The National Writers Union announces, "NWU Offshoring Campaign Gathering Steam." What an image! Reminds me of a history of U.S. intervention in Central America, wherein a noted historian wrote of "gunboat diplomacy in America's backyard." (I'm not making this up). Does a hell of a job on your lawn.
But the best mixing of metaphors I ever heard was from a community college president. Coming into a meeting after it had started, she announced, "I want to make sure I'm on the same page before I step into the water." At which point, no doubt, she would take in water to build up steam.
But about "offshoring": As the NWU says, you can find a description of the campaign and its strategy, as well as relevant position papers, on the campaign web site, and then you can sign the petition.
2005/04/25
"Artemio" & Carlos Fuentes on the BBC
On May 5 -- anniversary of the battle of Puebla (when the Mexicans defeated Maximilian's troops) and a big holiday in Mexico -- the BBC will interview Carlos Fuentes about his breakthrough novel, La muerte de Artemio Cruz, tr. The Death of Artemio Cruz. You can read and hear it on the BBC World Book Club. The producer found a comment of mine about the book, and asked me as a "fan" to pose a question to the author. (See? Blogs are useful.) I've got to think of a good one. If you've got any ideas, pass them along. For now, I'm thinking of asking Carlos Fuentes if he thinks that the kind of corruption characterized by Artemio Cruz -- with his claws in media, oil rights and the political machinery -- has survived in post-P.R.I. Mexico. If you have a better idea, let me know.
Back in business (of blog publishing)
I'm happy to report. Blogs weren't appearing because my web host, the Authors Guild, had changed servers and my settings had to be changed accordingly. Thanks to John Merchant of the Guild for getting this straightened out as soon he knew about it.
Unpeace in our time, with Howard Nemerov
Last Saturday my neighbors were holding a party so noisy that they couldn't hear the phone when I called to ask them to turn down the music; I was in pyjamas & didn't feel like barging in (I supposed their door was unlocked for their guests), and also I knew it was a big event -- celebrating their impending marriage -- so I just decided to bear it by reading poetry. I decided I wanted the company of someone very wise and witty, and so pulled from my shelves: Nemerov, Howard (1981). The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
I got so involved in reading the section "Guide to the Ruins" (1950) that I kept reading long after my neighbors' party had quieted. Because Nemerov's verse, in this period right after one great war and at the beginning of the next one, in Korea, was far from quieting. Here's one very short example, gruesomely timely in light of today's (and ever day's recently) report of casualties in Iraq:
And on a link on that page of the Academy of American Poets I also found a poem I should have read Saturday night, but isn't included in the "Collected Poems" -- maybe he wrote it later: Insomnia I
I got so involved in reading the section "Guide to the Ruins" (1950) that I kept reading long after my neighbors' party had quieted. Because Nemerov's verse, in this period right after one great war and at the beginning of the next one, in Korea, was far from quieting. Here's one very short example, gruesomely timely in light of today's (and ever day's recently) report of casualties in Iraq:
PEACE IN OUR TIMEAnd this:
Honor is saved by the national will,
The burgher throws up his cap.
Gone is the soldier, over the hill,
And the rat has defended his trap.
GRAND CENTRAL, WITH SOLDIERS, IN EARLY MORNINGFor much more on Nemerov, including a chance to hear his voice, go to the Howard Nemerov page of the Academy of American Poets. Here I learned that he had served as a pilot in World War II, first in the RCAF and then in the USAF -- he must have been very young; he was born in 1920. I also learned that he died in 1991. (I already knew this odd fact: he was the slightly older brother of Diane Arbus. I don't know what to make of that.)
These secretly are going to some place,
Packing their belted, serviceable hearts.
It is the earnest wish of this command
That they may go in stealth and leave no trace,
In early morning before business starts.
