Take Action: Online petitions to save Salinas libraries in John Steinbeck’s hometown will be handed in Tuesday
On Tuesday, April 12, National Library Week, more than 100 residents from Salinas, Calif.—including many farm workers and their children—will travel to the state Capitol in Sacramento and hand in petitions they have collected urging lawmakers to save their libraries.
Due to budget cuts, all three libraries in the city of Salinas, hometown of Grapes of Wrath author John Steinbeck, are on track to be shut down soon. Salinas is a poor largely agricultural community where many residents do not have money to buy books or access to computers. Their children don't have many places to study. This community desperately needs it’s libraries.
Last weekend in Salinas, as the nation marked Cesar Chavez’s birthday, dozens of authors, community activists and library backers organized an emergency 24-hour “read-in” outside the Cesar Chavez Public Library to call attention to this pending tragedy.
Make a difference and sign the petition today. Help us tell California elected officials that libraries and education are not expendable.
Sign the petition TODAY!
2005/04/07
For a more literate proletariat
What could be more socially responsible and literary than defending public libraries? And so I pass this on, from the United Farm Workers.
The unimbedded journalist
We read a lot about, and by, journalists "embedded" with the rich and powerful. Here is one who was fiercely unimbedded. For his story, see Gary Webb: Do What He Did. But there has to be more to it than that.
Recommended reading
These from the current Village Voice:
Liberty Beat: Circling the wagons around the defense secretary and his commander in chief. Whitewashing Rumsfeld by Nat Hentoff.
And this: "The dirty little secret about the modern soldier is that most of us are completely unsuited to being told what to do. You're thinking that an army can't run with its ranks full of anarchists. Well, we are not anarchists; we are iconoclasts." From The Essay: G.I. Joke. A real-life Yossarian on the comic efficiency of a soldier's life in Iraq, by Craig A. McNeil.
Liberty Beat: Circling the wagons around the defense secretary and his commander in chief. Whitewashing Rumsfeld by Nat Hentoff.
And this: "The dirty little secret about the modern soldier is that most of us are completely unsuited to being told what to do. You're thinking that an army can't run with its ranks full of anarchists. Well, we are not anarchists; we are iconoclasts." From The Essay: G.I. Joke. A real-life Yossarian on the comic efficiency of a soldier's life in Iraq, by Craig A. McNeil.
2005/04/06
Saul Bellow
This felt weird: Today’s NYT carries the obituary of Saul Bellow, just after I had finished reading one of his most famous works. Check out Featured Author: Saul Bellow, especially Edward Rothstein's appreciation with the slide show. Here's my take on one big book: Humboldt's Gift. New York, The Viking Press, 1975.
Charlie Citrine, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author and playwright, is haunted by the overwhelming spirit of Von Humboldt Fleisher, a once-brilliant poet and Charlie’s one-time mentor who went mad and abusive from his failure to make it big as a literary star or commercial success. Some very vivid character sketches of social types including sexy gold diggers, a would-be Mafioso, pretentious lawyers, and culture moguls after Charlie’s wealth (rapidly diminishing) or his talent (still intact), plus long-suffering wives (Humboldt’s ex and Charlie’s greedy brother’s current spouse); also amusing descriptions of Chicago society in the 1970s, and Greenwich Village in the 1940s. Most interesting to me were Charlie’s notes for a future essay or book on boredom, which “has more to do with modern political revolution than justice has. In 1917, that boring Lenin who wrote so many boring pamphlets and letters on organizational questions was, briefly, all passion, all radiant interest. The Russian revolution promised mankind a permanently interesting life.” (p. 200)
Also worth remembering: Humboldt, according to his widow,
The writing is energetic, witty, intelligent and linked through references to very wide reading, and so gives many moments of pleasure. But as a total fictional experience, I found it disappointing – disjointed and jerky, farcical realism but with an ending that that is more like a shrug than an explosion or any kind of resolution.
