New short story out

My story "From a Trolley Stop in Amsterdam" just arrived in the mail in INK POT: Special Edition: Short Story & Flash Fiction Contest Winners.

My story is in the section "honorable finalists" (sounds like a Japanese honorific). If you don't want to lay out $10 to buy your very own copy (there are lots of other good stories there, too, including the ones that actually won prizes), then RUSH to your library to read it or to demand that they get it.

"From a Trolley Stop in Amsterdam" is a reflection on some of the psychodramatic consequences of colonialism. I think. Or maybe it's just a colorful anecdote about two people in Amsterdam. INK POT: Special Edition

Mexican menace

I'm working now on a response to the latest bizarre, chauvinistic cry of fear from Samuel P. Huntington, The Hispanic Challenge, in Foreign Affairs (March-April). I dealt with all those arguments before, at some length, in Hispanic Nation, which is why I find this a bit tiresome. I'm going to attack it from a different, and wider, angle this time. Stay tuned.

More public funds to private (GOP - "Greed, Oil & Privilege") pockets

From the National Coalition for History Newsletter:

Recent reports show that the U.S. Forest Service, for example, has now spent $23.2 million to outsource positions that have resulted in a net savings of only $6.2 million to the government. Other agencies report similar statistics. But high-ranking Bush administration officials continue to articulate support of a program that critics charge is diverting scarce agency and precious bureau operating funds to line the pockets of private sector contractors who conduct the studies. The A-76 program is now being characterized by some as among the most inefficient programs in terms of cost/benefit ever created by government officials.

Sex and the City

In honor of the demise of this long-running show, I here reprint my comment from three years ago -- before I had Blogger and instead posted such notes under the heading "Unsolicited Comments." I never did see the show, but felt moved to ponder the ideas that I imagined inspired it.

Sex and the city: two good ideas

2001 July 17 Tuesday -- Last week the sidewalk across from our building was lined with huge circular lamps that flooded our bedroom with yellow-orange light, easily penetrating our semi-opaque window shades. It was - we found out next morning - the filming of an episode of "Sex and the City" that forced my bedmate and me to dig out our airline masks, like the one the Lone Ranger used to use but without the slits. The concierge in our building told me that they had scores of extras lined up that night, and the main action was occurring around a nearby rooftop pool where I frequently see, from my home office window, models being posed for photo or film shoots. It seemed like a lot of expense for a single TV episode, but hey, what's money for, anyway?

I've never seen the show, and wouldn't know the actresses if I ran into them in the elevator - which I probably have, given the popularity of our building with such types (we're two blocks from Washington Square, from which New York University and its film school have spread out to engulf most of the territory where East Village meets West). Nevertheless, the incident got me to thinking about sex and the city.

I think they are both good ideas. In fact, I think they are the two best, most civilized and most liberating principles for forming community, especially when they occur together. Sex is pretty good, or can be, anywhere, of course, but in a city - well, it can become part of the project to remake yourself as the kind of person you want to be, which is what cities are all about.

There are other principles for forming community, of course, but they are the opposite of liberating. The worst is tribe, or "race," or ethnicity, or any other label for an inherited status. Creed is another, not quite so bad because it is possible, at least theoretically, to change your creed - but hardly anyone ever does unless s/he lives in a city. For obvious reasons. Back in the village, they never give you a chance to experiment, and the only way you learn about other options is from the tourists. And the reason there are tourists is because cities are constantly sending out people who want to explore other ways of being and new experiences. Including sex.

Be very scared -- and very active

As noted here before, climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters, says the U.S. Pentagon -- while the U.S. White House denies that it is even occurring! Read all about it in Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us by Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, in The Guardian.

The Gospel of hatred

My union brother (National Writers Union) Charles Patterson has written a fascinating and, to my mind, persuasive article about how and why the stories we have received about Jesus were horribly distorted. In A Whiff Of Auschwitz: Mel Gibson and the Gospel of Anti-Semitism, Patterson writes,

The trouble with Mel Gibson`s film "The Passion" that opens in more than 2000 movie theaters on Ash Wednesday (Feb. 25) is not the film itself, but the gospel story on which it's based. The gospel story, which has generated more anti-Semitism than the sum total of all the other anti-Semitic writings ever written, created the climate in Christian Europe that led to the Holocaust. Long before the rise of Adolf Hitler the gospel story about the life and death of Jesus had poisoned the bloodstream of European civilization.