And on a link on that page of the Academy of American Poets I also found a poem I should have read Saturday night, but isn't included in the "Collected Poems" -- maybe he wrote it later: Insomnia I
2005/04/24
PEN Festival - the lowlights
My novelist & journalist colleague Jan Alexander missed the PEN events, so I took the opportunity to write to her what I would have put on the blog, if only my blog were functioning. I'm confident (or at least prayerful) that the Authors Guild will get it straightened out again (the moved to another server, and somehow blanked out my new blog entries), so here's what I had to say about the panels and celebrations at this week's festival. Some were just fun, others more practically useful. There's a short note in today's NYT -- too short, and Dinitia Smith thought that Salman Rushdie's closing joke at one panel was that "Literature is a loose cannon." I'm sure he was thinking "canon." I wrote up a note on the big Cervantes night and wanted to write others, but the Authors Guild (which hosts my website) has screwed up and no new entries are appearing in my blog for now. Bummer.
One of the oddest things I heard was from the Chukotka (I'll bet you didn't even know that was an ethnicity) writer from Siberia north of the Arctic Circle, who spoke in what I suppose is his second language, Russian. The panel was on "The Post-National Writer," basically about reaching audiences of different cultures from one's own, and naturally the question of translation came up, so the Chukotka, Yuri Rytkheu told, in scraps through his interpreter -- a New York Jewish joke. In New York City's New School. Rushdie, Francisco Goldman, Yoko Tawada, Eliot Weinberger and the others just looked out over the audience, too stunned to say anything. Here it goes:
Two Jews meet on the street in (Brooklyn?), and one says to the other, "Hey, Caruso's in town! I hear he's wonderful. He gave a concert last night." The other man answers, "Ah, Caruso shmaruso, he's not so hot. He sings off-key and he was flat." "What?" says the first guy. "You went to the concert?" "No, I didn't go to the concert. But Shapiro did, and he sung it to me."
That was about translation. It must have them rolling all over the tundra back home.
One of the oddest things I heard was from the Chukotka (I'll bet you didn't even know that was an ethnicity) writer from Siberia north of the Arctic Circle, who spoke in what I suppose is his second language, Russian. The panel was on "The Post-National Writer," basically about reaching audiences of different cultures from one's own, and naturally the question of translation came up, so the Chukotka, Yuri Rytkheu told, in scraps through his interpreter -- a New York Jewish joke. In New York City's New School. Rushdie, Francisco Goldman, Yoko Tawada, Eliot Weinberger and the others just looked out over the audience, too stunned to say anything. Here it goes:
Two Jews meet on the street in (Brooklyn?), and one says to the other, "Hey, Caruso's in town! I hear he's wonderful. He gave a concert last night." The other man answers, "Ah, Caruso shmaruso, he's not so hot. He sings off-key and he was flat." "What?" says the first guy. "You went to the concert?" "No, I didn't go to the concert. But Shapiro did, and he sung it to me."
That was about translation. It must have them rolling all over the tundra back home.
2005/04/23
Debating Venezuela
For some contrasting opinions on the media wars in Venezuela, check out this edition of Danny Schecther's News Dissector; you can follow the links to some recent journalistic attacks and the government's response. Also, on the Myths and Realities page of the Weekly Newsletter from Venezuelan Information Office, click on the link to the new media law, nicknamed "Resorte" (for REsponsabilidad SOcial de Radio y TElevisión -- "Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television"). At the bottom to the official description of the law (in English), you'll find a chart comparing its provisions to those of 6 other countries -- it really looks like a pretty moderate law.
2005/04/17
Don Quixote at the NYPL
A big crowd – Salman Rushdie said 500 – filled the elegant old Celeste Bartos Forum (a theater, not an event) at the New York Public Library, to hear --. Well, what was on the program was a tribute to the novel Don Quijote (or “Quixote”), first published 400 years ago, but the ladies who struck up conversations with me seemed to think it was about Salman Rushdie, who evidently has quite a distaff following. Rushdie, president of PEN and thus chair of the PEN World Festival: The New York Festival of International Literature, introduced the event with a funny, multi-staged argument attribute the novel’s greatness to India. (You see, Cervantes pretended the real author was an Arab, and used the typical Arab narrative frame or a story within a story – like Sheherezade in Arabian Nights – but the Arabs had learned that device from the Indians, so Don Quijote was really a masterpiece of the great Asian Subcontinent.)