Charlie Citrine, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author and playwright, is haunted by the overwhelming spirit of Von Humboldt Fleisher, a once-brilliant poet and Charlie’s one-time mentor who went mad and abusive from his failure to make it big as a literary star or commercial success. Some very vivid character sketches of social types including sexy gold diggers, a would-be Mafioso, pretentious lawyers, and culture moguls after Charlie’s wealth (rapidly diminishing) or his talent (still intact), plus long-suffering wives (Humboldt’s ex and Charlie’s greedy brother’s current spouse); also amusing descriptions of Chicago society in the 1970s, and Greenwich Village in the 1940s. Most interesting to me were Charlie’s notes for a future essay or book on boredom, which “has more to do with modern political revolution than justice has. In 1917, that boring Lenin who wrote so many boring pamphlets and letters on organizational questions was, briefly, all passion, all radiant interest. The Russian revolution promised mankind a permanently interesting life.” (p. 200)
Also worth remembering: Humboldt, according to his widow,
“...used to say how much he would like to move in brilliant circles, be a part of the literary world.”
“That’s just it. There never was such a literary world,” I [Charlie] said. “In the nineteenth century there were several solitaries of the highest genius – a Melville or a Poe had no literary life. It was the customhouse and the barroom for them. In Russia, Lenin and Stalin destroyed the literary world. Russia’s situation now [mid 1970s] resembles ours – poets, in spite of everything against them, emerge from nowhere. Where did Whitman come from, and where did he get what he had? It was W. Whitman, an irrepressible individual, that had it and that did it.” (p. 370)
The writing is energetic, witty, intelligent and linked through references to very wide reading, and so gives many moments of pleasure. But as a total fictional experience, I found it disappointing – disjointed and jerky, farcical realism but with an ending that that is more like a shrug than an explosion or any kind of resolution.
Your Holiness
I suppose I've been remiss by not saying anything about the death of the pope. It's not that I hadn't noticed. It's just that I'm one of the many millions of people to whom it didn't really much matter -- although from the TV coverage you would never suspect that we even exist. Karol Wojtyla seemed like a basically nice old man, with some dangerously reactionary views on women, homosexuals and sex in general, along with a refreshingly persistent challenge to social and economic inequality. Like Max Weber, who spent a lot of time thinking about the role of the sacred (not only in The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism), I am "religiously unmusical." That is, like Weber, I don't get any special thrill out of mystical claims of life after death, or some unseen and unknowable remote power controlling our lives, or any of the rest of it.
But like Weber, I do have a lively sociological curiosity, as to why other people get such thrills and are willing to believe such unprovable assertions. I was even wondering if Karol Wjtyla really "believed," but I suppose that's a ridiculous question -- "Is the Pope Catholic?" I think we have to distinguish between at least two kinds of beliefs. When I "believe" some claim or argument, I mean that I have adopted that claim as a working hypothesis. Believing requires no special emotional effort -- some things seem probably true based on my own experience or evidence I've read, and I'll believe those things until they're disproved. Once upon a time beliefs in gods must have seemed like reasonable working hypotheses, too, since people didn't have any better explanations available for the weather, disease, disasters or favorable events. A religious person today, though, must will him/herself to believe in God or gods, contrary to all available evidence. Willed belief is what they call "faith," and it takes effort. I wonder why they bother.
But like Weber, I do have a lively sociological curiosity, as to why other people get such thrills and are willing to believe such unprovable assertions. I was even wondering if Karol Wjtyla really "believed," but I suppose that's a ridiculous question -- "Is the Pope Catholic?" I think we have to distinguish between at least two kinds of beliefs. When I "believe" some claim or argument, I mean that I have adopted that claim as a working hypothesis. Believing requires no special emotional effort -- some things seem probably true based on my own experience or evidence I've read, and I'll believe those things until they're disproved. Once upon a time beliefs in gods must have seemed like reasonable working hypotheses, too, since people didn't have any better explanations available for the weather, disease, disasters or favorable events. A religious person today, though, must will him/herself to believe in God or gods, contrary to all available evidence. Willed belief is what they call "faith," and it takes effort. I wonder why they bother.
2005/03/25
Martín Espada on "killer Coke"
I'm a big fan of Martín Espada's street-wise, political committed poetry, and here (as in many other things he's done) he shows us that the commitment goes beyond setting angry words on paper: A Poet Speaks Out About Colombia: Why I Refused Coca-Cola's Money. Check out the links at that site for some of his poetry.
