 11:40 a.m.

What We've Lost

All of us here, we are aware of what we've lost.
Jobs, career, a first wife and a second,
one of us even lost part of a leg,
but most of all we've lost
hope
illusions
joy.
Youth
It's all over, we mourn, embittered all
that we have lost.
Every night we see on television
people whose homes have been destroyed,
whose relatives have been murdered,
whose social system has been bombed
to pieces,
and we frown and wince and shake our
heads.
And when it's over, this brief distraction,
we go back to mourning our loss.

Writing success

Wise words from Duncan Murrell, a former editor at Algonquin Books: Measures of Success:What Publishing Your Book Really Means, in Poets & Writers magazine.

CBS wants to keep you in ignorant bliss

I borrowed the following from John Battelle's Searchblog. No point in rewording what he has said quite well.

Loads of folks have commented already on this, but I wanted to add what I could to the meme, if only to insure one more protest is lodged in this particular record in the database of intentions. It boggles the mind how deeply lame CBS's decision to deny MoveOn's ad is. CBS claims "the network has had a long-term policy not to air issue ads anywhere on the network." Uh huh. Lessig comments that somehow a War on Drugs ad from the Bush White House, a blatant piece of "issue advocacy", made it through the CBS filter. Not to mention all the presidential advertising lucre CBS will be happy to suckle over the next 10 months. You're telling me an RNC- or DNC-funded attack ad won't be an "issue ad"? Did CBS refuse the Willie Horton ad back in 1988? What the fuck is going on here?

Close quote. I (Geoff Fox, not John Battelle) just called Les Moonves, President of CBS, at (323) 575-2345; the receptionist transferred me to a "comment line" (attached to a tape recorder? Who knows?) where I could spout off. MoveOn asks that after you call (please do) you let them know by going here.

Getting the news from poetry

David González, an excellent reporter on the struggles of ordinary people facing crushing problems and a writer of more than ordinary talent, has a poetic report in today's NYT on one of our great reporting poets, Pedro Pietri, who alas is ill: When Life Is Art, Dying Is Simply Not an Option I've known David since he was a reporter in Philadelphia and contributing to a newsletter I was editing years ago, Hispanic Monitor, then he was in Newsweek (not a good place for a creative spirit), and now has found more space for himself to say what really matters in The New York Times, lately as Caribbean correspondent. I know he feels kinship toward Pedro Pietri, who has always said things that really matter. Somewhere I still have one of Pietri's visiting cards, announcing him as chief reverend of the "Church of the Tomatoes."

The far more conservative NYT columnist, Clyde Haberman, also waxes poetical on the same page, reporting on and quoting from Wall Street lawyer and poet Eugene Schlanger on the proper memorial to the dead of September 11 (New York's September 11, 2001, not Chile's in 1973, which Wall Street lawyers can't be expected to remember). Schlanger's verses show that even Republicans can have human feelings, at least within the patriotic range of issues. Who'd have thought?

William Carlos Williams was right: It is hard to get the news from poetry, but sometimes, that's the best place to find it.

For a very short sample of Pedro Pietri: Telephone Booth Number 905 1/2
For info on the coming Tribute to Pedro Pietri (to raise funds for his treatment), February 12 at Taller Boricua, Julia de Burgos Cultural Center, 1680 Lexington Avenue at 106th Street in Manhattan

Speak out!

Terrific poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti expresses my feelings about America and our leaders' contempt for the world. In milk magazine.

Memorable dates

First, this blog and our entire staff (Bear, Lion, Fox & Glib) wish you all good fortune in the year 4071, Year of the Monkey, which began yesterday (according to our Chinese friends). Second, we are reminded every time January 23 comes around of that momentous day in 1958, when Venezuelans changed their history. For photos and background (in Spanish) on the events of that day, January 23, 1958, see Globovision's 23 de enero, momento para recordar

Is sex a sin? Please pass the fish (Los sordelis)

My compañera and I are not really hard of hearing ("sordeli" in Argentine slang). Not so you'd notice. But sometimes what comes out of the mouth of one is not exactly what reaches the ear of the other.

One evening this summer in Carboneras, Spain, as we were sitting on the balcony overlooking the Mediterranean, I was reflecting on the contrast between the topless foreign sunbathers and the local women, those older ones who would venture outdoors (in that heat) only in a kind of Roman Catholic burkha, a shapeless black dress down to the ankles to deny sexuality and distance the wearer from sin (pecado in their language).

And so I murmured these thoughts to the compañera. (To follow this, you have to know that she and I speak Argentine, a distant cousin of Castilian, and for us "coger" means what the Spaniards call "follar".)

"¿De dónde viene la idea de que el coger es pecado?" I asked.

She looked at me startled. "¿Escoger el pescado?"