There probably was no one person in the crowd who understood everything going on – the Jacques Brel lyrics (in French, of course) played from a recording or the Ravel lyrics (also French) sung for us with energy and flair by baritone Chris Pedro Trakas, the reading from Chapter 8 (the battle with the windmills) by Spanish actor Javier Cámara (which for us Spanish-speakers was hilarious in Cámara’s vigorous reading). And there were the commentaries by famous authors. Paul Auster’s was the most amusing (a fanciful little tale about the supposed “true” author of the book, concluding that it was neither Cervantes nor the Arab but Alonso Quijano, alias Don Quijote, himself). And Laura Restrepo gave me the most to think about, with her reflection on the madman (Quijote, Hamlet) as prototype of modern man, when all the ancient received truths crumble before new, myth-shattering experience (I suppose she meant the discoveries of distant continents, scientific discoveries and technology).
In the earlier session, Confronting the Worst: Writing and Catastrophe, I was most impressed by Carolin Emcke’s description of the great psychological damage suffered by victims of violence, that “they lose language.” She has reported on and from places of horror, including the killing fields of Colombia and Afghanistan, for her German readers, who (one might expect) know something about the lasting psychological damage of horrors. They – the victims – have never asked her for any material help, such as a ride to the border, or food, or money; what they do ask her for, almost always, is to tell their story. She thinks this is because the horrors they have suffered have caused them to lose trust in humanity, which makes it impossible for them to tell their own stories coherently, and because they may have begun to doubt that what occurred to them was unjust. They need the writer to confirm that the horrors really were horrors, that things are not supposed to be that way. I hope to read her work as soon as it is translated. Svetlana Alexeivich, who spoke in Russian (very ably translated, it seemed to me) about victims of Chernobyl and has also written about Russian casualties in the Afghan war, echoed these thoughts, and also spoke about the unreliability and variability of informants memories and thus the need by the writer to to work and feel to understand the patterns of people's lives.
In contrast, François Bizot seemed to have been obsessively focused on the psychology of only one person, the Cambodian who had beaten and interrogated and frightened him in Cambodia and had gone on to murder thousands of Cambodians -- and concluded, woefully and even despairingly, that his tormentor had been the mirror of himself. An understandable but deeply depressing conclusion that those of whose who have not suffered such trauma are not obliged to share. You can find out more about all these authors, and others at the Festival, by clicking on their names in the Festival program.
There probably was no one person in the crowd who understood everything going on – the Jacques Brel lyrics (in French, of course) played from a recording or the Ravel lyrics (also French) sung for us with energy and flair by baritone Chris Pedro Trakas, the reading from Chapter 8 (the battle with the windmills) by Spanish actor Javier Cámara (which for us Spanish-speakers was hilarious in Cámara’s vigorous reading). And there were the commentaries by famous authors. Paul Auster’s was the most amusing (a fanciful little tale about the supposed “true” author of the book, concluding that it was neither Cervantes nor the Arab but Alonso Quijano, alias Don Quijote, himself). And Laura Restrepo gave me the most to think about, with her reflection on the madman (Quijote, Hamlet) as prototype of modern man, when all the ancient received truths crumble before new, myth-shattering experience (I suppose she meant the discoveries of distant continents, scientific discoveries and technology).