2005/03/23
Literary images: Rubaiyat
These graceful drawings by Shahriar Shahriari should stir your imagination: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
Trying Bellow again
I've just gotten into Saul Bellow's zany opus, Humboldt's Gift. (1975, New York, The Viking Press). Immensely clever, with translingual puns and sly (sometimes) references to everything a litteratus should be expected to have read, from Zinoviev to Whitehead, built on a loony premise. It has long been on my list of "Famous Books I Really Should Read," but I'd been putting it off because I'd been so disappointed with a much earlier book of his. I'll let you know what I think of this one when I finish it. Meanwhile, here is what I wrote about the earlier one when I read it 8 years ago.
Bellow, Saul (1956). Seize the Day. New York, The Viking Press.
A feckless fool has a really bad day. Clumsy, paunchy, 40-something Tommy Wilhelm, a failure as a salesman, soldier (he's an undistinguished WWII vet), actor (he was an extra in 1 movie long ago, when he was still handsome but no brighter), son (his distinguished father, a retired physician, finds him repulsive) & husband (his estranged wife will not divorce him, nor let him have much time with their sons, but squeezes him for money he doesn't have), entrusts his last $700 to an extravagant old con man, Dr. Tamkin (who may not be a real doctor), who gambles it on lard futures & disappears when the investment crashes.Tommy then stumbles into a funeral and weeps so at the futility of it all, the others think he must be a relative of the deceased. The end. All this takes place on upper Broadway, between 70th & Columbia U., in Bellow's version an urban shtetl inhabited entirely by middle-aged & older Jewish men. Dr. Tamkin is amusing, but otherwise there's nothing here to merit the extravagant blurbs; if it was "one of the central stories of our day" (Herbert Gold, The Nation) back in the '50s, it's neither central nor much of a story today (April, 1997).
Bellow, Saul (1956). Seize the Day. New York, The Viking Press.
A feckless fool has a really bad day. Clumsy, paunchy, 40-something Tommy Wilhelm, a failure as a salesman, soldier (he's an undistinguished WWII vet), actor (he was an extra in 1 movie long ago, when he was still handsome but no brighter), son (his distinguished father, a retired physician, finds him repulsive) & husband (his estranged wife will not divorce him, nor let him have much time with their sons, but squeezes him for money he doesn't have), entrusts his last $700 to an extravagant old con man, Dr. Tamkin (who may not be a real doctor), who gambles it on lard futures & disappears when the investment crashes.Tommy then stumbles into a funeral and weeps so at the futility of it all, the others think he must be a relative of the deceased. The end. All this takes place on upper Broadway, between 70th & Columbia U., in Bellow's version an urban shtetl inhabited entirely by middle-aged & older Jewish men. Dr. Tamkin is amusing, but otherwise there's nothing here to merit the extravagant blurbs; if it was "one of the central stories of our day" (Herbert Gold, The Nation) back in the '50s, it's neither central nor much of a story today (April, 1997).
2005/03/22
Legislating life
I haven't wanted to comment on the Terri Schiavo case, because neither you nor I nor the U.S. Congress is qualified to say whether she is alive or dead. The physicians who examined her say that she is incapable of either thought or emotion, which means she is dead. The nervous system that was once part of her life may respond to various stimuli, but there is no Terri Schiavo there, no feeling, thinking person.
On the other hand, there are tens of thousands of feeling, thinking persons whose lives the U.S. Congress could protect, but won't. Ending our occupation of Iraq would save lots of them, taking decisive action in Darfur -- preferably in conjunction with other powers -- would save many more. On Congress's mindless interference in this Schiavo case and where it could lead, see the Los Angeles Times editorial, The Midnight Coup.
On the other hand, there are tens of thousands of feeling, thinking persons whose lives the U.S. Congress could protect, but won't. Ending our occupation of Iraq would save lots of them, taking decisive action in Darfur -- preferably in conjunction with other powers -- would save many more. On Congress's mindless interference in this Schiavo case and where it could lead, see the Los Angeles Times editorial, The Midnight Coup.
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