Like I said: Not so you'd notice.

e-reading

This is horrifyingly real -- how a very ordinary young man with decent impulses and a Socialist father could become a Nazi murderer of Jews. It must really have been like this for many of those young soldiers in the Wehrmacht. Do read A Report From Chekernassy by Sean McCormick, at Carve Magazine.

Recent reading: Steve Almond

Nobody writes funnier about sex than Steve Almond. In some of his stories -- the earlier ones, I suspect -- that's the whole point, frequently featuring a feckless male unable to rein in his phallus and thus following it into ridiculously bad relationships. But that's not always all: Almond has become such a master of the comedy of sexual desperation that he can use it as a device to tell other, less predictable stories. You'll want to read this collection, not so much for the title story or even the one after that (about another kind of feckless male, a widower who depended on his wife just to function) -- they're OK, and funny in a kind of sick way, but don't get put off by them from reading the others. Especially good: "How to Love a Republican" is full of wet, sloppy sex, but it is really about the utterly shameless lust for power and perversion of the political process in our 2000 presidential election (the narrator is a guy working for Bradley, the girl is an ambitious operative for McCain, scornful of Bush, but easily seduced into the Bush camp once it's clear that that's where the opportunities will be). And be sure to read "The Pass," a semiotic essay worthy of Roland Barthes (who was also a good story-teller). All but one of the stories are told from a guy's point-of-view, usually in first person. The exception is, I think, a successful representation of the same lustful desperation in a woman (maybe some woman who reads it can tell me if it sounds true; it did to me): "Geek Player, Love Slayer." Almond is really good.

Almond, Steve. My Life in Heavy Metal. New York: Grove Press, 2002.

Bio-terror of the state

I've been reading one of Henri Lefebvre's last books, The Production of Space, and so been reminded of the deeper crisis of our society. Now comes this important and distressingly accurate open letter from Giorgio Agamben, recently published in Le Monde:

Le Monde

Saturday 10 January 2004

The newspapers leave no doubt: from now on whoever wants to go to the United States with a visa will be put on file and will have to leave their fingerprints when they enter the country. Personally, I have no intention of submitting myself to such procedures and that's why I didn't wait to cancel the course I was supposed to teach at New York University in March.

I would like to explain the reasons for this refusal here, that is, why, in spite of the sympathy that has connected me to my American colleagues and their students for many years, I consider that this decision is at once necessary and without appeal and would hope that it will be shared by other European intellectuals and teachers.

It's not only the immediate superficial reaction to a procedure that has long been imposed on criminals and political defendants. If it were only that, we would certainly be morally able to share, in solidarity, the humiliating conditions to which so many human beings are subjected.

The essential does not lie there. The problem exceeds the limits of personal sensitivity and simply concerns the juridical-political status (it would be simpler, perhaps, to say bio-political) of citizens of the so-called democratic states where we live.

There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept as the humane and normal dimensions of our existence, practices of control that had always been properly considered inhumane and exceptional.

Thus, no one is unaware that the control exercised by the state through the usage of electronic devices, such as credit cards or cell phones, has reached previously unimaginable levels.

All the same, it wouldn't be possible to cross certain thresholds in the control and manipulation of bodies without entering a new
bio-political era, without going one step further in what Michel
Foucault called the progressive animalization of man which is
established through the most sophisticated techniques.

Electronic filing of finger and retina prints, subcutaneous
tattooing, as well as other practices of the same type, are elements
that contribute towards defining this threshold. The security reasons
that are invoked to justify these measures should not impress us:
they have nothing to do with it. History teaches us how practices
first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied later to the
rest of the citizenry.

What is at stake here is nothing less than the new "normal"
bio-political relationship between citizens and the state. This
relation no longer has anything to do with free and active
participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrolment and
the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of
subjectivity: I mean the body's biological life.

These technological devices that register and identify naked life correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: between these two extremes of a body without words and words without a body, the space we once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny.

Thus, by applying these techniques and these devices invented for the dangerous classes to a citizen, or rather to a human being as such, states, which should constitute the precise space of political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the point that it's humanity itself that has become the dangerous class.

Some years ago, I had written that the West's political paradigm was no longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and that we had passed from Athens to Auschwitz. It was obviously a philosophical thesis, and not historic recital, because one could not confuse phenomena that it is proper, on the contrary, to distinguish.

I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at Auschwitz undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the enrolment and registration of deported persons into concentration camps. The bio-political tattooing the United States imposes now to enter its territory could well be the precursor to what we will be asked to accept later as the normal identity registration of a good citizen in the state's gears and mechanisms. That's why we must oppose it.

Translated from Italian to French by Martin Rueff.
Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher and professor at the University of
Venice and New York University.