But read the whole thing. It makes a lot of sense to me. I've never (or at least, not since I grew up) believed that "Jesus" as talked about in the Protestant churches I knew, or the Catholic ones I knew of, had really existed. I supposed him to have been a folkloric composite of possibly several wandering magicians of Palestine in those days. Maybe, though, Patterson is right: It could have originally been one guy, but a very different guy and with a very different story from what is portrayed in the Gospels.

First, you've got to destroy it

For some mysterious reason, I've been put on the mailing list of a lot well-stuffed suits (just look at the pictures!) circling the moneybags of Halliburton, in an operation called Rebuilding Iraq. Lots of luck, guys.

WTC Memorial: my candidate

You can now see Susana Torre's submission (along with the 5,200 other ones) just as she presented it: Loss, Remembrance, Renewal . Here is another view, just the images and text. For my earlier comment describing Torre's proposal, see the December 10 entry in this blog (scroll down from 2003/12/13 to 2003/12/10). And just above that, on December 12, you'll find a reference to Torre's article on memorial designs around the world.

The end of the Earth as a habitable planet

A couple of days ago I was worried because scientists were saying the sun would "swell up and destroy the Earth in about five billion years." Now Al Gore tells me that we're in much more imminent danger: "Scientists project that within another 50 years, we may well see the complete disappearance in summertime of the Artic ice cap," which will bring huge disturbances in weather patterns. In fact, the disturbances have already begun, as Gore notes: "Skyrocketing losses from extreme weather events; and more frequent record heat waves, as in Western Europe last summer, when 15,000 people died."

Gore says that with "bold moral and political leadership from the United States of America… there is no doubt whatsoever that we could solve the world's climate crisis." I'm glad he's so confident. I'd like to think he's right, but -- bold moral and political leadership? From the American plutocracy that sees the rest of the world as theirs to plunder? Either we throw the bums out SOON, or we may see that the Maya were right: by their Long Count calendar, the end of the world as we know it is scheduled for 3 Eb 5 Kankin (21 December 2012).

Gore's statement is condensed in a full page ad in today's New York Times. For a fuller presentation, see his January 15 speech on Global Warming and the Environment. That same site has some ideas of what we can do to keep the Maya prophecy and the Bush plan for world disaster from being fulfilled.

Progress report

I've just spent the past few hours chasing translation job leads and remaking my AbraPalabra Translations page. I'm going to push this business -- it's been a lot more lucrative to me, dollar-per-hour, that the writing, though not half so satisfying. So, if you're in the market for a translator, or know someone who is, please keep me in mind.

In writing, meanwhile, I've also been busy. Monday I sent off a little essay that was really fun. It will be the introduction to the inaugural issue of a new English-language journal devoted to Turkish literature. Now why am I, a specialist in Latin American society and culture, writing about Turkish literature? Funny you should ask.

You see, in the course of writing my novel about 15th century Constantinople and the Ottomans who were besieging it, I came across a manuscript in pencil titled "Mihri Khatun, A Turkish Poetess of the 15th Century," by the Russian scholar Nicholas N. Martinovitch (1883-1954) in the Special Collections Office of the New York Public Library, along with other papers and glass slides of this multilingual cultural historian. It was such a charming and erudite little book, and Martinovitch had struggled for so long, and so unsuccessfully, to get it published, that I thought it should not remain ignored. I had a copy made and offered it to historians of Turkey, and now it is coming out in the new Journal of Turkish Literature, edited by the distinguished professor of Turkish literature Talat Sait Halman in Bilkent University in Ankara. And Prof. Halman asked me to write the introduction. I am delighted, and so would be Martinovitch, though it has been half a century since his death and about 400 years since the death of his subject, the "Turkish, Moslem, beautiful woman of a good, religious family, who remained unmarried, was highly educated, unusually for the time, took part openly in serious discussions with her countrymen, was the author of scientific works and, moreover, was a famous, prominent, distinguished poetess."

Other little projects include my articles for Monster.com, for Hispanics/Latinos looking to improve their careers. I just sent in my fourth one on Tuesday, but the only one up so far is the 1st, about dealing with the psychological stresses of immigration. And of course I'm still working away on that big book on Latin American architecture and urbanism, right now focusing on the Classic Maya of the 8th-10th centuries AD. It's fascinating. I'll tell you more soon.