In the earlier session, Confronting the Worst: Writing and Catastrophe, I was most impressed by Carolin Emcke’s description of the great psychological damage suffered by victims of violence, that “they lose language.” She has reported on and from places of horror, including the killing fields of Colombia and Afghanistan, for her German readers, who (one might expect) know something about the lasting psychological damage of horrors. They – the victims – have never asked her for any material help, such as a ride to the border, or food, or money; what they do ask her for, almost always, is to tell their story. She thinks this is because the horrors they have suffered have caused them to lose trust in humanity, which makes it impossible for them to tell their own stories coherently, and because they may have begun to doubt that what occurred to them was unjust. They need the writer to confirm that the horrors really were horrors, that things are not supposed to be that way. I hope to read her work as soon as it is translated. Svetlana Alexeivich, who spoke in Russian (very ably translated, it seemed to me) about victims of Chernobyl and has also written about Russian casualties in the Afghan war, echoed these thoughts, and also spoke about the unreliability and variability of informants memories and thus the need by the writer to to work and feel to understand the patterns of people's lives.
In contrast, François Bizot seemed to have been obsessively focused on the psychology of only one person, the Cambodian who had beaten and interrogated and frightened him in Cambodia and had gone on to murder thousands of Cambodians -- and concluded, woefully and even despairingly, that his tormentor had been the mirror of himself. An understandable but deeply depressing conclusion that those of whose who have not suffered such trauma are not obliged to share. You can find out more about all these authors, and others at the Festival, by clicking on their names in the Festival program.
2005/04/11
"Salvador"
I've been thinking a lot about Latin America and how the media filter and distort info, so when the accomplice suggested we rent a movie last night, I wanted to see Oliver Stone's powerful 1985 almost-true "Salvador". Wow! So gruesome it's often hard to take, but not nearly as gruesome as the reality it portrays. You see but don't get to smell the rotting, mutilated corpses of the U.S.-backed "killing machine," as former Ambassador White calls the Salvadoran military regime of the period -- in the fascinating documentary that's also packaged onto the DVD. In that documentary, you also get to see the real Richard Boyle (the character played with such overwhelming intensity and believability by James Woods); Boyle co-wrote the screenplay and shot the scenes in El Salvador (Woods refused to get closer than Mexico, where most of the movie was shot -- there was still a war going on in the real El Salvador). Woods is brilliantly crazy, and the real Boyle must have been, well, at least crazy and, like the character version of himself, basically honest though sleazy. If you haven't seen it recently, maybe you should, as a way of thinking about how information gets to us from Iraq, Afghanistan and Venezuela, among other places.
2005/04/08
Recommended reading: Democracy
Democracy Starts At Home
by Joseph Stiglitz, TomPaine.com
How can Bush spread democracy abroad when he undermines it at home?
by Joseph Stiglitz, TomPaine.com
How can Bush spread democracy abroad when he undermines it at home?
What's happening in Venezuela
What happens in Venezuela matters, to the U.S. and to every other country in the region. At issue: Can the Chávez government and its movement -- the MVR -- survive, despite fierce U.S. opposition? If so, will they be able to fulfill their program of reducing social inequality and broadening participation and opportunity, without going bankrupt? Can the chavistas maintain its honesty and openness despite being so embattled? Or have they, as the opposition claims, already lost them?
I think: (a) the movement will survive any coup attempt -- just look what happened in April 2002; (b) the oil wealth won't last forever but probably long enough to finance huge institutional changes that will be felt for ever after; (c) they (or at least the leadership) are going to try to be pure, but it's tough to remain democratic when you're under siege, and not everybody is going to resist temptation when there's so much money being invested. Finally, (d) the chavista movement will continue to inspire radical reforms throughout the continent and beyond.
To find out what's up and get a sense of what may happen next, from the chavista perspective, check the text and links on The Cyber Cycle, weekly newsletter of the Venezuelan Information Office.
I think: (a) the movement will survive any coup attempt -- just look what happened in April 2002; (b) the oil wealth won't last forever but probably long enough to finance huge institutional changes that will be felt for ever after; (c) they (or at least the leadership) are going to try to be pure, but it's tough to remain democratic when you're under siege, and not everybody is going to resist temptation when there's so much money being invested. Finally, (d) the chavista movement will continue to inspire radical reforms throughout the continent and beyond.
To find out what's up and get a sense of what may happen next, from the chavista perspective, check the text and links on The Cyber Cycle, weekly newsletter of the Venezuelan Information Office.
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